8
Gifted
The Hours by Michael Cunningham is one of my favorite works of art. From the book to the film to the opera, I’ve consumed it all. I read Mrs. Dalloway, which plays a central part in the narrative in The Hours, and other works by Virginia Woolf, intrigued and awakened by the vigor of her genius. And that’s what appealed to me about The Hours: its treatment of the burden of genius. How Virginia Woolf’s brilliance eventually killed her—her brilliance or her mental illness. They were one and the same, because all geniuses are mad, no? But The Hours was such a romantic picture of her genius and the genius of Richard, the poet dying of AIDS who simply “wanted to write about everything,” to be able to describe the immensity of life and joy and sadness, who kills himself rather than lose what’s left of his mind. In the quiet of my own mind, in the privacy it affords, I have fancied myself a genius, or at least touched by its madness. I expected myself to someday prove my genius to the world, to live up to the greatness I nurtured internally. The work necessary to provide its full evidence. Because what genius declares themselves a genius, besides Kanye West?
But didn’t geniuses make their genius known early in life? I was fascinated by the story of Arthur Rimbaud, the queer French poet enfant terrible credited with revolutionizing poetry as a teenager before walking away from it all to travel the world, performing odd jobs, never to write again. That was genius. I wasn’t that. I also wasn’t, like Virginia Woolf or Arthur Rimbaud, white. White genius was allowed to develop in a way that Black genius never was, and to this day the disparities remain. Affirmative action was supposed to be a remedy to this, but thanks to the rumors of racism’s death being greatly exaggerated, much like Demi Moore’s Molly, it’s in danger, girl.
Black genius was cultivated in spite of society, never because of it. There are geniuses on the block and in the projects and in prisons who will simply never get a chance to realize their full potential. What a tragedy. What a missed opportunity. Racism’s greatest achievement is retarding the progress of a society.
I hadn’t the ideal circumstances, but I made the most of them. Yet, twenty came and went, and I hadn’t revolutionized anything. My window for a becoming an enfant terrible behind me, I still believed I had a gift worth sharing. That I was what I had been labeled as a child: gifted.
The Hours spoke to me because I, too, wanted to describe the immensity of it all. And at times I felt myself losing my grip under the burden of my own expectations. While I had a passing belief in my own genius, I had always received affirmations that would stroke my ego. From being in advanced classes and gifted programs and graduating with honors, to when I started writing and the cavalier way people would use “brilliant” when describing me or my work. “Brilliant” is an overused word like “legendary” or “iconic” and should be reserved for those truly deserving, not some baby queen with one serviceable bop and a couple viral TikToks, or whatever the kids are talking about these days.
Did I think I was deserving of being called brilliant? I sure fucking did. It was incredibly validating, especially during all the times I thought I would never be recognized as a genius, or as brilliant, gifted, or talented. There were times I thought I’d simply continue to toil away in obscurity, just another would-be genius crushed beneath his own hubris, my talent proving no match for my ambition.
America has a way of destroying Black brilliance (Malcolm X, MLK Jr., Fred Hampton, Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, etc., etc.), if it acknowledges its existence at all. The very idea of genius is a revolution. A revolution of thought, of culture, of society. To be a Black revolutionary is to be a Black genius, and to be a Black genius is to be a Black revolutionary. America may have been founded on revolution, but it hates the idea within its own borders. No, maintenance of the status quo, the preservation of law and order, the upholding of tradition, are in the best interests of keeping the disenfranchised so. This reinforces the sacred traditions of white supremacy.
I’ll never forgive how gleeful they were. “They” being the tabloids, the media, people who had unashamedly loved her who somehow forgot they had, or chose to forget. I’ll never forgive how gleeful they were at Whitney Houston’s downfall. Hers was a transcendent talent, a form of genius in itself. A gift, unparalleled. As were her interpretive skills. She was one of the first Black artists MTV played, because she was undeniable. For a time, she was America’s princess, perfect, happy, with a megawatt smile and a mind-blowing voice. She was already huge when The Bodyguard hit, but that movie skyrocketed her to another level altogether, to a rarefied space in which it’s difficult to breathe.
And she suffocated. And how gleeful they were at her very public downfall: “CRACK” in bold letters in headlines on even bolder tabloids, the interviews, the reality show, the rehab stints, the attempted comeback, and finally the sad death in a hotel bathtub. Her voice still sends shivers down my spine, still makes me believe, just maybe, that there’s a god. And then I think about that sadistic glee. America’s Black princess, too talented, too successful, too uppity, brought low. And kicked while she was down. Sure, everyone loves her now, the years of laughing at her addiction and her struggles forgotten in favor of the good times, the music, the shivers down all those spines. But I’ll never forget. And I’ll never forgive.
