Blackbird

by Larry Duplechan

  The postmark was smeared, but I could see it had been stamped in El Paso sometime in July. Marshall had drawn little five-pointed stars around the address: “Johnnie Ray Rousseau, Student, University of California, Los Angeles.” It was a miracle it ever found its way to me at all. It read:

  Jukebox selections in Van Horn’s Sands Café include Earth, Wind & Fire, Elton John, and Dobie Gray singing “Drift Away.” Anti-nudists in Massachusetts maintain that nudity is contributing to the erosion of the sand dunes in Cape Cod – Channel 3 Evening News, Phoenix. Temp 105 in Phoenix; 106 in El Paso. I’m having walking nightmares listening to what the gov’t is doing with nuclear energy. Thanks for coming to my film. I’m working on a letter to you. Marshall.

  I’ve been using the postcard as a bookmark for my French textbook, and taking it with me everywhere.

  There’s a radio on the old metal desk across the office from Rod and me. Right now, Dobie Gray is singing “Drift Away.”

  You couldn’t slap this smile off my face.

  Appendices

  Early cover art proposal

  Manuscript page

  Correspondence

  From The Advocate, December 23, 1986

  Essential Lessons Shared in Black Coming Out Tale, by Joseph Bean

  Peeking over the shoulders of black writers are a vast assortment of critics with expectations as varied as their number. Because of the paucity of black literature some critics demand that said creations present positive images and progressive politics. Others, no doubt thinking of the marketplace and reader accessibility, require a certain level of universality and symbolism. In Blackbird, the “pre-quel” (the opposite of sequel) to Eight Days a Week (Alyson), Larry Duplechan reaches a satisfying denominator, which is not at all common.

  Both novels feature black protagonist Johnnie Ray Rousseau. In Eight Days a Week, he’s twenty-two and hooked on a white banker a decade his senior; in Blackbird, he’s seventeen and about to graduate from a bedroom-community high school forty miles from Los Angeles. Johnnie Ray is a talented singer and according to everyone, the finest actor in this suburban student body. He is also gay, a fact unknown to almost everyone, except his best friend, indeed his “girlfriend,” Efrem, who is white and also gay. It is Efrem who encourages Johnnie to audition for the lead in the ironically titled “Hooray for Love,” a comedy revue, which, among its vignettes, features the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Johnnie knows – even in 1974, in the liberal state of California – that a black boy can’t kiss a white girl (a shoo-in for the female lead happens to be Mormon). As consolation, he’s offered a student directorship at which he doesn’t shout hooray.

  But there’s more drama than the student play. There’s Todd, boyfriend of the minister’s daughter, Leslie, who he gets pregnant; Cherie, the cherub-faced black co-ed who decides it’s time Johnnie Ray learned about the birds ’n’ bees; Efrem, who is bashed and hospitalized. Then there’s Crystal or Carolann, who’s not schizophrenic, but has a dual personality distinguished only by her outfits. Meanwhile, Johnnie goes to an exorcist. Finally, there’s Marshall, the experimental filmmaker, who turns Johnnie Ray on to marijuana and sex with a man.

  Blackbird is zany and sentimental, chock full of anachronistic teenage colloquialisms like boner and up-chuck. We are thoroughly reminded of the tacky, tie-dyed, macraméd early 1970s, the Age of Aquarius. But love is anything but free for these kids. It’s Love and Consequences, which Duplechan handles deftly, more successfully than in Eight Days a Week.

  This time out his pen moves with more surety. There is a neatness of design and execution, a certain subtle symbolism. The Duplechan device of using pop artists and song titles, which seemed in Eight Days a Week to be too clever a kind of shorthand, is used more sparingly and thus more evocatively in Blackbird.

  What makes Blackbird important and essential reading is not merely that it is the first contemporary black coming out story, but its depiction of late adolescence, that precarious approach to adulthood. In the end, Blackbird is about learning to love, learning to heal, learning to fly. This critic can say only one thing to black gay novelist Larry Duplechan: We have all been waiting for this novel to arrive.

