Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen Essay

     The primary goal of any literature is to stimulate, inspire, educate and empower an audience by using writing techniques that employ a masterful and careful manipulation that will motivate the reader to challenge their conventional mode of thinking.  This, in my opinion, was the entire goal of not only the Harlem Renaissance but also the goals of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

            Let us begin this conversation with the philosophies of the Harlem Renaissance. It was during the early 1900s, that the flourishing African-American middle class activated a new political agenda that encouraged racial equality. The epicenter of this movement was in New York, where three of the largest civil rights groups established their headquarters.

             Black historian, sociologist, and Harvard scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois was at the forefront of the civil rights movement at this time. 

“By 1905 Du Bois, in partnership with a group of prominent African-American political activists and civil rights workers, met in New York to discuss the challenges facing the black community and by 1909, the group founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to promote civil rights…” (Biography.com)

 

            W.E. B Du Bois felt like many other African American artist that through the abstract thinking required by the reader of literature that the reader grows as in individual and discovers something innovative about their existence in society and it is through tis that the African American artist could and would further their foothold in gaining equality.  Additionally the Harlem Renaissance campaigners understood that it was the expression and exposure of the ideas, phrases and artwork would be vital to identifying not only a successful writer in an arena that appreciates social change but also creates that social change.

“Together, these groups helped to establish a sense of community and empowerment for African-Americans not only in New York, but also around the country. In addition, they provided a rare opportunity for whites to collaborate with black intellectuals, social activists, educators, and artists in an attempt to transform a largely segregated and racist American society” (Biography.com).
 

            It is within this framework that African American artist worked, produced and published work that they believed would not only promote themselves as artist but also promote the race.  

  “Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an apparent racial pride that came to be exemplified in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to promote progressive politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would serve to "uplift" the race” (Smith).

            There was no single connecting form that surprisingly characterized the art that emerged out of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and styles which would include the traditional form and new experimental forms in literature such as modernism. This duality meant that numerous African-American artists came into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia, who took issue with certain depictions of black life.

            If the reinvention of the Negro meant an ability to assimilate while decidedly retaining something called a racial self-consciousness then Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes fit the bill perfectly and could be encapsulated in Hughes’ poem “Bound No’th Blues” that could be applied to the Harlem Renaissance itself.

                        “Bound No’th Blues”

                        Goin’ down the road, Lawd,

                        Goin’ down the road.

                        Down the road, Lawd,

                        Way, way down the road.

                        Got to find somebody

                        To help me carry this load.

                        Road’s in front o’ me,

                        Nothin’ to do but walk.

                        Road’s in front of me,

                        Walk…an’ walk…an’ walk.

                        I’d like to meet a good friend

                        To come along an’ talk.

                        Hates to be lonely,

                        Lawd, I hates to be sad.

                        Says I hates to be lonely,

                        Hates to be lonely an’ sad,

                        But ever friend you finds seems

                        Like they try to do you bad.

                        Road, road, road, O!

                        Road, road…road…road, road!

                        Road, road, road, O!

                        On the no’thern road.

                        These Mississippi towns ain’t

                        Fit fer a hoppin’ toad (Poem Hunter.com).

            Countee Cullen was born on May 30, 1903 (Wikipedia).  Countee was something of a mysterious figure as it has been problematic for scholars to place exactly where he was born, with whom he spent the very earliest years of his childhood and where he spent them. James Weldon Johnson would write of Cullen in The Book of American Negro Poetry “There is not much to say about these earlier years of Cullen—unless he himself should say it” (Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life & Career).  Cullen himself would reveal a disposition that was not exactly secretive but private, less a question of modesty than a tendency toward being encrypted and insightful and in the course of his lifetime never said anything more illuminating.

            Cullen was a rather shy black man who more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure as he was a black man, in a time and place where it was rare to have a considerable academic training who in all effect could “write white” verse-ballads, sonnets, quatrains much in the manner of his literary idol Keats and other British Romantics.  With the publication of “The Ballad of the Brown Girl” Cullen would have encompassing themes that would remain noticeable for the remainder of his career.

                        “The Ballad of the Brown Girl”

                        ‘I am as brown as brown can be,

                        My eyes as black as a sloe;

                        I am as brisk as a nightingale,

                         And as wilde as any doe.

                        ‘My love has sent me a love-letter,

                        Not far from yonder town,

                        That he could not fancy me,

                         Because I was so brown.

                         ‘I sent him his letter back again,

                        For his love I valu’d not,

                        Whether that he could fancy me

                         Or whether he could not” (Hare).

            In time society would come to know that he had a complete understanding of himself as a poet; and it is in this vein that only two other Black American authors before Cullen could be taken so genuinely considered and proficient: Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Cullen believed that traditional verse forms could not be bettered by more modern paradigms.  He went further by believing that a writer had “to become conversant with and part of a received literary tradition simply because such a tradition has the virtue of longevity and universal sanction” (Daniel).

            Cullen’s first collection of poetry, “Color”, was published in 1925 (Wikipedia) and brought him national fame.  “Color” would receive universal critical acclaim and fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Alain Locke would say:

“A genius! Posterity will laugh at us if we do not proclaim him now.  “Color” transcends all of the limiting qualifications that might be brought forward if it were merely a work of talent” (Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life & Career). 

