Category Archives: eclectic music

My Alex and America’s 45, Bullies with Fan Boys on the March

05 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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45’s fans at campaign rally, Greenville, North Carolina, July 17, 2019. (Carolyn Kaster/AP; https:/usatoday.com).

At least one person will undoubtedly find my latest post unfair and offensive this time around. My Humanities classmate Alex, whom I interviewed as part of my book Boy @ The Window, will likely not be too happy with me this week. So Alex, if you do find yourself feeling this is unfair and my post offensive, I apologize in advance.

But either way, that’s okay, because the comparison between the person he once was and the person who is 45, America’s usurper-in-chief, is apt. Not because Alex was ever a malignant narcissist in need of constant adulation from his entourage. But because even small-d demagoguery around putting down so-called others out of insecurity, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, religion, a sense of superiority, and/or willful ignorance will still lead to violence and bullying. On a societal level, that is mass violence, that is fascism within a democracy, and nation-state sanctioned. No matter what the College Board and ETS says.

The thing I didn’t really allow myself to understand, even after I interviewed Alex in 2007, even after writing my first eight drafts of Boy @ The Window regarding Alex and the “Italian Club,” was this. That people like having leaders, folks they can relate to, even as preteens. In our times, that means someone who’s cool, or at least, pulls off the cool aesthetic well. Alex did. Whether you liked him or despised him at A. B. Davis Middle School in Humanities in seventh or eighth grade, Alex had a certain prepubescent charm. He was playful, goofy, corny, and fully engaged in pop culture as an up-with-everything 12 and 13-year-old.

And that attracted a specific group of folks into Alex’s solar system. Some of them knew him from their mutual time together at Columbus ES, but several in his entourage were from other schools prior to Davis. All of them were disaffected boys in some way or another, mostly Italian (or at least in one case, half-Italian), but almost to a person, not comfortable with the multicultural pressure cooker of relative uncoolness that was our magnet middle school program.

Alex led his “Italian Club” in acting out. Like a wolf pack, they looked for prey in the classroom to pick on, to call the wittiest names, to occasionally get physical with. Many times, they messed around with corny lines for girls like Sandra and Marianna. But I ended up on their radar early on. Between my kufi, my big but slow-talking mouth, and my fight with Brandie, I was ripe for Alex and his band of predators.

On November 2, 1981, the bullying started in earnest, as Alex and his band jumped me after school in the area near the side door exit from Davis. About a third of my classmates watched as the “Italian Club” knocked me to the ground, punched and kicked me until I began to cry. Alex himself never put his hands on me, but watched with glee as his fanboys did the dirty work.

But that wasn’t all. I had to endure seven months of being “dumb,” “stupid,” and a “monkey” from Alex’s band of brothers. It was topped off by a month of “Captain Zimbabwe” chants in May and June 1982, typically in Mrs. Sesay’s homeroom, but after counter-protests from other classmates, it moved to Ms. Fleming’s Italian class.

Eighth grade was nowhere near as bad, partly because I grew four inches over the summer, and partly because they likely sensed my rage from my summer of abuse with my idiot stepfather. Still, this didn’t stop Alex from messing with me or other vulnerable classmates that year or in ninth grade. I remember him greeting Josh a couple of times with the refrain from The Beatles “Hey Jude,” except it was, “Na, Na, Na, Na-Na-Na-Na, Na-Na-Na-Na, Hey Jew.” I remember him and his entourage calling my other classmates “monkey.” He once went after our class’ eventual valedictorian, “she’s a brainiac, a brainiac,” adapting a song from the Flashdance soundtrack.

This was the Alex I knew between the ages of 12 and 15. Comparing him to a 73-year-old who has the impulse control of a nine-year-old hopped up on crystal meth is somewhat unfair, as Alex isn’t that teenager anymore. Still, what 45 has done on a far larger stage than Davis’ Humanities program is essentially the same thing. Except that there are millions of folks — especially White men — attracted to his intersectional message of “this is our [read, ‘A White Man’s’] country.” And anyone not for White men first, second, and always needs to get out, or at least, get out of the way.

There’s a video clip making its social media rounds via Bloomberg editor Tim O’Brien from 45’s rally in Panama City, Florida on May 9. In it, you have 45 and many in his audience laughing at the idea of shooting “illegals” coming in from Mexico as a solution for stemming the tide of “invasion” from Central America.

