13th Annual MALCOLM X Arts, Culture & Education Festival

at Audubon Middle School

(Los Angeles, CA)The 13th Annual MALCOLM X Arts, Culture and Education Festival will be held this year at Audubon Middle School on Saturday, May 21 and Sunday, May 22, 2005, Noon – 7:00 PM. Audubon is located in the heart of the Leimert Park neighborhood at 4120 11th Avenue and is the last predominately African American middle school in Los Angeles County.

In association with

UCLA African Student Union & Awesome Productions KPFK 90.7 FM – Media Sponsor

Hosted by FAMLI, Inc., the festival is the nation’s largest cultural tribute to Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz). The great human rights advocate and family man would have been 80 years old on May 19 in this 40th year observance of his death. The festival is the main fundraiser for the many educational and cultural enrichment youth programs organized by FAMLI, Inc. such as the Annual Strategies for the Development of the African American Manchild Conference, I’ve Known Rivers Black History Video & Discussion Series and the See A Man, Be A Man and From Princess To Queen mentorship programs based at Audubon Middle School.

The decision was made to have the festival at Audubon to emphasize the importance of the educational component of the event and the need to connect to the youth in our communities and to remember three Audubon students that died needless deaths, Devin Brown, Marcel Belcher and Clive Jackson. Ironically and quite tragically, See A Man Be A Man organizers had just met with Audubon student, 13 year old Devin Brown to enroll him in the mentorship program just days before his death. Michael Franklin, See A Man Be A Man, Director, expressed his commitment by saying, “There is nothing more important than working with the youth and the issues they face.” The success rate of the mentorship and after school programs is such that is has caught national attention and other educational facilities are looking to model those programs. Academy-award winning actor and humanitarian, Louis Gossett, Jr. will be partnering with the FAMLI, Inc. on innovative and all-encompassing educational programs.

Festival organizers say so often in the community the question is asked, “What can we do?” They say a sure way to show your caring is to support those organizations that are out there in the community, consistently doing the work with the youth. Innovative ways of showing support include becoming a mentor, local businesses adopting the school and sponsoring school activities and providing scholarships.

The theme for the festival this year is “Education Is Our Passport To The Future, Solutions To Save Our Youth.” Festival highlights include morning youth workshops, a hip-hop summit and youth caucus; science and technology robotics interactive; and an announcement of Audubon Middle School Malcolm X essay contest winners. Daylong weekend activities include arts & crafts vendors; literary arts and spoken word village; health/wellness & recreation village; History video series with rare archival footage of Malcolm X; dance and musical entertainment; food; children’s play/carnival area; and a chess/domino game area. Suggested donation for the festival is $5.00, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

An reception will be held on Thursday, May 19, 2005 in recognition of Malcolm X’s birthday and honoring community, business, education and religious leaders that best exemplify Malcolm’s legacy of activism and commitment to excellence. This years honoree recipients include publisher, author and businesswoman, Dr. Rosie Milligan; Reverend

Dr. Richard Byrd (Meri Ka Ra), minister of KRST Unity Church and community activist; and Mrs. Laverne Brunt, Principal, Audubon Middle School. The FAMLI Malcolm X Festival Lifetime Achievement Award in Arts & Culture will be given to Mr. Louis Gossett, Jr.


Parking on the neighboring side streets for the festival will be extremely limited. Festival patrons are advised to park at the Magic Johnson Theater on Crenshaw and
King Blvd.
or the Leimert Park public parking lot on Degnan and
43rd Street
and use the DASH Shuttle for .25 cents, which runs every 25 minutes between the hours 9:00 am to 6:30 pm on Saturday. There is no Sunday Dash service.

May 19, 2004

Malcolm X - gay black hero?

On Malcolm X's 80 birthday, Peter Tatchell reveals the hidden gay past of
the American black nationalist leader

Thursday May 19, 2005

Malcolm X was born 80 years ago today, on 19 May 1925. But amid the
commemorations, controversy is brewing. Some black activists are enraged
by suggestions that their hero might have been gay - or at least bisexual.

