Of course he wasn't "my poet." He was my friend who was also a poet. I'd had other friends who wrote poetry and who had even published with commercial presses, but MW was the real deal. A poet through and through. It was poetry that extracted him from the dead-end factory jobs at which he had labored for 16 years. He still lived in his hometown of Baltimore where he had married young and fathered a son, born with Down Syndrome and dead after ten months. He came as close to spiritual extinction as most people do under the grind of uncreative work and the responsibility of providing for his family, but he never stopped feeling, never stopped writing.   In 1985, at the age of 34, he got his break. A volume of poetry published by a major university press and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship sprung him from the factory, and he resumed his long-abandoned path in higher education, culminating in an MFA in creative writing from Brown University.   MW and I met at New York University where we were both aspirants to a secure berth in a prestigious institution of higher education (MW ultimately succeeded; I didn't). MW was hired as an adjunct to teach creative writing and courses in African American literature in the English Department. As a newly-minted Ph.D., I had received a teaching fellowship to develop courses in African literature in the Department of Comparative Literature. Our paths crossed when I audited his course on African American drama (and was appalled by the clumsily nihilistic Rachel , a play written by Angelina Weld Grimké in 1916 which advocated racial suicide).  During the two years, our professional paths paralleled in New York, we struck up an unlikely friendship based on literature, a respect for each other's intelligence, and his tolerance for my then-monumental ignorance for what the Black experience was really  like in spite of my years in Africa and subsequent academic studies. In so many ways we were opposites. MW was straight; on his second wife with whom I got along famously; was proudly and consciously working class, and was a poet. I was gay; conventionally promiscuous (NYU was a 20-minute walk from Christopher Street); arrogantly thought that my time in Africa and studies outside of the white middle class had broadened me; and wrote facile literary criticism.  And yet we were friends. Our agreements and disagreements about literature stimulated us both. As he educated me about the subtleties of class and color in the Black community, I spoke to him about the perplexities of race, class and internalized homophobia in the gay and lesbian world (this was 1990, and the queer alphabet hadn't been invented yet). Our personal discussions could occasionally go deep. MW had a lot of pain to exorcise, and I was a sympathetic listener to his songs of dissatisfaction -- the usual racist crap from white society; the elitist crap from the academic class into which he had "risen." During one of our conversations, he confessed to being sexually abused as a child. (I'm breaking no confidences here; he later brought it all up through therapy, confronted his abuser, and incorporated it into his poetry.)   We were maturing men at the beginning of promising literary careers in New York. The pace and crowd of the city could be oppressive: sensory overload was the norm; and it was hard to break through people's ambitions to SUCCEED and know them as vulnerable humans. MW and I immediately established a soul-to-soul communication (though his soul was immeasurably deeper than mine). We can both tell you of magic walks we took together through Brooklyn and Manhattan. I and my Trinidadian boyfriend went to his apartment in Orange, NJ where we danced the electric slide along with his wife's closeted gay uncle who beamed at us approvingly.  Life took us in different directions. With my academic path blocked, I returned to California to be with my family. MW prospered both as a teacher and a poet. He snagged a position at Rutgers and lived in Philadelphia for the next eight years. With frequent trips to the East Coast, I was able to maintain our friendship for a while. In 1993 I attended the premiere of his one produced play and was his confidant when he fell in love with the female lead, thus accelerating the failure of his second marriage. (The flirtation was only a notch on her belt but a serious wound to MW's heart.)  The geographical separation took its toll. I stayed in California working my dead-end job as a computer literacy consultant during the 90s. MW ended up in a nicely tenured position at a Boston college; he continued writing and publishing to ever-greater acclaim, the recipient of numerous awards.  He took a deep dive into Chinese culture not typical of African American writers. I had given up on fiction but not on the academic book that eventually got accepted by a university press and which nobody read. We eventually stopped communicating.   Poets are a special breed. They are attuned to language and all its ramifications in ways that we are not. "Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter," to quote John Keats. I've suspected that the most avid readers of poetry are other poets. Poetry is not the genre I turn to first when I choose to read for pleasure. Thus, I am not so familiar with the extensive oeuvre of "my poet." Years later, long after we had stopped communicating, I was asked to write a one-page summary of a number of African American writers for a coffee table photo book. MW became once again my poet, and so I dipped into his world of words anew. I found myself again enchanted. And this is part of what I wrote about his poem, "Beginnings."   "His vision transforms the modest house of his childhood ... into portals of transcendence and cosmic communion."  Inside it had no end; the stairs led to God's tongue   the basement was a warm door   to the labyrinth of the Earth.   We lived on the rising chest of a star.   "But all this is extinguished with the introduction of violence when the young boy draws his first blood in a fist fight."  The world became many houses,      all of them under siege   If you are lucky, you've been transfixed -- more than once -- by a lyric or a line that has captured you in all its senses.  "Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on."  -- Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Poetry and Lynching SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

