Who's Who
My photographic practice and politics both emanate from a culture of otherness. My work challenges the bullshit in which those of us with culturally forbidden lives/desires are represented (or hidden) within Western society.
Ajamu is a photographer, cultural activist, and producer of Black queer arts festivals. Since 1990, his practice has explored the complex terrain of Black masculinity, same gender relationships, gender fuck and sadomasochism.
His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries, museums and alternative spaces throughout the world including New York, Sao Paulo, Berlin, London and Amsterdam.
In 1993, he was a co-founder of Wickers and Bullers; Europe’s first commercially produced Black queer magazine. In 1996, he created The Black Perverts Network, a safer sex club for Black and Asian men into underwear and fetish gear.
In 2000, along with filmmaker/theatre director Topher Campbell, he launched rukus! (a Black queer arts organisation) at The I.C.A. as part of London’s Mardi Gras festivities, and in the same year he received an award for his services to the UK Black gay community from Blackliners. He is also co-founder of The Breakfast Club, a monthly group for Black men regardless of sexual preference. http://www.ajamu-fotographie.com
Source: GMFA
Simon Nelson
Simon has been proactively working with Black men (whether gay identified or not) and those wishing to increase service provision to them for the past 8 years. Having started working as a volunteer at the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust in 1993 things have come full circle and he is now in a full time development role with the organisation as the Black Gay Men’s Development Officer. Last year he wrote Chatblack a booklet that explores much more than merely avoidance or treatment of sexually transmitted infections and HIV. As with Chatblack another resource Switch the Groove music CD addresses issues like self-esteem and acceptance. In 2000, he helped organise Mr. Black Gay UK as part of Black History Month combining music that the mainstream gay scene rarely caters for, proving that health needn’t be boring!
"My work will now focus on campaigning to address many of the issues Black gay men themselves have identified. Homophobia from within the Black community and racism in general need to be challenged if we are to truly tackle the root cause of bad health, namely inequality."
Simon also writes for the health section, "Sex With Simon"
Source: GMFA
Dennis L. Carney
In May 2001 Dennis L Carney was appointed to the post of Black Gay Men’s Groupworker to develop groupwork initiatives aimed at London’s diverse Black Gay communities, and to network with other agencies to promote this ground-breaking and necessary work at PACE.
Dennis moved from Manchester to London to pursue a career within the Civil Service in the early eighties. Soon afterwards, he attended a public meeting organised by the Black Lesbian & Gay Centre (BLGC), entitled Homosexuality in the Black Community. One month later, he was voted onto the Management Committee of BLGC.
This was the beginning of Dennis’ activism around Black gay & lesbian concerns. He was elected Chair of BLGC and became one of the early members of the board of Blackliners. He has also worked on the Management Committees of Black, HIV & AIDS Network (BHAN), and Big Up Limited. He co-founded the group Black Gay Men United Against AIDS (BGMUAA) and continues to develop sexual health interventions aimed at Black gay men.
Dennis was a founding member of Let’s Rap, a discussion group for Black gay men, and one of the first of its kind in the UK. He has also attended several national Black Gay & Lesbian Leadership Forum (BLGLF) conferences in America, and was invited to speak at last year’s annual conference held in New York by Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD).
After five years, Dennis recently resigned as Chair of Stonewall Housing Association and is now an active volunteer with Big Up @ GMFA. He recently facilitated a number of successful Basement Sessions (workshops) which aimed to empower Black gay men from diverse communities.
He currently works at PACE where he develops groupwork initiatives aimed at Black gay men. He is also a freelance trainer with a number of organisations concerned with challenging discrimination and working with diversity.
Source: GMFA
Dr. Kevin Fenton
Dr. Kevin Fenton is a Consultant Epidemiologist and is currently head of the national HIV/STI Division at the PHLS Communicable Disease Survelliance Centre, Colindale.
He also holds a joint appointment with the Department of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Royal Free and University College Medical School, as a Senior Lecturer.
