Memoir from Black Gay L.A.

I grew up in mostly white neighborhoods and attended mostly white schools, and in high school gifted classes was the ONLY Black male, so my romantic crushes and sexual pursuits were after white boys. I spent most of this time in Southern California enclaves of Santa Barbara, Claremont, and Alta Loma, so it was surfer dudes and soccer players who mostly caught my eye. There was no one else around. My first beau was a horseback show rider.

When I went away to college at Washington University in St. Louis, I got my first real taste of other ethnicities, not of Blackness - Wash U was fondly called the Harvard of the Midwest, and we are still talking about the 80's, when multiculturalism was but a flicker in an academic's eye and few were even giving lip service to class disparities. At Wash U, I met East Coast Jewish boys, sephardic, hairy chested. They became an exotic crush until our politics diverged year by year, they to defend Israel, me to question her and why the US was giving this apartheidesque, nuclear-armed state so much money.

Then I moved to San Francisco, shacked up with a motley crew of an aspiring actress, fellow aspiring writer, and a Frenchman, who was not aspiring to be an American, thank god; later joined by a French girl who daily hung her bed clothes out the front window. My surroundings were more diverse, but only slightly more Black. More Latins. More Asians. San Francisco is a wee more than half non-white in population, according to the data at the time. I say at the time, before the working class was driven out by dot-com mania and Willie Brown, a Black politco who adroitly strokes the heads of brown babies with one hand and with the other hands the keys to their food supply to profiteers. In San Francisco, I dated a few guys, a white SF state film student, a UC Berkeley Black student, a Vietnamese Berkeley grad student activist extraordinaire, a Thai man. I joined Queer Nation. Blackness at this point came to me in the weekly suggested readings the white facilitators photocopied: [the late] Audre Lorde and [evolving] bell hooks became familiar to me. The names of June Jordan and Angela Davis were dropped like pop culture. But also white Marxist gay activist Harry Hay. In part, the white-led progressive Queer Nation led to its downfall, when the lesbians and the colored began to agitate for the things these writers of color were telling us. We imploded.

As always, when the going gets rough, I seek a seminal book. My comrade, Alex Chee, a worker bee at A Different Light Bookstore handed me this book by the recently deceased James Baldwin. I knew the name Baldwin. I minored in creative writing at Wash U, that white school, read many a nice and boring classic, but never Baldwin. Freshman year the rage writers were the Alan Greenspan mentor, Ayn Rand, and Brett Easton Ellis' "Less Than Zero." Worn copies of both circulated the dorm.

Chee handed me Baldwin's last book, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen." A slim book. The book blew my mind. Without exception, every time I re-read the book, a nugget exposes itself and knocks the wind out of me. The book remains my favorite and the most penetrating narrative of racism in the West. Baldwin is the Jose Marti of the US without question. Blackness was for all intents and purposes an ideology, a radical ideology. I read a little Malcolm, but much preferred CLR James and Walter Rodney, the Marxists, the non-Americans.

When I relocated to Oakland's Lake Merritt ... the OTHER side of the lake, readers! The side bordering East Oakland. I was surrounded by Blackness. On the buses, in the stores, everywhere. A few whites. A few Asians. More Latins. Many Blacks. It was the photo negative of what I'd lived in San Francisco. I did not react in shock or horror to this, but quickly grew to see Black men as complex objects of what Rodney, Badlwin, hooks, et al, had written about. But I also confronted a side not included in their poetry.

Despite the enormous history presented to me of the Black and African Diaspora, time and time again, the Black men I encountered were cowards, not dreamers: they lived here on the DL and/or had such a visceral reaction to whiteness, they despised the fact I associated with them, dated them, sexed with them, which is apparently why they refused the terms GAY or CLOSET ... worst of all: I was indicted many times for the whiteness of my speech. If I was to be so indicted, what of the Baldwins, Lordes, hooks, Rodneys, James ... and Malcolms? Malcom X was of course suspiciously a cypher, nothing more than an "X" on a cap, and an excuse to unleash untreated hatred on whites, far worse. It was such an irony that the few gay white men I encountered in the neighborhood even told me that, and that they wanted a real Black man[!], not me.

