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Hold Tight Gently Glossary Terms:

Feminine: Seduction and mastery of womanhood and all the traits that serve the divine feminine.

Vogue: Liberation Through Movement and Using the Elemental:

Rebirth: A revelation while channeling your inner personality and waking up your egos or isms.

Nostalgia: Reliving or watching past works of people that came before and walked catergories.

Elemental: Catwalk, Duckwalk, Hand Performance, Floor Performance, Spin & Dips, Hair Illusion, BreakDown.

Queer: Butch Queens Vogue Fem, Fem Queen

Celebration: Community Gathering

Cultural Memory: Archive Moments

Poetry: Language through movement and tell a story

Final Rites: Icon & Legends of Mastery of your Category.

Sound: Commentating & Musical Vibrations

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Legendary | Werk It: Elements of Vogue (Catwalk, Duckwalk) | HBO Max

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Are You in Your Feelings? by Kyle Abraham

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Legends of Ballroom

Crystal LaBeija was a prominent drag queen and the founding mother of the House of LaBeija. She appeared in the documentary The Queen (1968), where she notably challenged the racist practices of drag pageants which favored white queens. At the suggestion of friend and fellow drag queen Lottie, she became mother of the House of LaBeija, which insipred a wave of black Houses across New York and eventually the world. (Lawrence, 2011, p.4)

Dorian Corey was a renowned drag queen, costume designer, and the mother of the House of Corey. She co-founded the House of Corey in 1972 along with Father Chipper Corey. She attended the Parsons School of Design and as a seamtress and entertainer, was known for her elaborate costumes and performances. She toured and made an album with the Pearl Box Revue, a drag cabaret act. She also hosted the annual Harlem Fantasy Ball with Pepper LaBeija. She went on to design a clothing label called Corey Design and was cherished for her mentorship to many children in the balls including the late Mother Angie Xtravaganza and the late Grandfather Hector Xtravaganza. (Hector Xtravaganza, 2011, pp. 33-34)

Paris Dupree was a pioneer in the ballroom scene. Known as a mother's-mother, she formed the first Brooklyn house, the House of Dupree, with Father Burger Dupree. Her leadership encouraged the formation of other houses including the House of Ebony, House of Revlon, House of Princess, the House Milan, which were formed under her. ( Faces, 2006) Her balls and elaborate costumes were revered by many and inspired the title of the documentary Paris is Burning. She is also credited as the innovator of voguing.

Avis Pendavis was the mother of the House of Pendavis and a prominent entertainer. She co-founded the House of Pendavis in 1979 with Father Kirk Pendavis. She was a seamtress, costume designer, and a famous drag performer. In her house, education and stability were equally important as performance. She had a tremendous impact on her children providing advice on life, education, and their well-being. She loved to see her children progress in and outside of the balls. ( The Luna Show, 2011) She was a Grand Prize Winner of Ballroom categories such as "Ethnic," "Space Age Illusion," and "Designer Delight Haute Couture Eveningwear." ( Legends Magazine, 2003)

Pepper LaBeija was a legend in the ballroom community for 30 years. As the second mother of the House of LaBeija, she was a prominent figure in the scene who won numerous trophy awards for her performance and costumes. Father Tommie LaBeija described Pepper as a mother who loved her kids and the House of LaBeija as a family where gay children came for refuge. In an effort to create an inclusive environment for black and brown LGBTQ performers, Pepper began hosting her own balls a long with Paris Dupree, Dorian Corey, Crystal LaBeija, etc. Her balls, which originally began as pageants, eventually became inclusive of butch queens (gay men) where numerous categories were implemented. Her Grand Prize wins included "Grand Prize Winner Ethnic Effect", "Punk Rock", and "Doing Your Own Thing." She notably received standing ovations each time she entered a ballroom. ( Legends Magazine, 2005)

Marcel Chrisitan was an artist, writer, historian, and legend in the ballroom community. In 1962, he was one of the first to host an all-black ball in New York in response to the discrimination faced by black queens. As a grand-prize winner and Grandfather of the House of Christian, he was responsible for creating Idle Sheets, which documented the history, background of the houses, and legendary people in the balls. As an artist and writer, he founded Widow Nails Media and Widow Nails Press in 1978, which designed and published "exquisitely crafted, couture programs, flyers, posters, booklets and ebooks by underserved black writers and artists whose lives and work transgress traditional gender norms." ( Widow Nails Media, n.d.) In 1994, his poem "Fair Prejudice" was featured in the book Aloud : voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Willi Ninja was the father of the House of Ninja, and he was also known as a the Grandfather of Vogue. The iconic dance form contributed to the popularization of New York club scence in the 80's. Willi Ninja started vogueing in drag balls in Harlem and has led him to a sucessful career. He worked with fashion designers, choreographers, models, and other celebrities (Ogunnaike, 2006).

is the father and founder of the House of UltraOmni, one of the famous NY houses known for voguing. Kevin founded the house in 1979 along with Tommy "Dimples" Baker. As a father, Kevin Omni has guided his "children" and provided support, teaching them the history of Harlem drag shows, ball culture, and more. Additionally, Kevin Omni is also an producer, educator, activist, event coordinator, and much more. At the balls, he won 178 trophies for categories including, "Legendary-Hi Fashion Executive," "Realness," "Face" "Face Over 25," "Face Over 30," "Face Over 40," and "Legendary Face." He made ballroom history for his first trophy as "BQ in Drag" then later as "Realness Unspookable/Unclockable." ( Legends Magazine, n.d.)

Octavia St. Laurent who has also gone by the name Heavenly Angel Octavia St Laurent Manolo Blahnik made her debut in balls in 1982 in the Harlem drag scene. She joined the House of St Laurent in 1990, a house founded by Robbie St. Laurent in 1982. Octavia was a part of the "Paris is Burning" documentary and took advantage of the opportunity to advance her career as an entertainer. She was a singer, actress, drag performer, and an activist. Octavia battled with drug addiction for many years and struggled with AIDS along with cancer later in life. Despite Octavia's many hardships, she kept a positive attitude. She passed away on May 17, 2009 (Maglott, 2018).

Angie Xtravaganza was a founding mother of the House of Xtravaganza, and she was the mother for many, one being Hector Xtravaganza. She was emmersed in the of New York's ball scene at a vey young age, and was a popular performer. Angie was a part of the documentary flim "Paris is Burining," and unfortunately, she was not able to enjoy much of the success of the documentary. Angie passed away on March 31, 1993 at the age of 28 after developing liver disease related to AIDS. Although she lived a short life, she made an impact on the many lives of childern she took under wing (Green, 1993).

Carmen Xtravaganza is a transgender woman who started off in the House of St. Laurent as Carmen St. Laurent. Known for her pretty face and walking the 'face' and 'model' categories at balls, Carmen became an icon. She eventually left the House of St. Laurent and joined the House of Xtravaganza. Her dramatic exit from the House of St. Laurent during the House of Omni's ball to join the House of Xtravaganza turned heads. She later became the mother of the House of Xtravaganza (Xtravaganza, 2013).

Tracey "Africa" Norman is an African American model who is an important figure in balls. Tracey was the first African-American trans women to be on the the box of the Clairol and she has modeled for Vogue Italia and Essence. After a few years looking for more modeling jobs, she joined the House of Africa. She later became a mother of the house. Tracey strived to use her experience in modeling to teach her children and other memebers of the House of Africa to walk. In 2001, Tracey was elected in to the Ballroom Hall of Fame (Zagaria, 2019).

Hector Xtravaganza was a part of the House of Xtravaganza. He was the father of the house at different times of his life and eventually became a grandfather. Hector was a prominent figure in New York City's ballroom scene. Because of this, he went on to become a fashion stylist for celebrities and a consultant for FX show Pose (2018). This icon was also a HIV/AIDS awareness advocate, and in 1990, he co-founded the House of Latex which works with Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) (National Museum of African American History & Culture, n.d.).