Born in Glasgow and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Kevin completed his initial medical education at the University of the West Indies before returning to England in 1992.
He worked in a number of clinical appointments in London before being appointed Lecturer at UCL in 1995. There he worked on a number of projects related to HIV/STI epidemiology including partner notification, sexual behaviour studies, hehavioral interventions and the relationship between culture, ethnicity and sexual health. Appointed to his current joint post in July 1999, Kevin's special interests include the survelliance and control of bacterial STIs, men's sexual health and the study of sexual behaviour.
A director of Big Up between 1997 and 2000, Kevin has worked extensively on sexual health promotion and research among Black gay and bisexual men.
He was the lead investigator of the "What are you like?" sexual health needs assessment of Black gay men in 1999, the first study of it's kind in Britain.
He has recently completed work on the Good Practice Guidelines for HIV Health Promotion with Black gay and bisexual men.
He is an avid traveller and enjoys oil and watercolour painting.
Linda Bellos
Raised in Brixton, Linda Bellos is currently co-chair of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Advisory Group to the Metropolitan Police Service, and chair of Southwark Anti- Homophobic Forum.
She has been involved in grass roots groups for over 30 years and has been actively involved in lesbian politics since 1980. She gained public recognition as part of Greater London Council’s women’s unit and as vice chair of her local Labour Party’s Black section. She was one of the organisers of the first Black lesbian conference in 1985, and also helped to organise an early Black feminist conference called We are Here in 1983.
Elected leader of Lambeth Council in 1986, her political philosophy has centred around 2 key issues, the involvement of working class people in decision making and equal opportunities. Among the many initiatives she undertook while leading Lambeth council was to increase representation of Black contractors from 2 to 100.
In the 90s she forged a new career in broadcasting for Greater London Radio. She has also been co-ordinator of the Global Trade Centre in London which exists to increase the trade between the Black communities in the UK and internationally.
Linda is a mother and grandmother and looks forward to forming a new group, Radical Lesbian Grandmothers!
She is part of the Broken Rainbow Conference Steering Group.
Linda was May 2002 Personality of the Month, and has just received a Black Gay Community Award for her outstanding work.
Source: GMFA In The Family
Deborah Perkins
Deborah started at Gay Men Fighting AIDS (GMFA) in November 2000 as the first Black female member and Director of the charity. She was one of three former directors of Big Up Limited co-opted onto the Board of GMFA and who were jointly responsible for the merger of Big Up with GMFA.
Deborah has continued to be an active member of the BIG UP group at GMFA which was set up to meet the specific sexual health promotion needs of Black gay and bisexual men. She is committed to a broad-based approach to the provision of health promotion for men who have sex with men and uses her extensive marketing, PR and leadership skills to help widen the profile of this and other groups at GMFA. Her voluntary contributions to project work have ensured that resources and campaigns address community building and self-esteem issues, as well as the sexual and wider health needs of gay and bisexual men.
Deborah is a pioneer who strongly believes in the need to challenge stigma and homophobia by providing accurate, unbiased, and culturally specific information on or about the need to support men who have sex with men in our communities. She has also been a governor at a local primary school.
She is still on the Board of Directors at GMFA.
Source: GMFA In The Family
Paul Boakye
Playwright, essayist, editor, and codirector of The Write-On-Line Publishing Company; Paul Boakye has written for theatre, radio, film, academia and magazines. He is the recipient of a national Livewire Business Award, and a member of The Writer’s Guild of Great Britain and, The Institute of Project Management.
Boakye’s debut play Jacob’s Ladder took the UK Student Playscript Award in 1986. In 1991, Hair, portraying the cultural gap between a Jamaican single mother and her British-born son, received the BBC Radio Drama Young Playwrights’ Award. In his self-produced Boy with Beer (1992), Boakye chooses to deal with hitherto taboo subjects including the making of a Black gay couple, bisexuality, and AIDS.
