The Eudora At Fondern Public

 I got to spend some time with Brother Lewis today.  We darkened the door of Fondren Public.  I had a drink that a friend of mine named the Eudora thirty years ago.  A few fingers of Makers Mark and a little ice if you have it, alone if you don't.   Miss Welty, I think, took it with a little branch water.  I modified it some.  Ice melts, ya know.

Talking with somebody who remembers what it was like in Jackson and Millsaps thirty and forty years ago makes me happier than a warm puppy.  It kind of needs to be a guy, though, because one of the things we're gonna talk about is girls, lost, found, and the ones that got away.  The guys I can still do this with are getting pretty sparse these days.  There's Tom and Doug Mann and a few others, but we're at the age with a fair number of our population is dropping away.  Old white guys don't typically "pour one out for our homie," but if we had, we'd still be there.  Those of us that survive the gauntlet will probably live until ninety.  That's a frightening consideration.

Tom's Dad is a titan at Millsaps and Galloway and the United Methodist Church.  To some, TW Lewis was one-half of the righteous brothers.  To others, he was an agitator.  In Mississippi, it turns out that the only people that had any sense were the agitators.   At church, I like to listen to TW and Don Fortenberry talk.  They experience a level of Christianity I've never approached, and there's much to be learned just by listening.

Tom mentioned that a friend of ours was getting fairly irritated with the goings on in the Mississippi UMC conference and just might take a trip to Tupelo and speak his mind at the conference meeting this summer.  I don't have permission to say who it is, but if he goes, I might just go too.  I have some concerns about what's going on in our conference to, so maybe we can do some good.

Talking with long-time Jackson people, it's hard not to lament what's been happening to the city lately.  Of all the brilliant men and women we talked about, almost none still live in Mississippi.  Ray Mabus once said that Mississippi's biggest export is brains.  In Mississippi, we take our precious youth and work like hell to educate and train them; then, once they're on their own, we lose them because Mississippi can't offer them opportunities equal to the skills we've given them, so they find something bigger--maybe less complicated morally.

A lot of guys our age are thinking about giving up.  They're moving to Madison or Oxford, or Hernando and pulling the world up around them.  I can't fault them.  They fought to keep Jackson growing all those years I was hiding in a cave.  Maybe it's just my turn to get back into the fight.  

I have a real need to one day be able to tell Tom and especially tell his dad that everything is OK now.  Jackson and Millsaps are growing again, and the danger is past.  Millsaps is doing light years better than Jackson, but both have a ways to go before I'm satisfied.   Ultimately, I'd really like to make Mississippi the kind of place where parents don't have to worry about their children leaving for greener pastures.  I don't really know how to do that, but, ya know, not knowing what I was doing never stopped me before.  

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Ministers and Missles

A lot happened in 1965.  I was two years old.  Millsaps formally opened its doors to integration, following a federal mandate that no school remaining segregated would receive federal funds.  We used federal funds to build the Christian Center, among other things.  

June fourth, 1965 The Clarion-Ledger publishes an article from Bishop Pendergrass, delivered at Galloway, imploring all methodist congregations to stop employing ushers at the doors of the church, implying bouncers who kept negros out, but not mentioning it directly.  Pendergrass said directly that the church in Mississippi must come into compliance with the national church's position on integration without ever using the word "integration."

On the same page, they had a much larger article with a photograph of the Gemini V capsule preparing for launch that week.  Gemini V was the first space walk; For comments by the Methodist Bishop to take up as much space on the front page as the Gemini Launch meant something.  

My Uncle Tom was the editor of the Clarion Ledger.  I never discussed his feelings about integration or how the paper covered it.  I don't know that he would have discussed it with me.  He had a reputation.  Sometimes, it was fair; sometimes, it wasn't.  My grandmother, his sister-in-law, tried to explain it to me a few times, but for people of her generation, these things were difficult to speak plainly of.

One thing I'm getting from all this is a new respect and appreciation for our parents.  Not just my parents but everybody's parents.  There was just so much going on.  There were missiles pointed at us, we were in Viet Nam, the Russians wanted to crush us (and said so), and here at home, everything was coming apart.  

