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Books by Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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Love
Letter to Gay and Lesbian Youth
A
Look Inside Baraka's
The Toilet
By
Marvin X
By definition a classic is a work
that withstands the test of time,
fad, beyond the ephemeral. A classic
theme deconstructs one or more of
the eternal concerns of
humanity—love, hate, life and death,
or the problems of life that never
seem to get solved even when the
solution is quite apparent. The
simple solution to hate is love, so
simple we must revisit the question
and solution from time to time.
Almost forty-five years ago,
Amiri Baraka
examined the themes of racism
and homophobia in his one-act play
The Toilet. The set is a high
school men’s room, wherein he
gathers a group of young men to
decipher the meaning of love and
hate. Mostly black, the young men
appear to be at an urban manhood
training rite. We see a myriad of
personalities expressing themselves
in the rhythm and rhymes of the
time—there are no pants sagging, no
grills in teeth, but they are there
seeking to discover their manhood,
racial and sexual identity.
The tragedy of that time and this
time is that their search for
manhood and sexual identity is
unorganized and haphazard, thus then
and now young men must grapple with
self discovery in isolated groups
without mentor, elder or guide. No
adult appears in the Toilet
to give words of wisdom; thus the
young men are adrift in their
ignorance, seeking to find
themselves in the midst of darkness.
How ironic the setting is a high
school where we assume learning is
taking place, and yet learning
occurs not in the classroom but the
toilet. The toilet becomes the bush
in African or primitive tradition,
for there is terror, violence to
bring transformation from hatred to
love and interracial understanding.
A white boy writes a love letter to
a black boy and the drama involves
the resolution of this event. The
white boy has crossed the racial
line into the black brotherhood and
suffers violence as a result—he his
beaten into a pulp, bloody as a
beet, half-dead when brought into
the
Toilet.
Gang violence is a natural happening
in urban culture, senseless violence
to express manhood; even sexual
violence is a natural part of this
oppressed society. And so the black
boy is finally confronted by the
white boy who loves him and the
brother is physically overcome by
the white boy to the chagrin of the
black brotherhood. The white boy is
again attacked by the toilet gang
and all depart, including another
white boy who had come to the
defense of his white brother.
The Toilet ends with the
black boy returning to embrace the
white boy. Lights down.
What was Baraka trying to tell us
forty-five years ago and what
relevance has his message now? Since
then gays and lesbians have come out
of the closet, although the passage
of California’s Proposition 8 denies
them the right of marriage, and the
gays are miffed at Blacks for
supporting the proposition, although
the president of the state NAACP in
her role as a lobbyist opposed the
bill, along with many black
newspapers and several ministers who
were probably paid to do so.
Apparently a majority of blacks do
not equate gay rights with civil
rights. Are sexual rights human
rights?
The question Baraka raised had to do
with transcending hatred in favor of
love. Proposition 8 denied gays and
lesbians the right to codify their
love in marriage.
Blacks are known to be sexually
conservative, although they now have
many children on the streets
embracing the gay/lesbian lifestyle.
Blacks are thus hypocritical and
drowning in denial, in similar
fashion to the black brothers in
The Toilet who refused to
consider that one of their own might
have crossed the line, not only
racially but sexually as well.
On my recent visit to New York to
see Woody King’s production of my
play (with Ed Bullins)
Salaam,
Huey Newton, Salaam, Baraka’s
The Toilet and Hugh Fletcher’s
Amarie, I was accompanied by
two lesbian assistants. Of course,
being a dirty old man, I tried to
get at them. (See my poem “Why I
Love Lesbians.”) And they were
highly upset at my offensive
language: something they should have
known I am known for by those who
know me. Although I imagined them to
be young women, with whom I could
talk adult talk, they were suffering
arrested development, in search of
their sexual identity, much like the
brothers in
The Toilet.
