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Writer Stanley Bennett Clay Talks with A&U’s Chael Needle About the
Stage & Screen Versions of Invisible Life, the Everyday Politics of
HIV/AIDS & the Search for Self-Empowerment
Recently, Los Angeles-based Stanley Bennett Clay was flown to New York City to meet with Ashford & Simpson. He had penned the book and lyrics for a stage musical version of the E. Lynn Harris [A&U, August 2002] novel, Invisible Life, and the solid-as-a-rock singer/songwriter duo had been impressed by the yet-to-be-finished songs and expressed an interest in possibly writing the music. After a productive Sunday afternoon meeting with the show’s director, George Faison, and its producer, Proteus Spann, at Faison’s Harlem theater, Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson invited Clay over to their East 61st Street brownstone the next day to hear more of his musical ideas.
“When I was at their house, Valerie Simpson asked me to sit at the piano and play a few things—do you know how intimidating that is?! You’re trying to play the piano in front of a genius like Valerie Simpson?” he asks, reliving the excitement. “That was probably the most intimidating moment I experienced in my entire life! I’m a fair piano player, but I’m a better composer than I am a musician. I got through it. It was very nerve-racking. They were kind, and, in their own way, very forgiving.”
Later I learn that Ashford & Simpson indeed signed on, and Clay is overjoyed by the results and deeply proud of and humbled by the collaboration. He is the type of person who might need a calculator so intent is he about counting his blessings.
The musical is only one of the projects on his many spinning plates. Stanley Bennett Clay is a busy man. Though fifty-five, he tells me he feels like he has the energy of a thirty-year-old. I imagine him as one of those figures in a sped-up silent movie, someone with the agility and creative vitality of a Charlie Chaplin—in his small, quiet residential home near Hancock Park, he’s out for his brisk morning walk, he’s back and revising his novel, composing at the piano, looking up and smiling as neighborhood kids tear into his home for a refreshment out of the fridge, on the phone with his significant other in the Dominican Republic, out to the porch to catch up on his correspondence or read one of the books with which he has lined his nest—the latest Toni Morrison novel, Alphonso Morgan’s take on black, gay teenage life in Brooklyn, Sons, or perhaps his actor friend Denise Nicholas’s fiction about Freedom Riders on their way to Mississippi, Freshwater Road.
But when I share with him during our phone interview that I’ve never been to Los Angeles, he compares the city his family adopted in 1963 with the energy of my home, New York City—and the iris closes on my daydream: “L.A. is going to seem to you like everyone is moving in slow motion. L.A. is culturally napping sometimes. It’s like one long siesta. This is a rare day that it’s gray. Usually it’s sunny every single day....It’s very restive, and very pensive, I think. It’s designed to lay out by a swimming pool.” Indeed he does all those things that I describe but at a much less frantic pace. “This is Chill City,” he reminds.
My cinematic metaphor is not quite on the mark, anyway. True, as a teen he flirted with acting as a profession but found the romantic leading man image encouraged by the fan magazines and his handlers too constricting as a young, gay man in a six-year relationship, which eventually became a casualty of the red-carpet closet. True, he has written the screenplay for the soon-to-be-produced nonmusical film version of Invisible Life, and has written and directed a film, Ritual, starring Clarence Williams III and the aforementioned Nicholas. But add the fact that before Ritual became a film, he wrote, directed, and coproduced the award-winning stage play on which it was based, you realize that Clay, rather than living in the shadow of the film industry, is more like an industry all to himself, an artist comfortable in any genre. Who else could start writing a memoir, Notes from My Nature, and finish it as a one-man show?
A prolific playwright and stage producer, he has also written musical scores for theater productions (as well as wearing all three hats for his musicals, Lady Panther, Something for God, and Why Do Fools Fall in Love?) and occasionally has returned to acting. Aside from the stage, he has also excelled on the page. Capitalizing on his editorial and writing experience at Black Beat magazine and the London-based Blues and Soul magazine, among others, Clay founded and published SBC magazine, in order to “have a magazine that represented the black gay and lesbian community, and talk from somewhat of an intellectual, controversial, political, social, and cultural point of view.” SBC became the most widely distributed black gay and lesbian periodical in the mid-nineties and enjoyed a ten-year run.
