L. Michael Gipson is a Washington, DC based critically acclaimed cultural critic, community health planner, and an award-winning youth advocate. His socio-political essays have been published in two recent anthologies, including "Emerging Agendas: The Best of Poverty and Race 2001-2005." As a cultural critic and music journalist, his work has appeared in Clik, Pulse, Arise, Pride, Swerv, Urban Dialect, Port of Harlem and Creative Loafing ATL. He is editor and columnist at SoulTracks and internationally heard weekly as “Cornfed” on The Dave Brown Radio Show
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by L. Michael Gipson
I was having a conversation on Facebook about the Oscars, doing my usual campy commentary on everything from the innumerable Grey Garden Grecian gowns to the bizarre choreo-miming to the “Best Song” nominees, when someone stopped my kitsch cold with a single post. The poster was an FB friend spouting annoyance because Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man, was not a major nominee (Colin Firth was a lone nominee in the Best Actor category). The “friend” sighed and lamented that last year’s Oscars must have been the designated year for the gays, and this year there appeared to be none in sight. You see, gay-themed movies like Milk and openly gay screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn (who brilliantly played gay for pay) were big award-winners at the 81st Annual Awards ceremony. Reading his naive sounding post, I released an exasperated sigh before settling into what can only be described as a mild but fitting rebuke. A humorous correction was delivered, but now I was annoyed.
By L. Michael Gipson
So, I’m surfing through my friend’s posts on Facebook and come across a self-penned article posted by one of my heterosexual Black brothers, an uber-secure, gay-friendly and affirming heterosexual in the music biz. The kind of straight whose been hit on by gays, but still knows who he is and what he’s about, so he keeps it cute and respectful about the flattering attention, even as he appropriately declines gay advances. He’s the kind who sees me as his brother and not a tool for proving or measuring his masculinity.
So, I click the link excited, because literate, artsy, and knowledgeable about all things underground his blog is an artist’s sanctuary. In the piece, after complimenting an up and coming male artist, he feels compelled to write “no homo.” Astonished, I did something I rarely do: called him out on it publicly on FB. Apologetic, he said it was an inside joke between him and the artist. Owning his acquiescence to trend, however innocent, he recognized that his remark didn’t contribute to the healthy de-stigmatizing vibe we need between gays and straights, but moreover between straights and straights, he corrected the article and we were quickly made whole. But it got me to thinking: if even our allies feel encouraged to state their sexual proclivities after any same sex expression of affection, compliment, or heaven forbid, platonic same sex love, then what hope do the rest of them or us have?
This year may go down in history as the banner year for Black women’s stories in mainstream commercial film. Last weekend the first hand-painted Disney film in decades starred the company’s first Black princess (and possibly the most Blacks behind-the-scenes employees in Disney’s 87-year history). This was on the heels of what was deemed one of the first Black Oscar contenders in a generation for Best Director, Best Film, and possibly Best Supporting Actress in Precious: Based on the Book “Push” By Sapphire. In our collective rush to deservedly celebrate hard-working black princesses being romanced by shiftless high yella Negroes princes, and illiterate molestation victims who will miraculously survive both HIV and two inbred children in pre-HAART, Bush I America, there’s a more earth-bound story I hope we won’t forget this awards season.
Early in 2009 a small film, American Violet (now available on DVD), was released to high critical acclaim. Directed by Tim Disney, written and produced by Bill Haney, and starring Alfre Woodard and rapper Xzibit, the film belonged to its lead, an astonishingly good Nicole Behaire as Dee Roberts. Based on the true-life heroics of Regina Kelly, Roberts is a 24-year old Black mother of four in Harmon County, Texas (real-life Hearne, TX in Robertson County) who despite a valiant grind of working-class servitude can only rise to survivalist poverty. Kelly as played by Behaire made some dooming life choices, poorly selected men based on her environments’ limited offerings, and has a slight anger management problem. After a series of systemically racist events involving illegal drug sweeps of innocent citizens on the word of a single, compromised informant, Roberts is asked to be the lead plaintiff in a civil rights case against a corrupt DA in an eerily oppressive town where Jim Crow-era racial hierarchy is still thrives. Even after she no longer has to fight to save herself, Roberts chooses to stay and fight her people and model something different for her daughters, eventually changing the laws for thousands of poor people, not just in her county, but across the state of Texas.