  From Gay Community News, May 10–16, 1987

  Blackbird Sings, by Michael Bronski

  Twenty years ago there were so few “gay” books available that the common homosexual reader cherished each and every one. (Many times against her or his better judgment.) Ten years ago there were enough books on gay themes being published that one had the privilege to pick and choose, as well as the freedom to disregard inferior, or just plain dumb, titles. Now as gay publishing – both mainstream and small press – releases a fair number of books each year (although still miniscule compared to the rest of the industry) readers not only have more wheat but a good deal more chaff to sort through.

  I read most of the gay fiction that comes out: a mixed bag ranging from horrible junk, to interesting junk, to well-intentioned, to pretty good, to great. As with all publishing, most of it is middling. The problem is that there are so few great books: books that make you sit up and laugh or cry or move you in any way, books that sound like they had been written by someone who has something to say and a voice with which to say it. So many books read as thought they had been written by a computer that to find a book with personality and character is a joy. Blackbird by Larry Duplechan is this sort of book.

  It’s hard to pinpoint why Blackbird is so good. Part of the reason is that Duplechan is quite modest in his story’s scope and intent. The plot takes a few weeks in the life of Johnnie Ray Rousseau – a gay, Black, high-school student in Southern California – as he comes to grips with his sexuality and with the realization that growing up means having to deal with a very real, sometimes quite dangerous world where the only person you can really trust is yourself and your instincts.

  On one level Blackbird is related to all of those with-it-contemporary-young adult novels à la Judy Blume that discuss such “important” topics as drugs, sex and not loving your parents enough. And certainly Blackbird has its fill of these sympathetic teen-angst roman themes: homosexuality, teen pregnancy, teen suicide, queer bashing, child abuse, birth control, as well as a hint of ESP and some fraudulent exorcism to boot. But with all of these top-heavy ideas, Blackbird has a lightness and a vivacity which saves it from sinking into the sewer of psycho-babble realism. The main theme of Blackbird is the survival of Johnnie Ray Rousseau – the book’s title is a reference to both him and the Beatles song from The White Album – and Duplechan writes in such a way that both Johnnie Ray and the reader come out singing.

  If Duplechan’s plotting is simple, his use of language is simply glorious. The whole novel is narrated by Johnnie Ray and you’d be hard pressed to find another book with such a fresh, startling and energetic voice: certainly Rubyfruit Jungle, and maybe Larry Mitchell’s The Terminal Bar, but these are few and far between. What is great about the writing here is not just that it makes for a consistently good read – and it does – but that it also has resonance and depth, as well as feeling and grace.

  The story takes place in the early ’70s and Johnnie Ray is a young queen obsessed with popular culture. He wants to be a singer and knows pop songs in and out, from the ’50s crooning of his namesake to the balladeering of Joni Mitchell. He also watches movies all the time and more than anything else uses them to inform and chart his life. After seeing Song of Bernadette with Jennifer Jones, he even tries converting to Roman Catholicism; when he finally becomes involved with his first affair, he flirts like Barbara Stanwyck, teases like Bette Davis, and makes love like Rita Hayworth.

  Other novels, particularly The Movie Lover by Richard Friedel, have tried to capture the connection between pop/camp culture and some gay men. They almost all succeed on a superficial level – how could they fail with all those great lines – but Blackbird aims for and hits at a deeper level. Johnnie Ray is not posing and posturing with these actresses and their movies to hide
his feelings; he is using them to express and to create his own life – a life that is quite removed from the humdrum heterosexual concerns of his staid, middle class Baptist parents and the empty-headed, suburban-bland high school he attends. Duplechan knows that this queen chatter, gayboy fantasy world is not real and Johnnie learns that in the real world Romeo and Juliet die, Rita Hayworth does not always get to keep the man, and that there may be real pain when the screen fades to black. Duplechan uses his large vocabulary of pop culture with style, but as opposed to other writers, he knows that substance lies elsewhere.

