DARK FRUIT
Eric Leonardson and Ensemble
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“Black & Gay: a Psycho-Sex Study” is in the form of a lecture with slides of pie charts, strange graphs, and photographs lifted from gay erotic magazines; it’s based on an actual book from the 1960s of the same title. Freeman, dressed in a lab coat and holding a collapsible pointer, describes gay black careers–“hairdresser, interior decorator, ballet dancer”–as well as the percentage of African Americans within the gay culture, the percentage of African American gays who prefer white lovers, the percentage of white gay men who prefer African American lovers, and on and on. At times the lecture takes loopy, bizarre turns, sometimes accompanied by incongruous slide illustrations.
This decidedly goofy lecture is also bolstered by several dramatized vignettes: Freeman is always a white all-American, “gee whiz” sort of high school boy; White (his love interest) is the anguished, earnest “up from shanty town” African American; and Branner portrays a white female teacher who dangles a Booker T. Washington college scholarship before White, never letting him forget that he is her token black achiever. (After each vignette White and Branner stop suddenly and bow solemnly to the audience while Freeman races offstage, then back out in his lab coat to continue the lecture. Sometimes he gestures at the “actors” as though shooing them away.) These vignettes–a play within the play–work beautifully, showing how the dominant white culture, straight and gay alike, has condescendingly “tried out” integration–the ways in which African Americans are often used to assuage both white guilt and curiosity.
Throughout we hear all sorts of recorded and live sporadic sounds–of a screen door opening and shutting, the wind blowing, synthesized bubbles and percolations, a clang, the thud of a palm on a drum, something like a motorcycle or a biplane. Isolated and apparently random, these sounds are somewhat annoying–until they’re given a rhythmic context. Eventually, dimly, there’s a galloping of hands on drums, which becomes increasingly louder: Drake and Zerang in some of the most poetic, beautiful drumming I’ve ever heard.
