Strange Fruit

"My images try to show a more personal and intimate beauty, pride, dignity, courage, and grace that have been painfully challenged by mainstream society." Photographer Gerard H. Gaskin has been documenting house ball life for twenty years. His latest book, "Legendary: Inside the House Ball Scene" is a vivid and beautiful look at a subculture we usually only get to see when a mainstream entertainer co-opts it. We spoke with Gerard this week about the book, and about what the house ball scene means to him. In our Juicy Fruit segment, we talked about George Zimmerman's latest arrest, this time for domestic violence. We also talked about the Colorado father who shot his toddler daughter and himself, and how it raises questions about who can seek protection from dating violence. In other Juicy news this week, Jaison and Kaila loved Best Man Holiday, Mayor Bloomberg said you have to be 21 to buy cigarettes in New York City, and Jaison shared his thoughts on the Trans Day of Remembrance.

"These buses came back from the West End with these little kids on them, and they were crying, there were windows knocked out. They had been beaten with baseball bats, they had been called every horrible racial name you can expect, right here in this town." It sounds like a scene we'd expect to see in the deep South, but this happened in Louisville in the middle of the 1970s, when public schools implemented the busing system. That's how performing artist Teresa Willis remembers it, and it makes up part of her one-woman show, Eenie Meanie. Because Louisville itself was so segregated, neighborhood schools were largely either black or white. Busing was designed to achieve greater diversity within school, but was met with resistance. "Racism really came out of the closet in my community," Teresa remembers. "There's crosses burning at the football field. Literally, we're at a football game and a cross gets lit on fire. It was not pretty in 1975, '76 around here at all. Dixie Highway at Valley Station road were thousands and thousands of people rioting. We made the national news. People were so angry." Teresa also lived in L.A. during the 1992 riots. Eenie Meanie looks at racism in the baby boomer generation and in her own life. She joined us this week to talk about the piece, which is part of the Slant Culture Theatre Festival going on this weekend and next (she's also the festival's director). In our Juicy Fruit segment this week, we talk about the horrible case of Renisha McBride, the 19-year-old black woman who was shot in the face by a white man when she went to his door for help after a car accident. Friend to the show Dr. Brittney Cooper, covering the story for Salon, pointed out the similarities between this incident and the recent shooting of Jonathan Farrell, who was also shot and killed while seeking help after an accident. She also points out how this case is different from recent white-on-black killings: because the victim in this case is a woman, and, "we have somehow come to believe that black women’s femininity exempts them from what Kiese Laymon has called 'the worst of white folks.'" Kaila also breaks down 12 Years a Slave with some historical analysis, and shares her reactions to the film. Among many other issues, the film demonstrates how lack of access to reading and writing tools was used as a weapon against enslaved people. "The fact that I'm sitting there as an African American, as a free person with a doctorate, watching this film about a man who was prevented from writing," she says, "It's a really really awful story. It was tough." ► VIDEO: 1975 Busing Riots

Around this time last year, we spoke with Dr. Stephanie Budge about the challenges faced by LGTBQ folks during the holidays - specifically college students. Some students who have come out while at school are no longer welcome at home, and for some, going back home means going back in the closet. This week we spoke with Brian Buford about how the LGBTQ Center at UofL tries to make the holidays a better time for the students under its care. Each year, they host a Thanksgiving potluck where all are welcome. To fund this and their other efforts, they have an annual event called Feast on Equality, which is coming up on November 22. In this week's Juicy Fruit, we talked about Kylie Austin, a biracial teenager who changed her name from Keisha after she was bullied by classmates. We also talked about the fascinating Chirlane McCray, wife of NYC's mayor-elect Bill DiBlasio. In the late '70s, she came out as a lesbian woman of color. The different phases of her public life nicely illustrate the fluidity of sexual identity and desire. We've also heard tell that the History Channel is planning to remake Roots, and our burning question is, who will be in the cast? Who would you cast, Fruitcakes?