Erskine Christian is the father and founder of the House of Christian. He founded the House of Christian in 1977 with Andy Christian, which was the first house for Butch Queens. As a Grand Prize Winner, he was the first to walk the Butch Queen category in the 1970s, making him a pioneer of the Butch Queen category. (Learn Your History, 2017)

David Ultima Xtravaganza is a costume designer, the founder of the House of Ultima, and the former father of the House of Xtravaganza. As the second father of the House of Xtravaganza, he and Angie Xtravaganza mentored their children, who went on to led careers in dance, modelling, music production, acting, etc. As a costume designer, he has worked with numerous designers such as Oscar de la Renta and Arnold Skavi. His Grand Prize wins included "Face" and "High Fashion Evening Wear". ( Swerve Magazine, 2013, p.25)

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Crystal LaBeija was a prominent drag queen and the founding mother of the House of LaBeija. She appeared in the documentary The Queen (1968), where she notably challenged the racist practices of drag pageants which favored white queens.

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Malcolm McLaren -  Deep In Vogue ( With Willie Ninja )

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Vogue, or ‘voguing’ is a type of improvisational dance inspired by the poses of models in fashion magazines. Many will recognise the style of dance from Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ music video, with its model-like poses and a runway ‘walk’ that includes angles, boxes, and lines with the body and arms on the beat. Between the 1960s and 1980s in Harlem, New York, a highly stylised form of dance emerged from the black and Latinx New York LGBTQ communities. Competitions known as ‘balls’ had been regularly held since the mid-1800s, gaining public visibility in the 1920s. Balls were crucial in the creation and maintenance of LGBTQ culture.

In the 80s, voguing was introduced to the scene. Ballroom culture incorporates ‘vogue’ battles, and dance competitions similar to pageant events that allow dancers to compete for trophies. Individual voguers in the ballroom scene traditionally each make part of a ‘House’, a competitive group that acts as a support network and extended social family.

Voguing and dance

There are currently three distinct styles of vogue dance:

Old Way (pre-1990)

The original form of voguing, ‘Old Way’ is characterised by the formation of lines, symmetry, and precision with fluid-like movement. Egyptian hieroglyphs, martial arts, breakdance, popping, and male fashion poses serve as the original inspirations for old-way voguing.

In its purest and historical form, voguing of the old way is a ‘duel’ between two rivals.

New Way (post-1990)

The new way of voguing is more flexible and gymnastic. It is characterised by creating complex angles, boxes, lines, and illusions with the hands, wrists, and arms. Inspired by performers who use poses including contortionists, gymnastics, and yoga.

Vogue Fem (circa 1995)

Vogue Fem is based on the ‘old way’ performance and embodies feminine appearance and movement. With five basic elements: hands, catwalk, duckwalk, spins/dips, and floor, influences are taken from a wide range of dance genres, including Modern Dance and Ballet.

Willi Ninja, a renowned figure on the Harlem Ballroom scene, was known as ‘the godfather of vogue’. He drew inspiration for his dances and intricate choreography from mimes and martial arts and took the dance form around the world.

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Recognized as the “Grandfather of Vogue,” Willi Ninja rose to prominence in the Harlem Drag Ball scene in the 1980s and took the dance form of voguing around the world. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1982, acting as a “mother” to a group of adopted gay and transgender “children” in New York City. Moving away from showgirl drag, the Harlem drag ball scene provided African American and Latino youth a space to express nonconforming gender presentations. The houses of the drag ball scene provided the participants a support network and an extended social family. Each house having distinctions, the House of Ninja was famous for its dancers. Ninja helped create and shape the dance form of voguing that combined exaggerated model poses and intricate mime-like choreography. After appearing in the documentary Paris is Burning, Willi rose to fame as a choreographer, musician, runway model and modeling coach, as well as serving as a direct inspiration to various artists who immortalized the style in their music videos. Willi Ninja’s life illustrates what it means to be a black gay male in a world that lauds white male heteronormativity. Willi Ninja transgressed rigid gender barriers as he participated in the ballroom scene and performed an androgynous gender presentation on and off the stage. His legacy continues as the House of Ninja members keep voguing alive and advocate on behalf of their mother to raise HIV/AIDS awareness.

Willi Ninja was born William Roscoe Leake on April 12, 1961 and grew up in Flushing, Queens. A completely self-taught dancer, Willi began to dance publicly at age 7. After high school, Willi dropped out of college, enrolled in beauty school and moved to Greenwich Village in the late 1970s[1]. Not much is known about his childhood, although in many interviews he describes how his mother, Esther Leake, was very accepting of his sexuality and had a direct role in nurturing his interest in dancing. Esther often took Willi to the ballet and the Apollo Theater to see various dance performances[2]. In an interview with Joan Rivers, Willi describes how he never came out to his mother about his homosexuality; in fact, it was she who confronted him, claiming that “mothers always know.” She told him that he was her son and she would love him no matter what[3]. Presumably having some sort of acceptance, Willi’s experience stands in stark contrast to the lives of the African American and Latino gay and transgender youth he later mentored. Inspired by Fred Astaire, Olympic gymnasts, and the martial arts (hence the name “Ninja”), Willi formed a dance group who called themselves the Video Pretenders in the early 1980s[4]. They would go to clubs and mimic the dance moves in the music videos being shown on the screens. They soon realized that they should create their own choreography. Willi began voguing at the Christopher Street Pier and Washington Square Park, popular hangout sites for LGBTQ youth, and made his debut in Harlem’s famous drag balls.

The culture surrounding drag balls and voguing can be traced back to the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge hosted its first queer masquerade in 1869[5]. In newspapers, these balls were disguised as “masquerades.” However, by word of mouth, they came to be known as fag balls or parade of the fairies[6]. This scene experienced backlash and police intimidation during the Depression, Prohibition, and the criminalization of homosexual relations throughout the first half of the 20th century. By the early 1960s, the drag ball scene began to fragment along racial lines, coinciding with the intensification of the Civil Rights movement. Although attended equally by black and white audiences, black queens were expected to “whiten up” their faces if they wanted a chance at winning a title. Frustrated by racial biases, black queens began to stage their own events. Crystal LaBeija formed the House of LaBeija in 1972 as a promotional gimmick for a drag ball she was hosting with a friend[7]. The formation of the house structure paralleled the increasingly assertive gay liberation movement and the reshaping of New York gangs. The house system of the drag ball scene provided an extended social family that helped the participants navigate through racism, homophobia, transphobia, and class oppression. Many were disowned by their family and friends, or ran away to avoid causing their family shame because of their nonconforming gender and/or sexual identity. The history of the house formation also requires references to the politics of abandonment and the racial and economic injustices occurring in New York City in the 1980s. There was a decline in the city’s welfare and social services, early gentrification of urban neighborhoods, decreases in funding for group homes and shelters for homeless youth, a sharp rise in unemployment rates among black and Latino men and a lack of funding during the Reagan era for people newly displaced or homeless as a result of HIV/AIDS. All these conditions forced black and gay (and especially black gay) people into the streets in unprecedented numbers, if they were not already disowned by their families for being gay or transgender. Queens competed in various categories to acquire the most trophies, thus placing their house higher in the overall hierarchy of the drag ball scene. Every house was known for something different. House of Ninja was known for its dancers, House of Xtravaganza for having the prettiest faces, etc. While black queens organized their own balls and attempted to represent people of color in their scene, internalized racism still materialized when the “children” still won prizes for emulating white actors and celebrities[8]. However, the shift in the scene to be more inclusive also gave way for showcasing talent at the drag balls. Instead of categories based all on appearance, singing and dancing became other forms of expression. This provided more acceptance in a space where drag usually meant males imitating femininity in order to be convincing women. There were also generational hierarchies, as legends tended to be the founding housemothers, upcoming legends were the older children who had been active in the scene for years, and children were the newcomers/rookies. The scene acted as a springboard for the older queens who were interested in furthering their careers. Willi Ninja participated in the scene to perfect his dance form. Others used it to polish their modeling or singing or other performance art. Arguably, the children benefited the most from the ball scene as it provided a chance at fame in the subculture and legitimized their identity and experiences. Having a space to fulfill their fantasies, they could be the person they wanted to be through the performance of an identity otherwise unattainable to them. Queens won prizes for expressing the most realness, a transformative and convincing performance of a particular persona. Many of the youth could not obtain jobs or an education, but by dressing up as a certain professional or student, they felt like they were fulfilling their desires of being that person and proving they could be that person by dressing the part. The categories ranged from company executives, students, military men, runway models, and a heterosexual man, and then dancers would come to sweep the stage.