And when I say "clueless," I'm talking specifically about African American culture. I grew up in Pasadena during the 50s and 60s. There were no Blacks in my neighborhood and Pasadena High School at the time in the halcyon days before court-ordered bussing (Pasadena was the second city outside the South to have that mandate clamped down upon it) had an African American enrollment of 8%. During the 1930s, Ruby McKnight Williams moved to Pasadena from Kansas with the intention of working in the public schools only to discover that the city did not hire Black teachers. “I didn’t see any difference in Pasadena and Mississippi except they were spelled differently,” she remarked. My parents, being Jewish (and therefore suspect as the only Jewish family in our neighborhood), were good New Deal liberals, and though they endorsed an anti racist ideology, they didn't have much opportunity to put it into practice. Their musical taste wasn't particularly advanced, and though we had some Ella Fitzgerald LPs in their collection, I never heard the blues or had the blues even though I was plenty unhappy as a social reject. The blues wasn't about that.  My college days at the mostly white University of California Santa Cruz didn't increase my exposure significantly. I read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth without much comprehension. (This was during the late 60s and early 70s.) The music I was listening to as part of the rock 'n roll generation was marinated in the blues, but I didn't recognize it as such. The only version of Robert Johnson's "Love In Vain" I knew about was that of the Rolling Stones. I certainly enjoyed "God Bless the Child" on the self-titled album by Blood, Sweat and Tears, but I was always a sucker for horns.Yes, I had heard that Elvis stole "Hound Dog" from Big Momma Thorton, but I never sought out any of her recordings. How could you top the King? With the exception of Motown, popular music was still fairly segregated, and I had never been one to comb through record bins searching for Blind Lemon Jefferson. Some of the white bands blasted the blues in your face (Cream, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers), and though I enjoyed the virtuoso guitar of Eric Clapton (still do), I never fell down amazed on the musical Road to Damascus. My soul was not open to the blues. Decades later, I was shepherded towards the blues through my research in the Queer Harlem Renaissance. I was confused at first because I had never heard of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, or Alberta Hunter. Wasn't the blues perfected by oppressed Black men during the Depression? There was martyred Robert Johnson, saint Leadbelly, B.B. King and his inamorta Lucille. Who were these women; what was the Classic Blues? Some of the songs I researched were cute but either sounded dated ("Kitchen Mechanic Blues") or were so poorly recorded that they were difficult to appreciate (any of Ma Rainey's songs put out by Paramount).  Fortunately Columbia had done right by Bessie Smith. Carl Van Vechten was so taken with Bessie's output that he bought two copies of every side, one to play and one to keep in mint condition for the future. So when I heard "Young Woman's Blues" and "Down Hearted Blues," I was softened up in spite of my advanced age. Furthermore, her renditions of such songs as "After You've Gone" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" dusted off the cobwebs from these pop classics. Many songs, especially Etta James' heartswept version of "At Last," helped pierce the cultural wax in my ears. For a more recent example, "Another Life Goes By" by Christone Kingfish Ingram stopped me in my tracks. And then it turned out -- who knew? -- that my hometown of Oakland not only claimed an important role in blues history but that it nurtures a healthy blues scene after a time of attrition due to the town's economic strangulation during the latter decades of the 20th century. Now we're solvent again, thanks to the Silicon Valley octopus (Frank Norris reference here). Blues collaborators such as Ronnie Stewart, Executive Director of the West Coast Blues Society, and Tia Carroll whose fantastic cover of Ma Rainey's "Prove It On Me Blues" (not a blues) launched Shoga's film line-up back in 2005, also contributed to my education.  Apparently you can teach old dogs new licks. See y'all at the Everett and Jones BBQ on the first Saturday of every month. Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The First White Promoter of the Blues SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Before there was the record producer John Hammond (not to be confused with the white blues musician John P. Hammond), before there was the British Invasion of the 1960s, there was (sigh) the music and dance critic, successful light novelist, socialite and tastemaker Carl Van Vechten who, during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance in 1925 and 26, introduced the blues to white America. This he did through several articles in Vanity Fair, the monthly magazine of popular culture that exposed Americans outside of New York to trendy topics, modern graphics, and a tone of humorous cynicism. The first of these articles, "The Black Blues" (August 1925) stands up remarkably well even a century later. Van Vechten had immersed himself in Harlem culture and was nothing if not a quick study. Also, being a music critic of long standing, he appreciated and explained the technical aspects of the genre -- the pentatonic scale, the improvised vocalizations, the innovative combinations of instruments. "Notwithstanding the fact that the musical interest ... is often of an extremely high quality, I would say that in this respect the Blues seldom quite equal the Spirituals. The words, however, in beauty and imaginative significance, far transcend in their ... poetic importance the words of the religious songs. They are eloquent with rich idioms, metaphoric phrases, and striking word combinations." Van Vechten goes on to quote, with attribution, assessments of the blues culled from personal communications with W.C. Handy and Langston Hughes. The passage from Hughes' letter to Van Vechten has become foundational. "The blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to." Why the sigh preceding the introduction of Van Vechten earlier? Van Vechten was a complex and contradictory character. His "discovery" of Harlem in the 1920s and the good-faith efforts he exerted to publicize what was then known as The Negro Renaissance were both extraordinarily fruitful (he secured the publication of Langston's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues) and, in certain instances, quite toxic. The most bedeviling instance of Van Vechten's impact was the 1926 publication of his novel, Nigger Heaven, and this also involved his literal appropriation of the blues, although the title of his book was so incendiary that the inclusion of actual blues lyrics without permission might have seemed like a minor infraction except for the threat of lawsuits following its bestseller status. In a panic, Van Vechten asked his friend Langston to quickly come up with substitute blues lyrics for subsequent printings, and the young poet complied. Although that staved off legal action, Langston's evident support couldn't entirely mitigate the public relations disaster amongst the Black intelligentsia occasioned not only by the title but by Van Vechten's pulpy and sensationalistic depictions of Harlem's nightlife. (The novel begins with the lurid doings of a pimp known as The Scarlet Creeper.) Although W.E.B. DuBois scathingly reviewed the novel as "a blow in the face" and "an affront to Negro hospitality," that didn't hurt its popularity amongst the white readership, and Nigger Heaven was by far the most commercially successful of Van Vechten's novels. But we have strayed somewhat from Van Vechten's championship of the blues, a cultural stance far ahead of its time, not only for a white man but for many African Americans as well. In an astute comparison with the recuperated status of the Spirituals during the 1920s, he writes of the blues, "The humbleness of their origin and occasionally the frank obscenity of their sentiment are probably responsible for this condition [of being looked down upon]. In this connection it may be recalled that it has taken over fifty years for the Negroes to recover from their repugnance to the Spirituals, because of the fact that they were born during slave days. Now, however, the Negroes are proud of the Spirituals, regarding them as one of the race's greatest gifts to the musical pleasure of mankind. I predict that it will not be long before the Blues will enjoy a similar resurrection which will make them as respectable, at least in the artistic sense, as the religious songs." He was right about that. Fifty years after the publication of his appreciation, the genre's conquest of new audiences amongst urban Blacks (the Chicago Blues) and its fervent embrace by white British and American rockers (the Rolling Stones, the Beatles) sealed its status as one of the most creative and consequential contributions of African American culture to the world. (Queer nota bene. Van Vechten's next Vanity Fair article on the subject, "Negro 'Blues" Singers," [March 1926] profiled Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and Clara Smith -- all bisexual women.)  Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in Growing Up Clueless SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

America hates old people. Aging out of relevance, health, and a community of peers as they die off is no fun even if one has wealth or family love to cushion these failings. The queers of the Harlem Renaissance were particularly vulnerable to the perils of aging – if they made it that far. Wallace Thurman committed suicide by alcohol at age 31. Countee Cullen died of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning aged 42. Hypertension killed A’Lelia Walker at 46, which was understandable since she was on the brink of losing her mother’s financial empire, the C. J. Walker Beauty Company, with the deepening of the Great Depression. Most of these men and women were in the prime of adulthood when they experienced the glory days of the Renaissance. Claude McKay was a good ten years older than the other writers whom he so influenced, and he contended with poverty, failing health, and a lack of community all the sooner. He turned to the Catholic church for support. Nonetheless his conversion in 1943 shocked his friends and literary fans; they didn’t see it coming. By then he had moved to Chicago entirely supported by the Church. He died three years later of a heart attack at the age of 58. Alain Locke never felt sufficiently at home or free to come out of the closet in the bougie Black community of Washington, DC, but that was where his career lay as a Professor of Philosophy at Howard University, and it was in DC that he lived alone and emotionally isolated until his retirement in 1953. He moved to New York City the following year where he was diagnosed with – what else? – heart disease. (I’m sussing out a