Nina Simone refused to be destroyed. She was a destroyer. The epitome of the Black genius as Black revolutionary. “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times,” Simone said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s their choice, but I choose to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself.” She not only sang about civil rights; she also became deeply involved in the movement. But, like so many Black artists who love this country despite the glaring lack of reciprocity, she grew heartbroken at the stagnant pace of progress and left the US.
She rebelled constantly, against America, against her fans, against herself. But she would not bow, she would not be broken. She left America as an act of self-preservation, as her friend James Baldwin did, as Josephine Baker had before them. It’s not just that Europe and other parts of the world were less racist than America—they were less racist, kind of, but theirs was also a different kind of racism. In Europe, racism isn’t as much of a governing principle and a baked-in ideology as it is here in the States. These artists moved to Europe because their genius was appreciated abroad. Paris may have fallen in love with Baker, but the St. Louis native was a foreigner in her home country and would’ve probably remained in obscurity if she had remained here.
Little Richard exploded like, as he loved to refer to himself, a quasar in 1956. He revolutionized a dangerously kinetic style of music that came to be known as rock and roll. Black, queer, flamboyant, sexy, and, above all, talented, Little Richard was a revolution on his own. His music literally broke down racial barriers, as teenagers, both Black and white, tore down the dividing ropes at his concerts, mingling with one another, and thus greatly upsetting the status quo. There was no such thing as a rock star before Little Richard. And every rock star who followed was an imitation.
Still, the artist spent most of his life fighting for the recognition of what he had accomplished. While he changed music with songs like “Tutti Frutti,” white artists Pat Boone and Elvis Presley sold far more copies of that song than he did. And the latter would come to be known as the King of Rock and Roll, an honorific that erased Little Richard’s foundational contributions to the art form. Adding insult to injury, at the height of his success, Little Richard broke his contract to pursue life as a minister, thus losing royalties, present and future, for all the songs he had written and performed.
Black artists and intellectuals aren’t afforded the generosity of the label “genius” as much as their white counterparts. Our accomplishments are often accredited to some white benefactor in the background, or some quirk of fate, or unholy combination of god-given talent, discipline, and hard work. That just makes it easier to steal our gifts without proper compensation, to water them down, to whiten them up, to make them more palatable for more mainstream (read: white) audiences. No one would’ve called Whitney a genius when she was alive. She didn’t write her own songs. She was the progeny of a heritage of great singers including her mother, Cissy Houston, and cousins Dionne Warwick and Leontyne Price. And she was the protégée of Clive Davis.
But her genius is undeniable. And her talent changed American culture. It changed the way people sing. Of course, it would do the world good if folks realized that not everyone has the range for an abundance of melisma. Sometimes it’s okay to just get the damn song out. But Whitney was America, for a brief, shining moment. America, as a concept and a country, peaked with her performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl. A Black woman sang the definitive version of the nation’s anthem, making it her goddamn own. A so-so song made better by the omission of multiple verses, including some with direct references to slavery, made incredible by a queer Black woman, the manifestation of the American Dream or Nightmare, depending on whom you ask. Her interpretation of that song is nothing short of genius. Because no one else has done it better, and most anyone who attempts it sings it like Whitney. Well, tries to. God bless ’em.
But because Whitney’s talent was so tremendous, the rigor behind it was diminished. Genius usually isn’t associated with rigor. As if ideas fall freshly out of the air. I interviewed Viola Davis while she was promoting The Woman King. She’s one of the most intense and electrifying actors to ever occupy the screen. But she was adamant that those performances always cost you something. I remember when I first saw her in 2008’s Doubt. She’s in the movie for like ten minutes, tops. But that’s all she needed to launch herself into the pantheon of the greatest living actors. Opposite Meryl Fucking Streep, no less. Davis just acts with her whole body, with her whole being; it’s in the way she walks, the way those magnificent eyes plead for truth, no matter how brutal it may be. Davis has accomplished more than any other Black actress in Hollywood history, deservedly, but I always think of that other greatest living Black actress, Angela Bassett.
So much was made of her arms in What’s Love Got to Do with It, the Tina Turner biopic in which she turns in truly one of film’s most amazing performances. And the rigor that went into that performance, the research she did, the way she closely studied Turner’s movements, the way she spoke, how it was so much more than mere imitation, but embodiment. But one of my favorite performances of Bassett’s is in Spike Lee’s criminally underrated 2015 film Chi-Raq, in which she plays Miss Helen Worthy, a pillar of her community in Chicago’s South Side.
