Poet-Trio

Today is the UK’s National Poetry Day. To celebrate I’m going to look at a trio of black lgbt poets.

One of the most famous black poets is Langston Hughes (1902-1967). A leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s Langston has become an icon of black American literature. He began writing during his high school years in Ohio and later moved to Harlem, New York.

He was a prolific writer, producing work in most literary genres right up to the time of his death. His works concentrated on black American identity and issues of racism and economic struggles. The issue of gay men in black society is just as important even if he never mentioned it. Black American society could not accept that there were gay black men in their community, so many, like Langston Hughes, hid it from the wider community. Among his friends of the Harlem Renaissance, of whom there were many openly lgbt black members, Langston’s sexuality was known and kept private.

 

There have been few Poet Laureate who have been lgbt and black. Only one has also been female, and that is Audre Lorde (1934-1992), who was officially appointed 3^rd Poet Laureate of New York State in 1991.

Audre began writing poetry before she was a teenager. Like Langston Hughes she wrote about black identity in society. She also introduced discussion of lgbt identity into her work. She wasn’t the first poet to do this but, added to her activism and advocacy of discussion between the various identities, Audre believed a better society would develop.

In 1968 Audre entered the world of academia when she accepted the position of lecturer in creative writing at City College, New York, and at the Herbert H. Lehman College. She later became Associate Professor of English at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Through these positions she was able to inspire and influence later writers.

Following her death the Audre Lorde Project was created to work with black community groups and non-violent activism for lgbt African-Americans in New York.

More recent black lgbt poets have embraced performance as part of their work. One of the most well-known of these from the Washington DC area was Essex Hemphill (1957-1995).

Essex was at the fore-front of what has been called the second Harlem Renaissance that began to emerge. The work of gay black poets came to the attention of the wider public in 1986 with the publication of “In the Life”, edited by Joseph Bean. Essex Hemphill contributed to this anthology and edited the follow-up volume “Brother to Brother: New Writings of Black Gay Men” in 1971.

But Essex is also remembered for his performance and readings of his own poems. A charismatic figure, Essex drew audiences to places as varied at small coffee houses to bit theatres and gained an international reputation.

Writing poetry became a means of refuge from his poor childhood. By retreating from this hardship he empowered himself. His poetry readings, often accompanied by his performance partner Wayson James, gave a confidence he never had as a youngster coping with his sexuality in a homophobic society.

It’s sad that Essex’s life coincided with the rise of the AIDS crisis. In some ways the crisis overshadowed everything else in the lgbt community. Essex himself died of AIDS-related causes at the height of his career. In recent years Essex Hemphill has been recognised as one of the greatest gay black poets of the post-Stonewall era. Most of his work, out of print for many years, is being prepared for re-publication and the profile of Essex Hemphill will, hopefully, resume itself in the world of black gay poetry as is did at his death.

However you celebrate National Poetry Day search out more works by today’s Poet-Trio and discover for yourself how their work is still very much poetry of our time.

The Seven Deadly Gay Sins : Going Blue with Lust

If there’s one sin which people admit to enjoying more than any other then surely it must be sex! But for sex to be included on a list of sins there has to be some concept of which kind of sex is considered acceptable and which kind isn’t. Every religion and secular philosophy have laws and regulations on sex, and quite often they contradict the others. In pre-Victorian times there was no problem in the UK with having sex with girls as young as 12 because that was the age of consent. Times, attitudes and morals have changed and today this would be classed as child abuse and paedophilia.

And then there’s pornography. Porn and sexual material has been referred to as being “blue” for many decades. Historians have often debated why. Some claim it originates in places like the Windmill Theatre where nude female models were bathed in blue light. Others claim it originates in the English censorship of theatre administered by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office where material deemed not suitable for performance was crossed out of the script with a blue pencil.

None of the historians bother looking further back. They know that red means anger and green means envy, not realising that blue for sex originates in the same Medieval cultural belief in western Europe. So, LUST, the excess of sex, is entered on my Seven Deadly Gay Sins flag.

So, what can we talk about today concerning the Deadly Sin of Lust in the lgbt community? Don’t get too excited because I’m not going into gay porn!

We should never assume that all lgbt heritage is about “good” people. One of the most constant downsides of the lgbt community is the presence of those who practice the form of lust currently considered the worst of them all – paedophilia.

There was a time when the general public thought all gay men were paedophiles (some still do). This opinion was brought into the open in my home city of Nottingham in August 1977.

The Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) held their annual conference in Nottingham. This was the same conference at which the inspiration for the play “Bent” was premiered.