            The volume would contain only two pieces which could be considered racial, but the remaining pieces were love poems and other traditional subjects with the overarching theme, as the title implies, was race.  It was the themes of racial subjects that captured the attention of critics; the result in this case was exactly what the Harlem Renaissance writers wanted.  Cullen was “praised for portraying the experience of African Americans in the vocabulary and poetic forms of the classical tradition but with personal intimacy” (Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life & Career). “Color” would establish Cullen as a writer with an acute spiritual vision with sublimity as one of many Cullen’s strong points as the reader would be  “brusquely catapulted into the all-too-realistic world of … overt racism” (Daniel). “Color” has the principles of romanticism, whose characteristics are noticeably absent fro the blues-based folk rhythms of Langston Hughes simply because Cullen looked beyond his own rich heritage for authorial standards.

            With the publication of “Copper Sun” in 1927 and his involvement in “Caroling Dusk” he was regarded as the leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance who according to Gerald Early was “… embod(ying) many of the hopes, aspirations, and maturing expressive possibilities of his people” (Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life & Career). Cullen felt that:

“To make a black poet, and bid him sing was a curious thing that G-d had done curious, indeed, that the voice of the black poet had to be assimilated to be harmonized with the bearers of an alien literary tradition” (Daniel).

            However difficulties, to an extreme, arose when Cullen stated that he wanted to be known nearly as poet and not “Negro poet”.  This issue can be seen as departing the goals of the Harlem Renaissance as “Negro Artist” and working to not only better self but community in the process thus beginning the process of the “white society” in acceptance and equality.    The trouble was compounded when Langston Hughes along with others interpreted Cullen’s statement to mean that he was wanting  to deny his race; however if one were to do a close reading of his poetry they would find that was unfounded.  Countee Cullen himself would respond to these allegations by simply saying:

“If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET… what has hindered the development of artists amongst us.  Their one note has been the concern with their race…none of us can get away from it.  I cannot at times.  You will see it in my verse.  The consciousness of this is too poignant at times.  I cannot escape it…. what I mean is this: I shall not write of Negro subjects for the purpose of propaganda.  That is not what a poet is concerned with… when the emotion rising…that I am a Negro is strong, I express it”(Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life & Career).

            Cullen would met Nina Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual; and Cullen married Yolande Du Bois in April 1928, it was the social event of the decade, but the marriage did not fare well, and he divorced in 1930. It is rumored that Cullen was a homosexual, and his relationship with Harold Jackman, "the handsomest man in Harlem”, was a significant factor in the divorce. The young, dashing Jackman was a school teacher and, thanks to his noted beauty, a prominent figure among Harlem's gay elite.  I bring this up because some scholars have noted that his homosexuality is central to his work, although most African American scholars try to ignore or suppress it (Norton).

            Cullen’s attitude in regard to his homosexuality was mixed as his attitudes of his blackness: simultaneously confirmatory and disapproving, triumphant and troubled; however scholars and researchers have stated that Countee’s adoptive father, Rev. Fredrick Cullen, was “a puritanical Christian patriarch and Countee was never remotely that in is life” (Norton).  While on the other hand, it has been implied, through research, that Rev. Fredrick Cullen was seen also something of an effeminate man; as he was dressed in girl’s clothing by his poverty stricken mother well beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such transvestism (Norton).

            Cullen, hypothetically wrote his poems for his lovers and dedicated poems to his closest gay friends: Alain Locke, Harold Jackman, Carl Van Vechten and Leland Pettit.  Cullen is reported to have been “closeted” but was well known in the gay underground (Norton) even though surely his “frankness” about his sexuality posed even greater problems and dangers if fully exposed.  This closeted-ness worked to protect Cullen from further discrimination while also holding a firm grip on his creative imagination.  However, with all of that said, it is rather difficult to decipher, the creative influence of gayness on Cullen’s literary imagination can be seen through coded references to homosexuality in much of his poetry.

            Cullen would develop a multifarious poetry that would incorporate racial themes as well as his complex integration of male-male relationships that although veiled are significant.  These poems would include: “Tableau”, “The Shroud of Color”, “Fruit if the Flower”, “For a Poet and “Spring Reminiscence” as well as “Uncle Jim”, “Colors” and “More than a Fool’s Song”.

                        “Fruit of the Flower”

                        My father is a quiet man

                        With sober, steady ways;

                        For simile, a folded fan;

                        His nights are like his days.

                        My mother's life is puritan,

                        No hint of cavalier,

                        A pool so calm you're sure it can

                        Have little depth to fear.

                        And yet my father's eyes can boast

                        How full his life has been;

                        There haunts them yet the languid ghost

                        Of some still sacred sin.

                        And though my mother chants of God,

                        And of the mystic river,

                        I've seen a bit of checkered sod

                        Set all her flesh aquiver.

                        Why should he deem it pure mischance

                        A son of his is fain

                        To do a naked tribal dance

                        Each time he hears the rain?

                        Why should she think it devil's art

                        That all my songs should be

                        Of love and lovers, broken heart,

                        And wild sweet agony?

                        Who plants a seed begets a bud,

                        Extract of that same root;

                        Why marvel at the hectic blood

                        That flushes this wild fruit? (Poem Hunter.com)

            Langston Hughes was born James Mercer Langston Hughes on February 1, 1902 and by 1921 had published his first poem (Biography.com).  Langston’s parents divorced shortly after he was born while his mother and he would settle in the Cleveland area where he would begin to write poetry He would say later in life that his influences for writing were Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman who was introduced to in high school.  It was during this time that he discovered his love of books. From this early period in his life, Hughes would cite as influences on his poetry the American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg. Hughes spent a brief period of time with his father in Mexico in 1919. “The relationship between him and his father was troubled, causing Hughes a degree of dissatisfaction that led him to contemplate suicide at least once” (BronzeBuckaroo).

