It’s the queers who made me. Who introduced me to Edwin Denby’s writings, and George Balanchine’s “Serenade,” and got me writing for
Ballet Review
. Who wore red suspenders and a Trotsky button; I had never met anyone before who dressed so stylishly who wasn’t black or Jewish. Who, even though I was “alone,” watched me as I danced to Cindy Wilson singing “Give Me Back My Man” in the basement of a house that my mother shared with her sister in Atlanta. Who took me to Paris. Who let me share his bed in Paris. Who told my mother that I would be okay, and I hope she believed him. Who was delighted to include one of my sisters in a night out—she wore a pink prom dress and did the Electric Slide, surrounded by gay boys and fuck knows if she cared or saw the difference between herself and them—and he stood by my side as I watched my sister dance in her pink prom dress, and then he asked what I was thinking about, and I said, “I’m just remembering why I’m gay.” It’s the queers who made me. Who laughed with me in the pool in Lipari. Who kicked me under the table when I had allotted too much care for someone who would never experience love as such. Who sat with me in the cinema at Barnard College as
Black Orpheus
played, his bespectacled eyes glued to the screen as I weighed his whiteness against the characters’ blackness and then my own. Who squatted down in the bathtub and scrubbed my legs and then my back and then the rest
of my body the evening of the day we would start to know each other for the rest of our lives. Who lay with me in the bed in Los Angeles, white sheets over our young legs sprinkled with barely-there hair. Who coaxed me back to life at the farmers’ market later the same day, and I have the pictures to prove it. Who laughed when I said, “What’s J. Lo doing in the hospital?” as he stood near his bed dying of AIDS, his beautiful Panamanian hair—a mixture of African, Spanish and Indian textures—no longer held back by the white bandanna I loved. Who gave me Michael Warner’s
The Trouble with Normal
and let me find much in it that was familiar and emotionally accurate, including the author’s use of the word
moralism
to describe the people who divide the world into “us” and “them,” and who brutalize the queer in themselves and others to gain a foothold on a moralist perch.
It’s the queers who made me. Who introduced me to a number of straight girls who, at first, thought that being queer was synonymous with being bitchy, and who, after meeting me and becoming friends kept waiting and waiting for me to be a bitchy queen, largely because they wanted me to put down their female friends and to hate other women as they themselves hated other women, not to mention themselves, despite their feminist agitprop; after all, I was a queen, and that’s what queens did, right, along with getting sodomized, just like them, right—queens were the handmaidens to all that female self-hatred, right? And who then realized that I didn’t hate women and so began to join forces with other women to level criticism at me.
It’s the queers who made me. Who said: Women and queers get in the way of your feminism and gay rights. Who listened as I sat, hurt and confused, describing the postfeminist or postqueer monologue
that had been addressed to me by some of the above women and queers, who not only attacked my queer body directly—you’re too fat, you’re too black, the horror, the horror!—but delighted in hearing about queers flinging the same kind of pimp slime on one another, not to mention joining forces with their girlfriends of both sexes to establish within their marginalized groups the kind of hierarchy straight white men presumably judge them by, but not always, not really. Who asked, “Why do you spend so much time thinking about women and queers?” And who didn’t hear me when I said, “But aren’t we born of her? Didn’t we queer her body being born?” It’s the queers who made me. Who introduced me to the performer Justin Bond, whose various characters, sometimes cracked by insecurity, eaglets in a society of buzzards, are defined by their indomitability in an invulnerable world. Who told me about the twelve-year-old girl who had been raised with love and acceptance of queerness in adults, in a landscape where she could play without imprisoning herself in self-contempt, and who could talk to her mother about what female bodies meant to her (everything), which was a way of further loving her mother, the greatest romance she had ever known, and who gave me, indirectly, my full queer self, the desire to say “I” once again.
It’s my queerness that made me. And, in it, there is a memory of Jackie Curtis. She’s walking up Bank Street, away from the river, a low orange sun behind her like the ultimate stage set.