His provocative and existential writing comes of age in Wicked Games, a dramatisation of contemporary postcolonial British identity as experienced by a group of London friends enacting the ‘social structures we live’ on a holiday in Ghana. This conflict between "the British, American, and African Dreams" is also explored in Darker Than Blue: Black British Experience of Home and Abroad.
Paul currently works at GMFA, as the Big Up Project Worker, developing targeted HIV prevention/sexual health promotion campaigns aimed at Black gay and bisexual men. Other health promotion projects include the commissioned dramas No Mean Street and Safe, the Big Love Radio Ads, and the text for The Briefings.
Source: GMFA In The Family
Walter Gilgower
Walter came to Britain in August 1990, having trained and qualified in automotive technology in Southern Africa.
He found several positions around London for the five years before he came across workers from LADS, who encouraged him to join their organisation as an outreach worker. He joined Big Up as a volunteer, at the same time, and later became their Community Development Worker. This saw the introduction of "nice-n-easy" sessions (places where Black gay men could meet in an informal setting). There was a general drive for the promotion of Big Up on the gay scene, as well as their telephone help line service, which saw Walter co-ordinate an extensive outreach programme. He was also one of the co-founders of the Mr Black Gay UK event.
Walter moved to Birmingham to become the Senior Health Promotion Officer - African & Caribbean Men - for Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care NHS Trust. He started Mayish project, a social support group for the West Midlands' Black gay and bisexual community.
He has contributed to many publications including, The Good Practice Guidelines for HIV Health Promotion with Black gay and bisexual men (GMFA, 2002). He has been instrumental in getting more Black and Asian people to join in the World Aids Day celebrations in Birmingham, and to help raise awareness of HIV/AIDS in their communities.
On meeting Walter, you will find a genuine, warm and caring person, bubbling with life and full of enthusiasm.
Walter is currently doing a Master's degree in multicultural issues in health and social care at the University of Central England and works with the African HIV Policy Network.
Source: GMFA In The Family
Dirg Aab Richards
Dirg was one of the first active volunteer members of the London Gay Black Group. He attended the first ever meeting for Blackliners, and founded the 1984-85 Lesbian and Gay Society at Goldsmiths College. He was the Black Lesbian & Gay Centre (BLGC) Project’s first Black Gay Men’s Outreach and Development Worker 1985 - 1989.
As part of his work for BLGC, he organised nation-wide poetry and performance events for (and personally accommodated both) poet Essex Hemphill (decd.) and musician Blackberri, using these events as vehicles to promote the visibility of Black gay men and lesbians. Along with colleagues, he was an active participant in the international campaign (with GLAAD - Gays and Lesbians Against Defamation) objecting to Buju Banton’s offensive record Boom Bye Bye and Shabba Ranks’ homophobic outburst on television programme The Word.
By bringing an increasing cross-section of individuals together, Dirg has helped to facilitate the development of a Black gay and lesbian community that had never before enjoyed such visibility or cohesiveness. He has lent his voice to many initiatives and campaigns, and as a result, his social circle is wider and stronger than even he could have ever imagined.
Source: GMFA In The Family
Rikki Beadle Blair
Born 1962, in Bermondsey, south London.
British actor, director, writer, musician.
He was brought up by his black single mother, Monica Beadle (born 1944), a counsellor, who was also gay. She was born in Jamaica and moved to Britain when she was 12. She was the first black child in her school in Peckham. When she was pregnant with Rikki at the age of 16 her mother had just died and her sister was throwing her out into the street. Rikki was brought up with a brother, Gary, 4 years younger, and a sister, Carleen, 8 years younger.
The BBC current affairs television programme, Nationwide, made a documentary about him when he was a child performer in Bermondsey, south London, in the 1970s.
When he was 17 he did a capella concerts at the Gay's The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury, London. At this time he was also going to gay pubs and clubs and was involved with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).
He was subsequently a dancer, a cabaret artist, a rock musician, an actor, a choreographer, and a director. He has performed worldwide, and has written plays for BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4 television. He was proud of his performance in the early 1990s in the film Sirens in which he played Blue, a punky Scouse heroin junkie.
