Notes on My Baby Is Black

Notes on “My Baby Is Black”

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“What is most striking here
is that Riggs’s assertion of
“film as Memory” again
envisions, through the
cinematic, the rendering
of history predicated on
the look.”—David Gerstner,
“Marlon Riggs,” Queer Pollen

1 Blaxploitation flicks are sometimes difficult for “heroicizing” the past, the present or the future. At least when it comes to movies like “My Baby Is Black”—if you know what I mean?

2 Rethinking Black history-memory, redoing queer historigraphic narrative, problematizing what “film as memory” envisages through the cinematic...

3 Rendering gay history through representation incorporating straight ideology, heterosexist mythology, dinge cultural artifacts & remodeling it in a linear, discursive investigation sometimes kills the “queer soul in the machine.”

4 Last weekend I watched the movie-version of Chester Himes’s “Rage in Harlem” (1991). Then I stayed late into the night watching "My Baby Is Black" (1961)—the trashy yet fascinating earlier blaxploitation flick filmed in Paris.

5 The jump between “film as memory” as “film as exploitation” isn’t really that much—both movies are rather straight linear experiences. “Memory as non-linear” interpreting them makes more & more sense to me.

6 How to stay in that “memory as non-linear” mode while “historicizing” & “heroicizing” the present—seems to me to be the trick in rendering straight fiction into film & queer day-to-day-life as in "Tongues Untied,” Marlon Riggs's gay documentary moment.

7 “My Baby is Black” (1961) was a seminal quasi-“Ethnic Notions” mockumentary film for me—similar & yet completely different than Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” (1959) in terms of gay racial politics. Françoise (Françoise Giret) the pregnant woman in Claude Bernard-Aubert’s film—is somewhat different than Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) in the infamous Lana Turner soap-opera flick.

8 Riggs’s assertion of “film as memory”—envisions through the cinematic rendering of gay history a documentary style predicated on "The Look": the queer Eye as Queens of Spades. Sarah Jane tries to “pass” & Françoise hopes to pass as well with her newborn child. But shock of shocks—“My Baby is Black!!!” So much for "passing" in Paris, my dears.

9 How does one “historicize” something like that? The whole film is meant to shock & over-dramatize—showing that not only is the kid black but that the mother has been having a taboo & forbidden sexual affair with a black man. Something that was at the cutting-edge of race-relations & desegregation in the early ‘60s.

10 The same with Sarah Jane—smooching & probably having sexual intercourse with Troy Donahue was never shown. While Sarah Jane kept coaxing Troy to run-away with her... away from her closety colored past & the lowly black mother (Lana Turner's maid) who is her eternal shame.

11 The alley-scene between Sarah & Troy is the kind of violent outing that “looking back/future/retroactive becoming” historiography problematizes for gays, using linear narratives (“shot, selected, supervised by straights/whites)—for making such scenes seem “causative and bloodless.” The violence is mostly some weak-wristed, soap-opera bitch-slapping & some groveling in the trash can alley with gushing tears. When actually violent memory can be non-linear & sometimes very bloody & seminal.

12 When I took Dwayne to see “Imitation of Live” at the local Granada Theater in local Shitville—he thought the film was more ho-hum boring than depressing. The trashy romanticized back-alley bitch-fight scene between Donahue & Kohner seemed much too straightforward & bloodless—even though it was supposed to seem full of revengeful rough-trade & violent betrayal.

13 But when I snuck him into the Lavender Cinema in Kansas City the next weekend to see “My Baby Is Black”—the opening scream-scene with sirens & the scuzzy Parisian surgeon smoking a cigarette while delivering the kid seemed perfect to Dwayne. The whole film was much more down & out, racially realistic & revealingly semi-documentary in terms of mixed-race sexuality & gritty ugly Euro-cosmopolitan discrimination—than Douglas Sirk’s rather polite & circumspect middleclass soap-opera version of scandal.