It’s my queer self that goes up to Jackie Curtis—whom I have seen only in pictures and films; I am in my twenties—and it is he who says, “Oh, Miss Curtis, you’re amazing,” and she says, in front of the setting sun, completely stoned but attentive, a performer to her queer bones,
snapping to in the light of attention and love, “Oh, you must come to my show!” as she digs into her big hippie bag to dig out a flyer, excited by the possibility of people seeing her for who she is, even in makeup.
SKIN FLICK
WINTER 1973. LATE
afternoon: the entr’acte between dusk and darkness, when the people who conduct their business in the street—numbers runners in gray chesterfields, out-of-work barmaids playing the dozens, adolescents cultivating their cigarette jones and lust, small-time hustlers selling “authentic” gold wristwatches that are platinum bright—look for a place to roost and to drink in the day’s sin. Young black guy, looks like the comedian Richard Pryor, walks into one of his hangouts, Opal’s Silver Spoon Café. A greasy dive with an R&B jukebox, it could be in Detroit or in New York, could be anywhere. Opal’s has a proprietor—Opal, a young and wise black woman who looks like the comedian Lily Tomlin—and a little bell over the door that goes tink-a-link, announcing all the handouts and gimmes who come to sit at Opal’s counter and talk about how needy their respective asses are.
Black guy sits at the counter, and Opal offers him some potato soup—“something nourishing,” she says. Black guy has moist, on-the-verge-of-lying-or-crying eyes and a raggedy Afro. He wears a green fatigue jacket, the kind of jacket brothers brought home from ’Nam, which guys like this guy continue to wear long after they’ve returned home, too shell-shocked or stoned to care much about their haberdashery. Juke—that’s the black guy’s name—is Opal’s baby, flopping about in all them narcotics he’s trying to get off of by taking that methadone, which Juke and Opal pronounce “methadon”—the way two old-timey Southerners would, the way Juke and Opal’s elders might have, if they knew what that shit was, or was for.
Juke and Opal express their feelings for each other, their shared view of the world, in a lyrical language, a colored people’s language, which tries to atomize their anger and their depression. Sometimes their anger is wry: Opal is tired of hearing about Juke’s efforts to get a job, and tells him so. “Hand me that jive about job training,” she says. “You trained, all right. You highly skilled at not working.” But that’s not entirely true. Juke has submitted himself to the rigors of “rehabilitation.” “I was down there for about three weeks, at that place, working,” Juke says. “Had on a suit, tie. Shaving. Acting crazy. Looked just like a fool in the circus.” Pause. “And I’m fed up with it.” Pause. “Now I know how to do a job that don’t know how to be done no more.” Opal’s face fills with sadness. Looking at her face can fill your mind with sadness. She says, “For real?” It’s a rhetorical question that black people have always asked each other or themselves when they’re handed more hopelessness: Is this for real?
Night is beginning to spread all over Juke and Opal’s street; it is the
color of a thousand secrets combined. The bell rings, and a delivery man comes in, carting pies. Juke decides that everyone should chill out—he’ll play the jukebox, they’ll all get down. Al Green singing “Let’s Stay Together” makes the pie man and Juke do a little finger-snapping, a little jive. Opal hesitates, says, “Naw,” but then dances anyway, and her shyness is just part of the fabric of the day, as uneventful as the delivery man leaving to finish up his rounds, or Opal and Juke standing alone in this little restaurant, a society unto themselves.
The doorbell’s tiny peal. Two white people—a man and a woman—enter Opal’s. Youngish, trenchcoated. And the minute the white people enter, something terrible happens, from an aesthetic point of view. They alienate everything. They fracture our suspended disbelief. They interrupt our identification with the protagonists of the TV show we’ve been watching, which becomes TV only when those white people, who are social workers, start hassling our Juke, our Opal, equal halves of the same resilient black body. When we see those white people, we start thinking about things like credits, and remember that this is a television play, after all, written by the brilliant Jane Wagner, and played with astonishing alacrity and compassion by Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin on
Lily
, Tomlin’s second variety special, which aired on CBS in 1973, and which remains, around forty years later, the most profound meditation on race and class that I have ever seen on a major network.