            By 1924 he would live in Paris for a brief period of time continuing to write his poetry. Langston would say in regard to art that “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose” ( Academy of American Poets). Unlike certain writers of the post-World War I era who became acknowledged as the “Lost Generation”, writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hughes instead spent time in Paris during the early 1920s becoming part of the black expatriate community (BronzeBuckaroo).

            Langston’s poem “The Weary Blues”, written in 1926 was published with the help and support of Carl Van Vechten and  was among the very first to use jazz rhythms and dialect to represent the life of urban blacks (Biography.com).

                        “The Weary Blues”

                        Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

                        Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

                         I heard a Negro play.

                        Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

                        By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

                                    He did a lazy sway. . . .

                                    He did a lazy sway. . . .

                        To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

                        With his ebony hands on each ivory key

                        He made that poor piano moan with melody.

                                    O Blues!

                        Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

                        He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

                                    Sweet Blues!

                        Coming from a black man’s soul.

                                     O Blues!

                        In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

                        I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—

                                    “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,

                                    Ain’t got nobody but ma self.

                                    I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’

                                    And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

                        Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.

                        He played a few chords then he sang some more—

                        “I got the Weary Blues

                                    And I can’t be satisfied.

                                    Got the Weary Blues

                                    And can’t be satisfied—

                                    I ain’t happy no mo’

                                    And I wish that I had died.”

                        And far into the night he crooned that tune.

                        The stars went out and so did the moon.

                        The singer stopped playing and went to bed

                        While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

                        He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead (Harold Ober Associates Incorporated).

            Langston’s subject matter was astonishingly wide-ranging and resonant, with is work about music, politics, America, love, the blues and dreams, about ordinary people leading ordinary lives and about a “world that few could rightly call beautiful, but was worth loving and changing” ( Academy of American Poets).  Langston characteristically has be known for his use of image, repetition and his virtually mesmerizing tempo and rhyme to join political and social content to the structures of poetry. It would be this aesthetic that created a modernist feel with hints of religious devotion to the very power of repetition and the “musicality in the blues, that  gave rise to Hughes’s voice” ( Academy of American Poets) which was uniquely his own.  Hughes' life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas.

            The primary conflict between the artists of the Harlem Renaissance was the representations of the "low-life", that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic layers and the apparent divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. Hughes wrote what would be considered the manifesto for himself and his contemporaries published in 1926, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain:

“The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark- skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.  The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free                           within ourselves” (BronzeBuckaroo).

 

            Hughes was unapologetically black at a time when blackness was no longer fashionable, and, he didn’t go much beyond the themes of black is beautiful as he explored the black human condition in an assortment of depths. His foremost concern was the uplift of his people who he judged himself the acceptable appreciator of and whose potencies, resiliency, bravery, and wittiness he wanted to record as part of the general American experience. Thus, his poetry and fiction centered generally on insightful views of the working class lives of blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African American identity and its diverse culture.            

            In visual media, Hughes has been the topic of two theatrical plays by African American playwrights whose subject matter involved in part or whole the fact that he was gay, “Hannibal of the Alps” by Michael Dinwiddie and “Paper Armor” by Eisa Davis (BronzeBuckaroo). In the 1989 film, “Looking for Langston” by British filmmaker Isaac Julien, Hughes is recovered as a black gay icon from where there is an unswerving effort to disregard or at least restrain his homosexuality because he is such a towering figure in African American literature; his iconic status among the African American community is believed to be based on his heterosexuality.

            The question for the 21^st century reader of Hughes’s work is how to read his poems without reducing his works to merely politics or denying the political density.  Hughes himself saw the political and the poetic as undividable and went on record by saying:

 

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know.  I am as sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet every reading I  answer questions like these from people: ‘Do you think Negros should always write about Negros?’ ‘I wish you wouldn’t read some of these poems to white folks.’ ‘How do you find anything interesting in a place like a cabaret?’ ‘Why do you write about black folks? You aren’t black.” (and finally) ‘What makes you do so many jazz poems ( Academy of American Poets)?
 

            It has been a distinguished fact that the formal devices, rhetoric, anaphora and rhyme as well as the innovative and captivating incorporation of the Blues come from a cultural tradition that had never had a voice in poetry. As we his readers we are pulled into his work because of its symbolic and ancestral reflections as well as the mere sounds that reverberate the musical quality of words that would drive him into the cultural fountain of African American music and can clearly be seen in “Po’ Boy Blues”.

                        “Po' Boy Blues”

             

                        When I was home de

                        Sunshine seemed like gold.

                        When I was home de

                        Sunshine seemed like gold.

                        Since I come up North de

                        Whole damn world's turned cold.

                        I was a good boy,

                        Never done no wrong.

                        Yes, I was a good boy,

                        Never done no wrong,

                        But this world is weary

                        An' de road is hard an' long.

                        I fell in love with

                        A gal I thought was kind.

                        Fell in love with

                        A gal I thought was kind.

                        She made me lose ma money

                        An' almost lose ma mind.

                        Weary, weary,

                        Weary early in de morn.

                        Weary, weary,

                        Early, early in de morn.

                        I's so weary

                        I wish I'd never been born ( Academy of American Poets).

            One of the greatest ironies in the life of Langston Hughes, The People’s Poet, was his plausible silence regarding the oppression of gays.  As a gay man, Hughes lived that secret life, much like Cullen, silently in the confines of a very constricted but well-constructed closet; one that still in many regards shelters him today.

            One of Langston Hughes poem called "Tell Me," he talks his sorrow. For instances in "Tell Me" he wrote:

                        "Final Curve"

                        Good evening, daddy

                         I know you’ve heard

                        The boogie-woogie rumble

                        Of a dream deferred

                        "Boogie: 1 a.m."

