Unprotected a memoir, p.23
Unprotected: A Memoir, page 23
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I couldn’t stop weeping. I couldn’t run anymore. Unconscious or otherwise, I had to face my reality. I was afraid of Black men. I didn’t know how to love a Black man intimately, because at my roots, my personal-experience roots, Black men were not a safe space for me. And unfortunately, the gag is, if I have issues with the Black man, then I have issues with myself. If, indeed, I’m afraid of the Black man, then I’m afraid of myself. Dare I say, if I hate the Black man—I hate myself. Not good! I’m a Black man first! That’s what the world sees first!
How could I not have seen this sooner? I was so embarrassed. If I’m being honest, almost a decade prior, I felt this coming. I knew I needed to address my feelings of completely unaddressed self-hate. In the mid-nineties I joined a Black gay book club to get more in touch with my Black gayness. I built relationships with Black gay men outside of my intimate circle of chosen family friends, most of whom are Black. I made real connections with Black men who were not in show business. I never ended up dating any of the men, never got to the sex of it all, but I did make enduring, loving, brotherly relationships that I cherish to this day.
Black Dr. McDreamy and I stayed in contact through the following year. And while I kept our association to myself, never speaking of him to my partner at the time, I’m proud to say there was never any cheating. I never stepped out on my relationship.
By the spring of 2002, post-9/11, I knew I needed to make some changes—the biggest change being breaking it off with my partner of four years. He didn’t see it coming. He was blindsided. My friends were blind-sided. Nobody knew how I felt. I never spoke about my feelings, where I was emotionally in the relationship. I kept it all to myself. That was wrong of me, and I paid a severe price for it. My ex-partner shut me out. Completely. However, he aggressively remained connected to every single one of my friends whom I’d introduced him to, while refusing to even talk to me. This went on for almost a decade. Some folks took sides. I let them. I moved on. I felt betrayed by some, mocked by others, misunderstood by all.
In the process of my torturous breakup I was presented with an opportunity to create and direct a Broadway-style musical revue based on Stevie Wonder’s musical catalog, called Signed, Sealed, Delivered. The project was set to debut at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. I worked with brilliant musical director and close friend Stephen Oremus on crafting the arrangements. Stephen would go on to musical-supervise Broadway hits such as Avenue Q, Wicked, The Book of Mormon, Kinky Boots, Frozen, and many, many more.
My first directorial experience turned out to be a wash of trauma. Firstly, I was embroiled in the middle of a desolating breakup. Secondly, the shifty producer found himself embroiled in some legal trouble, of his own making, and disappeared three days before rehearsals were set to begin. Thirdly, we were blessed to have the incomparable Chaka Khan to headline the production. Maddeningly, though, the Venetian had no incentive to support our efforts, so there was no promotional support for our production, and therefore our show fizzled and shuttered in just shy of three months.
Black Dr. McDreamy and I engaged in a torrid affair during the months between Signed, Sealed, Delivered closing and my moving back to New York to start rehearsals for the Broadway-bound production of Little Shop of Horrors. That experience didn’t turn out so well. But it’s all good. Things are werkin’ out!
The intensity of our love affair came to an abrupt end when, after flying to San Francisco to finally consummate the relationship we had been fostering long-distance for at least a year, Black Dr. McDreamy informed me, postcoital by-the-by, that he had met someone else and intended to move forward with the other fella. Needless to say, I was out on the next thing smokin’. I guess my trauma was too much? Too hard to navigate? Too much to hold space for? Not Black enough? I don’t know, at least that shit was quick!
We had no contact after the breakup, if we can even call it that, for about a year, and then—a rapprochement. He apologized to me for being an asshole. He owned up to how shady the situation was, and we remain very dear friends to this day. Black Dr. McDreamy has dedicated his life and career to addressing the systemic racial disparities in America’s health care system. He’s changing lives one Black, plundered body at a time. I’m proud of my friend.