  To compare Blackbird to the typical young adult novel does it a disservice, for while many of these books “deal with” sexuality in the most acceptable way, Blackbird does not stint its readers on the details of Johnnie Ray’s fantasy and actual sexual exploits. (It’s the sort of book that should be mandatory reading for high school students but would never be assigned.) Duplechan’s sex descriptions are never morose and leaden, nor are they coy and cute: honesty precludes affect here and the writing is simple and clean.

  For all of its good points, Blackbird does have some faults. The ESP sub-plot (it’s actually more a leitmotif) does not quite work and the religious exorcism at the book’s end, although thematically on target, seems excessive and somewhat silly. But with these exceptions, Blackbird is a fine piece of fiction. It should also be noted – and praised – for being one of the few books from small or mainstream publishers which is by a black man and deals with the black gay experience. In a world of books written by rote, to sell to people who buy cover art, Blackbird is a daring and refreshing exception.

  From Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1986

  A sunny, energetic “brat pack” story, only this time the high-school hero is black and gay. Unfortunately, Duplechan (the paperback Eight Days a Week) gets caught in the teenage narrator’s YA-ish voice, making this a bit too sweet and thin to stick to an adult reader’s ribs.

  The hero, Johnnie Ray Rousseau, quickly announces he’s no Holden Caufield, “with all that dire teenage alienation schtick”; instead, he’s a comforting soul to friends, an endearing wisecracker (who’s sometimes corny but often clever), an ace drama student, a horny virgin and an animated host to some pretty predictable farewell-to-high-school adventures. The weakest moments concern his teenage and/ or sexual angst; these rob the book of some depth and bite. Turned down for the spring play (as of 1974, this small Mormon and Baptist town won’t allow a black to kiss a white onstage), Johnnie Ray ventures up to a junior college drama audition and meets his first true love, a laid-back 24-year-old student filmmaker, who provides a blissful introduction to gay sex (and pot) before suddenly being called away to a film job. But subplots keep Johnnie Ray from feeling brokenhearted for long: some are overdone (a teenage couple, victims of rigid morality, meet a tragic death when her pregnancy ruins their lives); some are poignant (Johnnie Ray’s closest friend is caught in a gay sex act by his father and is severely beaten).

  Altogether a predictable, rather simple-minded book in plot and message; even with a winning narrator, still more YA than adult.

  Interview with Larry Duplechan, from Christopher Street, January 20, 1987

  by Christopher Davis

  Christopher Davis: I know this is a question that writers hate to be asked, but tell me about the writing of Blackbird.

  Larry Duplechan: I wrote Blackbird between September 1984 and September 1985. It was in September of 1984 that Michael Denneny of St. Martin’s Press rejected my first novel, Eight Days a Week. As rejection letters go, Mr. Denneny’s was relatively kind and rather helpful. I mean, it wasn’t a form letter, for one thing. And although he didn’t want my book, he did take the time to tell me why he didn’t want it (“… not enough happens in it” he wrote). And he also wrote that he’d be interested to see anything else I might write. Well, as far as I was concerned, I’d made an important contact at a major publishing house, and I was determined to get another novel to Mr. Denneny before he forgot who I was. So I worked my considerable behind off getting my second novel (then called Blackbird Singin’ in the Dead of Night) written as quickly as possible. I was at my Apple IIc every available minute after work (I was word processing for a living at that time – still am), and on weekends. My lover Greg saw very little of me other than the back of my head for about a year. But I got the book done, in just about a year’s time. Well, as it turned out, when Michael called me in late January, 1986, to make an offer on Blackbird (after sitting on my manuscript for nearly four months and nearly driving me to a nervous breakdown), he didn’t remember me or Eight Days a Week. “Well,” he explained, “I read so many things.”

  There are a couple of really fun stories connected with Blackbird. Someday I’ll tell you about posing for the cover painting; sprawled across someone else’s bed in the total buff, with the painter and the art director arguing over how much tuchus we could show and still get stocked at Waldenbooks. Some snowy evening in front of the fire.…

  CD: As long as I’m asking questions that writers don’t like answering: How much of Blackbird is autobiographical?