He has worked worldwide and is particularly proud of his performance in the early 1990's film 'Sirens' in which he played Blue, a punky Scouse heroin junkie.
In 1994 he wrote the screenplay for Nigel Finch's film Stonewall, about the Stonewall Rebellion. This won him awards at film festivals in London and San Francisco.
His profile was considerably raised in Britain in March 2001 with the Channel 4 television series Metrosexuality which he wrote, produced, and directed, and in which he played a lead role.
In 2001 he adapted Boy George's autobiography Take It Like A Man for a BBC film, and 2003 saw him starring in the Matt Harris production, "Venom" at the Oval House Theatre.
You can hear Rikki Beadle-Blair's journey round Jamaica in Roots of Homophobia on Tuesday 21 August at 8.02 pm on BBC Radio 4.
The programme is repeated on Sunday 26 at 5.02pm.
Work
Stonewall, 1995, as film screenwriter
- Heterosexuality, 1998, as film screenwriter and actor.
- Metrosexuality, 2001, as Channel 4 television series writer, director, and acting role as Max.
- Take It Like a Man, 2001, as writer for the BBC television adaptation of Boy George's autobiography.
Press cuttings
The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes by David Smith in Gay Times, February, 2001, issue 269, pages 25-30. "Rikki Beadle-Blair is a child of the 60s, and he ought to be famous by now. Every time I see him, I think he is famous. His name and his face - all wild hair, sharp eyes and huge grin - are big enough to be unforgettable. Any anyone who has come anywhere near London's cultural fringes (gay and otherwise) at any time in the past 20-odd years will think the same."
Relative Values by Helen Chislett in The Sunday Times Magazine, 13th. May, 2001, pages 7-8. Interviews with Rikki Beadle-Blair and his mother Monica Blair. Rikki: "People say: 'It must have been easy telling your mother you were gay,' In fact, it wasn't at all, because the last thing you want as a teenager is to be like your mother. I wanted to rebel and be the opposite of her. To say that gay people should not have children is like saying poor people should not have children - or disabled people, or people who are too ugly or fat or busy. I desperately want to be a father and I think I'd be very good at it. Don't I at least have the right to be as bad at it as everyone else?"
Monica: "I had my three children before I realised I was gay. Looking back, you can think, 'Ah, now I understand,' but for a long time it was not in my consciousness. Maybe that is a good thing, because perhaps, had I known, I would not have had the children. It was not until I fell in love that it became obvious to me; there was a physical attraction I could not deny, and it all slotted into place."
Source: GMFA In The Family
Delroy Constantine Simms
As a freelance journalist and equal opportunities consultant, Delroy Constantine-Simms works extensively in North America, Southern Africa, and Western Europe. He is currently based in London where he conducts academic research on diversity and equality issues in Britain and the United States at the University of Essex. He is the editor of The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (Alyson Books, 2001) and Teachers For The Future (Trentham Books, 1245).
For the second volume of The Greatest Taboo, coeditors, Kheven Lee LaGrone and Delroy Constantine- Simms, are currently soliciting theory, criticism, biographical essays, etc., on any and all topics with a Black gay
Contact:
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Source: GMFA
Topher Campbell
Filmmaker and theatre director, Topher Campbell, has been directing and producing plays for more than ten years, including world premieres by Black and Asian British writers (Paul Boakye’s Wicked Games and No Mean Street, Tariq Ali’s Necklaces and Cheryl West’s Jar the Floor). In 1996, he set up Gorgeous Films, for which he wrote and directed The Homecoming, a short film about photographer Ajamu and his quest for a place called home. This documentary features commentary by Stuart Hall and Kobena Mercer on representation of the black male body. A Mulatto Song, another of his poetic short films, tells of the 18th century Polish Barbadian slave George Polgreen Bridgetower, who played first violin in the Prince of Wales’ private orchestra.
