Eight LGBT African-Americans Who Changed The Gay Community
Bill T. Jones
Choreographer
One of the most celebrated (and outspoken) choreographers today, Bill T. Jones performed worldwide as a soloist and with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982. As a choreographer, he’s created hundreds of works for his own company, as well as pieces for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, AXIS Dance Company and numerous other dance troupes, and collaborations with author Toni Morrison, opera diva Jessye Norman and fellow queer New York artist Keith Haring.
He has been lauded for his professional accomplishments: He has two Tonys for Best Choreography (one for Spring Awakening and the other for Fela! which he also co-created and directed), received a MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1994 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2010.
Though Jones, now 60, came of age when the dance world grappled with acknowledging gay choreographers and dancers—Alvin Ailey guarded his sexuality throughout his life—he has always been open about being gay. (Zane and Jones were often paired in sensual duets.)
Jones has also never hidden the fact that he is HIV+ (Zane died of AIDS-related complications in 1989). He’s incorporated themes relating to AIDS in his works, including The Breathing Show, D-Man in the Waters and Still/Here and, after Zane’s death, created a series of “survival” workshops for people with HIV/AIDS, elements of which have inspired movements and passages in his artistic output.
“Living and dying is not the big issue,” Jones told the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1987. “The big issue is what you’re going to do with your time while you’re here. I [am] determined to perform.”
Though he’s endured prejudice, illness and the loss of a lover of 17 years, Jones is optimistic for the future of the gay community. He once told POV magazine:
“In 20 or 30 years, we’ll be out from the Middle Ages, the Inquisition. This is a benign universe that exists on a level so far beyond the screams and cries of the Holocaust, my mother’s tears, beyond lesions and sores and gasping for air in the last moments of life. I think that if we look back, it’ll be understood that we know what it feels for me to right now be saying, I am HIV positive, and I am all right. I am a homosexual man, and I have been promiscuous, and that too is all right.”
Photo: Abbey Braden, the Estate of Keith Haring
NEXT: Comedy with a message from Wanda Sykes
Frank Ocean has done nothing for the gay community or the music industry. Being gay is not an act of anything. There are far more artists in the last 20 years that have done more than come out of the closet.
As for his talent, he has done nothing Usher or Justin Timberlake have not done. Even the prick Chris Brown did it better.
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@Red Meat: The world disagrees with you:
http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/albums/2012/
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@Eric Auerbach: Jazz album that got less than 2000 votes on a website directly about the thing he is in.
Lets not get ahead of ourselves, the world doesn’t give a fuck about Frank Ocean, it’s good that he’s come out and is continuing doing the thing he loves in spite of criticism.
But lets not go assuming he’s up there with MLK, Harvey Milk and countless others.
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@Red Meat: @2eo: Visibility is power. It’s light and truth and transformation. That’s never more true than in black communities that have long been ruled by cultural ignorance, groupthink insecurities and religious intolerance. Ocean’s coming out is significant and potentially huge for young black and minority LGBTQ and their families.
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Did we have a brain fart and just forget James Baldwin? Baldwin had to go off to the safety of Paris to write and publish ‘Giovani;s Room” one of the few gay themed novels around when I came out. He also wrote on the themes of race and sexuality and the intersection of those themes.
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Thank you for including Bayard Rustin on this list! A forgotten hero to the cause is finally getting the recognition he missed out on in life.
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How do Frank Ocean and RuPaul get on this list but not James Baldwin? Speechless.
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I say take Frank Ocean’s name off the list. He played the gay card because it was the only one in his hand. Frank is basically propped by a media who seemed to know what the worst outcome could have been in his coming out, and went out of their way to shield him from it. Behind the forced critical praise, on every blog, message board and real life conversation I’ve been witness to where he’s the topic, I see a stalemate in reaction; he has his defenders, but he also has many callous detractors.
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I’m sure Bayard Rustin would have dreamt that one day all his work would result in being on a list with Don Lemon and Frank “he’s never said he’s gay” Ocean.
I wonder if a similar list is being compiled of white gay people who changed the world. With Harvey Milk, Lance Bass and the Honey Boo Boo dude…
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Very confused, very: how about a column about those who are changing: Don Lemmon, Frank Ocean, Wanda Sykes, et al, and those who have: Bernard Rustin and Mabel Hampton.
Alas, a list of 8 is a list missing too many: No James Baldwin? No Langston Hughes? Where is Alvin Ailey? Long, long before RuPaul — who is making waves for the LGBT community and I applaud that — there was Sylvester.
Barbara Jordan? Alice Walker? Sheryl Swoopes?
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Honorable Mention — Julian Bond, the gay community has no better friend and advocate than the Chairman Emeritus of the NCAAP. An all-out advocate for equality for all; and his advocacy for marriage equality is changing the LGBT community as the walls of resistance from the larger black community crumble.
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Wanda Sykes grew up in suburban Maryland actually. She went to the same High School I did, just about 20 years apart.
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White, gay websites kill me trying to make Frank Ocean into some gay, black hero. He doesn’t even want to be associated with us and the fact that y’all label everything black “hip-hop” is so annoying. Bye.
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When will the click-through photos end???