One of the Victorian legacies of the middle-class homes of the 1950s which bespoke of aspirations to gentility was the piano in the parlor. Every house in the newly developed Pasadena neighborhood where I grew up had one, whether it was an upright or a baby grand. It didn't matter whether there was anybody who was interested in playing it or not; the piano was an unquestioned accessory of a well-furnished house.  Ours was no different, and where our black, somewhat tinny upright came from, I never thought to ask. My father, who loved jazz piano, would noodle about a bit, but it never went beyond atmospheric noise. Of the four children who grew up in that household, I was the only one to show any interest, and although, unlike Chopin, I hadn't composed my first polonaise at the age of seven, I could plunk out a tune by ear, albeit with no particular fluidity.  Somehow it was determined -- or maybe I decided -- that I should take piano lessons, and I suffered through the same uninspiring curriculum of scales and simple melodies that traveling mediocre piano teachers imposed on thousands of suburban boys and girls. This wasn't enough for me, and on my own, I painfully sight read and practiced a tune out of The Rogers and Hart Songbook  ("I Could Write a Book," ironically enough) so that I could play it with some facility.  At this juncture, my mother could see I was serious, and so she found me a real piano teacher in Pasadena, Lou Momberg. When I banged out my version of "I Could Write a Book" for him in his living room, he exclaimed, "Kid! I'm gonna make you great!"  And so began years of practice and study that lasted throughout my adolescence. It was an education. Lou Momberg schooled me in jazz theory: voicings, extended chords, altered chords, substitute variations on common chord progressions, modal scales, and how to arrange popular melodies based on their chord progressions (the verse of Jerome Kern's "All the Things You Are" follows a perfect circle of fourths).  Lou Momberg was eccentric, to say the least. He threw theory and his own arrangements of popular songs at me that were consistently over my head. I practiced enough at home so that I never seemed to dampen his enthusiasm as we sat on his piano bench week after week. One day he startled me by claiming that he had found the cure for cancer, but at the age of seventeen, I just let this bit of insanity fly by me and never gave it a second thought.  There was no more talk of future musical greatness for me, but I enjoyed what I could grasp of his theory lessons, especially arranging. I came up with clever jazzy arrangements of "Heart and Soul" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Momberg was an excellent jazz arranger, and, although I had to painfully pick out then practice his versions of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "Stella by Starlight," I mastered these compositions finally with some facility and impressed my friends and their parents.  Improvisation, however, was beyond me; I simply had no sense of how to play alternative notes even if I was familiar with the chord progression. And there were other minor drawbacks I faced as a putative jazz musician. I had no sense of rhythm. I didn't seek out musical peers where I might develop a sense of music collaboratively. I enjoyed music, and I enjoyed playing music, but I didn't love music. It wasn't my life (however, I did develop a sense of rhythm later in life and a much deeper appreciation of music). Because of that, my patience with practicing was limited. I had extended it to 2 hours a day during the week. It wasn't enough to get any better, and as my social horizons widened, I often scanted my practice hours.  One day, Lou Momberg announced to my mother that he could do nothing more for me (an ambiguous declaration if there ever was one). He passed me on to a friend of his, Clare Fisher, who had worked as a pianist/arranger with the likes of Cal Tjader and Joe Pass. My mother drove me out to his Hollywood home and left me there for an hour while I showed Clare Fisher my keyboard chops. He wasn't impressed, but he didn't want to offend his friend by refusing to take me on as a student. So, he gave me my first homework assignment. "I want you to arrange and practice a circle of fifths in all 13 keys."   Those with a musical education will appreciate the enormity of this assignment. It wasn't exactly impossible; it was just demanding and tedious. Clare Fisher figured this would discourage me from coming to him again, and he was right.  The end of my formal lessons ensured that I would make no further progress on the instrument. I wasn't sufficiently motivated. I had a decent enough repertoire of jazz standards that I could trot out when I liked, and it was fun impressing new friends and acquaintances with my "mastery." Certain arrangements -- "Summertime" and "Pennies from Heaven" -- came to me so easily that I joked that they were genetically ingrained in my fingers, and were I to have children, they would be able to play those songs as well.   It took decades for it all to go away. Now I won't go near a piano. It's not exactly painful to look at this road not taken. It's just an acceptance that I was not particularly talented in this area. And, by God!, My introduction to The Great American Songbook ended up serving me well! Every time I croon "My Heart Stood Still" (and check out the version by The Mamas and The Papas) to a new beau, he melts.  --Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Jewish Mystery of the Great American Songbook SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination."   Well, there it is. Case closed and not much more to say about that for Jewish men. Except ... that pesky prick just will not listen. The godly won't lie with other men, as proscribed by the Book of Leviticus, but it happens. It happens in the dark, secretly, down through the ages, and perhaps in the semi-visibility of such passionate friendships as between Jonathan and David. (1 Samuel 18:1-4) Nonetheless, under rabbinical authority, homosexual desire was so horrific that there was no place for any discussion of it that wasn't an utter and blanket condemnation. Consequently, you will look in vain for stories, anecdotes, commentary, or even subversive references to Jewish homosexual desire in the vast Jewish literature generated between ... oh, say the year 3761 BC (the date for the creation of the world as described in the Old Testament) and 1965 when the Women of Reform Judaism officially supported the decriminalization of homosexuality in the U.S. That's a long period of silence, and it had a chilling effect on the development of any discourse that sought to insert (pardon the choice of verb) homosexual desire into religious observance. Unlike queer apologists of the West, Jewish writers couldn't appeal to the classical enshrinement of homosexual love in Ancient Greece. Socrates, Achilles, and Orestes were Gentiles and therefore had nothing to teach observant Jews who were otherwise amply instructed in the ways of pleasing Jehovah. Nothing else mattered.  Of course, things splintered at the end of the 18th century when some Jews emancipated themselves from the strictures of Orthodox Judaism by either creating a more liberalized Reformed Judaism or by abandoning religious observance altogether. Confusingly, the complete apostates were still considered, or still considered themselves, Jews. With the legal emancipation of Jews by various Western governments, these Reformed or non-observant Jews entered the civic and intellectual life of France, Holland, Germany, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some of them were queer and lived, either closeted or openly, as such, but none tried to harmonize Judaism or Yiddishkeit with homosexuality.  As queer culture developed, some assimilated Jews became prominent -- Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany, Harvey Milk in the U.S. -- but not as Jews. Even literature did not yield a great crop, although there were gay Jewish writers. How Jewish was Marcel Proust and how visible was that in his writings? The same questions could be asked of Maurice Sendak or Allen Ginsberg. Jewish by the tradition of matrilineal descent? Yes. Jewish in their themes and subject matter? Open to interpretation and not a definitive explication of their oeuvre. How gay was "Howl"? How Jewish was "Where The Wild Things Are?" What names can we put on a tee-shirt or coffee mug?  During the latter half of the 20th century, the pressure of gay liberation built up elsewhere and mowed down the opposition of the various flavors of Judaism in a predictable liberal-to-conservative timeline. In 1984, Reconstructionists accepted gays and lesbians as rabbinical students. By the mid-1990s, Reform Judaism fully endorsed same-sex marriage. A decade later, the Conservative movement reversed its longstanding ban on gay sexual activity and abolished its policy of not ordaining gay and lesbian rabbis. Even Orthodoxy has become infected with pockets of tolerance, although, for the most part, the ideology of abomination still holds. As recently as 2019 the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem declared, "[Gay people] aren't religious. It would be better if they cast off their kippah and Shabbat [observance] and show their true faces." Somehow we've gotten beyond Leviticus 20:10 (adulterers must be put to death) and Leviticus 24:16 (stoning blasphemers), but Leviticus 18:22 lives on and on. (It is fun, though, to see how liberal commentators, both Jewish and Christian, turn themselves into pretzels trying to explain it away rather than simply discarding it.) Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in "My Son, the Fegeleh" SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

