Love! Vallor! Compassion!

 This is a play Lance, and I discussed not long before his heart attack.  He hadn't been to New York in several years, so he never got to see Nathan Lane eat the entire play, cast and all.  My point was that if he liked it, and he did like it, he should do it.  

It was difficult to talk to Lance about gay issues as a practical matter.  "It wouldn't be accepted."  "Some would consider it scandalous."  For a mid-century marvel like himself, Lance could sometimes act like a Victorian grandmother.  

When Lance was uncomfortable, he would set his jaw and look side to side rather than straight on.  He tapped his cane into the ground and twisted it like a wood awl.  "You know, John Taylor died of this,"  Lance said.  John Tyler is a made-up name.  I'm sorry.  He was a real person.  A person both Lance I knew.  A real person who never taught at Millsaps but had attended Millsaps and worked closely with Millsaps and died of aids.  Love! Vallor!  Compassion! is an aids play.  

When I looked it up a few moments ago, something like seven hundred thousand men have died of aids since I was a freshman at Millsaps.  That's not a lot when you consider all men in America.  It's a lot more when you're starting with a group that's already only ten percent of the population.  If you're in my generation, in the arts almost at any capacity, that's one, two, three, several people you knew or worked with.  Within a demographic group, it's a plague of biblical proportions.  There are treatments now.  Most people live through aids now.  They're talking about how some people are actually cured now.  There was a time, though, when in a certain demographic group, you knew you were going to have to say goodbye to some people you loved while they were very young, only you didn't know who.  

It's ironic that the disease that was literally killing gay men in America was also the catalyst that made them more visible than they have been since Victoria sent Oscar Wilde to jail for it.  Rock Hudson had aids.  Liberace had aids.  Elizabeth fucking Taylor spread out her hands and spoke of aids.  

"I can't cast it,"  Lance said

That may not have been a lie.  Every cast call he ever had, there were at least three times as many women auditioning as men.  Finding four men willing to play gay characters at Millsaps in the Nineties would have been difficult.  Finding four men willing to play gay characters who could also meet Lance's standards for acting was a genuine obstacle.

"What about Matt Henry as Buzz?"  I said.

"Matt would be very good.  He has that sort of energy.  But would he?"

"Matt would do anything you asked him to."  I said, with an emphasis on "anything YOU asked him to."

Before his heart attack, I often shared cigarettes with Lance.  "Anything but Menthol."  He would say.  After his heart attack, I said I couldn't share anymore.  "Of Course not,"  he said with an almost accusatory glare.  I still smoked.  He knew that.  He would never smoke again.  He knew that too.  On that level, we were no longer comrades, veterans of a war he was no longer a part of.

We smoked silently, communicating with eyes and hands and whisps of translucent white air and thoughts and ideas we dared never verbalize.  Lance knew I was straight.  Lance knew I loved him more than nearly anyone we knew.  Lance knew that I loved art more.  He also knew I was willing to push boundaries; he was not.

"I do like the play," he said.  "I could do it.  It would be marvelous.  I could do it.  I'm just not ready to do it."  Stalemate.  

Wendy comes in and steals a piece of candy.  Brent is behind her.  We have a production meeting.  That was the last time we ever discussed Love! Vallor! Compassion!  

Lance died with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof being the closest thing to a gay play he ever produced.  For a man who spent sixty years in the theater, gay or straight, that's unusual.  Part of that is the difference between his generation and mine.  A much bigger part of that is being born in Mississippi.  On issues like race, gender, sexuality, and religion, we torture ourselves at least as much as we torture each other in Mississippi.  Lance did plays on all these things with great passion and energy, all of these things except sexuality.  That was a line he would not cross, but if you ever saw his productions of Cat, he got right up next to it without going over.  

Tennessee Williams always included a beautiful young man in his plays, rippling with masculine power and pathos and almost always suffering.  A few times, a beautiful young man past his prime but still the heart of the play.  Williams fanatics, knowing how much of his work was autobiographical, spent many hours trying to connect one of Williams' men to some actual person living in the delta who might have inspired Williams.  I think characters like Brick and Stanley were a way for Williams to say something about himself.  About the life he would lead if he wasn't an introverted writer with a complicated family history.  Lance loved producing Wiliams's plays.  He did them all.  He told me once he preferred them to Shakespeare, but it wasn't an easy choice.

