1990 Time Magazine Article: Lesbian Folk Rock Singer Tracy Chapman UnPopular & Ignored In The Black Community.
By Richard Stengel, Time, March 12, 1990 
Armed only with her voice, her guitar and her conscience, TRACY CHAPMAN has helped make protest music fashionable again
Tracy Chapman is serious about her smile. She does not bestow it lightly. Laughter, the same story. She covers her mouth when she laughs, as though to hide the fact that she is tickled about something. “If there is some major misconception about me,” she says very seriously, “it is that I’m always serious.” And then, a brief smile.
Be careful of my heart
I just lost a little faith
When you broke my heart
She is smaller and more delicate than she appears in pictures, her voice higher and more nasal than on her records. There is a solidity about her, a muscular spirituality. Her element is earth, not air. A master of silence, she does not talk about what she doesn’t know. Mostly, she is wary, skeptical.
All you folks think you run my life
Say I should be willing to compromise
I’m trying to protect what I keep inside
No one imagined that Chapman would be so big a success so soon. In 1988 Elektra Records released Tracy Chapman, eleven spare, well-crafted folk songs by a 24-year-old Tufts University graduate. Some were about unrequited love, yes, but others spoke of homelessness, racism and revolution. The album became Billboard’s No. 1 pop album and sold 10 million copies. Chapman won three Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist. Last year, on the Amnesty International tour, she crisscrossed the globe with Sting, Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel, performing before stadiums of cheering fans on five continents. In May she will begin an American tour.
Some have found her popularity mystifying. An earnest black folk singer in jeans and a T shirt? Yet it was really very simple, according to saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who has played with Chapman. “People were so used to hearing imperfection,” he says, “they were bowled over by perfection. People were ready to hear music again.” And there is that voice, a rich contralto that seemed to come from a hundred miles away. A sweet, sad, wise voice that haunted almost all who heard it. A voice that seemed to know things that they didn’t. A record to be played alone and late at night.
Chapman quickly became a cultural icon. Her short, spiky dreadlocks signaled a move away from pop glitter. Her music, pared down, almost willfully naive, was an antidote to the synthesized sound of the 1980s. In an age when pop singers seemed more like musical M.B.A.s than recording artists, she seemed genuine. Her politics were mushy headed and self-righteous, yet she was an urban folk singer without the fragility of the genre.
Crossroads, Chapman’s second album, has been out for five months and has sold 4 million copies. Again there are songs about poverty and the underclass, but Crossroads is darker, more self-involved than the first album. It is less concerned with the political battles of the world than the emotional conflicts within herself. We hear the voice of a young woman who gives more than she gets to lovers who take more than they give.
I’d save a little love for myself
Enough for my heart to mend
Turn on the radio these days, and you are more likely to hear a pop singer railing against homelessness than one urging you to get down and party. Protest music has made a comeback, and Chapman is partly responsible. Her first album showed that social concern sold. Now singers known more for their commitment to sequins than their dedication to social policy are decrying acid rain.
Chapman does not criticize others for a trendy embrace of social concern. “I don’t know that it’s fair to question people’s motives,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “Even if people are doing it simply because they think it’s commercial, I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. It can encourage action. If music can do anything, I would hope that it might make people more compassionate.”
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
She sang not long after she could talk. Chapman grew up with her mother and one sister in a mostly black, working-class neighborhood in Cleveland. Her father and mother divorced when Tracy was four. Her mother always listened to the radio when she was home: Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Mahalia Jackson, mostly rhythm and blues.
Chapman was a quiet child and liked to be by herself. On her way to school, she made up songs for her sister and their friends. Her first ambition was to play the drums, but her mother feared that they would be too noisy and bought her a tinny $20 guitar. The instrument harmonized with her soul. School and the neighborhood, she says, were rough. The local high school had a metal detector at the door. “At times, it was a terrifying place to be.” To say she wanted to get away is an understatement. “No desire to stay,” she says. “And no desire to go back.”