14 David Gerstner in “Queer Pollen” looks at how Riggs develops out of “Ethnic Notions” & “Long Train Running” the idea of recreating history (or histories) from more traditional generic spatial/temporal documentaries—into a more “non-linear” style of film-making with "film as memory” for queer cinema as with “Tongues Untied” and “Black Is…Black Ain’t.”

15 I would like to do the same: beginning with “Imitation of Life” & other traditional straight blaxploitation mockumentaries—and then proceeding in a gay nonlinear manner into the relevance of “My Baby Is Black” & other blaxploitation flicks as my own improvisational jazz-history of Dwayne Jerome’s Afro-American history, his being our mother's "love-child," the way he became my kid-brother "lover" in high school & how I fell in love with what DJ inherited from his saxophonist father in Chicago.

16 Gerstner quotes Johnny Waters in a Mississippi interview: "When you are a blues musician something is adapted to you, like a disease… an incurable disease… and it is something you have to stay with just like this disease is going to stay with you.” That's how I felt about DJ's rather generous young male endowment...all 12 thick veiny uncut inches of it. It was like a disease...an incurable addictive disease called dinge love.

17 “Baby, I wonder what’s gonna happen to me?”—that’s a question I’m still asking myself even now, thinking about "gay shame" as a “creative generative historical force”—the incurable disease inside me. The camera lens of Claude Bernard-Aubert in “My Baby Is Black”—commingling space & time, renders through film my own queer memories of 3 years of intense sex with my younger kid brother DJ.

18 “My Baby Is Black!” renders my own gay shock & shame—into a “non-linear/non-logical” dissolve going into black images, American culture, gay music & impromptu spontaneous “oral traditions.” My own “looking back/future/retroactive becoming”—has made a gay blaxploitation version of my life available to me through my attitude of shame that’s gradually become the nexus for publishing something online like this Gay Delta Review.

19 I see my incestuous love-affair with my teenage handsome mulatto half-brother back in the early ‘60s as not only a historical faggot fact—but as a queer memory source for what happened to glbt consciousness back then & how I’m remembering it now in terms of Riggs's docu-queer activist cinema. Since it audaciously & challengingly rendered my sexual relationship with Dwayne Jerome more cinematically than most film, I see “My Baby Is Black” now as a gay "Grenzsituation" (border situation) moment in my own modest "coming-out" history mockumentary. My baby was indeed black...

20 Neither coming-out or falling in love situations were sudden “neatly causative & bloodless” queer gestalts for me like the alley-scene in “Imitation of Life”—rather they necessitated a faggoty remodeling of what we both were going through by taking charge of my recurring, menacing, yet creatively potent “incurable disease” from which there was no escape except through shame, racism, sexism & homophobia.

21 Black shame & gay shame—“Baby, I wonder what’s gonna happen to me?” This incurable disease of shame for both DJ & me was something like The Supremes singing "Shame, Shame, Shame" on the radio. We both had to deal with in our own ways. He had to deal with it in terms of being like Sarah Jane—wanting to pass in school for white when his dick was big & black. DJ wanting to date white chicks—wanting to go steady like the other guyz. But ashamed of his Afro-physique proclivities & well-endowed penis—with envy & rumors going on behind his back.

22 DJ was pretty much like Sarah Jane in male drag—his Negritude showed up sexually while the rest of him was light-skinned and high-yellow. His skin was paler white than mine in fact even albino—his red-hair was kinky down with his pubes but he kept his haircuts close to his skull with a buzz-cut like a young Marine. His only girlfriends were older women—who like heard about it through the grapevine or gay guyz who were dinge queens for guyz with lots of young Negritude down in their pants. And then there was me, of course—I was usually available. He felt guilty about it sometimes—but then he’d get drunk or stoned & look at me with "The Look." And then look away from me...I got the idea pretty fast.

