Some Of My Best Heroes Are Black
Celebrating Black History Month
I realize that I absorb waaaaayyyy too much content in my obsession to know what is going on with our culture—or rather, attempting to comprehend what is going on with our culture. There’s such a thing as too much TikTok. TikTok overload. I fucking hate TikTok. It’s extreme. Extreme mental illness, and ignorance, and astonishing, delusional grandiosity parading as political activism. It’s not pretty.
This month, being Black History Month, many of the YouTubers I follow are sharing some straight up ugly videos from other content creators. Pure racism. Featuring people of color instructing white folks what they can and cannot do this month—making clear the line in the sand, and who this month is about; who it isn’t about. Such is the psychosis of our current cultural moment that, even during what should be a month of celebration and remembrance of, but mainly, for black people, so many would rather spew hate and perpetuate strife.
Well, I don’t care. Black art and artists, musicians and singers, cultural and literary heroes, and some of the dearest, beloved people in my life? These are inseparable from my history. So fuck the haters. I’m celebrating.
When I was a stagestruck kid growing up in the Boston suburbs in the 1970s, I did not only dream of being a child star, I believed I was a child star. I became obsessed, from an early age, with child stars and juvenile actors, from Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, to the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family kids. I was a member of the Jimmy Osmond Fan Club. Annie was the first Broadway show I ever saw, and Andrea McArdle was everything—until I found Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in The Wiz. Just picture tiny asthmatic 10 year-old me in my bedroom, lip synching my heart out to “Home”, with tears streaming down my face.
But my biggest idol? The one I was obsessed with? Michael Jackson.
The Jackson Five were a fixation of mine. I had all of their records, including 45s of all of Michael’s singles (I mean—“Ben?” Come on). I was glued to the TV whenever they made a guest appearance on one of the fabulous variety shows of the era. I watched the Jackson Five cartoon every Saturday, and I could do all of Michael’s moves to “I Want You Back.” As a small kid, he oozed confidence and ease, and a kind of fresh-faced charisma; he sang with perfect pitch and expert styling. Michael was older than me by a few years, and I looked up to him so much.
It was around this time, while seeking out more child stars to admire, that I saw old film footage of a seven year old Sammy Davis, Jr. He was tap dancing up a storm; owning the stage with his tiny self and huge personality. Being the little research geek I was, I started collecting Sammy’s records and seeking out his films and….well, Sammy became my ultimate idol. If I could sing like any man alive or dead, it would be Sammy. He could do it all: act, dance, sing, do impressions, dramatic films, Broadway shows, the Rat Pack. He was supreme.
I went full disco when I was a tween. I was studying jazz dance (remember that the big movies of the time were things like Fame, All That Jazz, Flashdance—I mean, I wore leg warmers to school!), but also, a local girl had just made it BIG: the sublime Donna Summer, “The Girl from Roxbury.” I adored her music. When she hit the big screen in the now extremely cringe Thank God It’s Friday, I got the record and added it to my growing disco collection; I had all of Donna’s albums. As the hustle champion of my temple youth group, I danced the Latin Hustle to “On the Radio” at all my friends’ bar mitzvahs. I still adore Donna.
Now, my mother was a huge jazz fan—her father was something of an afficianado of jazz as well as opera music. The great Lena Horne was his all time crush. So, I grew up with, and came to love, all the great ladies of jazz, whose recordings played daily in our home: Billie, Ella, Carmen, Dinah. As a young man, I had the thrill of stumbling into a performance by Sarah Vaughan at the Blue Note which transformed me; I saw Alberta Hunter perform at nearly 100 years of age, full of sass and wisdom.
I started college in Boston in 1983, and believe me, being a gay teenager in Boston, or indeed, anywhere in America in the early 80s, was tough. Lots of abuse. Bullying. Discrimination on and off campus. I was fortunate to have some older gay mentors, who passed along to me the books which had changed them and given them the kind of mirror of their experience which the culture did not, and could not, at the time. One such book was Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I didn’t know Baldwin was black when I read that book—to me he was speaking my life, my hidden desire, the truth of my being burning inside me. He was speaking to all of us outcasts. It was only later, when I immersed myself deeply in Baldwin’s work that I discovered his wisdom, passion, pain, poetry. His work has been central to my growth as a gay man and as an American. He’s essential to my history.