One of the guest speakers at one of the workshops was a Dutch MP called Dr. Edward Brongersma (1911-1998). As a member of the Dutch Senate he was instrumental in bringing the homosexual age of consent down to 16 in line with heterosexual sex (he had been imprisoned in 1950 after being convicted of having sex with a 17-year-old). What he is best known for, however, is his research into gay paedophilia. He was considered a world authority on the subject. So when it was revealed he would be attending the CHE conference in Nottingham there was a public outcry.

Protests were held outside the hotel where the workshop he was scheduled to attend was to be held. The hotel, fearful of losing business and of threats to the property, cancelled the booking. The workshop was moved to another venue (just across the road from my flat) and went ahead with Dr. Brongersma as the main guest. At the end of the workshop he was given a standing ovation.

Attitudes in the UK towards paedophilia at the time were, more often than not, not discussed openly. Today there is more discussion about paedophilia and its moral place in society. Child abuse in particular is a highly visible and almost constant topic in the media.

The lgbt community must be able to distinguish between paedophilia/child abuse and acceptable sexual practices in modern society. There have been several articles in the lgbt media this year about one man who has been hailed as a hero against Christian homophobia, when in fact he was a serial child rapist and abuser. Is he the sort of “hero” we want?

The man was brought to the fore last year when plans were announced of Pope Francis’s visit to Uganda to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the canonisation of the Ugandan Martyrs. The visit never actually went ahead but the lgbt media voiced their opposition all the same. The reason was because the Ugandan Martyrs were all young Christian men and boys who were executed by their king, Mwanga II, after they rejected his sexual advances. The visit was distorted into the Pope appearing to honour Christians who rejected homosexuality. Which was the greater sin – rejection of rape, or murder?

I gave a brief history of their martyrdom several years ago. The whole point about the killings is not that the Christian boys were being homophobic but that they were killed purely because they rejected the forced sexual abuse of a paedophile and child rapist who thought he had the right to rape who he pleased.

There was nothing good about King Mwanga’s sexual activities. The Ugandan Martyrs weren’t even gay. He used his power to abuse anyone he wished – gay, straight, male, female. This was part of his culture and the Christian missionaries realised (even if modern lgbt journalists don’t) that the human rights of Ugandans were being violated. Forget the religion. Would an atheist organisation have supported this violation? The fact that the boys were converted Christians is irrelevant. For the first time in their lives someone had arrived and said they had the right to say “No” to abuse.

For too many decades gay men have been portrayed as predatory paedophiles like King Mwanga. It’s the reason who so many people still oppose the idea of two gay men having children. I weep when members of the lgbt community start using their own religious prejudices to condone the rape of innocent boys. If I was murdered by a serial rapist because I said “No” I hope I’d be remembered as a hero not the villain.

Heritage Spotlight : Scraps of History

Have you ever kept a scrapbook? I have. I’ve still got over a dozen of them I put together when I was a teenager. I’ll be showing you two of them next year which I made 40 years ago. Unknown to me at the time these scrapbooks have become an invaluable record of the time I compiled them, something that can’t be reproduced in the digital age.

More often than not scrapbooks are thrown away. No-one thinks of them as significant to our cultural heritage. They’re often thought of as just sentimental, nostalgic items of no importance to anyone but their owners. But sometimes scrapbooks are saved by those enthusiastic enough to keep adding to them year after year after year.

One scrapbook compiler has become one of the most important chroniclers of black American heritage, without even having any academic background in history, and we’ll have a look at his life and work today at the start of the UK’s Black History Month. His name was L. S. Alexander Gumby (1885-1961).

Unlike my own scrapbooks, which I never imagined would still be around 40 years later, Alexander Gumby had the deliberate intention of making a permanent, ever-growing, and long-lasting record. His scrapbooks were also more than just a hobby and a collection of clippings, photos and ephemera that he found interesting. They became his life. In today’s digital age he would surely have had a major presence in the blogosphere and web universe.

Gumby began his first scrapbook in 1901 when he was 16, about the same age I was when I started. The subject of his first scrapbook was the recent assassination of President McKinley, but soon his desire came to centre on a record of the lives of African-American people and their contributions to American culture.

By 1904 he had left his native Maryland and had moved to Harlem, New York. Arriving at a very significant time in black American history, the early stages of the Harlem Renaissance, Gumby found himself moving in the same circles as great Harlem figures like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Josephine Baker.