He also found time to serve on the board of directors of Minority AIDS Project (MAP), the first community-based HIV/AIDS organization established and managed by people of color in the U.S. In 1985, Archbishop Carl Bean and members of Unity Fellowship Church founded MAP to serve the needs of the African-American and Latino communities in Central and South Central Los Angeles. MAP, which has recently come dangerously close to closing, is “a very needed organization. A very vital organization. Still very vital. But once again the funding, particularly in the minority community, is not equitable. It really is not,” Clay points out. “There needs to be a lot more funding—but there needs to be a lot more advocacy. We need a lot more advocates to get out there and fight for the money.”
His confidence as an advocate was at first almost shaken. Years ago, as the only non-positive gay male on MAP’s board, he remembers his being singled out and told his views were less-than because he didn’t have AIDS. “And I went to Reverend Carl Bean one time and said how lonely sometimes it made me feel....I felt kind of isolated, because I was often dismissed.” It seemed that people with HIV/AIDS had something to say, and he had nothing to say. “Then I said, ‘Wait a second, fuck that. I’m not buying into that.’ I stopped buying into that kind of pity/martydom thing that happens,” he says about the propensity to see those living with HIV/AIDS as saints and those who are HIV-negative as clueless rather than see both as human beings whose challenges sometimes differ and sometimes coincide. “My friends who are HIV or who have AIDS are treated exactly as all my other friends. Outside of their health considerations, there are no other considerations,” he says, both tough and tender.
Among the magazine, Minority AIDS Project, and other work, “I got so embroiled in the political part of being a black, gay man that my artistic side got neglected a bit,” he says. So he returned to writing, his “true love” as he calls it. Clay’s efforts have produced not only plays and musicals, but three published novels: Diva, In Search of Pretty Young Black Men, and Looker, hitting shelves next spring. But politics, like the keyboard of his laptop, is never far from his fingertips.
“This new White House—they’ve slackened off a bit,” he says, reflecting on the state of our HIV/AIDS union. “We still deal with a group of people in this country who for some reason believe that HIV/AIDS is a punishment for gay people. Of course, they don’t explain what the punishment is for all the people in Africa! They died because they’re black and you also still believe that black people are the curse of Cush?” He lets that Biblical misreading hover in the air, dissipate. “That’s the sort of right-wing Christian conservative thinking that really pisses me off. Especially this whole thing about abstinence [as the primary HIV prevention approach]. I mean, God created us to have sex and has given us this wonderful gift of sexuality; for those who think that sex is only supposed to happen for procreation, I think they’re sadly mistaken. If that were the case, then this world would be completely overrun!”
Clay bemoans the apathetic fog that has settled over Washington and much of the country now that AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence for many in this country. “I remember my days as vice president of the Minority AIDS Project board of directors and just watching people die left and right. At least during that period of time, people were constantly trying to do something about the situation....It’s no longer on the front burner for a lot of people. I think there has to be more political action in regards to AIDS. There has to be.”
Asked about political inspirations, he quickly responds, “The late Rosa Parks. Just that simple act. She just said, Fuck you, you know. I’m not getting up. To me, without any grandiose intent or anything like this, this woman changed the world. I’m just so proud to have lived in the same period she lived in.” Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Barack Obama are also high on his list, as well as former President Clinton and his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton [A&U, April 2005].
He doesn’t feel pressured to write about HIV/AIDS in an overtly political sense, but instead opts to address it when it pops up as part of the emotional journey of a character—a model that he thinks extends to real life: HIV/AIDS, like racism or breast cancer, “should be part of our everyday-speak. We need to talk about it, but we don’t need to be pressured to talk about it. I think sometimes it comes off as a little phony when someone feels the need that they have to always talk about it. It should just be part of their consciousness.” His first novel, Diva, based on a “hopelessly romantic, openly gay affair” Clay had as a young man from the suburbs discovering a new life in the city, reflects this forthrightness: “I didn’t realize how openly gay the book was until people made comments about it—[for] me, being who I am, it’s just natural. I am a naturally gay person as much as I am a naturally black person as much as I am naturally an American. It has always been easy for me to write about homosexuality and the normalcy of it.”