This is hardly the only blunt signal 45 has sent to his anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Latinx fanboys and footsoldiers-for-the-patriarchy (thank you for the truth, Mona Eltahawy) fangirls over the years that their intersectional -isms are justified. But it is one direct example that those who really believe a race war is coming can use to take up arms and shoot to kill Black and Brown folks for existing in the US. That’s what Patrick Crusius and Connor Betts did this weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio to their dozens of dead and injured victims. That’s what 45’s entourage has been doing with increasing frequency over the past decade. This is what demagogue bullies do. They build a following. They jizz their racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia all over their followers. Those most predisposed to lap up such vitriol and act on it then do the not-so-subtle calls for violent action and take it out on truly random marginalized people.

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which, attending a majority-Black-and-Brown high school and perhaps recognizing his own racism and misogyny, Alex wasn’t the same Billy Idol-worshipper I’d known in eighth grade. By our senior year, he even seemed like-able, and spend way more time with a group of Black and Latino friends than he did with his one-time entourage. I assumed he matured. Good for him. Really.

But it’s way too late for 45 to grow out of his -isms. It’s way too late for millions in his entourage to grow out of their violent fantasies for mastery over vulnerable others. We have to disarm them, with the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. We have to disarm them, by calling them out for the bullies and intersectional terrorists they are. We have to, if we’re going to survive them.

There’s No Starman Waiting in the Sky For Us

20 Saturday Jul 2019

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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James Cromwell as Zefram Cochrane making first contact with Vulcans screen shot, from Star Trek: First Contact (1996). (http://www.startrek.com/)

This week of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing has been yet another reminder that humanity’s evolution has not kept up with its aspirations for exploring and colonizing the universe. A week that is supposed to be one of celebrating NASA’s work and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon has become a week about the immutability of racism and misogyny (really, misogynoir) in the US and beyond. Telling four Black and Brown congresswomen “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” 45 once again showed his xenophobia and misogynoiristic racism and exposed the -isms of millions of Americans. 45’s campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina on Wednesday specifically targeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and descended into a Ku Klux Klan gathering, as the presidents fanboys and foot soldiers chanted “Send her back! Send her back!” for thirteen seconds.

A century before 45’s latest racist, Islamophobic, and misogynoiristic spewings, and a half-century before the Apollo 11 landing, Whites across the US engaged in Red Summer. It was part of a World War I and post-World War I response to the first wave of Black migration out of the Jim Crow South and Black prosperity across the US. A violently racist response made worse because the US plunged into recession in the two years after the end of World War I. The Fourth Estate trafficked in racist stereotypes around “Negro Man Rapes White Girl,” further fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia in the years around and after the Great War. Whites marched into Black communities to beat up, main, rape, kill, burn down Black businesses, and otherwise terrorize Black men, Black women, and Black families. To call these “race riots” implies that Blacks did the same toward Whites, a lie about as close to the truth as 45 has been in the past 50 years.

East St. Louis, Illinois really set the pace for these “race riots” in 1917. But in the Red Summer of 1919, it was Washington, DC, Chicago, Elaine, Arkansas, Omaha, Nebraska, and dozens of other cities and towns in which Whites went off to show Blacks the true nature of racism. Whites exerted their power and violence on Black populations out of an out-of-this-world narcissism, in that everything belonged to them. They were angry because Blacks had taken “their jobs” and moved into “their neighborhoods.” They also wanted laws changed so that White ethnics couldn’t come to the US and take jobs and depress wages, ultimately pitting White immigrants against Black migrants in these White terrorism efforts.

Sound familiar at all? It should. White terrorist attacks on Blacks in Tulsa (Greenwood, a.k.a., Black Wall Street) in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923 were the culmination of White supremacist violence stemming from the narcissistic need for dominance and economic distress. The Immigration Act of 1924 effectively shut off immigration from most of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean in an effort to preserve “White Anglo-Saxon stock” and as a way to appease White men angry about not finding work post-World War I. It was the third anti-immigration bill Congress had passed in the previous seven years.

The parallels between 45 and this week in American racism and the Red Summer of 1919 are enough to prove that humanity is most definitely not ready to meet extraterrestrials from elsewhere in the multiverse. We humans are ill-prepared to make contact with beings with technologies that help them traverse a radiation-filled void in a fraction of the seven years it took the Cassini probe to reach Saturn. We humans lack the emotional, psychological, moral, and spiritual capacity to cope with such a history-altering event. We Homo sapiens are devoid of the humility necessary to meet the challenges that will come after finding out that first contact with an advanced civilization is both an end and a beginning.