It’s one scene. She’s in her garden when an insurance salesman comes up to her. She’s patient, respectful, even kind at first, until she realizes this insurance salesman is selling insurance for inner-city boys who may be the victims of violence. Angela Bassett listens so beautifully. The way her eyes shift and her demeanor changes when this man shows his proverbial ass and her eruption into rage, righteous and riotous…it’s fucking thrilling.
Bassett reportedly stays in character while on set, a method often accredited to “genius” white actors like Robert DeNiro, Marlon Brando, and Meryl Streep. Bassett, who has a master’s from Yale, is never lumped in with those geniuses; her filmography is not as monumental, though her performances are.
All everyone wants to know is how she got those arms! The same way Michelle Obama got her much-buzzed-about arms: carrying the burdens of a brilliant Black woman in America.
Because I came from a foreign country, I was put into remedial classes when I entered the American school system via Poughkeepsie’s Clinton Elementary. So named after Governor George Clinton and sadly not Parliament Funkadelic’s George Clinton, as I would learn in time, to my great disappointment. I hated being in those classes and didn’t understand why I was in them, since my precociousness was already a thorn in the side of my entire family. But it was regular protocol, and I eventually “graduated” to whatever grade I was supposed to be in.
I don’t remember if it was kindergarten, but I do remember fearing for my life at the prospect of failing kindergarten because I couldn’t tie my shoes. My motor skills have always been shit. I remember being so frustrated that I couldn’t figure it out, I started crying. I was so fucking smart at everything else, as my kindergarten teacher told my mother, but since I was a kid who found his extraordinariness in feeling smart and being told how smart I was, feeling dumb made me lose all confidence in myself.
It still does. I hate not being able to understand something. I hate feeling dumb. It feels as if I’ve been found out, exposed for being not as smart as I think, or as I hope everyone else thinks I am. I placed all my value in being the smartest. I wasn’t athletic, I wasn’t popular. I was cute, but all…well, most kids are cute. But everyone at that age is looking for ways to stand out, their world having gone from their family to a classroom to a whole school. As their world expands, their place in the center of it is ever diminished. Some people are fine to recede into the background, while some people crave being the center, for all eyes to be on them. And we call those people stars. Or megalomaniacs. Same thing. If I wasn’t the smartest, then I was just like everybody else. No one put pressure on me to get good grades because no one had to. I put all the pressure on myself. My aunt would, from time to time, give me the “Make sure you’re doing well in school” talk, but my general attitude toward that was, Bitch, do you know who you’re talking to?
Once my mother realized she didn’t have to worry about me in school—I actually liked going to school (NERD!)—my achievements lost their luster. Oh, another 100 on a test, good for you. Anything less than perfect and I was known to cry, my fragile scholastic ego shattered. Unsurprisingly, kids made fun of me because I would cry at a 92 when they were staring blankly at a 65. I can’t say I blamed them. I was an unapologetic teacher’s pet. I craved the validation of that tall person at the front of the room more than I craved validation from my mother or anyone else. And if they were immune to my obsequious charms, I could at least win them over with my academic record.
At the end of every school year at Clinton Elementary, we took aptitude tests, which measured our skills in reading, math, and whatever the hell they taught us, against all the other kids our age in the country. I looked forward to those tests because I would regularly rank in the highest percentile. My teacher might call me over and show me my test and point out how I had scored in the 98th or 99th percentile in something that probably wasn’t math. I was fine at math, but words were my strong suit. Even as I got older and I wasn’t the smartest kid in my class anymore, I was always the strongest writer.
There was this profile on ABC about Ronan Farrow going to college at ten years old or something crazy like that. I was so jealous. I wanted to go to college at ten. I wanted to be a prodigy; I wanted to be profiled by Diane Sawyer. At the end of fifth grade, my teacher, Ms. Howard, asked my mom if she could take me on a trip to Boston as a reward for being her top student. She was a young Black woman with large glasses and an enviable sense of style—it was all culottes and chunky turtlenecks with her, in autumnal shades, gorgeous. With some not-so-gentle prodding from me, my mother agreed. Since coming to America, I had only been to about two places: New York City, where we flew into, and Poughkeepsie, some sixty miles north of the city in the Hudson Valley. Boston was in a whole other state!
I was so excited, but also nervous, because even at ten, I worried about the awkward silence of a long car ride. Sure, I had seen Ms. Howard nearly every day for the past nine months, but that was never a one-on-one situation. What will we talk about?! I wondered. But teachers know how to talk to kids, that’s literally their job, and before long my anxiety was put at ease for the five hours or so we drove to Boston. Ms. Howard wanted to expand my horizons. The world can feel small, suffocating, hopeless living in Poughkeepsie. And here was Boston. It wasn’t as big and busy and intimidating as New York, but it had all that centuries-old architecture, all that history haunting the air, all the blood that had soaked the streets. For a city baptized in blood, it sure was pretty.
