Hold Tight Gently (36 page)

He pointed out—“just for the record”—that he’d never considered
himself an “employee” of PWAC, had never been notified of staff meetings, and had neither a desk nor a telephone in the office. Though he’d “hate to see the
Newsline
become a house organ like GMHC’s shamelessly self-promoting
Volunteer
newsletter,” he expected that it would. In regard to his own future, he thought he’d devote himself to outreach to hemophiliacs, IV drug users, women, and people of color—all of whom, he felt, had failed to be sufficiently included in AIDS programs. He’d hoped for a more graceful departure from PWAC, but in his travels he’d long noted the prevalence of what he called the “eat the founders phenomenon. . . . I long for the days when we trusted each other and simply went about the business of accomplishing agreed-upon goals.”

Mike’s lover, Richard, was furious—as were Mike’s close friends—at the way he’d been treated after all his hard work for PWAC. Richard became so angry that he once tried to compute on an hourly basis how much money Mike might have earned at a minimum-wage job—which he didn’t have—and on top of that factored in the prodigious phone bills they incurred when calls came in from around the world asking for Mike’s advice. In the early years of the epidemic, moreover, when Mike had spoken widely on safe-sex practices, he’d rarely been offered either plane fare or an honorarium. And besides, as Richard kept reiterating, Mike wasn’t devoting nearly the amount of time to making music that his talent warranted. The Flirtations stood ready and eager to rehearse more and to turn out a first CD before the end of 1990. To that end, Mike now rededicated his energy.

Though the lead vocal on any given song in the Flirts’ repertoire constantly shifted, Mike’s unique voice was central to the group’s success and he was its recognized star. Part of the reason was his ability to sing falsetto effortlessly. Before 1990, Mike rarely used that ability professionally; in fact he was somewhat embarrassed by it, apparently feeling that his effeminacy was pronounced enough without adding further embellishment. But one day, when he absentmindedly started singing falsetto, Richard dashed in from the other room. “What was
that
?!” he asked in astonishment. “It’s beautiful!” The falsetto took much less work for Mike than singing in his natural voice, and with Richard’s encouragement, he thereafter added it. A happy side effect was that singing in general became less of a torment and much more fun.
¹⁵

A capella singing lends itself to “messing” with lyrics and adding twists—particularly gay political ones—to tunes like “He’s a Rebel,” “Something Inside So Strong,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” and “Mr. Sandman.” (The latter served as the brief background music for the party scene in Jonathan Demme’s 1993 AIDS film
Philadelphia
—though Demme rejected the campy lyric “Give him two legs like Greg Louganis / But make him public about his gayness,” and also excluded the Flirts from the soundtrack album.) “Messing with lyrics” was especially true for doo-wop songs of the 1950s, which audiences in 1990 were still conversant with.

The group did a considerable amount of touring even before its first album appeared in 1990. In 1988 alone, the Flirts did more than thirty concerts, including a wide variety of events and benefits—events like the AIDS Candlelight Vigil, the AIDS Walk, the National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference, and the Gay Pride Day Rally; and benefits for organizations including ACT UP, GMHC, Identity House, the Names Project (AIDS Memorial Quilt), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and GLAAD. In 1989, they performed at least as many concerts, this time including one at the high-toned Alice Tully Hall.

Given the built-in tedium of touring, Mike’s wit became an invaluable asset, especially at mealtimes. Cliff Townsend, the group’s bass, recalls one evening at a restaurant when Mike asked the waitress if the turkey on the menu was fresh or the compressed, processed kind often served; when she assured him that it was fresh, Michael responded, “So you’re saying that if I went back in your kitchen, I’d find a carcass in there?” Another time, when staying at a hotel that included a “continental breakfast” and being served a single piece of dry toast and some coffee, Michael asked the waiter, “This is your continental breakfast? From what continent, Biafra?!” Mike also had a tendency to ad lib when the Flirts performed, and Townsend remembers the time Mike told the audience that “as a group we tend to defy some stereotypes about gay men. But then, of course, we also confirm a few. You’ve all heard of the Four Tops? Well, here you have the Four Bottoms.”