For other reasons [I think], I moved to Los Angeles. I considered that not only might a move improve my career but also my love life with my Black brothers. Neither has been the case. I have found a decimated, shame-filled population of pathetic Black Gay men. Hurricane Katrina came through here, I imagine, and no one reported it. I think I should have read the more dense writing of Franz Fanon along with Rodney, Fanon who goes into the psychoses of colonialized Black men.

The Black community in LA had yesterday been a middle class community, but evidently it did not produce much. The public education system is a Third-World atrocity, with a conservative 50% drop-out rate. Worse is what years of middle-class jobs did for this community and how they used it to supply themselves with houses, stuff, cars, and no sense, let alone not a single institution. When the defense industry floor was ripped from beneath them, they did not hum the Internationale or storm the Bastille, or wage a peasants' war ... they smoked more weed. They bought more weed, a point which cannot be missed. More weed was available to sell. Who's selling? Who's profting from this? At any rate, I've met Black men who proudly grew up in LA, educated in their schools, jobless, marginally employed, or employed in the underground, drug economy. This doesn't speak well for the 50% who do matriculate.

The local white men have learned. White men my age will not touch me, period. White men who have spent any time here catch on a lot quicker to what lies on the other side of the tracks. Race puts me automatically on that other side. Baldwin did comment he loved but did not like all Black people, so I guess I can safely say the same now, but it makes the dilemma no less complicated. I can't take these weed-smoking, meth-addicted men home to my mother and don't want them in my bed for a fling. I've had my periods of misery and joblessness and had to take lower-wage jobs and never thought to turn to alcohol or weed. "My head is bloody but unbowed," wrote Henley. Henley's poem, "Invictus," ranks for me along with Kipling's "If," and Cavasky's "Ithaca" as poems every child should know by heart. They are poems that may sound nice to a 9th grader but will continue to explain a Journey, which we all make alone. I guess for some, the poetry of the Old and New Testaments resonate.

But not these Black people. There is no poetry or holy commandment. A few years ago, Bill Cosby seemed to have a meltdown when he deigned to criticize the Black community; more recently, a prominent Black Harvard scholar, Henry Louis Gates, and talk show diva, Oprah Winfrey, added their voices to this criticism. Knowing what a risk this criticism entails, I can only imagine the private frustration these public people brought to their public comments. Cynically, we expect white America not to care, and are dismayed to find Black America equally pathetic. The Black community - if you can call a small cadre of ageing activists no one listens to a community - is broken when its elders are ridiculed. Really, guys, what has been going on here? I wish Mike Davis, socialist historian, would conduct an anthroplogical study of what went on in this city all those years.

I speak as a Black Gay SINGLE man who desires, like most gay men, to make connections with other gay men. We really are social animals. But this is problematic in a phenomenon like Los Angeles. If a rise in hardcore drug use is an indication of hopelessness, LA is at the pit. Crystal Meth is used in epidemic proportions here and a deal breaker if you're trying to meet someone for a fling. Heavy weed smoking slows the brain and clogs the plumbing from working, if you get my drift! (I know I am a teetotaler, but I am a teetotaler who knows that putting SMOKE of any kind into your lungs is counter-intuitive) The new, fashionable hatred for Whiteness dismisses not only white allies but identifies any sign of progress, like good grammar, as suspect. The Down Low phenomenon is not really different from my generation's construct of The Closet, but DL comes out of a rejection of whiteness. Gay is white. Language is white. And White is a deemed a social negative.

All men are brothers, Baldwin told us again and again in sometimes agonizing terms. Like other admonishments, ancient and biblical and kindergarten, we do not heed their instruction. Life is always more complicated than a commandment. But we must all stop and ask ourselves, in light of the state of our post-Katrina society, what would we say to a drowning man who would quibble about the color of the life jacket you would throw to save his life?