Here’s a short list beyond 45 of leading people and recent events that prove humans are as ready for first contact as a newborn baby is for a seven-course meal. Jeffrey Epstein. R. Kelly. Marine Le Pen. Kim Kardashian. Vladimir Putin. Boris Johnson. Xi Jinping. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Nigel Farage. Richard Spencer. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Rodrigo Duterte. Theresa May. Bashar al-Assad and Syria. Kim Jong Un and North Korea. Jair Bolsonaro and his anti-LGBTQIA work in Brazil. Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. Capitalism. Neoliberalism. Misogyny and misogynoir. Islamophobia and anti-Black and Brown xenophobia. Patriarchy’s foot soldiers. The very need for Black Lives Matter. The limited response thus far to man-made global climate change. Hollywood. Las Vegas. The endless fighting over resources and enslavement of peoples for a narcissist’s dream of independence, freedom, power, and wealth. That’s already enough for me to never want to meet humanity!

Can anyone who possesses a reasonable amount of empathy and knowledge imagine what the most powerful and learned members of an advanced alien civilization would think of humanity’s stewardship of Earth? They’ve heard and seen us in action for at least a century, since humans started broadcasting on wireless radio. In that time, there have been been two World Wars, ethnic cleansing and mass murder (e.g., Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot and Cambodia, and Rwanda), the Cold War, and the nuclear arms buildup. Powerful nations and corporations have repeatedly exploited indigenous peoples, the most poverty-stricken in Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, and the planet’s biosphere. I am sure sentient aliens have seen us and feel just as welcome to visit Earth as migrants from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East feel in the US and Europe right now.

Is it possible that sentient extraterrestrials might find some exceptional humans potentially worthy? Sure. Science folk like Michelle Thaller, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Hakeem Oluseyi, and the late Claudia Alexander come to mind. One might be able to make the case for humanitarians and social justice activists, for the best writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, vocalists, and actors out there. But from a sentient alien’s perspective, why should any of these humans be exceptions? These beings are likely able to use dark matter or dark energy to power faster-than-light spacecraft. They may possess the ability to convert matter to energy and back again at a whim, to make food and weapons out of thin air and bio-waste. They may even be able to fold space and create wormholes and black holes. There’s no way they could see any humans as deserving of first contact.

There is also the real issue of what it would take for an alien civilization to become advanced without blowing itself up in the first place. These advanced beings would be collaborative and cooperative to a fault, would’ve long ago assured equity and inclusion as their reason for existence and exploration. They would likely avoid war-loving civilizations like the ones on Earth, while looking to break bread (or the alien equivalent) with more stable, peaceful, and advanced civilizations out in the galaxy.

They may make exceptions, though, for the most vulnerable of sentient beings and other species trapped in warring worlds like our own. These aliens may decide someday to “rapture up” indigenous peoples, vulnerable minority groups, the poverty-stricken, certain women and children, to save them from the leading Western nations and other developed countries on this planet, who seek to oppress and exploit them. It’s something writers like Octavia Butler and Derrick Bell contemplated for Black and Brown folk. It would be the humane thing— maybe even, the godly thing — to do.

Humans should continue to explore space and its endless scientific revelations and mysteries. But humanity should refrain from colonizing the Moon and Mars, much less anything interstellar. All humanity will end up doing is spreading its Whiteness-driven elitism, racism, patriarchy and misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and life-destroying narcissism. The species remains too primitive to be worthy of prime time on a galactic stage. We’ll have to wait for a more just, verdant, and glorious age before first contact will work out well for us. We’re not ready.

How Did I Know I Was Heterosexual?

09 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” 45 single sleeve, circa 1986. (https://medium.com)

This is more than just whether I knew I liked teenage girls and women by the time I was my son’s current age of fifteen, though. Between humping older women’s legs when I was three or four years old (too much information, I suppose), me and Diana slobbering on each other in first grade, and my crush on Ms. Shannon in third grade, that would be enough for most kids to know their orientation. But because I wasn’t “hard” like the boys I lived around at 616 and 630 East Lincoln and the young Turks who lived in public housing on Pearsall Drive, I was often the neighborhood “pussy” or “faggot.” I was mugged four times between April 1979 and the end of 1983. I spent more than one weekend dodging a hail of pebbles and rocks that the neighborhood kids pelted me with. That, and the then buried sexual assault I endured when I was six left me questioning my own sexuality, and with that, my place in the world in terms of friendships and relationships.

The whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, and the additional layers of abuse, hypermasculinity, and misogyny that came with it didn’t help my evolution one bit. One would think that a months-long crush on — really, love for — Wendy in the spring of 1982 would once and for all settle this issue. It didn’t. It didn’t because even I recognized that my love for Wendy was for the version of her who took up space in my imagination. She had become ethereal, and was detached from the flesh-and-blood human being with whom I shared little more than the confines of the classroom in the years between 1981 and 1987. I found her attractive, but had already judged myself unworthy.

Puberty, rebellion, and my switch to Christianity in 1984, and the contradictions that came with this switch over the next year, would tell me more about who I was. This was the beginning of my years of relative asexuality, at least as I presented myself in public. Since I dedicated my life to Jesus, every potential carnal thought I had or action I could take was met with self-doubt and loathing. Mostly, though, I feared for my newborn soul. I feared that somehow, I would go back to being suicidal, Hebrew-Israelite-and-going-to-Hell Donald, the one that got clowned and stoned before reaching six-foot-one.

One of my many attempts at being chaste between September 1984 and May 1985 involved toting my Bible everywhere and breaking it out to read during every idle moment. At school, which got me in trouble with my 10th grade history teacher, Ms. Zini. At home, when I wasn’t distracted by music, my younger siblings, or our fucked up living arrangement with one Balkis Makeda. As sanctimonious as it was, I was really trying to learn, to receive revelation, to understand how this 66-book, 1300-page document could transform me and my mini-apocalyptic world.

I also rode the buses and subways around the city with my red-covered Bible in hand. On many Fridays and Saturdays, whether working for my dad or hunting him down for money, or just because I needed to get away, I’d take the 2 from East 241st in the Bronx to 72nd in Manhattan, or further down, to Times Square, or sometimes, all the way out to Flatbush in Brooklyn.

No matter where I or we (when my older brother Darren would tag along) went, the most interesting part of these outings usually were the people who would be in the cars with me/us. Drunkards who reminded me of Jimme. Older Jamaican women on their way to do domestic work. Middle-aged, haggard-looking White guys who dressed twenty years too young for their faces.

Screenshot from “I Wonder If I Take You Home” video, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam (1984/85). (https://imgue.com).

Frequently, Nuyorican or Dominican girls and young women would board somewhere between 180th and East Tremont and 149th and Grand Concourse (though because of the ethnic tensions I didn’t understand at the time, certainly not at the same time). I would look up from reading II Chronicles or Esther or Ephesians, and before I could comprehend the people my eyes took in, my dick responded. At 15, I already knew that even a mildly warm breeze was enough for me to get a hard on. I didn’t know that four or six young Latinas on a train wearing bright, tight clothes, makeup, lipstick, and perfume, and heels that would accentuate their breasts, hips, and round butts would completely counter my asexual front. Luckily for me, the Bible-toting phase of my life was during wintertime, and I could cover up my woody with my jacket.

Of course, it felt sinful, and I felt ashamed, that a second and a half of staring up from my Bible would lead to carnal stirrings. But it also gave me a sense of who I was and wasn’t attracted to, really and truly. When White girls with their voluminous ’80s hair got on the train, I hardly noticed. They were trying too hard, and their flat butts did nothing for me. When single Black women in their twenties and thirties would board, I noticed, too. I didn’t have what I would learn later to be colorism issues.

Of course, I learned that I was heterosexual, which I knew would please my Mom to no end. Which actually pissed me off. So, if I had discovered I was gay, she wouldn’t accept me? Wow!, I thought one April Saturday on way back to East 241st. At that point, my evangelical zeal for setting myself apart from the rest of world with my Bible as a baseball bat had waned. I was nowhere near ready to be involved in any kind of relationship that would lead to sex. But, I was ready to drop the idea that my eternal life completely depended on me ignoring both women and my attraction to women. I would remain publicly asexual for a few more years and endure f-bombs from my dad. Truly, it took until I was twenty to understand that whatever my orientation, no one has the right to tell me that my sexuality was anathema to my Christianity.

Year 50 (So It Begins…)

05 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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US Route 50 sign, August 26, 2017. (Fredddie, originally SPUI, via http://wikipedia.com). In public domain

As I’ve said in other settings and on my blog, I never dreamed of making it to 30 growing up. Fifty might as well have been 150 for me when I was in the middle of my Boy @ The Window years! But, with my forty-ninth birthday and the calendar change to 2019, I’m here anyway. A half-century (starting sometime in March) between conception and me being just old enough for my son and my students to see me as a fossil. To think that I was Egg #3 in one of my Mom’s ovaries this time 50 years ago? I’m sure I just creeped myself and a large number of you out with that strand of my imagination!