23 Gerstner sees black shame as a “creative generative historical force”—a kind of disease hatched within the crucible of contemporary racist, white capitalism. In Riggs’s “Long Train Running,” he sees the blues as black diaspora & movement during WWII to LA—black consciousness on the rails, with dissolves into black music, culture, images, film clips.

24 Shame for me then was what made sex with DJ possible—I felt it & did him anyway. I can look back now feeling that shame—feeling it becoming retroactively a way of dealing with queer cravings, looking back from the future into getting it the way I did. My own “looking back/future/retroactive becoming”—although I’m not writing a Master’s thesis here with these notes or anything like what Riggs did at Berkeley for his academic career.

25 This isn’t a journalistic-art-historical writing piece for a second-year MA methodology paper—like Riggs’s “Secondary Sources: George Platt Lynes." Nor is it a personal coming-out narrative like Riggs’s “Memoir: Philip” like some first-year "What I Did Last Summer" journalism class.

26 These notes are more like a montage of white-black homoerotic impulses coming back to me—still very much intensely taboo & incestuous, queerly intermingling with themselves, cross-pollinating each other like queer pollen in different shades of looking back at a gay bildungsroman love-affair. “My Baby Is Black” is one cinematic lens—to see sex & romance with Dwayne Jerome “like a love story in an old war movie.” And the war movie continues...

27 “Imitation of Life” is another lens—for retrospective looking-back on lived-autobiographical cinematic self-portrayals. Embarrassment & obsequiousness is like shame & guilt—these are also part of the flashback process for me in terms of the personal transformation of a ‘60s dinge queen...mincing down thru the tulips where Angels fear to tread.

28 I don’t claim to be writing a tight, concise, journalistic narrative like Riggs’s “Memoirs”—but still I find Gerstner’s way of looking at the 4 Riggs themes in the piece effective: 1) coming out, 2) the relationship between black and white young manhood, 3) the homoerotics of man-to-man sexual & nonsexual romance and 4) the “Look”—which for me was the white dinge-queen gaze & the black-to-white looking-away view of things with DJ.

29 It’s this last point, the “look going both ways" that interests me. The gay-straight cinematic experience of watching both “Imitation of Life” & “My Baby Is Black” with Dwayne Jerome my younger dinge kid brother-lover has its own dimensions of black-masculinist power, white seduction, the troubling power of shame, as well as the complex strategies that dinge queens went through back then to embrace both lived simultaneities of shame & identity-shaping ideology from both POV's.

30 This is the thin ice both DJ & I were skating on back in the early ‘60s—whether we knew it then or not. Black “heterosexual self-pity” & black “masculine scapegoating”—was nothing new to me. I was used to it...it projected so much of the guilt, shame & self-loathing I went through back then to get what I wanted. To put up with what I didn't like...to help me with my queer urges for blackness, size & brotherly love.

31 It’s not easy for a younger brother to live with an older white gay brother—so there was this “projective potency” that fueled & permeated the subterfuge that defined the black-white relationship we had. Incest was an uneasy thicket, a paradoxical ticket—usually unframed cinematically even in such pseudo-blaxploitation films as MBIB & IOL.

32 There was a certain black masculinist demand to “not look” at me or what I was doing to him—the oral sex I engaged in with DJ being something re/disfiguring for him & uncomfortable to see on my face. Gradually though when he called me a "cocksucker" though like they did in school & on the streets...it was like Baldwin getting a rise outta being around a butchy white cop. Cross-pollination between races was a turn-on for Baldwin as in "Giovanni's Room"...yet it was detested by straight black activists like Ishmael Reed & LeRoy Jones as well as many homophobic black lit critics & queer-hating feminists. Reverse-discrimination withing the black community is waiting for a revelatory Novel...something like a True Confession Reverend Eddie Long Epistle to the 4 black youths he settled a lawsuit with for 4 million dollars recently down in the decadent Deep South of Miss Faulkner...

33 Subsequent eye-to-eye contacts after sex were rarely extended between DJ & me after sex—there was no desire on his part to “look” with an “intense stare” at what he saw as something shameful, shameless, far from intimate. Secret maybe...but not romantic like with a chick. Sometimes during climax, he’d even call me a girl’s first name or stare & ogle at some porno to get off as he fucked me in the mouth, through my tight lips & shooting my brains outta the back of my head...

34 Another reason there was no “penetrative gaze” between us like between Riggs & his whitey loverboy Philip—was that there was a perplexingly primitive, uncanny cannibalistic, uncontrolable man-eating fantasy lurking in the back of his mind about my queer dingehood desires & shameless sizequeenery taking over my rational side. That I'd perhaps lose it & revert to some kind of psychopathological S/M “lynching party” mode provoked by his well-endowed black manhood, that I'd lose control of myself & would savagely get carried away with my hunger for queer sexuality. He said I'd get this headhunter "Look" on my face for his dickmeant...and he'd get scared just looking at me going down on him. Especially when he lost it...
.
35 Something like that which was super-intimate between us—always seemed to have a certain amount of uncomfortable intensity perhaps even hidden violence which he held back for the longest time. Not just out of shame about having gay sex—but out of other more powerfully sadomasochistic taboos, male misgivings, animal fears & straight self-loathings like when he really lost it sometimes, feeling exceptionally vulnerable & especially helpless when “getting down” with me. Sometimes his stoney climaxes & "queer pollen" ejaculations were so strong—DJ almost fainted in my arms. Sometimes he actually did faint...coming at the same time. He couldn’t help it—he had to trust me. Talk about sucking off a young cumly Zombie boy...like Darby Jones nude at the Crossroads in that classic snake noir Jacques Tourneau flick "I Walked with a Zombie" (1943).

36 How did both Riggs & I make sex productive—these uneasy and ambiguous feelings of queer shame & homosexual desire? The cinematic experience of going to see movies—provided a useful point/counterpoint for me back then. I rewrote the Scripts & changed the Characters. While cinema-production for Riggs was serious documentary business...much more professional & impressive. Riggs went on to filming “Tongues Untied” and “Black Is…Black Ain’t”—while I got into filmic poetry in “Chicken” (1979)& “Size Queen” (1981) to frame my dinge-queen/size-queen representations along certain black Uranian lines. It's a filmic disease I still suffer from...redoing movies by gender-fucking the roles & doing new gay versions of classic drive-in blaxploitaion flicks like "Blackula Sucks" & "Black Snake Moans & Groans."

37 The dogged hetero-sentimentality that Riggs dealt with in dealing with schmaltzy, hetero, cocksure, stupid, asshole “Philip” in his "Memoir" flashback remembrance—was the same “hopelessly-hetero” attitude I was dealing with in terms of DJ’s repressed homophobia & only slightly sublimanted hetero feelings of violence toward fags. There never was a subtle change in any power relationship between white & black, between straight & gay, between him & me—things stayed pretty much the same. There was no happy Cinemascope "closure" or Wizard of Oz colorful gay "rainbow" story-ending for my black kid brother & me. No logical linear narrative or rational plot complications or complex TV Guide character development.

38 There wasn't any psychological transformation or mind-bending cinematic re/disfiguration of feelings or attitudes on DJ’s part—no magical uncloaking of any post-blowjob relavatory experiences that went beyond any attitude change of straight shame on his part. No Sedgwick-like change in the tension between the homoerotic and the wariness that defines white seduction of such youngmale blackness.

39 DJ’s sexuality was just as much a pulling away from intimacy—as was Troy Donahue’s violence in the back-alley with Sarah Jane once her dingeness had been revealed. DJ’s size enhanced his shame in fact—since I was a sizequeen as well as a dingequeen which made things even worse. I had the dinge disease bad...taking advantage of my vulnerable kid brother, craving his youngmale phallic size like Mapplethorpe & projecting all sorts of racist-slave block, cotton-patch history bullshit & antequated Mandinglo slave-owner consciousness on this kid who needed to get off.