Campbell is also a founder member of rukus! (a Black queer arts organisation created to profile the best work by Black gay men, lesbians, and transgender people). He was Artistic Director of Urban Mass, an eight day festival that featured HIPHOP Theatre, contemporary dance, film, fashion, politics and club based events. His most recent production Pantheon of The Gods saw over thirty of Britain’s most well known, respected, and new Black actors appearing together on stage for the first time to perform a reading of Homer’s The Odyssey at The Young Vic.
Source: GMFA
Kobena Mercer
As a writer and lecturer on the visual arts of the Black diaspora, Kobena Mercer’s first book, Welcome to the Jungle: New Position in Black Cultural Studies (1994) covered topics including Michael Jackson’s video Thriller, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs and Black hairstyles.
He has contributed catalogue essays to many international exhibitions including Self Evident (Ikon Gallery, UK, 1995), featuring the African photographer Seydou Keital; Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1995) on the influence of Frantz Fanon; Transforming the Crown: African, Caribbean and Asian Artists in Britain, 1965- 1996 (Caribbean Cultural Centre and Bronx Museum, NY, 1997) and Pictura Britannica: Art from Britain (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia).
Mr. Mercer has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, California Institute of the Arts and most recently in the African Studies Program at New York University. He is currently a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University and is working on a book on contemporary art in the African diaspora.
Kobena Mercer is currently a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. His areas of research and teaching cross several disciplines, from Africana studies and multicultural literatures to Art History, film, and visual culture, especially in relation to the black diaspora. Already the author of Witness at the Crossroads: An Artist's Journey in Postcolonial Space (1997) and Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), he is now engaged in a book-length work on contemporary art in the African diaspora. In his Mini-Series lecture, drawn from this project, Professor Mercer will venture behind the recent controversy over the "Sensation" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum to take up questions of the New British Art as a contradictory response to artworld globalization, with special attention to the works of such black diasporan artists as Chris Ofili and Steve McQueen.
"Concepts of cultural mixing, including syncretism, creolization, and hybridity, have inspired a wide range of critical practices among visual artists and cultural theorists, yet these ideas have recently been called into question. This introductory overview will examine the key debates alongside the concerns of contemporary artists and will map out questions for future inquiry."
— Kobena Mercer
Source: GMFA
Isaac Julien
Born in 1960, in Bow, east London. British film producer and director.
He was the first a new wave of black British independent film makers.
His parents were from St Lucia.
Isaac Julien originally studied painting at St Martin's School of Art in London. In his final year there he studied along with Sandra Lahire.
He had a painting accepted by the Royal Academy Summer Show in 1980.
He was a founder member of the Black Workshop, Sankofa, the pioneering black film and video collective, which led to his first television collaboration with Channel 4, the award-winning drama-documentary, Looking For Langston, (1989). (Inspired by the enigmatic sexuality of the US poet Langston Hughes.)
Julien's first feature film, Young Soul Rebels, (1991), won international critical acclaim.
In 1993, with friends Jimmy Somerville, film-maker Steve McLean and writer/producer Mark Nash, he set up Normal films, a production company specialising in queer documentaries and films. Their productions include The Attendant, (1993), A Darker Side of Black, (1994), and Postcards From America, (1995).
Work
- Territories, 1985, film director.
- The Passion of Remembrance, 1986, film co-director with Maureen Blackwood.
- Looking for Langston, 1989, film director.
- This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement, 1988, film director.
- Young Soul Rebels, 1991, film writer and director. Received the Critics' Prize at the 1991 Cannes Festival.
- Dancing with dudes by Susan Corrigan in The Times Metro, 12th. August, 2000, pages 20-21. "This take on those funky, punky years filtered through the eyes of two young black DJs, established the director's turf: issues of identity and inclusion - racial and sexual - in an urban setting. The film identified Julien as the pre-eminent British member of the New Queer Cinema set; directors such as Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine) also launched their careers in the shadow of this banner.
