BROTHER TO BROTHER: New Writings by Black...

BROTHER TO BROTHER: New Writings by Black Gay Men edited by Essex Hemphill, conceived by Joseph Beam (Alyson Publications: $8.95). Thirty-five men of color use poetry and prose to explore the double alienation that characterizes their experience. Rejected by a large portion of the African-American community on the basis of their sexuality, they find much of the white gay community unwilling to accept them because of their color. The often compelling autobiographical pieces infuse the discussions of racism, religious intolerance, homophobia and fear of AIDS with a personal immediacy. A junior high school boy lives in terror that his ultra-religious parents will discover he’s attended any party--let alone one for young gay men in Charles R. P. Pouncy’s “A First Affair:” “The worst thing that might possibly happen would be that everyone in the nieghborhood would find out, my father would beat me viciously, and I would be sent to Cheraw, South Carolina, to live with my Aunt Gert. Was all of that worht one little party?” In “Aunt Ida Pieces a Quilt,” Melvin Dixon captures the thoughts of an elderly woman making her nephew’s panel for the AIDS quilt: “When Francine say she gonna hang this quilt in the church/ I like to fall out. A quilt ain’t no show piece,/ it’s to keep you warm. Francine say it can do both.” These accounts of life in a doubly hostile society reveal why filmmaker/contributor Marlon Riggs ended his award-winning documentary “Tongues Untied” with the statement “Black men loving black men is a revolutionary act.”