While I'm at rehab, upstairs from me are five people who were at Galloway in 1965.  Two left the Methodist discipline altogether.  Two stayed; one became an independent Methodist for a while but eventually reconciled with Galloway.  Seeing them makes it all very real.

When I go to Sunday School, I try to sit near TW Lewis and Don Fortenberry.  Ed King joins via Zoom.  All pastors fully engaged in what happened in 1965.  William Faulkner said of Mississippi, "The past is never dead. It's not even past"

What started me down this rabbit hole, partially, is this is was a part of my life that had huge implications in my life, but I was too little to understand it, and for a long time, not many people would discuss it.  My sister wasn't even alive yet.   My brothers were mostly concerned about baseball and tree houses.  Most of what I knew about the schism at Galloway came from my grandfather, who used it to frame the story of his childhood church in Hesterville, Mississippi, which chose to leave the larger Methodist church and go it on its own.  That was very painful for him.  His father built that church after the first church burned down.  His father and mother, and brother were buried there.  Since he moved to Jackson, he had no say in what happened there, even though his brother's estate was paying for the upkeep of the cemetery.  Granddaddy decided he wouldn't die on either hill during the fight for integration.  His task, as he saw it, was to employ as man negros as he could and see to it that some effort was made to educate them.  He would and did break bread with any man, but he saw all this fight over race was painful.  Necessary but painful.

Sixty is a nice round number.  The church, my church, again finds itself on the rubicon of deciding whether or not to fully open our doors to people who are unlike us sixty years later.  That decision is rending us into pieces, much like it did in 1965.  

Reading "Agony at Galloway," written in 1980, I get some sense that Cunningham is trying to align himself with the winning side now that the conflict is over, but I do strongly believe he was in genuine Agony in 1965.  Pastors tend to be more idealistic than practical.  That's one of the reasons they become pastors.  Having known some of the people he mentions later in life, I wonder if Cunninghman had taken a firmer stand on one side or the other if the situation would have escalated and truly ended Galloway.  

As it stands, between 1960 and 1968, Galloway lost 18% of its enrolled members.  That number was higher among those who actually sat in the pews every Sunday, but it was a survivable number.  I had always believed it was much higher.  It certainly could have been higher.  Cunningham may have felt personally tortured, but he piloted the ship through the breakers, with some damage, but we were afloat.  He didn't have the benefit of a crew with beeswax in their ears, but I do believe he was tied to the mast.

In today's conflict, Galloway, from what I have seen, is very unified, which is quite different from what happened in 1965.  The rest of our conference, though, is not nearly as unified.  There are painful days ahead.  What I get from all this is that we survived it before.  One product of the change in the sixties was the creation of the United Methodist Church.  It's hard to imagine that, out of a time of such hurtful division, so much growth was the product.  

I'm not a traditionally prayerful person.  I say the Lord's Prayer as instructed to keep the communication between myself and God open,  but I don't ever pray for specific things.  I figure that any God capable of making all this is also capable of seeing what I need and what the people I love need--without me begging like he was Santa Claus.  

What I write, either here or in my journals, is how I articulate the things I would pray for.  Even that is unnecessary for an entity that knows the number of hairs on my head (that one's easy, it's zero), but writing it and articulating it in my own mind helps me see things more clearly.  If that's praying, then I pray for my church nearly every day now.   Not Galloway so much because we're pretty durable, but for the larger church.  We're facing a crisis of conscious similar to that we faced in 1965, and we're getting beat up pretty good for it.   

I have faith that we'll sail through these waters alive.  I have faith because, even though I was very young, in my experience, that's what happened before.  My current pastor, and the two before him, are all within four or five years of the same age as me.  When the church last rented itself apart, all four of us were more concerned about what Captain Kangaroo had to say than Bishop Pendergrass.

I have no issue with following Cary Stockett wherever he leads us.  I've listened to his sermons for a few years now, and we are of like mind on most of the important issues.  His pastoral staff is vibrant and energetic and also of a similar mind and purpose to mine.  I suspect Connie Shelton, of all of us, will take the greatest heat from all of this.  It's already started.  One man felt completely content to lie about her on his website.  I sent him a letter but got no response.  I'm not worried for Connie.  She's pretty strong.  I am sorry she has to go through this.  She loves her church, and she loves us who are in it, and this has to be painful.  In church affairs, the leaders of the battle and the front line are the same.  When the arrows fly in anger, they will hit her before they hit me. I'm sorry for that, but I'm also appreciative of what she's doing for us.   This is the way.