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Do you believe in relationships? Is a committed, monogamous relationship between two men even possible? Why is it’s about sex. S.E.X.!!! Sex inside the confines of a relationship, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The more I fall the less I can connect. To sex . . . I mean, I guess it’s not a new issue or dilemma. My therapist tells me I’m not the only one with this problem.
I . . . I . . . I am having a problem. A problem connecting, a problem closing the chasm, that hole in my heart, that hole that exists between sex and intimacy.
Where I come from, being gay is not an option. The last taboo. The ultimate sin. An abomination. My people would rather I be a serial killer than a faggot.
Some people . . . most people aren’t strong enough to overcome the rejection, the abject alienation, so they—so WE—burrow underground. I tried to bury my instincts. I tried to squash the impulse, replace the pain, replace the shame. Pray it away?
Our Father
Who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name . . .
The desire comes in waves. I call it the Entity, the Other, the splitting off of personalities. Compartmentalize. Disassociate.
Bernie is in my bedroom, AIDS is in my bedroom, always.
Have a drink, drop an X, do some blow, block out the noise, mute the shame, if only for a moment. I don’t know how . . . I don’t know how to connect.
AIDS is in the room, Bernie is in the room. Cumulonimbus clouds of shame. Always.
It’s like a demon possessing, trauma engulfing my mind, tryin’ to turn my mind reprobate. Like the Bible says, Romans 1:28, fools who don’t acknowledge God will lose their minds. Where are you, God? Am I losing my mind?
Every minute of every day, feeding the bastard of shame, bound by her fiery talons. I can’t catch my breath. I can’t feel my soul. I’m fucking to remember. I’m fucking to forget. I’m fucking away the shame. I’m fucking my way through the pain. I’m fucking for my freedom. I’m fucking to feel something—anything . . .
Or is it to numb, anesthetize. Coming of age, experimentation.
Silence = Death
Sex = Death
Trollin’ the streets, after Pegasus—da’ club. Hoe strollin’ around “Dithridge” in the middle of the night. Picking up trade at “The Fruit Loop” up in Schenely Park, blue collar blow-jobs in pickup trucks, dusty boots from venturing into woods, into the shadows. Always in the dark, always in secret, under the shame of night. When contempt and oppression, stigma and shame are all you know . . .
I can’t dream much anymore—really . . . but I’m haunted. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. Every choice, every decision, every relationship, every fucking breath I take . . .
Then he died! The motherfucker died! Before resolution, before closure, forever traumatized . . .
I hate him for that. I hate him for robbing me of my childhood, my innocence. He dumped his shit on me and then disappeared. Now it’s my shit. And I have to live with it, pay for it, the Sins of the Father. My fath—my stepfather . . .
Our Father
Who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name . . .
The hate consumes me with a power that paralyzes. I’m better sometimes. I have really great days. I have really bad ones, trying to sort the shit out. But he’s not here. He’s not physically here.
I thought Mommy knew. I thought it was all a part of the plan. PLEASURE turned to SHAME turned to RAGE. I need it to go away. I need to heal. I need peace . . . I understand now how people lose their minds. I understand the addict who needs a fix. ’Cause she just wants the pain to go away, or to subside at the very least. And just when I think it’s over, that pain, that fury . . . Every time I feel like I’ve made progress, forgiving him, forgiving myself, forgiving God, the universe, or WHATEVER . . . The shit comes back . . . the Entity, the Other, morphing into yet another terrifying monster, coming for me bigger and stronger than the time before, laughing at me.
Just laughing . . .