Nevertheless, I wanted them to spend
some time with Amina Baraka who is
still in grief over the lost of her
daughter
Shani and her lover Rayshan
to homicide. I thought conversing
with the young ladies, 19 and 25,
would help Amina heal from the
horror of losing her only daughter
by Baraka. She did meet the young
ladies at the theatre and
immediately saw the physical
similarity between one girl and her
daughter,
Shani. “I knew you would
see that,” I told Amina. The girl, Raushanah, like
Shani, had been a
point guard as well. We agreed to
come to Newark to spend time with
Amina, but after my verbal insults,
the girls declined to make the trip,
even though we reconciled our issues
as best we could.
I made the trip to Newark alone to
hang out with the Barakas, who had
me bar hopping after a wonderful
dinner at the Spanish restaurant
across from city hall. One of the
bars we visited is owned by former
mayor Sharp James, now doing prison
time for corruption.
I hadn’t planned to spend the night
but Amina had other plans, so she
made room for me in the space they
have preserved for Shani. On my last
visit, she had told me that I was
the first person to spend the night
in
Shani's room, filled with her
artifacts, several basketball size
trophies, numerous awards and
proclamations to her athletic
prowess and mentorship.
After the last bar, we headed home.
Tired, I said goodnight to the
Barakas and went upstairs to my room
or rather, Shani’s room. I shut the
door and looking around at
Shani's
archives, something told me to say a
prayer, so I did.
I got up the next morning early, way
too early to disturb the Barakas, so
I surveyed the room, and seeing the
trophies were dusty, wiped them. I
just happened to have a poem in my
back pocket “When Thy Lover Has Gone
to Eternity.” I placed it between
the trophies as an offering. I said
another prayer before departing. And
then I heard
Shani speaking, saying,
“No, no, no, no to hate, no, no, no,
no.” She said, “Yes, yes to love,
yes, yes, yes, yes.”
I shut the door and made my way
downstairs, passing the sleeping
Barakas and out into the cold Newark
morning. At South Tenth and Clinton
Streets I hailed a taxi, telling him
to take me to John’s Place, my
favorite breakfast spot in Newark. I
ordered Whiting, grits and eggs,
with biscuits that melted in my
mouth. After breakfast, I walked to
the bus stop for the ride to Penn
Station and the train back across
the river to New York. As I stood
waiting for the bus, Shani spoke
again in the winter wind, “No, no,
no, no to hate. Yes, yes, yes to
love.”
Shall we not love our gay children,
the many young men and women who
have chosen the gay lifestyle for
whatever reason: we can say they
were born that way, or have an
identity crisis from feminine or
matrifocal socialization (lack of
manhood rites or womanhood rites),
or there was sexual assault by a gay
or lesbian relative, or incest by
father, uncle, brother, cousin who
turned the girl against all men. We
can catalogue all the possibilities
yet not get to the end of the road
on this matter: our gay children
need help!
They need love and support as they
go through their daily round. We
cannot simply look at them and
reduce them to social rejects,
pariahs we must shun at all costs as
if they are not natural but some
kind of mutants from Mars.
In short, they need our help with
their growing pains. All children
need love, recognition and
acceptance. Do you think the gay
children are not suffering the
normal white supremacy virus of
parental abandonment, abuse and
neglect? Even more so, our gay young
men are suffering the highest rate
of HIV infection. What shall we
do—surely we can reach out and touch
these young men on a suicide path—at
the very least, we can educate them
about the dangers of their unsafe
sexual behavior.
Our lesbian children need our love
and acceptance as well. Maybe some
of them will return to the straight
life (as if that’s anything to brag
about until we evolve our spiritual
consciousness from the patriarchal
mentality of domination.)
Again, no matter the cause of the
explosion of the gay and lesbian
lifestyle, it is a reality we need
to deal with. Those who want to be
straight should be guided, others
who want to be accepted as gay or
lesbian should be shown
unconditional love as well.