Christianity was born out of one man's agony on a Roman cross.  In that, he prepares us for the far lesser agony that sometimes comes from following him.  Just like in 1965, most of Southern Methodism is girding its loins to fight on one side or the other.  I am, too, I suppose.  My church won't be on the front lines like it was last time.  I'm grateful for that.  Our pastor seems to have the idea that we can become a sanctuary for the battle weary.  Sanctuary, in the original sense, of a place free from attack, but also our architectural sanctuary.  Safety, in the lee side of the tempest.  I'm grateful for that too.

For thine is the kingdom.  Kingdoms are born of suffering.  

The Tartans of Mississippi

They say that associations make a man.  I don't know if that's just, but it certainly was true growing up in Mississippi in the seventies and eighties.

In most places, political party would be an essential association, but it didn't matter much in Mississippi.  Everybody but Wirt Yerger and Billy Mounger were Democrats, and Yerger and Mounger were generally considered mad priests screaming on the temple steps about this new Republican God.   A political trick got Thad Cochran elected, but nobody thought this Republican business would catch on--until Ronald Reagan.  

Mississippians loved movies with cowboys and war heroes, and Reagan made many of them.  Reagan told America its biggest problem was welfare moms, and he took the guns away from the Black Panthers in California.  Yes, Regan was for gun control--under certain circumstances.  These messages resonated in Mississippi.  The glacial ice around the Republican party began to melt.   Yes, they were the people who burned Jackson to the ground.  Yes, they were the people who imposed reconstruction on us for sixty years.  Yes, they were the ones sending revenue officers to raid the parties at Crystal Lake.  All of that is true, but ya know, he sure did show them Black Panthers what, didn't he?

We were a democratic family.  Part of it was just business.  The Democrats were in power all over our sales territory, and we made most of our money selling to public institutions.  It was also a moral decision.  Daddy felt, and I felt, that Mississippi is nearly entirely made up of poor people.  This middle-class bubble we lived in wasn't the real Mississippi.  The real Mississippi could barely pay their rent.  They had poor health because, even if they worked, they had no insurance, and they had no education because that cost money, and nobody had any.   Democrats were more interested in and more generous to poor people.  Democrats also had a better farm bill than the Republicans.  Reagan promised to "restore profitability" to Mississippi farmers by removing government intrusion.  Boy, was he wrong.  

Even though things weren't really working out between Mississippi and Ronald Reagan, this new Republicanism was quietly growing like a thief in the night.  Young Republicans could be identified by their highly starched Oxford cloth shirts, and their numbers were growing.  

From 1963 until the day Daddy died, every successful candidate for Governor of Mississippi had passed through my mother's doors to introduce the candidate to the new Capitol Street Gang.  (Every one, except Cliff Finch.)  I knew when Johnny Gore showed up in the afternoon with all of his bartending stuff, we were in for one of "those" parties.

William Winter and Herman Hines had alerted Daddy to this young fella named Ray Mabus.  He was one of the "boys of spring" who were either hated or celebrated in Mississippi.  He had a firm handshake and a burning intensity in his eyes.  The silent promise was that he would finish what Winter had started.

The party at the Holiday Inn on Millsaps campus, the one owned by Mike Sturdivant (who also had political aspirations), was not my first political victory party, but it was the first where I was old enough to be expected to wear a tie, so I did.  Ray's face was beet red, and sweat rolled freely from under his perfect hair.  He grabbed my hand and my shoulder, like a German butcher sizing up a fresh ham.  This was our new governor.  

Mabus lived up to his unspoken promise and continued the work Bill Winter started.  He was an education-forward governor, and he was winning.  Mississippi adopted new history textbooks on schedule but had no money to buy them.  Mabus made sure Mississippi school children had history and science textbooks written since we landed on the moon. 

