10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE February 16, 2007
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Remaining yourself
Dancers perform a pas de deux in the Joe Goode Performance Group's Stay Together, an examination of long-term same-sex relationships.
According to choreographer, writer and director Goode, the piece is about not losing oneself in a relationship.
"How do you stay with someone who has strong opinions, worthy opinions, and keep with your own ideas?" the openly gay creator asks.
The company will also perform Goode's Deeply There, a piece on how AIDS can devastate a neighborhood. Deeply There won a New York Dance and Performance Award in 1999.
The Joe Goode Performance Group is being brought to Cleveland to perform at the Ohio Theater at Playhouse Square on Saturday, February 24 at 8 pm. The show is presented by Cuyahoga Community College and the Cleveland LGBT Center.
Tickets are $20-$47, available by calling 800-766-6048 or online at www.tricpresents.com.
History
Continued from page 8
G. B. Mann's Low-Hanging Fruit (Grapevine Press) is the sexuality of rap music without the homophobia. This collection of stories deals with black men loving black men, plain and simple.
It suffers from the malady of many smallpress offerings: it's poorly edited, with capitalization, punctuation and grammar not what they should be, even taking into ac-
count the use of vernacular.
However, reading an erotic story is much like eating chili. The question is: Is it hot? 'Mann's work is hot.
Of some concern, though, is the almost complete disregard for safer sex. In an age when AIDS and HIV threaten untold samegender-loving black men, not having more condoms in the book goes beyond literary license into the realm of the irresponsible.
Samiya Bashir's verses in Where the Apple Falls (Redbone Press) deliver lushness in every line, love, pain, anger, sadness, joy and fear, page by page.
"The Trouble with This Harvest Time," for instance, illustrates the chasm between blaming the victim and the reality of victimization, that even someone who lives dangerously has a right to her safety.
And "Foxfire," dedicated to Amiri Baraka, one of the creators of the African American poetry form, leaps off the page, staccato bursts of words firing in typeset rounds.
"Amazon's Confession" is a call to arms, a celebration of the power of sisterhood and anger at the interloping men who view themselves as the center of the universe.
Bashir has the ability to be the Lorde for a new generation of women, a leader, a light guiding the way through the darkness of civilization in the new millennium.
A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride, collects eight critical essays by the author, poet and scholar who died of AIDS in 1992, months after delivering an address at the OutWrite queer writers' conference. That
-Anthony Glassman
address is also included in the collection. Dixon was never one to throw the baby out with the bathwater, always looking to the future while keeping himself firmly grounded in the past.
His study of the works of writers in the African diaspora provides fodder for essays so informative, it's almost impossible to read them and not try to find these books by Haitian, Martiniquian and French writers, working in tandem with the Harlem Renaissance writers, many of whom were themselves gay.
While Dixon's works in this book don't necessarily focus on homosexuality, “I'll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name," his address to the OutWrite conference in 1992, draws parallels and comparisons between the efforts of black and gay writers, and plants himself firmly in both worlds.
"As gay men and lesbians, we are the sexual niggers of our society," he said 15 years ago. "Some of you may have never before been treated like a second-class, disposable citizen. Some of you have felt a certain privilege and protection in being white, which is not to say that others are accustomed to or have accepted being racial niggers, and feel less alienated."
"Since I have never encountered a person of no color, I assume that we are all persons of color," he continued. "Like fashion victims, though, we are led to believe that some colors are more acceptable than others, and those acceptable colors have been so endowed with universality and desirability that the color hardly seems to exist at allexcept, of course, to those who are of a different color and pushed outside the rainbow."
His use of the "N" word is inflammatory, yes, and deliberately so. He goes on to use the "F" word made so infamous by Isaiah Washington, as well as terms like dykes, sissies and bulldaggers.
Whatever the epithet, however, he embraces the identity underlying it, among a myriad of others. If everyone would read his speech, see the power in his words, perhaps they would realize that black history is made every day.