HUMAN NATURE OR AFRICAN DEPRAVITY? It’s all depressingly familiar: an artificially cobbled state created under colonialism explodes in tribal/sectarian violence. Men and young boys indiscriminately shoot and maim whoever gets in their path, women, children, innocent bystanders, one another. The world cries in horror; insufficient troops from the outside may or may not be sent in to protect the capital and its airport; the slaughter continues; world leaders point fingers and counsel moderation; millions of lives are blasted and disrupted; refugees huddle, flee, starve, provide horrific images for Western news consumption. Yes, we’ve seen the like amongst white people (a tear for Yugoslavia), but surely that was an anomaly! This kind of savagery is endemic to the African continent, isn’t it? Not to be racist about it, but … What’s the difference between the sectarian violence now being visited upon that perennial basket case of a country, the Central African Republic (even the name testifies to its artificial nature) and Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sudan? Only my personal history, for I was a Peace Corps Volunteer and lived there from 1974 to 1977. The high school in which I taught is now a refugee camp for 8,000 Muslims too terrified to return to their homes, many now destroyed or burnt out. Another 35,000 Christian refugees are massed around the Catholic mission in the town’s center. Bossangoa, formerly a peaceable savannah subprefecture of 50,000 people, is now a string of blackened buildings. The thing I find most shocking about this turn of events is that when I lived there in the mid-70s, there was no whisper of the sectarian hatred that has how turned this country into a cauldron of violence. Tribal rivalries there were aplenty and then dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa provided a colorful twist on the usual narrative of a cardboard democracy, installed by the departing colonial powers, overturned by a military dictator. (Bokassa brought unusual notoriety to his fiefdom by declaring himself emperor and staging a shockingly opulent coronation modeled on that of Napoleon.) Muslims had always been a quiescent trading minority (barely 15%) in this country of mostly Christians and animists. If I were placing bets at that time on who would be hacking whom, Muslims vs. Christians would have been low on the list. HOW DID WE GET HERE? Beats me, but I have a theory. You may have noticed that for the past couple of decades, the Muslim world has been “waking up,” if you will, from its centuries of sleep. This has included all manner of unpleasantness from bombings in Mumbai (Lashkar-e-Taiba) to church killings in Nigeria (Boko Haram). You might not have pegged the Central African Republic as a likely domino in the spread of Allah-inspired violence, but the C.A.R.’s immediate neighbor to the north, Chad, and to the east, Sudan, were very much roiled by Islamic fighters. These battle-hardened men made up an available pool of thuggery for the ambitions of the C.A.R.’s first Muslim “politician” of note, Michel Djotodia. I put the word “politician” in quotes because even though the Western-imposed form of putative democracy is sometimes sketched out as the playing field, the actual struggle for power and the ability to rape the country’s meager resources plays out in a bewildering round of coups, failed coups, sabotaged elections, rebellions, and worthless peace deals featuring the same names – Patassé, Kolingba, Goumba, Bozizé – in endless competition for Supreme Kleptocrat, aka the President. As you might imagine, orderly rule of a country the size of France was always beyond the capability of this turbulent, self-immolating central power. Djotodia, though ambitious for the Presidency, was always a 2nd tier rider on this merry-go-round until the Muslim turmoil of the neighboring states really revved up. He became a key leader in a coalition of Muslim fighters called the Séléka, which means “alliance” in Sango, the country’s lingua franca. In 2013, the Séléka quickly overran the country’s army, invaded the capital, Bangui, and installed Djotodia as President. Then the wholesale killing, raping and pillage of Christians, unarmed at this point, began in earnest. Djotodia proved incapable of rebottling the bloodthirsty genii he had let loose, and the sickening carnage finally rose to the level of global visibility via the Western press. The balance of power teetered back toward the Christian majority, not because they turned the other cheek but because they formed their own, equally arbitrary and bloodthirsty lynch mobs, called the Anti-Balaka (“anti-machete”). Djotodia tried to disband the Séléka, but that only sent the mercenaries out into the bush where their violence and pillage went completely unchecked as they made their way back home. That left the hapless Muslim resident minority at the tender mercies of an enraged decentralized Christian militia. Under internal and external pressure, Djotodia resigned as President January and went into a peaceful and unrepentant exile in the Republic of Benin. What he has left in his wake is a country that is, as the U.N. has declared, on the verge of genocide. THE HOARY CANARD RETURNS As I contemplate this ravaged landscape from afar, I prefer not to think about the fates of former colleagues and students. I lost touch with my Central African friends long ago. Who would have guessed that the 10-year reign of the buffoonish Bokossa would constitute a Golden Age of stability? There was plenty of fear and corruption when I lived there but no widespread violence, and even the streets of Bangui were safe at night. This all deteriorated as Bokassa, driven mad by unchecked power, descended into full-blown megalomania. His $20-million coronation, costing a full quarter of the country’s pathetic GDP, fuelled a popular unrest that first manifested itself in a 1979 revolt of schoolchildren who refused to purchase uniforms made in a factory “owned” by one of his 19 wives. During the street riots that followed, Bokassa was accused not only of personally supervising the massacre of 100 schoolchildren but of cannibalism! Shortly after the school protests, the French magazine Paris Match published photos allegedly showing fridges containing bodies of children. That was proof enough, and, in fact, when Bokassa was put on trial for treason and murder in 1986, cannibalism was one the charges. (He was cleared of that due to lack of evidence.) Cannibalism? Now? In the harsh glare of our present-day knowledge? Recent and current dictators, the Kim Jong Ils, the Pol Pots, the Muammar Kaddafis, have their little sanguinary foibles, but only African dictators get tarred with accusations of cannibalism. Because, you know, they’re Africans, and Africans do that. And guess what? The hoary canard returns. In January the media lit up with the story (and photos – I’ll spare you the link) of a young Central African known as Mad Dog on the streets of Bangui eating from the body of a lynched Muslim. THE TAKE-AWAY It’s easy to condemn all of this from the comfort and safety of the American middle class. What the Central Africans taught me was the reality of my white male privilege. God willing, I’ll never see my home destroyed, my family raped and slaughtered, my own body mutilated by neighbors and acquaintances following the lead of some bloodthirsty demagogue. That might drive me to equally violent paroxysms of vengeance (I know how angry Americans can get behind the wheel of a car), but I’ll never be tested in such a manner. Outside of donations to Medecins sans frontiers, doing heroic work in the C.A.R., there is little I care to do. My life has moved on. My Central African days date from almost 40 years ago. Still, I cannot help but follow the news from the C.A.R. with unusual interest and a phantom sense of connection. The fitful spotlight of Western media will move to fresher catastrophes, and the tragic parody of nation-statehood that the French contrived in their effort to extract diamonds and hardwoods from that part of Africa will thrash about at even lower levels of desperate survival or splinter into of fiefdoms of local power. The Central African Republic was a failed state from its moment of birth. And yet, the country was beautiful, the people were lovely, and their misfortunes were never solely self-inflicted. There but for the grace of God, go I. Au revoir mon beau pays de souvenir.

