Category Archives: Television

RIP: Duanna Johnson

This summer a video from a Memphis Jail circulated of a Black transgender woman who was repeatedly punched in the face by a police officer while she sat in the precinct. for which she was suing the police department:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QpVb6fTqpU]

According to news reports out of Memphis, she was found shot dead this weekend in Memphis. Eyewitness news reports:

Lawyer Murray Wells confirmed to Eyewitness News that the person who was killed is his client Duanna Johnson. He says Johnson was often in the area where she was killed.

Murray says Johnson was trying to leave Memphis and go back to her hometown of Chicago. According to Murray, Johnson was just about homeless trying to live in Memphis. He says the apartment where Jonson was living did not have power. Murray says he was helping Johnson buy a bus ticket to Chicago.

I get sick of blogging these stories, but somebody besides the coroner has to record what happens to us.

Jody Watley: So Black & So Gay

I have to say that I am having too much fun blogging about frivolity while the world’s economy comes crashing down, McCain & Palin pull every stunt in the book short of a physical attack, and the gays can now rock a Vera Wang in Connecticut-perhaps I should have never left acting! I could have ignored politics forever! LOL!!! Anyhoo, this is the next-to last in this installation of So Black and So Gay.

It’s hard to select one video or song from dance music artist Jody Watley that is Black and gay. They kind of all are. But I am gonna narrow it to two. Watley began her career as a regualar dancer on Soul Train in the 1970s, and then joined the group Shalamar, and had several hits with that band, before going off on her own with the release of her debut solo album in 1987. The second single, Still A Thrill, was the least successful as a single, but I think is one of the funkiest tracks of the decade by any artist, period. The Andre Cymone (a high school friend of Prince, and the Minneapolis sound is all over this track) produced track is about a love affair that remains steamy after many years, and has a killer bassline, and a funky guitar lick over a synthesized drum. The video is simply Jody and Tyrone Proctor a dancer, clearly a Black gay man (who’s name I can’t remember nor locate), who vogues with Watley through the video. This video pre-dates Madonna’s “Vogue” by 3 years, and is often given credit for being the first mainstream video to feature voguing. Shot in Black & White in what looks like Paris, the video is super sexy, and I also see a lot of where Aaliyah got her look and movement influences, which I had never thought of before.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nArOa8OViw]

I could not mention Still A Thrill and not talk about Real Love, from Watley’s second album, Larger Than Life, which definitely was a move toward a sound more associated with the 1990’s, though it was released in 1989. A much bigger hit for her than the previous single, but is no less relevant. This song kills as a dance track, it’s still fresh and interesting to listen to 20 years later. And the video, so black and so gay, is a tribute to Jody’s career as a model, and as someone who was very fashion-forward. Watley is giving you looks in this video. She’s giving you fierce runway (in an over the top way reminiscent more of the Ball/Vogueing scene than an actual fashion runway show), and even though it’s a video that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the song, it somehow completely fits it. Real Love, and Jody Watley in general, is so Black and so gay!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8MrB7MlJ4&NR=1]

Stephanie Mills' "Home": So Black and So Gay!

If you’re a Black gay of the Classic Era (meaning you’re over 30, or at least have Classic Black Gay Sensibilities, or CBGS), you’ll know that Stephanie Mills‘ “Home” is really the Black gay anthem. The song, written for the 1975 Broadway play The Wiz for which Mills was cast as Dorothy (and Diana Ross played in the 1978 film version and does a lackluster version of the song. In fact, it is Lena Horne’s “Believe” that becomes the showstopper in the film. But I digress.), is the “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” of this black version of the Wizard of OZ.

Why is this song, so Black and so gay, you might ask?

One reason that the Black gays of the classic era love this song, in my opinion, is that it speaks to the pain of feeling cast out of the larger Black community-we have no “home” in a sense. The song is about a stateless person-someone who has dreams of a physical place, but the lesson that they learn is that home has to be made in the family and community we create.

But Mills re-recorded the song for her 1989 album “Home” (with a Capella group Take 6 singing the background vocals). She has said that she recorded the song after the deaths of Kenneth Harper (The Wiz Producer, whose mother told the New York Times he died of cancer at age 48 in 1988) and Charlie Small, The Wiz Composer who died in 1987 of a burst appendix. I think that many Black gay men from the Classic Era were in the throes of so much death due to HIV (and sometimes violence) that this song became a song about the losses they were feeling too. I started going to gay clubs when I was 18 or so, and this song was a staple drag performance for about a decade. I think the part that really cinches it for the Black gays, me included, is at the end of the 1989 recording, when she sings “I can hear my friends tellin’ me, Stephanie, please, sing my song.”