At Boston Common, Ms. Howard and I took in the memorial to Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre, a statue of a woman holding aloft broken chains and crushing the British crown beneath her granite heel. This being an educational trip, Ms. Howard took the opportunity to quiz me on who Crispus Attucks was. A formerly enslaved man, Attucks was the first casualty of the Boston Massacre; thus from his blood sprang forth the American Revolution. Attucks was one of the few Black heroes (though his ethnic origins are disputed) not limited for study during Black History Month since his story is directly intertwined with the fight for American independence. Black people, legally not even people at the time, rarely figured in that telling, save for maybe a passing mention of Sally Hemings as proof of the fallibility of the Founding Fathers. But Attucks was the first person to lose his life for a country that had previously kept him shackled, beginning a long tradition of Black sacrifice for a nation resolute in its whiteness.
For a young Black boy, Crispus Attucks was a hero, but for a young Black man he became more of a cautionary tale. As I grew older, my heroes didn’t die for this country. They died in defiance of this country. Malcolm X was one of those Black geniuses on the block, in the projects, in prison, who, through the force of his own intelligence, became one of the preeminent thinkers of twentieth-century America. Short shrift is given to the genius of just being able to survive, let alone thrive, in America as a Black person. Or the genius of defying expectations and overcoming extraordinary circumstances. But with the burden of just surviving, let alone thriving, it’s often impossible to cultivate genius in any other realm, not when all of one’s energy goes to getting through the fucking day.
That trip to Boston meant so much to me. I knew I was special, but I rarely got to feel special, living in that one-bedroom apartment on Main Street, the small black-and-white television in the room I shared with my mother my only outlet to the world at large. Ms. Howard emailed me out of the blue one day a few years back. She had thought of me and just Googled my name. “I am Miss Howard and I taught a Lester Brathwaite in fifth grade at Gov. Clinton Elementary School, room 16. I took him on a trip to Boston once and I just wanted to know if it is you,” she wrote. It’s so rare you get to thank, as an adult, the people who made a profound impact on you as a child. I was overjoyed to have that opportunity.
And I’m sure teachers rarely get the chance to see the fruits of their labor in the adults whom they inspired as children. I thanked Ms. Howard for taking me on that trip and for the impact she had on my life. I bragged that I was a writer living in Brooklyn, that I was “more or less living my dream.” I figured she’d like to hear that, and it was true, more or less. “I am so proud of you. I never forgot you,” she wrote me back. “I always knew that you would be successful. You were always a very gifted writer, so I am not at all surprised to see that you write professionally.”
She was “so proud” of me…it was almost like hearing that from my mother. I never got to hear my mother say that to me as an adult. I had never thought I needed to hear that from her, or to know that she was proud of me, because I was a bad bitch, I had done this and that and the other by myself. What approval did I need? I might not have needed it, but I cherished hearing that from Ms. Howard. Teachers are fucking awesome.
With teachers like Ms. Howard who believed in me, encouraged me, recommended me for gifted programs or for special awards, I really thought I was special and could and would do great things. As I got further along in school, I continued to feel special, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. By the time I was taking Advanced Placement classes in high school, I was one of two, maybe more, maybe not, Black students in a scholastic sea of white. I was special because I was a minority who excelled academically.
I felt the pressure to prove I was smart not just for myself but for all the other Black kids who didn’t make it that far in high school, because there were a lot more of us back in the honors middle school classes. Slowly, year by year, they fell away, and there was sometimes just me. I feared giving the wrong answer, even when I knew I was right. The doubt threatened to overcome me. Why, I wondered, were there so many white kids in these classes? Were they just smarter than Black kids? Or were they just better at taking tests? Did they have some advantage that we didn’t, most likely money? These thoughts nagged me every day in my AP classes. But I was determined to best them any way I could. I was determined to be a sterling example of my race. The Sidney Poitier of Poughkeepsie High School.
Poitier, the first Black man to win a Best Actor Oscar, was saddled with the burden of representing all of Black America during the ’60s. He was then the community’s only leading actor of his stature in Hollywood. He garnered both praise and criticism for the roles he played, often portraying the exalted, gooder-than-good Negro. That is, until in one of cinema’s most satisfying scenes he slapped a white man as take-no-guff detective Virgil Tibbs. That role in 1967’s Best Picture winner, In the Heat of the Night, was an outlier for Poitier. That same year he had also starred in the popular To Sir, with Love, as a respectable Black teacher to a class of predominantly white delinquent kids, and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as a respectable Black doctor with the gall to marry his way into Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s very white family.
