I Bet You Didn't Know... (Part 2)

It would be impossible for me to compile a bibliography of the scholarly and literary work of black gay men without acknowledging perhaps one of, if not the most important, figure in the history of black gay men's literature and that is of course, Joseph F. Beam.

I first encountered Beam's landmark work, In the Life when I was 20. I no longer recall what led me to this volume. I felt myself pulled in the same way I imagine birds are pulled South in wintertime or the way the tide is pulled by the gravity of the moon, by some unknown force, some biological or ecological necessity.

In the Life was in a solid maroon binding with white block letters along the spine. It blended perfectly with every other book on the shelves of the University Library. Yet, to me, it was so clearly unlike any other book on the shelf. I remember being puzzled because I expected it to be difficult to find. I expected it to be hidden or under guard, like most other images of black gay men at the time.

I believe that any black gay man who truly desires to be both at the same time can only go so far and so long until his sanity requires him to look in a mirror, to see himself reflected back. It takes some much longer than others, some it takes no time at all and others still go all their lives unvexed by an absence of self.

There is no correct path. Each path we walk is the path we must take, there is no other. We are who we are supposed to be. So in my case, it was only a matter of time before I became so starved for the sound of another black gay man's voice and words that I would have walked much farther than I actually ended up having to.

I devoured the book like the first crust of bread to a famished mouth. In the Life was a communion and a welcome, an unequivocal acknowledgement that I was not a product of my own imagination and perhaps most importantly that, at least a far as black gay men are concerned, I was not and am not one of kind, a fiction I valiantly challenge everyday as a black gay man in 2011.

When I think about the enormous courage it must have taken for a black gay man to compile an anthology of the work of other black gay men in America in 1985, my spine stiffens a little toward my own work. I simply have to point people to information that, for the most part by now, has been thoroughly documented. I have Google. I have library databases accessible by computer. Beam and others created something from nothing in a more hostile social environment than, I pray, I will ever know.

In the aftermath of the overturning of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' in the U.S. Armed Forces and the legalization of gay marriage in New York state, we reach a summit many may have doubted we would ever reach. And while we rejoice in justice we must remain ever-vigilant. The summit of one mountain is the foot of another.

And in our vigilance we must also attend the ways justice is diffused along the fault lines of race and class and gender and sexuality.

Even as our world curves toward justice in the same way our planet's path is guided by gravity, I still must do this work. Because even as we live in a substantially more equitable world, indeed more equitable than many past worlds, I am still largely invisible.

I have learned to greet this truth with a shrug and keep my focus on my work, to take courage from from my forbears. I take courage from people who struggled against the same headwinds I do now, who managed to speak despite their fear their voices would be swallowed by the gale.

I owe many things to many people. I strive to exceed their expectations. The wisdom of Luke bangs in my head like a bell: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." (Luke 12:48)

I owe something to Joseph Beam, much in fact. I strive to exceed his expectations: for what will be possible for black gay men to do, say and become in the future and for the future of black men's literature.

I bet you didn't know that in 1986 the first ever anthology of black gay men's writing was published by a man named Joseph Beam.

That's right. Titled In the Life, published by Allyson Press the book was considered a cultural hallmark by the gay and lesbian community but nevertheless was completely ignored by African-American critics and institutions.

Beam was born in Philadelphia and attended Franklin College, a small liberal arts school roughly 20 miles outside of Indianapolis and prior to his undergrad work he primarily attended parochial schools as he was baptized Catholic.

After leaving Franklin in the middle of a Masters in Communication in the early 1980s, Beam returned to his childhood home and worked in Giovanni's Rooom, a bookstore catering to gay and lesbian interests in Philadelphia. Shortly after beginning work at Giovanni's Room Beam's articles and short stories began appearing the gay press. In 1985 he became a consultant for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, joined the Executive Committee of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and became editor of their then new, though now defunct, Black/Out Journal.

In 1986 Beam began collecting submissions for In the Life, with the goal of countering the absence of positive images of gay men of color in the media and their exclusion from the social justice efforts of white gay rights activists.

Beam was working on a sequel to In the Life at the time of his death from HIV related illness in 1989. The work was later completed by Beam's mother and Beam's long-time friend and collaborator, Essex Hemphill. The work was published in 1991 and titled Brother to Brother, after one of Hemphill's own poems.

So many things to do. So very little time. And of that time so much is spent deciding upon what to do and when to do it.

So much has changed since the year 1989 and yet the lease on many black men's lives remains short indeed. From beyond I heed the counsel of those gone before, artists, thinkers, leaders, doers one and all: whatever there is to say, say it now; whatever there is to write, write it now, whatever there is to do, do it now.

To those who are one thing and many things; to those do not know; to those who refuse to know; to those who take some sustenance in this profile of courage.