American Violet doesn’t depict Roberts as anyone’s angel. She’s an ordinary citizen facing extraordinary circumstances. Her every fault and frailty is thrown in her face with enough snide judgment to crush a lesser mortal. The welfare of her children dangled before her with little regard for their lives, her livelihood stripped from her, and still she stood and fought with little more to gain than dignity for herself and her people. Despite the re-election of the Bull Conner D.A. she defeated, the true plaintiff of Regina Kelly vs. John Paschall stayed in Hearn, Texas until this year, in a town whose power structure hated her guts. If I had a daughter, I’d rather she view Kelly’s chutzpah as something worth emulating rather than the fictional ambitions of a singing frog. The example of a flawed Black woman exposing systemic, institutional racism despite her own socially demeaned stature should at least be as celebrated as the personal holocaust survivor of Grand Guignol parents.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed both Precious and The Princess and The Frog. Both films offer vitally important Black women’s stories and images, but they are end spectrum hyperbolic works of art. America Violet is a reality-based road map for walking with dignity for the living. Appropriately, American Violet closes not with some faux-celebratory scene of Regina Kelly’s David vs. Goliath triumph against an ever-present corrupt system; it knows Kelly’s win is but a ripple in a social justice ocean. Instead, it closes with a sobering, challenging statistic for us all to determine whether to act on with the same justifiable outrage and fight of a young mother in Texas: 90% of all U.S. convictions are made through plea bargain.
The internet is abuzz with shade and conjecture about Rihanna’s latest single, “Russian Roulette,” and what it all means. Written by Ne-Yo, the song has been argued as a metaphor for Rihanna’s abusive relationship with Chris Brown. This argument seems a wee bit of a stretch (are the rounds to represent how many times she went back until she got “shot?”). However, many people, including singer/songwriter Eric “Erro” Roberson, have taken the song for something more sinister, as a playbook for youth suicide.
The song is not the only thing about “Russian Roulette” that’s making noise. Several fans commented on Roberson’s page that they found the video offensive as well. The video is obscure in ways that the very direct song is not. On its face, the song presents an introspective, but detailed narrative about a woman playing Russian roulette for the first time with a man whose played it often and survived.
The video on the other hand is artsy, full of Saw imagery, some of which is ripped off from old Maxwell and Janet videos, but I digress. Anthony Mandler, the video’s director, told MTV News that the goal of the video is to be intentionally “not obvious” given the seemingly unending media drama about Rihanna and Brown’s fateful night of intimate partner violence.
But is the song about suicide? Is she playing footloose and fancy free with a song that glorifies suicide? And as an artist doesn’t she have the right to cover a broad array of subjects, including the controversial?
“It’s the Pygmalion,” I say to myself, “an updated Pygmalion with a dash of Cyrano de Bergerac.” That’s all I’m thinking the whole time I’m watching the hyper-sexist The Ugly Truth starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (newly released on DVD). In playwright George Bernard Shaw’s version of Pygmalion, better known as My Fair Lady among theater buffs, a strong-willed, Cockney gutter snipe is transformed into a proper (read: demure and “precious”) English lady. In the end, through a montage-worthy series of transformative lessons, is determined to be worthy of love by an arrogant, obnoxious middle-age bachelor. How’s Frazier for a grand prize? For all her work to become acceptable for marriage and society, our hard-working lady wins a Viagra-eligible curmudgeon who is verbally abusive and disrespectful at every turn. But, hey, at least he’s paid and can keep his upgrade out of the gutter, right?