Virgil Tibbs slapping a white man who tried to put him in his place as an uppity nigger was wish fulfillment for Black people all over America that year. Until that point, Poitier had been the unimpeachable Negro, for the sake of white people. He wasn’t an example for Black people to follow so much as for white people, a sterling example of his race. Being a Black person in predominantly white spaces often leaves me feeling like Sidney Poitier, both in wanting to be of unimpeachable character and in wanting to slap the shit out of a white man.
For whom, however, was I being this sterling example? For these rich white kids? My teacher? Myself? I really thought those rich white kids would think less of me—and by extension less of all the other Black kids in school—if I was anything short of exemplary. And maybe they did, implicitly or not. Or maybe they didn’t have to think about things like that at all. Perhaps not being told or otherwise made aware of having to be “twice as good to get half as far” gave them the freedom to think about other things, the confidence to be wrong, and the knowledge that their opinion was valid.
I think it’s easier to be a genius when you’re young because the world doesn’t expect too much from you, so when you exceed those minimal expectations, grandly, then the superlatives start flying. To be a genius in your more advanced years, you have to continue to revolutionize, when revolution is primarily the domain of the young. That’s why some prodigies flicker out so early. Maybe Arthur Rimbaud had just said and done all he had to say and do. Genius is not infinite.
In order to prove my worth, to myself most of all, I thought I had to come out with something revolutionary by a certain age. Twenty-three seemed to be the cutoff, maybe twenty-five. Any older and both I and my accomplishment would be less impressive. Lauryn Hill came out with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill at twenty-three. By twenty-three, Stevie Wonder had already produced several certified masterpieces. And unlike Lauryn Hill, Wonder wrote, produced, and performed nearly all the instrumentation. In popular culture, there’s probably no more pure embodiment of a “genius” than Stevie Wonder. And nigga was blind the entire time. Songs in the Key of Life (released when he was twenty-six) is, for my money, the one album that could and should represent the height of human achievement for future generations, for the aliens, whatever.
Hill was credited as the sole writer and producer on her Miseducation, a move that prompted a lawsuit against her, her management, and the record label. Her team claimed that the credit was the decision of the label in an attempt to market her as a Wonder or a Prince. A true genius. A prodigy. The rest of the writers and producers, however, didn’t take kindly to that and sued, and won, to get their proper credit. Does that take away from the brilliance of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill? A little bit.
I was incredibly impressed when I thought that Hill had written and produced this entire album by the time she was twenty-three. While the fact that she didn’t do it alone doesn’t take away from the brilliance of the music (that’s timeless), it does take away from the legacy of Hill’s virtuosity. The same questions that dogged Lauryn Hill now dog Beyoncé; that is, how much of her work is her, and how much is it the work of everyone else? Beyoncé is the most important, ambitious, and consistent artist of my generation. While I try to abstain from stan culture and don’t consider myself part of the at-times cultlike Hive, I’m a big fan. But even I question how much of her work is hers alone.
These are questions I don’t really bother with when it comes to white artists. Or, for that matter, male artists. Beyoncé’s music has been transformative for me, and as I see it, her artistic vision can be divided into three eras. There’s the millennial pop diva with something to prove, from her solo debut, Dangerously in Love in 2003, to 2008’s I Am…Sasha Fierce. Already known as a writer and producer, she co-wrote and co-produced the majority of Dangerously. She was twenty-two. That’s impressive. But like every album she produces, it’s seen as a production, incorporating multiple songwriters and producers. As she’s gotten more successful, and as her music has gotten greater, the number of contributors has also increased. While she’s still credited as co-writer and co-producer on nearly every if not all tracks, there’s a veritable army behind her.
As a result, despite four nominations, Beyoncé has never won an Album of the Year Grammy. Despite releasing the album of the year multiple times. In comparison, Taylor Swift, noted as a singer-songwriter, has won three Album of the Year Grammys, her first at just twenty. She was the youngest artist to win Album of the Year until Billie Eilish won at just eighteen. Eilish wrote the majority of the album and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, produced it. The Recording Academy respects “artistry.” And often their “true” artists are white.
A Black woman hasn’t won Album of the Year since Hill. Had the fact that she hadn’t solely written and produced the album come out before voting commenced, she probably wouldn’t have won the top prize, despite Miseducation being the album of the year. The controversy around it alone would make it anathema to the Recording Academy, but then, her feat wouldn’t be as commendable, as award-worthy. Beyoncé will never win an Album of the Year award unless she writes and produces the album by her own damn self. And while I’m sure she could, she doesn’t want to and I don’t want her to. Have you heard “Cuff It”? It has three hundred (okay, nine) writers and is worth every last one of them.