Because it so much speaks to the Black gay experience, Stephanie Mills’ Home is So Black and so gay! The video below is a live verson from the Apollo in the 1980s. To see yet another un-embeddable music video from the theives at Universal Music Group, click here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a5czUgDAMw&feature=related]

Klymaxx: So Black and So Gay!

Bernadette Cooper, with the firece asymetrical Bob, next to last on the right.

No one brought Black gay culture, in terms of the language and the unique kind of camp/pretense of Black gay life to the mainstream in the 1980s more than Bernadette Cooper. Consider her lyrics, which open her band Klymaxx’s first single from 1984, The Men All Pause

I knew I was looking good

I had my Kenneth Cole shoes on, My Gianni Versace blue leather suit.

My nails were done, and my hair was FIERCE!

I was riding in a Coupe S Limousine…

The song get’s even gayer. But it is Cooper, with her not quite butch, not quite femme persona who continues the camp factor ripped right from the runways of the balls. It was as if she was writing songs for queens to get ready to the club to, or drag queens to perform…

‘cause they all love’d me
Slap me, no, somebody slap me
‘cause i know i’m lookin’ good
I’m givin’ attitude all over the room
People are starin’ at me
I just look too good for these people

As it turns out, I would meet Ms. Cooper years later when she lived in Jersey City, and operated a high-end vintage clothing store. She was still fab then. She also penned other such “I look too good” songs like Salt-N-Pepa’s “The Body Beautiful” and Bette Midler’s “I Look Good.”

For her camp factor and drag-a-licious performance, Bernadette Cooper & her band Klymaxx is so Black and so gay!

FUCKING UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP has blocked people from being able to embed the video, so you have to follow this link to Youtube.

Technotronic's Ya-Kid K: So Black and So Gay!

Since National Coming Out Day is this coming Saturday, I am going to do a new video everyday this week.

When Technotronic hit the scene in 1989 with Pump Up The Jam, it was one of the first house tracks to cross over to pop radio. Listening to the radio, we heard this hip-hop MC rhyming over the track with a husky, heavy voice that really made the track stand out. Well, the video for Pump Up The Jam featured a high-femme black model lip-synching the words. It wasn’t until the group performed on Saturday Night Live did we meet Ya-Kid K, the voice behind Technotronic (much like the Black Box and C&C Music Factory videos that featured models instead of Martha Wash). Was Ya Kid K simply considered too butch for music video?

Ya Kid K was dressed in a very butch/hip-hop effect, complete with cornrows, hat turned around, baggy clothes, and very little (if any) make-up-and everyone was shocked to see her, given the fraud perpetrated in the original video. But Ya Kid K was one of the first women to rock a butch hip-hop effect in pop music, inspiring many Black and Latina butch dykes across the country, if not the world! Here’s there most famoussong, Move This. Ya Kid K-so Black and so gay!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK5a2afUySw]

I Heart Fonzworth Bentley, Kanye, Andre 3000 & Sa-Ra

How You doin?

How You doin?

I JUST saw this video on Vh1 Soul and I think I am in love with it. It is a new video by Fonzworth Bentley, called “Everybody,” with Kanye West and Andre 3000. I like how playful it is with the choreography and the cute stylized winking and smiling, how hot they all look in their suits, and I think producers (the fellas in the band in the video) Sa-Ra Creative Partners are the next big thing in Black music. This new image of Black masculinity gives me hope that we won’t all perish under the hegemony of hip-hop. I know I’m being dramatic-this song is just as misogynist as most music these days, but I am happy to see the cultural swing away from artists selling Black death.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0GsrYwAPOU&feature=related]

Afro-Latinos in Colombia

In the last couple years there have been an increasing amount of news stories in the US about Afro-Latinos. I have been glad to see some of it because oftentimes I feel like in the US, it’s as if slavery didn’t happen in Latin America and there are no Black people there to speak of. Or that somehow or another, the Spanish speaking Caribbean and South America has “gotten beyond” racial categorization, when it was only a generation ago that people like Cuban singer La Lupe (among many others) proudly declared she was Black. And why don’t any of these Baseball players from the Dominican Republic get discussed as Black people? There’s also this thing that happens, where I have been told that I, as an African-American, don’t understand the nuances of what happens in terms of race/racialization in Latin America.