Through the patronage of a stockbroker called Charles W. Newman Gumby was able to expand his scrapbook collection and house it in a studio in Harlem which soon became known as “Gumby’s Bookstore”. This became an important gathering place for members of the Harlem Renaissance and also the lgbt community (Gumby was gay), and all of them helped to expand the scrapbook collection by donating photographs, clippings and autographs. There Gumby hosted talks and meetings, displayed his scrapbooks, and his flamboyant personality made his something of a must-meet for visiting black Americans. He earned the nickname “The Great God Gumby”.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a huge blow to Gumby’s stockbroker patron, and Gumby’s Bookshop closed down. Everything was sold, except the precious scrapbooks which were stored in a friend’s house.

Gumby continued to compile scrapbooks. Every aspect of black culture and heritage was collected, from slavery to sport (he compiled 7 scrapbooks on black boxers alone).

In 1950 he donated his entire collection to Columbia University. They employed him to help organise and catalogue the scrapbooks, which are now called the Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana.

Gumby never stopped collecting, right up to his death in 1961. In total he left 300 scrapbooks of vital contemporary records of black Africa and historical documents dating back to 1850. They leave a chronicle of black life that lives more than any book. We can immerse ourselves in parts of those scrapbooks online at “Unwritten History: Alexander Gumby’s African America”.

Perhaps we should all start our own scrapbooks. They would include all the things that can’t be put on Twitter or Facebook, or whatever technological version of the world you choose to live in.

For me, I stopped doing scrapbooks over 20 years ago, but I still collect various personal ephemera which are stored in boxes and envelopes. Is it time for a revival in the lost art of scrapbooking? Thanks to Alexander Gumby we have something to inspire us.

Ruby and Tiny

Back in July I wrote about lgbt drummers and briefly mentioned the jazz drummer Ruby Lucas. It seems appropriate to write more about her today, during Black History Month UK and immediately after my piece about the Harlem Renaissance.

Ruby Lucas was born and raised during the Harlem Renaissance. She grew up in to become a member of a small all-female jazz/swing band and, with the partner Tiny Davis, founded a popular lesbian and gay bar in Chicago.

Much of what we know about Ruby’s life comes from her position as Tiny Davis’s partner. There’s very little information which tells us about Ruby as an individual in her own right. Most of her story is told in relation to her place in Tiny’s life.

Ruby grew up in Kansas City. Whether that is where she was born or not is uncertain. I’ve tried to track her down on the US censuses for 1940 and 1930 without success, so I cannot tell you the year of her birth or her family circumstances. It is almost certain, though, that Ruby was raised in poor surroundings.

Ruby learnt to play the piano as a youngster, and this leads me to suspect that there was music in her family background. Perhaps her parents were musical entertainers of some sort during the Harlem Renaissance years. Ruby’s musical talents were obviously encouraged by someone and she also learnt to play the drums and bass.

As a performer Ruby used the stage name Renei (or Renée) Phelan. I have seen a couple of references which indicate it was the other way rough – Ruby being her stage name and Renée her real name. I have also listened to interviews where Tiny Davis uses the name Renée for Ruby which might be supportive of this. Again, a search of the US census reveals nothing definite.

It was in Kansas City that Ruby met Tiny. Ernestine “Tiny” Davis was a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female, inter-racial, jazz/blues/swing band which toured America during World War II. Tiny was in Kansas City performing with the Sweethearts in 1948 and was organising refreshments at the after-show party when she met Ruby. There must have been an instant connection, because shortly afterwards Tiny left her husband and children and lived with Ruby.

Soon after the war the International Sweethearts disbanded and work for female black musicians was difficult to find. Ruby not only became part of Tiny’s personal life after that but also a member of a new all-female band called Tiny Davis and the Hell Divers. This was a smaller band than the Sweethearts, just 3 or 4 members which would find work in many more smaller venues than the dance hall. Tiny was band leader and trumpet player and Ruby played the drums. The Hell Divers undertook small tours of the US and Caribbean.

Ruby and Tiny moved from Kansas City to Chicago shortly after forming the band. Tiny hinted in a 1988 documentary that they left Kansas because of their relationship (they were “thrown out” of Kansas, in Tiny’s words).

In Chicago the Hell Divers performed in clubs and bars, some of them gay and lesbian clubs. But tastes in music were changing. The swing and jazz sounds of the 1930s and 1940s were being replaced at the top of the music charts by rock’n’roll. With tour dates diminishing Ruby and Tiny decided to open their own club in the early 50s, “Tiny and Ruby’s Gay Spot” on Wentworth Avenue in Chicago. It soon became a well-known venue for gays and lesbians to gather and hear Tiny and Ruby perform live.

The Gay Spot could have gone into the 1960s had it not been for the ubiquitous urban redevelopment in many cities. In 1958 Tiny and Ruby’s Gay Spot was demolished to make way for a new road, the Dan Ryan Expressway.