But this isn’t just my Year 50. There are some 500 people I know from my Mount Vernon public schools days, from my years at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, and from other settings who’ll turn 50 this year. Among the Mount Vernonites and New Yorkers I’ve known directly, between a handful who graduated with the Class of ’86, and with the exception of a couple who graduated with my class in ’87 a year early, almost all from my high school days will turn 50 between now and January 2, 2020 (One notable exception is a classmate whose forty-ninth birthday isn’t until April, but…).

What does all of this really mean, anyway? Have I used up more than half of my youth? Will I shrink immediately? Will my joints, which only ache on occasion, grind me into oblivion and infinite pain at the same time? Will my steel-trap mind become mush? Or, will I finally harness my lost dunking ability, in one last grand gesture of youth, getting my head above the rim one last time, before crashing down to earth and fracturing my metatarsals? Who knows!

What I do know is that I’ve been keenly aware of my mortality since my summer of abuse in ’82, and off and on since the summer of ’76. With a milestone such as this, and the average life expectancy of Black males at 64.5 years, I can’t help but think it. Will I make it through middle age? Heck, will I make it long enough to see my son graduate from high school and earn a higher education degree? Will my wife outlive me (probably), and if so, by how much?

Mostly, though, I’ve had dreams about the plausibility that I haven’t done enough in my life, and what little I have achieved could be turned to ash in an instant. Especially by an indifferent-to-openly-hostile and virulently racist nation-state. I’ve had dreams about losing my jobs because I was forty-five minutes late to lecture for one of my classes. I’ve worried about whether I could ever publishing another article again, even though my track record the past four years has been at least pretty good. I’ve worried about never publishing a book in the mainstream, about leaving my son and wife with nothing, about the possibility that not everything will work out, for me and for us. I also worry about not doing enough to support my family, my friends, even strangers, knowing that I can barely save myself in the here and now, much less anyone else.

But perhaps God has more in store for me beyond Year 50. Dare I hope to be healthy and relatively youthful and around long enough to live past 70, 80, even 90? My grandfathers lived until they were 90 and 97, my aunts on my father’s side are both in their late eighties, and my father (despite a 40-year battle with the bottle) is nearly 80 himself. We’ll see.

I just hope that my youth battery is on the plus side of fifty percent, and not on the minus side. Part of me feels like I’ve only just started living, not out of mission, faithful desperation, or obligation, but out of a sense of it all being worth it, of me actually being worth it. I’ve traveled all over the US, to Alaska during the summer solstice, to Canada, to the US-Mexican border. But it was all for work, to present at conferences, to visit family, to give my son a sense of the world. Except for my honeymoon and other marital excursions, I’ve only traveled a couple of times just to experience the world. Despite my disdain for humanity, I still want that, for me and for my family. I can’t get there, though, on my current double-adjunct, full-time equivalent salaries. This must change.

If it all continues to work out, let it be this year, my God, let it be, let it be. For “there will be an answer, let it be” — eeeeee! (It’s not so interesting to quote a song from The Beatles final studio album, the title song released when I was just a bit more than two months old.) To misquote Princeton professor Tera Hunter’s 1996 book, let it be that I “‘joy my freedom,” that I give myself permission to do so, that my life gives me more opportunities to do so. Let Year 50 be about more than just Nixon and Vietnam, the Moon landing and the FBI’s infiltration of the Black Panther Party, about Woodstock and the Jets and Mets winning titles. Let it be that I have as keen an understanding of my future as I do of the past.

The Sweet Consolation of Suicide

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Sweet-and-sour-chicken, 2011. Source: http://www.foodnetwork.com

Well, not exactly sweet to be thinking about what you have thought about and attempted to act out in the past. In the next few hours, I turn 49, which is to say that I begin year fifty on Planet Earth. “Yay me!,” right?

Not so much this time 35 years ago. My suicidal ideations had gone on in December 1983 for nearly three weeks before my fourteenth birthday, in the aftermath of my fourth mugging in four years. That Tuesday, December 27, at 2:30 pm, coming home from C-Town in Pelham, standing on the parapet of that stone bridge overlooking the Hutchinson River Parkway, I had every intention of jumping. I played it out in my head all the different possibilities. At first, it was going to be like the second between taking a deep breath plunging myself underwater and holding my breath while feeling the pressure build up all around my head, eyes, and ears. Except that I imagined a screech, a pop of a hit, and the world turning into stars before I escaped into eternal darkness.

