Come Sunday Morning – a book review

Now and then one comes across a promising writer; one who seems to offer enough promise for one to expend time on reviewing his work. One such writer is Terry E. Hill whose novel, Come Sunday Morning I finished reading the other day.

Come Sunday Morning is about the imposing pastor Hezekiah Cleveland and his wife, the beautiful and ambitious Reverend Samantha, the mega muliti million dollar church they are building, and their friends who, rather unsurprisingly given the deceit and machinations common in these mega evangelical churches, are all trying to secretly tear them down for egotistically selfish reasons.. It is the size of the daggers that is in question, not that men and women of God are walking around with them or the fact that they will do all they can to use them.

Even as we learn that Hezekiah and Samantha’s marriage is one of convenience, Hezekiah takes a male lover who, rather unconvincingly if you ask me, shows him that there are things more important than power, status, homes in Beverly Hills, stretch limousines, private jets and millions of dollars in the church’s coffers.

Samantha uses everyone for what she can get out of it and manages to be so cold and one-dimensional she reminds you of a stainless steel thumb tuck. Even so, the story takes on a totally implausible turn when she sleeps with one of her husband’s arch enemies in order to get him to commit a heinous crime for her benefit. Yes, we all know ambitiuos women in the 21st Century will make Lady Macbeth look like Pollyana but Samantha sleeping with that man really does stretch credulity especially since one can figure out that she didn’t have to in order to get him to do her bidding. She is not the only one who compromises her Christianity for ambition and greed so anyone who might feel that Hill had it in for the women in this novel would be justified.

The rest of the characters are as incidental to the main plot as they are flat. Hezekiah’s male lover, Danny St. John, is a sympathetic figure but not rounded enough as a character to evoke lasting sympathy even though it eventually becomes clear that the odds against his love affair with Hezekiah are simply too great.

The main women in this book do come out smelling of  a stench so strong that all the scents of Arabia wouldn’t expunge it. If that was intentional, Terry E. Hill certainly does a commendable job of portraying them as ogres, albeit expensively dressed and dolled up ones. The Clevelands’ daughter is incidental to the entire story but she, too, comes off as a wastrel that many readers will find to be merely a self-obsessed irritant. She could have been left out of the entire story without impacting it in any way.

In the end, Hezekiah turns out to be a modern day Marcus Brutus; torn between staying stoic and keeping up appearances with a wife and ministry he doesn’t value with the same fire anymore, or following his heart and doing “the wrong” thing with Danny St. John. In the end the decision is taken out of his hands by events.

It will be a small miracle if Terry Hill doesn’t pen a sequel to this novel, given the way he ends it. One can see a myriad directions he can go with the next part of the story. Sadly, the down low, clandestine gay element is more or less wrung out by the end of novel and it is difficult to see how Hill could possibly continue it with the same smell of roses he managed to establish in Come Sunday Morning. But there is enough left in the story line to warrant another look if Hill ever decides to write the denouement to the Cleveland saga in a follow-up novel.

I bought this book as an E-book and apparently I can wirelessly loan it to anyone with a Kindle … If you want to borrow it, talk to me nicely.

 

Related articles

• Terry Hill’s interview with PrideIndex
• Eddie Long

Review: The Love that Dares

I am wondering what the purpose of this story was and why we are supposed to care.

That is one of the responses to an article, The Love that Dares, that someone sent me this morning. The article paints in some harsh light the tribulations of the gay community in Uganda as seen by the article’s author. It is not clear why the article appears in the January/February 2012 issue of Mother Jones since much of what it deals with seems to be events that occurred in the past.

Sappho Islands the (mainly) lesbian bar that Kasha Nabagesera fronted opened in 2010 and closed a year later, to pave way for more lucrative retail shops. The real-time events of the article happened in April 2011, around the time of the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. In a nutshell, the article neither raises any new issues nor guides readers as to future direction.

Gay human rights are a hot topic right now, especially since Britain and America decided to wade in feet first, telling African regimes to be inclusive if they wanted to continue receiving their money. But it only makes sense for human rights activists to fight the the fight while also suggesting a way forward.

