Play It Forward

by Frederick Smith

  “They said it’s about some video or something,” DeMarco said. “You know anything about a video?”

  It was obvious that DeMarco’s new boyfriend, Compton, hadn’t said anything about me or seeing me on GayClick. Or it wasn’t Compton who I’d seen picking up DeMarco yesterday after work. Or maybe DeMarco was just helping me save face by not letting me know he knew about the videos Deacon leaked. Whatever scenario, it didn’t matter. The people who mattered had seen the videos, obviously.

  “Let me take the messages,” I said and grabbed the message cards from DeMarco. “I’ll be on the phone for a while this morning, so unless it’s the board president…”

  “Gotcha, boss,” DeMarco said and winked. At least he didn’t have on those damn sunglasses at the front desk again. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  I heard hip-hop music playing from the desktop, but given the circumstances, decided it wasn’t so urgent to reprimand DeMarco.

  “I’ll let you know,” I said.

  “And I’ll get offline,” he said. “I was adding friends from my page to the LADS page.”

  “Whatever, DeMarco,” I said. I probably rolled my eyes or responded flippantly, but wasn’t too caring about how I came across. “Just hold down the fort up front. And if anyone, and I mean anyone, asks you anything related to the organization or me, don’t answer anything. Even if it’s the normal spiel you give to people inquiring about LADS.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Come to think of it…” I said, as I contemplated closing down the office for the day. “Never mind. Just hold it down for me. I’ll update you in a few.”

  Little did I know that those few minutes would turn into hours.

  Chapter 11

  I hated the kind of meetings where you knew the agenda of the person running it was set, and the decisions were already made, and your feedback was just hot air. I always saw them as a waste of time, as there was nothing to do other than agree to whatever the chair wanted or set forth.

  The LADS Board of Directors called an emergency meeting that afternoon. The meeting was no different than the kind I hated. Despite the fact that most, if not all, of the members had a day job or other obligations, there was a quorum to make the meeting legal and on the books, a requirement for agencies like LADS to stay chartered with the city and neighborhood council.

  I knew it was starting in the wrong direction when Lamont Murphy, the board member who happened to be a youth minister for the church two blocks from LADS, chimed in.

  “So you’re teaching the young men here how to do pornography?” Lamont said, after barely leafing through the information packet I’d prepared for the meeting, just in case the board members wanted a reminder of the good work I’d done running LADS and for the young men using the services. He’d tossed it aside, seemingly assured that he wouldn’t learn anything new from it. “Isn’t that kind of stereotypical for the community of young men and boys you work with?”

  Men like Lamont Murphy made me sick. Further, it was ironic that a man like Lamont Murphy could talk about stereotypes, as he was a walking one. As usual, he wore a too-tight black suit in the middle of the ninety-degree afternoon, and his processed hair was reminiscent of Barry White. The only thing youthful about him was that his hair and suit were trendy around Barry White’s heyday in the seventies. Sad, because Lamont Murphy was probably just a year or two older than me. Obviously trying to fit in with the elder ministers he aspired to assume leadership from in the future.

  “Nothing could be further from the truth, Pastor Murphy,” I said.

  “Well, I’d say your actions definitely match the first objective of the LADS curriculum,” he said and pointed to the cover sheet of the packet I’d prepared.

  On it, I’d included the main objectives of LADS and what I’d hope it would accomplish with the organization. Reverend Murphy had chosen to focus on point one: LADS clients will learn to make smart and sexually empowered decisions for their lives and health.

  “What exactly is ‘smart and sexually empowered’?” Reverend Murphy asked, with his brows furrowed and eyes squinted at me. “Is that what you’d call making a series of pornographic videos like you did?”

  I paused and took a breath. I thought about Kyle’s advice he’d shared when I got a moment of his time in between returning messages.

  “Just tell them the truth,” Kyle said. Though I didn’t have the money to retain him as my attorney, though I didn’t think I needed one, Kyle always was willing to share his legal opinions on whatever I asked him. “Don’t make up lies or try to ‘politician’ your way out of it. But if you need me to come over there for support or counsel, I will.”

  I chose not to have Kyle leave his day at the studio, and now, as I had to answer sensitive questions about my personal life—my personal sex life and relationship with Deacon—I wish I’d taken Kyle up on his offer. I wished I’d called Deacon over to explain what he’d done, but considering what I did to his laptop, I’m sure coming to my defense was the last thing on his mind.

  “Reverend Murphy…members of the board,” I said and looked around the table, making sure I caught each one in the eye, “I don’t teach the young men here anything inappropriate. I try to empower each of them with the skills they’ll need so they won’t be a statistic or a stereotype. And if they happen to be a stereotype, so what? We’re not trying to create clones that are safe for straight people or the mainstream, white LGBT community. But that’s not the point. What’s important is that before I opened up LADS, there were very few to no community organizations focused primarily on young, gay African American men in Los Angeles. Through the services and resources offered the past two years, we’ve been able to help almost forty young men find jobs in areas they want to work in. Our numbers of new HIV infections are at or below the city’s and county’s average, and well below organizations focused on young, gay men of other ethnicities of color. The education efforts are working, and the pre and post LADS awareness numbers show the young men are learning how to prevent HIV infections. All of that you can see in the information packets I’ve shared.”