It's one of the deadliest attacks on LGBTQ people in U.S. history - and even if you're an activist or scholar, there's a good chance you've never heard of it. Louisville filmmaker Sheri L. Wright is bringing a story to light that can be difficult to hear. If you're up on your history, you know that in this country's history, it's often been unsafe for LGBTQ folks to gather and socialize. We all know about the bar raids and wrongful arrests that are part of our story. In her new documentary now in progress, Tracking Fire, Wright tells the story of the Upstairs Lounge, a gay bar in New Orleans. In June of 1973, as the city was concluding its very first Pride celebration, someone set fire to the club, killing over 30 people who were inside. Security bars on the windows made escape difficult - there was one back way out that wasn't widely known about. In the days following the fire, some suspected investigators weren't being as thorough as they should have (in fact, no one was ever convicted of the crime, though there was a credible suspect). Remains were left publicly visible for longer than necessary. Some families of the victims never came forward to identify their loved ones and claim the bodies. The media did little reporting on the crime. Clergy were largely unwilling to perform memorial services, and the one who did was sanctioned by his church and received hate mail. In short, the lives of these gay and lesbian New Orleanians did not seem to have much value. That's why Wright said she felt it was so important for their stories to be told. "The more that I looked into this, the more outraged I became," she explained. "These people [...] needed to be acknowledged." Wright joined us this week to tell us about the project, where her crew is with production, and how we can keep up with and support their efforts. In our Juicy Fruit segment this week, we talked about donning our "fun" apparel for the holidays, and how Target recently became one of the largest retailers to "ban the box," or refrain from asking about criminal history on initial job applications.

If you've never been to a ball, you don't know what you're missing - but Dr. Marlon Bailey's book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps, is probably the next best thing. He takes us inside the ballroom scene in Detroit with an ethnography that examines how ball culture redefines ideas about gender, performance, and community. We spoke to Dr. Bailey this week about his work and what drew him to it, and he told us about his first time at a ballroom event and how it challenged all his previous assumptions about black gay culture. In our Juicy Fruit segment, it's Halloween week, and that means a lot of white folks will be out and about in blackface. We talk about what causes people to think that's okay, and why it never is (also check out Ohio University's campaign, We're a Culture, Not a Costume, which comments on the wrong-headedness of using stereotypes as costumes). Elsewhere in cultural misappropriation, American Apparel thought a Voudou-themed window display would be perfect for Halloween. And we also talked about our favorite study of the week: The National Bureau for Economic Research published a paper this week saying first-born children are smarter. With apologies to our younger siblings, the entire Strange Fruit team agrees.

Stephen Jimenez went to Laramie, Wyoming in 2000, to write a screenplay about the murder of Matthew Shepard. He expected to be researching fairly open-and-shut case which had almost immediately become the national symbol for anti-gay hate crime. What he found, tucked away among the files, was an anonymous letter that would change the course of his work completely. "I was shocked to hear that Aaron McKinney's attorneys claimed gay panic in their defense," the letter began. "Aaron and Russ were quite familiar with gay guys and had frequented gay bars. They became aware of the fact that they had a valuable asset in their pants, and that gay guys would give them shelter, food, and money in return for a few minutes pleasure." The letter also named some mutual acquaintances of Matthew and Aaron, suggesting the two had known each other before the night of the crime, and casting doubt on the pickup-gone-wrong narrative that had been presented in court. Jimenez spent the next thirteen years researching the case and speaking to more than a hundred witnesses. What he ended up with was The Book of Matt - a portrait of the crime that's been met with controversy and has, in fact, been condemned by the Matthew Shepard Foundation and other critics in the media. We sat down with Jimenez this week at an event at Carmichael's Bookstore to ask him about his work, and get his response to some specific criticisms of his conclusions. On this week's episode, we bring you that conversation so you can draw your own conclusions about what's undoubtedly a complex situation. Note: Because Stephen Jimenez was intentionally precise with many of his answers, and due to the controversy surrounding the book, we've decided to run this interview unedited. It's been altered for volume levels only. In our Juicy Fruit segment this week, WFPL's Joseph Lord fills us in on the local case of an Audubon Park police officer who lost his job after complaining about anti-gay harassment. And we reflect on the sad story of Nathan Verhelst, the Belgian trans man who chose doctor-assisted suicide after his body rejected his reassignment surgery.

Writer and activist Janet Mock was living a successful life, working as a journalist, outside the spotlight, until a friend recommended her for a profile in Marie Claire magazine. The article's publication had consequences that changed the course of her work, and life. "I didn't plan the role model part of it or the advocate part of it," she explains. "I think that all just kind of started. I realized after the piece came out that there was such a hunger to hear more about young trans women of color experiences. I think my writing just kind of went there because I think there was a need to hear more about that and I think there was also a need within myself to share more about parts of myself that I'd kept silent for so long." Janet's still a writer, but now she's also an activist - and one of the most recognizable faces in trans advocacy. In many ways, she's become the role model she herself didn't have while growing up. "People often say that I'm a role model," she says. "I feel like I'm a real model. Like, there's a real model of how you can do it. I'm existing. I'm out in the world. I'm still discovering who I am. I'm not playing a role. I'm being real. This is my life." In her upcoming book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, she tells her story and shares some of what she's learned along the way. Janet will be the keynote speaker for Pride Week at UofL, and we're thrilled she took some time to speak with us this week and share some of her wisdom. "The biggest lesson that I've ever learned in my life is to just truly fight for who you are, and not let anyone - not even your own body - tell you that you can't do something that you know you're supposed to be doing."