The controversy has been stirring since the publication of Bruce Perry's
acclaimed biography, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America
(Station Hill, New York) in 1991. Based on interviews with Malcolm's
closest boyhood and adult friends, Perry suggests that the US black nationalist
leader was not as robustly heterosexual as his Nation of Islam (NoI)
colleagues have always insisted.

Malcolm X, real name Malcolm Little, joined the militant Muslim NoI in
1949, attracted by its teaching that Allah would deliver black people from white
bondage. By the 1960s, Malcolm had developed NoI ideology in new
directions, becoming America's leading spokesperson for black consciousness, pride and self-help. Sexual freedom was not, however, part of his agenda.

Yet Perry's book documents Malcolm X's many gay experiences. A schoolmate,
Bob Bebee, recalls the day they stumbled on a local boy jerking off.
Malcolm, Bebee recalled, ordered the youth to masturbate him, and
subsequently boasted he had given him oral sex. Later, from the age of 20,
Malcolm had sex with men for money - as hinted at in Spike Lee's 1992
biopic - and he had at least one sustained sexual liaison with a man. While
living in Flint, Michigan, his roommate noticed that instead of sleeping in the
room they were sharing, Malcolm sneaked down the hall to spend the night
with a gay transvestite named Willie Mae.

In New York, two of Malcolm's friends from Michigan remember bumping into
him at the YMCA, where Malcolm bragged he earned money servicing "queers".
Later, Malcolm worked as a butler to a wealthy Boston bachelor, William
Paul Lennon. According to Malcolm's sidekick Malcolm Jarvis, he was paid to
sprinkle Lennon with talcum powder and bring him to orgasm. Perry suggests
that Malcolm's gay encounters may not have been entirely financially
motivated. His masculine insecurities and ambivalence towards women fit
the archetype of a repressed gay man and point to latent homosexuality.

After the death of his father, when Malcolm was six, he lacked male role
models and was dominated by strong women - in particular, his tyrannical
mother. He feared women and his early sexual experiences with girls were
mostly unsatisfactory. Far from macho, Malcolm hated fighting and got
beaten by other men. His passionate assertion that the need to feel masculine is
a man's "greatest urge" indicates someone doubtful of his own manliness.

As for his sporadic gay hustling, as Perry notes, "there were other ways
he could have earned money". Dope-dealing, thieving and pimping were sources
of income he had pursued with success. There was no imperative to sell his
body. Why, then, did he prostitute himself? Misogyny and repressed
homosexuality might be the answer. According to Perry: "His male-to-male
encounters, which rendered it unnecessary for him to compete for women,
afforded him an opportunity for sexual release without the attendant risk
of dependence on women."

Was Malcolm X gay? Bisexual? In his schooldays, he was apparently a
passive participant. Others masturbated or fellated him. Later, while working as a
male prostitute, he took a more hands-on role in sex, especially with
Lennon. This part-time whoring may have been pecuniary. There is, however,
plentiful research suggesting that many guys who have sex with men for
payment are in denial about their homosexuality. They tell themselves they
are doing it for the money. This is their way of coping with same-sex
desires that they are unable to accept. Was this Malcolm's excuse? Surely
there must have been some degree of queer desire to enable Malcolm to
sustain his sexual experiences with men over a period of 10 years? If this
desire was within him from adolescence to early adulthood, could he have
erased it completely in later life?

Sexuality is not like a newspaper - read today and discarded tomorrow.
Established desires can be sublimated or repressed, but never eliminated.
If people have a homosexual capacity, it stays with them for life - even if
they never act on it. Was Malcolm an exception? There is no evidence that
his same-sex dalliances continued once he joined the NoI; he married and
had children, and, with all the fervour of a zealous convert, he embraced the
NoI's fiercely puritanical Muslim sexual morality.

Had he not been assassinated in 1965, almost certainly at the hands of NoI
rivals, Malcolm might have eventually, like Huey Newton of the Black
Panthers, welcomed the gay liberation movement as part of the struggle for
human emancipation. Instead, to serve its homophobic political agenda, for
50 years the NoI has suppressed knowledge of Malcolm's gay past.

Now it is time to blow the whistle. There is not a single world-famous
black person who is openly gay. Young black lesbians and gays need role models.
Who better than Malcolm X, one of the inspirations of my activism and one
of the great modern heroes of black liberation?