Richard produced their first album, simply entitled
The Flirtations
, recorded direct to digital two-track in New York City at Classic Sound and Manhattan Recording Company in November 1989 and February 1990. The critical reception was overwhelmingly positive. The gay
music critic Will Grega, for example, wrote that “between the brilliant harmonies, general silliness, and giddy repertoire, a splendid time is guaranteed for all.” Gene Price, music critic for the
San Francisco Bay Times
, hailed the Flirts as “the most entertaining, vocally enchanting, all-male singing ensemble I have ever heard.” And the group often got standing ovations. Their tour in 1990 extended as far as Vancouver, where they ran into some momentary trouble: they made the mistake of revealing to a customs official that the records they had with them were intended for sale—which led to their prompt detention. Feigning haughtiness, Michael told the official, “
That
will teach us to tell the truth!” To which the officer sternly replied, “No Canadian would say that”—and proceeded to go meticulously through every one of their bags before finally giving them the nod to cross the border.

The group’s concerts, as one of them put it, had arrived “at that annoying point where it’s half way between part-time and full-time . . . I think within a year, we’ll get enough bookings to keep us at it full time.” Michael had a wittier take: “I’d say 90 per cent of my time is spent on activism, five per cent on music and five per cent on being a housewife. I’m trying to divide up that 90 per cent—like sleep for a change.”

Once back in New York City, the group returned to rehearsals with the goal and expectation that their next record would appear in fairly short order. But in August 1990, group member T.J. Myers succumbed to AIDS. His place in the Flirts was taken by Jimmy Rutland, who was gradually integrated into the group. Their second album,
Out on the Road,
was recorded live on December 3–7, 1991, and would appear in 1992.

Marlon Riggs was an “army brat” born in 1957 in Texas, but he grew up, starting at age eleven, in Georgia and then West Germany. He returned to the United States in 1974, got a BA from Harvard in American history, and returned to Texas to work at a television station. The endemic racism he encountered made him decide to leave the state and take a master’s degree at UC Berkeley. He made a number of short documentaries on a variety of themes, then turned his professional attention to the subject of racism. It took him five years to raise the $230,000 budget for his first feature-length film,
Ethnic
Notions
, a documentary on the historical depiction of black Americans in the popular media, which won him an Emmy nomination in 1989.
¹⁶

Riggs next turned his attention to making
Tongues Untied
, which would become by far the most controversial of the eight works he produced between 1987 and 1994. He wanted to attempt to do for black gay men what a number of filmmakers and writers—Michelle Parkerson, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clark, and Jewelle Gomez—had begun earlier for black lesbians. To reach his goal of exploring black gay male identity, Riggs wove together a wide variety of elements and crossed a variety of genre boundaries. He utilized lyric poetry (mostly work by Essex), vogue dancing, music by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, “vérité” footage, autobiography, montage, and “Snap!-thology” (finger snapping). The latter was of special importance to Riggs. For him, “snap is a form of resistance, a form of saying, ‘Yes, I’m different and I’m also proud of it.’ ” For similar reasons, he utilized the “so-called effeminate gestures in vogueing”; it was a way to “deliberately distinguish yourself . . . to affirm those gestures which the dominant culture looks down upon. . . . It becomes a virtue rather than a vice or flaw.” He used Essex’s poem “A Homocide,” about the murder of a black drag queen, in a comparable way, moving the poem beyond an expression of grief to a longing search for community and love.