  “But what does that have to do with the pornography you made?” Reverend Murphy asked. I wondered why he was so fascinated, and why he had a fascination with the word “pornography.” “What does sexual empowerment have to do with pornography and young Black men?”

  I looked around the table at the rest of the board members, wondering why none was coming to my defense. I thought I knew the board members. I’d selected or at least had a hand in selecting most of them to participate, except for the city councilperson’s assistant and Reverend Lamont Murphy.

  “It might have looked like pornography, but it wasn’t,” I said. “I was in a committed and loving relationship at the time, and those videos you saw were of him and me while we were together many years ago. I never knew I was being videotaped.”

  “Really?” Finally, another board member spoke up, though his voice had a tinge of sarcasm in it. “We’re supposed to believe that in not one, not two, but more than fifty times of having sex with your boyfriend, you never noticed a camera in the room?”

  “You won’t believe me, but no.”

  “A boyfriend you were committed to? Whose house you’d been to on numerous occasions?”

  “People do duplicitous things, I’ve come to learn,” I said. “Deacon has done the most disgusting thing and betrayed my trust by videotaping our most private moments. We’re not even together anymore.”

  “Then who put them on the Internet for the whole world to see?” Reverend Murphy chimed in again. “If you two were so in love, as you would lead us to believe, then why would he betray you like that? What did you do to make him so angry that he would put your sex life online, knowing the work you do? It’s one thing to not know you were videotaped, as you say you did not. It’s another to put that pornography online for our youth and the boys you serve at LADS to see.”

  The meeting seemed to go nowhere,
and everywhere, fast. Then came the barrage of questions that I didn’t think I deserved, nor ever expected to face. Not Malcolm, the good boy.

  “What about your reputation, Malcolm?”

  “How do you think this will damage the boys?”

  “What makes you any different than a porn star?”

  “How can you educate and be a professional role model with these kinds of videos floating around of you?”

  “Are you Black first, or gay first?” That was out of nowhere.

  The board members continued to ask me, and each other, questions about me, the videos, the mission of LADS, and what I thought would happen when the videos made the rounds on the Internet and in the Black community. The last question, about being a professional role model, stung the most. I thought, if they forgave R. Kelly, someone who only made music, the Black community would forgive me, someone who was doing something to make a positive difference with young men no one wanted to acknowledge in the community. It all seemed like a blur. And the meeting had definitely gotten out of my control, which was unusual for me. In times of crisis, I knew how to dig in, put on my poker face, and talk people to my way of thinking. Some called it posturing. I called it surviving as a smart and empowered Black man in the late 2000s. This time, though, pulling what I called a Hillary was not working. Maybe I needed to pull a Barack, or better yet, a Michelle from South Side Chicago to make sure they knew who they were dealing with.

  In between questions, I’d started doing the mental math on my personal finances and budget. What I wanted to get by on, and what I needed to survive. Those moments, I liked to say, were when God, or my late father, were speaking to me and guiding my thoughts.

  “You know what,” I said and handed over a piece of paper to the board chair. “I’m the one who works day to day with the young men who use LADS. You all just come in once a quarter to get reports to take back to your constituents…to say you care about Black queer folks, and HIV and AIDS education. But that’s okay. I’m going to be okay. LADS is going to be okay.”

  “And we’ve appreciated your work, Malcolm,” Reverend Murphy said. “I always speak highly of what you’ve…”

  “Whatever, sure you have,” I said, feeling myself getting tense and defensive. Definitely not professional demeanor, but the board members were far from professional with me. “You all can’t even get a consortium of people to make Black gay pride happen consistently in L.A. and most major cities, and you’re worried about some sex tapes between consensual adults.”

  “At least I don’t suck dick like a prostitute,” Reverend Murphy said. He slammed his hand on the table for emphasis as he scooted away from the table. “Smart and sexually empowered, my ass.”

  “Spoken like a true Sunday-morning sermon,” I said. “You act like you’ve never made a mistake before.”

  “I make…I’ve made mistakes.”

  “When? In 1992?”

  I heard a chuckle from someone at the table, but didn’t look to see who found me a little funny in responding to the reverend. Glad I didn’t. I probably would have lost it and laughed too.

  “We need order in this meeting, my brothers.” The board chair spoke up and looked at the paper I’d handed him. “What’s this number? Does this have to do with the number of hits your videos have gotten on the Internet?”

  “It’s my price to resign.”

  “LADS doesn’t have this kind of money,” Reverend Murphy said once he took a look at my request, which the board chair had passed around the table. “The low six figures. Why don’t you sell those videos you’re producing online to make some extra spending cash?”

  “Not funny, Lamont,” I said. I didn’t care at that point if I was calling him out of his title or name. I wanted to add that I was sure he and his wife would be the first customers to download my videos, but figured that would be unnecessary gasoline on the flames. “Actually, if you’d done your homework and looked further in the report, LADS is in good shape in terms of a contingency fund, reserves, and investments. Pay me from reserves.”