It is wrong for anyone to hate
another human being, and especially
to hate a child. So let us put on
the armor of God and exercise
Supreme Wisdom. Either we are
working with Divine power or we are
on the animal plane, from which our
actions are devoid of spiritual
consciousness
The Toilet is a state of
mind—toxic and transfixed. It must
be flushed clean with pure water.
There is a moment in the play when a
brother goes down the row of urinals
flushing each one and laughing with
joy as the water flows loudly like a
river. Let us flush ourselves with
the royal flush of all the urine and
defecation in our lives, in our
minds that have a strangle hold on
the eternity of love, for love is
all there is that is precious and
real, radical and revolutionary,
love, the meaning of the morning,
the essence of the night, the why we
rise to try again the daily round,
to suffer the pain and joy—only love
makes the day possible and the night
bearable.
In conclusion, moral propositions
become just that and nothing more, a
momentary thing, until the
destruction comes, then we see some
things are beyond mere propositions,
thoughts, a consensus of the moral
or the immoral, for who is moral
today, who is immoral? Who are the
good guys, bad guys? Who is without
sin? You are against gays and
lesbians, yet you are a child
molester! You are against gays and
lesbians, yet you are a wife beater,
a murderer, a dope dealer, a wicked
teacher, a corrupt banker. Who has
the high moral ground? Is it he who
does the most good—in the hood?
Shall he or she determine the moral
code, or is this a free for all, do
yo thing, I do my thing—in the
Arabic: lakum dinu kum waliyadin
(to you your way and to me mine,
Al Qur’an).
Unless there is a consensus, who is
to say what is right or wrong? We
must come to a consensus on the new
morality, no matter what ancient
mythologies have taught us. In
Divine consciousness surely we can
find the Way of Love in all matters.
Let us search the ancient holy
books, texts, inscriptions, for the
sure path, since there is doubt
persisting into the night. What do
the holy books say?
Shall we be swayed by illusions of
any kind, spirituality or
physicality, mentality or sexuality?
If we reinstituted manhood and
womanhood rites of passage, we might
go a long way toward helping our
children cross the threshold of
sexual identity and toward spiritual
maturation as divine beings in human
form. Sexuality and other illusions
become secondary to the primary
objective of reaching spiritual
maturity, following our true bliss,
as Joseph Campbell taught us.
November, 2008
Berkeley CA 94702
Marvin X, poet, playwright,
essayist, philosopher, social
activist, teacher, is one of the
founders of the black arts movement
and the father of Muslim American
literature. His next collection of
essays is Up from Ignut, the
Soulful Musings of a North American
African Thinker, Black Bird
Press, 2009. He is available for
speaking and performing engagements.
Write to him at 1222 Dwight Way,
Berkeley CA 94702. Call
510-355-6339.
jmarvinx@yahoo.com.
www.marvinxwrites.blogspot.com.
Also see
and
www.aalbc.com. Search Google as
well.
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Dear Morehouse Community:
Next
week, Vibe
magazine, a hip-hop music and culture
monthly, will publish in their
October/November issue an article on
Morehouse. I strongly disagree with the
likely substance of this article and wanted
to write to you directly to share my views.
The
article, entitled, “The
Mean Girls at Morehouse,” purports to
examine the lives of some of our gay
brothers as it relates to the enforcement of
our appropriate attire policy we enacted a
year and a half ago. |
It seems clear from
the headline alone that the Vibe editorial team’s intent
is to sensationalize and distort reality for the purpose
of driving readership. The title of the article speaks
volumes about a perspective that is very narrow and one
that is, in all likelihood, offensive to our students
whether gay or straight.
As president of
this institution, as a Morehouse graduate and as a
father, I am insulted by what is to be published.
Addressing our young men as “girls” is deeply disturbing
to me, no matter what the remainder of the article may
say. Morehouse has for 140 years developed men—men who
are equipped to live and contribute to an increasingly
diverse, global and complex world. . . .—Robert
M. Franklin, Morehouse
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The Mean Girls of Morehouse—Aliya S.
