I Am a Funny Black (Part II): Clothes-minded Folks

As a Funny Black (FUN-B) living in New York City in the 1990s, my wardrobe choices could sometimes be an issue as some Black people were disapproving of my steelo, or lack thereof.  We Black people are always searching for new and interesting ways to express ourselves, something that can seem a bit ironic considering how inflexible and judgmental our cultures can be with some of those same expressions.  It’s like we are free to go out on a limb with it comes to clothes, music or language as long as those expressions don’t stray too far from what has been collectively agreed upon as being “Black”.  Even worse than being too daring with your wardrobe choices was being indifferent about the whole thing as I was.  Like many FUN-Bs, I just didn’t pay attention to such things and didn’t realize how monumental the issue of wardrobe was for Black people.  In contrast, no matter how rich my white male friends might have been back in college, they all had the right to roll out of bed and throw on any rags that were lying in their path to the bathroom and arrive to class looking like straight up bums.  And no one said a word to them about it.   

Not me at a party. I was never this cool.

I remember back in high school when my older brother and his friends would sometimes show up at our parties.  They would stand to the side and look at me, elbowing each other, pointing in my direction and kind of keeling over with laughter.  They were tickled by the kind of a sad, pitiful jester I was with nappy, uncombed hair and draped in the same unfashionable rags the white kids were wearing.  And all of this came on top of the customary anti-Black bullying I received from other Blacks about the size of my nose, the unsightly gap in my teeth, and big, awkward blob of a booty that sat too high on my legs.  (They called me booty-on-the-back and made me feel so damned unpretty!)

I had hoped to leave that all behind when I moved to New York City, but even though I became more conscientious about my wardrobe, I still made the occasional fashion faux pas. 

It was the early 90s and I was living downtown, and like many Funny Blacks, I was a late bloomer. But by the time I got to New York, I had finally begun to bloom like Orlando.  I had been hitting the gym all throughout college, so I arrived in New York City with a body like pow! I was 21 years old and really feeling myself because I had found my very own Sugar Daddy who took me from the hell hole of Suffolk County, Long Island and moved me into a cute loft in a walk-up located the heart of Greenwich Village. 

My oldest brother—not a Funny- but a Weird Black—had joined some religious cult and had come to the Tri-State area to shake tambourines with these fools up in Harlem.  Before going to meet him up there around 135th Street, I had never been to any predominately Black parts of NYC, so I was unaware of how drastically different certain sectors of New York City could be.  I was finna find out in a New York minute.

When I went to meet up with my brother and his cronies at a basketball court in Harlem that Saturday before his religious retreat, I was in my West Village summer uniform of that era:  brown ankle-high Chelsea boots with the black two-inch heels and a torso-grabbing white tank top tucked into short cut off Levi’s.  I had been wearing out the gym all winter and felt pretty confident in giving all kinds of body in this rather skimpy outfit.  I got off the C train at 135th, stopped by the bodega for a six-pack of brewskis and made my way over to the basketball courts.  I instantly noticed that my brother was pretty standoffish with me, barely introducing me to the other cult members.  And since there was no way I was going to be dribbling a ball around in those heels, I found a bench for me and my Heinekens, a place where I could drink my beer while looking slightly out of place and feeling uncomfortable in this strange land. 

I was still a country bumpkin, so the lexical of these Black men seemed exceedingly slangy and their treatment of each other came across as excessively aggressive even when they were being friendly.  I appreciated the fact that nobody came near me during those two hours, including my brother.   It was hot out there, so I downed three or four Heinis to cool me down and to help assuage the awkwardness I was feeling.  I was the only Funny Black for miles in every direction and that made me uneasy. I was an alien.  A sexy alien, though.  