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It’s a novel virus. And a novel virus is one that has not previously been recorded. It’s new, a new threat, a new killer. Scientists are scrambling. Orangina 45 lied to us all. He said it was just like the flu, said it would go away by Easter. Gotta get the economy back up and runnin. While dead bodies are being stacked up on top of each other in overflowing hospitals. Nursing homes all over the country have patients dropping dead by the hundreds. He says it will disappear by summer—like magic. And proceeds to not engage. No national plan, no protection. Every man for himself. Every local government can figure it out on y’all’s own. And ain’t no PPE for those frontline workers either. Ain’t enough, and what’s actually available will go to the highest bidder, each state left to compete for the medical supplies that will save lives. Fuck em.
“It is what it is . . .” That’s how the leader of the free world responds to a global pandemic.
Wearing masks would be of great use in bringing down the spread of this virus. Orangina don’t care. None of his cronies care. The GOP is still actively trying to dismantle Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid. During a pandemic . . .
It’s been the long game for decades. One of the long games. The other is the courts.
Doesn’t matter who the president is, or what party controls Congress, if all the courts are conservative. Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died. Of course the GOP is rushing to fill the seat with a female conservative who has been against anything and everything that we’ve spent the last century-plus fighting for. The hypocrisy! The bullshit!
Actually, the entire system is bullshit. It’s not broken. It’s working exactly how it was set up and intended to work. To keep us Negroes in our place! James Baldwin wrote, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
It’s all a game to them, and we got played. The Democrats got played because we still naively believe Michelle’s “When they go low, we go high.” It’s time to redefine what “going high” means. It’s time to play the game that we’re in and stop taking a bag of popcorn to a gunfight.
We got played. For years. For decades. For centuries.
During the 2016 election, when Orangina entered the race and everybody thought it was a joke, I fucking knew he was gonna win. ’Cause we were asleep at the wheel. We had a Black president and we was all like, “Kumbaya, bitches—racism is over!” In December 2015, GOP senator Lindsey Graham said Orangina was “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” but as soon as the choice came down to denouncing Orangina or the loss of his power, sycophantish #LadyGraham fell right in line.
I can’t breathe. I literally cannot breathe right now as I live inside of this terror that is America.
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Back in 1992, I kept hearing about this new show called Jelly’s Last Jam, based on the life of Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz. At the time, I was in rehearsals at 890 Broadway for Five Guys Named Moe, and I would run into the cast in the elevators. I was excited to see this new Black Broadway show that I had not even been considered for, had no idea it was even happening. I treated myself to a preview during the first week of performances. It was not good. It was four hours long and mostly incoherent, a disaster to my young, pretentious, Carnegie Mellon–ass, twenty-two-year-old self.
Four weeks later Jelly’s Last Jam opened to rave reviews and went on to garner eleven Tony nominations. In his effusive review in the New York Times, Frank Rich called George C. Wolfe, who wrote the book, “a visionary talent,” and the show “a sophisticated attempt to tell the story of the birth of jazz in general and, through that story, the edgy drama of being black in the tumultuous modern America that percolated to jazz’s beat.”
He didn’t see the same show I saw. I don’t know what they talkin’ ’bout. I’ma have to go see that shit again.
I didn’t know much about Wolfe. His rise was meteoric, as far as I could see. He had seemed to come out of nowhere to me, when in, like, a three-year period, he became the it man of American theater. I knew a little of him because my drama teacher in high school hooked me up with one of his first plays, The Colored Museum: a series of eleven “exhibits” (sketches) that explore prominent themes of African-American culture and identity. I performed the searing Miss Roj monologue from The Colored Museum to audition for Carnegie Mellon, but had not truly paid attention to the name of the playwright at the time. I was young; please forgive me.
Being that I was a standby in Five Guys Named Moe a few blocks south at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, it took me some time to steal a moment away and take myself back to the see Jelly’s Last Jam again. By the time I got back there, it was post–Tony Awards, where Jelly’s took home a total of three: Best Lead Actor in a Musical for Gregory Hines (God rest his fine-ass legendary soul), Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Tonya Pinkins (who, come to find out, is a CMU Drama Department alum who also left the program early, to make her Broadway debut in the ensemble of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along), and Best Lighting Design for a Musical for Jules Fisher. Five Guys was nominated for two Tonys: Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical. We lost both.
