when you go looking for a happy story

In 2015 the son of an Ivory Coast celebrity got legally married to another man in the United States. I am sure there were Ivorians who quietly congratulated the happy couple, but, you know how it is in this homophobic world, the voices the media found to comment said mean things. 

Roger Fulgence Kassy was “a television personality credited with launching the careers of a number of famous Ivorian performers,” according to Robbie Corey-Boulet. Thierry Kassy was the son. I googled him to see if I could find any positive coverage, maybe a wedding announcement naming his husband. 

Unfortunately what I found was an article reporting Thierry Kassy’s death. According to Presse Cote d’Ivoire, “Thierry Kassy, the only son of the famous Ivorian TV host the late Roger Fulgence Kassy died in the United States of America as a result of Covid 19. The information was made public on Saturday, April 11 [2020] by reggae artist Serge Kassy on his Facebook profile.” (Thanks, Google Translate)

My condolences to Thierry Kassy's husband, family and friends. 

source:

Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives

by Robbie Corey-Boulet

2019. Zed Books, London UK

“human beings who can do what they like”

As I said in my Feb 16 post, LGBT news out of Africa is usually bad. The author Robbie Corey-Boulet offers a quote from a Ugandan politician that manages to be both bad news and good news. 

In 2011 the Obama administration made supporting LGBT rights a priority worldwide. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said gay rights are human rights. 

John Nagenda, who Robbie Corey-Boulet identifies as “a senior adviser to President Yoweri Museveni,” was quoted in the international press calling “homosexuality … taboo, it’s something anathema to Africans.”

I remember hearing something like this. Nagenda even calls the Obama/Clinton position “abhorrent.”

Along with the murder of gay activist David Kato that same year, Nagenda’s unequivocal denunciation of justice for gay people makes Uganda seem a hellhole for sexual minorities. 

But Robbie Corey-Boulet says Nagenda’s full statement, not disseminated as widely, sounds more hopeful:

A very, very slowly increasing number of Ugandans, and I am one of them, see homosexuals as full human beings who can do what they like in private, between consenting adults. But people look at me like I am a very funny fish when I say these things, even in my own household.

The path to the revocation of legal sanctions against LGBT people was a long and slow process, even where our rights are fully recognized. The US, sadly, has not yet gotten all the way to full recognition. But we’ve come a long way. As for Africa, it is a big place, a land of many cultures and nations. There will be change for the better in some places, for the worse in others. But I do hope “very, very slowly” can speed up. 

source:

Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives

by Robbie Corey-Boulet

2019. Zed Books, London UK

Notes toward an autobiography by others

“I am still someone who absent-mindedly reads aloud from any sign I see, as if it is some way of learning where I am.” 

I sometimes read aloud random words we pass as we’re driving along. I rarely do it when I’m driving, I note, but when I am in the passenger seat, my attention is a little loose and catches on things. Kent will say, “What?” And I will say, “Oh. Sorry. I was just reading a random sign.”

Alexander Chee in the quote above says, “it is some way of learning where I am.” For me I think it’s just reading, which I do a lot. There I am going over the landscape, reading it, and sometimes the landscape features words; the words go into my eyes and fall out of my mouth. It’s not really talking to myself. It’s more reflexive than that, like saying Mm when you run your fingers over a silky surface.

source:

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: essays

by Alexander Chee

Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York

Tecumsay Roberts, pop star, martyr?

The LGBT news out of Africa is typically bad. Homophobes, hate crimes, terrible laws. How bad it really is there is hard to gauge from outside. Africa is a big place. There are a lot of people in it, a lot of very different cultures/languages/ethnic groups in quite a range of environments. One can’t really say something about “Africa” and be right. European colonialism left many legacies, anti-gay laws, especially in former British territories, being one of the bad. 

In his book on three African countries, Liberia, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire), Robbie Corey-Boulet tries to give his readers some perspective. These countries are on the continent’s western coast. Liberia and Ivory Coast share a border, Cameroon roughly a two day drive from Ivory Coast. Not that far, considering African distances — and roads. 

Tecumsay Roberts was a Liberian pop star. His “hits would be familiar to anyone who so much as set foot in a nightclub in Monrovia [Liberia’s capital] in the 1980s,” says Corey-Boulet. The author compares Roberts to Michael Jackson. “The cover photo for his single ‘Comin’ Home’ is a mirror image of Jackson’s iconic ‘Thriller’ album cover. It shows Roberts in a white blazer, lying diagonally across the frame, staring into the camera, his face less severe than Jackson’s but similarly captivating.”

Roberts “was trailed by whisperings that he was gay.” So was Jackson, of course. But the rumors derailed neither career. 

Sadly, Liberia was plunged into civil war in 1989. Queer people are often scapegoats in times of trouble. One of the rebel armies “arrested Roberts … in 1990. [Roberts and his brother] had gone out looking for food when they were stopped … After complimenting Tecumsay on his music, [the rebel military leader] told him to get in the car and go with the convoy to a rebel base to sing for his fighters.”

Testimony to the post-war truth and reconciliation commission revealed that Tecumsay Roberts was suspected of being gay by this leader, so was murdered. His body was never recovered. 

Anti-gay rhetoric has continued to this day. Robbie Corey-Boulet doesn’t quite call Tecumsay Roberts a martyr to the LGBT cause, but that’s not hard to figure. 

Liberia was founded as an African American African colony, and the people there still look across the Atlantic as to a motherland, Corey-Boulet says. The changes in the status of gay people in the US has not gone unnoticed. Just as here, change has been difficult. Many in the gay community have not welcomed public discussion — and exposure, even when (as with human rights groups and, at times, the US State Department) the attention has been benevolent. When no one really notices you’re there, no one attacks you. At least, not as a group. But change has come, some of it good. In Liberia, as in most of Africa, the laws remain hostile, but Corey-Boulet sees signs of hope. Explicitly anti-gay political campaigns seem to sputter out. Although gay sex remains illegal, proposed additional penalties have failed to be enacted. 

source:

Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives

by Robbie Corey-Boulet

2019. Zed Books, London UK

Bad Weather

In an essay exploring possible turning points in the life of philosopher William James, Louis Menand defines Depression the way I do:

Commentators prefer to assume that [William] James was despondent in the years after his graduation from medical school because of some problem — a family problem, a sexual problem, a career problem, an identity problem, a philosophical problem. But depression is not a problem; it’s a weather pattern. Under its cloud, everything else is a problem. When the weather changes, these problems disappear or become ‘opportunities’ or ‘challenges’ — until dark skies return.

Depression can certainly be triggered by events in one’s life. You may be able to pinpoint the thing that “made” you sad. But if you can’t, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. There might not be a concrete causal factor. Even if you find something you think must have brought it on, addressing it directly often does not blow the Depression away. Sometimes all you can do is endure until the bad weather passes. 

source:

American Studies

by Louis Menand

2002. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Think how?

Alexander Chee took a writing class at Wesleyan from Annie Dillard. In an essay describing his experience Chee lays out a lot of Dillard’s precepts on how to write well. 

In this passage Dillard is pushing her students to go back over their writing with one particular feature in mind:

Have you used the right verbs? Is that the precise verb for that precise thing? Remember that adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening in the mind of the reader. Think carefully.

Wait. What just happened? 

The last two words in the original text are a bit hidden. The whole written out goes: “Think carefully — when did this happen in relation to that? And is that how you’ve described it?”

You’d think, if the adverb was meant as a joke, it would stand on its own, not be tidied behind two concluding questions. But, hey, I laughed.

source:

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: essays

by Alexander Chee

2018. Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York