She won a scholarship for gifted minority students and went off to the Wooster School in Connecticut. It was her first glimpse of white, upper- middle-class life, and she found aspects of it dismaying. “It was difficult because a lot of students there just said very stupid things,” she recalls. “They had never met a poor person before. In some ways, they were curious, but in ways that were just insulting. How many times as a black person are you asked to explain to a white person what racism is or what it means to be black?”
She was a fine athlete, star of the basketball team and captain of the varsity soccer team. But it was music that moved her. She wrote songs all the time. Friends remember her singing Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution during her junior year. Her 1982 yearbook from Wooster predicts, “Tracy Chapman will marry her guitar and live happily ever after.”
During her freshman year at Tufts, she won a talent contest by singing Baby Can I Hold You?, which appears on her first album. She majored in anthropology, but her real discipline was being a troubadour. She played in coffee shops, churches, sang in Harvard Square and developed an ardent following. In those days, she talked when she performed, telling stories, explaining the genesis of certain songs. Chapman went from college student to recording artist after a classmate persuaded his father, Charles Koppelman, co-founder of SBK, a major music-publishing company, to listen to her music. Chapman needed a producer; many heard her tape and passed, thinking it too uncommercial. But music producer David Kershenbaum fell in love with her voice. “The timbre of it,” he says, “is rare to find. It instantly disarms you. She’s able to sit there and produce an almost flawless performance. Normally today’s producers take tracks and build them and then put in the voice. We wrapped the tracks around the voice.”
Today Chapman is less than thrilled about fame. “I guess if there were some way to choose what I wanted or didn’t want from what my success has brought me,” she says, “I would choose not to have the celebrity. I don’t think I’m very good at it.” She isn’t. She doesn’t like getting fussed over. When strangers approach her, she is often cool to the point of brusqueness. All she divulges about her private life is that she recently moved to San Francisco and lives there in a rented house with her sister.
They’re tryin’ to dig into my soul
And take away the spirit of my god
Her performance style reflects her reticence. There is no chatter, no dancing, no fireworks. Yet she is capable of creating an intimacy with the audience that more gregarious performers cannot duplicate. At an outdoor concert for the homeless in Washington this fall, she stood atop a six-story platform facing 40,000 people. When she played the first few bars of Fast Car, the fidgety audience grew quiet, as though she were singing a lullaby to a baby.
Chapman is one of a handful of black recording artists whose music directly addresses blacks’ concerns. Yet her audience, the people who buy her records, are by and large white, upper-middle-class baby boomers. She says she is speaking to and for the disenfranchised, but they do not listen to her.
Urban contemporary radio stations, or what people in the record business call “black stations,” rarely play her music. A Chapman tune on an urban contemporary station is about as common as a rap song on classical radio. This is primarily because it does not fit into the dance-and-funk formula of those stations. But Chuck D., a member of the controversial rap group Public Enemy, says the reasons have less to do with genre than with soul. “Black people cannot feel Tracy Chapman, even if they got beat over the head with it 35,000 times,” he told Rolling Stone. The implication is that her music is too precious, too bland, too white.
But Salim Muwakkil, an editor for the Chicago biweekly In These Times, who has written about Chapman, says blacks are uncomfortable with her not because she’s too white, but because she’s too black. “There’s a reverse prejudice in the black community,” he says. “The Michael Jackson syndrome is strong. She refuses to disguise her racial characteristics. Blacks are uncomfortable with the lack of glitter.” At the same time, critics have suggested that Chapman is merely penance music for yuppies; listening to her songs on their CDs is a way of assuaging guilt about their own materialism.
This kind of talk hurts Chapman, though she tries to conceal it. “There are people who have gone as far as to say that I’m not black or not part of the black musical tradition,” she says. “I don’t have a problem with so-called black music as it is today, which is mostly dance music, R. and B., and rap music. But I don’t think things are that way because that’s the only music that black people can respond to. I think the reason I don’t get played on black radio stations is because I don’t fit into their present format. And they’re not willing to make a space for me. I’m upset by what has been said because it doesn’t speak well of black people. You know, it basically says black people don’t respond in a cerebral manner to music, and that’s just not true.”