The literal closing message of the Pygmalion and its offspring, The Ugly Truth, is that a strong, independent, working woman should be grateful an oaf could love her—as worthless as she is with all her neuroses—but only after being smoothed out by that jerk’s sanding hands. This has been the message women have fallen in love with since the Pygmalion myth was first created centuries ago by the story’s primary beneficiaries, men.
As a cultural critic, I spend a lot of time mining issues of race, class, gender and sexuality in the musical arts. My bread and butter is inking challenges to artists to go deeper than commercially appealing but soulfully destructive tales of exploitation and objectification of people, male and female, that has become our international booty shaking standard. Asking artists and listeners alike to consider how they contribute to pervasive, impressionable messages confusing sex for love, beauty for depth, finance for romance and cars for manhood. Asking us to reflect how our messages to each other, and even more devastatingly, to ourselves feed decisions that fail to fulfill us, fail to uplift us, fail to make us whole. So, it’s exciting to share a song that lifts a mirror to us, asking us is this really how we want to live, to be?I’m living for a symbol/The way I live my life/Symbol/the way I choose my wife/Symbol/the way I raise my kids/Symbol/to the way I live.
On July 24, 2009, E. Lynn Harris went into cardiac arrest and died at the age of 54 years old. Lynn, as he was known to friends and associates, was a 10 time New York Times bestselling author with over 4 million books in print. This distinction made E. Lynn Harris the first commercially successful, openly Black gay writer in America since James Baldwin. While he stood on the shoulders of a spare number of pioneering Black gay writers who came before him, including: Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, Assoto Saint, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Samuel R. Delaney and other members of this exclusive club, Lynn would go further than any of them in cultural impact and financial reward. Like Harris, all of these writers described the lives of closeted and openly gay Black men, some long before Harris was even born, but Harris fortuitously arrived at a time when the culture was hungry for different, more sophisticated stories about Black people. The public proved eager for operatic tales of Black affluence, celebrity success, and salacious sexual diversities, not the previously dominating stories of poverty, racial animus or traditional sexual and family relations. For them, Lynn delivered, changing the national dialogue about Black gay men forever.
The debut of Invisible Life and its numerous sequels benefited as much from the times as it did from the earnestness of Harris’s fresh, confessional tales of closeted Black male life on the down low. In 1991, when Harris arrived on the scene, America was in the middle of its fourth Black literary renaissance, only this one was better known for its commercial achievement rather than its literary cred. In the late 80s, early 90s, mainstream publishers (again) discovered that Black people do indeed read books and were a considerably large portion of the untapped literary market. The stratospheric success of Terry McMillan’s Waiting To Exhale proved prescient, shepherding in an explosion of Black writers delivering what some derisively be termed “sistah girl fiction” and the vaguely dismissive “urban lit” by others. Simultaneously, Hollywood realized (again) there was an untapped market for urban romantic comedies starring post-Civil Rights buppies in situations parallel to their professional white counterparts. Popular music was just experiencing its split between b-boy rappers and thug crooners and those “queer-oriented” dance music artists like RuPaul, C.C. Penniston, C&C Music Factory, and Crystal Waters whose tribal beats were fostering a revival of the sexually diverse discotheque. In these anything goes nightclubs, straights and gays and everything in between together partied like it was 1999 and tried to live out try-sexual movies like Threesome. The organized gay rights movements were becoming more vocal and visible, but thanks in part to queer racism, was largely a white identified movement. Black gay life was limited to bars, gyms, clubs, parks, bathhouses, fraternities and telephone chatlines—there was no Internet and you could count the national number of Black gay organizations on your hands.
Other than a fading masculine beauty, echoes of an earlier athletic might, Donnie has only one thing going for him, at least to hear him—and also his ex-wife—tell it: Donnie is incredibly hung. Donnie is a bankrupt, disenchanted America whose remaining claim to fame is old athletic glory and its lingering physical might. The show willfully ignores the remaining privileges, attributes, and dare I say the choices Donnie and America made to end up in their unenviable circumstances.