- The Attendant, 1992, film director.
- Black and White in Colour, 1992, BBC television director of a two-part history of black people in British television. (Researched by Stephen Bourne.)
- The Darker Side of Black, 1993, film writer and director.
- The Question of Equality, 1995, television producer.
- Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, 1996, film director.
- Cinerama with Venezuelan choreographer Javier de Frutos, 2000. A gallery installation, at the Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester, with the main feature a video, The Road to Mazatlan, giving a stylised view of the cowboy. The title is from a line in Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana.
- Dancing with dudes by Susan Corrigan in The Times Metro, 12th. August, 2000, pages 20-21. " 'It's an otherness that a black, gay man can relate to in so many ways, but it also appeals to me because people can see why the attraction is a little bit dangerous. We filmed in San Antonio, Texas, one of those places full of men who don't like being looked at by a bunch of woofters. We've even taken the 'you talkin' to me?' monologue from Taxi Driver - which is really a western set in New York in the Seventies - and changed it to 'you lookin' at me?' to reflect that'."
"Julien is still making the second part of Cinerama, entitled Vagabondia which examines the interiors of London's Sir John Soane museum, in an irreverent way: 'It's a totally Post-Modern building filled with art bought with a fortune made out of the colonies. It's a good piece of irony to shoot the interiors with that in mind'."
- Winsome cowboys by Adrian Searle in The Guardian: G2, 22nd. August, 2000, pages 14-15. "He has always been difficult to place. He is a film-maker, an artist, a theorist, a black Londoner who teaches at Harvard. His themes are black identity, history and culture, queer aesthetics and desire. His films and DVD installations are multi-layered, rich, poeticised, witty and sexy. He's an expert at the erotics of vision (in this case, the homoerotics)."
"Julien has said of video art, disparagingly, that 'something had to replace painting'. And, like history and allegorical paintings, his films are reference-laden, spectacular presentations. They are screens on which things happen, places where the world is refracted and presented to us, foreshortened, condensed, cut down to size, yearned for and parodied. A place where the fictional and the real meet."
Bibliography
- Isaac Julien and Colin MacCabe , (1991), "Diary of a Young Soul Rebel"
Press cuttings
- Stephen Bourne in Gay Times, August, 1991. "Isaac Julien is one of Britain's most exciting film makers and his track record is very impressive . . . With Young Soul Rebels, Isaac has made a film which works on several levels. The terrific music score, exciting new actors and 1977 setting will appeal to a general audience looking for entertainment, but the film is also challenging and provocative, exploring complex themes of race and sexuality . . . With the British film industry in the depressing state it is in, The British Film Institute and film makers like Isaac are to be applauded for taking risks and helping to keep British cinema alive and kicking."
- Hamid Kamara , Gay Times, May, 1995, issue 200, page 88.
- Ill-conceived , by Peter Burton in Gay Times, April, 1993, issue 175, page 79. "Although Isaac Julien's feature film debut Young Soul Rebels picked up the Critics' Prize at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, it didn't prove particularly popular with audiences. Perhaps the main fault of the movie is the ill-conceived screenplay (Paul Hallam, Derrick Saldaan McClintock and Julien) which sets a murder story and an inter-racial romance (black dj; and white punk) against the background of Betty Windsor's Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1997."
Source: The Knitting Circle.
Essex Hemphill - A Tribute
The Black gay man is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions.
This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history.
The "chosen" history. But these sacred constructions of silence are futile
exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home.
....Essex Hemphill
Essex Hemphill was a writer, poet, performance artist, editor and activist who helped energize the Black gay movement. He was the second oldest of five children. He was born in Chicago and raised in Washington, DC.
Hemphill is the author of Earth Life(1985) and Conditions (1986). In 1986 he received a fellowship for poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). His poems have appeared in Obsidian, Black Scholar, Callaloo, Mouth of the Dragon, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Essence. Hemphill contributed to In The Life(1986) the historic collection of literature by Black gay men, edited by Joseph Beam. He also contributed to Tongues Untied a collection of poems by Black gay men and to two films: Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied and Isaac Julien's" Looking for Langston.
