Sorry, I missed the Daily Karnal Captions the last few days. I want to provide excuses. But excuses suck. I did try to get the DKC done on the 6th and the 7th. I worked very hard to try and get it done. But I didn’t get there. I’m sorry. I’ll try to lock in more.
I was going to make this post just an apology post. But then, when I chose an image to put at the top, I stumbled upon the above image of James Baldwin. And that got me thinking about him. So this post is now about gay African American writers.
James Baldwin (the man in the picture above) was a writert. He was also openly gay. He wrote about racism and gay things, I guess you could say. But I think that’s a too simplistic summary of his writing, but it’s probably what the Google AI would say if you were to ask it who James Baldwin was.
He’s always interested me, because he had two crosses to bear, if you will. He was a black activist in the civil rights era, and he was openly gay. I felt like being both of those things during the times he lived in had to be some hard shit to deal with.
But he always presented himself with such class and elegance (in my opinion at least). And whenever I see interviews of him, he seems so self-assured and grounded in who he is, that you think that discrimination couldn’t possibly effect this man. It probably did, though, and it probably made him cry at night. Who knows? What I do know is, he was an impressive man to me. Here’s a snippet of him speaking. I love his voice (I used him in a porn musivc video once)
The other gay African American writer I find quite impressive is a Sci-fi writer by the name of Samuel Delaney. He is pictured below.
Sometime after Obama was elected (I bring up that fact, because in the book I will reference the Obama election was mentioned, and I don’t feel like checking the publication date, yet still want to give you an idea of the time in which it was written), Delaney published a non-sci-fi book all about explicit gay sex. The book is called “Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders”
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is super fucking long. I mean, it’s like lord of the rings, thick as the bible long. And it’s like one continuous gay sex scene. I mean, hardcore, make you want to vomit gay sex. I read it because a friend of mine was reading right before he committed suicide, and I was intrigued to read the last book he was reading. And the whole entire time, I was amazed that my friend would read this crazy gay sex book (maybe he was gay, and I didn’t know). Oddly enough, couldn’t put the Delaney book down.
I couldn’t put it down out of both thoughts for my friend, and also because I couldn’t believe that a man could write so many damn words about gay sex.
And not just because the gay sex is very extreme, the whole book is written with very sophisticated and flowery word choice. Like, it’s definitely an exercise in high literature writing at times, while being about fucked up gay sex (and Spinoza, oddly enough). You know the gay sex is fucked up, if I, a guy who makes plenty of captions about gay sex is calling the gay sex in this book fucked up.
I kept pushing through the book and finally made it to the end of this giant tome. And wow, the ending is the most touching and beautiful ending you could possibly read. I actually cried at the end of the book. Because the ending is so touching. But it’s only touching because you go through this crazy journey to get there and wow, what a payoff.
Anyway, Delaney’s “Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,” I would recommend. But it only gets amazingly, rhapsodically good, on the last page. But it’s a journey to get there. A journey through a valley of a nest of spiders, if you will.
It taught me one thing about stories, though. It doesn’t matter how it begins. It doesn’t matter what happens in the middle. All that matters is the ending.
And finally, since I’ve started rambling, I’ll end with a suspected homosexual African American writer, Octavia Butler.
She wrote science fiction like Delaney. I’ve read two of her books, The “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of Talents”. Those books also came from my friend who committed suicide. As his only friend, and someone I am proud to have called a brother, I inherited his whole book library, which I am grateful for. But i wish I still had him in my life and not his books. (I miss you so much, Elliott, you have no idea…)
But back to Octavia Butler. Her books “The Parable of the Sower” and “The Parable of Talents” are very good post-apocalyptic fiction. The world the young African American woman main charactr lives in, isn’t Mad Max and it isn’t “The Road” (written by Cormac McCarthy, another book I’ve read and would recommend). It’s like just on the border of becoming Mad Max and The Road. Like the step before total chaos. Don’t get me wrong, the world of the Parable books is definitely fucked up. But it’s not completely all the way fucked up. Anyway, I’m not sure Octavia Butler was a lesbian, but for some reason, she gets thrown into the “queer” bag.
Well, there you have it, a long blog post about gay African American writers that was originally just supposed to be a paragraph about me apologizing for not updating over the last two days. Once I get to typing, it’s hard for me to stop. Which is why so many of my captions are so damn long.
Anyway, so uh… yeah. Those are some gay African American writers I enjoy. And two of the three I never would’ve heard of, if my best friend hadn’t committed suicide. Again, I wonder if he was gay. Also makes me wonder, if I had known if he was gay, would we have had sex? Most likely, we would have. We were extremely close. But not close enough for him to tell me he was gay, I guess. Then again, I never told him I like cock, either. Well, I did tell him I liked femboys once, which he responded to with utter silence, and we just moved on to another conversation. So there’s that…
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