King and Alex Martinez—October 11, 2010—Michael
J. Brewer, 24, is a 2009 graduate of
Morehouse who currently works in the office
of Georgia State Representative Alisha
Thomas Morgan. The former president of Safe
Space, he still serves in an advisory
capacity. There’s not a swishy bone in
Brewer’s body. If he doesn’t tell you he’s
gay, you wouldn’t know. In his off-campus
apartment, he’s joined by Kevin Webb and
Daniel Edwards, the current co-presidents of
Safe Space. “In any culture, there will be
divisions,” explains Brewer, choosing his
words with care as he describes attitudes
toward the Plastics. “Yes, there is some
dissonance against the more eccentric,
ostentatious and flamboyant members of the
gay community.” |
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Kevin chimes in.
“In some ways, it’s like it’s okay to be gay. But not
that gay. Or it’s okay to be queer. But not that queer,”
he says. “There is homophobia even within the gay
community—which is something we have to deal with if
Morehouse is going to progress.”
Brewer insists that
Morehouse’s future hinges on its ability to deal with
students like the Plastics and finding a place for them.
“My hope is that Morehouse can step into the space of
the most progressive colleges in the nation. Morehouse
can be a beacon of light. Morehouse can find a place for
the LGBT community. Even the ones transitioning to the
opposite gender,” says Brewer. “If a student comes to
Morehouse as a man and plans to transition to a woman,
yes, there should still be a space for that student. It
may sound radical. But that’s what Morehouse has always
stood for—radical change in the face of injustice.”
But Brian “Bri”
Alston has his doubts about whether Morehouse will ever
achieve that level of enlightenment. “We know our lives
aren’t really reflective of the Morehouse gay black
experience,” says Brian. “And Morehouse has enough
issues dealing with just the gay community. They don’t
know what to do with us.” Brewer thinks
there’s a chance. “There’s a motto at Morehouse,” he
says. “It says above her son’s head Morehouse holds a
crown which she challenges her students to grow tall
enough to wear. As long as a person is holding to that
ideal, it shouldn’t matter how they identify.” It
remains to be seen whether that coronation might one day
include a tiara.—Vibe
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Who's afraid of gender bending Morehouse men?—By R.
L’Heureux Lewis— HBCUs remain under
attack and must be
defended. But an article about the experiences of
discrimination that our brothers experience within a
college community is not an attack. In fact, it is a
service. If there is anger to be felt, it should be
directed at the teasing, chastisement, and harassment
that so many same gender-loving, gender-bending, and gay
people endure daily. There are no simple solutions to
the issues facing Morehouse, our schools, or our
community, but it has always been black people's ability
to redefine family and community that allowed us to
survive atrocities like slavery and Jim Crow and
succeed. Our schools can be the vanguard of developing
all black people, but only if we start from a place of
love and community—not fear.—TheGrio
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Mythology of Pussy and Dick (Toward Healthy Psychosocial Sexuality) by
Marvin X
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Malcolm My Son a play by Kalamu ya
Salaam
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Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men
in the U.S.A.
By
Jonathan Ned Katz
Number
3 on list of 100 Best Lesbian and Gay
Nonfiction Books, a project of the
Publishing Triangle, the association of
lesbians and gay men in publishing.
This
unique and pioneering work is a
comprehensive collection of documents on
American gay life from the early days of
European settlement to the emergence of
modern American gay culture. Hailed by
reviewers, it offers a new historical
perspective on this once invisible minority
and its 400-year battle. Photographs and
illustrations. |
In 1976 he published his
Gay American History, a source book. One section is
“Passing Women” which features many that we would consider trans
men but he presents them as women and lesbians. Another section
is “Native Americans/Gay Americans” which features Berdaches as
they were called in the 1970s. He presents them as mainly gay
men rather as third gender persons [‘transgender’ was not an
available concept at the time]
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* * Jonathan Ned Katz
(born 1938) is an American
historian of
human sexuality who has focused on
same-sex attraction and changes in the social
organization of sexuality over time. His works focus on
the idea, rooted in
social constructionism, that the categories with
which we describe and define human sexuality are
historically and culturally specific, along with the
social organization of sexual activity, desire,
relationships, and sexual identities.—Wikipedia
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Coming Out!