But even when a Black artist does write and produce and occupy that white singer-songwriter space, because it is a white space, they aren’t guaranteed respect. Mariah Carey’s been talking about being a songwriter first and a singer second since the beginning of her career. But because she’s a woman, and because she’s a Black woman, for years she wasn’t given respect as a songwriter despite penning or co-penning eighteen of her nineteen number one hits. Speaking of Grammy losses, at the 1996 Grammys, Carey was expected to clean up with six nominations, including Album of the Year for Daydream. One word: “Fantasy.” She lost all six awards, with the top honor going to singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill.
Of course, awards are bullshit, but Black artists have always strived for respect from institutions that they don’t really need. Is Angela Bassett any less of an actress because she doesn’t have a competitive Oscar? (An honorary is cute, but…c’mon.) They’ll give those things out to just about anybody these days. Jared Leto? C’mon! But those institutions say that they’re important, despite the public’s growing apathy toward them. Interest in, and ratings for, the Academy Awards has been on a steep decline for more than a decade. And the Grammys are irrelevant. They just like inviting all the top Black talent to make their show interesting and maybe give them a few small awards to keep them “happy” while doling out the big awards to white acts. It’s blatant disrespect, and some artists refuse to play along. Drake, the Weeknd, and Kanye West, among others, have been boycotting the Grammys. If only Beyoncé refused to show up to another ceremony, as she certainly should, the Grammys would lose whatever’s left of their credibility. But then she would be criticized as a sore loser, despite losing graciously again, and again, and again.
After Miseducation, Lauryn Hill dropped out. She was expected to be this savior of music; she was heralded as the talent to watch in the coming millennium, a self-proclaimed “rapper slash actress, more powerful than two Cleopatras.” But years went by and…nothing. Then she resurfaced with a double album and accompanying TV special, MTV Unplugged No. 2.0. Both the show and the album were divisive. Its unnerving intimacy, with Hill breaking into candid soliloquy and occasionally breaking down in tears, was uncomfortable for people to watch. Which was the whole point. Hill had reinvented herself as, would you believe it, a singer-songwriter, sporting a guitar she was still teaching herself how to play. Her music was raw, incredibly personal, but it was hers. All hers.
It was as if she wanted to prove that she had the chops and that she didn’t need the trappings of the industry. It was not a commercial release. There were no hits to come off it, at least not until Kanye West sampled “Mystery of Iniquity” for his “All Falls Down.” Hill could’ve followed up with another big studio album, which is what everyone wanted her to do, but instead she did what she wanted to do, what she had to do. Hill has garnered comparisons to Nina Simone, and it started with Unplugged. It’s that kind of fierce genius that refuses to be defined or confined, reflecting the times in an unexpected, even volatile way.
Since Unplugged, Hill hasn’t released any new material of consequence. She had grown disillusioned with the recording industry, as nearly every artist inevitably does and has, and walked away from it all. She was hardly the first Black genius to shun the spotlight for the sake of self-preservation. Sometimes you just have to choose yourself over the wants and desires of everyone else. Something Nina Simone certainly understood. So, rather appropriately, Hill reemerged in 2015 on the soundtrack for the Nina Simone documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, singing six songs, including a cover of Simone’s “Feeling Good.” Simone had laid the template from which Hill had built her own path to freedom. At least her version of freedom.
To be young, gifted, and Black is a lovely, precious dream, but it’s also a burden, even a curse. To be young, gifted, and Black is to see the world in possibilities. But the older you get, the less possible things may seem, and looking back, you wonder how you were able to do any of what you did in the first place. Or maybe you regret not doing more, having realized that sometimes the only obstacle in your way…was yourself.
I wanted to create and perform and be loved for my work. But as I got older, while I was impressed with what I was able to accomplish, when saddled with the complexities of reality, I was disappointed to fall short of my own expectations. I was also wary of the passage of time, the hours disappearing before my very eyes. How many self-styled great Black artists struggled in futility to fulfill their potential, only to succumb to madness, or poverty, or self-destruction from a combination of the two? How many of those minds were truly great, but chained by their circumstances? What tragedies. What missed opportunities.
It takes so much to realize one’s own potential, so much drive and determination, and the further one is from the mainstream, the more infallible one must be on the path to that realization. Of course, luck has something to do with it. I felt I was lucky to just have survived and made it out of Poughkeepsie, to make it to thirty when for years I romanticized an early death, a brilliant flame snuffed out too early. Artists who die young get off easy. They’re always remembered as greater than they were due to all the things they were never able to do. Perish the thought they had given all they had to give.