OK, I am not trying to take over that conversation, there are plenty of Afro-Latinos organizing on their own, but I know that when many of these organizations of Afro-Latinos in Latin America are referring to Black American struggles for inspiration, and sometimes directly seeking assistance from groups like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (as did organizations in Brazil) to help address legal forms of racism in their countries. That says something to me about how Afro-Latinos in those organizations see what Black Americans have done as a possibility, and not as some group of people who don’t get it. And I do, ultimately, feel responsible for what happens to Black people wherever we are, however we got there, and no matter what conquistador language we now speak.

Anyhoo, I found this interesting story about Afro-Colombians, which are even less talked about than Cubans, Dominicans or Brazilians. What interests me most about the many different movements of racial justice happening in Latin America is in what ways are notions of “nation/nationhood” informing conversations about gender, sex and sexuality-that is, as a cautionary tale from many Black Nationalist configurations in the US-is the Afro-Latin revolution being formed as a (hetero) dick thing?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgzOlTAze3Q&eurl=http://www.myglobalhustle.com/wp/?p=3510]

The Clintons Take Drama to Shakespearean Levels

How much like the Macbeths are the Clintons? Though they switch roles between Lady M and McB himself, the two seem to be hell-bent on remaining in power and will bring down the Democratic Party in the process if they must.

Note to the Left: Listen, I am not really a Democrat any more than I am a Republican, but this is a moment in history where I think we need to be strategic. If John McCain wins you’d just better pack and move-he’s about as centrist as he is psychologically stable. So for all of Obama’s flaws, I don’t feel like I can afford a McCain presidency. There’s not enough Pepto-Bismol in all the world to stomach the disaster that is going to be. But i digress.

Just when I thought it was all over, signs seem to point to the fact that the Clintons may still be hoping to sabotage the Obama candicacy in hopes of a Hilary Clinton ticket in 2012.

In a “non-shock of the week” turn of events, The Atlantic Monthly’s September feature story proves that the Clinton Campaign worked really hard to drape themselves in the fabric of American flag-style patriotism, and paint Obama as foreign other who couldn’t be trusted (this scoop, combined with me picking up the last two brilliant issues at airports this summer means the mag has won itself a new subscriber in Kenyon Farrow!). Non-shock as it is, The Atlantic has published all the emails/memos on their site proving it (theatlantic.com/clinton), and the story is an interesting timeling of the inner workings of her campaign. Joshua Green writes:

Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

But we thought since she lost, she’d concede to get a cushy job in the new administration (though not the VP slot) and leave well enough alone. Maureen Dowd, who undoubetdly despises the Hillary Clinton, wrote in her column yesterday that Hillary and Bill are still planning to use their platforms as major speakers at the Democratic National Convention to set Hillary up as the nominee in 2012, and damage Obama’s chances against McCain now.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012.

She’s obviously relishing Hillaryworld’s plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read “Denounce Nobama’s Coronation.”

In a video of a closed California fund-raiser on July 31 that surfaced on YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and a roll-call vote.

She said she thought it would be good for party unity if her gals felt “that their voices are heard.” But that’s disingenuous. Hillary was the one who raised the roll-call idea at the end of May with Democrats, who were urging her to face the math. She said she wanted it for Chelsea, oblivious to how such a vote would dim Obama’s star turn. Ever since she stepped aside in June, she’s been telling people privately that there might have to be “a catharsis” at the convention, signaling she wants a Clinton crescendo.

Bill continues to howl at the moon — and any reporters in the vicinity — about Obama; he’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.

LOL!!! Further proving Dowd’s point, Bill Clinton had the fucking nerve to tell ABC News last week that Congressman James Clyburn (D-SC) had purposefully made him look like a racist and ruin Clinton’s Negro Pass in the Black Community-a fact which Clyburn categorically denies.

Clinton told ABC News last week that Clyburn “used to be” an old friend of his, but he “was not Hillary’s supporter. Never. Not ever. Not for a day.”

When told that Clyburn had said Clinton damaged his own credibility with the black community, Clinton responded, “That may be by the time he got through working on it, that was probably true.”

Though Clyburn usually operates with the utmost restraint, I think he should tell Bill:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Gi28pNruA&feature=related]