One blanket statement we can endorse about American Jewish boys and men is that we are neurotically attached to our mothers. Since our mothers all want the best for us and believe that we are, in fact, capable of achieving their highest goals, we eventually enter a fraught relationship of guilt and carrying a burden of failure on the son's side, disappointment and struggling with reduced expectations on the mother's.   "My son, the fegeleh" is a riff on that preordained dance as it manifested in my relationship with my mother. Initially, she dreamed of me marrying a nice Jewish girl and producing bubbling grandchildren that she could enjoy without having to raise. Then she hoped that I would tie the knot with any girl whether the union-issued children or not. Finally, she realized that the best she could hope for was a same-sex liaison with someone she could tolerate. (I failed to reach even that low bar.) "Fegeleh," meaning "little bird" in Yiddish, bears a convenient phonic kinship with "faggot" and is used as such in Yiddish-speaking circles. Whether it has been reclaimed as a slur is a matter of opinion.   I've known I was Jewish for as long as I can remember. I only realized I was attracted to men at the advanced age of 19. Since I was Jewish only in the most diffused cultural sense with no religious fundament, connection to Yiddishkeit, or ties to any Old World relatives, that aspect of my identity never entered into a dialogue with my struggle to accept myself as a gay man. I didn't give a flying frito about Leviticus 18:22 or anything the Torah had to say about God and morality. Any religion that forbade lobster and cheeseburgers was not one that I could take seriously.   Many years later, when I got comfortable being gay, I made some desultory excursions (literary, of course) into the intersection of Jewish and gay. As homosexuals became more visible, more and more Jews in high-profile professions and public life potentially inhabited this dual identity -- yet I got no sense of a special sensibility or specifically constructed worldview from, say, Allan Bloom, George Cukor, or Barry Manilow. (Fun fact: the creators of West Side Story -- Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurentz, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim -- were all gay Jews. Maybe that's our Torah text?)   The yield from literary production wasn't particularly rich either. David Leavitt's gay Jewish characters were just as cut off from a grounding sense of Jewish identity and as poorly equipped to deal with same-sex relationships as I was. The essays of David Rakoff, while entertaining, were no more enlightening on these subjects. If some manipulative cultural production twanged my Jewish chords, the gay ones didn't resonate with sympathetic vibrations. Where were the fegelehs in Fiddler on the Roof? I might have entertained inciting fantasies about Mark Spitz in his heyday but put him in a prayer shawl, and it all deflates.   The descent into gay Jewish pornography ended predictably. The best thing about the slim 2000 anthology, Kosher Meat, was the cover. The stories inside were tawdry or ludicrous -- and so many missed opportunities for lamenting our foreskins!   I resigned myself to foregrounding my gayness and soft-pedaling a Jewish identity that I couldn't bolster through religious belief or what sociologists call "symbolic ethnicity," a nostalgic allegiance to a cultural tradition that can be "felt" without having to be incorporated into everyday behavior. (Not even a mezuzah on my doorpost!)   But there is a God after all, even though (insert pronoun) has a wicked sense of humor. Because of his early documentary, Trembling Before G*d, I knew of the Bay Area filmmaker and producer Marc Smolowitz. On a gamble, I approached him in 2017, and as a mitzvah, he took me on as a client. He has been a consulting producer for Shoga's last three films and has proven to be not only an invaluable advisor but a good friend. Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Leviticus 18:22 SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

When I was coming out in the Stone Age of the 1980s, drag was not well understood (at least by me) or widely accepted, even in the gay community. Drag shows were always part of the gay ecosystem, but, to my mind, they carried the scent of marginality and desperation absorbed during the wilderness years before Stonewall. I couldn’t imagine drag as defiant or empowering or as an act of reclamation. Not that I knew or talked to any drag queens. Effeminate behavior scared the crap out of me; I didn’t want to be associated with it. They’re freaks! That’s not me! Of course, this was internalized homophobia deeply inculcated by my straight upbringing, but I didn’t have the self-awareness to recognize the toxicity of scorning drag queens – something that I could share with my straight counterparts. The solidarity of bigots was itself a bulwark against any accusations of effeminacy that might be leveled against me. I wouldn’t dream of wearing a dress or make-up. My occasional attempts to act campy for the purposes of humor were just as awkward and pathetic as when straight men tried it. I had no sympathy for it and made no attempt to understand drag queens. I remember being asked by one, “Are you a Judy girl or a Barbara girl?” “Neither!” I silently screamed, but I knew what she was talking about. My butch persona was compromised! Of course, there were cracks in the wall of homophobia I had inherited. A beautiful male body could trump everything else. I briefly dated a dedicated gym rat in DC who was magnificently masculine until he opened his mouth or moved his body. We were riding bikes together one day, and I playfully shot him with the compressed air hose we were using to inflate our tires. He screamed like a woman. I met a handsome Latino man whom I bedded pretty quickly, and it was only afterward that I discovered he was one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. These were anomalies - or so I thought. Then I learned about the heroic work the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had done during the worst days of the AIDS plague. Though I still rarely frequented drag venues or made any friends who were drag performers, I began to appreciate the rapier agility of a snap queen’s comeback. ("I'd slap you, but that would be animal abuse.") And then I discovered how deeply pleasurable it was to say, “Guurrlll, you didn’t!” As I settled into my gay identity, one of my liberating discoveries was: “I’m a faggot! I don’t have to worry about my masculinity.” Mediating influences also bore in on me from early classics of the stage and screen. Craig Russel, star of the Canadian independent film Outrageous (1977), astonished me with his mimicry of Judy, Barbara and multiple other divas. Like the rest of America, I fell in love with Anna Madrigal in the 1993 mini-series, Tales of the City. The following year brought The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and its humanization of drag queens and trans women. My God, even hunky super-masculine Wesley Snipes turned in a credible drag performance in To Wong Fu … (1995)! The Broadway musical, the gayest of all genres, made outsized contributions towards acceptance with La Cage aux Folles in 1983. La Cage introduced America to a screaming queen who was part of a strong and loving gay relationship. If his butch partner and straight son could accept him as worthy of love, why couldn’t we? Of course, Albin’s effeminacy was mocked and used for the purposes of humor, but he was ultimately a sympathetic character, not one who was doomed to a loveless old age or conveniently killed to satisfy some Hayes code nonsense. Albin’s gay anthem, sung in full drag, became our gay anthem – butch, femme, fluid. It didn’t matter. In the dark days of 2008 following the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which reversed legal same-sex marriages in that state for the next five years, I found myself in a crowd of angry queers led by the MC -- in drag -- to sing: I am what I am And what I am needs no excuses I deal my own deck Sometimes the ace sometimes the deuces It's my life that I want to have a little pride in My life and it's not a place I have to hide in Life's not worth a damn til you can shout out I am what I am And, yes, I teared up! I was a fag, and I could cry without shame. In short, I got over it. To be clear, I didn’t start wearing eyeliner or seek out the company of drag queens (my loss), but I had finally dug out the piece of internalized homophobia that hadn’t allowed me to recognize our commonality. If they were hated publicly, I was hated too. “A fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room,” as Truman Capote famously observed. When the San Francisco Frontrunners announced their annual Little Black Dress run a (coyly vague) number of years ago, I jumped at the chance to rummage through the local Goodwill. And, wouldn’t you know?, I found the perfect confection – minus the string of pearls that I couldn’t risk losing during the run. (And the shoes! O Mary!) But it was my seal into the sisterhood. How could I resist the allure of drag when I looked so fetching in my little black dress? Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Forgotten Pansy Craze SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