With their own venue gone Ruby and Tiny returned to performing in other venues around Chicago. They had acquired something of a cult following by then. In the end it was the progress of time that stopped them performing. Tiny developed arthritis which prevented her from standing for long periods on stage. Even so, it was 1982 when they last performed professionally – that’s nearly 30 years after Tiny and Ruby’s Gay Spot first opened.

In 1988 Ruby and Tiny were featured in the documentary mentioned above, “Tiny and Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women”, in which they performed together and with Tiny’s family. This documentary is featured on the DVD release of “Before Stonewall”.

Tiny Davis died in 1994. Ruby Lucas survived her. Nothing is recorded of Ruby after this, perhaps someone out there can let me know.

I’ll leave you with this clip from the 1988 documentary.

Renaissance Women

Following on from my article last Sunday on lgbt Renaissance composers here’s a look at a more recent group of lgbt Renaissance musicians, those in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s.

It is something of a misnomer to call the movement a true Renaissance. There was no consolidated or focussed cultural or artistic past to be reborn, unlike the medieval Renaissance which saw the rebirth of learning and art resulting from the rediscovery of long forgotten and ignored Ancient Greek writings.

The Harlem Renaissance began quietly and was a consolidation of many cultural influences from African-American communities as they converged on New York City in what is called the Great Migration at the end of the 19^th century. The consolidation of these influences began to be noticed in the 1920s when many African-Americans began publishing their writings and new musical experiences of modern cabaret, blues and jazz were being created.

When we look back at the Harlem Renaissance we see many names emerging as pioneers of black American culture. Many of these names are of women. But we must remember that the culture of 1920s USA, even though it seems close to ours, was different. In her recent undergraduate thesis “Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space During the Harlem Renaissance” Samantha C. Tenorio points out that within the black community of the period the term “women-loving women” “…implied a particular intersectional identity of race, gender, sexuality, and often class, due to the systemic impact of racism that produced wealth inequality, wherein the woman-loving woman’s identity as a black, often working-class, woman of non-normative sexuality located her at the lowest position of almost all social hierarchies in the United States…” Today the contributions and influence of women to the Harlem Renaissance is seen as equal to that of the men, but it wasn’t thought so at the time.

The fact that the majority of those involved were of the first generation of black Americans not born into slavery is very important. Despite their lack of wealth and property they were able to find a self expression which their parents and grandparents never had.

This new self expression included the freedom to meet and socialise in public. Nowhere can this be more evident than in the music and entertainment venues whose influence spread throughout the rest of the 20^th century.

Jazz and the blues are both seen as deriving from the music of the slaves and the southern states. The blues continued the slave-music convention of expressing a desire and hope for an improvement in the singer’s life. The desire to be free from slavery turned into a desire to be happy, wealthy or accepted in society. Acceptance included sexual orientation, and many of the famous female blues singers of the Harlem Renaissance sang about same-sex acceptance.

No-one expressed this same-sex acceptance in blues more openly than Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886-1939), who is known as “the Mother of the Blues”. She was one of many female performers who began their career on the American vaudeville stage of the southern states. It was on that circuit that Rainey first heard the blues. Using influences from both southern country and northern urban sounds Rainey developed the blues into a medium which became popular with all audiences and became commercial enough for record producers to start marketing the blues to Americans of all heritages and social groups.

Sexuality was a large element in both Rainey’s performance and lyrics, using this in her most well-known song, “Prove It On Me Blues” in which she challenges the listener to catch her with anther woman. It was performed with a knowing look, and it is generally accepted that Rainey was indeed bisexual.

During a tour of Tennessee another influential blues singer joined Ma Rainey’s show. She was the “Empress of the Blues”, Bessie Smith (1894-1937). To say Bessie led a colourful life is an understatement. Hers is also a genuine “rags to riches” story of how a woman from a poor black family used her talents to amass wealth. Most of this was achieved through a recording contract. In 1923 Bessie’s recording of “Down-Hearted Blues” sold over three quarters of a million copies in America in 6 months.

Bessie’s private life was hardly private at all. She never his her tempestuous, sometimes violent, temper, nor her sexual preferences for both men and women. She led the sort of life to which legends attached themselves, though one story may be true. It is said that she once shouted at a female lover that she had 12 women in her show and she could sleep with one every night if she wanted.

Bessie’s untimely death, like so many others of legendary performers, is also surrounded by legend. The plain truth is that she died from injuries she sustained in a car accident in 1937 at the age of 43.

From these influential pioneers, and from other female performers of the Harlem Renaissance, blues and jazz disseminated across the whole of American society and established itself as a timeless genre which still has many fans and performers to this day.