Jelly’s Last Jam was revelatory. Astonishing. A masterpiece. Period! This is the moment I learned what the “preview period” in the theater is truly meant for. You see, the last scene partner we have in making theater is the audience. The audience will always tell you if yo’ shit is working or not. Previews are the time when a show can go from good to great! That means that there is work happening during the daytime. Book changes, musical changes, new full dance numbers, and the like. Previews are ostensibly a “work-in-progress” situation. At this point I was on my second Broadway show, and both pieces had transferred from London, so by the time these shows came to America the preview “fixing work” had already been done. My preview period for both Miss Saigon and Five Guys Named Moe was merely performing a show that had already been “frozen” years prior.
Ticket prices for previews also used to be cheaper back in the day. Like, 30 percent less, sometimes only half the price of a normal ticket. This practice really gave the magical theater makers time to perfect their work without disgruntled audiences leaving the theater and talkin’ shit about a piece of art that’s not finished. Sorta like what I was doing.
When I saw Jelly’s again, I marveled at the way the artists found the space to use tap dancing as an emotional language, as a life force that is needed to propel the narrative forward. Not just shuckin’ and jivin’ and coonin’ for white folks’ entertainment pleasure. This was the first piece of theater I had ever experienced that asked the mainly white audiences of Broadway to consider the cost. What do racism and white supremacy and alla that cost us spiritually, emotionally? What toll do they take on one’s psyche? Gregory Hines, a young Savion Glover, George C. Wolfe, and the entire cast of exquisite artists managed to redefine and reclaim the meaning of our African-American heritage, which in this particular piece is found in the rhythms. From the drums of Africa to the tap, tap, tapping of our feet to the rhythm of life, we search for our history, for our collective healing—our rhythm is our life!
I would spend the next decade trying to get in a room with the genius whom I fondly refer to as “GCW.” But to no avail. Like . . . nuthin’, no love whatsoever. After a number of years of literally feeling invisible to this man I adored from afar, I gave up. Moved on. It almost felt personal.
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In 2002, my two-year-and-nine-month Los Angeles exploration had come to an end. I can count on one hand how many film and television auditions I had in almost three years. I had blown through my savings attending the Professional Program in Screenwriting at UCLA. I had broken it off with my boyfriend of four years, Matthew Anderson. So I jumped at the opportunity to move back to Manhattan with a gig on Broadway. I was poised to make about $300,000 to sit backstage in a sound booth and voice a man-eating plant—playing Audrey II in a revival of Little Shop of Horrors.
And then along came Radiant Baby, a new musical based on the life of Keith Haring. I had participated in several readings of this piece at the behest of the writers, Stuart Ross and Debra Barsha. And when an exuberant Debra came to me with the news that George C. Wolfe had taken a liking to the piece and was announcing a fully realized production for the 2002–2003 Season at the Public Theater, and that the man himself was going to direct it, I told her that Mr. Wolfe would probably not want me.
Debra scoffed, “That’s ridiculous! Who wouldn’t want Billy Porter in their show?”
Turns out—a lot of people. A lot of people didn’t want me in their shows. “Listen, I would love to be a part of this project, I’m just letting you know, based on my history with George, he won’t want me.”
So, the myth goes like this: George knew I had been involved with the project. They started casting. They saw the entire world. I was broke—excuse me, financially challenged at the time and doing a play in New Haven, Connecticut, called Going Native. The Long Wharf Theatre Company was housing me, but the play was closing in a couple of weeks and I was waiting on George to say yea or nay. My friend Jordan Thaler was (and still is) the in-house casting director for the Public Theater, so I called him personally. “George has till midnight tonight to make a decision. I’ve been waiting long enough, and I have another offer on the table that I need to take if this ain’t happenin’. A bitch needs medical insurance!”