I suspect “Hung” will not allow Donnie’s relationship to women and his underestimation of his children and other inherent privileges to follow to their natural conclusion, to mirror so completely America’s relationship to its debt-holder, China. That wouldn’t make must-see TV, as much as tragic Masterpiece Theater. I don’t begrudge the show for trying to make a comedy of such tragic circumstances, but I find their choice of hero a curious one.
While the issues and remedies of marital decline in urban communities are more complex than a song, the cultural impact of having influential young men sing about the trials and benefits of committing to a partner cannot be underestimated for the young Black men who have few models or male-centered messages encouraging them to do otherwise. Nearly half of young Black people today can expect never to marry, and it isn’t because the sistahs aren’t trying! Civility advocates financial and marketing support of artists who make marriage sexy or better yet, real and accessible, could be inspiring and influential in how the urban community views relationships that are now more celebrated for their dysfunction than their love.
Gospel artist Tonex has a new album out, Unspoken, but no one seems to notice. The Alternative Prince of Gospel has his first major label release in years (he’s released several independently), and it does less than 5,000 copies in sales during its first few weeks. Radio has not broadly picked up his music, many megachurches have closed their doors to him, and the press on this release has been limited.
The significance of these disappointing early sales and virtual blacklisting of a major talent with nine releases and who’d accrued ten years of fans, speaks to other artists watching from the sidelines wondering how far they can reasonably push gospel boundaries to include more real life experiences, struggles and language without receiving a commercial backlash for their artistic candor.
It certainly will make those gospel singers who have struggled with sexual identity and gender presentation to take note, as Tonex has radically been the only gospel artist to ever play with his gender appearance and discuss personal sexual issues from adultery to child molestation and even same sex feelings with the complex moral conflicts these concerns warrant. His very public demise as an artist could also mean the demise of artists striving to present Christianity as a faith large and compassionate enough to embrace believers who are not perfected, but who engage in lifelong struggle, periods of failure and questioning, and experience tension, confusion, anger and even rebellion with the faith that most speaks to their hearts, but whose most esteemed faithful too often fail to heed its tenets. Tonex’s the artist who reveals himself in the midst of the storm, not the artist who sings about how he got over once the clouds have passed by.
I thought I’d take a peek behind this musical sensation sweeping our land and major shows like American Idol, Jimmy Kimmel and—rather curiously un-critiqued on—the Tyra Banks Show. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that recession-weary Americans are groovin’ to much more than the idea of escaping their hard knocks life through the bottle, but we are in fact bouncin’ to a one man’s stealth plot to take advantage of a woman he purposely gets drunk for sex. Have you actually read the lyrics to “Blame It”?
While there’s no danger of Obsessed leading to an explosion of Black women’s membership for say the National Council of Negro Women or Black women sponsoring new legislation against miscegenation, if the film does prove a box office success it will have done so by cynically by playing into irrational, unfounded fears. It would also say something dark about where some of us still are nearly 100 years after white men in hoods came to defend their families against interracial desire. Only this time the hoods wore weave.
*This posting was originally written prior to the release of weekend box office results. Since written, Obsessed has gone on to be the #1 box office hit of the April 24th week, grossing 28.5 million dollars in a single weekend, the second-highest weekend opening in Screen Gems history.
There have been very few media representations of full-figured Black womanhood that are sexy, strong, vivacious, compassionate, and concerned about the needs of Black people. In film and television, the big Black woman can usually be depended on to be sassy, funny, sexless, and preternaturally concerned with the trials and tribulations of white children over those of her own besieged family and community. Rooted in antebellum fantasies of grateful, satisfied wet nurses and nannies (then termed Mammies) of white children, the character sold everything from maple syrup (Aunt Jemima) to Dixie sheet music. Lifting Mammy from 19th and early 20th century pop culture, Hollywood for nearly 80 years mastered selling Mammy until she became a normalized, iconographic image in the minds of several generations of Americans. Even though movies like Gone with the Wind and Corrina, Corrina and TV shows like Beulah and Gimme A Break are no longer widely acceptable, they still live on as late night films and through reruns aired on nostalgia cable stations like AMC, TCM, and TVLand, their caricatures forever beckoning to new generations with a beautific smile and ample bosom. Pushing Mammy down the stairs, in struts a vibrant Jill Scott and HBO’s No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, a TV series based on 10 best-selling books by Alexander McCall Smith about a lady detective in the Motherland.