The drag ball scene in Harlem was not simply a product of the LGBTQ subculture of New York City. In its own right, the drag queens operated as a wide-ranging community of gay men, trans men and women, lesbian women, and queers. It was a reflection of many gender nonconforming people in society. Queens did not just imitate gender binaries; they pushed to break them down. Willi Ninja did not to “pass” as a woman. He did not live as a woman nor do full drag. He walked and danced down the stage sporting a mustache, long hair, large jewelry pieces, make-up, women’s clothes, all while performing a blend of masculinity and femininity. While a lot of the femme queens and transwomen found validation in winning categories for their realness of passing as biological women, Willi Ninja, an androgynous self-described butch queen, performed a fluid gender presentation in a world that celebrates white male heteronormativity and in a subculture that rewarded woman realness. He just wanted to be himself and showcase his talents and techniques.

Similar to hip-hop and break-dancing, voguing emerged from black, poor and working class communities as a form of expression with an emphasis on male bonding and street crews. Paris DuPree created the style at the dance club Footsteps in New York. She was trying to “out dance” another queen when she grabbed the Vogue Magazine that was in her purse and began to imitate the poses the models held in the photographs[9]. In an effort to insult the other queen in the form of shade, Paris DuPree had created a dance form that is still popular today. Voguing is a contorted, jerky, slicing style of dance, combining model like poses and pantomimic choreography. Willi redefined voguing and prided himself on being a clean, sharp dancer to “kill his competition.” He is credited with revolutionizing the dance form by adding swift angular movements and contortionist arm and leg positions.

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Five Elements Of Vogue With Leiomy Maldonado | E!

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 BV on Instagram: "Mood I’m just getting my creative juices flowing tonight #BveMix #PromoByPromoe #fqperformance #voguecompilation"

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144 likes, 1 comments - ballvoyeurs on December 30, 2023: "Mood I’m just getting my creative juices flowing tonight #BveMix #PromoByPromoe #fqperformance ..."

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Vogue Like Your Favorite Femme Queen at OTA LATEX BALL EDITION October 18

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Amazing LEIOMY - Vogue Femme solo STREETSTAR 2013

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BQ Vogue Fem @ DC Black Pride Unity Ball PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

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Bq Vogue Fem Part 6 Back View @ ALPHAOMEGA BrtbTv Inaugural Awards Ball 2020

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STARR REVLON WITH DRAMATIC FF PERFORMANCE AT RUMBLE BALL 54 LATEX BALL AFTERMATH

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STARR REVLON WITH DRAMATIC FF PERFORMANCE AT RUMBLE BALL 54 LATEX BALL AFTERMATH

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Honey Balenciaga vs Una ALPHAOMEGA BQ Vogue Fem Part 3 @ Latex Ball 2022

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Minstrelsy to Modern Day: How Black people are portrayed in media.

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Blackface Minstrel [Jim Crow] Show Sand Dance (1951) "Yes Sir, Mr. Bones"

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Essex Hemphill: From The Anacostia to the Potomac

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The late poet Essex Hemphill, right, pictured performing with his friend and collaborator Wayson Jones in 1986. (Daniel Cima)

When Essex Hemphill spoke, people listened.

Back in the 1980s, the poet and activist would fill the District's coffeehouses and artsy theaters for his readings. He was the unofficial voice of the city's black gay community - lyrical, charismatic and fiercely political.

"He had this intensity," his friend and performance partner Wayson Jones recalls. "And the audiences, he really had not just their attention but their whole energy."

From 1981 till his death from AIDS in 1995, Hemphill captivated the D.C. arts scene. He was a focal point for what people were calling a second Harlem Renaissance, and one of the sole writers to articulate what it meant to be both black and gay during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Today, Hemphill's impact is largely invisible, obscured by the passage of time and, his supporters say, the biases that have left black LGBT authors out of the literary canon.

But to Hemphill's proponents, he remains a giant - arguably America's most important black gay poet, and certainly D.C.'s. Among them are scholar and activist Martin Duberman, who met Hemphill only once but was drawn to write a book about him two decades later, published this May; New York literary agent Francis Goldin, who cared for Hemphill when he was weakened by AIDS and now wants to republish his collected works. And of course, Hemphill's friends in Washington, who can still recite whole stanzas of his poetry from memory and who speak of him with a mixture of affection and awe.

For this group, the "Speaking of Essex" tribute event at the D.C. Center for the LGBT Community this past Friday was something of a reunion. Duberman was there, discussing his book, as were several of Hemphill's friends and admirers from the renaissance period of the 1980s. Older and bespectacled now, they greeted one another with long hugs and lots of cheek kissing, then settled into folding chairs facing a podium at the front of the unadorned room.

Twenty years after Essex Hemphill was silenced by AIDS, they're hoping to once again get people listening to what he had to say.

'He left too soon'

Hemphill was born in Chicago and raised in Southeast Washington, "in poverty so deep I don't even want to remember it," he once told Jones. Poetry was his refuge - every night after dinner, Hemphill would hole up in his bedroom and work through his feelings about his race and sexuality by putting words on the page. By the time he started college at the University of Maryland in 1975, Hemphill readily identified as a writer, although he was not yet prepared to publicly call himself gay.

Hemphill left college after his freshman year and spent the following four years in Los Angeles. When he returned to the District in 1981, his poetry was stronger, sharper, simultaneously more elegant and more visceral.

He began staging rigorously rehearsed performances of his poetry with Jones, who had been Hemphill's roommate during his sole year at U-Md. Their readings soon graduated from cramped coffeehouses to small, alternative theaters, then to the Kennedy Center, then to New York and London.

By his early 30s, Hemphill was being heaped with accolades: a Lambda Literary Award in 1991 for editing the anthology " Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men," a National Library Association award in 1992 for his own collection, " Ceremonies."

"What he was doing was something people were hungry for," Jones says.

E. Ethelbert Miller, director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, said that Hemphill's words "put an end to silence" in the black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Miller became a mentor and patron to Hemphill - he organized readings, put him in touch with other artists. And, conscious that such things would be valuable one day, he saved Hemphill's letters, first drafts and newspaper clippings, which he wound up donating to George Washington University.

These are the memorabilia that fill the slim manila folder on Hemphill, maintained by the university's Gelman Library - D.C.'s sole public collection of the poet's unpublished writing. There are posters for poetry readings, letters that all conclude with Hemphill's signature sign off: "Take care of your blessings."

"He had a big heart," Miller says, warmly, as he scans the folder's contents during a recent visit to the library.

But his mouth tightens when he sees what's beneath them. It's Hemphill's obituary - the last item Miller put in this folder, nearly two decades ago.

Talking about it makes Miller wonder: What would Hemphill have become had he not died at 38, before the peak of his literary career?

"You know, maybe you would look up and he would be seen as a [James] Baldwin or someone like that, someone of that stature," he says.

Instead, interest in Hemphill's work faded. Even Duberman, who knew of Hemphill during his heyday, had largely forgotten about him.

But when he started work on his book " Hold Tight Gently" in 2009, Duberman came across Hemphill's name while searching for a second figure to profile alongside activist Michael Callen for a history on the early years of the AIDS epidemic.

He'd met Hemphill just once before: As director of the City University of New York's Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies, he had invited Hemphill to perform at an event in 1993.