In the 1980s, gay men had to find each other through clandestine hooking up and in the nightlife subculture of the clubs. Gay clubs were more than gay: because the best music and best deejays were there, everyone wanted to be there, and everyone, gloriously, was. In the clubs I found new divas to adore, principal among them the iconic, majestic Grace Jones. Grace did it all first, kids—she broke all the rules: of gender, race, style, interpretation; way before Michael Jackson and Madonna, she pioneered the new medium of the music video, in wild artistic ways. Goddess.
Around the same time, I was introduced to the meteor that was Prince. We all became obsessed with Prince when his first album hit, and we were suddenly dancing to “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” and marveling at this brilliant Mozart of the dance floor, who played all the instruments and sang all the vocals. And his androgynous, rapacious, audacious sexual power and charisma? No one like him, before or since.
And speaking of goddesses, around this time Dynasty was all the rage and I was suddenly aware of Diahann Carroll. She’d been on TV throughout my childhood but it was not until her bitch-tastic turn as Dominique Devereaux that I became obsessed. My father, a scholar of all things theatre, especially musical theatre, educated me on the great Diahann Carroll, playing her albums and the Broadway original cast recordings of No Strings (first woman of color to win a Tony for Best Actress in a Musical) and House of Flowers. Diahann was a massive star across the landscape of the entire entertainment industry. In addition to the Tony she won—for playing a woman in an interracial relationship, on Broadway in 1962!—she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar (Claudine, 1974); won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series (Julia, 1968); and numerous Emmy Award nominations. She was literally everything.
Speaking of pioneering black women in the arts, let’s talk Audra McDonald. When I moved to NYC in 1993, I took part time work as an usher on Broadway and at Lincoln Center Theatre to see as much theatre as I could. How lucky am I to have been able to see Audra’s debut, as Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel, twelve times? Ohmigod. People. Audra had just come out of Juilliard, and her voice was celestial, but it was more than that—I got to witness the arrival of a star. Audra lit up the stage with her presence, her freshness, her virtuosity. The rest, of course, is history. She’s, without question, the Meryl Streep of Broadway.
There are so many more I could mention, and would. Stars long gone and stars on the rise. Have you seen and listened to the sublime Samira Joy? Oh, do. Do, please. And watch the extraordinary Cabin in the Sky, Vincente Minnelli’s first film at M-G-M, starring the magnificent Ethel Waters, Eddie Anderson, the luscious Lena Horne, Rex Ingram, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong! Life-changing when I saw it first.
I can’t end this essay without sharing my love and admiration for the black heroes in my own family: my late lamented, eternally beloved sister, Clea Coburn Beaman, who was adopted at six months and raised in an almost entirely white community. In her short life, as that community grew more diverse and accepting, Clea became a much loved member of it. She had the biggest heart…sadly, it wasn’t strong enough. I miss her. She lives on, though, in my two gorgeous nieces, Katy and Keira, and my nephew Dan, who put himself through school, is training toward a job in the police force, and is getting married to his lady love, Eliza, next year. These kids are beautiful and sensitive and have overcome a lot of adversity, and yeah—call me corny, they are certainly heroes to me.
Happy Black History Month to them, to you, and may we all reconnect with the richness and true diversity that is core to what it means to be American—the cross cultural sharing of music, and art, storytelling and food and family, and, I hope, collective historical healing, instead of perpetual racial strife.
This is so wonderful - many of these same actors, singers, musicians are people I’ve admired and related to through my years of exploring the diverse field of entertainment. It never matters to me what color a person’s skin is - my only criteria for admiring an artist and their work, is the work - and if I connect with it, and in turn, them. How we limit ourselves, or have others try to limit us - if we’re not “allowed” to cross all lines of race, culture, gender, etc. to connect with, and find glorious emotional harmony that enrich our lives. And without being accused of trying to appropriate another’s culture.
I do believe the Cabin in the Sky has a Russian Jewish connection btw. Going back to an earlier post of yours, it can be easy to forget how closely the two communities did work together in many areas to the benefit of both. Cabin in the Sky does show that collaboration quite clearly.
But hooray for doing this because Americana, particularly the American theater and music in general owes a huge debt to the black American performers, composers, arrangers, and indeed the mostly forgotten people who kept the show on the road. You simply can't disentangle them from the story. it is wonderful that the nearly erased are being finally being inked back in. They are an integral part of American culture.