                        Why should it be my loneliness,

                        Why should it be my song,

                        Why should it be my dream

                        deferred

                        overlong? ( Tangient LLC.)”

            He was referring to the racism and discrimination that he and his fellow black people faced through. Then he talks about "dream deferred." So what does dream deferred mean? It means when your dreams are postpone or putt off. Most of Langston Hughes poems talk about the dream deferred and that is why it is often repeated.  The poem is gestalt in which the phrase “Why should it be my” is used three times to highlight the personal anguish over loneliness and the sheer unattainability of dreams.  The “it” of the poem can be seen as racism, poverty, homosexuality or a host of other causes that make the dream unachievable.

            Some academics and biographers today recognize that Hughes was a homosexual and incorporated homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Whitman and most patently in the short story “Blessed Assurance” which deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and queerness (BronzeBuckaroo). 

     With tunnel vision, Hughes framed Delmar's story within the structure of the black church, and many of us will recognize his special relationship with the choir director as they sneak off alone to the Village, when the choir visits New York. While the father obsesses over what he considers his son's obvious effeminacy, things come to a head when the director, a Dr. Manley Jaxon, writes and dedicates an original anthem to Delmar based on the story of Ruth in the Bible.  Those of us with a queer eye for the bible know that some theologians now consider the story of Ruth and Naomi to be one of a few same-sex relationships remotely possible in the scriptures.  Those of us with a working knowledge of black same-gender history will also recognize the peculiar spelling of the doctor's last name as that of Frankie Jaxon, a transgendered musician (Jarrell)”

            Like Cullen, Hughes had close alliances with such gay men as Alain Locke, Noel Sullivan, Richard Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman.

            It is my hope that someday that both Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen’s literary legacy can be used as the cornerstone in which we can rebuild their reputation as the gay poet laureate and the inaugurator’s  of the black gay male poetic tradition. As this kind of dialogue continues as the reading public is made aware that sexuality has great consequences for artist creativity, and the closet is deconstructed, surely Hughes and Cullen’s as well as others will take their place just not as race and folk poet, but as one whose multifaceted achievement includes battling oppression through their veiled “homosexual expressivity”. Then we will be able to understand that they were not silent about their gayness after all.

Works Cited

Academy of American Poets. Poets. org: From the Academy of American Poets. 1997. 17 February 2013 <http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/323>.

Tangient LLC. Analysis of Langston Hughes. 2013. 23 February 2013 <http://trcs.wikispaces.com/Analysis+of+Langston+Hughs+Poems>.

Biography.com. Bio Classroom. n.d. 22 February 2013 <http://www.biography.com/tv/classroom/harlem-renaissance>.

—. The Biography Channel Website. 2013. 17 February 2013 <http://www.biography.com/print/profile/langston-hughes-9346313>.

BronzeBuckaroo. The Life of Langston Hughes . 2 June 2007. 23 February 2013 <http://www.lifeoflangstonhughes.blogspot.com>.

Daniel, Walter C. Georgetown College: Countee Cullen. n.d. 17 February 2013 <http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/cullen.html>.

Hare, John Bruno. Internet Scared Text Archive. 2010. 22 February 2013 <http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch295.htm>.

Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. Poetry Foundation. 1987. 23 February 2013 <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176785>.

Jarrell, Corey. Corey @ I'll Keep You Posted. 22 May 2009. 23 February 2013 <http://illkeepyouposted.typepad.com/ill_keep_you_posted/2009/05/forty-two-years-ago-on-this-date-langston-hughes-made-his-transition-fromthe-peoples-poetto-eternal-literary-icon-in-this-a.html>.

Modern American Poetry: About Countee Cullen's Life & Career. February 2000. 22 February 2013 <http://www.english.illonois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cullen/life.htm>.

Norton, Rictor. Gay History and Literature. 1998. 17 February 2013 <http:// rictornorton.co.uk/cullen.htm>.

Poem Hunter.com. Poem Hunter.com. 27 March 2010. 23 February 2013 <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bound-no-th-blues/>.

Smith, Dr. Brenda. "Senior Seminar Class Notes." Canton, Ohio, 1- 22 February 2013.

Wikipedia. Wikipedia: Countee Cullen. 21 February 2013. 22 February 2013 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countee_Cullen>.

Gay and Growing Older

One day last week, after having stepped out of the shower, barely awake and having applied the shaving cream to my face I looked in the mirror.  I wasn't wearing my glasses, didn't have my false teeth in and said "Who is that old man in the mirror?"

It was disheartening in many ways to realize that the old man in the mirror was me.  When exactly did that happen?  Now I know what some of you maybe thinking "Charlie, your only forty-six it isn't the end of the world"; and you know something you are right but I also know that for the first time in my life I have really accepted the fact that I am and have been officially a middle-aged gay man.

I was living as an openly gay man at eighteen, even though my family would not know that till I was twenty- one, I was living with HIV by the time I was twenty-four and had my AIDS diagnosis at twenty-five. I buried my first friend who died of GRID--what became AIDS-- in 1986 and my first lover died in October 1988, I was in rehab later that same year.  Two suicide attempts followed in 1989 and you could say it has been a hell of a life all along.  It's never been easy, many times downright painful to say the least.

The oppressing poverty,  the breaking away from a religious cult, recovering from a sexual assault, recovering from a drug and alcohol addiction, surviving a period of eleven months in an abusive relationship that ended with me shoved down a flight of stairs, and the list seems endless--because they is so much more I could talk about but many times do not wish to do so.