"He was mesmerizing," Duberman recalls. "He had these wonderful sort of alive eyes, and a beautiful speaking voice. It was electric."

So Duberman began looking back at Hemphill's poetry. He was simultaneously struck by its power and by the fact that no one else seemed to have written about it. He scanned dozens of poetry anthologies, but Hemphill's name appeared in almost none of them. There were no biographies, no academic analyses of Hemphill's impact.

Though "egregious," Duberman says, the lack of scholarship on Hemphill isn't surprising. It's hard enough to find studies of LGBT writing in mainstream academia, let alone black LGBT writing. And research on Hemphill is made more difficult by the fact that with the exception of "Brother to Brother," all of Hemphill's works have gone out of print.

That's something Frances Goldin is trying to change. She had been Hemphill's agent during the early 1990s, and she is working on a book: a complete collection of Hemphill's poems, including a few that have never been printed.

Goldin was also Hemphill's close friend. He stayed at her house when he visited New York and later, when AIDS had ravaged Hemphill's body, Goldin would cook for him.

It's unclear when Hemphill got his diagnosis - he resisted speaking about it publicly, and in those days, AIDS was not something people told you about, his friends say.

Hemphill stayed in touch with Goldin throughout his illness, calling her occasionally and always sending her drafts of new poems. In a 1993 letter, he wrote to her: "I am not too frightened, but simply stated . . . all is a mess right now."

Hemphill died Nov. 4, 1995 - just a month before the approval of the very first protease inhibitors, a type of AIDS treatment that made a manageable disease out of what was once a death sentence.

The memory of it still stings: Goldin can barely describe the day she found out about Hemphill's death. Instead, her voice cracking, she says, "He left too soon. He left too soon."

That same sense of unjust loss makes events such as the one at the D.C. Center on Friday difficult for those who knew Hemphill.

"It brings back all kinds of memories and the years and where we were and how we were growing up together," says Michelle Parkerson, a friend and collaborator of Hemphill's. "There's an emotional level at which you prepare for tributes like these."

But she finds them heartening as well. Parkerson notes that there have been a number of Hemphill tributes in the past year - a sign, she speculates, that the readers are more interested now in the works of black LGBT writers.

For Jones, too, it was an emotional night. After reading "Balloons" - the first poem he had ever heard Hemphill perform - Jones had to ask the audience for a tissue.

Having wiped his eyes, he closed out the program by reading aloud a letter Hemphill had written to him in the year before his death, as AIDS was beginning to take its toll. It ends, as they all do, with Hemphill's trademark:

"Take care of your blessings."

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A poet who spoke to the black gay experience, and a quest to make him heard

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D.C.'s Essex Hemphill was a pioneering literary voice - and

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Stephen Foster | Article
How did blackface minstrelsy begin?

Center for American Music, U. of Pittsburgh

Fath Ruffins:
Before the 1830s, when blackface minstrelsy begins formally, African Americans, people whom we today would call African Americans, have been involved in local entertainment. They are the fiddlers at the Virginia reels there, the entertainers in local restaurants and saloons and that kind of thing. But what happens with blackface minstrelsy is that it begins the formal or well-organized entertainment industry in the United States because blackface minstrelsy is created by a small number of people who then begin touring all over the country and indeed to western Europe and to other parts of the world. It becomes the first kind of a national theater or national entertainment that people began to see outside of their local setting. It starts out as a humorous and dance-oriented, music-oriented, joke-oriented variety show, in between other kinds of more formal theatrical acts, but over time minstrelsy becomes itself the entertainment.

Dale Cockrell:
In probably the summer of 1830, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who was called "Daddy" Rice, a sort of minor character actor out of New York City, was in Louisville, Kentucky. And he had the idea of dressing in shabby attire, which he may or may not have borrowed from an African American that he met in the streets of Louisville, and going on stage, and it was the kind of entr'acte between parts of a play, he got on stage and did this extraordinary and extravagant dance to this tune called "Jim Crow." And the tune featured not only an extraordinary dance but an extraordinary moment of elevation in which his body kind of exploded off the stage, turned around, wheeled around and jumped Jim Crow, with the exclamation on the "jump." And T. D. Rice, in that moment of exploding off the stage, took us into a completely new realm of popular culture where white audiences (and Thomas Dartmouth Rice is himself a white actor who put on blackface to pretend to be that African-American on the street of Louisville), and in that moment, whites in the audience as well as white actors appropriated an aspect of African-American culture and changed the face of popular culture.

Ken Emerson:
Minstrelsy swept the world in the 1830s and 1840s much the same way that rock and roll did more than a hundred years later. In the same way that Elvis Presley electrified the world, so did Daddy Rice when he did "Jump Jim Crow" on the London stage.
Why did it spread in the 1830s?
Sean Wilentz:
It's not really a coincidence that T. D. Rice and the so-called Ethiopian delineators got going in the early 1830s. That's precisely when issues around slavery and abolition begin to heat up -- not at the center of American politics but certainly as its margins and increasingly moving towards the center. In 1831 there's the Nat Turner rebellion. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison begins his newspaper, The Liberator, in Boston, proclaiming the cause of immediate abolition. By the middle of the 1830s there are tense riots directed against abolitionists in the North and in the South.

Fath Ruffins:
These elements of culture, songs, stories, jokes, toasts, all of these kind of things which once before had only really been very localized, through transportation and through new kinds of printing technologies and new methods of diffusing all kinds of cultural products, come to be portable. So this industry grows during the nineteenth century and eventually becomes the entertainment industry that we know today, which is very complex. It's at the very earliest moments where Americans are beginning to define who they are distinctively apart from the rest of the world, particularly apart from western Europe, where many American ancestors had come from.

Eric Lott:
I think that as an industrial order arises and then clamps down in the 1830s and 1840s in America, it is not countenanced anymore that when you're in the shop, one person reads to the other workers from the newspaper while they work. Rather, it's more and more standardized, it's more and more routinized. You can't drink at work anymore. There's a general, sort of clamped-down cleanup going on. [The blackface minstrel show] was a place of incredible release from all that.
What was a blackface minstrel show?
Deane Root:
Stephen Foster, when he heard a minstrel show, would have heard something that sounded altogether different from what his sisters or other polite society were playing at home. The difference was not so much a structural one because the musical style, the musical structure, the form of the melody and so forth, followed certain European patterns that were derived from the same kinds of music that genteel society were playing and singing. The differences were much more in the style of the performance itself and in the kinds of words that were being put to it. And to some extent rhythm, but we tend to overemphasize those differences, I think, in retrospect, because many of the songs that we see that were published by the minstrel troupes, performed by the minstrel troupes, were essentially the same, out of the same stock as what was being performed in the home. So what was the difference? Style, manner. It was much cruder. It was exaggerated. It was even -- foreign. Out of the culture, in a sense. They were trying to exaggerate and make [something] exotic.

Mel Watkins:
It presented the black character as being stupid, as being comical, as being basically a frivolous character. Now, how that impacted upon society itself was that they embraced it. They loved it. This was what people had thought about blacks all along. So Rice's characterization of blacks then reaffirmed what mainstream America had been thinking all along.

When the Virginia Minstrels came along what they did was to develop other characters, and the characters they developed were much more over the edge than the character Rice had portrayed. That's when you get Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. That's when you get the semi-circle with the traditional minstrel set-up, with these two characters being outrageous, who fidgeted all the time, who were saying the most inane things that could possibly be said. The masks had become much more grotesque. That's when you really get the negative characterization of blacks as the total comic fool, and that is what minstrelsy was about, to a certain extent.
Who went to the shows?
Eric Lott:
The audience for minstrelsy, especially after the 1830s and into the 1840s was a quite localized and specific working class, lower middle-class, mostly male audience that responded very vocally to the kinds of syncopated, pre-rock-and-roll sounds that were put forward on the minstrel stage. There were aesthetic components of this response as well as racial components, as well as class components of this response. But I think that the rousing nature of the event -- I mean, this is a moment in theater history when it was typical and more or less sanctioned for men to rush the stage. For everyone to kind of be collecting in a rowdy way, right in front of the footlights, be spitting tobacco on the floor in the theater. It was a kind of madhouse. People congregated around the footlights. Dancing was done in the theater, people called for their favorites and booed things they didn't want to hear. They spit upon the stage, they threw peanut shells on the stage, and the kind of jumpy quality that the music exemplified was right up their alley.