“We’re doing some community research and we’d like to ask you a few questions,” the white woman social worker declares as soon as she enters Opal’s. Juke and Opal are more than familiar with this line of inquiry, which presumes that people like them are always available
for questioning—servants of the liberal cause. “I wonder if you can tell me, have you ever been addicted to drugs?” the woman asks Juke.
Pryor-as-Juke responds instantly. “Yeah, I been addicted,” he says. “I’m addicted right now—don’t write it down, man, be cool, it’s not for the public. I mean, what I go through is private.” He is incapable of making “Fuck you” his first response—or even his first thought. Being black has taught him how to allow white people their innocence. For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies. Eventually, you direct that anger at yourself—it has nowhere else to go.
Juke tries to turn the questioning around a little, through humor, which is part of his pathos. “I have some questions,” he tells the community researchers, then tries to approximate their straight, white tone: “Who’s Pigmeat Markham’s mama?” he asks. “Wilt Chamberlain the tallest colored chap you ever saw?”
When the white people have left and Juke is about to leave, wrapped in his thin jacket, he turns to Opal and says, “You sweet. You a sweet woman...I’ll think aboutcha.” His eyes are wide with love and need, and maybe fear or madness. “Be glad when it’s spring,” he says to Opal. Pause. “Flower!”
Lily
was never shown again on network television, which is not surprising, given that part of its radicalism is based on the fact that it features a white female star who tries to embody a black woman while communicating with a black man about substantive emotional matters, and who never wears anything as theatrically simple as blackface to do it; Tomlin plays Opal in whiteface, as it
were. Nevertheless, “Juke and Opal,” which lasts all of nine minutes and twenty-five seconds, and which aired in the same season in which
Hawaii Five-O, The Waltons
, and
Ironside
were among television’s top-rated shows, remains historically significant for reasons other than the skin game.
As Juke, Richard Pryor gave one of his relatively few great performances in a project that he had not written or directed. He made use of the poignancy that marks all of his great comedic and dramatic performances, and of the vulnerability—the pathos cradling his sharp wit—that had seduced people into loving him in the first place. Tomlin kept Pryor on the show over objections from certain of the network’s executives, and it may have been her belief in him as a performer, combined with the high standards she set for herself and others, that spurred on the competitive-minded Pryor. His language in this scene feels improvised, confessional, and so internalized that it’s practically nonverbal, not unlike the best of Pryor’s own writing—the stories he tells when he talks shit into a microphone, doing stand-up. And as he sits at Opal’s counter we can see him falling in love with Tomlin’s passion for her work, recognizing it as the passion he feels when he peoples the stage with characters who might love him as much as Tomlin-as-Opal seems to now.
Although Richard Pryor was more or less forced to retire in 1994, eight years after he discovered that he had multiple sclerosis (“It’s the stuff God hits your ass with when he doesn’t want to kill ya—just slow ya down,” he told
Entertainment Weekly
in 1993), his work as a comedian, a writer, an actor, and a director amounts to a significant chapter not only in late-twentieth-century American comedy but in American
entertainment in general. Pryor is best known now for his work in the lackadaisical Gene Wilder buddy movies or for abominations like
The Toy
. But far more important was the prescient commentary on the issues of race and sex in America that he presented through stand-up and sketches like “Juke and Opal”—the heartfelt and acute social observation, the comedy that littered the stage with the trash of the quotidian as it was sifted through his harsh and poetic imagination, and that changed the very definition of the word “entertainment,” particularly for a black entertainer.
The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought: first, because blackness has almost always had to explain itself to a largely white audience in order to be heard, and, second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell—a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt. The writers behind the collective modern ur-text of blackness—James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison—all performed some variation on the theme. Angry but distanced, their rage blanketed by charm, they lived and wrote to be liked. Ultimately, whether they wanted to or not, they in some way embodied the readers who appreciated them most—white liberals.