Yet that "old man" is still in my mirror, looking at me and in many ways "Saying who are you?"  I never thought I would even be this old to tell you the truth.  I am one of six people I personally know who have lived over twenty years with HIV/AIDS.  Now I know there are others but are they in my life-- no.  Do I personally know them--- no.  Nearly all of my friends of the late 1980's to mid 1990's are gone.  Dead; and to be honest--brutally so if I have to be completely honest--- I thought I would be among them....the dead.

I'm not by any stretch saying, implying that I want to be dead; that is far from the truth but the experiences I have lived through really showed no other way.  It was literally living one day at a time, if you woke up you were thankful that you were and did your best to live your best possible life for that day.  For me that kind of existence went on for YEARS!

No plans for the distant future, no IRA, no retirement fund, no plan for retirement and certainly no plan for what my life would be like at nearly 50.  Some of it I have been very blessed-- a great and supportive family who has been there every step of the way, an incredible man who literally was the great love of my life for ten wonderful years and now finally getting the education I have wanted for a very long time.  I have even been accepted to a Graduate Program-- if you would have told that to me ten years ago I would have said you were out of your mind.

But growing older, has some down sides--especially... in my opinion... when your gay.  You no longer the hot young thing fresh on the seen, your no longer the twenty-something gay boy.  You looks begin to slightly fade, grey hair sneaks (thank you Cancer Radiation treatments) and in my case fell out (thank you AZT for that one). I feel like I woke up one day and finally realized that realistically I could be the father of a 29 year old--how did that happen?  I've gone from the "boy" to being the "daddy"-- you will understand that if your familiar with gang slang.

Being gay and being forty-six is almost like being eighty; not there isn't anything wrong with being eighty but how many gay guys are still being pursued at eighty I ask you?  When you live in a culture of youth, beauty, the great physique that for many revolves around the bars, the dances, the circuit parties and you know what sooner or later you realize your not as hot as you thought you were.

Now I was never really the "party type" and I can tell you the last time I was in a gay bar--Chicago, July of 2012 while on vacation--- and I can say I felt old.  Maybe it's the way I have seen myself the last few months and I know deep down I need to change it.

Being gay and going on 50 is not the end of the world, and in my case it will literally be the beginning with my MFA in Creative Writing by that time.  Life will really begin and in a big way.  I have survived... and you know something I will here and now acknowledge I am a tough old bitch to do so.  22 years living with AIDS this July, 4 rounds of Cancer, 4 rounds of Pneumonia, one round of Meningitis and I'm still standing--takes a lot to to take this bitch down.

In the mean time I am going to enjoy the "old man" in the mirror, kick up my heels and in the words of the "Flintstones" ....."Have a GAY ole time"

Auschwitz (poetry)

     This poem was just written a few weeks back and will be included in my Honor's Thesis which is Creative Nonfiction and hopefully when finished in December will be published.  

My we never forget

 

Europe's outcasts viciously sleep

Begging God for their souls

What a horrendous thing - to wake the following day

Realizing freedom is now transported away

Into ghettos they walk in a communal custody

They lied

In the coldness, Auschwitz’s mouth is opening wide.

Is there a God in Heaven

If so show us your great authority!

Why must we plunge into abyss

Of a concentration camp

To be rendered our souls

By Auschwitz’s great might

They are interred - day and night.

Oh, Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Your devastation is so wide -

The unknowing drove in, ignorant of what's inside.

Run ...Run for your very lives!

You've been brought to The Executioner- and few survive.

It is easy to swallow these us whole -

Effectively you murder body and soul

Directly from the trains - rushed through your doors...

As Ghettos are cleared, you’re straining for more.

Auschwitz you seem hidden away

As your soil turns red with blood

Is there anyone to stop you

Something must be done

Or there will remain not one.

Auschwitz chimneys bursting with the wafting burn

Human remains gusting in the air are churned

Swirling dead who inhabit thoughts of remembrance

Abandoned in our vacant painful trance

Dug pits hidden beyond the eyes of God

Auschwitz endures only if no one sees

Covered over by Them,

So that no one would envision this place

To hide what was done –

What of us remains is barely a trace.

The demonic Nazis smile,

Trying to attract and hypnotize.

It is not so hard to mislead the trusting masses

Could God really be giving these us up to die?

Guiltless weeping eyes having to say “Good bye"

We think it's ended

 "...it is resolved, it is over”

We want to believe they screamed their last cries

Listen carefully, and you will hear the vibration,

Of Auschwitz’s faint heartbeat, beneath the soil

In our weakness we call

The criminals ‘Them” and “They”

Are our souls so distinctive and fearless

That we'd have arose and stood in the way?

"Bound No'th Blues" by Langston Hughes

  Since yesterday I posted a poetry piece my Countee Cullen I thought it only fair that I also post one from Langston Hughes who is "rumored" to have been gay as well.                     

 

                        “Bound No’th Blues”

                        Goin’ down the road, Lawd,

                        Goin’ down the road.

                        Down the road, Lawd,

                        Way, way down the road.

                        Got to find somebody

                        To help me carry this load.

                        Road’s in front o’ me,

                        Nothin’ to do but walk.

                        Road’s in front of me,

                        Walk…an’ walk…an’ walk.

                        I’d like to meet a good friend

                        To come along an’ talk.

                        Hates to be lonely,

                        Lawd, I hates to be sad.

                        Says I hates to be lonely,

                        Hates to be lonely an’ sad,

                        But ever friend you finds seems

                        Like they try to do you bad.

                        Road, road, road, O!