Politically, we were successful, and we were happy, but this Reagan thing was growing.   Still, it had to be an anomaly.  One day, Daddy and Rowan and my brother and Doby Bartling used our company tickets to attend an Ole Miss game at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Jackson.  The announcer said, "Please stand while the Rebel Band plays our National Anthem."  Wich everybody did.  "Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to our distinguished guest, the Governor of Mississippi, Ray Mabus!"  I could see Ray and his Wife standing in their box seat and waving, but then a sound came from the Ole Miss student section.  They were Booing the Governor of Mississippi, A Democratic Governor of Mississippi,  A Democratic Governor of the State of Mississippi who had graduated Suma Comes Loudly from the University of Mississippi--and they were booing him.  I looked at Daddy and said, "Are we in trouble?"

So, that was the day the Democratic Empire in the state of Mississippi fell.  The dragons had arrived, and soon we'd have our first Republican governor.  Party became an important association by which you judged a man.  For a while, it was, at least.  Lately, we basically flipped the situation that existed; all the white people are n the Republican party now, and all the not white people are in the Democratic.  

Politics were one way to judge a man; religion was another.  Wherever you went to church in Jackson, nearly everyone aligned themselves with five major churches.  Three of them were on corners of the new Capitol Building.  Galloway, First Baptist, and St. Peters.  Beyond that was Central Presbyterian which was replaced in power by First Presbyterian and Beth Israel out in North Jackson.   The other churches followed what these five did.  One thing I'm learning in my recent studies is that St Luke's had all the same problems that Galloway had, just on a smaller scale.   Don't let anybody tell you that Jews and Catholics had no power in Mississippi.  Look at the names of the people who served on the boards of the banks.  Jews from Eastern Europe and Catholics from Ireland were a force in our economic life.  Look at the names of the stores.  Names like Stein and Maloney.

That brings up the next most important way to judge a man.  Banks.  There were two.  You had to pick one.  You HAD to pick one.  Deposit Guarantee had more assets.  First National was more conservative—First National funded financials and retail.  Deposit Guarantee funded an awful lot of real estate and light manufacturing.   One day Jeanne Luckett considered the entrails of a sacred goose and renamed First National Trustmark National Bank, followed by one of the most extensive marketing campaigns in Mississippi history.   Gone were the plastic frugal banks and all the trappings of the sixties.  This was a new bank for a new decade.  Mainly it was done because there were so many "First National" banks all over the world.  It worked.  Shortly after that, she reworked our image as well, and we got rid of those awful orange block letters and got a nifty stylized "M" to represent us.

What college you went to wasn't nearly as important as what college you supported in football and baseball.  Daddy played football for two years at Millsaps and then two at Ole Miss.  He enjoyed Ole Miss Football, but it was mainly a way for him to spend time with us kids.  One of the problems with having a dad like mine was that it sometimes got really hard to spend any time with him.  The only way to do it was to figure out how to fit myself into his schedule.  We had tickets to every game at Veterans Memorial Stadium because we had installed the bleachers and were morally obligated to buy season tickets.  Ben Puckett was one of his best friends.  As much as Daddy was lukewarm about Ole Miss, Ben was very warm about Mississippi State.  

Rowan went to Mississippi State too, but in a culture that was obsessed with the major public university football teams, Rowan Taylor was solidly in a secretive, invasive cult called Millsaps.   I don't even know what lured Rowan into the Major's influence.  Toward the end of his life, it was the woman he loved, but I never knew about how it started.  He was deeply devoted to Eudora Welty.  Maybe that was it.

Daddy enjoyed football at Ole Miss, but he loved football at Millsaps.  You could tell because he'd skip an Ole Miss game if none of us went with him, but he'd go to Millsaps games alone, in the cold and the rain.  He would never really be alone, though.  If they were in Mississippi and in good health, Daddy would meet Rowan, George Harmon, and Jack Woodward at the same spot for every game.  There's a balcony/deck thing there now.  Then it was just grass.  

"Get me some peanuts, buddy.  Get one for Rowan.  Here's five bucks; get five."  I figured out if I was gonna get to know my Daddy, I had to meet him on his own turf.  

So, of the houses and tartans of Mississippi, I align myself this way:  Trustmark, Democrat (mainly because the Republicans are currently fuckin' nuts), Galloway, Ole Miss--but in the cult of Millsaps.  