And to Joseph Beam: this is for you.

Excerpt from "Dispatch from a McDonald's in Brooklyn:" An Open Letter to My Mother

"..."

I know that your concern for me is also a concern for our communities. I share your concern. I share your concern for strong black men and your desire for them to take leadership in our communities alongside black women and youth.

But lately as I grow into what I am confident is a strong black man, I have reasoned that this is not specific enough a request for our homes and communities and families. A strong black man is a ‘what’ not a how or a why.

There is little discussion about how black men may find and achieve this strength for themselves beyond the cliché.

We expect this strong black man to appear fully formed from our collective hopes and our collective scars. We expect him to know precisely what to do and how to do it. We all reach for this bright star called ‘strong black man’ not realizing that constellations’ s positions in the night sky shift according to where they are perceived from the Earth.

We stretch our hands upward and outward toward what we believe is the same star only to learn that my version of ‘strong black man’ is essentially your version except skewed a little to the left or right. We talk about ‘strong black man’ as though it is a fixed point but really all any one of us has is an educated guess.

There have been many strong black men, many of whom were exactly that and yet others who have been liars, cheaters, traitors, thieves and villains who still managed to retain the mantle of ‘strong black man.’

There are those black men who, having a need for support the community cannot or will not attend, are forced to do an (im)balancing act of self against community.

And those who would, as James Baldwin says ‘go the way their blood beats,’ leave the community and the community loses valuable capital in this man.

And those who submerge their sense of individual identity beneath sense of community, thinking they can resist their ‘blood beat’ become ‘strong black man’s’ negation: weak black man.

This is the man who lies and deceives, who misleads and pretends and thereby endangers his community not because he would deliberately destroy it but because his love of his community is so great that, for him, rejection from that community is to cease to exist.

Alternatively this is the man whose toils are unnoticed, whose heroism is unsung and whose contributions are unacknowledged. This is the man who would gladly throw himself beneath the bus for his community. This is the black genius that is undercapitalized, never actualized or quietly exploited.

Avoiding reprisal and rejection (social consequences) are often worth courting the deadly and destructive physical consequences of HIV/AIDS for these black men. And the imprint that this high price for inclusion leaves on black men, women, families and communities is a depression that has too long gone unaddressed. And in the same way strong black men are created by strong black communities, weak black communities likewise create weak black men, and weak black men, in their various manifestations, are a blight on the physical and social infrastructure of black communities everywhere.

The moral ramifications of these men’s actions l leave to the men themselves, the people affected by these men’s actions, to the individual hearts and minds of black people everywhere and to God.

I only know that any concept of community, if it is to have any meaning at all, must include me as I am. Any other notion of community is a fabrication; it would be an inorganic community incapable of sustaining life. This community could only stifle life. This community could not cultivate expression and honesty; it could only restrain it.

And what of the strong black female, without whom the strong black male could not exist? Whatever concerns him must also concern her.

The future rushes at us all at once like a wave and breaks over us like sea foam. The future, always pregnant with possibility and always on a collision course with our present, gives us anxiety because we exercise as little control over it as the oncoming tide.

We are so dizzy with possibility that we think we see stars and we do.

Black men and women today are presented with hitherto unheard of and unimagined possibilities and the shifts or key changes we hear and feel in our culture and in our communities is the release of new creativities, the unlocking of new possibilities and the germination of imagination.

Many are worried because no one knows what all this will come to. But this is what it means to be alive and to live to see a new day.

There are many fatalists who fret over the destiny of black people but they do not give black men and women much credit.

Strong black women will keep finding strong black men but these unions will only mean anything if they are based upon honesty and integrity. I have a feeling that no matter what black men do black women will continue doing what they have always done: living the best way they know how by going the way their blood beats.

I do not believe, as some do, that black men loving other men, particularly black men, in affirming relationships encompasses a failure of community. If anything, this points toward a collective male psychic healing, a gradual breaking of massive ice floes that have isolated many men (not only black men) from their emotions and further offers a direct challenge to the enormously chauvinist and often sexist values of ‘black macho’ culture into question.

In a world where black men readily kill, maim and fight each other, their families and communities, we could use a few more examples of brothers loving brothers in both romantic and platonic capacities—if for no other reason than to remind ourselves of something we desperately need to remember: that we are capable of loving and being loved. And further, that love of community begins with self-love.

I do not believe, as some do, that black women should feel robbed of black men who build romantic partnerships with other men. Black women, pragmatic as they are, would likely find themselves incompatible with such men, should they become available.

And insofar as reparative therapy is possible, I wonder, given the cultural climate regarding black men with ‘irregular sex lives’ (?), what practical black woman of the 21st century would want to become involved with such a man? Would you, Mother? Really? What if you had a daughter? Would she?