He was responsible for completing Brother to Brother the companion anthology to In The Life, which was begun by Joseph Beam, before his death in 1988.
Hemphill died on November 4, 1995 due to complications related to HIV/AIDS. Hemphill touched many lives. What follows is a tribute.
Take Care of Your Blessings Memories and a 1990 Interview by Chuck Tarver.
GLBPOC Tribute Memories of Hemphill from GLBPOC the week of his death.
Profile of Black Gay Writer Essex Hemphill by Deb Price.
MEMENTO MORI Reginald Harris' tribute {Read at Lambda Rising Bookstore: Baltimore, Maryland; 18 February 1996}
Re-Released works by Essex Hemphill at Standards.
An Open Letter for Essex, My Brother In this open letter, Lois Holmes, sister of Essex Hemphill, responds to some of the newsgroup digest postings on the subject of her brother's death, and her family's handling of the funeral.
Funny Thing, Essex an open letter by Steven G. Fullwood.
More to Come.
Alicia Banks
Alicia Banks hosted AM and FM radio shows in Atlanta GA, the heart of the bible belt of America and is the only out gay person in the nation known to have hosted a prime time commercial radio talk show. Her FM show mixes the musical and literary voices of Black women with musical, political and sexual diversity. She writes a column, Eloquent Fury. Her pending book of radical essays "Outlook: The Book" will soon be scheduled for release. She can be heard on KABF in Little Rock, Arkansas.
She has an M.A. degree in Interpersonal and Organizational Communications from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a B.S. degree in Speech Communications and Pre-Law at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign UIUC.
"Alicia Banks is no wimp... It's that kind of outspokenness that has brought an audience to her show..." SOUTHERN VOICE 6/17/93
"Alicia Banks jumped the tracks from FM to AM, sending sparks through the airwaves and widening debates on heated topics...Banks is no ordinary talk show host. She's articulate, intelligent, and above all, she's fearless...Banks' soft graceful voice belies the forcefulness of her views...Since 1989, the French-fluent host has segued personal commentary and literary messages with hours of music..." ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION 10/14/93
"Since 1989, Alicia has been heating up the airwaves with her eyebrow raising program...Although the show is packed with great voices of the past and present, there's room for deep talk...Banks is now having the last laugh with her success..." ATLANTA MAGAZINE 10/93
"Banks' program combines the voices of Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday with tribal songs, fictional readings, erotica, and political discussions. It is the politics which have caused a stir..." THE WASHINGTON BLADE 2/25/94
"Banks makes it her business to deliver music, news and commentary in a way that challenges...Her show has become ground zero for a fire storm of controversy...Banks has built an enthusiastic audience and won a second prime time talk show...." OUT MAGAZINE 2/94
"Banks' programs are no ordinary talk shows...Her broadcasts are not to be taken lightly. She seems ready for anything. She is fearless..." DENEUVE MAGAZINE 6/94
"If talk radio seems dominated by clones of Rush Limbaugh, Alicia Banks is the answer...Her fans revere her...The creator of two immensely popular radio programs, Banks has her finger on the pulse of American culture. There's a growing hunger for her message..." VICTORY MAGAZINE 1/96
"Alicia Banks drops a weekly bomb fused with consciousness and sister melodies..." HUES MAGAZINE 11/96
"Musicologist, activist, and cyber columnist is how Alicia Banks describes herself. But she's better known to her fans and detractors as a popular talk radio personality. She is the producer, creator, and host of two radio shows...Alicia heats up early morning airwaves with her take-no -prisoners approach. But her shock-jock comparisons end with her eclectic mix of music and anti-racist interpretation...." GIRLFRIENDS MAGAZINE 9/97.
http://www.geocities.com/ambwww/index.html
Please look out for her new website: www.aliciabanks.com.
Source: Eloquent Fury
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