With each new case-solving episode, Scott dismantles the Mammy image, while also bringing the dignity of African womanhood to international audiences. Set in Botswana, Scott’s character is proud of her “traditional frame” sharing with a slimmer peer “that some men like it that way,” after the woman tried a sly dig at Scott’s weight. No undesirable wallflower, here many men vie for Scott’s attention, including a smitten mechanic sure to eventually win her hand. Indeed, in the premiere, an investigated philanderer with a slender wife tries his damndest to bed Scott, to no avail. More than depicted as desirable, Scott’s a woman of keen intelligence with an unwavering sense of justice and a tireless focus on the needs and welfare of Black children and community. While she was once the victim of violent Black manhood (balanced by her being the clear beneficiary of a caring Black father) and served the role of dutiful daughter, those submissive images serve as a backstory to the dynamic, self-made woman serving the greater good. In this sun-kissed land a proud, independent, voluptuous, Afro-sporting African woman is idealized as the most whole, amidst a desert of half-formed, Westernized women depicted as victims (sometimes complicitly) of men with loose morals. And yet, the character is no saint, rather a rarely seen three-dimensional woman.
This is not the first time Jill has dismantled Mammy. As a multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning soul singer, Scott reminded the music industry that sexy, confident voice comes in all sizes. Before Scott and Angie Stone, large women were expected to be dance divas or belt the blues about Black men who cheated and mistreated them. From Bessie Smith until Aretha started demanding some “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” with few exceptions, black female singers were required to be fantasy fetishes like Beyonce. Since Scott, several thick to full-figure singers have been given their chance, maybe Hollywood will follow here too. It seems regardless of medium, Jill Scott is giving young women of all sizes a new iconic image to aspire to and believe in, a nurturing figure who is a full fledged human being, this time with a wink to her golden smile.
There is something moving, swaying and beautiful about a good love song. When performed by a skilled, yet unbridled soul singer, a simple song about love becomes transformed into an aching, nearly unnerving display of vulnerability and unassailable honesty. Romantic soul dares you to deny the truth of the love it professes; this distinction gives powerful cultural and emotional validity to heterosexual love, which may be why so few gay soul singers have dared to sing the love—or even the lust, for that matter—that “dare not speak its name.” As a man who professes to be love’s advocate, heretofore political soul singer William Scott may be about to change all that.
As Black artists operating in the heterosexual bastion of soul, their willingness to be the canaries in the mine when the costs are still high and the obvious returns so low is laudable. Commendable as it may be that white gay soul singers Tim Dillinger and Adam Joseph do more than credible jobs as “out” blue-eyed soul artists, there are enough majority peers keeping them company as soulful white gay artists, including magazine cover boys Sam Sparro and Ari Gold, to prevent either from achieving unique cultural distinction. Scott and the new breed won’t have that problem; they are clearly black pioneers in R&B and soul.
Say gay music or queer music and a couple of rapidly dated visions emerge. Visions of handsome, short-haired women—mostly white—strumming acoustic guitars or skyscraping drag queens—mostly black—belting falsetto over a dance track immediately come to mind. A barely memorable butch queen or two singing techno, electronica, or house may register a mental blip, but otherwise few queer masculine images in popular music, especially black-identified music, will pop-up. Sadly, those who operated outside of these stereotypes in real life generally haven’t been very good singers or songwriters, putting out sub-par crumbs of material which gay audiences eagerly consumed because it was better than nothing at all. However, several genuinely good artists are beginning to color the queer lines of gay popular music, and I say it’s about damn time too. Where have ya’ll been, and why have you made us wait so long?