With himself, Essex, Wayson Jones, Craig Harris, and Larry Duckett as the film’s chief performers, Riggs created a vibrant tapestry that combined defiance and anger, flamboyance and wit, pain and frankness. Addressing black homophobia and antigay violence, in one sequence he showed black “ministers” fiercely denouncing homosexuality, and in another a young black man being mugged by a foul-mouthed (“Fag! Punk! Queer!”) gang of black toughs. As Kobena Mercer has pointed out, Riggs (as well as Isaac Julien in
Looking for Langston
), rejecting silence and exclusion, addressed his audience directly on the subject of black homosexuality, confronting it with the lived experiences of black gay men. As Riggs told an interviewer, “
Tongues
, for me, was a catharsis. It was a release of a lot of decades-old, pent-up emotion, rage, guilt, feelings of impotence in the face of some of my experiences as a youth. . . . [It] allowed me to move past all of those things that were bottled up inside me, that were acting as barriers to my own internal growth. . . . I could also finally express my rage about being
treated as a pariah by the black community when I was younger, as my differences became more and more marked.”

Riggs had a highly sophisticated attitude toward the standard issue of whether black gays primarily identified with and owed their allegiance to being black or being gay. “Neither,” was Riggs’ response: “I try to invalidate that argument. Part of the message of the video is that the way to break loose of the schizophrenia in trying to define identity is to realize that you are many things within one person. Don’t try to [arrange] a hierarchy of things that are virtuous in your character and say, ‘This is more important than that.’ ” No single voice or attitude dominates
Tongues Untied
; there is no unifying “typical” narrative of what it is like to be a black gay man. Riggs’ views on “identity”—much debated in these years within intellectual circles—incorporated the current innovative investigations of “queer theory” and contributed to their expansion as well.

Unwilling to compromise his vision, Riggs was well aware that the provocative
Tongues Untied
, unlike his earlier film
Ethnic Notions
, would have trouble finding an audience.
Ethnic Notions
had been shown on many PBS stations, but
Tongues Untied
could hardly count on a national venue and had to mostly rely instead on film festivals and college audiences—despite receiving a number of favorable reviews and even awards (eventually including Best Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Best Video at the New York Documentary Film Festival). The very first showing of
Tongues Untied
was at the American Film Institute Video Festival before an invited audience of some 150 to 200 “largely white” fellow filmmakers and artists. Preceding it, Riggs had been isolated in the editing room day and night and had had no advance work-in-progress screenings to give him some sense of what to expect. At the festival, people reacted so enthusiastically that Riggs was profoundly shocked. The second showing of the film—at the Film Arts Festival at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco—was before a sold-out crowd filled with Riggs’ primary intended audience of gay black men. At the film’s close, the audience rose as one to give Riggs a standing ovation.
¹⁷

Given the difficulty of finding outlets for screening
Tongues Untied
, Riggs was pleased when an invitation arrived to show the film at the Washington, D.C., Filmfest at the Kennedy Center. But he was far less pleased with the way the screening turned out—and Essex was
downright apoplectic, calling the event a “disgraceful embarrassment.” He wrote a long, scorching letter to the directors of the festival in which he itemized the assorted insults of “this shabbily handled affair.” Six weeks in advance of the screening, Essex had himself submitted a list of the technical needs—microphones, music stands, and so forth—that the artists planning a performance along with the screening would require. Arriving at the theater an hour ahead of time, Essex discovered that none of the equipment had been assembled and that the directors denied ever having received such a request. Essex and Larry Duckett had to chase the theater manager around for some forty-five minutes in an effort to obtain the needed equipment, but that produced only four microphones—two of them dead—and music stands so wobbly that one actually fell apart when handled. Essex found the situation “galling,” since the Kennedy Center was a national performing arts space with first-rate equipment of every kind.

To top off the shoddy business, people who’d reserved tickets in advance were told after arriving that their names weren’t on the box office list. Angry “chaos” followed in the lobby. Once the performance finally got started, it turned out that the two microphones that did function were too loud for the room (the artists’ request to do a sound check had been denied) and no technical personnel, they were told, were available to make the needed adjustments. On top of all that, once the screening began, the images that appeared jumped shakily up and down. After five minutes, Riggs, Essex, and Ron Simmons raced to the screening booth—only to find that the projectionist was occupied with something else entirely and paying no attention to what was happening on the screen. He was finally persuaded to stop the film and rethread it. The only partial consolation for the botched event was that it had sold out.