40 As with Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrayal of his black lover in “Man in Polyester Suit”—half of the artistically audacious high-class commercial pulchritude was not only the model’s Afro-American skin color under the spotlight but also the well-endowed proportions of such exquisitely black masculine oower & penis-pulchritude. DJ was my "Prick in Polyester Suit"...they would've grabbed him up in Manhattan & gobbled him up with the fuckin' Plague...

41 One of the objections raised by black activists both gay & hetero has been the fact that Mapplethorpe was only interested in his lover/model’s penis, reducing him to nothing but a black phallus destending from a nude black physique cut-off at the neck without a headshot in the photo portrait.

42 But in actuality, it was the desire for privacy & the insistence of Mapplethorpe’s lover to disguise his identity & keep his relatives unaware of his NYC homosexual affairs with Mapplethorpe & the cosmopolitan gay art scene that resulted in the controversial portraits being carefully framed the way they were. Loaded on coke, Mapplethorpe getting him off...one can see why the young AWOL sailor from hicksville Tennessee was shy about letting the whole world oggle at his junk & see him shoot his brains out. For every artsy-commercial art portrait slick photo...how many times do you thing Robert Mapplethorpe got his lips on loaded dark chocolate going totally spaz there in his crummy Manhattan dumpy studio late at night...without any photos being taken at all except in the Mapplethorpe perfect perverted moment...

43 Perhaps the neck-shot photos were a flaw in Mapplethorpe’s “white admiration and seduction” routine—but then the couple actually flew back to Milton Moore’s Tennessee hometown once according to a trashy biographer. Mapplethorpe got to meet Moore’s tenement family—and took photos of Moore’s young chicken nephews outside the cockroach-infested apartment. This completely outraged Moore—who saw such chicken-hawk cruising of his “family tree” younger relatives as indicative of Mapplethorpe’s shocking, shameless obsession with young Negro size & adolescent black sexuality. One revealing photo taken of a handsome, sullen, moody teenage cousin of Milton Moore...shows the cute "spitting-image" of a young black Adonis basketball player leaning back in a cheap rusty metal lawn-chair with an all-knowing, precocious, very mature "Look" in his eyes.

44 Queer young black identity & sullen Negro phallic pulchritude—these two things became problematic with me as well. Disfiguration, admiration, condescension, brotherly benevolence, whiteness/blackness, looking-up-at & looking-down-at, closeness & distancing, assertion & letting-go, holding-it-back & coming—all these Afro-American roots & reefs of my relationship to my kid brother. Now it's all over YouTube & the Net...growing outta cellphones embedded in ghetto & ghost-mall heads. But back then for me at least...it was basically The Supremes with "Shame" & James Brown with "I Feel Good"...

45 DJ never said to me like Philip sayz to Riggs: “I never talk to anybody about my problems—except maybe you.” I was 18 & DJ was 16 when we broke-up & he gotta outta town by joining the Navy—already he was taller, more built & muscular than me. He “looked down” at me even when he was stretched naked out in bed—waiting for me to give him a blowjob.

46 I was smaller, less muscularly built than DJ—his basketball-player physique framed his sleek black body & domineered his black Adonis presence around me. His penis got to be 12” & fuckin' thick as my wrist—something that certainly aroused my admiring Mapplethorpe-gaze & "Man in Polyester Suit" brotherly incestuous penis-envy desires & deceits.

47 DJ’s looking-down at me & my looking-back up at him—these two ways of "looking" involved with young male black beauty & adolescent heterosexual veiny beauty looking down at me—what kind of queer dismay & faggy shame fermented & got regenerated by such illicit nightly encounters? Isn’t that what shame, incest, penis-envy, dinge-desire & oral sexuality enact & reenact in our memory—when “the look” is activated by a pseudo-Proustian remembrance of queer things past? Funny how many times it's purely spontaneous & comes outta the blue like a gift from the Faggy Id... Tea & marmalade flashbacks...tight testicles & K-Y deja-vu heartbreakers...