And while Clay’s In Search of Pretty Young Black Men can’t be described as an HIV-themed novel, its characters’ journeys do resonate with much of the current dialogue about African-American men on the down low and the connection between HIV risk and low self-esteem.
His portrait of Baldwin Hills, a Los Angeles enclave “where muffled black pride, discreet black money, and relentless black reserve went hand in hand in hand,” as the narrator describes it, does not simply depict a husband and wife who are both stepping out on each other but rather fills in the emotional, historical and social context of infidelity on both sides of the bed. Though sexual healing is found in the arms of a “pretty young black man,” suppressed desires lead to tragic consequences.
As the novel touches on the complex dance of sexual, political, and class-based identity, I ask him about the media attention heaped on men on the down low as the newest “face” of HIV transmission. “It’s another way to demonize black men. I’m pretty much appalled by it because the down low is just a new name for something that’s been going on for ages,” he says about the media’s simplistic reduction of the down low to cheating. “It’s not black men, it’s not white men, it’s everybody. It’s not men!” Cutting to the core of the issue, he says: “I think the question is, Are you being honest with someone? And whatever the two of you have decided to do in regards to fidelity, monogamy—that’s kind of a personal decision.” Whether one wants monogamy or multiple partners, Clay feels it’s important for one to own—and own up to—his or her sexual truth. The dialogue about HIV and the struggle over black sexual identity shapes his latest project, Invisible Life, as well. One of its female characters has become sick with an AIDS-related opportunistic infection and all eyes turn to her boyfriend as the bisexual boogeyman. He’s not. In fact, he turns out to be one of her most supportive friends.
When I offer that the down low seems like another way to exoticize black sexuality and make it seem different from sex that is safe and straight and white, Clay zeroes in on the reason: “Black men are a target. And black men have always been a target. And black men understand why they’re a target. It’s because we’re the most threatening individuals on the face of the earth, and so of course we’re a target. There’s a fear of us. There’s a desire for us. There are all these things that people want out of black men or wish they could have that black men have. We get that. Of course, we understand why for years the publishing industry would only publish black women that had books that demonized black men and you could not find a book by a heterosexual black man anywhere on the shelf....We know what’s up.”
He points out that targeting even happens after alliances are apparently forged. For example, blacks and whites worked together to build up the West Hollywood gay community and, more broadly, the women’s movement, he says, but, then, the white community took the political support they needed and closed the doors on black people. “I think [it’s] because black people have a tendency to be very giving, and they just give, give, give. And if you’re just giving, giving, giving and somebody is just taking, well, then, when they’ve used you up...well, then, hey. We all know that we live in a racist society,” he says, mentioning the media’s representation of black people in the aftermath of Katrina as “looters” and white people as “survivors.” The effects of Katrina, he says, helped air America’s dirty laundry—that people in this country go without and many of those people are black. America has got a lot of healing to do, he says. “Part of it is that we as black people have to accept a lot of the responsibility, too. Because we have to just simply say, This shit stops right here. No more. And that’s the one thing I do miss—the activism of the sixties and the early seventies.”
That kind of self-empowerment comes in part by “getting out of the slave mentality. They really have to understand that they are very special and that they are equal to everybody else in the world. And you really do have to self-empower yourself....God made me left-handed, God made me black, God made me gay, God made me an artist. Now these are four things, throughout history, that people have hated....With all that that I am, if I allowed any of that to create self-hate in me, I’d be a fucked-up mess. But I have embraced all those things because those are all the things that God made me....And when you understand your specialness...then you can go about changing the world because you inspire other people.”
This search for a protective self-love runs throughout In Search of Pretty Young Black Men. “It’s that pretty young black man that’s in all of us,” he says about finding that specialness inside. “We do need to search that out and embrace it. Embrace that inner beauty. If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anybody. How can you possibly love anybody else if you can’t love yourself?”
With the blessings of the producers, he wrote a small part into the movie version of Invisible Life for himself as a hippie-ish, T-shirt-and-jeans-type professor and the self-casting fits. Stanley Bennett Clay has the approachability, heart, and intelligence in real life as he will surely bring to the big screen.
Watch for the premiere of the musical, Invisible Life, in Washington, D.C.
Chael Needle interviewed singer Spencer Day for the March issue.
September 2006
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