Chapman belongs to the tradition of black intellectuals caught between the mainstream black audience that ignores them and an elite white audience that supports them. Writers and artists of the Harlem renaissance in the 1920s and black poets from Langston Hughes to Amiri Baraka have often complained that their principal audience and patrons were white liberals. “It hurts you when your own people don’t appreciate what you’re doing,” says Henry Louis Gates, a Cornell University professor of English. “John Coltrane heard that. Charlie Parker heard that. I think that’s the most painful feeling for a black artist.”
She is trying to protect what she keeps inside. She wants the music to speak for itself, while her manager and record company would like her to be more outgoing. “I think I write songs better than I give interviews,” she says. She’s right.
Chapman has written hundreds of songs, more than she cares to acknowledge. She keeps the lyrics and a chord chart in a notebook, and often makes a cassette. “There are lots of things that you never show anyone else. But they’re basically exercises that teach you something about writing.”
I’ll save my soul, save myself.
“When I was a kid and I’d listen to records,” she recalls, “I used not to be able to understand what they were saying. I thought they had done that purposely. So when I would play my songs, I would sing so you couldn’t necessarily understand the lyrics.” She laughs. “When I was playing for my sister and mother, they would say, ‘I couldn’t understand what you are saying.’ Then I explained to them that I thought it was supposed to be that way. But I realized at that point that if I felt that what I was saying was important, then it should be clear.“
Tags: branford marsalis, interview, press in english, time
LA Times: Controversial New Medical Pill Can Reduce & Alter Female Newborns Chances Of Becoming A Lesbian Or Having A Gender Disorder!!!
Medical treatment carries possible side effect of limiting homosexuality
A prenatal pill for congenital adrenal hyperplasia to prevent ambiguous genitalia may reduce the chance that a female with the disorder will be gay. Critics call it engineering for sexual orientation.
Each year in the United States, perhaps a few dozen pregnant women learn they are carrying a fetus at risk for a rare disorder known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia. The condition causes an accumulation of male hormones and can, in females, lead to genitals so masculinized that it can be difficult at birth to determine the baby’s gender.
A hormonal treatment to prevent ambiguous genitalia can now be offered to women who may be carrying such infants. It’s not without health risks, but to its critics those are of small consequence compared with this notable side effect: The treatment might reduce the likelihood that a female with the condition will be homosexual. Further, it seems to increase the chances that she will have what are considered more feminine behavioral traits.
That such a treatment would ever be considered, even to prevent genital abnormalities, has outraged gay and lesbian groups, troubled some doctors and fueled bioethicists’ debate about the nature of human sexuality.
The treatment is a step toward “engineering in the womb for sexual orientation,” said Alice Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University and an outspoken opponent of the treatment.
The ability to chemically steer a child’s sexual orientation has become increasingly possible in recent years, with evidence building that homosexuality has biological roots and with advances in the treatment of babies in utero. Prenatal treatment for congenital adrenal hyperplasia is the first to test — unintentionally or not — that potential.
The hormonal treatment “theoretically can influence postnatal behavior, not just genital differentiation,” said Ken Zucker, psychologist in chief of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, who studies gender identity. “Some people refer to girls with CAH as experiments of nature because you’ve got this condition and you can take advantage of studying it.”
Complicating the situation is the fact that the daily hormone pill does nothing to treat or cure the underlying condition, caused in this case by a defective enzyme in the adrenal gland.
Dreger and critics — which include the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Advocates for Informed Choice (an organization that works to protect the rights of people with intersex conditions), and some pediatric endocrinologists and parents of children with the condition — say far too little is known about the safety of the hormone, the steroid dexamethasone, when used prenatally. They say it should be used sparingly, in closely monitored clinical trials, or not at all. They’re even more concerned that some doctors might tell parents that a reduced chance of homosexuality is one of the therapy’s benefits.
“Most clinicians speak about this treatment as ambiguous-genitalia prevention,” said Dreger, who co-wrote an editorial about the treatment in a July publication of the Hastings Center, a bioethics organization. “Others suggest that you should prevent homosexuality if you can. But being gay or lesbian is not a disease and should not be treated as such.”