October is LGBT History Month, and so we should remember the Pansy Craze of the early 1930s, one of the few bright spots of pre-Stonewall history that isn’t a catalog of martyrdom and calamity. But it’s hard to remember something that you never knew about. What are our touchstones of early 20th-century queer history? Weimar Berlin (crushed by the Nazis); the pink triangle (again, courtesy of the Nazis); the Lavender Scare of the 1950s (brought to you by the US government). There were points of light in the homophobic gloom, stories of enduring love and brave affirmations, but these were individual stories, snuffed out, erased, or known only to the initiated. They did not impact the culture at large. Except … in December of 1930, the Pansy Club opened in Times Square, featuring the nation’s best-known female impersonator, Karyl Norman, the “Creole Fashion Plate.” The club sent out opening-night invitations printed in lavender ink promising “something different” entitled ”PANSIES ON PARADE.” Two of Times Square’s three most successful clubs depended on the drawing power of their pansy emcees. Brevities, a gossip sheet billing itself as “America’s First Tabloid Weekly” offered extensive coverage – twelve to sixteen pages – of the gay scene. The Broadway Tatler devoted a double column in most issues to the “Pansy Bugle.” Variety, the trade publication of the entertainment world, regularly covered the gay scene from the mid-1920s to 1931. Book publishers for the first time, opened their presses to novels that were sympathetic to or explanatory of gay men – none of them very good, alas. Still, Strange Brother (1931), Twilight Men (1931), and A Scarlet Pansy (1932) increased the visibility of gay men in a way that didn’t lead to calls for their extinction. The period of the Pansy Craze also saw the apogee of the drag balls which had been increasing in number and visibility throughout the Prohibition era. By the late 1920s six or seven enormous affairs were staged every year in some of the city’s largest and most reputable halls, including Madison Square Garden, the Astor Hotel in midtown and Rockland Palace in Harlem. The Hamilton Lodge ball held in Rockland Palace drew thousands of dancers and spectators. These events not only provided legal cover for transvestites (who would have otherwise been arrested for appearing as such in public) but catered to the growing fascination of non-queer spectators both titillated and dazzled by the flamboyant display of camp culture. Jean Malin, the era’s most famous pansy, cut his sheath on drag, winning prizes for his costumes at the Manhattan balls. When Malin became the headliner in the spring of 1930 at the swank Club Abbey, he not only brought effeminacy into the mainstream, he made it positively fashionable. Malin was swishy, but he was also a six-foot-tall, 200-pound bruiser with an attitude and a lisp. As America’s first openly homosexual performer, Malin established the persona of the gay man, not as a female impersonator, but as a sassy queen in male attire. He moved on stage and amongst audience members as a sophisticated, flamboyant, wisecracking emcee, sometimes heckled but always with a clapback. This was one pansy who wasn’t cowed or ashamed or hiding. It’s borderline criminal (but predictable) that Jean Malin isn’t celebrated as a gay icon, much less even recognized as a trailblazer. The Pansy Craze spread from New York to Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. But like most fads – like the Negro vogue that preceded it – the Pansy Craze fell out of fashion. Then it was murdered by the forces of reaction – the Catholic church, the Hays code in Hollywood, the new liquor laws set up after the end of Prohibition that withheld licenses from establishments deemed “disorderly.” To quote historian George Chauncey, “The state built the closet and then forced gay people into it.” The Lavender Scare of the 1950s made identifying as queer so dangerous that there was no question of digging up the past or remembering a time when homosexuality was visible and exercised some cultural power. It wasn’t until 1994 that Chauncey himself coined the term “Pansy Craze,” and this in his groundbreaking history, Gay New York. But still, that period hasn’t been recuperated by our queer brethren. Still, Jean Malin remains uncelebrated. Why not? These inconvenient historical facts don’t square with the politics of respectability so beloved by our mostly white, mostly middle-class leaders of gay liberation. It’s embarrassing enough that the Stonewall Riots were initiated by trans women and young queers of color, sex workers and street people. Do we have to add that our earliest example of gay empowerment came from … a Pansy? Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in Fear of a Little Black Dress SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

As a mid-century Jewish American child, I was enrolled in the Zionist project without my knowledge or acquiescence. I was born in 1950, five years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. In light of the expanding knowledge of the Holocaust, no Jew could argue against the concept of a homeland where Jews could be safe from the blood-soaked antisemitism of the West. Though I personally experienced little of it growing up in Pasadena, my mother's conflicted feelings about being Jewish in an earlier generation -- part fear, part pride, part culturally-induced inferiority complex -- filtered into me by osmosis.  I didn't give my Jewish ancestry much thought growing up, but I knew it was there, and when, in college, I underwent the obligatory identity crisis, I glommed onto Jewishness (and possibly even Judaism) as an alternative to what my generation--we were hippies back then --deemed the soulless pursuit of power and money. During my sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz, I spent five months learning Hebrew and working on Kibbutz Mizra in the Jezreel Valley below Nazareth. The year was 1969, two years after the Six Day War had definitively secured Israel's borders and foisted upon this still-young nation the poisoned spoils of Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The Arabs within Israel's new borders were depressed and flattened. Rockets and attacks there were aplenty, but their origins were from the Arab neighbors -- Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. The first Intifada was 20 years in the future.  I gave little thought to the plight of the Palestinians, dazzled as I was by the physical presence of The Holy Land and the redeeming narrative of an Israel Resurgent. The Jewish state was incomparably more advanced than its Arab neighbors. Through guts, skill, and imperiled valor, the tiny beleaguered nation had survived, triumphed, expanded. The Arabs had fled in terror before the Israeli army, leaving their shoes in the desert as witness to their flight. The Sinai was embraced, Jerusalem reunited. Israeli paratroopers had battled their way through blood and fire to kiss the Wailing Wall with tears of thanksgiving in their eyes.  I ultimately decided that Judaism -- or any religion for that matter -- had nothing to offer me, and my sojourn in the heart of the Zionist state left me pretty much where I was before I went. I was a Zionist but only reflexively. That unexamined state of affairs began to crumble in the late 1980s. The Intifada had begun, and I could hardly ignore the mistreatment of the Palestinians under the rule of the Jewish state. I came to the horrific realization that the people who had suffered the greatest organized, technologically enabled genocide in history had in the space of two generations become oppressors in their turn.  