A Documentary Play About Gay Life and
Lesbian Life Liberation
By
Jonathan Ned Katz
My
participation in the gay movement soon led
to my first imagining such a thing as
homosexual history. At a meeting of the Gay
Activist Alliances’ Media Committee, in an
apartment on 16th Street in
then-unfashionable Chelsea, we talked of
ways to publicize our new movement. I then
privately resolved to research and compile a
documentary theater piece on gay and lesbian
life and liberation. . . . the piece I
imagined would employ American historical
and literary materials to evoke dramatically
our changing situation, emotions, and
consciousness. |
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The
agitation-propaganda theater piece, Coming Out!,
produced by the Gay Activists Alliance Arts Committee,
opened on June 16, 1972, at GAA's rented firehouse,
reproduced in September 1972 at the Washington Square
Methodist Church, and then again in June 1973 at The
Nighthouse, in a tiny theater (a ground-floor room,
actually), in Chelsea. . . .
So the play
Coming Out! included my own coming out to my mother
and, after several years, the start of a new
relationship between us. Over these years she moved from
knee-jerk anti-homosexual hysteria to using her editing
skills (honed as a long-time Associate Editor at
Parents’ Magazine) to help me edit the book that became
Gay American History. Mother love triumphed over
homophobia.
My work on the play Coming Out! initiated my new
life as an open gay person, my long professional career
as a historian of sexuality and gender, and furthered my
movement into the world of human relationships, with all
their pleasures and, of course, their pains. My work on
Coming Out! helped make me human.—Jonathan
Ned Katz, Recalling My Play "Coming Out!" June 1972
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Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary. Written
by: Jonathan Ned Katz A new documentary in which is
contained, in chronological order, evidence of the true
and fantastical history of those persons now called
lesbians and gay men; and of the changing social forms
of and responses to those acts, feelings, and
relationships now called homosexual, in the early
American Colonies, 1697 to 1740 and in the Modern United
States, 1880 to 1950. Harper & Row, 1983; reprint NY:
Carroll & Graf, 1994. Number 21 on list of
100 Best Lesbian and Gay Nonfiction Books, a project
of the Publishing Triangle, the association of lesbians
and gay men in publishing.
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Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before
Homosexuality
By Jonathan Ned Katz
Forget
about the Lincoln Bedroom scandals of the
Clinton administration; the real scandal is
who was in Lincoln's bed in 1837. This
highly provocative, often startling
reconsideration of 19th- and early
20th-century male-male sexual relationships
begins with a detailed description of what
Katz depicts as Abraham Lincoln's romantic,
erotic relationship with
Joshua Speed, the man with whom he
shared a decades-long intimate friendship,
as well as a bed for three years.
While
Speed himself wrote that "no two men were
ever more intimate," Katz is not arguing
that these two men were homosexual; Katz
makes it clear that referring "to early
nineteenth-century men's acts or desires as
gay or straight, homosexual, heterosexual,
or bisexual" places "their behaviors and
lusts within our sexual system, not theirs."
|
Katz, whose groundbreaking 1976
Gay American History is foundational to contemporary gay
and lesbian studies, has researched deeply and widely,
uncovering astonishing materials: a relationship between John
Stafford Fiske, the U.S. consul to Scotland in 1870, and famous
British cross-dresser
Ernest Boulton; the existence of the Slide, a male-male
pick-up bar in Greenwich Village in the 1890s; romances between
older sailors and their "chickens" during the Civil War.