                        Road, road…road…road, road!

                        Road, road, road, O!

                        On the no’thern road.

                        These Mississippi towns ain’t

                        Fit fer a hoppin’ toad

Countee Cullen

 From author, poet and (possibly) gay man-- Countee Cullen (1903- 1946) "Brown Girl". 

I wanted to share this here as February is drawing to a close and so is African American

History month.  I also wanted to share this because I think Countee is nearly forgotten 

by the vast majority, except in the case of college classes.  I believe that in order to know 

exactly where we are going we have to fully understand and appreciate where we come from.

                The Brown Girl

         ‘I am as brown as brown can be,
  My eyes as black as a sloe;
  I am as brisk as a nightingale,
  And as wilde as any doe.
  ‘My love has sent me a love-letter,
  Not far from yonder town,
  That he could not fancy me,
  Because I was so brown.
  ‘I sent him his letter back again,
  For his love I valu’d not,
  Whether that he could fancy me
  Or whether he could not.
  ‘He sent me his letter back again,
  That he lay dangerous sick,
  That I might then go speedily
  To give him up his faith.’
  Now you shall hear what love she had
  Then for this love-sick man;
  She was a whole long summer’s day
  In a mile a going on.
  When she came to her love’s bed-side,
  Where he lay dangerous sick,
  She could not for laughing stand
  Upright upon her feet.
  She had a white wand all in her hand,
  And smoothd it all on his breast;
  ‘In faith and troth come pardon me,
  I hope your soul’s at rest.
  ‘I’ll do as much for my true-love
  As other maidens may;
  I’ll dance and sing on my love’s grave
  A whole twelvemonth and a day.’

An AIDS Free Generation: Is it possible

President Barack Obama included AIDS in his first State of the Union speech after his re-election:

“.... the United States will join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades by.... saving the world’s children from preventable deaths; and by realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation, which is within our reach.”


Watching the State of the Union last night I was taken that President Obama made the mention that we could have an AIDS free generation and not only have it but it is within reach.  This clearly, to me, seems like an incredible idea but I seriously have my doubts--- and here is why:

1. I have been involved with the AIDS crisis since 1986 when I first became aware of it at the tender age of just 19 years old when a friend of mine was diagnosed with what then was "the gay cancer" and was within six months dead!  That has been nearly thirty years of involvement and I have heard a lot of things in those thirty years that promise great advances, possible cures and even scheduled treatments. I also have watched six hundred friends die from AIDS before I stopped counting. I also know that we are far from an AIDS free generation when it seems so little is being done.
2. FACT:   As the U.S. observes the tenth anniversary of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the landmark global AIDS program which President George W. Bush first proposed in his 2003 State of the Union address, advocates from AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) urged President Obama to reconsider recent funding cuts he made to the lifesaving AIDS program which has saved millions of lives worldwide. AHF advocates also note that given his actions versus his rhetoric, President Obama’s highly touted goal of an ‘AIDS-free generation’—which received only a glancing mention in his State of the Union address last nightt—is unlikely to be achieved, as the funding cuts he’s instituted take devastating—and deadly—effect globally.       “By all accounts, PEPFAR has been a tremendous success, saving millions of lives while also serving as one of America’s most successful diplomacy efforts over the past decade,” said Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “However, President Obama is also the first U.S. president to cut global AIDS funding, a shameful retreat at a time when, according to World Health Organization, there are 6.8 million who need treatment now but aren't receiving it, and at a time when we are seeing the real impact of treatment on saving lives and reducing new infections.”
   
   3. FACT:  A new survey focused on gay and bisexual men who use apps such as Grindr, Scruff and Manhunt to meet sexual partners found that nearly half had engaged in unprotected sex.
   Conducted by New York's Community Healthcare Network (CHN), "Zero Feet Away: Perpective on HIV/AIDS and Unprotected Sex in Men Who Have Sex With Men Utilizing Location-based Mobile Apps" found that although 80 percent of respondents said they were knowledgeable in how the HIV virus was transmitted, while 46.4 percent admitted to having bareback sex always, often or sometimes.
        The most frequently-cited reason for bare-backing among the 725 gay and bisexual men who were surveyed was "with condoms, [sex] does not feel the same."
        "Clearly, we've come a long way in educating people about HIV and AIDS," Dr. Freddy Molano, Assistant Vice President of HIV Programs and Services at CHN, said in the report. "Yet among certain populations, HIV/AIDS is on the ride, and that's alarming."
        Added co-author Renato Barucco: "The survey findings show a clear disconnect between the reasons why men engage in unprotected anal intercourse and the way prevention initiatives attempt to address risk behaviors."
   
    4. The following is simply my opinion and should be taken as thus:
   
   
    In nearly the nearly thirty years of work in the trenches I have seen it all-- people who are compliant with all of there drugs and still die, people who are complaint with all of their drugs and who somehow pull through (in my circle there are five of us, counting myself, who have lived twenty years or more with AIDS), I have seen lovers thrown out of their homes because one of them died and a family took literally everything, I have seen hospital trays left in the hall because no one wanted to go into the hospital room.  On that note I have a very good friend who works at a "Christian" Nursing home and the staff when they found out a specific resident had AIDS and was there to to die, wanted nothing to do with him, let alone for care him-- this was just LAST YEAR!
   
   
   Yet President Obama has the gall to say we "are within grasp of an AIDS free generation. Really?  People can not afford or get access to basic HIV medications in Africa and "we are within grasp of an AIDS free generation.  Really?  The government keeps cutting funding to not only research a cure, cut funding to Ryan White Access and cut funding for services for people living with AIDS and yet somehow we are within reach to an AIDS free generation.  Really?  
   