To that end, in September, a consortium of medical groups led by the Endocrine Society will release updated guidelines on treatment of congenital adrenal hyperplasia that acknowledge the controversy. The guidelines are expected to describe prenatal dexamethasone therapy — first used about 20 years ago, but now with increasing frequency — as experimental and reiterate that the standard approach for cases of ambiguous genitalia is to perform corrective surgery.
But they’re not expected to discourage research on the treatment.
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia, caused by a defect in an enzyme called 21-hydroxylase, affects about 1 in 15,000 infants, and almost all newborns are screened for it. Undetected, the abnormality can make both male and female infants critically ill within a few weeks of birth because of an associated salt loss through the urine. The defective enzyme also causes a deficiency of the hormone cortisol, which can affect heart function, and an increase in androgens produced by the adrenal glands.
The excess presence of the male hormone testosterone in the womb has little effect on a male fetus’ genitalia. Even in females, the anatomical defect may be mild, involving nothing more obvious than a slightly enlarged clitoris. However, in severe cases, girls are born with male-like sexual organs although they usually have ovaries and a uterus.
The treatment of such disorders has long been the subject of debate. Early surgery to assign a child’s gender is controversial, but prenatal treatment for congenital adrenal hyperplasia is even more alarming, said Anne Tamar-Mattis, executive director of Advocates for Informed Choice. She adds that the complicated surgery carries risks, including infection and nerve damage, and that parents may not be adequately counseled beforehand. The group favors allowing children born with intersex conditions to participate in decisions about their gender identity, including delaying a decision until adolescence.
Most couples don’t know their offspring are at risk for the condition until one child is born with it; prenatal dexamethasone treatment is offered in subsequent pregnancies. The drug is an anti-inflammatory medication used most often for arthritis. Prenatal use is considered off-label.
In animal studies, the treatment appears to cause an increased risk of high blood pressure, plus changes in glucose metabolism, brain structure and brain function, leading to memory problems, for example. Long-term studies in humans are lacking.
“There is not a lot of information on its long-term safety,” said Dr. Phyllis Speiser, a pediatric endocrinologist with the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York who chaired the Endocrine Society task force writing the new treatment guidelines. “The efficacy has been demonstrated in case reports — a fairly sizable number of cases that used untreated siblings for comparison — but not in randomized, controlled clinical trials.”
Carriers of the gene mutation that causes this form of hyperplasia have roughly a 12.5% chance of having a daughter with the condition. The hormone treatment must be started as soon as possible, before the gender of the child is determined, for it to have an effect on genital development.
“It would be much less of a controversy if the treatment was just given to CAH girls,” said Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and a prominent researcher on disorders of sexual development in children. But, he says, “to effectively treat one fetus, you have to treat seven others.”
There have been only a few hundred cases of prenatal dexamethasone treatment in the world. But the emerging data on those cases have captured researchers’ and activists’ attention.
Dr. Maria New, a highly regarded pediatric endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, is among a handful of physicians worldwide who have studied the treatment. New does not offer the treatment in her position at Mount Sinai, but follows children she treated previously or who have had the treatment provided by other doctors. She declined to be interviewed for this report, but on her website and in publications, New says the data so far show that the treatment is safe and effective in preventing ambiguous genitalia.
However, New’s more recent studies have caused more consternation, because — as she describes it — treated girls behave in ways that are considered more traditionally girlish.
In a 2008 study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, New and her colleagues administered a sexual behavior assessment questionnaire to 143 women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia who were not treated prenatally. They found that most were heterosexual, but the rates of homosexual and bisexual women were markedly higher in women with the condition — especially those with the most severe conditions — compared with a control group of 24 female relatives without congenital adrenal hyperplasia.
And, in a paper published earlier this year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleagues reported on data from 685 pregnancies in which the condition was diagnosed prenatally, acknowledging the potential effects of the treatment for reducing traditionally masculine behavior in girls. Prenatally treated girls were more likely to be shy, they wrote, while untreated girls were “more aggressive.”
Moreover, the authors said, failure to provide prenatal therapy seems to lead to traditionally masculine gender-related preferences in childhood play, peer association and career and leisure choices.
