script

Fade to Black script

We weren’t born black
We weren’t born black
We weren’t born black
we learned that lesson
we learned that lesson when it was already too late.

In the decades since I knew
since I knew sir or lady as I called him
I adopted his speech and dress.
I adopted his speech and dress. I became him.

We each had a daddy
and that can send you packing
even from yourself.

And like me
like me he couldn’t have his maleness
because that was sick and controlling
sick and controlling like his father.

We were husbands
We were husbands who longed to be wives.

His anger could not trump my silence
so after a while he gave up
and climbed into bed with me.

I’d never felt like part of a couple before.
The only time we separated
was in gay bars.
In gay bars it was every man for himself.

What is grace
What is grace but the desire to forget one’s body
or share it with others?

I did not suck white dick.
I refused to suck white dick because the world
the world sucked them off well enough.

Being openly gay is a luxury
Being openly gay is a luxury many black men can’t afford.
Our queerness was seen as a form of whiteness
even by other gay black men who sucked our cocks.

One evening an actor asked me
an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast.
But what exactly is a black?
What exactly is a black? First of all: what’s his colour?

What I saw in the person I loved
What I saw in my love was the person I was frightened of most.
Would he die because of this love? Would I?

I want to get back to the first question
What is the relation of the white people
What is the relation of the white people in these lynching pictures
to the white people who pay me
to the white people who pay me to write about these pictures.
To perform my blackness.

I was a great actor, but only in real life.

We worked in a mostly white office.
It was the first time
It was the first time we had ever been around white people much.
It was strange to feel our bodies
It was strange to feel ourselves next to their white bodies.
It made us hate each other

It made us hate each other for the first time.

Without the faith
Without the faith that our face expresses our self
without that basic illusion
without that basic hope we were lost.

If only we could be rid of one another
we might be the one
we might be the one someone could love.
But since there were two of us
there was two of everything
there was two of everything no one seemed to want.

Our need for love felt cruel
Our need for love felt cruel even to ourselves.
To speak it would be a crime.

This is how we left each other
This is how we left each other not with a cut but a fade
a slow dissolve
fade to black.

credits
Hilton Als, Amira Baraka, Dick Davett, Steve Cropper
Laura Dern, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Rare Earth
Al Freeman Jr., Juan Gonzalez, Jean Genet
Larry Hamm, Mike Hoolboom, Al Jackson, Jr.
Wayne Jackson, Booker T. Jones, Shirley Knight
Andrew Love, David Lynch, Richard Pryor
Otis Redding, Alan Walker, Kanye West
Stevie Wonder, Komozi Woodard