Furthermore, as I pursued graduate studies and teaching in the elite universities where liberal-to-progressive ideologies held sway, I was exposed to the view that Israel was a colonizing power, putting it in the same category as the vilified French, Portuguese, and American empires. In 1975, the United Nations passed a resolution stating that Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination, and that put Israel on par with apartheid South Africa. Sure enough, Israel became one of Pretoria's closest allies, providing money, arms, and military aide to South Africa's multi-front war against the African frontline states.  I was no longer a Zionist. Furthermore, I simply shut the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict out of my analytical abilities. I knew the history; I knew the wrongs that had been visited on all sides; I knew the egregious mistakes and catastrophic miscalculations of the various leaders. The only constant was that the hoi polloi, the Arabs and Israelis without power, would suffer and die.   The following decades saw the Yom Kippur War, the first and second Intifadas, the era of suicide bombers, the rise of radicalized Arab militant groups, the quiet strangulation of the two-state solution, and the increasing retrograde influence of right-wing and religious Jews. All of that I consigned to "the news" -- events that occurred in a hopeless land that I would never step foot in again.   But this , the terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas militants and the predictably savage destruction of the Israeli riposte? Thousands of lives lost, maimed, uprooted; Israel shocked out of its certainty that its continuing depredations against the Palestinians could be "managed" and that the Palestinians themselves would have to accept the permanent limbo of refugee status; the inhumanity of slaughtering Israeli kids at an outdoor rave; the fear and rage of the Gazans ordered to move to the southern part of their open-air prison, a repeat of the Nakba ("the catastrophe") of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 that drove half the Palestinian Arabs out of the country in what they thought would be a temporary flight but which turned into permanent exile. "Never again!" both sides say, and are they not justified in their fear?  As a Jew, I feel helplessly and unwillingly connected to this ongoing mess. It's too big to ignore, and it's roiling the American waters as well. Antisemitism is on the rise; progressive Jews are shocked that their political bedfellows blame Israel for Hamas' atrocities with hardly a tear shed for the 1400 slaughtered Israeli civilians. Many Jews feel abandoned and beleaguered, but hasn't that always been the case in our long and difficult history?  Are there really only two mutually exclusive, ultimately dead-end choices? "I stand with the Palestinians." "I stand with Israel." I am a Jew who is neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist. I don't like the fact that Israel is an apartheid state in the making (or already made, depending upon your viewpoint), but I don't want to see it eradicated. Personally, I would never move to Israel in case America turns fascist, even though, as a Jew, I have the right to obtain Israeli citizenship. If I have to build a house with a "safe room," doesn't that say something about my choice of residence? I'm not jumping out of the frying pan into that fire, thank you.   And thanks for reading. I hope you feel as conflicted and unresolved as I do.  -Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Grand Alliance Falls Apart SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Once upon a time, in an America far, far away lived two pariah peoples in a land that the Anglo-Saxon ruling class considered as theirs by right of God and the ideals of democracy: the Blacks dragged over from Africa as slaves, and the Jews chased out of their European exile. The two groups came into significant contact at the beginning of the 20th century when the Black peasants of the Great Migration settled in the same northern cities that hosted the masses of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Soon an alliance developed between the two groups to fight nativist prejudice and to promote civil equality. This so-called Grand Alliance midwifed the birth and growth of the NAACP, encouraged the flow of money from Jews for philanthropic purposes (most famously the 5000 Rosenwald schools built in the South) and the funding of civil rights organizations, and orchestrated a Fight for Freedom campaign in the 1950s that eventually culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Grand Alliance was based, in part, on the benign fiction that a "fellow feeling" existed between the two groups rooted in mutual recognition of a common oppression. Less discussed was the unequal power dynamic between these allies. Jews had the money, but Blacks were on the front lines. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank shocked the Jewish community, but that episode also spurred the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which killed a hell of a lot more African Americans over the next 40 years. Furthermore, Jews used their money and social capital to direct the initiatives of the Alliance in ways that may have been well-intentioned but often came off as patronizing. Thus, it was that when the major cultural shifts of the 1960s hit, a segment of Black activists, the folks who eventually coalesced into a Black nationalist wing, were ready to dispense with not only Jewish participation but any white participation. (This often perplexed Jews, as many didn't see themselves as fully white.) The breakpoint came in 1967, but there was already trouble brewing earlier in the decade. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, but his posthumously published Autobiography brought the radical teachings of the Nation of Islam to the attention of the mainstream. The Nation of Islam had been one of many fringe groups in African American history, but the personality and eloquence of Malcolm X brought out of the shadows a popular Black nationalism that hadn't been seen since the days of Marcus Garvey. 1967 ushered in the defeat by Israel of its Arab neighbors and the occupation of new territories with Arab populations. That same year, SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, published an article in its newsletter denouncing Zionism and charging the Israelis with inflicting atrocities upon the Arabs. This was a major speedbump for the Grand Alliance, but Black Power ideology was rapidly changing the thinking not only of Black America but of the anti-Establishment generation of students, anti-war protestors, hippies, and dropouts. Nonetheless, the major Black organizations -- the NAACP and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference -- dissociated themselves from Black Power, and the Alliance saw major victories and advances in the Civil Rights Movement. However, the following decades brought plenty of shocks: Whites, a disproportionately high number of them Jewish -- were expelled from SNCC in 1968. That same year, a New York City teachers' strike pitted a predominantly Jewish United Federation of Teachers against the Black Ocean Hill Brownsville school districts. Before the century was over, Louis Farrakhan, the new leader of the Nation of Islam, gained notoriety for his antisemitic remarks; Jesse Jackson referred to New York City as "Hymitetown" during a presidential campaign, and Andrew Young, President Carter's ambassador to the U.N. was forced to resign because he had held an unauthorized meeting with an official from the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The spectacular three-day Crown Heights riots of 1991 drove the final nail in the coffin. Though nobody held a funeral, the Grand Alliance was dead. It's interesting that the first rupture was over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Given how important Jews were to the Civil Rights movement, siding with Palestine seemed like an act of folly, and indeed, SNCC disappeared soon after its Jewish supporters stopped donating money. However, SNCC's analysis of the Mideast conflict was one of the first to define that history as a critique of Western colonialism, deploying a Third World analysis rather than the "fellow sufferer" perspective of American discourse. It was financially foolish but ideologically consistent with the liberation theology of Black Power. When, nine years later, the United Nations passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism, the battle for the hearts and minds of progressives had been long lost. Unless you were Jewish or an American foreign policy official, you could not support Israel. And that was especially true for Blacks when they learned that Israel had allied itself with the white apartheid regime of South Africa in the 1980s. So here we are again, and nothing has changed since 1967. The Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter posted the following statement on Instagram after the October 7 massacre: "When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned.” To be fair, this one chapter of BLM doesn't speak for all African Americans (who does?), but it's probably close to what a lot of them think. Although the analysis is not wrong, the conclusion does not follow and is a little short of catastrophic. Of course, we should condemn the slaughter of 1400 Israelis, the greatest one-day death toll in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Alas, it appears that all the king's horses and all the king's men will never be able to resurrect the Grand Alliance. And that's a pity because the two groups have more that should unite them than what divides them. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Zionist Phase SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The raffish director strikes a casual pose in front of the Queens Film Festival banner Grey Gardens , if you must know. And if you don't know, please read up on it or, better yet, watch it. Grey Gardens was the direct cinema documentary classic, released in 1975, that added to the lustrous filmography of the Maysles brothers, David and Albert. After its premiere, Grey Gardens circulated subterraneously in film classes, lived on as a gay cult phenomenon, and finally exploded into visibility as a Broadway musical in 2006, then an HBO movie in 2009.  In 2007, I excitedly attended my first-ever film festival as a director. The Queens International had selected my maiden made-in-film-class music video, " Ma Rainey's Lesbian Licks ." A gay man, Roger, with whom I had been in correspondence, offered me the hospitality of his Sunnyside apartment for the four days I planned to be in New York. I took Roger to the film festival, and he, in turn, suggested that we visit his friend Jerry Torre, also gay and also a resident of Sunnyside. "Who's Jerry Torre?" I asked. Roger arched a queenly eyebrow. "He's the Marble Faun in Grey Gardens ." I still looked blank, "The handyman," Roger continued. "Little Edie called him the Marble Faun." It had been years since I'd seen Grey Gardens , and Jerry didn't figure very prominently, so I could be forgiven not being able to instantly place him. Nonetheless, as I was now in "the film world," so to speak, Roger brought me to Jerry's apartment, a ground floor unit festooned with indoor plants and its own beautiful garden, where he lived with his much younger lover, Ted, The relationship was still new, dating from the opening night of the Grey Gardens musical on Broadway to which Jerry had been given two tickets. Ted had been the manager of a Grey Gardens Facebook fan group specializing in The Marble Faun. Though they had only corresponded (Ted was living in Philadelphia), Jerry invited Ted to the opening knowing that it would be a special fanboy treat. Ted came to New York and never left.  Jerry was engaging, full of stories about his iconically gay life -- the club scene in the New York of the 70s; Provincetown and the sometimes paramour of Wayland Flowers; business success, the AIDS inferno, and drug addiction in the 80s; the unexpected resurfacing of Grey Gardens in the 90s. At the end of it all, he asked, "Would you like to meet Albert? He runs a production studio and documentary center in Harlem." Thus it was, a few days later, I found myself sitting across from Albert Maysles, half of the legendary Maysles brothers. (David had died in 1987.) This octogenarian was wizened, spry, and so zestful that his documentary center was full of young folks working on the small screening room downstairs and their own projects upstairs. Albert and I had a generic, pleasant conversation with no particular agenda until I asked him if he was working on a film at present. "Have you ever heard of the blood libel?” he asked in his gravelly Boston accent. "I'm Jewish," I replied. That changed the tenor of the conversation. This son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants suddenly took me in as a person of interest. "I want to make a documentary about the blood libel in the United States." "Messina, New York." I returned. Startled, Albert Maysles looked at me even more sharply. Most people, most Jews , don't know about the infamous accusation of blood libel in America, but I had researched antisemitism for my own projects. He was impressed. When I asked him how he proposed to make a documentary in the direct cinema style he had pioneered about an incident that had occurred eighty years ago, he was even more impressed. I had demonstrated my knowledge of film and Jewish history simultaneously. "It's not history," he replied. "The blood libel is alive and kicking. There's a Syrian-Lebanese mini-series that was broadcast during Ramadan a couple of years ago. In one of the storylines, a rabbi enlists a member of his synagogue to help him kidnap and murder a Christian child, whose blood they drain and use to bake the matzoh served to the congregation on Passover. By focusing on the present-ness of this myth that never seems to go away, I have a justification for going into the past." In his turn, Albert asked me what film projects I was working on. "I'm in New York not only for the film festival but to research a documentary on gay and lesbian contributions to the Harlem Renaissance." "Wonderful!" Albert enthused. "When you get ready to film, let me know. I could be your cinematographer." Now, it was my turn to be floored. True it would be a local gig, and I suppose he would have accepted one of the lower cameraman rates of $25/hour. But I recognized the professional version of a sweet nothing. Still, it was a grand gesture, and I thanked him profusely.  Albert Maysles died in 2015. He never finished "The Jew on Trial," nor does his name appear as a cinematographer in any of my Queer Harlem Renaissance films. It is a story to dine out on, but I don't often tell it because it requires so much background. These anecdotes are best served in hot, quick strokes, such as "The first film festival I ever screened at went defunct because the founder had been scamming everybody for years, and it finally caught up with her." Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, When We Were Victims: The Blood Libel SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

When We Were Victims: The Blood Libel It's safe to say, I think, that Jews have never been well regarded, especially in Christian and Muslim lands. The gamut of acceptance has run from grudging tolerance at best to ... o well, I don't need to spell it out. Throughout our history there has been many a curious fabrication about who we are (Christ killers) and what we do (world domination), but one of the more grotesque slanders to surface was the conviction that Jews used the blood of Christians (usually children) for their unholy religious rituals. (Though no recipes have yet turned up in Jewish cookbooks, the blood of Christian babies seems to be an essential ingredient for Passover matzoh.) This unsavory canard, born in medieval times and continuing right up to the present (O yes! Check out what Salah Eldeen Sultan, a lecturer on Muslim jurisprudence at Cairo University, had to say in a 2010 address that aired on Al-Aqsa TV) has come to be known as the Blood Libel. It wasn't the Jews who gave it that name, but it was the Jews who suffered the consequences: massacres in London and York in 1190; torture, execution, expulsion in Bern in 1293. One cute story coming out of Bazin in present-day Slovakia told of a nine-year-old boy abducted and bled to death. Thirty Jews confessed to the crime under "enhanced interrogation techniques" and were publicly burned. Shortly afterwards the child was found inconveniently alive in Vienna where he had been taken by the accuser, Count Wolf of Bazin, as a means of ridding himself of his Jewish creditors. One of the presumed victims of Jewish ritual murder in 1475, Simon of Trent, was not so fortunate. The Italian boy was found in a watercourse running beneath the property of Samuel, the head of the local Jewish community. Even though it was the Jews who reported finding the body to the authorities, the entire community (both men and women) were arrested and forced under torture to confess to having murdered Simon