   
   We have the largest influx of gay bareback movies, gay bareback porn studios and a gay society-- which I myself am gay--are largely burned out, overworked, underpaid and in my opinion under appreciated when it comes to what we do for AIDS.  
   
   
   We have a young gay society under twenty-five who know precious little about the struggle we the generation into our forties and more who were there and saw first hand all of the death, all of the suffering, all of the protests in the streets and I will go out on a limb and say attend an ACT UP funeral of one of its members in front of the White House with the "dead" in a pine coffin laying in the streets and we the mourners demanding change.
   
   
   We have Californians having the discussion whether condoms should be on all porn shoots gay or straight, laws in California which have been passed and yet we can not move past the idea that somehow by "enforcing" condom use we are stepping on the toes of those wishing "their freedom of expression".  Really?  But yet somehow we are within grasp of a generation that is AIDS free.
   
   
   We have a vast number of Americans who still view "victims of HIV/AIDS" as the minorities-- you know the "them" we always speak of--- gays, African Americans, drug users, prostitutes, the poor, the uneducated, the brother on the down low, the Hispanic woman who sleeps around to much, the gay man who who still anonymous gay sex in bath houses or sex clubs.... when in all reality it has been more than this group of "minorities" for a LONG time.  Yet somehow we still can not have a honest, frank and open discussion about sex--- yet President Obama believes we are within grasp of an AIDS free generation.
   
   
   5.  FACT:   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation when funding is cut. 
   
   
    We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation when people refuse to have an open, frank, honest discussion about sex.  
   
   
   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until the church as a whole not only embraces those living with the disease, but gets off their knees praying but actually does something to address the issue, help those in need of help and make a concentrated effort to embrace everyone into their fold.
   
   
   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until we do everything in our power to prevent sexual transmission to those who choose to make porn a career.
   
   
   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until we make AIDS medication to every single living human being on on the planet, and not only make it available but affordable.
   
   
   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until we do everything within our power to help our brothers and sisters, like myself, who are living with AIDS.  We need to be able to provide medical coverage that would continue at affordable rates for those wishing to return to work, we need to provide the time off needed by our employees if they need it for medical purposes to recover from an AIDS related illness, we need real equal employment opportunities for those living with AIDS.  And finally we need to provide affordable and accessible college opportunities to those living with AIDS-- many who do not realize that there is available funding where we could in all honesty pay very little out of pocket to not only get a degree but get a job that would once and for all get us out of poverty.
   
   
   Finally, we can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until we treat this disease as a human disease and not a minority disease.  That the attitude and change that needs to take place is what has happened with Americans embracing Cancer (i.e. The Susan G. Koman Fundraising events), Heart Disease and even Alzheimer's and until all of these things Mr. President happens we will NEVER have an AIDS free generation!

I'm so very tired: Bigotry and Stupidity

You know I was watching "Betty and Coretta" on Lifetime last night and I was moved to tears and heavy sadness.  I am to the point where I have reached the end of my rope.  Let me explain...

It seems here lately that I am having to defend my G-d given right to be an openly gay HIV+ man, and to live my life as one.  That the "Christian-right", being whatever domination they are have the right to judge me based on what I happen to with either my dick or my ass and where and how either of those items may or may not be used.  If G-d has all that free time to be that concerned with that aspect of my life, I have one thing to say--- Get a life, and preferably not mine.

According to the Talmud there are 613 mitzvot ("commandments") in the Torah/Old Testament.There are 248 positive mitzvot and 365 negative mitzvot given supplemented by seven mitzvot legislated by the rabbis/religious leaders of antiquity.

Items that are in the Bible:

1.   A glutton should be put to death--OK, all you morbidly obese people, go slit your throats because the Bible tells you too.
2. A woman's place is in the home under the husband authority at all times no questions asked or required-- so no more working women,no more equal rights for women, no more voting rights for women and certainly no equal pay for women.  Let alone having the wife own, inherit, or possess anything of any value.
3. A disobedient child should be stoned--OK, all you parents with G-d awful brats, you know who you are-- go stone your child to death right now.
4. All adulterers should be put to death-- OK, anyone who has ever cheated, which BTW includes a former-President, congressmen, senators, mayors, school teachers and religious leaders-- your next to be stoned to death.
5. Probably most importantly.. and this one is a shocker... The Emancipation Proclamation needs to be done away with because the Bible SUPPORTS slavery!
6. Some have gone so far as to say that the ENTIRE African race was born out of the curse of Ham! And have used the Bible to support their thinking.

Yet, somehow, the most pious of Christians would be simply be appalled  by these notions, and "Oh by the way darling, Christ himself did away with all the laws of the Old Testament with the whole idea of "Love thy neighbor as thyself", the Old Testament's is after all out of vogue."

Really--wow.  Love thy neighbor as thyself...... when you say LGBT folks are "not created in G-d's image, that LGBT Folks are in a continual state of sin for being LGBT, you ARE in fact saying that we are less than what G-d created--how self righteous of you to point that out. 

That employers have the right to fire us, landlords have the right to evict us, that the government has the right to deny us the right to marry, to adopt and to even love and in some countries has the right to put us to death... because you feel that this ONE particular Old Testament commandment is more relevant that than other 612 commandments of the Bible.

This goes into supporting organizations, or business that support anti-gay causes as well.  You give them your dollar, your dollar supports their hate, their rhetoric, and their bigotry plain and simple--no questions asked.