pattern here.) He expired after a six-week illness at age 68 – a long and productive life but a lonely one. Richard Bruce Nugent also enjoyed a long life, one of the longest. He was only 19 when his drawings and stories were published in the Black publications at the time. He had a checkered career afterwards as an artist and entered into a sexless marriage with a professional woman so in love with him that she agreed to those terms in the hope that he would change. When she committed suicide in 1969, Nugent lived out his remaining years close to becoming homeless and almost entirely forgotten. But he survived long enough to witness the birth of the post-Stonewall culture, even though he was initially unwilling to accept the gay label or proclaim solidarity with the movement. Nonetheless the movement found him, and he saw his work anthologized, became the key figure in the rediscovery of the Harlem Renaissance arts journal, Fire!!, and witnessed his growing reputation as a Black gay pioneer before he died in 1987, age 80. Because of his longevity and relative visibility as gay, Nugent benefitted from the support of a queer community that, obviously, wasn’t available to others who died earlier or who remained deeply closeted. When Langston Hughes lived out his final years in a Harlem, he didn’t need the support of a queer community which he wouldn’t have recognized as his own in any event. He had the African American community where he was respected, beloved, and had held the unofficial post of poet laureate of Harlem for decades. (Hughes bucked tradition by dying of surgery complications related to prostate cancer, age 66.) Did it matter to Langston that, despite his attractiveness, generous personality, and talent, shared his life with no other? We don’t know and we won’t know. But had Langston been gay and ensconced in a community that accepted queer relationships instead of exiling their culture heroes for the merest whisper of homosexuality (pace Bayard Rustin) . . . ah, but one can only speculate Being Black, susceptible to hypertension, socially isolated, without a long-term partner, and probably without financial security guaranteed a difficult old age. There were sunnier scenarios, and the best of these fell to the lot of the white writer, tastemaker, and socialite Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten promoted the Harlem Renaissance and his own status as a cultural critic simultaneously and with great success. He possessed money, talent, social graces, and a wife who adored him through the gay liaisons of their 50-year marriage. (He died in his sleep, age 84, in their marriage bed.) During the latter part of his life, Van Vechten collected and created one of the most important literary and historical archives of African American culture, the James Weldon Johnson Collection housed at Yale. Although Van Vechten was, of necessity, discreet about his queer proclivities, he left boxes of his “queer-eye” photographs and eighteen scrapbooks recording a vibrant life of homosexual desire. Van Vechten, never troubled about his own sexuality (he had that in common with Nugent), thoroughly indulged a camp sensibility, which prances out of the scrapbook pages. Cataloguing Van Vechten’s vast donation took a quarter of a century, but when the venerable institution finally got around to unpacking the scrapbooks, Van Vechten, anticipating their surprise, had penned as an inscription the supremely queenie comeback: “Yale May Not Think So, but It’ll Be Just Jolly.” Snap! Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in On Aging as a Gay Man SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

On the right! Look at the guy on the right! That’s me at age 69. The physical specimen with his arm around me is Adam, my personal trainer for the six months leading up to the 2019 Folsom Street Fair. I wanted a “Folsom Street body” at least once before I died, and I figured this would be my last shot. I was modeling myself, as we all did, after the mesomorphic hunks who flaunted their gym-built bodies. This was as close as I got.  I say this not to boast (well, a little of that) but to show how poorly the gay ideal fit into the realities of aging. In the popular gay imagination, success was measured by body image, athleticism, and the hotness of ones’ boyfriends. Never mind wisdom or loyalty or devotion to anything but sex, drugs, and house music. How could one sustain such a high bar when the gym routine became more onerous, the advancing decades less of a punchline and more a presentment of unavoidable loss. “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near."  A committed long-term relationship offered a possible soft landing, but heterosexuals had a hard enough time securing that berth, so what hope was there for me who wasn’t monogamously inclined to begin with? Money might buy me the facsimile of companionship, but everybody knew that was a sucker’s game.  Passing the 30 mark was the occasion of much hilarity and some real, if hidden, angst. Turning 40 required a support group. When I was going to graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, the “Men Over 40” group shared their sadness at monthly potlucks. The specter of old age was terrifying. There seemed to be only two endgames, the sad aging transvestite and the bitter old queen – isolated, lonely, pathetic figures lusting after youthful bodies they could no longer attract.  My personal solution was to ignore the question altogether (vicious tongues have dubbed me Cleopatra, Queen of Denial). As long as my luck and my body held out, I could lead an active life, continue to bushwhack my way through the thickets of love and sex, and pursue interesting professional challenges. Each succeeding decade was better than the last. I’d finally learned to distinguish my ass from a hole in the ground. The 40s were good; the 50s were better; the 60s were positively wonderful! Obviously, I can’t keep this up. Already I live with a sense of horizon. I won’t dive the Blue Hole of Belize. I’ll never lay eyes on Iguazu Falls. And what did I come upstairs for?  