  LD: As you can imagine, everybody but everybody asks me that. And I’ve thought up a whole collection of half-truths and lies, just to keep things interesting. I mean, I love telling people about my exorcism! But the truth of the thing is that Johnnie Ray Rousseau, the narrator/ protagonist of both Eight Days a Week and Blackbird, is my alter-ego. Just about all Johnnie Ray’s likes, dislikes, attitudes, beliefs, political leanings, sexual quirks and bad jokes coincide strikingly with my own. So to that extent, both books are very autobiographical. On the other hand, almost none of the things that happen to Johnnie Ray in Blackbird actually happened to me, in high school or otherwise. I basically took this character who’s a lot like I remember myself being at seventeen-and-a-half years old and plopped him into the story. Some of the characters and incidents in the book amount to wish fulfillment for me: for instance, I didn’t have sex until college. And I didn’t have a “best friend” (like Johnnie Ray’s friend Efrem Zimbalist Johnson) until after college.

  CD: In both Blackbird and Eight Days a Week, a black narrator has relationships with white men. Have you written anything with totally black or totally white relationships? Why or why not?

  LD: What an odd question, Christopher. The answer is really quite simple, though. All my romantic relationships (all three of them) have been with white men. Like anybody else, I write about what I like. And yes, Christopher, I do intend in the future to write about white people loving white people and blacks loving blacks. Give me time!

  CD: I noticed that in your Advocate [magazine] review of In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, you said that you thought the “vehement anti-assimilationist thrust of most of the essays” was “distasteful.” Why?

  LD: I was so afraid you’d bring that up. I’ve already taken a certain amount of flack over that bloody review – and I don’t mean Roberta Flack. Big deep breath. All right: here goes. I wrote that review from a copy of the manuscript, last May. Eight months later, I think perhaps the word “distasteful” was a little strong. I did not mean “repulsive”; I simply meant “not to my taste.” If only I could have found one word for “interesting but mostly irrelevant to my own life.” The fact is, I found that most of the writings in In the Life reflected experiences and feelings so far removed from my own, I seriously considered asking Mark Thompson (cultural editor of The Advocate) to ask someone else to review the book. (In the end, I only wrote the review at all for fear that I might never be asked to write anything else for The Advocate if I refused.) Most of these pieces seem to have been written out of the sort of anger and hurt and feelings of victimization of which I know very little; I myself am not angry, nor have I ever felt myself a victim.

  By “anti-assimilationist,” I referred to those essays in the anthology which called for the formation of a black gay community, separate from both the black community and the gay community as they now exist. I found (and sti
ll find) such a notion personally “distasteful” because I personally would simply have no use for such a community.

  In the essay “By the Year 2000” (in In the Life), Max C. Smith defines “Gay Blacks” as “people who identify first as being gay,” and then as being black. Which sounds a lot like me. I don’t have a strong black identity. My gay identity is much more important to me. But more than that, I am very much an assimilationist. By that I mean, I have no desire to set myself apart from white gay men – I’ve been sharing my bed with one for nearly eleven years – or from black gays or white heterosexuals or Native American bisexual leather dominatrixes for that matter; and that I also have no desire to segregate myself from society at large. Rather, I feel my role as an intelligent, talented, gifted gay man is to create a niche for myself within the larger society. I think I have a contribution to make to society, and a good part of that contribution is just being the kind of person I am, and being among people who are not like I am. (Being an openly gay black man within the corporate structure is in and of itself a statement, you dig?) And I think the more you surround yourself with people who are just like you, the fewer your opportunities to learn, and to teach.

  Maybe it’s the way I was raised. My parents have always had friends of various races, and so have I; I’ve always been comfortable with different kinds of people. Whatever the reason, I just don’t like the idea of people splitting themselves off into ever-smaller cliques. It just goes against my grain.

  In “Risin’ to the Love We Need” (the last piece of work in In the Life), Assotto Saint writes: “america’s [sic] already so divided, so disembodied that if we keep ghettoizing ourselves, it leads us to more wars … leaves us in ruins.” And for me, a call to create a separate black gay community is a call to “ghettoize” ourselves further. I say, enough already. Have I answered your question?