Our culture doesn't really go by these rules anymore.  For one thing, When Warren and Elsie Hood retired, they sold off their Deposit Guarantee shares, so now they're owned by an out-of-state entity.  That's a whole other story.  I'm old-fashioned, though.  I like to pretend it's 1982, and I'm eighteen, and Jackson is growing like a weed...

Not really.  I'm pretty realistic about the world as it is.  I still like to think about the way it was.  That happens when you get old.  "You Damn Millennials are gonna run everything!!"  Actually, that's not true.  I kind of like the Millennials.  They have great potential.  

Creative Constipation

 For weeks, I was suffering from chronic creative constipation.  I tried talking to feist-dog, but he was mostly asleep and not at all interested in me.  If I can't make things, eventually, I'll die of starvation.  I think that's part of how I ended up flat on my back in the hospital.  I had given up on making things for too long.  If creation is my life force, then I was suffering from severe ataxia.

It took me fifty-eight years to become what I was born to be.  I don't blame anyone except maybe myself.  My parents had no more idea of what to do with me than if someone had given them a giraffe.  I stole that line from the movie Gods and Monsters.  You should see it.

After what seemed like an eternity of constipation, this weekend, I had a breakthrough and have been experiencing an abundant eruption of griffonage ever since.  A friend of mine read my piece about Lavender Graduation and said how much she enjoyed it, but it was "SO LONG."  

I told Sam that part of that was me figuring out how I'm going to write about certain things and certain people in my book.  My purpose isn't to expose anyone or excise any personal daemons (any more than I can help it). What I'm trying to create isn't journalism.  It's more like writing down a melody that's been haunting me for decades.  I'd like to say something about humanity, not individual people.

If I ever finish the goddamn thing, and if you ever read it, there will be times when you say, "Oh, I know him!" but you won't.  All the characters are composites of several people.  Almost all the events in my story are, or were, real; but I might move them around thinking it's more interesting if it happens to John rather than Peter like it did in real life, so there may be times when you say "oh, I remember that."  but, it'll be different from what you remember.  

Some of the people in the book aren't alive anymore, so I'm moving gingerly through the words because their memory is more important to me than any ten books, and they're not here for me to ask, "Is it ok to say this?"  Part of why I want to do this is because it's a love letter for people I can't speak to anymore.  That doesn't include fiest-dog.  

Without anything more logical, I'll attribute my late surge of creativity to Nicole Saad going to Greece.  Some of the plays I enjoyed working on the most were with Nicole.  For the most part, we love the same people and the same things.  That counts for a lot.   You don't get to share that with very many people in this world.  When it happens, hold them dear.

The myths of Greece, the plays, and the poems are as fundamental to my way of thinking as the Christian myths.  "Myth" doesn't mean "not true."  Myth means "A story of the Gods."  I have no problem mentioning Greek myths in the same sentence as Christian myths because the only commandment I have to deal with is "Thou shalt have no Gods before me." and I don't have a problem with that.  Zeus, as important as he is, won't ever supplant Yahweh in my mind or heart.

My love for Hellenistic culture I owe to several people.   The finer points and more intricate discussions I owe to Joseph Campbell's books in part, but a much, much larger part to Catherine and Richard Freis.  My dearest Martha Hammond gave me an illustrated Edith Hamilton book when I was in middle school, which helped a great deal.  Martha was one of the people who didn't give up on the idea that I could learn to read.  

My very first exposure to Greek Myth came on a Saturday night on the rug of my mom's house, with two boys around me and a baby sister in daddy's arms on the sofa.  Jason and the Argonauts came on television, and I was amazed.  Later in life, I would come to know the magician, Ray Harryhausen, who created the god Talos and the monster hydra and the army of the dead.  I've written a lot about my experiences with Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury, and Forrest Ackerman; this is how it began.

Nicole travels the world with a cluster covey of ladies like a younger version of The Golden Girls, but also like Sex In The City in the Suburbs.  They spread a bunch of Mississippi all over unsuspecting people in foreign lands.  It amuses and pleases me to no end.  I'd do anything for Nicole Saad Bradshaw.  I'm absolutely certain she'll have cocktails on the moon one day, and I'll see it on Instagram.