What waits for me when old age takes me in its clammy embrace? I do not know when or how; I only know that it will. Aging, it seems, holds no consolation except for the dubious one of giving up.  And yet I have so much to offer! I could be a gay elder, but the term itself strikes as an oxymoron. Young gays have no interest in me or my life experience. Ironically, I survived the onslaught of AIDS in the 80s when 10% of my gay cohort perished. Diminished to begin with and succumbing in ever greater numbers to death, impairment, and disease, there are not many of my generation left.  It is a pity that no one cares, but generational indifference isn’t confined to the queer community. What could be more American than to devalue the past? It’s not new; it’s not now; it’s not next. I won’t accept marginalization until I have to. Then  I’ll be pathetic but not before. And yet the Africans have a proverb. When an elder dies, a library burns.  --Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Not-So-Golden Years of the Harlem Renaissance Queers SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Ask an American what areas and sectors of America are controlled by Jews, and you’ll get a variety of responses from “nothing” to “everything.” If you’re mildly anti-Semitic and given to conspiracy theories, you’ll respond with “banking,” “the law,” “Hollywood,” and anything else that strikes you as potentially exploitative. If you’re really anti-Semitic and completely detached from facts and history, you’ll cite organizations that secretly control government, international affairs and Zionism as a cover for world domination.   Jews themselves don’t like the question – its very formulation presumes an illicit dominance – and tend to downplay their overrepresentation in education, academia, popular entertainment, psychology, and the law. Nonetheless, the number of recent Ivy League presidents, Nobel Prize winners, billionaires or leading academics of Jewish descent is extraordinary, especially given that Jews comprise no more than 2.4 percent of the U.S. population. Looking at one tally: between 1965 and 1982,  Jews made up 40% of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 20% of professors at the elite universities, 40% of partners in leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors and executives of the major print and broadcast media. This is impressive but overrepresentation is not dominance. If one out of every five professors is of Jewish descent, there are four who are not. Furthermore, Jews in any field do not speak with one voice nor work together towards any specifically Jewish goals. Louis Brandeis was Jewish but so was Roy Cohn. (“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” to quote Prospero.) But Hollywood . . . that’s another matter. During the height of the studio system in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, five of the major studios and two of the minor ones had been founded by immigrant Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe. There were economic and sociological reasons for this. Many of these Jewish-Americans came from vaudeville and the garment trade, two areas of the economy hospitable to Jews. When movies were introduced in the late 1890s, success in this new industry required many of the same skills as vaudeville and the garment trade: salesmanship and chutzpah . Even as motion pictures became increasingly popular, Gentile industrialists wanted no part of them. The moviegoing audience was working-class and immigrant; tickets were cheap; and silent cinema had no language barrier. The Protestant cultural elite dismissed film as “lowbrow”, and major investors considered it a passing fad. But what about the dominance of Jewish composers in the music that is now known as The Great American Songbook? What explains the fact that, with the exception of Cole Porter, every major composer of the Broadway musical – and quite a few of the lyricists – were of Jewish descent. That kind of talent isn’t parceled out for sociological, or even ethnic, reasons. You can talk about vaudeville, the drive to assimilate, quick adaptation of American vernacular forms, but not all Jewish composers fit the up-from-immigrant narrative. Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, and Johnny Green were all of German Jewish descent whose families came from high culture and were already well established by the 1920s. From the international success of Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1912) to the haunting strains of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In The Clowns” (1973), Jewish composers created the hits of Tin Pan Alley, the Broadway stage, and Hollywood that coalesced into The Great American Songbook before that musical world ceded its preeminence to rock ‘n roll, then hip hop. There were a few Gentile composers besides Cole Porter who made substantial contributions – Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen – but they were rare fish in an overwhelmingly Jewish sea. What explains this huge Jewish presence in an American musical genre that has no visible connection to Jewish ethnicity? It didn’t come from 2000 years of anti-Semitism; it didn’t come from 2nd Avenue Theater; it didn’t come from the cantorial traditions of the synagogue; it didn’t come from the Jewish resorts in the Catskills. It is a mystery and must remain so. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Aborted Jazz Career   SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

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

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