to use his blood for ritual purposes. (See the woodcut above, naming not only Simon but prominent members of the Jewish community as well.) Top Catholic authorities, including the pope, had their doubts about the veracity of The Blood Libel accusation, but the fifteen Jewish men in the small community were burned at the stake anyway. Over the subsequent centuries, this "boy martyr" became the object of a cult with all the trappings of relics and annual processions. We've just scratched the surface and haven't even come to the modern era. The sites of these imaginary crimes and the very real repercussions for local Jews -- pogroms, expulsions, sensational trials, imprisonment, death dealt out in any number of ways -- roll on: Velizh (1823), Rhodes (1840), Tiszaeszlár (1882), Kishinev (1903). The formal indictment and trial of Mendel Biellis, a Jewish supervisor of a brick factory in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, sparked the greatest international scrutiny and criticism of the Blood Libel. In 1911, a 13-year-old child disappeared on his way to school. Eight days later, his mutilated body, drained of blood, was discovered in a cave near the brick factory. Beilis was arrested months later after a lamplighter testified that the boy had been kidnapped by a Jew. He spent more than two years in prison under horrendous conditions awaiting trial. During the trial, the trumped up nature of the prosecution's case was so obvious that the majority of the all-Christian jury voted to acquit him, although a finding of ritual murder (upheld in the face of a local police investigation that convincingly demonstrated the culpability of a gang of criminals) was allowed to stand. The Nazis made propaganda hay out of that 25 years later. And then, in 1928, in the small manufacturing town of Messina, New York, four-year-old Barbara Griffiths wandered into the surrounding woods and disappeared. Hundreds of locals, organized by Massena’s police and firefighters, searched frantically through the night and into the next day. Yom Kippur was only two days away, and the Blood Libel began to spread. The theory caught fire not only with the townsfolk, but in the powerful figures of the state police and the town mayor. Rabbi Berel Brennglass, leader of the town's synagogue, was brought in for interrogation about the possibility of ritual murder. Brennglass rebuked his interrogators and expressed outrage that people believed such lies in the United States in the 20th century. Later that day Barbara Griffiths wandered back out of the woods where, she told authorities, she had gotten lost and had slept through the night. Messina's pillars of society would have been more than happy to let the matter rest there, but Rabbi Brennglass brought in the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress who made it a national affair and extracted unwilling apologies from the mayor and the state police to the rabbi, the town's Jews, and all Jews of the United States. And that was the end of it in the West, right? Ah ah ah! Don't forget about the Nazis! They used The Blood Libel in full force for anti-Jewish propaganda. A 1934 edition of the Nazi daily, Der Sturmer, devoted a special illustrated number to the Blood Libel, in which German scientists openly served Nazi aims. While in power, the Nazis revived old allegations and instituted reinvestigations and trials in territories under their rule or influence: Memel in 1936; Bamberg in 1937; and Velhartice, Bohemia, in 1940. Once the Nazis were defeated and six million Jews had perished at their hands, who could invoke the Blood Libel again? The Poles, of course! Murderous antisemitism was part of their DNA. In the town of Kielce in 1939, one third of the population, approximately 24,000, was Jewish. Almost all of them were murdered during the Holocaust. However in the summer of 1946, about 200 survivors had straggled back. But ... on July 1, a nine-year-old Gentile boy left his home without informing his parents. When he returned on July 3, the boy told his parents and the police, in an effort to avoid punishment, that he had been kidnapped and hidden in the basement of the local Jewish Committee building. The lie was a patent one (the building in question had no basement), but the adult Poles knew the Blood Libel script as well as the mendacious child, and -- bang! -- another pogrom! A mob of Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians murdered 42 Jews and injured 40 others. The Kielce Pogrom convinced many a traumatized survivor that there was no longer a place for Jews in Europe and that perhaps in Palestine they might find refuge from the Blood Libel. Ah, but the Arabs took it up and made it a staple of anti-Jewish propaganda. (No escape!) I will spare you the roll call, but, as an example, an October 2000 of the Egyptian-govenment sponsored newspaper, Al -Ahram, published a full-page article titled “Jewish Matzah Made from Arab Blood." But surely these medieval beliefs no longer carry currency in contemporary America! Wrong again! Just last year, the QAnon crazies used a sculpture of Simon of Trent to promote the theory that Hollywood elites are harvesting adrenochrome from children through Satanic ritual abuse in order to become immortal. (No escape!)  Strangely enough, the very outrageousness of the Blood Libel can offer Jews some kind of weird consolation in dark times when the world is telling us how evil we are. I know I'm asking for it by quoting Ahad Ha'am, a Jewish essayist and purveyor of cultural Zionism (who died in 1927, well before the State of Israel was a gleam in Ben-Gurion's eye), but ... “This accusation is the solitary case in which the general acceptance of an idea about ourselves does not make us doubt whether all the world can be wrong, and we right, because it is based on an absolute lie. Every Jew who has been brought up among Jews knows as an indisputable fact that throughout the length and breadth of Jewry there is not a single individual who drinks human blood for religious purposes…. ‘But’ – you ask – ‘is it possible that everybody can be wrong, and the Jews right?’" I am sorry if any of this can be interpreted as justification for the State of Israel's misdeeds. It is not. Being a victim conveys no special moral authority. Wrong is wrong no matter who is the perpetrator. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in I Uncover the Queer and Jewish Undercurrents of a Documentary Classic SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Some of the staff of Hage Geingob High School. Guess which one is the Coloured.  First of all, note the British spelling. Second of all, note the lighter skin color. I didn't make this sh*t up.  In 2005, I was teaching computer literacy skills in a high school that served one of the poorest areas of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Having endured 70 years of South African rule as a League of Nations Mandate (don't ask), Namibia was forced into the same social deformation of apartheid and meticulous racial categorization, even though there were far fewer whites in that relatively distant land. Nonetheless, the hierarchy was established with whites at the top and Black Africans at the bottom.  And then there were the Coloureds, spawn of Boer fathers and Black mothers -- at least initially. Even though such couplings violated the laws of God and nature, Coloured children arrived -- and in the millions (the Coloured population of South Africa currently clocks in at 5 million, a little over 8%). Everything in Namibia followed this tripartite racial division, which still held force even fifteen years after the Black Namibians wrested their independence from a recalcitrant South Africa. Namibia has been ruled by a majority-Black government since 1990. There's been a gradual relaxation of the barriers and snobbery between Black Africans and the Coloureds, but the Namibian whites still live in their privileged and segregated world -- no social mixing from their sector. During my year of teaching, I was given the house of the high school principal to stay in and gained some notoriety as The Only White Man in Khomasdal, the area of Windhoek that had been designated and built as the Coloured "location" (the local term for ghetto).  The principal arranged for me to be picked up and driven to school by one of the teachers on her staff, Melvin Gallant. Over the course of the year, we became friendly, although Melvin was older than the rest of the teaching staff and not socially outgoing. Also, he was from Cape Town, the Paris of the Coloured world, and that, too, presented a barrier. The other teachers read his reticence as arrogance, and although I personally felt that Melvin was being maligned, it wasn't my place to defend him. There were socially entrenched attitudes that I couldn't have knocked down anyway.   