But then, I thought about the plausibility of surviving the 13-foot jump, only to get hit by a car or truck flying down the parkway at 60 or more. Paralyzed, brain-damaged, trapped for days, months, years, decades even, in a body that defied me once again. At this point, my knees were already bent, pretty much ready to push off the stones I stood upon anyway. The possibility of survival and suffering, though, stopped me short of taking that leap. That, and wanting sweet revenge on the stepfather and others who had driven me to this moment.

It’s all in Boy @ The Window. What isn’t in the book is that I couldn’t imagine living past my thirtieth birthday, much less to 49. What isn’t in the book is that I have had other episodes where I either attempted to take my own life via car accident or had suicidal ideations (anywhere between 1982 and 1988, as well as in the late-1990s). This isn’t the same as contemplating my own mortality or considering how much more I may be worth dead than alive (at least I think it isn’t the same, anyway). If someone had put a gun to my head, and asked me why I should keep living, I probably would’ve told them to pull the trigger. I really didn’t have any answers when I got low enough to consider best suicidal practices.

Sure, in the process of working through my own trauma while in progress, I found God, I found Jesus, I read my Bible, I embraced the Holy Spirit. But as the U2 song goes, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,” at least not during my Boy @ The Window years, or in the years after my doctorate, or even after a decade in the nonprofit world. Heck, I’m still a work in progress, and not quite sure what’s around the corner for me (although I’m cautiously hopeful, with fingers and toes crossed, and knocking on wood in my mind’s eye as I type this). But a focus on escape isn’t enough. Striving for perfection — including perfect chastity — wasn’t enough. Even writing my fifty-to-100-pages-too-long memoir wasn’t enough.

Two things in the past decade have been enough. One was to admit, and not for the first time, that I controlled nothing, not even my own body, and certainly not all of my thoughts. For a person who’s policed himself as much as I have over the years, this was a hard truth to finally and fully accept, and that was a little more than four years ago. Two was that I needed to let out my thoughts and feelings, no matter how fucked up or how revealing or embarrassing they could be for me. Some of that has worked through this blog and Boy @ The Window. The rest has been as a result of social media, freelance writing, and otherwise remembering that though I may be truly weird, I am also truly human.

Maybe that’s why in the past couple of years I’ve mostly read Black women writers on their trauma and intersectional experiences, between Brittney Cooper, Morgan Jerkins, Roxane Gay, Crystal Fleming, Patricia J. Williams, and a host of others. Maybe that’s why I found more solace in Kiese Laymon’s Heavy than I ever did with any of my history monographs. Maybe this is why I’m convinced that to be a better writer, I had to become an even better reader, and read across genres and disciplines like I never had before. Maybe, too, this is why I as an educator have committed to use a wider variety of materials to reach my students, even if one or two want to only read mainstream history texts and don’t want to engage in “literary analysis.”

I finished Darnell Moore’s No Ashes in the Fire two days ago. Despite his stepping out of narrative to preach “Black radical love” at least three too many times, Moore’s book reminded me of what all the other wonderful books I’ve read in the past three years have told me. Share your truth, so that others may see, hear, or react to it. Tell your story, ‘cuz ain’t no one else gonna tell it for ya. Talk about it, if only to yourself, so that you know you’re not crazy. There’s bravery in putting in words your pain, your joy, your sense of the world and sense of self, your need for a higher power (or lack thereof). There’s courage in pointing to your unique sameness relative to humanity, and your need to crystallize the dominance of systemic racism, heteronormative patriarchy, and narcissistic worshipping of dollars and billionaire elitism that is this warped-assed world.

None of this may convince someone from taking their own life. I don’t pretend that I have any specific answers, because I don’t. But many times, living begins with one question, then another, then another. Living for me is about finding the best questions to answer, to turn the embers of what was once a wall of bullshit into a forest fire of questions, for me and others. This world will never give us the right to question it, which is why we who might want to live another day must wrest that right for ourselves, every single day.

Viewing World AIDS Day From the Cheap Seats

01 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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World AIDS Day 2018 logo, November 30, 2018. (http://hiv.gov).

Today and this weekend mark 30 years since the first World AIDS Day. Unlike three decades ago, I seldom give HIV/AIDS any thought at all. Where did it go? Has anyone actually died from AIDS recently? Do people still have to worry about HIV/AIDS? I know the answers are, nowhere, yes, most definitely, and hell yes, dumb ass.