I do not believe most black women would.

I do not believe, Mother, that in your creation of Miss Ebony Brown, the exemplar of black womanly virtue, you have created ‘strong black man’s complement: ‘strong black woman.’

What you have created, Mother, is a black woman who is a passive object in her own life, who must first and always wait on a black man to come along and complete her.

In the short term she must cleave to the Lord and wait. In the long term, if no black man appears to fill the niche black community has carved for black man to fill in black woman’s life, black woman must lead a life devoted to God but divorced from body and desire because her community demands she subordinate her desire to community. She must first and always wait and pray for a black man, even as the community that instructs her to do so fails to produce suitable men or create the conditions for their emergence.

This black woman, Mother, Miss Ebony Brown sounds like no ordinary woman. Indeed, she sounds like a nun.

This is the problem with prescriptive definitions of community: many needs go arbitrarily unmet and we are told only that this is wheel of fortune and that in life there are no guarantees.

I save the Lord for last in this discussion because he is the most expansive part of it: to talk about events, to talk about people and our lives on this planet is to talk about the creations and the thread connecting all things, quite naturally, is the Creator.

Standing on a hill and looking backward and downward we see the slope of history, a gradual coming up from an archaic spirituality to a modern definition of Christianity.

Things are not as they were in days of old and it is foolish to pretend as though they are. Yet God’s word is the same today, yesterday and forever more. And were any of us to hear God speak for himself I have no doubt we would all hear the ring of eternal verity in that voice.

Unfortunately we only hear God speak through people and thus it becomes impossible to distinguish the messenger from the message. Those who would hear the voice of God must question the conduit of that voice and pray for the wisdom to discern dilutions and impurities farther upstream.

In the end one must measure the truth of any proposition against one’s own heart and pray that one hear God’s voice for oneself.

God answers prayer.

Many have heard his voice and done his will.

Many have killed; many have burned; many have pillaged; many have ruined; many have destroyed; many have oppressed in the name of God and his will.

To be even an average student of history is to acknowledge that the will of God has variously justified everything from poverty and keeping the pulpit a men’s only club, to the enslavement of people across the globe, the disenfranchisement of women and black people to sundry plots of extermination by history’s most ruthless regimes.

I do not question that the men and women who participated in these atrocities did not hear some voice within. I question whether this voice was that of God. And absent any means to authenticate voice-of-God experiences, I will continue to attend not how loudly someone proclaims the righteousness of their cause or how many hours they spend in prayer but rather their actions and the consequences of those actions.

I do not believe it is God’s will that we be racists, sexists, classists, homophobes and xenophobes. I do not believe it is God’s will that we create societies in which we all scramble for a first class citizenship while cleaving to the right to oppress others we deem less deserving than ourselves. I believe that God is just and that his will bends toward justice.

If we can know anything it is that the voice of God is apt to take as many forms as our own voices and for each instance of that voice to be as different as our own voice is from our neighbors. The wisdom of Thessalonians sounds as a bugle: ‘Prove all things. Hold fast to what is true.' (Thessalonians 5:21)

But even to speak of truth as a fixed quantity is treacherous. Once upon a time the world was flat; now it isn’t.

The truth is as hard to know as the voice or the face of God. To experience it requires sensitivity and vigilance. This is what is meant by ‘watch and pray.’

To those who grapple with whether God truly wants an equal, just and loving society, it is, as always, a matter of choice. The is the meaning of ‘…choose this day whom you will serve.’ This is not merely an edict commanding us to choose whom we will serve but how we will serve and to what our service will be put: to love and justice or to hate and injustice.

As I close this letter I wonder if I’ve said it all, if all of it can even be said and above all, if I’ve said it right. I worry about who my audience is: myself, of course; I write to remind myself of things I need to remember but also for my family and my communities.

I wonder if they will understand. I wonder if they will understand wanting to be understood. But they must for much of the audience of this letter is black and to be black is to often be misunderstood.

In Sunday school we are instructed to let our little lights shine. This is easy when you are a child because children often shine all on their own. I’m beginning to think this song was written for adults.

In dark and loveless world, shining is a difficult thing to do. And since we all experience light differently, recall the last time someone tried to convince you something green was in fact blue, its often hard to know when those around us are shining and even harder to know when we are trying to block or cover that light.

In this way we are all blind. All of us, equally, are never really quite sure we’re seeing what we’re seeing; our vision is impaired simply because we are human. How do we know the light of truth when we are in its presence? How do we know when we are seeing the true brilliance of those we love? The same way the truly blind know the light of the sun though they can’t see it, because of the energy of its presence, because of its ability to envelope us and penetrate us with its warmth.