The Annual AfroSolo Arts Festival will do a public reading of my new play, “Waiting for Giovanni,” at the African American Arts and Culture Center, (August 8th, 762 Fulton Street, San Francisco, 3 PM). It’s free and the lovely intimate theatre seats a nice number of people…enough to create a real theatre experience but small enough to facilitate post-reading discussion.
The play, in develoment for about 4 years, is not biographical but rather more of a dream play designed to evoke an artist’s state of mind when he is confronted with a major threat to his personal integrity and his ability to make a living. When James Baldwin wrote the novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” many in publishing and in the Civil Rights Movement thought the short book about the tragic love affair between two men (not Black) in Paris would ruin his career. Yet he felt compelled to tell the story. About love, hope, class and conscience, the story is both poetic and heartbreaking.
I use this specific moment…as he struggles with how to respond to this threat…as a way to explore how any of us might respond to being pulled in so many directions. Our readers, publishers, editors, agents all have an idea of where we should be going with our work. How often does that correlate with what we, in our hearts, need to write about? How much compromise can we honestly make? How open can we be about who we are in our writing and hope to find a publisher?
As I wrote my most recent novel I had to think about whether the main character should even be a lesbian if I wanted the book to be bought by a mainstream publisher.
The dilemma goes beyind simply being a writer or artist. Our social conscience is perpetually challenged by every day needs and demands. As we get older how do we stay true to our beliefs? Our personal satisfaction is closely tied to our social conscience, or at least it used to be. Being a lesbian seems so easy sometimes, especially in the Bay Area. Being a woman—most of us take that for granted. But the culture isn’t hospitable to us. How can we make it more so for those who come after us?
James Baldwin was a brilliant thinker and writer whose fiction and essays are classic American literature. He was an amazing jumping off point to write about these ideas. Lorraine Hansberry faced a similar dilemma in her career as well. My hope is the play will send people back to Baldwin’s work and other classic queer Black writers and that it will inspire us to re-commit to social activism in our lives and our writing.