After a bit, I got up to toss the empties into the trash.  As I strutted my funky stuff over to the trash bin, one of the cult members on an adjacent court began to sing out, “Look at them girls with the Dazzey Duks on!” to the laughter of the other players, including my brother.  I was already buzzed and was not familiar with that particular hit song, so I had absolutely no idea that he was referring to me and that I was the, um, butt of his jokes.  It wasn’t until months later when I was visiting the fam in Arizona that I realized what had happened.  While in the kitchen, my brother retold the story of his visit to New York to our dad and mentioned how embarrassed he’d been made when this Black muscle queen of a brother—decked out in a wife-beater and holding a six-pack of beer that he didn’t share with anyone—showed up to play basketball in high-heeled boots and shorts that put his booty cheeks on full display.  I was absolutely stunned as those memories came rushing back to my mind:  the hot sun, the six beers I drank, the whispers and laughter, and how everyone ignored me.  Sitting there in my father’s living room and listening to my brother tell his side of the story, I suddenly realized that some of the laughter from those Harlem basketball courts was aimed at me every time I got up to walk.   Thank God that I was oblivious of the rude reception I’d received that afternoon because I probably would have started crying if I’d known what was happening around me.  Knowing that my own brother was part of the fun-making would have torn me up from the inside.   

The incident was indeed cruel, and it underscored the clarity of the rules of the straight Black man that I did not understand at that time:  it was an unwritten rule that their rejection of the swishy Black dude be openly addressed through public scorn to protect and solidify their own fragile masculinity.  So engrained are these rules of Black masculinity that the whole notion of blood being thicker than water melted away right there under that scorching New York sun as my brother not only refused to defend me but also supported the jeering of his flesh and blood with some hearty laughter of his own.  All of this just because I erroneously rocked some Daisy Dukes in the wrong zip code.   

What made me a FUN-B wasn’t so much that I had slid on booty-out Levi’s shorts, but that I was oblivious to the idea that what you wore in any particular setting really mattered, especially to non-Funny Black people.   It wasn’t so much that I looked like a queen from hell because I could have expected similar public ridicule if I had decided to tuck my Wrangler jeans into some cowboy boots or had donned an Abraham Lincoln top hat to Harlem that sticky afternoon.   I had to have been a Funny Black because a regular Black dude would have known better. 

Daisy Duke

At that time, I lived around mostly white folks and their biggest concern was whether Ross and Rachel were going to get back together, not what other white people put on their backs and feet.  I didn’t have any typical Black friends who could have advised me to hollllld up, waaaait a minute before getting on the subway train to Harlem dressed like that, for I would be breaking several social norms if I took my Muscle Mary ass into a Harlem that was not yet the gay Black mecca it would eventually become two decades later.  (I ended up studying at CUNY City College almost 20 years later.  The university is located a stone’s throw from the same basketball courts where I got called out for my Daisy Dukes in the early 90s.  When I finished my night classes at CUNY, I had to catch the C train, which meant walking through the park adjacent to those courts, which was now home to some of the raunchiest gay cruising in Uptown.  What goes around cums around, they say.)  Hell, I had worn similar outfits in whitey-white parts of town like SoHo, TriBeca, the East Village and Chelsea to standing ovations.  So why did I need to drink a six-pack to calm my nerves up in Harlem?  My twenty-something-year old FUN-B mind was befuddled by the fact that if my choice to strut the streets of New York City like the construction worker in the Village People didn’t raise a single eyebrow among the whites, why did the Blacks have to be so cruel about it?

***

As I stewed in my own humiliation while my brother told the story to my father, my Funny Black mind asked the question, If some of those Harlem dudes had gone downtown in their oversized Phat Farm shirts, thick gold chains and Timberlands, would we Black queens had publicly mocked them for not rocking a muscle shirt with Daisys?

The answer is no because many gay Black men are also Funny Blacks and one of our greatest attributes is our live-and-let-live attitude.  (The shadier queens might have whispered something to a friend, but certainly would not have outwardly ridiculed another brother for expressing himself in his own way.).  We FUN-Bs don’t have the “privilege” of acting all discriminatory or exclusionary towards others because that would fly in the face of the main reason we flock to places like New York City in the first place.  One of the most remarkable things about living in NYC is that, if you’re patient and resourceful enough, you will eventually find other Funny Blacks who completely identify with what you’re going through, making it no longer necessary to seek solace in the arms of white people who try their darndest to be sympathetic to our issues, but will never fully grasp the true meaning of being Black in America, and especially a Funny Black.

A Funny Black like me.

***

It did not take me long to get over it once I realized what had happened to me in Harlem because by that time, I had a solid group of Funny Blacks around me who solidified the fact that whether we choose to wear FUBU or a feather boa, we are all equal members of this big, beautiful, diverse Black family, whether other members of that family want to accept it or not.   

At the same time, I was also becoming very aware that it was not only unacceptable wardrobe choices that complicated the life of the Funny Black…

To be continued…