One of the sacred cows that needs to be slaughtered, but won’t, is the tendency for interviewers to assume that because someone has told them something, it is true. One has to accept that most interviewers, especially ones in the human rights area, approach their subjects looking for the most emotive angle. It is thus in their interest to find the most heart-tagging human stories to buttress their agenda which is usually to drive readers to their Kleenex boxes and keep their hands on the tissues as they read. Mac Mclelland doesn’t disappoint, quoting liberally on Ugandan vigilantes who treat transgender people and phone thieves with the same disdain – stripping them naked and reveling in the spectacle.

Human rights are, of course, an important element in the fight for equality. But,  I have said it and will continue to say it; if we exaggerate the level of our suffering or the extent to which we are being hunted by our own countrymen, it tugs at the right heart strings in readers sitting in their plush living rooms in New York City and San Francisco. But it alienates, if it doesn’t stoke resentment and anger among, the crucial people we need to persuade that we are part of their world and should be treated equally – our fellow countrymen.

When all is said and done, the battle for gay rights in Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria, etc. will be fought and won in those countries – not England, Sweden or the United States of America. It thus behooves us gay men and women in Africa to have some perspective when talking about how much we are suffering. Of course, it is not lost on one that there are a lot of jobs, Dollars, Pounds and Euros tied into the stories with the ‘right’ emotional tone. The more tear-jerking the scenario, the more likely that the donors will dig deeper into their coffers. The temptation to exaggerate is thus understandable. It, however, has to be resisted because the truth eventually will come out, making us look like the boy who cried wolf, thereby rendering flippant a highly deserving cause.

It is important to remember that Uganda is also a country where 30,000 babies and 6,000 women die in child birth every year due to medical neglect and/or incompetence. This, too, is in a country where HIV/Aids in the gay community is spreading unfettered, forcing public health officials to admit that 18,000 new cases in 2011 were of men having sex with men. Gay activism in Uganda currently doesn’t have a coherent message or strategy to address this threat. Is focusing on a fellow public transportation rider who might or might not be a bigot really the priority we want to expend 3,000 words of a publication on?

The reader who commented on Mac Mclelland’s article (see above) thus has point.

Unmentionables – A Book Review 1

I finally got down to reading David Greene’s Unmentionables while on my recent trip to Uganda. It seems pretty sad that, unless one is away on vacation, one gets hardly any time to sit down and read a book. But perhaps that is the price to be paid for living in the rat race that is life in the United States of America.

But this is about a book review, not a mourning session about the difficulty of living life as it comes at you.

David Greene has written a 557-page tome set in Civil War America circa 1860. It is about two white families, the Askews and the Hollands and how they live life with their slaves shortly before the onset of the American Civil War. Both families own slaves but the daughter of the Hollands is obviously ill-at-ease with the entire concept of slavery, leading her to push the boundaries in all sorts of ways throughout the novel. On the other hand, the Askews take their owning of slaves for granted, and it turns out that Mr. Askew took the liberty of slave ownership to extreme levels 20 years ago when he had sex with a black slave and begat a boy called Cato. True to form, he promptly made the boy his slave upon the death of this mother. And so, when we first meet him, Cato is a beautiful mixed race young man who works for his father as a slave. Interestingly, everyone apart from Mrs. Askew seems to know that Cato is Mr. Askew’s son. Which brings one to wonder how daft Mrs. Askew must be if even the boy himself knows that her husband is his father.

Greene does an admirable job of keeping the story-telling breezy, and the narrative easy to follow. The story telling is simple and, despite the improbable occurence here and there, it is difficult to put Unmentionables down once one gets one’s ‘teeth’ into it. Greene’s sugary optimism leads him to create a series of incidents that buck the most rudimentary knowledge of what we know about the civil war era. It is, for instance, hard to believe that Dorothy Holland could have gotten the best of her bigoted and cruel mother the way she does in the novel. The speed at which Cato learns to read and write is nothing if not miraculous. And Jimmy”s survival in the novel, too, especially on his trip to Chicago, leaves one with the distinctive impression that Greene was determined that his novel cheered readers up.