Dale Cockrell:
Much more so than today, audiences controlled what went on the stage. And they felt that they had a right to have someone do the dance again if they particularly liked it or the song. If they didn't like the song, they would cut it off. And so an audience, a common-class audience in New York City felt a direct alliance with what was going on in that stage, much more so than we can even begin to imagine today in a real way.
How were the minstrel shows racist?
Mel Watkins:
Minstrelsy is much under-rated historically in terms of its influence on American society. [Consider] the stereotype of Uncle Tom, for instance, the black man who is without backbone and who is really the white man's black man. That characterization of Uncle Tom did not come from the book by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin. It came from the images portrayed in minstrelsy. In the book Uncle Tom was relatively intelligent, although not educated, and an example of Christian morality, in one sense. On stage in the minstrel show he became the shuffling toady. He became the sniveling black man who was really a coward and was ignorant and somewhat comical in his connection to the slave masters. So that image came totally from minstrelsy, and if we could go down the line and point out other ways in which those images pervaded the society at that time, those were the images, that was the sense of what black people were like. I think it becomes much clearer when one looks at black minstrelsy again because when black minstrels started to take to the stage, they were advertised as the real thing. In fact, one group was called "The Real Nigs." And this was -- they were advertised as "Come to the theatre and get a real look into what plantation life was like." So this was not advertised as a stage show. It was advertised as a peephole view of what black people were really like. To that extent, it affected all of society because those people who didn't know blacks, and there were many places where there were very few blacks, assumed that those characterizations, those depictions, those foolish characters on stage, were real black people. And so it had an immense effect on the way mainstream society thought about blacks.

Certainly it had a [lasting] effect on the entertainment industry in the sense that most producers in Hollywood, most producers on the radio demanded that black people speak the same way they spoke during the 1800s, even when we get to the 20th century and we get to film, we get to radio. In fact, many actors and actresses were taught by whites to speak as if they were black because that was demanded. It was the way the world was. Blacks were presumed to be this way, the stereotype was this and therefore the media had to reflect it in that way. And most of that came from minstrelsy. You can trace it all the way up to the "Amos 'n Andy" show in the 1950s, to the maids that appeared in "Beulah" and other shows on radio and on television in the 1950s.
Was blackface minstrelsy only about caricaturing blacks?
Dale Cockrell:
Minstrelsy is one of the hardest things to talk about because minstrelsy is all things to all people, and it's intentionally so. And it's one of the reasons that it's such a popular phenomenon. It need hardly be said that minstrelsy is about racial derision. You can hardly look at the mimicking of African-American manners, mores, maybe music, maybe dance, and see that these people are being cast as somehow less than the people who are portraying them. And that needs always to be forefront in any consideration of this. But at the same time, there's an embrace of that culture that's happening on the stage at the same time. People are having great fun, entertainment. They're embracing a culture that they're seeming to deride at precisely the same time. It's a kind of love and loathing that's happening simultaneously.

Eric Lott:
What's fascinating about minstrelsy is really just how strange it is, how weird it is at bottom. Here you have a stage form that depends on caricature, yes, but a real desire on the part of white actors and performers to act like, to inhabit the bodies of black people, to act like them, to be like them, to impersonate them. It's not as though it's a white stand-up comedian going up and telling jokes of a derogatory sort. It's actually getting inside the persons of slaves and free blacks in the North, and there are whole sets of complications and contradictions that arise from that simple fact. On the one hand, [there's] the desire to take a kind of racial ridicule to the stage and to make fun, indulge in sport at the expense of black people and made a lot of money at the same time. At one and the same moment, though, you have a real interest, cross-racial interest in what it feels like to be a black person.

Mel Watkins:
In blackface, in portraying a black person, you had even more freedom because blacks were assumed to be even more naive and more foolish than the frontiersman. So that you had these two different things going on. There was a release. It was a sense of attraction to this uninhibited state of being that these characters were depicting. And it was also the ability to laugh at them and feel superior to them because that was considered negative. That was considered -- too wild, too uninhibited basically for what America thought of itself as at that time.

Fath Ruffins:
It spoke to the problems of living in a multi-ethnic society, of living in the society that was a slave society at that time. African Americans live both enslaved and free within that society, but everybody else is living in the society, too. It doesn't just affect them. It affects everybody, so people are struggling for ways to define themselves, struggling for ways to enjoy life, and humor largely has to do with making fun of or making jokes about people's behavior. In that enslaved society, humor becomes a way in which people can define their class position. There's a way in which they can mark who is included and who is not. African Americans come to be excluded from certain aspects of American society. And blackface minstrelsy, in a very interesting way, moves back and forth over these lines. It's not just on one side or the other. It's not just done by whites to parody blacks. That is part of it, but it's also done by people of African descent. It's done in ways in which people say, "This is authentic. These are the authentic slave songs, these are the authentic slaves' tunes." It's a way for people to negotiate or to think about or to find humor in an extremely problematic aspect of American society, which they are arguing about in their politics and in government and in other ways. The issue of what to do about having slavery in the society is a key issue in the years in which blackface minstrelsy comes to be important.

Ken Emerson:
In some ways, African-American life and the Southern life has always functioned as a fantasy for Americans in popular culture. Think of Creedence Clearwater Revival, four white boys from El Cerrito, California. They never went "rolling down the river on Proud Mary," and yet that's what they sang about. The South and black life in particular has an appeal to Americans of all races that is fantastical, that is unquestionably on some levels deeply racist, but it also speaks to a longing that we all feel, I believe, for a pre-technological, pre-urban, primal, more essential life, as it were.
How did class frictions relate to blackface minstrelsy?
Dale Cockrell:
The question of the moment was, what was America going to be? And Jacksonian Democrats, common people, wanted to cast it in their own image. Minstrelsy continues that development. The large opposition is a rising American middle-class that wants to cast what it is to be American in a middle-class image. And so the conflict that minstrelsy is playing out is between America as a common-class culture or America as a middle-class culture. Music is socially defined. People who control the dictionaries say, "This is music," and "That isn't music," that that is noise out there. By 1840, 1842 or so, there is a contest going on between minstrelsy as noise and the music of the parlor tradition, representative of a middle-class tradition. Minstrelsy had clanging banjoes, it had clanking bones. It was filled with things that a middle-class culture considered beneath it and amusical. Whereas the parlor classes had pianos. They had proper instruments playing proper music. This aural environment, very much in the minds of Jacksonian Americans, was very much central to the way that they heard the world.

Middle-class culture is one that has worshipped the mind and has largely tried to divorce the body from the expression of what they are. To give expression to life energy through the body is a disruption of that middle-class value system. Minstrelsy, through the body, expressed wildness, expressed abandon, it expressed joy, it expressed sex, it expressed all of these things that the middle-class was trying to repress through a worship of the mind.
How did class issues relate to the race issues?
Dale Cockrell:
If you are a working-class American in New York City at the time, you're feeling yourself squeezed politically, economically and socially from the top, but also to some extent from the bottom. And minstrelsy was one of those special kind of inventions that enable you to speak to the oppression that you are feeling from the top and to give yourself a niche in society that was different from those that you hoped to be below you, African-Americans. So simultaneously you can give expression to your identity, and you can also criticize the policies of those that you feel are oppressing you.

