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Transcription: [00:24:28]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
You know where Flipper actually goes back, goes to Brooklyn searching [[?]] all that's been changed, you know.
[00:24:28]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And so it's very interesting to look at the text, and then look at the, look at the film.
[00:24:39]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
But I think Spike Lee, as a writer, has to be looked at in terms of his impact on a generation.
[00:24:46]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And then, finally, we know we have to look at the influences and significance of rap music as, not only music, but also oral literature.
[00:24:55]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
These are things that one could do their thesis on.
[[audience laughter]]
[00:25:00]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
This is the-- this is what I do. I just sit down, tell people, "Well go study this." [[audience laughter]] You know, I mean, they got the PhDs and stuff. I just say, I just make them probe, like, this is what we need to look at.
[00:25:10]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Let me show you how this all works. Let's look at the, what I call the arrival of the African American male homosexual writer.
[00:25:22]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
I tell people that this is almost predictable. People usually ask me, "Well, how can you predict stuff?"
[00:25:28]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And back in-- Like, if I was giving a lecture back, back, like, '72, '73, what I was telling people to look at was science fiction writers.
[00:25:37]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
People who know me say I was telling them about Samuel Delaney, and then people discovered Octavia Butler and people like that.
[00:25:42]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
But you know it was just a thing; you could tell science fiction writing was a key thing to follow.
[00:25:48]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
If you look-- If you just follow the social conditions in our society, the times almost demand that a black, gay writer step forward.
[00:25:56]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And some of this might be due to the AIDS epidemic and crisis. Some of it also might be due to what we consider the crisis in the African American family.
[00:26:05]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Some of it might also be a result of the fact that, today, we have a more visible and organized gay community.
[00:26:12]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
We see that the black male homosexual, immediately on the screen, on such programs as In Living Color, which, generally everybody's like snapping [[snaps fingers]] and stuff like that, you know, all that is part of In Living Color.
[00:26:24]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And also, there's been a number of movies that have incorporated the black male homosexual.
[00:26:29]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
But there's a stereotype that we usually see. And that is the character is usually the comic character, the hairdresser or something of that sort.
[00:26:37]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And you have yet to see, really, the serious black, male, homosexual character on the screen.
[00:26:45]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
One of the things I was following was how they were going to resolve the incident on In Living Color with the two men.
[00:26:54]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
You know, where the guy gets the bump on the back of the head, so he's no longer gay. Right?
[[laughter]]
[00:26:58]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
You know, I mean the implication of that, we just everybody just hit everybody upside the head, they'll come to your senses [[laughter]]
[00:27:01]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
That sounds like something my mother would say. You know? [[laughter]] I mean, that says something about how a community might perceive or look at homosexuality.
[00:27:11]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And then you realize as it gets-- You're caught in suspense between seasons. And then it's all resolved and he's all-- and it's another bump on the head again to get him back.
[00:27:20]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
That's dangerous because it has a way of how we interpret all of this.
[00:27:25]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
But I just say that because we see that on camera. Because of In Living Color doing this, it will make it easier for some of the other networks, now, to deal with that theme.
[00:27:37]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Also, within the African American community it would've opened a door, see, for other discussion.
[00:27:44]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
So, we can just monitor this, you know, the same way we know we're going to be looking at these TV shows dealing with the war in Kuwait and all of that, there'll probably be some other things.
[00:27:52]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
You can predict this, during the next couple of months. But this is the thing, in turn, that we look at what's happening today.
[00:28:00]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
One, we have to look at the gay rise in trends also in terms of the literature to see what type of image they are presenting,
[00:28:09]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
in terms of is it more realistic or are they stuck within certain stereotypes? Much of the new gay writing has emerged in the late 1980s with several journals and publications.
[00:28:21]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
A number of them are cited in Essex Hemphill, introduction to his anthology, Brother To Brother.
[00:28:26]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And what Essex does in his introduction, he summarizes the last, like, decade, and Essex writes,
[00:28:31]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
"Black gay men can consider the 1980s to have been a critically important decade for our literature.
[00:28:38]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Literary journals, periodicals and self-published works were sporadically produced and voraciously consumed."
[00:28:43]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And he goes down and he lists all these magazines and journals. And then the key person is Joseph Beam, who published a groundbreaking anthology, In The Life, in 1986.
[00:28:56]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And, actually, Brother To Brother is a continuation of Joseph Beam's work. And I think we can see the importance of Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill.
[00:29:09]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
I place Essex Hemphill, in terms of importance, next to someone like Audre Lorde. Many of you are familiar with Audre Lorde, who was one of the leading black lesbian writers,
[00:29:21]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
opened a lot of doors, especially for many African American women, to come forward and feel much more comfortable in terms of being identified within the lesbian community.
[00:29:32]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
I would say, for example, here in Washington, one of the leading gay writers, Michelle Parkerson, I would imagine that her life is made possible because of Audre Lorde, the role model.
[00:29:44]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And I can see, for example, that when people look at Essex Hemphill, people will begin to associate the fact that this anthology and some of the others made it easier for them to write or to step forward.
[00:30:00]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
And in this sense, Essex Hemphill has done some very important work in terms of black gay literature.
[00:30:07]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Now, Essex gave me a piece that I ran in Shooting Star Review a few months ago