Greene, one feels, uses Unmentionables to conjure up what he wished would have happened in the deep South when slavery was the order of the day, rather than what likely really happened. And, frankly, there is nothing wrong with that. The last chapters are devoted to the key protagonists meeting in Chicago, and that process, too, throws up yet more unbelievable but, nonetheless, satisfying results. In that sense, Unnentionables is a typical feel-good novel. One doesn’t want to say too much about the main love stories (between Dorothy Holland and William Askew, and Cato and his fellow slave, Jimmy) without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that in both love stories David Greene’s desire to maintain the feel-good factor in his novel is palpable.

It wouldn’t be a gay relationship if we didn’t learn that Jimmy has a massive pudendum. And it wouldn’t be a gay love affair if one of the men didn’t submit in a supplicant manner to the other; after all can it be a gay relationship if one man is not the sexual top and the other the bottom? And could it be a gay sexual relationship if the man with the bigger dick wasn’t the top? But there is little point in quibbling over the ins and outs of gay love and/or gay sex. That is not Greene’s intention and once one suspends one’s disbelief at the more pat elements of the love affair between the two enslaved men (for instance, no one knows about it unless the lovers tell them), the vicissitudes of their romance are quite engrossing.

The ending, too, leaves Greene with wide latitude to explore Jimmy’s and Cato future in a sequel (perhaps). Indeed, the conundrum that is Dorothy’s existence is also not totally resolved, leaving enough room for the sequel that should surely follow this highly readable ‘epic’ as surely as night turns into day.

We hope … and wait.

Visible Lives – Three Stories in Tribute to E. Lynn Harris 6

BOOK REVIEW

A dear friend of mine who lives in London brought my attention to this book and I decided to pick up a copy to while away the hours on my recent trip to California. I read the book on the plane to Los Angeles and then on Saturday afternoon, after the graduation ceremony I had gone to attend in San Luis Obispo, California. For the most part I found it to be thoroughly entertaining. “Un-put-downable” I would call it.

As the title so clearly lets on, Visible Lives consists of three black gay stories written by three of the late E. Lynn Harris’ admirers and who, as it apparently turned out, were inspired by him to write. E. Lynn Harris is, of course the doyen of African American gay writing who took the United States by storm by writing about subjects of black homosexual loving at a time when there was virtually no literary attention paid to the subject.Tragically, he died of heart failure in 2009 at the tender age of 54 and that is what led the three writers to put together what, to me, is an very able tribute to their idol.

The first short story, by Terrance Dean, is called The Intern. It is set in New York City, and focuses on a high powered black TV executive, Chase, who is rich, down low, handsome, uppity and yearning for love but has not been able to find it despite being so successful career-wise. That is until a 22-year-old intern with raging ambition and hormones walks into his office. Chase is an, ahem, older man which would be complicated enough. But Chase is also the young intern’s boss.The rest of the story is about Chase and his intern making their way towards the inevitable relationship the two must surely have. Dean does a good job of keeping the story-telling breezy and the sex scenes steamy. Not many people do that without degenerating into seedy porn. And yet the sex scenes are quite graphic to say the least.

The premise of the older 35+ guy successfully dating a 22-year-old is preposterous of course and Dean stretches it a notch further when he portrays the younger man as the one in control and of clearer and more resolute mind. I didn’t buy that one bit. At the end, there is an interesting twist to the love connection that one is best advised to read for oneself. Suffice to say that though I found the twist intriguing, Dean could have taken the end to a more thought-provoking direction than he did. But a man is entitled to end his story in the way he wishes so there is no point in quibbling about that.