The Coloureds naturally considered themselves superior to the Blacks. And just as naturally, the Blacks, now that they were in power, made sure that the Coloureds didn't share in the state spoils. The poor guys couldn't win for losing. Too Black to be white and too white to be Black, the Coloureds were second-class citizens under apartheid and under Black democracy.  Nonetheless, because they were a step closer to the white ideal under apartheid, many of the city Coloureds have several generations of economic and educational advantage under their belts. While they may be marginalized politically, they often enjoy a relative business prosperity, although there are lots of poor Coloureds as well. Khomasdal, established as a Coloured township, is better off than Katatura, the Black location.  For reasons I was never able to fathom, Melvin was hellbent on establishing Namibian citizenship. It took years because, in addition to the glacial pace of African bureaucracy, he had to surmount the double disadvantage of South African origin (bad former colonial power) and being Coloured (wrong race), he was tough or persistent or perhaps just thick, but he eventually succeeded. The victory didn't add much joy to what I came to appreciate as his heart of gold. You couldn't ask for a sweeter guy, but his view of humanity was bleak, bleak, bleak! Every morning, Melvin regaled me with tales of bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency. “Can you believe it?” was his refrain after informing me of the latest scandal, teen pregnancy, suicide, betrayal, and sexual misconduct. Even though he proved himself (to me at least) the most generous and self-sacrificing teacher at the school, he remained socially isolated. In fact, none of the four Coloured staff members mixed much with the others.  The Coloureds are linguistically differentiated as well. Because of its South African heritage, Afrikaans is the common language of roughly half of the Namibian population, but the other half are the numerically and politically dominant Ovambo who had been excluded from the colonial economy of the time, never learned Afrikaans, and had no interest in maintaining the language. Thus, upon independence, English was arbitrarily declared the country's official language, even though nobody spoke it as a mother tongue. Black Namibians could communicate with one another in their own tribal tongues outside of a sometimes uncertain grasp of English, but even though Afrikaans was still the informal lingua franca of the non-Ovambo population, it was on the historical chopping block -- probably destined to die out. It's not taught in school (as are some of the tribal languages), and the fact that Afrikaans is still the first language of 60% of the small but rich white minority doesn't boost its prestige.  -Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Inescapable Blackness of Jean Toomer (And the Escapable Jewishness of Waldo Frank) SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In the fall of 1922, two young American writers, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, traveled together to Spartanburg, South Carolina, for research on novels that both were writing at the time. Toomer, of mixed ancestry, was oftentimes light enough to pass for white but did not wish to do so on this particular occasion because his subject was Negro life in the rural South. Waldo Frank was a Jewish writer, famous at that time in modernist circles, who had also conceived of a novel (“Holiday”) that dealt with race in the Deep South. Through the medium of a literary correspondence (Frank lived in New York; Toomer, Washington, DC), they discovered themselves to be kindred spirits, striving to bring about the upheaval of spiritual yearning and frustration below the surface of ordinary life. Although Toomer was beginning to get his short pieces and poetry published in the little magazines that promoted modernist writing, Frank had already published a psychoanalytic novel – an innovation for the time – and had two more modernist experimental novels in the works, as well as being an associate editor of the influential Seven Arts journal. During their brief but intense friendship, Frank not only guided Toomer through the composition of “Cane” but brought the manuscript to his own publisher of Boni and Liverwright. (Horace Liverwright was one of the Jewish upstarts, along with Alfred Knopf, who forced upon the hidebound publishing world the writings of Negroes and modernists, but that is another, although related, story.) Waldo Frank’s imprint is visible in “Cane.” Not only did he write the Introduction, but Toomer dedicated its longest section, “Kabnis,” to his friend. As “Cane” was being published in 1923, Frank managed to bring his friend to New York City to live the literary life in Greenwich Village. And so Toomer did but soon became disenchanted with the egos and quarrels and clashes. More significantly, however, Toomer wanted to go beyond mere literature and conceived of himself not as a writer but as a spiritual seeker. He soon fell under the influence of the Russian philosopher, mystic, and spiritual leader George Gurdjieff and wrote out of that worldview until the mid-1930s. It was a worldview that transcended race, and that was, for Toomer, part of its appeal. As a light-skinned African American, Toomer had spent his life crisscrossing the color line – Black in DC, where he had grown up the grandson of a famous Black politician, white in other places where he traveled for education (the midwest) and as a young man finding himself. When he spent four months in Sparta, Georgia as a substitute principal in a Black school, he tapped a current of creativity that spurted out the astonishing sketches and poems that were later collected in “Cane.” It was a one-off, but what a one-off! American writing was producing other High Modernist classics from that period (“Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson, “Spoon River Anthology” by Edgar Lee Masters), but “Cane” was the first to treat of African American life. The irony was that Toomer was the first Black author who did not believe that Black ancestry made him Black.  He grudgingly gave his approval to have “Cane” marketed as a Negro novel but quickly came to regret it. As he wrote to his publisher, "My racial composition and my position in the world are realities that I alone may determine.” It wasn’t true, but he refused to accept it. He held himself aloof from the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance of the later 1920s – or rather engaged with its writers only as a teacher of Gurdjeffian philosophy. He had gone beyond writing and never published anything of significance again. Although Toomer was, in appearance, racially indeterminate and tried to retreat into the anonymity of Quakerism in the Midwest, his subsequent marriages to white women ignited anti-miscegenation firestorms in newspapers and magazines. In a final historical irony, Toomer became acclaimed as a great American writer because “Cane” was rediscovered (and appreciated in a way that it had not been at the time of its publication) as part of the reclamation of African American literature spurred by the celebration of Black consciousness in the 1960s. And what of Waldo Frank? After his friendship with Toomer ended in 1923, Frank went on to have a productive, influential career in journalism, leftwing politics, and, most importantly, as a cultural ambassador between North and Latin America. He continued to write novels, sometimes with Jewish characters (“Summer Never Ends", 1941) and even published “The Jew In Our Day'' in 1944. However, Frank was never defined or circumscribed by his Jewish ancestry. The novel that he was researching during his trip to the South with Toomer was published shortly after “Cane” and disappeared quickly, an unrevivable failure. Dying in 1967, Frank lived long enough to know about “Cane”’s remarkable efflorescence of literary glory, but what his reaction may have been to the book in whose making he had played such a significant role remains unknown – or at least subject to further research. Even as a putatively Jewish writer, Waldo Frank is all but forgotten. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Coloured Friend SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts