A start...

The problem for me...and my want to tell my story is I am not always sure where to start.  My whole reason for even thinking I had a story began after Corey passed.  Sure, I'd kept diar...jour...gravel-books for about 5 years prior to thinking there was anything more than adolescent rantings.  I recorded all of the things I was encountering just as I was leaving Morehouse and returning North to really begin discovering NYC...for me.

I formed greater bonds with old high school friends - Nicol and even Stephanie; while finding new kinMANship in Anton-Lance-Anthony.  Brad and Chad - the other 2 sides of what I'd left in Hot-lanta as a TRIANGLE - graduated the year after I left, moving together to DC.  We continued to live vicariously through one another's experience and new friends. We visited.  We DID it.

I held a myriad of jobs - the first at BLOOMINGDALE's in the fabled Short Hills Mall.  I departed there in a "typical" FAG-manor!!!  LoL

 [My only time, I might add...as the fear of anything greater had me shook...for a while.]

Next, Paid Prescriptions.  I stayed there...way too long, but it was steady income; with insurance.  I was hanging out with a new set of friends - all of whom were young, black, cute, gay, liked the city...could drive...and worked.  We did it.
While traversing the city - specifically on Saturday HAIRCUT excursions down to Charlie Rock's chair at ASTOR PLACE - I really began to explore the city and see it on my own terms.  I indulged my every art-fashion-music-gay....adolescent whim.  I learned the varied villages and their then...still intact character.  I watched the people and discovered HUDSON NEWS.  I would spend hours...literally gazing at the wall of IMAGES looking back at me...in every language.  This was before the On-Slaught of the internet.  If you wanted to indulge your fashion whims, you had to go out and look-see!  I did.

 [I discovered high-priced fashion mags after buying my first Italian VOGUE as soon as I got my first check from Bloomingdale's.  $20...I believe.  I choked and then saw Linda DONE on the supplement, spoon dangling from her nose...Magalie as Sophia Loren...perfect.  Stephen Meisel at his HEIGHT!  I poured over those pages for mon...shit I STILL have the publication.  The ads were stellar, as the SuperModels were at their APEX and VERSACE had a SICK ad campaign with Naomi, Christie and my FAV YASMEEN GHAURI!!!  Linda in the Gianfranco Ferre ads...Amazing!]

Suffice to say HUDSON NEWS...was just like an explosion of this...and more.  So, as the coconut smell from my freshly cut SPANISH BOB...avec Natural pre-MaxwellCurl and the yearning for FUDRUCKER's began to rumble...I would stand and absorb all of the beautiful images I saw before me...and buy.  I began to budget into my Saturday Haircut alotment Fun Funds for Mags.  Most Importantly, the now plethora of start-ups by young blacks - from NEW WORD (which I freelanced for); NOIR, REBELLE; a Caribbean import PANACHE; a start-up HIGH arts magazine I also freelanced for;

as well as a British imports TRUE
(the Father of TRACE), ID and UNTOLD young black artists were showing and knowing.  I was witnessing the on-coming BROWN Arts Movement - BROWNIES, as I liked to call them.  Folks who wore brown clothes; wore brown make-up; spoke, wrote; rapped; painted; sung about BROWN things.  Media...smart, young mags were their...our media.  And they were great. Not to mention PAPER, the old W newspaper;  I still have some at my Parent's spot.

Fashion, Music, Film, Painting, Poetry...SMART art.

A start.

Hmmm...