Charles Alexander
Parting Glances: Black Gay Detroit Friends (Pt. 1)
As a teenager in the mid-1950s, I listened faithfully to country and western music radio — especially Patsy Cline — and later 'Senator' Bristo Bryant's rhythm and blues after high school class broadcasts. (A favorite group was Billy Ward and His [...]
Parting Glances: When Arts' Gay Fleet Scuttlebutted!
Back in the "good old days" of Great Depression No. 1, following Stock Market Crash '29 years and years – well, at least a galloping few – before my time, the arts with a capital "A" took a real financial broadsiding. Money for spending on painting, [...]
Parting Glances: Memories of a Near-Forgotten Past Pt. 4
For five dynamic years — 1940 to 1945 — Detroit was America's Arsenal of Democracy, a vital source of war materials and weapons. First for England's defense. Later, for our own. Automotive factories focused on round-the-clock, nonstop production of [...]
Parting Glances: Channeling Rainbow Creativity in 2019
As an artist, I'm fascinated with the mental phenomenon known as channeling. In the mid-'90s channeling was a cultural fad with many fans. Channelers brought forth purported messages form ages-old entities and other twilight-zone dimensions and [...]
Parting Glances: Christmas with Liberace
My grandmother Lottie Lee Alexander lived with my parents and me from the time I was five until she died in 1954 when I was 18, and had just finished Cass Technical High School where I was a commercial art major. My grandmother did much to encourage [...]
Parting Glances: Two times A Mary Christmas!
There are paths that by strange chances on Christmas Eve mix up in time, space, thought, crazy activation. Some fact. Some fantasy. Who knows? So it happened once upon a near but distant whimsical time in a universe that was hoodwinked into [...]
Parting Glances: Don We Now Santa's Gay Apparel!
'Twas New Years Eve and "Santa Closet" – lavender quill pen in hand, Gucci trifocal sunglasses on his merry nose – was double checking his private list to see who's straight, and who's – hopefully, er, – gay. Unbeknownst to almost everybody – the [...]
Parting Glances: How's your sugar plum fairy, Mary?
I hate to play the gay Grinch who stole Christmas, but there's a movement afoot by the Southern Comfort Baptists to do away with all suspected gay references in Christmas carols and holiday traditions. (Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Veterans Day [...]
Parting Glances: Two Kings and a Presidential 'Queen'
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1965 historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for African-American voter rights changed the South forever. (Or, did it?) Few know that another King – William Rufus DeVane King – gave Selma its name 145 years [...]
Parting Glances: How's your Thanksgiving Parson's Neck, Mary?
DRUMSTICK #1: If you're looking for a ploy to come out to your family this Thanksgiving, you might casually remark that according to "Biological Exuberance" by animal behavior specialist Dr. Bruce Bagemihl, the female domestic turkey often engages [...]
Parting Glances: 'Ys' Beyond my Years!
Long, long before The Village People made "YMCA" — the song that would become the unofficial, persistent national anthem of Winter Olympian Brian Boitano – "Ys" played an important role. They were second only to gay bars, as places to meet available [...]
Parting Glances: JFK: Troubling days gone by
Back in the mid-'80s a group of gay friends gathered monthly for dinner and sharing at Detroit's historic venue, the Scarab Club. We called ourselves "The Friends of Dorothy Kilgallen". Our campy title was a play on the old closet question, "Are you [...]