James Earl Hardy’s story, Is It Still Jood to Ya, focuses on a gay couple, Raheem and Mitchell who once dated, fell out and are now getting together again which they do on a blacked-out night in New York City in the summer of 2003. Fast forward to 2009 and they are a happy and apparently prominent gay black couple raising three children, two of whom are biologically begotten. Raheem is an out gay actor and Mitchell is a best-selling author. Hardy uses the two men to discuss contemporary elements of black on black homophobia, condescension,  black gay pride, sexual dynamics and parenting. He does this using a radio interview that the two gay men take part in. While the interview reminds us  about the lack of homogeneity in gay relationships, it also attempts to portray what could be for many gay black men if they took the time to focus on love rather than raw sex. And for that, Hardy certainly deserves credit. Despite the incondite radio interview style, and, for instance, liberally using the word “jood” for good, Hardy’s narrative is fast, simple and gripping. The radio interview seems a little far-fetched given that I have never ever heard of a single black gay couple (let alone a prominent gay couple) take to the airwaves to explore their sexuality so publicly and extensively. But perhaps Hardy (thanks T)  is trying to be a precursor of revolution – showing us what should be routine radio fodder if gay rights continue their onward march.

The last and, for me, the most engaging story is Stanley Bennett Clay’s House of John. It is about a 38-year-old man on the rebound from a traumatic lover affair in Los Angeles who travels to the Dominican Republic on a sex trip, gets his groove on with the Dominican money boys, soon loses interest in the sex-for-hire and goes to explore the less sexual elements of the island with his camera. It  is a classic case of a gay man approaching middle age and searching for something “more.”And our 38-year-old rebounder of course finds love – or better expressed, he finds a subject his camera and, eventually his heart, can’t resist. But the story is not as straight forward as I am telling it here, and the older man’s journey to everlasting love is not all smooth sailing. To say more about it, however, would be to give away what turns out to be a tale of moral refocusing as well as an attempt to do unto others as one would want done to one.

Call me jaded, but I quite simply don’t believe that there is anything a 38-year-old could have in common with a man 16 years his junior (apart from the sex of course) but Clay does a respectable job of trying to show his readers that, perhaps, perhaps, there could be. And the pride expressed by the younger man cannot but make most readers choke with emotion.I found myself wondering whether my skepticism regarding such age discordant relationships is perhaps not ridiculous.

The running theme thus seems to be that, yes, black gay men can find love with the most unlikely people and keep it. And that is a message I have no problem embracing especially in this day and age where men grope your pants to find out “what you are working with” before they introduce themselves.

If you don’t have the money, ask AfroGay nicely. This is one book that he would gladly buy and distribute free of charge to as many people as his budget will allow. It is definitely a page-turner and has a lot to teach us homosexual men that there is a lot to life than getting horny and slinging your hook with whoever agrees to have you. You will, I think, seriously consider skipping a meal or two to finish it once you start reading.

E. Lynne Harris … RIP.

Homosexuality – Perspectives From Uganda

In 2007 we wrote a book. By ‘we’ I mean a group of Ugandan gay men and women wrote articles which were compiled into a highly readable and educational book. Copies were made available to all members of Parliament (this was in the run-up to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit, and this was our effort to ensure that homosexuals’ rights didn’t get swept under the rug) as well as diplomats.

Below is the cover of the book (ISBN 978-9970-001-90-3) as well as its blurb:

The book was sold in Aristoc at Garden City and Kampala Road and made brisk sales as far as I know. I need to check whether it is still available – which will indicate that more copies were printed after the first publication.

If you ever find a copy, buy it. It is well worth the read and I for one am very proud of the various gay men and women who contributed to bringing it to the light.
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Aldrine Nsubuga Makes an Unmarketable Argument

Aldrine Nsubuga is an interesting man. He loves everything Liverpool and rumor has it that at one point that he turned his son’s bedroom into a Liverpool shrine, complete with Liverpool posters, duvet, blanket, sheets, flags, hat pins, badges, players’ plastic figures, socks and God knows what else. What is not rumor is that Nsubuga had his child named Anfield, after Liverpool Football Club’s stadium. Always well groomed and dapper, Nsubuga attended good Ugandan schools, is well traveled and speaks softly but very passionately about a lot of sports.