To speak to Gert McMullen about the origins of the AIDS Memorial Quilt is to go back to a scary, sad time in LGBTQ history: San Francisco in the early 1980s. "People were terrified," she explains, "because they didn't know what was happening. People were just dying. They were trying to figure out, why were these gay men dying?" Gert lost many of her friends in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and thanks to the fear and stigma surrounding the disease, she was often their only visitor. "You would go into the hospitals and there was nobody there and the nurses would put you in a moon suit, basically, to walk in there, because they didn't know what was going to happen," she recalls. No one understood how the disease was transmitted, so many people were afraid to come into close contact with their afflicted loved ones - even during their final days. "I remember a friend of mine who was so lonely and I just kind of touched him, and he just went, 'Oh my god, it's been so long since somebody even touched me.'" Witnessing all this sparked Gert's involvement in LGBTQ activism - involvement which continues today. She began work on the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the 80s and is now its caretaker, taking it on tours so people can see it in person. Twenty panels of the quilt will be on display as part of the 20th Anniversary Louisville AIDS Walk on October 13th. We'll talk more about the walk as it gets closer, but this week we speak to Gert about the quilt itself, and the evolution of AIDS-related activism. In our Juicy Fruit segment, we talk about the Charlotte, NC police shooting of Jonathan Ferrell, who was unarmed and running to them for help after a car accident. We also take a look at the racism that erupted online when Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America. And we celebrated Queen Latifah's new talk show but wondered why so many folks involved in its debut are widely-rumored to be gay.

Earlier this month, 7-year-old Tiana Parker was told that her locs were considered an unacceptable hairstyle in her African-American charter school. Word quickly spread among black feminist scholars, including friend-to-the-show Dr. Yaba Blay. What followed was a testament to the power of black women to uplift each other and celebrate the beauty of black girlhood. Dr. Blay assembled a care package for Tiana which quickly got attention from thousands and thousands of people online, and has now been crafted into an e-book for black girls. Dr. Blay joined us this week to tell us what moved her about this story, and how the project came to fruition. And in our Juicy Fruit segment, we talk about the South Carolina church whose black pastor requested that only white people be church greeters, and The Talk host Sheryl Underwood's disparaging comments about black children's hair (why did everyone decide this is the month to come for black babies' hair?).

This week, Frankfort became the fifth Kentucky city to pass a fairness ordinance, protecting LGBTQ folks from discrimination! We talk about it in our Juicy Fruit segment, along with the strange case of Tyler Perry laying hands on T.D. Jakes, and what #DonLemonLooksLike with his new haircut. In our feature interview this week, we spoke with sex therapist Dr. Joe Kort, who got our attention with his recent article, Why Some Straight Men Are Romantically or Sexually Attracted to Other Men. In it, he shares a whole list of reasons why this phenomenon might happen. These reasons are by turns predictable (they're in prison with no access to women), poignant (they seek to replace the affection they didn't get from their fathers), hilarious (narcissism!) and taboo (we're pretty sure this is the first time the word cuckholding has been uttered on Strange Fruit). It was a fascinating conversation and Dr. Kort shed some light on a lot of things. Let us know what you think, Fruitcakes. Have you encountered straight men like this?

How multi-racial is your circle of friends? Are any of your close friends of a different race than yours? Not the lady who works down the hall from your office or the dad you chat with while waiting for your kid to get out of school. Someone who's been to your house or invited you over for dinner. A recent poll by Reuters found that the many white people - 40% - have no friends outside their race. We on Strange Fruit figure this is probably no surprise to black folks. Among people of color, 25% of respondents said they didn't have friends outside their race. We wanted to talk more about the reasons why this might be the case, and what historical and demographic factors created the situation. So we spoke to Tanner Colby, author of Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America. Tanner realized while volunteering for Barack Obama's campaign in 2008 that he actually had no black friends. So he went on a cross-country research trip to examine interracial friendship, and on this week's show, he shared his findings with us. At the end of the show, we turned our focus inward to talk about some of our own experiences of interracial friendships (and speaking of personal narratives, we'd be remiss if we didn't point you to Friend to the Show Dr. Brittney Cooper's Salon piece, The Politics of Being Friends with White People). In our Juicy Fruit segment this week, we of course had to address the Miley Cyrus Situation. While our hosts disagreed - Dr. Story has no time for Miley and Jaison thinks she's actually poking fun at ideas of race in music - it did lead to a larger conversation on the ways artists take on and cast off cultural and racial signifiers. We've seen it with white artists like Justin Timerblake, who started out poppy then moved into a more R&B aesthetic. We've also seen it with artists of color like J-Lo and Mariah Carey. Do non-white artists have to adopt a "mainstream" (read: white) sound to get a foot in the door, and can later be more real with their work? And why do white artists seem to use black culture when they want to seem more mature, sexual, or distant from their bubble-gum pop beginnings?

