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.