  “That’s quite a sum.”

  “It’s what I put into LADS initially,” I said. “If I leave the organization, I want what I put into it so I can start a new life. The rest is six months of what would have been my salary as Executive Director of LADS. It’s a tough economy out there to be looking for work.”

  I needed my initial investment in LADS in order to survive. I wanted six months of salary to figure out what I’d do with my life.

  In the end, I got what I needed and wanted.

  The board got my letter of resignation by eight o’clock that evening.

  Chapter 12

  For the first time since I was fifteen, I was without a job.

  I’d pulled out all my spiral notebooks that had served as personal journals and diaries since I was a high school freshman. Fourteen years old when I started. Still keeping them at age thirty-five.

  Since my nephew Blake would be arriving in L.A. in a few days, I knew I’d have to straighten up the second bedroom in my apartment. It had been serving as an office, Kyle’s or a boyfriend’s friend hangover-can’t-drive room, and study space since I’d moved in almost ten years earlier.

  To feel somewhat productive about the cleaning process, I started with the boxes of journals, which had been sitting on the sleeper sofa in the room. I thought I’d just move the boxes into the closet in my bedroom, but nostalgia got the best of me, and I pulled out my ninth-going-into-tenth grade journal. Fifteen years old. The summer I got my first job. A peer counselor for a sex-education program through the local Catholic parish in Indianapolis. Sex, sexuality, education, and morals had been with me for too long. It was time for a change.

  I pulled my current journal from the bookcase and hit the Shuffle button on my iTunes. Sat back in the middle of the floor with a box of my life’s recollections.

  I couldn’t believe I’d been in the same apartment for the ten years I’d lived in L.A. Certainly by now, and with my past experience in banking, I would and could have owned something. Even if it was a shack, in the middle of a neighborhood that resembled a shooting gallery with police helicopters that circled overhead all day.

  Times like this I tried not to compare my life to Kyle. True, he’d gone on to law school—UCLA—after our Northwestern University days, while I settled for just the four-year bachelor’s degree. True, Kyle treated his dating life like an upwardly mobile career track, while I likened my dating life to social work—if the man had problems, I felt sorry for, thought I could save, was attracted to, and dated him. Definitely not the kind of role modeling and example I should have been setting for the guys at LADS. A pattern of dating people you feel sorry for is just plain sad and sorry. If I’d had a glass of wine, I’d have been on a downward slide to a depression session. Without a buzz, I was just reflective and thinking about the circle of life, what I’d created and what I’d been dealt. And that sucked.

  With the check I’d be getting from the LADS Board of Directors, I could put a healthy down payment on a home, maybe a small town house or condo in Inglewood or Leimert Park that was being foreclosed. Finally put some roots down in L.A. for myself and Blake, if he chose to stay beyond the summer. But with no current job, I’d have to think about making the monthly mortgage payment. A lump sum would only go so far, even in a recovering real estate market in Southern California.

  I put the journal aside and lay in the middle of the floor. There were a couple more days to clean and prepare for Blake’s arrival. I turned up the music and wondered if it was a sign from above that Shirley Horn’s “Where Do You Start?” had just started playing on my iTunes.

  It made me wonder. What does an unemployed thirty-five year old Black gay man start when life as he knows it is over?

  Chapter 13

  That night, I dreamed that I was slipping on ice.

  I wasn’t quite sure if it was an ice rink or an ice pond. But every time I tried to walk to the edge, to solid ground, I kept
slipping and sliding across the ice.

  The dream happened more than once throughout the night.

  When I woke up in the morning, it looked like someone had ransacked my apartment. Books were strewn around and on me, where I’d fallen asleep in the middle of the floor. The sofa was askew and a few inches out from the wall. But nothing looked to be missing.

  I reached for the remote control to turn on the television. After a few minutes of resetting channels, it settled on the local CBS affiliate and the morning news.

  I learned I’d slept through a series of moderate earthquakes in the middle of the night.

  Chapter 14

  I had ten voicemail and seven text messages when cell phone service was finally restored. Most were from out-of-town people wondering if I’d survived my first real earthquakes in Los Angeles. It was a subject for which I had no real response, because I’d slept through most of the night’s activity.

  “Lord have mercy,” my sister Marlena said when we finally connected. “There’s no way I could deal. But of course DUMB-ASS BLAKE is eager and ready for earthquake country.”

  “Marlena,” I said. “Stop arguing with him. Is he there?”

  “He’s got on those goddamn iPod headphones again, he can’t hear me,” she said. “I’m dropping him off at the airport early. He couldn’t wait to get out to L.A. And oh, did I tell you I FOUND A LITTLE WHITE BOY SNEAKING OUT HIS ROOM when I got home from work this morning. A WHITE BOY. You know what mama used to tell us. Anybody but a white boy. Ain’t no white boys living around here, so I know he probably met him on that damn Internet again.”

  I sighed. The trials and tribulations of Marlena and Blake Campbell.

  “You’re dropping him off at the airport now? Today?”

  “Praise the Lord,” she said. “Now me and the girls can have a peaceful summer.”