Aldrine Nsubuga

Aldrine Nsubuga’s article in the Sunday Vision on homosexuality in football circles thus caught my attention because I have always thought of him as thoughtful even if a little too fixated with a painted sheep’s skin being kicked around by grown men. The gist of Nsubuga’s article is that a Ugandan team, SC Villa, has seen its fortunes fall because of homosexual activity within its ranks. How so, I asked myself? Nsubuga, using mostly innuendo, tried to explain.

Money quote:

Research as to why SC Villa have struggled though reveals a heart-breaking account. Over the last five seasons Villa has heavily relied on players who have steadily progressed from their youth system but whether by design, coincidence
or mere accident, a high-ranking club official turned these same youngsters into girlfriends and, in some cases, even wives.

Research? What research? Knowing that Aldrine Nsubuga is an Economics major and a marketing professional, I drew breath and checked twice what his “research” is. Nada, nothing, zero, zilch. Nsubuga just moves on to more important things like how to rid Ugandan football of homosexuality:

The accused should be the ones to prove their innocence not the other way around. Believe me a quick appointment with any doctor will easily help in either absolving or condemning them. We don’t need eye witness accounts.

Not only is Nusbuga resorting to rumor and guesswork to diagnose the problems of an entire soccer team, he also decides to rewrite the law in order to advance his agenda. Never mind that the law says that one is innocent until proven guilty, and that it is up to the law (not the accused) to prove their guilt, Nsubuga has opted for a total travesty of the law. But the mighty Aldrine Nsubuga has spoken so that’s it … end of argument.

I have met Nsubuga a number of times and in fact dealt with him on a professional level while he was marketing manager or something like that at Crane Bank, opposite Kampala’s City Square. On the last occasion I met him at his office, Liverpool had just lost a game to some team I now forget. While I sat in his office, his cell phone kept going incessantly. He turned to me and complained about how he was fed up with all these people calling to rib him about his beloved Liverpool’s loss. “Have you thought about switching the phone off?” I asked him. He looked at me askance, as if he was wondering how I could even think that the great Aldrine Nsubuga could miss the opportunity to know that he was popular. So, I ventured another option: getting a second phone and line for the non-nuisance calls and answering the pundits’ calls only when he wanted to. Nsubuga actually warmed to this suggestion for a moment but then wearily wondered aloud about having to carry around two phones … his voice trailed off in resignation. I didn’t offer any other options because, in truth, I didn’t have any.

My general impression about Nusbuga was that he couldn’t have been very busy as a marketing manager at Crane Bank since he had all that time to commentate on sports, host radio chat shows, write newspaper columns, field phone hecklers (he actually answered two calls while I was in his office and patiently lectured the callers about how Liverpool had hallowed soccer history, and this defeat was a flush in the pan etc…), travel the continent with the national soccer team and rant about Liverpool ad nauseum. With obviously so much time on his hands, you would think that he would have put in time to actually do the research on how homosexuality had ruined S.C Villa’s standing in Uganda’s football league.
Which is why it is disappointing that Nsubuga chose to use loud-mouth ‘soccer stands’ gossip in his article. For had he bothered to actually present evidence about homosexual predators in Ugandan soccer and illustration that young men are being lured into soccer clubs by homosexuals whose intent is to prey on them, he would have done the sport, aspiring soccer players and, eventually, law enforcement a huge service.
Alas, like many before him, Aldrine Nsubuga takes the knee-jerk, lazy, easy way out; gossip, innuendo, hysteria and diktat. It’s not a very educated position to assume but, hey, who cares about educated positions when you have a climate that provides ferfile ground for witch hunts and empty-minded finger pointing?
Related Reading:
1. Aiyekho the sacrificial lamb
2. Gay activists want Uganda banned
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Andrew Mwenda’s The Independent magazine again meanders on homosexuality

Andrew Mwenda is an intelligent, incisive journalist whose articles mostly show an excellent understanding of Uganda’s political and social dynamics. His analysis of Ugandan affairs is peerless. Alas, his sharp intellect and clarity of mind seems not be rubbing off on contributors to his weekly magazine, The Independent.