Ask any LGBT black music lover over 30 and they will breathlessly describe just how long they’ve been waiting for their Melissa Ethridge, Aimee Mann, Elton John, George Michael and Boy George. The wait was particularly acute in the 90s when everyone was coming out - everyone whit,e that is. Throughout the 90s black images in queer music were mostly Afro-centric earth mothers like Toshi Reagon, bisexual rebels like Meshell Ndegeocello, or RuPaul (no adjective needed). Certainly, there were no out gay hip hop or R&B artists, with “out” being the operative word.
At least not artists while they were still in their commercial prime. Several were forced out because of illness, like the departed singer/songwriter Kenny Greene (Mary J. Blige, Will Smith) of the R&B quarter, Intro; or “outed” by police in embarrassing vice stings like Quincy Jones’ discovery, Tevin Campbell. Several artists have come out during their middle age, once no one was really paying attention and their major label careers had long passed them by. We won’t even discuss Luther Vandross or the rumors surrounding luminaries like Phyllis Hyman. Only chart-topping dance artists like Sylvester, Carl Beam and Byron Stingily were willing to represent as out Black gay artist while in their commercial prime.
Now, there has always been something queer in black music. Music videos have long been peopled by curiously gendered men and women who received the more ambiguous label of “freak” (think Grace Jones, Nona Hendryx, Annie Lennox and 80s mascara boys like Prince and Jermaine Stewart). There have also always been over-the-top sangin’ queens in gospel who with heavy lisps would lament in interviews about God’s negligence in sending them a wife (if ever there was ever evidence of God’s wisdom, this is it). Still, Black music was the bastion of heterosexuality. Then along came Tim’m West.
A soul singer, hip hop poet and academician (Duke, New School and Stanford graduate), Tim’m West has released three books (Bare, Flirting, and Red Dirt Revival) and eight hip hop albums—five with the rap group Deep Dickollective and three solo projects (Songs From Red Dirt, BlakkBoy Blue(s), and his latest) of traditional hip hop with clear lineage to 80s rap and the Black Arts Movement. With his overtly sexual and political lyrics, the swaggering intellectual also is an heir apparent of the 80s Black Queer Movement led by writers like Essex Hemphill, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam. His latest album, In Security: The Golden Error his best produced to date, with more than half being radio-ready in quality and modernity. Tim’m West has been the Black gay rap pioneer we thought the manufactured Baby Phat recording artist, Caushun, was going to be in the early 2000s, before he got locked up for identity theft. West’s indie shows are well attended, he’s in-demand on the college lecture circuit and, as a feminist and self-avowed “Kingchaser,” he is the darling of pro-feminists and bears alike. Conscious rap artists like Talib Kweli and soul men such as Gary Taylor regularly offer West the credibility of mainstream praise. Adding to the chorus are the many blogs, national magazines, regional newspapers, and documentaries (Pick Up The Mic, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, and the forthcoming Bring Your “A” Game) prominently featuring West. Though nearing 40 years in age, he still possesses a boyish appearance and—listening to the artistic progression on his albums—one feels his best work is still ahead of him, promising a future bounty for those who’ve been waiting for him and his breed.
I chose to focus on West in this first installment because he is more than a pioneer; West is the Kevin Bacon of Black queer music movement. West’s circle of friends and associates are a virtual who’s who of the queer people of color music scene, including Donnie, Baron, Nhojj, Ashley Phillips, Phillip Alexander, and Rahsaan Patterson. If the laundry list seems daunting for those just discovering there is more gay music in the world than k.d. lang, West’s latest tours and project, In Security…, offer a primer for beginners seeking other gay boundary pushers, including: Bryn’t, Deadlee, Last Offence, Tori Fixx, Tim Dillinger and the indomitable soul singer, William Scott (more on Scott and soul singers in the next installment). Tim’m West and his circle represents the future of gay music, Black music and a pop music future where same sex loves, hates and politics will be put to digital wax. Their efforts today feed the waiting, while offering hope for a time when singing about same sex lives isn’t revolutionary at all, but just another banging iPod track in the hood.