You want to stone me to death then darlin' keep in mind the words of Christ himself "Let him without ANY sin cast the first stone" oh and by the way darlin' here's your ROCK!

I have just had it and I don't care what the excuses are, if we as American were doing what we are doing to LGBTQ folks to any other race, anywhere on the planet someone would be screaming their bloody head off about it.  And I guess I am!

There are so many issues that we as a human race do not want to take a stand on---  you have someone like Gabby Gifford speaking out on gun violence, gun legislation and yet our elected officials have yet to take a stand and say that we as society do not need a gun that can shoot 300 hundred rounds in less than a minute.  Really, you need a gun of this power to go hunting Bambi, protect your home and your life--if this is the case then guess what I want to leave America.

You have someone like Harry Belafonte speak at the NAACP Awards about gun violence and yet did it fall on deaf ears.  It is not just the role of the black church to take stand on this issue but the church as a universal whole needs to say NO MORE!

You have masses of people who dying of AIDS because the costs or availability, or any other excuse are denied access to those drugs when the focus should be doing what we can to provide those desperately needed drugs to those who need them.

You have people tortured and killed in countries for whatever reason--sexuality, race or other topics simply because they are who they are,  When was the last time we spoke out about the gay man killed in Afghanistan or the genocide that is happening in Darfur--when we said "NEVER AGAIN" in the 1940's?

Are we that per-occupied with all of our technology, all of our commitments, all of the unnecessary things in life to take a stand for the things that really matter? Is it so important Johnny or Suzie belong to five after school activities, is it life changing if we don't talk on our cell phone constantly, that we forget the dead child killed in the streets yesterday only to talk about he dead child in the street killed today.

When have we done something for the poor, the underprivileged, the illiterate and the struggling in this country alone, not to mention the entire planet.  It has to start somewhere.  Mother Teresa started out simply--not being who she ended up being---Martin Luther King Jr.started as a simple country minister, Ghandi began earnestly and determined to change fate.

You want to be small minded--- do it on your clock, you want to be naive--- do it on your clock, you want to bury your head in the sand--- do it on your own clock.  I for one can't take it anymore.

I feel in the depths of my heart this is the real reason G-d in his divine wisdom left me alive nearly 22 years after being diagnosed with AIDS--- that I am to be the voice of the forgotten, the down-trodden, the struggling, the repressed, the hated and ridiculed and like Coretta Scott King I will strive to eradicate these issues till my dying breath.

In closing, I want to leave you with the words of Coretta Scott King:

Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation. 

 The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members, ... a heart of grace and a soul generated by love. 

 I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Now, my challenge is to bring about change!

Why do words fail me....

     I find myself in an odd circumstance today, I am as a writer at a loss of words to begin to describe to you my readers and followers (if I have any left after months of no posting) what I'm really feeling today. If you have followed this blog any length of time you all know by now how hard of a time I have with the month of December since the death of my partner Ron Rooy in 2002. This year marks ten years that he has been gone and today marks the the day of the anniversary we entered hospice care.

     From the time we entered hospice care until he died was only ten days.  The days ending December 21, 2002 and forever altering who I am at my core.  First let me say I would have never have been able to keep him at home, and let him die at home without help.  First his daughter Christina who was there for part of it, despite having very small children at the time, Frank D'Angelo, Ken Walrath, Annette Tabar, my mother, Brian Fabo and of course the nurses and staff of Western Reserve Hospice.  It is amazing you never forget the small details.

     They say that with time, that the wounds of death become less, well that my friends is a HUGE lie!  It does not become less it becomes different and in some ways, and especially for me it is becoming more painful as the years pass.

      This year marks ten years since Ron died and, we were together four months short of ten years---so in reality he has been dead as long as we were together.  How do I sit here at my laptop and begin to describe to you what that feels like.

     I am forgetting what he smelled like when he first got of the shower as he stood at the bathroom mirror naked and shaving.  I am forgetting the feel of his hand in mine, the touch of and feel of him in bed next to me as we slept.  I am forgetting the taste of his lips on mine in the morning when we first woke.  I am forgetting what his voice sounded like when he told me he loved me.  The pain of this happening in in a word--- brutal!

     But in all honesty I can not ever forget how I felt when I was with him.  I can not forget how easy he was to talk to, to spend time with or how easily he could make me laugh.  The feel of his hands on me when he made love to me--- those sweet, tender passionate moments sitting in bed on Sunday mornings with the paper and breakfast in bed as we just shared our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our secrets.  I can not forget that he more than anyone made me value the life I have.

     To lose someone like that, not just a lover, or a husband but also your best friend does something to you, it dramatically changes you forever and realizing that this last February we would had been together twenty years was very painful.  I sit here this morning in tears knowing I would still be with him today if I just had the chance.  That even today, ten years later I love him more than ever and I always will. 

     But he only lives in memory.  Am I as the widower the only one who feels the way I do?  Am I the only one who feels that part of my very being is buried with him?  I think a lot about him and what he would have to say about my life and what it is today.  Would he be proud of me?  What advice would he give me?

     I have to admit that I pray to him all the time, my own patron saint--- my own connection to the divine--- I just wish as he said "You will feel me when the wind blows against the back of your neck"---  I need the wind to blow to guide me, lead me and direct my feet to the path I should take.  I need to know that he is proud of what I am becoming, and of what I want to do.

     It sad in so many ways that in many regards I have distanced myself from the life I had, and it has been a huge mistake.... but maybe life does go on, we change, we grow, we adapt and I am not longer the thirty-six year-old man whose partner had died.  I am now his widower, the keeper of his life, his legacy and I am so very very grateful that i have been blessed with that enormous responsibility.