The last play I did with Lance was Dangerous Corner by JB Priestly.  Some of you were in it.  A heart attack, a broken leg, and shoulder had taken much of the fire out of Lance.  Normally he would do four, if not five, plays in a year.  That year he did two.  I told him I wanted to Stage Manage both.  I said it was because we didn't have a good stage manager in the company that year.  That was a lie.  I wanted to stage manage these last plays because I didn't know how much longer I had with Lance.  I didn't know how much longer the world would have of Lance.  If these were to be his last plays, I wanted them to be the kind of experience he loved.  

I wouldn't normally wait for the director to drive up and walk them to the theater when I stage manage, but I did then.  Fears for his health and fears for his life made Lance often feel defeated and afraid.  Not things I ever expected of him.  I've seen men die before.  It starts in the mind.  

"I can't do it today."  He said, sitting in his car seat, weeping.  

"Take your time, bud.  There's thirty minutes until call for the cast."

"I can't walk." He said, "I can't walk from her to the theater."

"We can stop and rest on the stoop halfway.  I sit on the stoop all the time."  I said.

"I hate this."  Lance said.

"I do too."  I said, and we went to rehearsal.  

For Lance, rage against the dying of the light was something he did with fierce discretion and a fair amount of fear and doubt.

Soon after that, he'd be in an assisted living facility in another county.  Soon after that, he would be no more. Lance pushed the barriers and challenged the world, but in the end, he grew weary of it, and wounded and broken, he lay down to die.

Love! Vallor! Compassion! is a play about a man with aids that helped make Nathan Lane a star.  They're also words to describe a man I loved--who hung in the sky like a comet for fifty years at Millsaps and then moved further out into space.  

Believing in Jackson - Great City Mississippi

Lavender Graduation

Tuesday night, I attended Lavender Graduation at Millsaps College.  You probably don't know that that is.  I didn't either until about three weeks ago.  I'll explain more about what it is later.

Once upon a time, I took an oath.  It went something like this "I swear, my life long to (among other things) defend the weak."  That sounds like overly-dramatic, false masculinity smoke and mirrors.  For me, it's not--at least, I try to make sure that it's not.  We're born into a world where there is an immoral imbalance of power.  An oath like this seeks to mend that by making the strong the vassal of the weak.  Not everybody takes it seriously, but I do.

I hesitate to call homosexuals "weak."  It might offend them.  It would offend me.  Individually, they are generally better educated, healthier, and wealthier than the rest of us.  The problem is that, as a group, they suffer from a political weakness because their numbers are fewer than other demographic groups.  That means they are politically vulnerable, and right now, there are people, particularly in the South, who are bullying gay people for their own political gain.  It's a sad fact that in our democracy, demagoguery can win elections.  Anyone who can convince two people that a third is their enemy is halfway to being king.  Mississippi doesn't lead the way in this, Florida does, but Mississippi is doing its best to catch up.  

When you look at what's been happening in the Florida legislature, Tennessee, Lousiana, Mississippi, and more, it's quite clear that there are people seeking to turn back whatever gains have been made in gay rights, just as they turned back whatever gains have been made in Women's reproductive rights, and they're using the same mechanisms to do it.  When you pair that with what's going on currently with the United Methodist Church, the sponsors of Millsaps Collge, it's not hard to get the feeling that homosexuality is under siege in this country.  

There are those who say the United Methodist Church is on the cusp of changing its policy and allowing the church to sanction gay marriages.  I don't know if that's true, but I do know there are thousands of people who are so worried that they might that they are leaving the United Methodist Church.  I know scores of people who are in gay marriages.  There's not one of them I could say to them, "I do not accept your bond."  The man sitting next to me, Tuesday, is married to a boy I knew from his days at Millsaps.  I would fight for them.  

There are a number of reasons why I would side with homosexuals in this political battle.  For one thing, they're often very good, if not the best, at things I consider very important.  That's not the real reason, though.  The real reason is that I find it immoral to hurt someone who hasn't hurt you, and it's doubly immoral to hurt an entire group of people who never hurt anybody.  I find it immoral to attack or to seek to contain people just because they are different, so this is where I draw my sword.  This is the weak I will defend.   I'm old.  If this is the hill I die on, I'm satisfied.