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
in which he summarizes, in what I think is,
[00:30:28]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
a very strong statement on behalf of black male gay writers.
[00:30:22]

Essex says the following, "I speak for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men,
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{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
who live and die in the shadows of secrets, unable to speak of the love that helps them endure and contribute to the race.
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{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Their ordinary kisses, stolen or shared behind facades of heroic achievement; their kisses of sweet spit and loyalty are scrubbed away by the propaganda makers of the race;
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{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
the talented tenth who would just as soon have us believe Black people can fly,

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
rather than reveal that Black men have been longing to kiss one another, and have done so, for centuries.
[00:31:01]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
The Black homosexual is hard-pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers,
{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his omissions.
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{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
This is what the race has depended on, in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history; the chosen history.
[00:31:19]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
But these sacred constitutions of silence are futile exercises in denial.
[00:31:23]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator or rebel. Who did he love?
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{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me; watered-down versions of Black life in America.
[00:31:43]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal."
[00:31:50]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Essex's piece is interesting. One, you get, first of all, the whole issue of numbers; how many Black male homosexuals are out there. Then, also the fact that so many, perhaps, might be quiet.
[00:32:00]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
But that is the whole thing, of the fact, that many of the people that are gifted and talented sometimes have happened to be gay.
[00:32:09]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Our community, who has really wrestled with the whole thing of role model, is really torn, at odds, in terms of this issue.
[00:32:16]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
A case in point is how the African American community is beginning to deal with Langston Hughes, a poet whose work is memorized by people across the country.
[00:32:25]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
The issue around possibly Langston Hughes being homosexual is a very [[pause]] controversial issue,
[00:32:33]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
for some people because, one, it sort of taints or doesn't taint, however you want to interpret it, Hughes's credibility.
[00:32:40]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Also, I think Essex raises some interesting things here in terms-- He wants to know who's loving who.
[00:32:46]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
I think, when we look at our days, and we just came through the Supreme Court hearing, the whole issue of privacy is one that has to be raised.
[00:32:54]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
How important is it that we know who's loving-- What's been happening behind closed doors?
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{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Does that affect your life, and how important is that? Case in point, one person that really we don't define as a Black male homosexual writer in terms of Black male homosexual writers
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{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
is someone like James Baldwin, who simply saw himself as an individual, and he loved whoever he wanted to love. Not really part of a movement or anything of that sort.
[00:33:18]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
But you would see a difference between a James Baldwin and a Essex Hemphill, in a sense of politics.
[00:33:23]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
Homosexuality and sexuality is very important to Essex Hemphill, in terms of he wants to know that.
[00:33:32]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
He feels it makes a difference. This is something that we need to debate in terms of trends.
[00:33:37]

{SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
I raise this because you can see the impact that this has on our own life; even those of us who are not in the gay community.
[00:33:42]

That as soon as one group begins to assert itself, it has influences on us. I think that the issue of black male homosexuality raises issues in terms of masculinity, manhood, sexuality, all these things
[00:33:57]

come forth. Those of you who are, for example, women writers, how do you begin to deal with like, say, images of masculinity when there's the body of homosexual literature that is beginning to emerge. You cannot ignore
[00:34:11]

this, okay? And this is a thing that raises an issue in terms of our community. And writers like Essex, have placed this work on the agenda. I just want to read one poem from his anthology. It's by the writer Lloyd Vega
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and the poem is entitled, "Brothers loving brothers."
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"Respect yourself, my brother, for we are so many wondrous things.
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Like a Black rose, you are a rarity to be found.
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Our leaves intertwine as I reach out to you after the release of a gentle rain.
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You, precious gem, black pearl that warms the heart, symbol of ageless wisdom,
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I derive strength from the touch of your hand. Our lives blend together like rays of light.
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We are men of color, adorned in shades of tan, red, beige, black and brown.
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Brothers born from the same earth womb. Brothers reaching for the same star.
[00:35:12]

Love me as your equal. Love me, brother to brother." And that's from the Brother To Brother anthology,
edited by Essex Hemphill.
[00:35:22]

Transcription Notes:
FINISH PUTTING SPEAKERS IN AT [00:33:37] in AP Style, Black is capitalized when it refers to ethnicity.