PEOPLE

Young Actor Plays Options As They Come

by E. Donnell Stoneman

(Ed. note: Once an artist becomes a famous name, the process is automatic: interviews are sought and publicity comes easily. The ADVOCATE has published many interviews with famous and successful people. Now we want to do more. We want to help talented, rising young people to create their own success.

We hope to make this interview with a young actor the first of many articles about those who have not yet achieved fame but who have made a promising beginning.)

NEW YORK, NY-He's young, gifted, black and gay. At 23, Phil Blackwell has come through. He exchanged Minneapolis for San Francisco where he played a featured role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for a year and a half and signed on for a college tour of the play. Yet his options remain open for any sudden shift in plans.

Today I was thinking about how I wanted to go to Indonesia. Why not?

He left the University of Minnesota on a Thursday in March, the beginning of the spring quarter. A senior, he was working on his thesis in Humanities when it hit-the feeling of boredom, of it not being something he really wanted to do. And he had to split; get out of Minnesota; find himself.

He remembered a friend who had just come back from Boston talking about the fun he'd had working with a theatre group. there. San Francisco was another possibility. Another friend had told him about the theatre group at Berkeley. He'd flip a coin. Boston or San Francisco?

(New York was out. He'd been here a few years earlier, running away from hometown conformity, proving something, taking a stand. But he was afraid of New York, the Big Time.)

His parents-reasonable, OK in his book-were upset, but they were good about not saying anything. His father bought him a suitcase, a couple of pairs of pants, some shoes. They took him to the airport.

Poetry editor of Black Thoughts, the only student paper still publishing at Berkeley. A member of the Black Ensemble Theatre

Company for six or seven months. Stage. managing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at a rented theatre in downtown San Francisco. The theatre owner, a woman, was connected with the long-running production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He connected. First ushering, then understudy. Finally, a part.

When the touring thing came up, they combined two roles, and I took it. It's specified in the script to be played by blacks. I'm not particularly fond of the role. It's racist is what it is. There's been a lot of

"I want to see both, black companies and integrated companies...The same thing goes for gay theatre. Nothing has to destroy the other thing."

times I wanted to quit, but I think it's better to work than not work. It's a question, something you deal with. You make your choices. I think the learning experience has been well worth it. Aside from the fact that I've also made my living for a year and a half.

But there's no signature on a contract yet. During the first break, after they played the Kennedy Center, he headed home to Minne-

sota to see his family, older brother, younger sister. Close, only eight and ten months' difference in age. And a friend who does black theatre, who wants to tour the South in the summer. He wants to do that, too. He'll see what can be worked out, making agreements as they come along.

I want to see both, black companies and integrated companies, being supported. The same thing goes for gay theatre. Nothing has to destroy the other thing. Everybody talks about erasing demarcation lines, but I wonder about that. I'd like to keep the dif ferences but I'd like to see people pass through the differences easily, go back and forth. But I'd like to see the differences exist.

When he was 19, or maybe 20, he'd already achieved some sort of rationalization

about being gay. Everybody, he figured, deals with it on their own level. At school he saw a boy. Very pretty. A traumatic event. It gave him a lot of pause. When he went home that night he heard an ad for Gay House on the radio. "Come on, we'll help you out. Come see a counselor." He said, fuck it, and went. Just like that. Something inside snapped; he wanted to deal with it.

I was well read as a child so I knew all the things you can read in dumb books. Every time I would talk to somebody about it. they'd tell me that I wasn't. I feel real good about coming through. I've told my brother and sister and cousins. My father and I have discussed it sort of obliquely. I don't lie. I don't push it, but I think it's probably coming soon.

Photos: Ken Howard

Within a week after coming out he was at a national gay convention in Madison-a mindblower-meeting gay people from other parts of the country, people who were and were not political, people who were and Iwere not into the arts. Different factions. One thing he discovered, the white gay leadership was not addressing itself to the needs of the various communities that made up the entirety of gayness. They were not, for instance, trying to raise the consciousness of black men and women in Chicago's South Side bars. It was true; in this country you suffer not only from racism but sexism, too. If this is America and America is racist and sexist, then, he decided, it is doubly bad to be both black and gay.

The race thing is more overt because obviously people are able to detect quicker whether somebody is black or white than whether they're gay or straight. But still you know if they'll do you for one thing they'll do you for the other because it's the same kind of neurosis. Sometimes you get the feeling that other black men are particularly bitter about you being gay. The worst exper ience I've ever had, thinking about being gay, happened about six months ago in San Francisco on the bus. Some high school kids. They're real bad, like savages. I've learned in a situation like that the anger,

"If this is America and America is racist and sexist...it is doubly bad to be both black and gay.'

the ugly space that you would make for yourself to have to deal with that, would be worse than a situation that's already been. Not to say that you shouldn't fight for yourself and defend yourself. I think if it were to happen again I probably would.

He'd like to go home to Minnesota, live there again. A feeling he wouldn't like New York. San Francisco: pleasant now, but it might not always be. Life in Minnesota is

the kind he's used to. Maybe that's what he's doing now, getting all that together. It's important to see a lot of things, meet a lot of people. After leaving home it was wonderful, getting up every day, learning something new, meeting another kind of person. Things don't happen on time, he's sure of that, so you can afford to be open, and when you're open you go right into what you need. Having a sort of questioning, analytical mind, I always wanted to understand the nature of what it is to be gay. Why this is so. And it makes no sense. All the crummy books from the '50s give all the horrible things about how you hate your mother and are afraid of your father, none of which is true. I love my mother very much and my father and I are great friends. I finally concluded that things are just a totality. It's my entire life. I have some real good friends who are older and they tell me about the things that happened to them. Some of them paid horrendous dues. I'm just not that strong. I'm happy to be where I am because I've known good people. In the beginning of the movement people did some really brave things. I have my right ear pierced now and I walk around town and there's no problem. Because people have already paid their dues. I'm not interested in being flagrant or anything. It's not my style. But still things are pretty easy for me, in a sense, because of those people who paid. their dues.

Maybe now I'm paying somebody else's dues....

May 7, 1975

THE ADVOCATE

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