The mask of blackface enabled you to have voice and to speak without fear of repression. I mean, masks do that. We put on masks at Halloween, and it gives us a kind of anonymity to go and to do things and to say things that we normally wouldn't. The same thing happens at Mardi Gras. Minstrelsy effectively did that.

Eric Lott:
I think there is a kind of subterranean identification with the desire for indolence at work. There's a real identification with the plantation style of labor which white Northern working men actually come to transform into protest rhetoric of their own. They say, "We're wage slaves. We don't want to be wage slaves." A rhetoric that itself is double in the sense that they'll do anything not to be considered slaves. There is a kind of admonitory kick to the word slavery. On the other hand, they feel like they've been reduced to slavery and so that they are not all that different from slaves on the plantation and there is a kind of, I think, a kind of felt identification of, based on oppression, given these two labor systems: a really kind of booming capitalist industrialism in the North and a slave economy, plantation economy in the South.
Although blackface minstrelsy was racist, did it have any benefit for African Americans?
Mel Watkins:
On stage you had white performers saying, "Okay, we accept this type of music, we accept the antic performers," and even though it was done in a ridiculing manner, there was some acceptance -- at least on stage. And by the 1860s black performers [were] going on the stage themselves and performing in a similar manner. Because basically when the black performers did minstrel shows, they were doing the same acts that whites had done before. It was necessary for them -- it was necessary for them to do that to be on stage. Otherwise, they would not have been allowed there. Gradually, they would change it, they would make modifications.
What's the connection between blackface minstrelsy and rock and roll?
Ken Emerson:
I began my career as a rock journalist and critic. And from the beginning of my interest in rock and roll, I was fascinated by the question of, "When did it first become cool for white teenagers to pretend they were black?" Obviously, from Elvis Presley to Beck that has been one of the primary impulses behind rock and roll. But it goes back a lot further than Beck's imitating a rap star, saying, "I got two turntables and a microphone," or Elvis Presley singing, "That's All Right, Mama" in emulation of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. It goes back beyond the jazz performers, musicians such as Benny Goodman and the nice Jewish boys from the housing projects of Austin Hill in Chicago. It goes back before the turn of the century when immigrant songwriters such as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin fell in love with black culture. And it goes all the way back to blackface and minstrelsy before the Civil War. And so in a way rock and roll led me to a long, tortuous path to Stephen Foster because that's where really this interplay and intermix of black and white culture that so defines American music to this day really began.

Think of, for instance, and this is not restricted to America any more since rock and roll is an international language, but think of Mick Jagger performing almost as if he were a minstrel performer, the sort of extravagant mimicking and caricaturing of black mannerisms that many people do in rock and roll. Think for instance of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," when Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight and the Pips sang the original versions of the song. They sang "I heard it through the grapevine." Then when a white boy did it, John Fogerty in Creedence Clearwater, he sang, "I hoid it through the grapevine," almost as if he was going to exaggerate the black characteristics. That's pure minstrelsy right there. And of course that was the minstrelsy, that's what was happening and the sort of the exaggerated caricatured stereotypical black dialect of minstrel songs in the 1830s and 1840s.

Eric Lott:
It's kind of like in the 1950s if you were a middle class guy and you saw Elvis, you knew that Elvis was shaking his hips in ways that weren't typically countenanced for white middle class boys, and that's why all the citizens' councils in the South called Elvis "nigger music" and were terribly afraid that Elvis, white as he was, being ambiguously raced just by being working-class, was going to corrupt the youth of America. Stephen Foster was deeply attracted to this kind of ambience of the minstrel show.
What legacy did blackface minstrelsy create for American culture today?
Eric Lott:
Minstrelsy is the first public commercial venue in which blacks, though of course, they're not blacks, are represented on the theatrical or musical stage. It's the arena, for better or worse, in which black people come to be displayed and black issues come to the floor, in the American culture industry, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s and extending all the way to our own day. Not only does minstrelsy mirror in many ways the cultural and social predicaments of the country in the 19th century, it itself changes form and gets new life every 20 years or so until, as a stage form, it basically dies out in the 1920s and migrates to film, where it has a very long afterlife all the way to the present day in a film like Warren Beatty's Bullworth. Now its political charge varies enormously through the decades, but there are exemplars of the minstrel tradition all around us, both white, as well as black. The centrality of it as a cultural institution makes it an inescapable cultural condition for black performers moving into public. It's one of the things that defines your stance as a black public performer; there's no easy way around it.

I think the stereotypes that emerge from the 19th century minstrel show circulate to the present day and are crucial in defining white people's sense of who black people are, I'm sad to say. Whether it's in the perceptions of black people who drive fancy cars -- Miles Davis complained about being pulled over every five minutes for driving a Maserati -- or whether it's in the hardly updated version of Jim Crow and something like the welfare mother. I think there are still the lenses white people put on when they look at black Americans, and it's sad but it's kind of desperately indicative of the way in which this country still hasn't surmounted the kinds of feelings that gave rise to minstrelsy in the first place.
Should we change Foster's songs to remove their racist aspects, or not perform them?
Dale Cockrell:
The songs of Stephen Foster are, especially the minstrel songs, are problematic today. And perhaps quite rightly they are. In 1996 I know members of the Yale Glee Club decided not to sing "My Old Kentucky Home" because they considered it to be racially derisive. I think that that's somewhat unfortunate because it's a song that grew out of a minstrel tradition but was critical of the minstrel tradition. And in many ways it's a song that enabled us to begin to undo racial bigotry and prejudices that exist in this country. But I also understand at the same time -- it's the old thing, minstrelsy is many things to many people. But I understand, too, that it's so embedded in the tradition of derision that people want nothing to do with even the association of it. Minstrelsy is certainly something that should not enjoy any kind of resurrection at all today. The associations are certainly too strong there.

Nanci Griffith:
I think we're losing something in not repeating his lyrics or in adapting them, changing them to make them more politically correct, because he was trying to blend some things and create an awareness that we need to remember. It's part of black history and it's part of American history and you can't change history. It's good to reflect on it. I think it's more important to study history as it is, lest we ever repeat ourselves.

Ken Emerson:
Stephen Foster's music today is deeply embarrassing for two reasons. First of all, because of the obvious racial epithets and caricatures and stereotypes that he uses, which were typical of the time and unfortunately are still typical of our time today. Secondly, and perhaps even more embarrassing, is his extreme sentimentality in an age that prides itself on being ironic and cool.

It's important to come to terms with Stephen Foster because we have to understand the racial complexity of American culture. It won't do any good, I believe, simply to sweep Stephen Foster under the rug of political correctness and ignore both the racism that is endemic in his music and the many instances in which his music transcends that racism. How can we understand our past, which created what we are today, without looking this in the eye -- and hearing it in the ear? To this day Stephen Foster's music touches on what unites us as Americans and also on what divides us.

Thomas Hampson:
I think we must find a way to learn and grow from people and respect their context. It's too easy and too unfair to just simply write someone off until we've actually looked through their eyes at their world. That Stephen Foster wrote songs in an idiom that is just simply an anathema to me as an American, to me as a human being in the 1990s, and that I would never possibly think in any form of either wanting to hear or sing -- that's true. The fact that we can see it from both sides and have to see it from both sides is infinitely more important in a questioning process than the right answer.

Josephine Wright:
It would be historically inaccurate for me, as a musicologist, to suggest that we abandon a repertory of music which is so historical because of the racial insensitivity of some of the text. I believe as a teacher, and as a historian, that they should be placed in the historical context and people should understand where these songs fit and why. Personally I would not be singing them as a part of my musical entertainment today, but I have great respect for them and I would introduce them to my students because it's a part of the American culture and American heritage.