Lavender Graduation is a ceremony celebrated by over two hundred colleges and universities that acknowledge and celebrate LGBTQ Plus students.  It was created by a woman who wasn't allowed to attend the graduation of her own children because she was a lesbian married to another lesbian not quite thirty years ago.  Now that I've seen thirty years go by twice, I can tell you that 1995 was not very long ago.

When I attended Millsaps, there were very few openly gay students or faculty.  Last night, the event in the Christian Center event space was so full they had to call out for more chairs to hold everybody.  When I attended Millsaps, there were several people who were either closeted or "quietly open," which is a phrase I learned meant that they told a few people but didn't mention it very often.  There was one person who told me they were gay way back in 1985 but still have not told their parents.  I hope they'll read this.  

Before I attended Millsaps, there were at least two incidents where people called either my dad or Dr. Harmon with proof that a professor was gay in hopes that they would lose their job.  It happened once more while I attended Millsaps, and probably more than that because Dr. Harmon and my dad never really told me everything, just those things they thought might affect me because I knew the professor in question.  To my knowledge, no one was ever fired at Millsaps for being gay.  Daddy's response in situations like this was usually that his hands were tied because of tenure and "thank you for calling."  His thought was that engaging these people gave them the confrontation they wanted, so he kept it brief.   Mind you, this happened with straight professors too.  Jilted lovers or angry wives would call about Doctor So-and-So running around with a student.  In one case, he was openly cavorting with a lawyer downtown that I also cavorted with, and shouldn't we fire him for cheating on his wife.   He didn't get fired, either. 

There were three professors at Millsaps--I don't have permission to say their names.  I  feel pretty strongly that the individual chooses if they are out or not.  There were three professors who were very dear to me and very influential in my life and who spent most of their lives working at Millsaps and were never able to say publically what they were.  One of them pulled me aside one day,

"Boyd, you will hear things about me."

"I know."

"These things are true, but I need you to understand that I am very discrete and careful about these things."

"I know.  I need you to know something, man to man.  What you've told me changes nothing.  My feelings for you, my respect for you doesn't change.  Your life, outside of this room, is your life.  Not mine."

I don't know how many other students he told.  That was thirty-five years ago.  I don't know how many colleagues he told.  I do know that he died, not ever feeling comfortable saying who he loved, while I cavorted with every co-ed I could find without any repercussions.  While we both attended Millsaps, I was able to take whoever I wanted to formal dances, but he could not.  That's not fair.  That's not right.  He died, not ever knowing that would change.  I hope that there's some way he could look down from heaven and see Lavender Graduation and see that things have changed.

One of the most remarkable things the theater program at Millsaps ever produced was Sam Sparks.  As a student, he was the go-to kid.  The go-to kid is the one with the confidence and knowledge, and responsibility that you can go to with serious jobs.  One summer, Brent had to be away all summer, so he gave Sam and Erin keys to the theater.  Tens of thousands of dollars in lighting equipment, power tools like you wouldn't believe, dangerous ladders, and catwalks were all in the hands of these two young people with the keys to the kingdom.  It strained the relationship between Sam and Erin because it was so much responsibility and sometimes so much of a pain, but they made it through, and Wednesday Night, I had dinner with them both to celebrate Sam's first year as the Director of Theater at Millsaps College.

Besides being only one of two responsible kids in the whole department, Sam was also an incredible artist.  Very young, he returned as a guest artist to direct Equus.  If you know this play, it's a remarkably difficult hill to climb that requires so much out of the actors and the director, but he made it through, and it was beautiful.

Sam sent out a notice that Monty had asked him to deliver the address at Lavender Graduation.  Monty is our everything kid.  The everything kid is an awful lot like the go-to kid, except they're everywhere.  Everything I go to at Millsaps or at Galloway, Monty is there.  There may be clones of him.

I knew that Sam was interested in Millsaps Pride because we talked about it, and I was really interested in what was happening with Millsaps Pride, mainly because it didn't exist when I was a student. 

If you like to read, take the time to read Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums and then read Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks.  There's something like seventeen years between when Kevin was at Millsaps and when Casey was at Millsaps; while the school didn't change that much, the life of gay students was so very different that I doubt they would recognize one another.  Having known both of them as students, one older than I and one younger, that progression and the progression from when Casey was at Millsaps until today pleases me very much.