“The majority, no matter how severe, are heterosexual,” said Meyer-Bahlburg, who has collaborated with New on some of the studies. “But the rate of CAH women attracted to females increases with their degree of androgen exposure during prenatal life.”
Studies have not yet been conducted to examine whether the hormone treatment would reduce the rate of lesbianism, Meyer-Bahlburg said.
“I would never recommend treatment in order to take lesbianism away if that is someone’s predisposition,” he said. “Any treatment can be misused. That could happen here. But this is not the focus of the treatment. The focus is to make surgery unnecessary.”
Creative Loafing Article: Atlanta’s Black Gay Pride Event Is A Social & Political Event Empowering Black Gays & Lesbians.
Why ATL needs Black Pride
Guest columnist
Raymond R. Duke is a communicable disease specialist who lives and works in Decatur.
As an event that stands apart from next month’s broader Gay Pride Festival, this weekend’s Black Gay Pride is necessary to Atlanta because it speaks to our culture and our need for affirmation, acceptance and respect.
Atlanta is full of proud black gay people. We need to rally in a way that speaks to our culture first and foremost, and to examine how we interact with each other and the rest of the world: our family relationships, employment, entertainment, spirituality, health disparities, socioeconomic status, and, yes, sexuality.
Pride is a sense of personal dignity, a feeling of pleasure because of something achieved, done or owned. The need for Black Pride exists because our forebears, comprised of gay brothers and sisters who fought for rights, acceptance, love, respect and pride, need to be celebrated and remembered. We have a beautiful, colorful history, and much to be proud of.
Recently, the Advocate dubbed Atlanta “The Gayest City in America.” The black gay culture in Atlanta figured into that decision. In the new millennium, we’ve seen members of our population make headlines, locally and nationally. We are elected officials, clergy, educators, entrepreneurs, property owners and parents.
Then there are the daily offenses sustained by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals that channel racism, sexism, and other “isms” that aren’t yet named. Because of this, our self-image is often disfigured. Members of our population have come to mimic our oppressors. Mentally, physically and emotionally abused, our brothers are not hard enough, thug enough. Our sisters are not soft enough, feminine enough.
Living in metro Atlanta for more than 12 years, I’ve seen a lot and heard a lot about inclusion, tolerance, love, acceptance and diversity, but one thing I know is that the city exhibits many traditions and contradictions. Our religious institutions reign over our culture and tend to foster an atmosphere of homophobia, shame and stigmatization. In the same breath, we are asked to celebrate being American. We are asked to celebrate life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For many of us — though it’s seldom stated — being happy, being who we are, also means being gay.
Why shouldn’t I be proud to be an Atlantan — a black Atlantan and a gay one, to boot? Nearly everyone celebrates who and what they are. If we just took the contributions that black gay residents have made and continue to make to this city, this state and this country, there’s no question that that’s cause for celebration.
365 Gay.com article: Pastor Slams American Gay & Lesbian Organization For Racism.
Withers: Pastor accuses GLBT organizations of racism
Rev. Eric Lee takes LGBT organizations to task for “unconscious racism”; he thinks this is a major stumbling block to the gay rights movement.
“I believe that the cause of justice and equality also suffers when the unconscious racism of the white male-dominated LGBT community goes unchecked. I’m sad to see it appears they have not learned the lessons from the mistakes of the California Proposition 8 campaign for marriage equality.”
Lee, a straight ally, argues that while GLBT political organizations, specifically those working on marriage, talk good about outreach, they never really engage blacks and other people of color. His point is worth paying attention to.
In all of the heat produced after the Prop 8 fallout, few examined the sad work marriage activists did to round up allies of color. Don’t take my word for it. Read this interview of Latrice Johnson of the United Lesbians of African Heritage.
“We weren’t approached, however I did make attempts, as did many of our staff and volunteers made attempts to reach out and let them know we were certainly willing to come to the table and help out,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately we were not approached. It was almost a dismissive response.”
Unlike Lee, I don’t think the reason is just racism, unconscious or conscious. As gays and lesbians we see our experience as GLBT people through our individual races and cultures. When we use the term gay community, what we really mean are those who either look like us or come from similar social backgrounds. Nothing wrong with this, but it is disastrous of you are trying to build a diverse movement to support marriage equality. Or any other gay rights agenda.
Georgia Voice Article: The Social & Political Importance Of Black Gay Pride.
Editorial: Why we have ‘two Prides’
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| by Laura Douglas-Brown |
| Friday, 03 September 2010 00:00 |
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The conversation comes up every year, but this time it seems even more distasteful. As Labor Day nears, it never fails that some Atlantans start questioning the need for one of the city’s largest events over the holiday: Black Gay Pride. “Why do they want to be segregated?” these white gay people ask. “Why do we have two Prides?” The answer is that we don’t have “two Prides.” Georgia has at least eight Prides this year, including Atlanta Pride, Black Gay Pride, Augusta Pride, East Side Pride, Marietta Pride, Savannah Pride, South Georgia Pride and Chattahoochee Valley Pride. But we never hear anyone ask about the need for the other Prides in addition to Atlanta Pride, just Black Gay Pride. And that’s worth talking about. Many people who live in Augusta, Marietta, Savannah, Valdosta and Columbus come every year to Atlanta Pride, which is much larger than their festivals. So why do they need their own Prides? The reason, of course, is that although they enjoy being part of the larger group, they also want the opportunity to address issues and provide empowerment specific to where they live. It’s the same for Black Gay Pride. We don’t just live in geographic communities; we also live in other kinds of communities. Often, despite all of our goals of inclusivity and integration, those communities are at least somewhat defined by race. And that’s okay. Integration doesn’t have to mean assimilation, where we have to give up the unique aspects of our culture. Equality doesn’t mean everyone has to be the same and like the same things. To be certain, African Americans and people of every race are welcome at the Atlanta Pride festival in October, and the organization is doing a better job each year of drawing a diverse crowd. Likewise, white people and people of every race are welcome at Black Gay Pride. It’s similar to straight allies who attend Gay Pride festivals: the event may not be focused on them, but their support is still appreciated. But Black Gay Pride gives black attendees the opportunity to celebrate being gay with people who “look like” them — to see their culture reflected in the faces of those around them. Think back to the first big gay event you attended. Remember how good it felt, to finally be in the majority? That’s what it feels like to be black at Black Gay Pride. Why would you want to deny anyone that joy? When ignorance becomes something worseThe idea that Black Gay Pride somehow represents “segregation” is also a myth that needs deconstructing. That starts with acknowledging the extreme irony inherent in white people complaining about segregation, when — while other races are certainly capable of it — white people have been the perpetrators, not victims, of most of the segregation in this country’s history. If you are white and question the need for an event you see as not explicitly including you, that’s something you need to think about. And if you are white and feel the need to make comments questioning the need for Black Gay Pride on articles covering the tragic shooting death of one of the event’s organizers, that’s something you really need to think about. Durand Robinson, co-owner of black gay nightclub Traxx and an organizer of Black Gay Pride events, was gunned down Aug. 25. As news of the killing spread across Facebook and gay websites, so did comments that ignored the tragedy and focused only on the event he helped organize. “So he was the one who was promoting segregation by organizing a separate ‘black’ gay pride in Atlanta. Good riddance!” one commenter wrote on the Advocate.com. “This is the 21st century, and we don’t need someone still trying to shackle us to the mid-20th century! Pride is for everyone!!! Why is there even a need for a separate gay black pride???” A commenter on the cheeky gay site Queerty.com was more succinct: “Black Gay Pride? ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,’ I guess.” Luckily, other users of these two national gay websites countered these willfully ignorant comments, with most arguing that Black Gay Pride is needed because there is still racism in the gay community. I disagree. While we definitely need Black Gay Pride because there is still racism in the larger gay community, I think we should still celebrate Black Gay Pride even if racism is completely eradicated — just like I hope Gay Pride festivals in general continue long after we win full equality. Why? Because we will still be bound by our shared history, shared culture, and shared community. That will always be worth celebrating. |
Gayblackcanada 