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Photographs: "Selma, Lord, Selma" and "Ain't I A
Woman"
The first two pictures are from me in or on the way to Selma,
Alabama, for reasons listed in the captions.
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Here I am (in the middle, as if it
weren't obvious) with Malachi Gillihan and Marra Carson as we ride in a van to Selma,
Alabama for the 35th anniversary of the Voting Rights March. It was
an important cause, and an amazing time was had by all.
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This is one of my favorite photos of all-time. It
features Kim Stephenson and I (or from left to right, me and Kim) actually
in Selma, waiting on Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young,
Julian Bond, and President Clinton to speak. She and I had a great
view of the days festivities, getting within a yard of the President and
being among the first to walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of
the travesty that occurred 35 years ago when African-Americans in Alabama
decided that they had had enough of second-class citizenship, and that
they were going to do whatever it would take to get their rights back--to
attain the equality promised to every American. The gay community could take a lesson from what
African-Americans have accomplished over the past 50 years.
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| Not exactly a picture of me in Selma, this is me, in the center of the picture, reading poetry
for "Ain't I A Woman," an open-mic night at the Starbucks
on Butler's campus. Sandwiched between two of my favorite women who
like women (translation: bisexual or lesbian) in the set-list, I read from three of my favorite African-American, female
writers. I started with a selection from Nikki Giovanni's vast
collection of poems, one called "Watermelons." Both of us
being Tennessee natives (Nikki and I) it was extra special. I
followed with a short poem from Maya Angelou, author of the landmark novel
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
That night the crowd was large, but almost exclusively white.
The musical acts before me were the new standard of two chicks singing
songs about how much God has done for their life. God must be a
woman in their mind if they bothered to sing about Him (Her, rather) on a night
celebrating women. The crowd, easily cut from the Campus Crusade for
Christ cloth ate that shit up. The next act, immediately before me,
was this wonderfully talented bisexual woman who sang songs about a friend who was a stripper and--when she needed the money--a prostitute. Well, needless to say the
Campus Crusaders didn't particularly enjoy her act too much. You
should have seen their faces. Their reaction was tepid, but the
performer was all smiles. Go, Cat, Go!
And then it was left to me, a white boy from the South, to give the audience
a sense of what it would be like to be a powerful, black woman in less
than 10 minutes. I hope my choice of poetry hit the spot and was
able to incite the thirst for knowledge of the black woman experience that
these Midwestern white kids had never knew they had. But I'm not
that good.
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