I had no conception of what a Lavender Graduation might be when I said, "I'm in."  They could have had strippers and snake handlers and dancing elephants, and I would still have sat there to take it all in.  I've seen dancing elephants before.  

It embarrasses me and always has, but I'm aware of what my name means to Millsaps.  I'm also aware that, if I had any other name, I've still devoted enough of my life to Millsaps that sometimes, just showing up matters, so that's what I did.  I showed up.  

I arrived early because I'm annoying like that.  One student was setting up.  He had a table with twenty rainbow pattern lanyard chords laid out.  I recognized immediately what this was.  Chords representing some aspect of the student's life are worn around the neck and shoulders during Commencement Ceremonies.  Sometimes, it's a fraternity; sometimes, it's a sport; in this case, at least twenty of the 2023 graduates would be wearing Millsaps Pride chords when they walked.  Monty, the everything kid, among them.  

I was far too early, so I went outside to wait.  I don't smoke anymore, but I still slip outside and sit on the stoop of a building to clear my mind.  Sometimes it's hard not to smoke when I do that.  The stoop of the Christian Center, if you're a certain kind of student from a certain period of time, is hallowed ground.  From there, I pulled out my little folding keyboard and wrote a short piece about my dad and Andy Griffith, and Atticus Finch.  I can't go to Millsaps without seeing the ghosts of my dad and Dr. Harmon, and Lance and Jack Woodward, and Lucy Millsaps and Rowan Taylor and Robert Wingate, and even Dick Wilson, even though he went to Ole Miss.  My brother is a ghost at Millsaps now.  One day I will be too.

After pressing "post" on my essay, I went back to the event space room and met Sam on the way.  Soon Shawn Barrick and Catherine Freis, Liz Egan and Anne MacMaster, showed, and I knew I was in the right place.  Our kids, the theater kids, were dramatically gathered at a table together laterally from us.  Theater kids are either always performing or always hiding--divided between actors and technicians.  Even at dinner, it's easy to tell which is which.  It's fun to watch them as a group.

Assistant Dean Ryan Upshaw spoke first.  Ryan invoked James Baldwin.  I honestly don't know how much the students know about Baldwin.  He's a name that's really from before my generation and far before theirs.  He was born in Harlem, both black and gay.  A rough hand to play in the twentieth century.  For a twenty-year-old Millsaps student, who was gay, of color or not, I think I would recommend Giovanni's Room by Baldwin.  They may not ever have to live through the struggles that Baldwin did--but I can't promise that.  One of the reasons I was there was that I can't promise things won't get bad again.  There are people who want very much for the life of homosexuals to go back to the way it was when I was a boy and before.  I specifically wanted to be there last night to say "NO" with my presence--and now, with my words. 

Sam's remarks were beautiful.  He's a fine writer.  Having been a student of Catherine and Anne and Brent, I don't know that he had much choice.  Every time I see Sam, I think, "he can do all the things Lance dreamed of but never could."  That's how much things have changed between when Lance taught at Millsaps and today when Sam teaches at Millsaps.  Lance did Equus; it shocked the world.  Sam did Equus; the world was more ready to receive it.  I think those bookends in time say a lot.  Sam spoke of many things, but he ended with the final speech of Angels in America Perestroika.  Although Angels in America is technically an "aids" play, it encompasses everything there is to know about being a gay man in America before the current century.  I'm hoping his speech will motivate at least one student to pick it up over the summer, either to read or watch the HBO production.

At the end of the ceremony, I turned to Sam and said, "You know... if you could cast it, there's nothing to hold us back from..."  

"It's SIX HOURS LONG," Sam said.  

"You can do it in parts, maybe a project over two semesters; not all the roles have to be students..." I said, and Sam, for a moment, starts thinking of people who could fill some roles who aren't students before he said again, 

"It's six hours."  Needless to say, I don't think we're gonna do Angels in America any time soon, as much as it would please some of us, but the point is, he could.  

Sam could do Boys in The Band.  He balked at doing Corpus Christi, but I think he could get away with it.  Lance put on Equus with a fair share of ferocity about what the world thought about it.  He did that play, but he couldn't have done any of those.  We talked about Boys in the Band.  Toward the end of his life, we talked about Love! Valor! Compassion!  In the days I knew Lance, we talked about maybe a thousand plays, most of which he had done at Millsaps.  That sounds like an exaggeration, but it's not.  He put on all those plays, but he never felt like he could put on these, even though he had high regard for them.   The point is Lance could be a bulldog for theatre, but for these plays, for these subjects, he believed he couldn't.  Sam can.  Sam can.  He can, and he would receive accolades from not only the students and his peers in theater but also from his colleagues at Millsaps and the administration.  Much has changed.

