Brief Obit on Ruby Dee and a Lot about our Real Missing Militants

Ruby Dee (October 27, 1922 – June 11, 2014) was an actress. She was a GREAT actress, stage and screen. That she was a supporter of various civil rights activities of her time and has had her name associated with some of the icons we have come now to revere - but we did not always, mind you[!] - should not revise her biography. To now mourn her as if she had been some kind of Black Panther or Communist Party activist is false. Worse, to inflate her role also underplays Dee's peers, African, Indigenous, and European, who committed their lives to radical, revolutionary work. Women we do not talk much about: instead we talk about actors who say interesting things ... when sometimes saying interesting things is quite powerful.

If after Katharine Hepburn's death, someone like me - who adores her and has read every biography - had cast her as a civil rights activist I'd be looked at with a lot of justified skepticism: and yet, one can glean from the Hepburn biography a continuum of far leftist politics, causes she herself supported, and her name was associated with a few militants. But Hepburn was an actress. Like Dee, she was a GREAT actress of stage and screen. Like Dee, Hepburn paid a price sometimes for her politics.

But to call Hepburn an activist because she supported and campaigned for a Communist Party-backed presidential candidate does not, in the totality, make her a political activist. This grade inflation revisionism of calling either Dee or Hepburn "activists" really undercuts the people who do put their necks out for radical change. They rarely come from Hollywood, though you wouldn't know this if the center of your universe is in Hollywood. The political associations of each woman say a lot about who they were but that they chose the road they'd hoe - film, theater - says a lot about them too.

Recently a low-income elder home for the veterans of the Stonewall riots was opened in Philadelphia. We don't think about these fighters, but they paid a great deal as out lesbians and gays and drag queens in their employment. Now that they enter the senior years they lack hefty 401K's to sustain them. They chose a path, often a militant path, and we must honor their path as we queers stand on their shoulders. Because they aren't fixtures of Hollywood, they and their plight is ignored.

I honor Ruby Dee as a great actress, and that much greater that she succeeded in a racist, post-Dred Scott United States She was a working and prolific actress, performing Shakespeare and O'Neill, Hansberry and Tennessee Williams. I would love to have seen her perform Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession."

But she's not Assata or Angela or Winnie Mandela. Let's not get it twisted. If we are hungry for militants - and we should be if we had any sense - they're here, and they were here.