48 Which brings up the matter of dinge power-relationships for me—things that bump in the night like paranormal pricks...psychic sexualities that manage to remind me of the look on DJ’s distended face as it oozed off the edge of the bed onto the floor with him hitting his head against the headboard at night...the way he kept ogling cross-eyed & spastically down at me & my looking back up at him lip-locked to his straining obscene anaconda. Worshipping him—my kid brother's lanky athletic physique, his black sexuality that wouldn't quit, his cumly losing of his runny family jewels. Why did he even bother gazing down at me sometimes—when he wouldn’t look at my face most of the time having sex. Was he thinking how much he needed me... judging me by the way I shameless got my lips on him & got every skanky squirt? Who permitted himself to be seduced by his own queer cocksucking older brother... who was obviously nuttier than a fuckin' fruitcake obsessed like some faggy Son of Dracula?

49 One could say it was all disingenuous sentiments & DJ simply using me to get off that's all. That we were both permitting ourselves to be used & abused by each other—it was just down & dirty sex-business whether one calls it homo or hetero sexuality?

50 There was this "shot/reverse-shot" sequence between DJ & me—after we watched "My Baby Is Black" & "Imitation of Life." After we had sex together...lying in bed next to each other listening to the radio late at night. Sometimes quietly DJ would tell me in a low voice afterwards—that he needed a chick to feel like a man... but maybe I'd do in a pinch every once in awhile. Like everynight... I laughed & he laughed...and then we were both silent for awhile. I told him I needed a guy to feel like a man too...maybe he understood me, maybe he didn't. It was like we were both lying to each other...and reassuring each other that we needed the Other to survive & feel human. Even though, of course, that Other wasn't him or me...but some other Other instead.

51 DJ identified with Sarah Jane—being rejected & going through the same mind-fucks because of her blackness & attempts to pass for white. DJ wanted to “pass” like Sarah Jane in Imitation of Life—but his black penis made it difficult if not impossible. At least in gym & at the YMCA. If he lived in the closet, didn’t take showers & kept outta sight—maybe his boyfriends & girlfriends would never know he was black. He was a fair-skinned high-yellow African-American kid—he had mother’s red hair, her kinky orange pubes & freckled complexion.

52 DJ didn’t feel sorry for Françoise (Françoise Giret) in Claude Bernard-Aubert’s film MBIB. Françoise was white & she didn't have to pass for white like he wanted to. She had an affair with a young handsome black dude in Paris—like our mother had there during her getaway in Chicago. He felt more like the kid Françoise had in childbirth at the beginning of the flick—delivered by the skuzzy cigarette-smoking surgeon who looked like he'd seen everything. The French nurses were the same way...they weren't shocked really in the least by the black newborn enfant. The only one shocked was Francoise who should've expected it. The blaxploitation drive-in theater audience expected it...what would one expect with a movie title like "My Baby Is Black!" The only thing really shocked was the crummy racist Zeitgeist back then in the early '60s. And even that was fake...in a satiric sensationalist way that appealed to closeted racist prurient interests. Except the kid in "My Baby Is Black" grows up into today's mixed-racial cities, towns & ghettos—like Dwayne Jerome did in our hometown Shitsville.

53 According to Gerstner, a judge in the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame considered “Tongues Untied” flawed—because of something called obsequiously “white admiration & seduction” in the movie. WTF would the esteemed film critic have thought of Mapplethorpe's later even more blatant white admiration of blackness in "Man in Polyester Suit" and other highly esteemed & valuable studio artwork?