Eric Lott:
The relevance of studying Foster is not unlike the relevance of studying Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. What you have, in both cases, are works that reach very deeply into major American paradoxes, historical contradictions around race, racism and slavery, and the nature of artistic production. Huckleberry Finn is, I think -- this is hotly debated now -- but it's ambiguous to this day in ways that I think still one could make a fairly defensible argument for withholding [it] from school students until a certain age, 13 and 14, when they're able to deal with certain of the racial implications. Foster is no less ambiguous. When I got Foster's songs in grade school, they're such terrific melodies that it's almost a crime not to parlay the melodies into the classroom setting but if I got the racist lyrics, I don't remember it. And that may just be the condition of being white in America, but I think that there's a kind of evasion of the full implications of Foster.

Fath Ruffins:
There are many instances in my childhood in which people sang Stephen Foster music. At summer camps, there was lots of singing around the campfire. And what do you sing around the campfire? Well, religious songs drop out because everybody at the camp isn't necessarily of one religion. So these classic American songs came to be the music that you would learn at camp or at school or someplace like that. So I learned many of these songs, usually with changed lyrics. That's one of the reasons why I emphasize that the lyrics have changed over the years. The most offensive of the lyrics used words like "nigger" which would have been common in the 1840s or 1850s [but] the lyrics that I was taught didn't have that in them. So actually I loved Stephen Foster songs as a child and basically in a sense, still do. I think that they are catchy, wonderful, popular tunes that really reflect something interesting about the United States. But I think it is necessary to adapt them, maybe by just learning the instrumental, just learning the melody or by changing the lyrics, learning the changed lyrics because to sing them in their original form would be, I think, just perpetuating a stereotype that is no longer useful or no longer helpful or no longer functions in the same way in American society as it did in the 1840s and 1850s.

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Blackface Minstrelsy | American Experience | PBS

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Learn more about the history and legacy of the blackface minstrel show in these excerpts of interviews with historians Dale Cockrell, Eric Lott, Deane Root, Fath Ruffins, and Josephine Wright, writers Ken Emerson and Mel Watkins, and performers Nanci Griffith and Thomas Hampson.

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Christopher Street Pier (Pier 45) taken from the Hudson River.
Photo by Joe Mabel (CC BY SA 2.0; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christopher_Street_Pier_from_Hudson_02_(9443744624).jpg)

Since the 1970s, the Christopher Street Pier (Pier 45) has been a popular meeting place for drag queens, as well as gay and transgender people. The pier has been a popular social spot for decades, particularly for communities of color, despite pressure from residents and local authorities. With a deep history of oppression and abuse, queer people of color have found space to call their own on the margins of less desirable neighborhoods across the country. In the case of Pier 45, an area that was once ignored and left to the enjoyment of queer social outcasts came to be identified as edgy, trendy, and queer friendly, bringing in wealthier residents and putting pressure on local authorities to remove the "rowdy youths" disrupting the neighborhood.

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Collectives, Enclaves, and Gayborhoods: Pier 45, NY (U.S. National Park Service)

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Since the 1970s, the Christopher Street Pier (Pier 45) has been a popular meeting place for drag queens, as well as gay and transgender people. The pier has been a popular social spot for decades, particularly for communities of color, despite pressure from residents and local authorities.

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Hart Island is a graveyard of last resort. Since 1869, New York City has owned and operated this potter’s field—the largest in the country. City workers put unidentified or unclaimed corpses in simple wooden coffins, load them onto a ferry and entomb them in trenches across the island. The homeless, indigent and stillborn all lie within eyesight of the hyper-kinetic, high-rolling inhabitants of the Manhattan skyscrapers across the water. “Hart Island is like a shadow of New York City,” says Justin von Bujdoss, 45, the cemetery’s chaplain. “It reflects the lives of people who live on the margins—the homeless, the sickly, the neglected, the forgotten and overworked.” Over a century and a half, more than a million people have been buried in unmarked graves on the island, including from past epidemics like tuberculosis, the 1918 flu and AIDS. Hart Island is once again reflecting this latest dark truth: many who thought they were immune to America’s inequalities are vulnerable in this pandemic.

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A cemetery, especially one with more than 1 million bodies, is a place where you would expect people to gather to celebrate many lives lived. Not here. Hart Island may be a rather easy place to reach if you’re deceased but not if you’re among the living. Family-member graveside visits are allowed only twice a month, require weeks of careful planning and must be authorized by the DOC, which for much of the past 151 years has been responsible for providing the labor and oversight for the burials at Hart Island. The bodies are buried over 131 acres of rolling meadows. The only signs of the dead are 3-ft. white posts stuck in the ground every 25 yd. or so. Each marker signifies 150 bodies below, and they are every-where on the island. Quiet reigns on Hart Island, except for the occasional jangle of a nearby bell buoy afloat in the water. Sailboats glide along in the distance. Seagulls wheel overhead and nibble atop rocks half submerged in the receding tide. Bones are sometimes found jutting from the coastline where erosion has washed away the soil.

Hart Island is a uniquely New York phenomenon. In other cities, the indigent are cremated or buried at a traditional cemetery. Here, they’re buried together on an island inaccessible to most city residents. Although most New Yorkers are oblivious to its existence, Hart Island is a necessary by-product of a sprawling metropolis—not everyone can afford a formal funeral. And to people who oversee the graveyard, burial is a more sensible option than cremation.

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Kimyah Ebony & Chloe Milan deadly battle.

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HAND PERFORMANCE BY THEE LEGENDARY KEVIN JZ PRODIGY 

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HAND PERFORMANCE BY THEE LEGENDARY KEVIN JZ PRODIGY 

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STARR REVLON AT CRYSTAL BALL 2013 FEMALE FIGURE

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STARR REVLON AT CRYSTAL BALL 2013 FEMALE FIGURE

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choices of songs I’ve been thinking of:

Vogue by Madonna

U Say by Goldlink, Tyler the Creator

Losing You by Solange

Gits Weary by keiyaA

Deep In Vogue by Malcolm McLaren, The Bootszilla Orchestra, Willi Ninja

Elements of Vogue by David Ian Xtravagnza ( Beat Only)

The Slang Word Pussy Tolls of The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Words with proper word vagina. Do You Agree by André 3000

R&R by berlioz

La Femme Fantastique by Honey Dijon, Josh Caffe!

Let it Flow ( Kususa Sophomore Dub ) by RudeBoyz, Zameka, Kususa

TRACK UNO by Kaytranda

Back on 74 by Jungle

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Surviving Voices 2022 - The Black Community & AIDS

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AIDS & the Black Community | Folks (1987)

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Documentary HIV/AIDS Channel - 1982 1992 News Clips On HIV AIDS The First Ten Years

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Looking Back On 40 Years Of The AIDS Epidemic

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Facing the innumerable deaths of friends and loved ones, as well as the likelihood of his own untimely passing, Washington, DC poet Essex Hemphill composed " The Tomb of Sorrow" in 1989. Hemphill was characteristically irreverent in relation to social conventions when he wrote in the second section of the poem, "My witnesses / will have to answer / to go-go music. / Dancing and sweat / will be required / at my funeral." Hemphill replaces the somber rituals of funerals with the sweaty vitality and motion of a party. He reimagines his funeral as a GoGo-a dance party themed by the sound and choreography of the percussive music that provided much of the soundtrack for Black working-class culture in the region around Washington, DC, especially between the 1970s and 2000s.

Given the centrality of funerals in Black culture, Hemphill's embrace of the sound and motion of GoGo for his own foreshadowed funeral is significant. While funerals are unwelcome in all their regularity and seriality, they have also marked one of the primary sites of Black cultural reproduction for Black communities in Washington and beyond. They compose a principal site in which Black communities share, edit, and reproduce cosmological and social relations and elaborate the grammars of Black insurgent social life. Conscious, as an artist, of the role of funerals as a dense site in which Black communities create and reimagine matters of culture and social life, Hemphill queers the final rites by bringing elements of what was viewed as the disreputable culture of the GoGo into a sanctified space. Police and politicians in Washington characterized GoGo as the disreputable sound of the city's poor in the 1980s and 1990s, yet Hemphill infuses "the end" with a frenetic social life felt, heard, touched, and entered through the energy of GoGo's percussion.