In 2023, with Ron Desantis passing bills that say "don't say gay," the Methodist church rending itself in half over whether to sanction gay marriage, and two remarkable pastors in Mississippi facing a church trial for marrying two of their students in love,  and suddenly the whole world really mad about transgenderism--twenty Millsaps students will walk at graduation with rainbow chords hanging on their shoulders.  

So, the question becomes: "Who's the old guy next to the theater professor?" and the answer is, "It's an old guy who believes more in your capacity for greatness than he believes in the people who would hold you back.  He's somebody who never thought in 2023 there would be people who wanted to hold you back, but there are.  He's somebody who doesn't know you but loves you enough to be counted with you." There's no color on the rainbow for old guys who just want the people he loves to be happy and complete and safe and able to reach the full limit of whatever gifts God gave them.

That's ok.  I'm still there.

You Are Safe With Me Lapel Pin - Amazon

If I had a muse

 They say that every writer has his muse.  They've said this for quite a long time.  Still, I'm not entirely sure what it means.  

A muse, I suppose, is a memory of someone or something that pushes you to create.  Sometimes it's a beauty that inspires, but more often, it's a wound that won't heal or a memory that can't resolve itself.

Williams' muse, they say, was probably his mother.  Her name was Edwina, but on stage, she was Amanda, Cat, Blanche, and more.  Memories of his mother and her efforts to deal with the declivity in her life inform nearly all of his work.  It's not a loving memory, either.  A muse doesn't have to be a pleasant force.    

Shakespeare had his "Dark Lady."  Nobody really knows who she was, although there are some interesting theories.  It's very likely that she was no Anne Hathaway, his wife.  

Wilde's muse was a beautiful young man that sent him to prison and kicked off the Victorian effort to eliminate homosexuality.   Queensbury was very clearly the inspiration for Dorian Gray.  Known for his chamber comedies, his most revealing work is a gothic horror about a murderous young man with a mirror that kept him beautiful--very much a description of his experience with Queensbury.

If I have a muse, it's an imaginary dog a man on the radio talked about when I was a very little boy.  There are certain memories of smokey-eyed beauties that sometimes motivates my work, but feist-dog is the summation of my life from my flickering waking into sentience through my life until the day my father died.  Feist-dog is a well of all the souls that moved in the firmament above me when I was young, including Jim Neal, who invented him--although I'm sure even he would admit that Feist-Dog really came from Faulkner, and Faulkner would most likely say, Feist-Dog came from the fecund dark loam of Mississippi.  

One of the reasons there are so many great writers from Mississippi is that being from Mississippi is a very complicated thing, and living here is still complicated, even if you're not from here.  I include Memphis in my definition of Mississippi because it's more delta than it is mountain.  The northernmost point of Mississippi is the fountain in the Peabody Hotel.  

What makes Mississippi complicated is we'll kill you for acting up.  We'll kill you for being different, but then we'll invite you into our home to watch over our infant children.  We send our children to cotillion so they'll have proper manners, and we'll have debutante balls so our daughters can lead the next generation into polite society.  

If a muse is a thing that pushes you to write and gives you things to write about, then my muse is an imaginary dog that holds Mississippi inside of him.  

In Absalom, Absalom! Quinten Compson is asked why he hates the South; he famously says, "I don’t, I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”  That's very likely a reflection of Faulkner's complicated feelings about his homeland.  Faulkner died in Oxford.  He had the money to go anywhere, but he died in Oxford.  He may have hated the South, but he never left it.  

Faulkner nursed large quantities of bourbon while his muse bubbled over in his brain.  Miss Eudora did, too, but in much lesser quantities.  Twelve years younger than Faulkner, they will always be the bookends of Mississippi writers in my mind.  Everyone else fits between them.  

Ultimately, I don't know what makes anyone write.  Whatever it is, sometimes it won't let me alone.  On nights like tonight, when I just can't stop writing, it's not hard to imagine a little dog fiercely tugging my pants leg, trying to force me to do something; I don't know what.