Walt Whitman,
noted Harvard mathematician
James
Millis Peirce, writer
Charles Warren Stoddard, English philosopher
Edward
Carpenter Katz finds these men engaged in deeply loving and
erotic friendship with no specific labels of sexual orientation
attached. All of this is described and shaped with enormous
sensitivity and judiciousness. Written clearly, succinctly and
free from postmodern jargon, Katz's arguments are strong and
vibrant. By contextualizing "sexual, acts, sexual desires,
sexual identities" in their historical periods, but never
avoiding the specifics of sexual activity or emotional
connection, he contributes surprising, even shocking, insights
into how sexual and emotional relationships are constructed, as
well as demonstrating the enormous diversity and malleability of
human eroticism.—Publishers
Weekly
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The Invention of Heterosexuality
By Jonathan Ned Katz
Foreword by Gore Vidal. Afterword by Lisa
Duggan
Katz (Gay
American History) argues that
heterosexuality is a social construct rather
than a natural, unambiguous given. He notes
that the terms heterosexual and homosexual
were coined in 1868 by German sex-law
reformer
Karl Maria Kertbeny and did not gain
wide currency until the early 20th century.
Katz contends that heterosexuality as a
universal, presumed, normative ideal was
invented by men, such as Kertbeny,
Sigmund Freud and German psychiatrist
Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Prior to the
late 19th century, he maintains, the social
universe was not polarized into "hetero" and
"homo." The examples he cites in support of
his thesis—ancient Greece, the New England
colonies (1607-1740) and the U.S. between
1820 and 1850-do not substantiate Katz's
claims. |
 |
Nevertheless, this often provocative work challenges rigid
notions of gender identity, building on the ideas of French
historian
Michel Foucault and on feminist critiques of heterosexuality
by Betty
Friedan,
Kate Millett,
Adrienne
Rich and others.—Publishers
Weekly Although
we take for granted that heterosexuality is and has
always been the sexual norm, historian Katz reexamines
the constructions of sexual identity and postulates that
heterosexuality has a history that has heretofore never
been analyzed and that "such privileging of the norm
accedes to its domination." Tracing the first appearance
of the terms heterosexual and homosexual in 1868 in
Germany, the author of
Gay American History (LJ 12/15/76) analyzes the
changes in usage in dictionaries, medical journals, and
a wide variety of other published sources. Carefully
building his argument using Richard von
Krafft-Ebing's and
Sigmund Freud's seminal theories in the creation of
heterosexuality, he goes on to challenge such
influential figures as
Alfred Charles Kinsey,
Betty Friedan, and
Michel Foucault.
This provocatively
original research, recalling similar problematizations
of race, gender, and other seemingly immutable,
ahistorical constructs, is complemented by Gore Vidal's
foreword and Lisa Duggan's afterword. For informed
readers.—James E. Van
Buskirk, San Francisco, Library Journal
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I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished
Writings of Audre Lorde
Edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch
Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall
The
editors of this abundant feast of a book
remind us of the importance of [Audre
Lorde's] work, which for 40 years has served
as a foundation and catalyst for questions
of identity, difference, power and social
justice. There is much to ponder, discuss,
teach, and revere in this compilation.—Ms. Magazine
I Am Your Sister is a collection for
those who want and need to be introduced to
Audre Lorde's thinking, and it is a great
anthology for those who have read and been
inspired by Lorde's writing all of their
lives...a celebration, an honoring, and a
thoughtful presentation of who Lorde
was...an eye opener to how the struggles of
past times continue to be what we grapple
with today...a tool for survival—a teacher
to help us realize our possibilities for
change.—Feminist
Review |
I Am Your Sister combines some of Lorde's most
powerful essays with previously unavailable writings, as
well as reflections on her work from other influential
artists and activists.—Southern
Voice
In "harsh and
urgent clarity" Audre Lorde spoke directly to "that
chaos which exists before understanding," insisting on
work to be done, the necessity for difficult alliances,
for standing up to be counted, and for inclusive
liberation. The poetic realism of these essays and
speeches resonates here and now.—Adrienne Rich, poet, essayist, activist
Audre Lorde's
unpublished writings, combined with her now classic
essays, reveal her to be as relevant today as during the
latter twentieth century when she first spoke to us.