It's five o'clock in the morning, and I can't sleep because I need to make words.  They make themselves, I just jot them down.  I used to do this knowing that nobody but feist-dog would ever see what I wrote.  Now that I'm letting everybody see my scribbles, it's kind of weird.  This has changed from the way I communicate with God to the way I communicate with my friends.  Ironically, when I communicated with only God, my language used many more blue words.  I'm trying to cut down because my Aunt says I can do better.  She's right, of course, but I still like to slip on in here and there for emphasis--goddamnit.

I hope, when I die, it will be during one of these periods where the words flow freely from me, like a bubbling well, rather than one of these periods when I don't anything to say to anybody, where God and Feist-dog have both abandoned me. 

In Mississippi, practicing law or medicine will make you somebody, but writing will make you immortal.  Go to Hal and Mal's some time and see how many writers are on the wall.  We're almost as big as Elvis.  Go to Oxford sometime, and you can feel the words moving through the air.  There are many things Mississippi cannot do, but this we can.  

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.  

Andy Griffith and Atticus Finch.

Before he got old and started putting on weight and losing his hair, My daddy bore a strong resemblance to Andy Griffith in terms of dress and speech, and mannerisms.  There was a time, in the seventies, when he wore sideburns down his cheek toward his chin, but Billy Nevill told him that looked silly, and that was the end of that.  My mother had told him the same thing, but there are things a fella just needs to hear from another man.

Among Southern men of my dad's generation, Griffith was a pretty good model for behavior.  Being white and male and from Mississippi was reviving criticism all over the world, so I can imagine many men seeking a way of saying, “I’m not one of those types of men.”

Another role model for men of his generation was Atticus Finch.  Most lawyers I knew (and a fair portion of doctors) did their best to take on the airs of Gregory Peck.  Peck’s portrayal of Finch was not only not offensive, he was positively heroic, and for men born in the twenties and thirties in Mississippi who had been through World War II and Korea, being heroic was just about all they wanted to do.  

These men were in their thirties when the Civil Rights movement broke out in Mississippi.  They were still too young and hadn’t ascended to their full adult potential economically, politically, or socially, but they would be judged their entire lives by what happened in those years.

For men who never ventured outside of Mississippi, it wasn’t so bad, but for men whose business took them to different latitudes and different longitudes, being from Mississippi could be used against you.

Daddy taught me to turn my accent on and off.  Some people found it charming, while some people found it offensive, so I learned.  My sister is better at it than me, but she’s also more charming than I am.  

When I went to Los Angeles or Chicago for business, I had o be conscious of this.  In Hollywood, once, a gentleman in his cups approached me and said, “I’m a Jew!”  

Taken aback but also a bit in my own cups, I said, “Hello, I’m a Methodist.”  Then he said, “If they had their way, people like you would kill people like me, wouldn’t you?”

He must have been an Irish Jew because he clearly wanted to have a bar fight.  His accusation of me hurt me more than his knowledge that Mississippi was sometimes cruel to Jews hurt him, but not by much.  We were at a stalemate.  

I wasn’t going to fight this man.  When you’re my size, you learn to either not fight or be thought of as less than fully human and certainly not a gentleman your whole life.  I was already having a problem with that this night.   

Even though I’d been raised with the Andy Griffith model of Southern manhood, that night, I switched to Atticus Finch and explained to this man the history of Jews in Mississippi, including the bombing of Beth Israel.  I told him about Emmitt TIll and Medgar Evers.  My plan was that if I owned up to what happened and showed that I fully understood the gravity of what happened, I could convince this man that I, Boyd Campbell, had no desire to kill any Jews, least of all the ones drinking with me on Hollywood boulevard while I try to imagine myself back in the thirties when some of the movies I love the most were being shot over on Gower Street.

I don’t know who young Southern men model themselves after now.  I don’t know how many of them have even seen Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch or read the book.  I suspect the prejudice against us still exists, though.  It’s gonna take a lot for that to wear off.

“Buddy, you need to know that your accent can work for you, or it can work against you.  You need to learn to control it and figure out what’s right for the situation you’re in.”  Daddy and Andy Griffith are both gone now, but I figure that’s still pretty good advice