Critically, Hemphill's poetic transgression of the boundary between the disreputable and the holy provides an entrée into the contours of a wider Black queer theology. In the same section of "The Tomb of Sorrow," Hemphill refits heaven with tall stunning "Black Drag Queens." According to Hemphill, these stunning figures shimmer because of the sequins they wear as he greets them with a deep kiss upon his entry through the pearly gates. In this symbolic reconfiguration of the heavenly realm, Hemphill dethrones the normative white god the father and replaces the dominant symbol of Western theology with the despised figure of a Black faggot.

Here Hemphill brings to the fore the stakes of Black peoples' alternative figurations of the cosmos through poetry and other retainers of heterodox epistemologies. While queer does name explicit connections to non-normative sexuality in Hemphill's case, it also signifies more broadly a tense social relation counter to processes of normalization. Black queer theology is a critical engagement with matters of the relations between people and divinity on the part of those relegated to the margins of societal hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality. It is a form of insurgent theology whose practitioners, including Hemphill, have sought to reimagine the very basis of social-cosmological order from within the shadow cast by white civil society.

While it is common in Black and other insurgent theologies to displace the Western white god the father with socially despised figures, Hemphill's queering of god and the heavenly coterie of angels is particularly pointed. It raises fundamental challenges to the theology used to justify and make compulsory social and biological reproduction along the lines of dominion and heteropatriarchy. As Wende Marshall and Delores Williams demonstrate, dominion is an ideology of domination based on an exegesis of the bible that suggests the predominance of (white) man over all the resources of the planet. Western Europeans and settlers have mobilized variations of this vision of stewardship through control and domination since at least the colonization of the Americas to justify the commodification and destruction of the biosphere as well as the domination of Black and indigenous people (as well as other beings considered of a lower order). Dominion is indictable for its denaturing effects and sustained threat to the planet's life.

A central tenet of the divinely ordained mandate of total control and exploitation that justifies the US settler state is compulsory patriarchal-biological reproduction-the imperative found in the same passages of Genesis to " be fruitful and multiply." This clause of the theology of dominion has resurged in larger measure due to the mainstreaming of evangelical theology, especially in the wake of HIV-AIDS. This has had particularly damning effects on Black queer people living as outsiders marginalized for not leading lives deemed worthy and acceptable by what Black gay Philadelphia writer and anthologist Joseph Beam in 1985 called "the purveyors of decency"-the state and other agencies seeking to neutralize and excise subversives and insurgents from the social fabric. As certain forms of white gay and trans life have become mainstream and tacitly tolerated, Black trans and other Black queer people have experienced a spiral of violence in the hands of the state and vigilantes. The "agents of decency" have remained steadfast in their reinforcement of white supremacy, compulsory gender, and forced heteronormative reproduction.

Hemphill's poetry cleverly draws on the much longer history of Black communities politicizing funerary rites and the afterlife to critique that governing order and to provide insight into a different kind of future up and out from the site of the body's interment to the wider cosmos. If, from the vantage of dominant Western theology, especially as interpreted within the evangelical tradition, god continues to ordain a social order grounded in marriage and compulsory biological reproduction and predicated on expansion and dominion, then the indications of Hemphill's reformulation of god as a Black queer (or at the very least as someone willing to be in the company of Black drag queens) is a poetic and prophetic reordering of the entire basis of social-biological connection. Hemphill creates the opening for a theology beyond dominion and the imperative of human proliferation.

For me, Hemphill's poetry also begs another important theological query: if god created the world in their image, and god is a Black queer (or a similarly positioned outsider) and therefore part of a group against whom normative reproduction is historically defined, then what is the new basis for the social-cosmological order and integrity? Although "The Tomb of Sorrow" does not explicitly answer this query, the loving letters and notes Hemphill exchanged with Joseph Beam before Beam's death in 1988 reveal glimpses of Hemphill's vision for a different basis for social and cosmological wholeness. Hemphill did not entirely explode the features of monogamous union; however, his riffing on these normative forms makes his poetry that much more powerful in its renegotiations of social relations. Hemphill and other members of his generation of Black queer thinkers and writers were in the heart of the process of figuring out alternative bases of social order even as many of them confronted their own untimely passing.

In a letter dated December 5, 1985 Hemphill wrote about his longing and desire for some of the aspects of monogamous romantic partnership: "I too sleep nights and all I dream are tall blue trees with strong torsos and muscular thighs. And I too, miss the domestic repetition of beauty that is found in caring for and being cared for by a lover." In the same letter, Hemphill also reworked the bonds of intimacy and love in ways that reflect his poetic displacement of the white hetero god the father and patriarch by a Black queer. As Hemphill stated, this "is a letter actually to wish you well and to tell you, quite frankly, I love you, for the man you are, which is why I believe our friendship will be forever, a friendship tied to waffles in a diner. A friendship tied to concerns that when galvanized will save us all." Here Hemphill outlines a prospective for the future in which everyone might survive or "be saved," not through the imperatives of dominion or biological reproduction as in the dominant Western tradition, but rather through the bonds of Black queer friendship. Hemphill stages this loving Black queer communion not in the normative home, but of all places in a diner over waffles.

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Facing the innumerable deaths of friends and loved ones, as well as the likelihood of his own untimely passing, Washington, DC poet Essex Hemphill composed "The Tomb of Sorrow" in 1989. Hemphill was characteristically irreverent in relation to social conventions when he wrote in the second section o

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Social demonstrations of blackface appear to coincide with periods of increased racial ambiguity.  Since the call in the mid-1980s from leading African American theorists to deconstruct race and move beyond essentialized notions of identity, much has changed in the larger cultural understanding of racial identity.  The United States Census Bureau included the category “multiracial” for the first time on its 2000 census.  Encouraged by Toni Morrison’s 1992 Playing in the Dark, whiteness theory swept academic circles through courses, conferences, and several readers concerning critical white studies. Time magazine dedicated a special issue in 1993 to the spreading American multiculturalism, using computer-generated images to blend the facial characteristics of individuals of various ethnicities into “the new face of America.”  PGA champion Tiger Woods publicly embraced his African and Thai heritages, refusing to label himself as black (Norment 112).  Moreover, countercultural publications like Noel Ignatiev’s Race Traitor journal and website, which proclaims, “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” found voices in American and international venues.   By the turn of the millennium, “race” was a term in flux, but the fluidity of the term did little to take away its power.  In fact, the persistence of and renewed interest in (both now and more than a century ago) parodic images of blackness demonstrate a social backlash against the instability of racial categories.  Minstrelsy climbed to its highest popularity during the 1830s and 40s when racial lines between blacks and Irish were most blurred (Lott 64-70). To a new millennium American society increasingly ambivalent about the existence of racial categories, the theatricality of minstrelsy and other metaphorical blackface performances serves dual purposes—dismantling stereotypical notions of racial identity while recreating and reaffirming them in the process.

[3] The move to deconstruct race parallels work in gender theory seeking to subvert traditional male-female binaries.  Responding in part to Lacanian assertions in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” that the phallus or lack thereof was the primary mark of identification (Lacan’s bathroom door example), Butler redirects critical focus to question the polemics of Lacan’s initial division:  “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Gender Trouble 33).   For Butler, the theatricality of drag (both male-to-female and female-to-male) works to dislodge essentialized notions of gender identity and sexual difference.  Thus, her example of a drag queen singing Aretha Franklin’s “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman” highlights the instability of gender identification on multiple levels; not only is the irony of Aretha’s (a “natural” woman) self-reflexive subversion of gender identity noteworthy, but so are the implications of mimetic appropriation of femininity.  Working specifically through excess and repetition, drag deconstructs and reconstructs gender identities, challenging and reifying the materiality of the phallus as a distinguishing marker just as minstrelsy subverts and affirms the logic of essential race differences and other attempts to link physicality to identity.   If “gender trouble” can go from parody to politics, as Butler suggests in her conclusion, can “race trouble” do the same?