But 30 years ago, I worried about HIV/AIDS the same way I worried about the Soviet nuclear threat, my Mom still living with my idiot stepfather, and dying if I wasn’t part of some evangelical Christian rapture. I pretty much worried about everything back then. In the context of my heterosexuality and mostly burying it for fear of intimacy, pregnancy, and bodily fluids, though, I worried that with my luck, any sex at all would lead to the STD to beat all STDs.

So when my dad went out of his way to get me a prostitute (we didn’t use the term “sex worker” then, I think) for my seventeenth birthday in December 1986, a young woman I knew to have been a fellow Mount Vernon High School student the year before, I didn’t hesitate to say no. I preferred Jimme calling me “faggat” to doing the equivalent of Spike Lee’s character in School Daze, a form of meat-market sex approaching (but not quite) rape.

I knew, down to my bones, despite the ACT UP crowd of relatively well-off gay White male activists on MTV and elsewhere, despite the dome of Black hypermasculine homophobia found in Mount Vernon and in the city, that HIV/AIDS wasn’t a “gay disease.” Basic biology would dictate that viruses don’t make left turns based on sexual orientation, class, gender, or race. So, hell yes, I was scared, for quite some time, from the prospect of living with a disease that has killed more than 35 million people worldwide since 1979.

The dangers of sex work, of casual unprotected sex, and of HIV/AIDS were made clear to me on my trip to Pittsburgh in August 1990 to secure what would be my studio apartment living for the next eight and a half years. It started at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 41st on Friday night, August 3. It was going to be my second trip ever on Greyhound, catching the 11 pm red-eye, nonstop bus from Manhattan to downtown Pittsburgh. As the 40 of us stood in line to catch the bus, I saw a woman around my age wandering between the men’s room and the waiting areas, talking to different guys, with one or two jumping out of line for a few minutes.

Port Authority Bus Terminal entrance, New York, NY, October 22, 2015. (Ilana Gold/CBS2; https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/10/22/port-authority-bus-terminal-plan/).

As she drew closer to my line, I recognized her. She was someone I knew to be the cousin of one of my neighbors on the third floor of 616. By then, I also saw a Black guy in his mid or late-twenties, standing near the men’s room, keeping a close eye on her. It was like the cogs of my mind moved in slow motion as it became clear that this person I knew was a sex worker and the guy was her pimp.

A few minutes later, the pimp bellowed, “Five-O! Five-O!.” The all-too-familiar woman took off. She booked out the terminal doors and toward the streets around Times Square. The Port Authority police and two NYPD cops had grabbed the pimp, put him on the ground, handcuffed him, and took him away.

I was so surprised and sad after that, at least as we boarded the bus and weaved our way through New Jersey. I hadn’t seen this woman since 1986 or 1987, when I was a senior in high school. Over the years, she had come over to her cousin’s place to visit, and maybe to stay (at least temporarily). She had mostly teased me about my “White music,” except for Tears for Fears in the summer of 1985 (their “Shout” had been turned into some hip-hop urban mix on WBLS).

She had asked me on more than one occasion, “Do you like girls?” I mostly ignored her, saw her as just another person at 616 and in Mount Vernon who saw me as something to kick around. I didn’t consider her attractive because of how she talked to me, but looking back, she was. At five-seven or five-nine, she was a yellowish-brown skinned woman, with some freckles, a nice smile, shortish hair, and a nice proportionate shape. She could be witty, in a New Yorker’s sarcastic sort of way. But between Wendy, Phyllis, and my march to college, nothing and no one in Mount Vernon could compete for my attention in that way back then.

A week later, I came back from my Pittsburgh trip, on another Greyhound non-stopper, only to realize at 8:30 on Saturday, August 11 that I needed to take a dump. As I’ve said elsewhere, I tried and failed to take one at Grand Central, as the basement restrooms were full of broken toilets, boarded up stalls, and at least one person with obvious signs of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a sign of full-blown AIDS. I don’t know how I managed to hold my shit until I made it back to 616.

I learned from my Mom twelve or thirteen years ago that my former neighbor and teaser had died from AIDS-related complications, leaving two children behind. Even though I didn’t know her very well — didn’t want to know her, really — I was still heartbroken for her and her kids. All I could think was, what an awful life, what an awful way to die! Who’s going to raise her kids?

But really, I couldn’t help but go back to that Friday night in August 1990. I observed from up close, what the limited choices in a world of capitalism, patriarchy, misogynoir, and racism left people like this young woman. I observed, from afar, how this world can make something as destructive as HIV/AIDS a movement for gay White males, and a silent way of killing Black women at the same time.