A part of me put so much stock in accomplishing something “great” in my youth because I feared I was already living on borrowed time. Touched by death so early and unexpectedly, I anticipated death at every turn, and then there was the cavalier way I went about my life, snorting whatever anyone put in my face, no questions asked. The drugs and debauchery, however, were also part of the frustration and the romanticism of an “artist’s life.” I thought it my right to destroy myself as part of the creative process. I found validation in people like Rimbaud, who was reportedly a fucking little monster during his most productive years, seducing the older, married writer Paul Verlaine, drinking absinthe, smoking opium and hash all over Europe. Verlaine eventually shot his young, impetuous lover in a drunken rage, putting an end to their affair as a bullet to the arm often does.
Naturally, I romanticized that kind of gorgeous, lived chaos, particularly because it was so fucking gay, proving that faggots have always faggoted and will continue to faggot, in perpetuity. Moreover, Rimbaud’s youthful rebelliousness worked, to my naïve eyes. It added to his appeal, perhaps not in his own time, but for future faggots and would-be rebel geniuses. But Rimbaud gave it up to live a steady, normal life, perhaps disillusioned with poetry, with his own genius, with his suffering. Did he ever find happiness?
I was content to be the ultimate sacrifice to my art. I was supposed to be miserable. I was supposed to succumb to my demons. That was what artists did, wasn’t it? Virginia Woolf walking into a river with stones in her pocket. Hendrix and Joplin and Morrison and Cobain and Winehouse all dead, famously, at twenty-seven.
The role of the artist seemed to be to change the world, then get crushed by it. Or maybe it was that one couldn’t change the world without paying some consequence for doing so. I foolishly but fervently related suffering to genius and profound creativity. The success I sought was thus a validation of my suffering. Proof positive I hadn’t gone through this, that, and the other for no reason at all. That being Black, and queer, and poor wasn’t a hindrance to my success but the reason for it.
My idea of success, however, changed. Out of necessity. Surviving was a success in and of itself. Or as Dorian Corey, the world-weary drag queen and one-woman Greek chorus of the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, says with marksman-like precision in the film’s epilogue:
I always had hopes of being a big star. But as you get older, you aim a little lower. Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think, you’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name. Then you’ve left a mark. You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy it. Pay your dues, and just enjoy it. If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.
I never wanted to aim lower. In truth, I still feel like I can do whatever I want, become whatever I dream, because I have to believe it. I have to have unwavering, almost superhuman, confidence in my own bad bitchery in order to keep going. I need that confidence to continue on this foolhardy quest of being an artist, of being a writer, of living for ideas. But believing is not the same as doing. I know in theory I can do anything, but I know in reality I am only capable of doing so much. When I started to accept reality was when I started feeling defeated by life. Reality was, after all, “something you rise above,” in the words of the always down-to-earth Liza Minnelli.
That rising above was also the ethos of Paris Is Burning. That one need not accept the reality one is given. The subjects of this landmark documentary, drag queens and gender-nonconforming people of color living in ’80s New York City, faced myriad obstacles to simply existing: poverty, racism, homophobia, transphobia, AIDS, governmental indifference. This is what I mean when I write about the genius of Black survival. They turned their method of survival—which is exactly what ballroom has always been—into a culture-shifting art form.
Black kweens have been throwing balls in Harlem going back to the late 1860s. They started off as charity masquerade galas with men in female drag and women in male drag, and prizes were given out for the most handsome drag king and the “most perfect feminine body displayed by an impersonator.” Imagine being able to embrace any sort of queer identity just a scant few years after you had been constitutionally recognized as a human being.
There is a need for fantasy in Black queer life, whether as a means of survival or an expression of our defiantly boundless joy. Fantasy is an escape, it is an aspiration, it can even lead to self-actualization. Fake it till ya make it. The performance of this fantasy—which is often a fantasy of white life and its attendant freedoms, luxuries, etc.—is done so elegantly, so eleganza-ly, as to always attract white audiences. By the 1920s, the “fairies” or “faggots” balls, as they were called, had white folks, already drawn by the siren call of jazz, dancing with Black folks and gawking at the drag queens.
There was an initial wave of mainstream (that is, as always: white) interest in ballroom—from Jennie Livingston shooting the bulk of her doc in 1986; to the 1989 release of Malcolm McLaren’s “Deep in Vogue,” crescendoing with Madonna’s “Vogue” in March of 1990; the eventual wide theatrical release of Paris Is Burning the following year; and the interest it piqued in its immediate aftermath. During that time, the members of the ballroom community did their best to cash in on the newfound attention. But the stigma of AIDS and the rampant conservatism of the post-Reagan years, coupled with the fickle nature of the mainstream’s interest, didn’t bring them the fame around which they had built their fantasies.
It’s funny, though. Dorian Corey died in 1993. A number of the subjects of the documentary died either violently or from AIDS-related causes, yet their influence has long outlived them. Their words are mantras, slogans, and some faggots’ entire personalities. RuPaul—despite being more of a downtown kween, in style and location, when most of the balls were uptown—has built a media empire on ballroom and drag. RuPaul has always been clever. He changed his downtown, drag-punk style into a more glamazon, high-fashion version of drag. This brand-new Ru was more in line with the rich white woman fantasy that had been born in the ballroom, and his 1993 single, “Supermodel (You Better Work)” made him a post-Paris drag superstar. Ru was the more polished, more palatable version of Pepper LaBeija, one of the main figures in Paris Is Burning.
Not coming from the balls, RuPaul’s appeal was able to outlast interest generated by the documentary. But his career waned nonetheless until the first season of a cheaply produced but highly entertaining drag queen competition show in 2008. From the Vaseline-lensed, duct-taped gowns of that first season, RuPaul’s Drag Race became a global phenomenon.
Incorporating elements of ballroom (such as reading, balls, and runway categories) within the competition, Drag Race created its own bastardized version of ballroom. If you say “death-drop” around a ballroom kween, they will slice you from tip to taint with their side-eyes. It’s called a “dip.” And “boots the house down” was never in coinage before, like, 2018. But while bastardized, RuPaul’s Drag Race keeps ballroom culture alive by introducing it to newer generations and audiences, all while opening the door for other media that is more authentic to its original spirit, such as the ballroom competition show Legendary and the groundbreaking FX drama Pose.
Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, and so many of the brilliant talent featured in Paris Is Burning didn’t live long enough to see that their arrows didn’t stop soaring; those arrows continued flying higher than they could ever have expected. I guess reality can be something you rise above; you just might not live long enough to see it. The gift and curse of genius is that it’s always ahead of its time and therefore risks going unrecognized.
Every few months I like to take a mushroom trip, to realign myself and the way I’m seeing the world. The last time was quite the doozy. I had a crisis of conscience about writing. I had finally gotten around to reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and was floored by its beauty. My interest in Hurston piqued, I did a little research on the old girl. Famously written in seven weeks (or so), and with such vivid language, brilliantly rendered characters, and a compelling story, surely Their Eyes Were Watching God was a work of genius. And the forcefulness of its genius must have been apparent at the time of its publication in 1937. Surely.
It wasn’t. Hurston, I was depressed to find out, died broke and forgotten at age sixty-nine in 1960. What was the point, I wondered, of creating something so wonderful only to be forgotten in your lifetime? But the book lived on. Her work lives on. With this weighing heavily on my mind, I took my shrooms and cried naked on the floor listening to Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, filled with the joy of his genius. I sat on the beach in Provincetown, home of Michael Cunningham, and wept at the beauty of a sunset, when my favorite quote from Cunningham’s The Hours came to me. It was about thinking a moment is the beginning of happiness when in fact, in cruel reality, it is happiness. This, I thought, looking at the beautiful burning red sun at the end of the world, was happiness. This was what I’d been working my way toward. This brief moment that I would carry with me long after I’d left that place. And so I cried. I’ve cried only a handful of times in my adult life.
And then I realized why I write. It was for these moments, when I feel at peace with the universe, when I feel a part of the world without the need to bend it or to bend to it. These moments of indescribable beauty compel me to describe them, to capture them, to make the ephemeral somehow permanent. If this is happiness, I need to preserve it, disseminate it, honor it the best way I know how. It’s a gift to be able to do so. Sometimes I stop to think the little gay boy inside of me would gag at what I’ve been able to accomplish and who I’ve become. It may not be exactly what we imagined, but to come this far, to live life on our own terms, to be able to be happy, to have moments shaking with joy, to write and write well for a living—it’s what I’ve always wanted. I mean, an Oscar would be nice, but I never have to give up on my fantasies. After all, reality hasn’t beat me quite yet.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I probably won’t change the world, Beyoncé having taken the career I really wanted. But she’s doing fine with it, I guess, it’s in good hands, I’m not bitter, whatever. I may not change the world, but I can experience as much of it as possible, divorced from any one institution’s or person’s idea of success or genius. Including my own. It’s more than enough to just enjoy being alive.