54 What about this "shot/reverse-shot" double-take look in the overdetermined positioning of the Mapplethorpe-Milton Moore relationship—the closeted male-male relationship between Riggs & Philip? Riggs is forced to “look up” at Philip—trying to return the paternalistic whitey gaze looking down at him...which Riggs couldn't do, resulting in his trip into self-discovery at Berkeley with the fermenting & regenerating of homosexual shame, condescension, regret, worship & other emotional assertions into somethig going beyond simply the holding back of the gaze.

55 DJ doesn’t even bother returning my gaze—the "shot/reverse-shot" double-take reflection of my white admiration/black seduction mind-game. He doesn’t want to perceive the "frame" of the shot—but simply controls it by not looking down at my worshipping fellatio face & queer whitey admiration of his athletic physique. Did he perceive the frame, see the shot—know the film the way I knew it?

56 Who authorizes the filmic “suturing” of this blowjob scene between DJ & me—the classical cinematic setup querying the way that only the subject himself (me) is authorized to see the frame & shot of what’s happening? Or was perhaps DJ that epitomized the emotional coolness of being aloof from the queer action—associated with modern Japanese manga Yakuza gang films like Director Takeshi Kitano’s “Brother” (2000)? The quick comicbook takes & action-filled manga frames that appeal to young Japanese cineastes today? Something to extend my "brother to brother" Riggs filmic awareness to...Takeshi Kitano as "Beat" Takeshi with his younger gangster half-brother, African-American actor Omar Epps...

57 Or is there another possibility—using the idea of queer whiteness ruling the frame? Returning the frame back to queer cinematic pleasure—by allowing the queer white cocksucker to redirect, re/disfigure the gaze of his younger dinge half-brother? Redoing frame...redirecting the film.

58 Given the possibility of being gay moviegoer, queer director and homosexual actor in the same frame—isn’t the possibility of cinematic suture as ideological mechanism more possible with the bottom-up "Look" of characters down-under instead of the other way going down? The “look” up at DJ being the new redirected gaze—instead of the top-down relationship of him looking away or hardly ever watching the unwatchable?

59 By recuperating the Imaginary subject & refusing the hetero-dominating illusion of cinematic suture—isn’t that the way the Imaginary subject incorporates shame for productive possibilities? A “shamed” subject—with different gay spectatorial resistances which has multiple levels of agency?

60 For example, there’s the matter of experiencing a young heteromasculine black male’s climax, long drawn-out ejaculation & excruciating post-orgasmic aftershocks. Being privy to feel, touch & taste DJ’s oozing, thick, snotty pearls of virile hung Negritude that “glisten in the late-night shadows” has given me a certain aestheticized homoerotic sympathy with Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.”

61 Like the “droog” gangster-leader in Kubrick’s film—I can’t close my eyes or take my eyes off the violence & hypertheatrics of the production. They're stapled & pinned open by my obsessive queer oral urges. My eyes are wide-open shut & I can't see through them anymore than I can coerce myself away from the pre-filmic cum-shot of knowing, watching, tasting, getting DJ off. My willingly or unwillingly ogling queer-engorged bulging eyeballs—getting into “going down” & being seduced by DJ’s mulatto theater of black dick desire…

62 Was DJ a wholesome, all-American, goodwill lover for me—or just a skanky young wolf in sheep’s clothing? In some ways I suppose it was a marriage of convenience—we both needed each other, we used & abused each other for 3 years in high school & then he joined the Navy. Was it to just see the world—or maybe it was just to get away from me? Probably both—cramming me with enough “droog” oysters during our so-called love-affair to last a lifetime maybe. Well, at least until I followed him down to San Diego before he flew to Nam...

63 I inherited an aging art deco (actually a 1940’s streamline moderne) apartment house after mother died—I moved into the penthouse apartment up on the 4th floor & had the whole joint remodeled like new. Then I started renting the other 3 floors with 12 apartments to college students. On weekends the art deco glass-block window corners—glowed & oozed young male collegiate sexual libido out into the night like a steady dull phosphorescent underwater temple to my kid brother who got killed in Nam...