Coming From Where I’m From

30 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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A week and a half ago, I received an email from a reader in response to my latest Al Jazeera piece, “Why I Don’t Understand the Black Affluent Class.” She congratulated me on the article, and agreed with most of my sentiments in the piece. She also revealed that she had spent a decade living in Mount Vernon, NY.

It turned out that this reader lived five blocks from me during my Boy @ The Window years, right off East Lincoln Avenue! Part of my follow-up included, “[m]aybe our paths crossed, maybe they didn’t. But I’m sure my growing up years helped shape some of what went into my Al Jazeera piece from last week.”

I was mildly excited that someone from Mount Vernon had read one of my mainstream articles, and not just the blog. But, even with some shared ideas and a common point of reference, the reader’s response actually reflected some of what I critiqued in the article. She agreed that “Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon” had helped shape my views around the buying in of a relatively materially privileged class into White patriarchial and supremacist ideas like civility and respectability politics. Then she immediately veered toward identifying the great Mount Vernonites — “Denzel Washington, Al B Sure, Heavy D, Sidney Poitier, etc.”

What is it about smaller cities not blessed with the narcissistic largesse of a New York, L.A., or DC that causes people to fall back on the “but we have successful people from here, too” trope? Not only is this not necessary. It points to a sense of competing for attention and importance in a way that can be a bit unseemly, a way of countering a negative narrative from a crowd of self-centered media elites with one that’s just as narcissistic and needy.

The fact is, pick a spot on a map where at least 1,000 people live, and guess what? Someone rich and/or famous either grew up there or lived there for a time. Even if those individuals aren’t nationally known, one can guess that they’re known in that region or state. Dean Martin’s from Steubenville, Ohio. The opera singer Leontyne Price is originally from Laurel, Mississippi. Mr. “The Price Is Right” Bob Barker is from Darrington, Washington. Stand-up comedian Lewis Black’s from Silver Spring (where I’ve lived for nearly 20 years now). I bumped into former NFL player and sports broadcaster Ahmad Rashad at my local pizza shop in 1989. Heck, the Black feminist lesbian poet Audre Lorde worked for years at Mount Vernon Public Library. None of this could possibly change how I saw my original home base, not in 1976, not in 1987, and certainly not in 2018.

It’s not that I didn’t know the Delaney sisters lived off South Columbus Avenue, or that Stephanie Mills had a house somewhere between Mount Vernon High School and the Mount Vernon-Bronxville border. But what did that really mean to my day-to-day when I was going from one end of Mount Vernon to the other for groceries, for piece of mind, and sometimes, to avoid more physical and emotional abuse at home? How did knowing that a classmate was in a scene on the soap opera General Hospital change the fact that I still needed to hunt down my alcoholic father on Friday for enough money to cover the cost of my AP English exam? What did Al B. Sure or Heavy D’s success in the 1980s have to do with my striving for a college education, or my five days of homelessness in 1988? Nothing, of course, absolutely nothing.

It’s good to know that there are notable people, Black, Afro-Caribbean, African, Latino, Nuyorican, Italian, male, female, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, dead, old, young, and alive, from Mount Vernon. But a community doesn’t hang its hat on notable people or the rich and successful. Its lifeblood is the ordinary, of activists, artists, and educators, students and librarians and postal workers, the grandparent here, the friend of the family there, who takes a real interest in your development and success. For that reason, Denzel doesn’t really matter to me. I can’t tell you how I feel about Albert Brown night and day, because I’ve hardly given his music a thought since Quincy Jones’ 1989 album Back on the Block (the song “The Secret Garden” makes me gag). Sidney Poitier living in Mount Vernon for a time? And?

For me, for better and for worse, it was the crossing guard at the corner of Esplanade and East Lincoln when was at William H. Holmes. Or, it was my mom and dad’s friends (drinking buddies, really), Ms. Pomalee, Ida, Callie Mae, Lo, and Arthur. Or, it was my mom’s Mount Vernon Hospital friends, especially Billie. It was my Uncle Sam. It was Ms. Griffin, Mrs. Shannon, Mrs. O’Daniel, Mrs. Bryant, my school teachers before Humanities and Meltzer. Whatever lessons I learned about aspirations, civility, and respectability politics, and the idea that these ideas aren’t all good or set in stone, they helped me in that process. These were the people who mattered to me outside of 616 and off the street of Mount Vernon.