In the January 28 issue, a one Rafaella Asio makes an effort to discuss homosexuality in Ugandan schools – and ends up saying absolutely nothing worthwhile. Take the following quote ( I have removed the names to make the point):

[The school head], … believes that counselling can be done but the school cannot put at risk the entire student population in a bid to cure one girl’s problem. The school rules … clearly spell out the consequences of being found kissing, fondling, romantic behaviour, isolated in dark corners, sharing a bed or sleeping in another person’s bed for whatever reason. The punishment is expulsion. Like her counterpart … she flatly condemns the act and would do everything to prevent the vice from spreading.

As you can see, once you excise the names of the schools, the sexual activity in question might refer to heterosexual or homosexual activity. What then is the point of Ms. Asio’s singling out homosexuality when the “vices” she is talking about are equally relevant to heterosexuality? In fact, her article would have made better sense if she had just entitled it: “Would you talk to your child about sex?” Instead, she ends up with a vacuous article that rehashes cliches on homosexuality without, however, saying anything of substance about what a parent or guardian should say to their child about homosexuality or sex for that matter.

Andrew Mwenda

Andrew Mwenda clearly needs to work more closely with his editors if The Independent is not to degenerate into a dull, uninformative, agenda-driven piece of writing. Ms. Asio’s article says absolutely nothing new and The Independent surely cannot afford to become associated with churning out inanities. For another example of another piece of pulp Mwenda let through, check out John Njoroge’s October 22, 2008 cut and paste job claiming that Ugandans are turning to homosexuality in order to get rich and/or to get visas out of the country. The silliness is as staggering as it is disappointing to come from a magazine edited by someone of Andrew Mwenda’s caliber.

Queer Kenyans Call for Queer Writing 2

If you are interested in writing, and are Kenyan, this might be of interest to you:

From: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gaykenyapersonals/

We [,the] lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals, in a word, queers, have had the distinct un-pleasure of being told wedon’t exist—in official government statements, historical documents,and contemporary statements. Well, we do.

We want Kenyan stories by Kenya-based and Kenya-born queers. About everything. We want writing about the dailyness of our lives, the good, the bad, the weird, the indifferent. If you have lived it, wewant to hear about it. We especially want to reach beyond Nairobi, Mombasa, and other cities to all corners of the country. And we knowthe rest of Kenya, Africa, and the world wants to hear these storiesas well. Formats.

We have three distinct formats. Choose what appeals to you.

1. Interviews: Tell us your story. Get in touch with us and we’ll arrange an interview. We value your time and your confidentiality.Not sure you want to meet us directly? We have phones and email and all manner of ways to make this happen.

2. Letters to Kenya: Write (or unearth) a 500-1,000-word letter.To whom? Parents, pastors, the government, best friends, formerfriends, present lovers, former lovers, the person you really want to tune. Get personal, get intimate. Say what you really want to say!

3. Personal narratives: Write (or unearth) a 2,500-3,000-wordnarrative about the dailyness of being queer. The high points, lowpoints, the endless plateaus, the quick glances, in drawn breaths of desire, domestic thrills, sexual boredom, beginnings and endings. If you write it, we’ll consider it.

All submissions should be typed, double-spaced, and submitted electronically to queerkenya@gmail.com. If you can’t type, don’t want to, or can’t get hold of an email program that functions, get in touch with us. We can help.

How You Can Contribute

1. Get the word out. Convince your friends with hidden manuscripts or stories that must be shared to un-closet them.
2. Send us encouraging emails. We need your good wishes, your fabulously good wishes.
3. Volunteer time! We need all the help we can get.
4. Take ownership. We’re editing, sure, but these are ourcollective stories.

Important Dates

April 30, 2009: Deadline to Receive Submissions
June 30, 2009: Selected Contributors Contacted
Publication: December 2009.

Questions? We’re glad to answer. Please contact us at queerkenya@gmail.com