In keeping with the Cincinnati nostalgia run we’ve been on with the “Gone” video, I had to post this. For anyone who used to read Citybeat in the 2000′s, you may remember a column titled “Your Negro Tour Guide”. Written by Kathy Wilson (the woman holding up the Roc sign at “Selectas Choice” in the “Piece of Our Soul in the Road” documentary), this column was one of the first things I read upon my first real visit to Cincinnati. It was such an amazing column that it affected my decision to actually move to Cincinnati. I felt like any city that could house a writer like this must be on some shit (and it definitely was, for better or worse).
A few years ago, Kathy put a stop to the column, closing out with a book (that I still hold on to) filled with her best writings. “Your Negro Tour Guide” would go on to become a US touring play (by my UC homegirl Torie Wiggins).
Much to my surprise, Kathy is back on the writing tip. Below is her first column. After the column, catch her newest as well. I may post these on here off and on, because she’s that fresh and her writing needs to be spread to the ends of the earth. So…read up.
“BACK TO BLACK”
Your black-ass president is a fag hag.
A fag hag is usually a woman who co-stars and co-signs in the lives of flamboyantly gay men. She is a benign accessory and sometimes even a beard to the gay man who thinks he is fooling the folks who should not matter to him into believing he is heterosexual. He will carry his fag hag like a Kelly Bag to parties, weddings, family dinners and reunions, bars, clubs and even to church.
Fag hags are pesky cheerleaders buzzing about meaninglessly to little affect; they are quick to appear down with gay (and lesbian … dykes have fag hags, too) causes, but it’s all too much, too little, too late. And fag hags flip flop with the changing wind, agreeing vigorously to whatever Fags-In-Charge say the fag hag should agree to, so significant issues tied to sexuality and gender as they relate to politics and, ultimately, legislation become diminished into pop culture popularity contests.
Take your black-ass fag hag president, for example.
In the 16 years between his run for Illinois state Senate and May 9 when he announced — or was outed by his blabbermouth veep — in an interview on ABC News that “for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” he has changed, switched, denounced, waffled on and used flimsy black logic (that marriage carries “a religious connotation” especially among blacks) and Harvard semantics to sidestep gay and same-sex marriage and civil unions 11 different times in forums as disparate as gay publications, online discussions with liberal bloggers, on MTV and during presidential forums and during a Human Rights Campaign dinner, according to the Republican-tilting site Politico.com.
It’s like the president is in a one-man Venus-and-Serena Wimbledon smack down with his race, his consciousness and his thirst for re-election, all to prove to voters that he may very well be something he never was: firm on an easy-to-figure-out topic.
I have never known why all manner of homosexuality has always been in my lifetime (47 years) the last bastion of ignorance, fear and misguided opinion among classist blacks and why, more frighteningly, blacks thump on the Bible and get thee behind wack jobs to steel themselves against the coming gay and lesbian scourge.
It ain’t comin’.
The gay subculture is the fungus among us and if it were black mold everybody’d be lined up for miles across America for gay allergy shots.
Have you seen these lines?
My point, exactly.
I do not speak for dykes and fags as a monolith, but the ones I know want the same things the rest of y’all want: money, property, educations, jobs, safety, vacations, safe sex (for the most part) and the legal rights to put some shit in another motherfucker’s name should one or all the aforementioned tent poles of the American Dream fall flat.
What makes being gay or lesbian strange in this strange land is that other fools — outsiders — are discussing, debating and bandying about “the results” of one of the most fundamental and intimate identity markers we all possess.
This ain’t Dancing With the Stars and politicians and pundits should not be allowed to play Most Likely to Be Denied Marriage Based On Whom You Fuck with any parts of anyone.
But since your black-ass president has put his foot on this path and blogs blew up about it, at least he has some black back-ups in the NAACP, aka The Fag Hag Chorus.
However, wouldn’t it have been nice if the NAACP had back then — and even earlier — used the full heft of its voting block and the long pull of its purse strings to snap close potential campaign contributions to get the president’s attention and lean on that snitch to say something definitive about same-sex marriage?
Instead, still basking in the Black History Month Hallmark-Jet-Ebony-Essence afterglow and wet spot of what I call firstblackitus, blacks have given and continue to give him a black hall pass.
Here’s what’s what: Heterosexual marriage is a federally and internationally recognized contract protecting and encouraging wealth-building, and all national conversations about throwing the table scraps of that contract to gays and lesbians that use any combination of the words “entitled to the same happiness as…” is a colossal distraction from the real issues of rampant (mostly) white male heterosexual fear that freaky butt-fucking, pussy-eating homos may get the same entitlements or — GASP! — take the same, leveled-off economic playing fields they do.
Sadly, many gays and lesbians have bought into the sentimental okey-doke of “entitled to the same happiness as…” and have, therefore, weakened the teeth within all the same-sex marriage talk.
It is because subcultures aspire to the same insanities majority culture practices. As long as same-sex marriage legislation will include full rights to the co-ownership of and equal transfer of wealth and properties, the legal recognition of adoption and co-parenting and a binding contract/license that’s not a placebo, then I am all for it.
Until then, fuck a fag hag’s “endorsement” or a civil rights group’s “support.”
I am newly partnered. In our partnership talks we discuss co-habitation, shared workloads, co-parenting, traveling, financial stability.
Each time we have these talks, I look around. Ain’t a fag hag to be found.
Check this weeks article HERE