Lately, many mainstream (read: white) media outlets have taken notice of Black Twitter. Often their approach seems almost anthropological. "How did this amazing phenomenon come about? Who are these people and what is their motivation?" But as Dr. Story says on this week's show, "Black people talk about political issues amongst themselves, and they have been for centuries. And they sometimes write about it too." To dissect Black Twitter and the media's response to it, we're joined this week by Tracy Clayton, aka @BrokeyMcPoverty, who writes The Root's Grapevine blog and can also be found at PostBourgie. Tracy is one of the funniest voices on our timeline (in our opinion, and you know our opinion is never humble), and lucky for us, she's from right here in Louisville, so she was able to pop down to the studio for a visit.  Tracy's been called for several interviews now about the black twitter phenomenon, which she defines like so: "It's black people... who use twitter." Or in a more concrete example, "It's like the table of black kids in your school cafeteria."  She says the folks on twitter have been responsible for changes in the real world, both large (no book deal for you, Juror B37) and seemingly small (never come for @honesttoddler, Miss Alba). We agree, and we also appreciate the way black twitter uses very sharp humor to poke fun at those who need it. Witness the #PaulasBestDishes hashtag (we were partial to Strange Fruit Pies, of course). Tracy also sat in on our Juicy Fruit segment and we chatted about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's ban on conversion therapy in New Jersey, and how emotionally confusing it is when politicians we generally disagree with do things we love (and how we also love seeing folks with supposedly-unconventional body types in the news for positive reasons).  We also talked about the pastor who doesn't want female church members wearing weaves, and filmmaker Lee Daniels' questionable comments about black homophobia, and how an HIV clinic with women and children in the waiting room reminded him of a welfare office.  And it seems like we have to revisit the concept of linguistic reclamation every few months, because someone is always using language that doesn't belong to them. This time, it's a drag performer in Portland hosting an event whose name includes a slur commonly used against trans* folks. We've also heard lesbians using the f-word and gay men using the d-word. So does membership in any of the LGBTQ letters make it ok to use slurs again

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney has been called the next August Wilson. Maybe that can be partially attributed to the fact that there are so few prominent African American playwrights, but there's still no doubt he is carrying an important mantle. At age 33, he's already had plays debut at the Royal Court London, New York's Vineyard Theatre, the Young Vic, and Steppenwolf Theatre, where he is an artist in residence. In March, he received the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.We spoke to McCraney this week about his career, and how and why he writes about black gay life. He told us the real-life roots of some of his most famous works, and about working as August Wilson's assistant at Yale (including an unforgettable story about buying Wilson an iPod).In our Juicy Fruit segment this week, we had lots of news to cover: The #solidarityisforwhitewomen and #blackpowerisforblackmen hashtags, "straight" men who sleep with men, Oprah's experience of racism in Sweden, black ESPN colleagues calling each other racial slurs, and more.  Photo Credit: Playbill

This week we meet Coury Deeb, founder and director of Nadus Films. The Louisville filmmaker's latest film, Bboy for Life, takes us into Guatemala's breakdancing subculture, and shows how gang violence affects the lives of the dancers - many of whom are pacifists, themselves. In our Juicy Fruit segment we finally talk about Orange Is the New Black. And Jaison gives us an update on Marco McMillan's murder (McMillan was a black gay man running for mayor in Mississippi, and a friend of Jai's).

While we spent the week celebrating Jai's birthday and recovering from EOY, CNN's Don Lemon was busy making people mad and agreeing with Bill O'Reilly. In our Juicy Fruit segment this week, we deconstruct his list of advice for black folks. The video is worth a watch, but if you're pressed for time, it boils down to pulling up your pants and not having babies out of wedlock. It was a disappointing reminder that just because someone's family doesn't make them immune to the lure of respectability politics. But as Doc said, he's certainly no Boykin (and we did agree with him that littering is gross). Also this week we bring you part two of our chat with Louisville activist Carla Wallace, and author Chris Crass. Chris was in town recently to celebrate the release of his book, Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racism Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy.