On Tuesdays we share photos of people with tattoos. If you live in the DC area, I will gladly shoot you.
This is a model I photographed a few years ago. Enjoy.
Raunchy, Ratchet, and the coming of Fly Young Red
This handsome fellow is Fly Young Red, an emerging rapper out of Houston, Texas, who has been making waves with his single and video for “Throw That Boy Pussy.”
Over the past week, I’ve been asked for my opinions the song and video. Usually, I like to be the first to see something so that I don’t let others’ opinions taint my own. Unfortunately, before I even got to see the video, I was told it was vulgar, not representative of the black gay experience, a disgrace, etc. I’ve also read that it was sexist, misogynist, and all types of things the social justice elite want me to hate.
Luckily, I love vulgar, nasty, raunchy, ratchet music and videos. I even have a playlist.
Truth be told, the twerkin’ and ass poppin’ in Fly Young Red’s video doesn’t do much for me. The artist himself, however, has a lot of charisma about him, and to that I am attracted.
And yes, the song itself is pretty basic – not quite revolutionary as some have tried to make it. But it has a decent beat and witty lyrics which speak to black gay men in a way that hasn’t been done this well in a while.
Underneath all the controversy is actually a really talented openly gay black rapper who has a shot at long-term success. Whether you agree with his content or not is immaterial. He is speaking to and for a generation and class that you probably don’t come from, anyway.
Check out an older song of his, “Get Money.” It’s a far better example of his lyrical skills. I really do hope he sticks around for a while.
And last thing… I really am not here to intellectualize ratchet music. It’s either your cup of tea or it isn’t. If you’re under 18, or are responsible for children under 18, just make sure you’re having conversations about how what you listen to doesn’t have to be how you act.
Rashid Darden Reviews: Leave It on the Floor
I am a late adopter to Netflix and I am not a big movie-goer, so with the exception of my DVD and Blu-Ray purchases (thanks to my all-knowing Amazon recommendations), I don’t always catch a movie’s hype on the first wave. In the case of independent films with LGBT themes and black characters, you almost have to know somebody involved in the production to be able to support it in a timely manner.Continue reading “Rashid Darden Reviews: Leave It on the Floor”
Paranormal Wednesday with Shonda Brock
Rashid Darden has been interviewed for the Paranormal Wednesday feature on Shonda Brock’s website.
“I’ve always loved stories of the supernatural, but I never saw my own culture represented in the stories. There may be a few token black characters, but the stories themselves always originated with European mythologies of some sort. I wanted to write a story which begins with a simple, but loaded question: What if everything we knew about horror originated in Africa?”
Read more at ShondaBrock.com.
The Chapter-publican Manifesto: Membership Selection, Legacy Clauses, and the Whole Shebang
So, about these chicks and their mothers who are suing Howard University and Alpha Kappa Alpha because they were denied membership into Alpha Chapter.
Actually, I don’t want to talk about them at all. They suck.
Let us instead talk about being a Chapter-publican. Among my fraternity, I tell brothers that I am an Alphapublican. That means I believe that the most important unit in the fraternity is the chapter. It is the chapter who recruits, retains, and reclaims the membership. It is the chapter which serves the community. People join chapters. Based on the national organization’s legacy, of course, but they still join chapters. In an area like Washington, DC, or any other large metropolitan area, there are often multiple chapters of the same organization, each with their own personality and culture.
Leadership of the organizations should support the work of the chapters. People who aspire to be leaders should enjoy the chapter experience – not think about the glory and prestige of being a national, regional, cluster, state, or district officer.
The national headquarters of the organizations should focus on chapter services – giving the chapters what they need in a timely manner to fulfill their obligations of service to the communities.
The chapter is the most important unit. Not the region. Not the cluster. The chapter. Support the chapters.
As such, I believe that the chapter ought to have the final say in matters of membership selection. Always. Even when they are morally or ethically questionable.
First and foremost, every chapter vote ought to be final. When a chapter comes together to vote on who they want, the organization should trust that they have carefully considered who they want, who qualifies, who will be the best fit, etc. If you as an organization or an organization leader can’t trust that you have given the chapters the proper tools to make the right selection, then you have already failed them. Spend your time on training the chapters on how to identify the right candidates.
No one outside of the chapter or higher than the chapter should have the right to change the chapter’s vote in any way. You know what that means? No add-ons. If the chapter has not voted affirmatively on you, then this is the end of the road. There should be no way at all to appeal a decision of the chapter on matters of membership. No Region Directors adding people on after the vote. No parents calling headquarters. No. No, no, no. Bad.
And you know what? No take-offs. It wasn’t until very recently that I learned that some organizations have the power to actually remove a man or woman that the chapter has voted on for specious reasons. Again, if you are empowering the chapter to make the decision to select a line, how is it that one has the time to even check up behind that chapter to “just make sure” they have done everything properly? Sure, a chapter here and there might assist an applicant in fraudulently gaining entry, such as knowledge that the candidate doesn’t reside in the service area of the chapter, or a letter of recommendation which suggests a deeper knowledge of the candidate than is accurate, but you know what? Who cares? The chapter voted yes. The chapter wants the candidate.
Which leads me to the problem of so-called legacy clauses. And no, this is not just an Alpha Kappa Alpha problem. Theirs is just the one you know about.
I am against any policy which bypasses the chapter vote. I do understand the desire to have a policy which honors the bond between mother and daughter, father and son, or between siblings. I get it. I really do. But this bond should not be at the expense of the sovereignty of the chapter.
If your daughter is the bee’s knees, then let her shine on her own. If your son is the top banana, then the chapter will know it. But you, as their parent, will be biased. You just will be. By the time they submit an application, you will have seen their growth over two decades. You will see how far they have come. The chapter they are pursuing will only have known then for two or three semesters. Let them fall in love with your child as you did.
And acknowledge that while we do join organizations, we join them through chapters. The person must fit in the chapter. Let your child find out if they fit. Let the chapter make that determination. Don’t rob your child of the opportunity to forge their own path.
As Oprah quoted someone else on her show, there is a time for the parent to transition from manager to consultant. The women involved in this lawsuit never made that transition. If you are a Greek parent, do your children and your organization a favor: stay out of the membership process until it’s time for you to pin them or come to their neophyte show. It’s the best gift you could give them.
And ponder what I mean by becoming a Chapterpublican yourself. Consider the rights of your chapter, what’s best for your chapter, how your chapter can best serve the community. Don’t undermine your chapter – or anyone else’s – by robbing them of the right, privilege, and responsibility of selecting new members.
Where did Lazarus come from?
1) Where did you get the idea for the series of Lazarus, Covenant, & Epiphany?
2) Did it all come to you in one big idea? Or a little bit at a time, and that’s how it became 3 books. — Rico W.
The story of the Lazarus Trilogy began with a question: What would happen if the star basketball player got into a relationship with the most popular young man on campus?
That idea became a play that I wrote in 2000 called Behind Closed Doors, and later named Discretion. It was the story of a slightly different (yet familiar) Adrian Collins who was living with a basketball player named Isaiah, while dealing with mild Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from having been hazed and literally beaten off line from Beta Chi Phi. (Although he was still initiated into the fraternity, he was viewed as an outcast for being gay.)
In the midst of this story, he falls in love with Isaiah and deals with his ex-boyfriend Carlos, who he lost while pledging.
When the play was finished, I tried to stage a reading, but only my friends Maya (RIP) and Amerie showed up to help out. On top of that, my mentor at the time, Dennis Williams, said the play was good, but he wanted to know more about Carlos the ex-boyfriend and about the pledging process.
So I made the decision in 2000 to rework this story as a novel, beginning with the fraternity story and saving the love story for a subsequent novel if I still felt like it. I also decided to postpone writing it until after I finished undergrad. Incidentally, it was also during this time that my “black vampire” idea was born.
In fall 2001, I began writing the novel called Lazarus. President’s Day Weekend 2002, it was complete. I published it in 2005.
Of course, Carlos became Savion and Isaiah only made cameo appearances in Lazarus, so Covenant still had to be written. It was completed in 2007 and published in 2011. That novel was quick and easy to write because I already knew how it would turn out.
While writing Covenant, I had ideas for two more novels. In the end, there were to be four novels, more or less mirroring the four years of college. If you have read Epiphany, imagine the first two-thirds being novel #3, and the last third being novel #4, plus a story line about Adrian becoming the Dean of the line during his senior year. But I decided that I was done writing about the fraternity experience. While interesting to me, I don’t think most people would care about Sigma Chapter anymore after one novel about Adrian’s experience on Uprising and another about his experiences bringing in the Phantoms.
Oh hell, while we’re here, I might as well tell you about what was going to happen on the next line. So Calen was going to get elected Dean of Pledges, then he was going to have a terrible car accident and have to take a semester off school to recover. The chapter was going to recruit six guys:
Morris Jordan from Potomac was going to be the Ace. As you know, he had a previous history with Adrian. As the Dean, Adrian felt it might not be appropriate for Morris to make the line, given their past, but the chapter liked him so Adrian was outvoted. After he gets a little….shall we say “sassy” with Adrian, he is given the line name “Cruel Intentions.”
Kyle Sykes, a business student from Rock Creek, was the deuce. All I know about him is that his personal motto was “greed is good” which landed him the line name “Monopoly.”
Justin Wilson and Jason Wilson were twins attending Potomac. My notes on them indicate that they were always nervous so the chapter named them “Paralysis” and “Aphasia.”
The number five was Leon Rogers, a theology student from Rock Creek who is named “Holy Terror” because he turns out to be a homophobe that can’t seem to respect his Dean.
Finally, the number six is Shane O’Neil from Potomac. Everyone seems to think he a guitar-playing, stoner white boy, but he is actually biracial and struggling to find himself through the fraternity. Because he is so unique, and some would say strange, he is given the line name “Xenogenesis,” which is not only the prior name of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series, but it literally means “the supposed generation of offspring completely and permanently different from the parent.”
Needless to say, a lot was going on with this line, which Adrian named “Crucial Conflicts.” But in the end, I decided to make Mohammed their Dean to allow Adrian the chance to focus on his national position that he gained at the end of Epiphany and to provide a way for Mohammed to gain the respect of the chapter. And I didn’t think those things needed to happen “on-page” for them to be believable.
So that’s how Epiphany was written the way it was, with that “extra third” at the end which seemed like a separate story altogether. At the end, three college novels was enough, and if I was going to continue to write about these beloved characters, they’d have to be young adults removed from the college campus.
How do you just start a story?
“I am an aspiring novelist. Right now, I keep a journal of my day to day thoughts and inspirational quotes. I’ve always said that I wanted to write novels one day, but I don’t know where you begin. How do you just start a story?” –Rico
I think keeping a journal is an excellent start. Keeping a journal gives you practice for descriptive narrative. It helps you refine your abilities to observe and recall events. Be sure to push yourself further and practice recalling everything that happened to you in a day: where you went, what you wore, how you felt, what you ate, what it tasted like, how places smell, what things reminded you of other things. Pick one day out of the week to make your ultra-descriptive journal entry so that you don’t overwhelm yourself every day that you write.
But obviously, keeping a journal alone won’t result in a novel. Novels will have dialogue, and I will get to dialogue writing in a future entry. What I will focus on today is how to just start writing.
In your daily adventures, observe people and situations that you find interesting. Then ask a “what if” question based on your writing interests. For my upcoming novel Birth of a Dark Nation, I merely asked myself “What if vampires came from Africa rather than Europe?” From that single question came many others:
- How did African vampires get to America?
- Are there white vampires?
- If so, how did they come to be?
- What makes my vampires different from traditional vampires, aside from race?
And so on and so forth. Now, you might not be writing in a paranormal genre, in which case the questions might be simpler. In the case of Covenant, the central question was “What would happen if the star basketball player was dating a fraternity man?” And from those questions arose more, some from me, some from people who read the rough draft:
- What if one of them was already in a relationship?
- Who is the girl?
- What if there’s an ex?
- Who is he?
- Does the public know?
- What are their parents like?
Your questions should start you down a path of either/or scenarios, sort of like the “Find your own adventure” books from back in the day. You might already know how you want the novel to turn out, and that’s fine. The toughest part may be getting to the end.
Take your time and make an outline of the story. Be patient with yourself. Give yourself time to figure out the beginning, middle, and end. but never forget your central question. Answer it in your novel, or at least write the kind of novel in which everyone who reads it walks away pondering the same question: “What if…?”
Reflecting on Malcolm X
48 years ago today, our shining black prince was taken from us.
He will always be royalty to me.
Delta Sigma Theta Centennial – From the Outside Looking In
My fraternity enjoyed its Centennial Celebration in 2006. While the celebration had some bumps in its execution, it was by and large a decent event. We got some good swag (medallion, pin, leather convention bag), some great literature (Centennial Book of Essays and Letters), a huge photo op in a stadium, a concert…. you know, all the stuff that makes for a nice five-day long celebration.
Since that time, I’ve eagerly awaited the Centennials of the remaining black Greek letter organizations of the so-called “Divine Nine.” None have disappointed me yet. In 2008, the AKAs set world records with the largest sit-down dinner ever. I attended a Howard University sponsored-event during the AKA Centennial in which they raised an AKA flag over the campus. And of course there were fireworks, wax statues, and over 20,000 women all dressed in white.
Then came the Kappas and Ques in 2011. While I did not travel to Indianapolis to see the Kappas, I saw many photos of the great time they had with their pilgrimage to Indiana University and the world’s largest cake. And as for the Ques, well of course I was in the mix. I went down to their host hotel just to stand in the middle of it all and I wasn’t disappointed. They brotherhood was high, their souvenir journals were hard cover, and their spouses were chatty.
So far, I think each Centennial has reflected the personalities of the organizations. Delta Sigma Theta was no different. They did it big for 2013 and this is only the beginning. Delta Days in the Nation’s Capital and Women’s Suffrage March Re-Enactment are coming up in March, and the 51st National Convention is coming in July.
Below, you will find a collection of photos and videos I was able to collect from the weekend of official and unofficial events as documented through social media. Even if you weren’t in the thick of things, you certainly couldn’t escape Delta Sigma Theta Founders Day Weekend 2013 or even the weeks leading up to it.
First, the Deltas had a float in the 2013 Rose Parade in Pasadena, California. KTLA’s Gayle Anderson had a lively interview with the volunteers who helped make the float possible.
And here is HGTV’s coverage of the Delta float:
And here is the NBC coverage. I got a kick out of “Sami Brady” and Al Roker announcing the float:
Later that evening, Delta had a star-studded Hollywood Gala. The Federal City Alumnae Chapter has an album of those pictures on their facebook page, but I couldn’t resist sharing this photo of my fraternity brother Tim Reid and his Delta wife Daphne Maxwell-Reid.
A few days later, Deltas descended on New York City to participate in the various morning shows. I don’t normally even turn on the television that early, but I was glad I did. Here’s Al Roker again. (He’s an honorary Sigma, by the way.)
The next day was the first official day of the weekend celebration. It was Howard University Day, and the Deltas not only convened on the campus to celebrate, but to give and to serve. The “Deltas for Howard” group donated a total of $50,000 for the university and 22 distinct service projects were conducted all over the city. The concept of a new stained glass window in Rankin Chapel was revealed to the members, and Centennial Chair Gwendolyn Boyd said it would be the first stained glass window in the chapel to depict faces of African American women. Howard University Day concluded with the singing of the Sweetheart Song around the Fortitude Statue in “The Valley.”
Local media was on top of things, as Delta Allison Seymour interviewed Gwendolyn Boyd for Fox 5.
Other events took place in DC as chapters had mini-reunions and the national organization sponsored a sisterhood luncheon and an awards dinner. But, as they used to say, “The nighttime is for sisterhood.” The Valley was once again ablaze as thousands of Deltas descended upon Fortitude to ring in the new Delta year.
Needless to say, it was bananas out there.
The next day, the official activities included a marathon Ecumenical Service and a Founders Day Dinner which included pre-recorded greetings from Barack Obama as well as surprise musical guest Eric Benet.
Elsewhere in the news:
On Sunday morning, Delta Melissa Harris-Perry closed her show with a tribute to the sorority, in which she revealed she had been chapter president.
The Washington Post reported on the Centennial.
And the Detroit Free Press gave a shout out to Alpha Chapter President Erin Keith.
If you want to see the Centennial Founders Day activities from the point of view of the members that lived it, just type in #dst100 on Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram. It seems as though social media is advancing exponentially with each passing Divine Nine Centennial, and I’m grateful for it.
And now I leave you with Deltas on the Metro:
Number One in African American Gay Romance. And Two. And Five.
Great news, readers!
As 2012 comes to a close, I am really humbled that so many of you voted for me to appear on the GoodReads African American Gay Romance list! Epiphany has been voted number one, Covenant has been voted number two, and Lazarus has been voted number five!
Listopia uses a formula that somehow multiplies number of votes with rankings and reviews….hell, I don’t know how it works, but I am glad that it puts the power in the hands of the readers! Self-published authors rarely get that courtesy.
By the end of the day, this list could change and another worthy author could be on top. But I’m just glad that right now, at this moment in time, my readers thought enough of my work – and of the epic love story of Adrian Collins and Isaiah Aiken – to vote for it and share it with the world. Thank you for giving my books this shine. Adrian and Isaiah appreciate it!
To vote for your favorite black gay romance novels, click here!