This new collection should be read by all who understand
justice to be indivisible, embracing race, gender,
sexuality, class, and beyond, and who recognize, as she
so succinctly put it, that "there is no separate
survival."—Angela Y. Davis, author of
Women, Race & Class and
Are Prisons Obsolete?
Provocative and
profound, the work of poet, essayist, and
autobiographer, Audre Lorde, has positively affected
scholars and writers, teachers and students, feminists,
gays, lesbians, and indeed countless individuals in the
United States and elsewhere who have struggled with the
question of how to integrate aesthetic, cultural, and
political concerns. Now, with the publication of this
collection of some of Lorde's best writing, we all have
the opportunity to consider seriously Lorde's legacy and
to continue in our efforts to resist the silencing of
our various communities, our various selves in these
wondrous and difficult times.—Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of
Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black
American Intellectual
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Joseph F Beam (December 30, 1954 in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – December 27, 1988 in
Philadelphia) was an African-American gay rights
activist and author who worked to foster greater
acceptance of gay life in the black community by
relating the gay experience with the struggle for civil
rights in the United States. . . . Joseph F. Beam was
working on a sequel to
In the Life at the time of his death of
HIV related disease in 1989. This work was completed
by Dorothy Beam and the gay poet
Essex Hemphill, and published under the title
Brother to Brother in 1991. Both books were
featured in a television documentary, Tongues United in
1991. “As a writer, Joe was more profound than
prolific,” wrote his friend Craig Harris after his
death. “His articles and essays were poetic, containing
turned phrases and puns, metaphors in meters that made
his writing musical with penetrating meaning. He took
great pride in his skill and devoted time to multiple
rewrites, crafting his work to create the style which
other writers of the Black genre dubbed `Beamesque'.”—Wikipedia
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Essex Hemphill—poet, editor, and activist—was
born April 16, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois. Hemphill's
first books were the self-published chapbooks Earth
Life (1985) and Conditions (1986). He first
gained national attention when his work appeared in the
anthology
In the Life (1986), a seminal collection of
writings by black gay men. In 1989, his poems were
featured in the award-winning documentaries
Tongues Untied and
Looking for Langston. In 1991, Hemphill edited
Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men,
which won a Lambda Literary Award. In 1992, he released
Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, which won the
National Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and
Bisexual New Author Award. His poems appeared in
Obsidian, Black Scholar, Callaloo,
Painted Bride Quarterly, Essence, and
numerous other newspapers and journals. His work also
appeared in numerous anthologies including
Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1986) and
Life Sentences: Writers, Artists and AIDS
(1993). He was a visiting scholar at The Getty Center
for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1993. On
November 4, 1995, Hemphill died from complications
relating to AIDS.
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Male Male-Intimacy in Early
America
Beyond Romantic Friendships
By
William Benemann
Previously hard-to-find information on
homosexuality in early America—now in a
convenient single volume! Few of us are
familiar with the gay men on General
Washington’s staff or among the leaders of
the new republic. Now, in the same way that
Alex Haley’s Roots provided a generation of
African Americans with an appreciation of
their history,
Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond
Romantic Friendships will give many
gay readers their first glimpse of
homosexuality as a theme in early American
history.
Male-Male Intimacy in Early America
is the first book to provide a comprehensive
overview of the role of homosexual activity
among American men in the early years of
American history.
Male-Male Intimacy in Early America is the
first book to provide a comprehensive
overview of the role of homosexual activity
among American men in the early years of
American history. |
 |
This single
source brings together information that has until
now been widely scattered in journals and distant
archives. The book draws on personal letters,
diaries, court records, and contemporary
publications to examine the role of homosexual
activity in the lives of American men in the
colonial period and in the early years of the new
republic. The author scoured research that was
published in contemporary journals and also
conducted his own research in over a dozen US
archives, ranging from the Library of Congress to
the Huntington Library, from the United Military
Academy Archives to the Missouri Historical
Society.—Routledge
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 26 December 2008
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