first round
(5) after the fire, “der kommissar”
burned
(12) jennifer holliday, “and i’m telling you i’m not going”
274-252
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/2/23.
don’t turn around: jendi reiter on “der kommissar”
The year was 1983, or 1601, or 1890. The place: New York's Lower East Side, but actually Buckingham Palace, or fin de siècle Vienna. Anywhere but here, anytime but now.
Growing up in a three-member Victorian re-enactment cult, I didn't have MTV. I owned three non-classical music cassettes: Madonna's debut self-titled album and Like a Virgin, and Huey Lewis's Sports, which I didn't actually like once I'd listened to the whole thing, but couldn't admit my misjudgment, or else my mother might never let me buy another pop album.
I had briefly owned and loved Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, but my mother made me return it to Tower Records. I don't know why. It was one of those arbitrary diktats that justifies its authority by the lack of alternatives, like why we didn't have a toaster, or the size of the paper that prisoners can write their letters on, or why liquor is legal and LSD isn't.
The culture that awaited on the other side of childhood was full of such mysteries, which only multiplied, attended by fear and not-always-unpleasant trembling, when I was allowed to have my first portable radio. That little silver brick, lousy with static, was my treasure. Memory tells me the first song I heard on it was Prince's "Raspberry Beret", but memory is wrong. The Internet dates this raunchy ballad from 1985 but I feel that strap around my 11-year-old wrist, picture myself carrying the box of voices from out there through the conspicuous solitude of middle school.
Did we understand anything, before we could discover its backstory and 1,000 variations by typing a few words into Google? My 10-year-old son engages with music in a way that would have been both satisfying and terrifying, and certainly unimaginable, to me as a tween. He veers from his classmate's history skit about Rasputin, to the Boney M. disco song, to the endless YouTube remixes featuring bongo cats or Minecraft zombies or a dancing cut-out of Vladimir Putin, and finally to conversations about the Ukraine war and the Trump-Putin autocratic alliance. I'd say he's drowning in context, except he doesn't seem overwhelmed at all.
As for me in 6th grade, I was aware that the Cold War existed because my parents let me read their Robert Ludlum spy thrillers (shout-out to the bonkers scene in The Holcroft Covenant where the Nazi has hot sex with his sister and then kills her—like that didn't confuse my hormones at all). But I was uninterested in political developments that occurred after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The clothes were less attractive. The problems were too real.
*
Before "Der Kommissar" was a one-hit wonder performed by a band that fell apart almost immediately thereafter, it was the creation of Austrian pop star Falco (Johann Hölzel), who composed it with songwriter Robert Ponger and recorded it in December 1981. The German-language version of "Der Kommissar" charted at number one in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.
Wikipedia's entry for Falco claims that it was one of the earliest successful rap songs in Europe. This genre designation surprised me. The well-known melodic hook is so strong that I had misremembered him singing the verses, when he actually speaks them over the background music in a hard-edged rapid patter. My preconceptions and, let's face it, my prejudices wouldn't have let me stretch "rap" to encompass a video so white and European, Falco's slicked-back hair and white suit an aesthetic throwback to Elvis or the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, rather than the Reagan-era urban ferment that our family tried to pretend we weren't living in the middle of.
The story that Falco's lyrics tell is disjointed—okay, maybe some of that is Google Translate filling in for my half-forgotten undergraduate German 101, but still. Two, three, four, eins, zwei, drei/Es is nichts dabei. "Two, three, four, one, two, three/There is nothing there." He meets a young woman whose heart is rein und weiss (pure and white), but not in the way that you might think. We're talking about cocaine: ihre Nase spricht dafuer (her nose speaks for it), Den Schnee auf demn wir alle talwaerts fahren (The snow we all ride down the valley on). A better translation that was probably not written by a robot still leaves some of the song's references obscure. What is the nursery rhyme about? Why are they scraping the walls?
Are the lyrics oblique and full of disorienting subject changes in order to mimic the experience of being high and paranoid on the subway? Or because Falco himself was (reputedly) often stoned to the point of incoherence? Or is it the coded language of life under the Stasi, the dreaded secret police of East Germany's communist regime?
Dreh dich nicht um—oh oh oh
Der Kommissar geht um—oh oh oh
*
When I was a child, I didn't know how to lie, but I was forced to do it all the time. My family depended on me to deny something that everyone around me knew to be true.
Roberta, the woman who drove me to and from school, attended all my parent-teacher conferences while my mother put me to bed, and was always at our apartment on the rare occasions I had friends over—this woman could not be named even in our own house as my second mom (because my mother could have no other gods before her), nor as my mother's partner (because butch Roberta might be gay, but my high-femme mother wasn't, you see).
My moms moved in together in 1977, the same year that born-again pop singer Anita Bryant founded the first national anti-gay activist group, Save Our Children. Like the Right's current rhetoric about trans folks and our allies as child-abuse groomers, Bryant and her ilk spread the myth that gays and lesbians "recruited" children into perversity. Based on this argument, California State Senator John Briggs crusaded for a ballot measure that would let school boards ban gay teachers. Though activists like Harvey Milk defeated the initiative, it cast a shadow long enough to touch my parents, two elementary-school teachers in the NYC public school system.
Without ever hearing a word of LGBTQ history, I understood I had to deny that Roberta lived with us, and call her my "babysitter" long after I was too old for one. Sometimes, it's what we don't know, that teaches us to be afraid. I didn't have any friends, imaginary or otherwise, with same-sex parents. There were no out lesbians in Anne of Green Gables or "The Love Boat" or Cricket Magazine.
What I did have was camp. Not the kind you do in the woods with sticks and marshmallows. The kind with glitter and tragedy. Mannered facial expressions and hot pink clothing and a throbbing backbeat that hinted at cruel pleasures. I had 80s music.
After the Fire's "Der Kommissar" didn't make me as horny as The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams are Made of This," but it scared me in the same fascinating way. Someone with power was watching me. He was sophisticated, implacable, villainous. Or what was worse, I wanted to be the watcher. I was aroused by wielding that power of surveillance, which had only ever tormented me when I was on the receiving end (a/k/a all the time). I wanted to wear a uniform—preferably something outdated, with a frock coat and brass buttons—and hurt a man who would enjoy it. Which was not something I could ever admit, so I went to the ballet in my calico dresses and bought Gibson Girl paper dolls and cut their heads off.
In my unrecognized little trans-boy heart, I had re-invented Tom of Finland.
*
If only I could find a way of changing what I am
Maybe that's what I need to know?
But would it go and complicate some vast eternal plan
To re-direct the way I want to go?—After the Fire, "Signs of Change"
"Der Kommissar" was the only big U.S. hit, and the last single, of British pop band After the Fire. According to their official website—because no band is too obscure to have a surviving fandom in the Internet era—the original group formed and disbanded in 1972, was relaunched two years later by keyboardist Peter Banks and drummer Ian Adamson as a contemporary Christian music (CCM) group, and went through a dizzying number of personnel and stylistic changes over its remaining eight years.
A video of ATF performing their 1979 song "One Rule for You" certainly looks like a band having an identity crisis. Lead singer/guitarist Andy Piercy goes full Carnaby Street in round sunglasses and a long black coat adorned with costume jewelry, while the keyboardist sports a bad teenage mullet and a T-shirt, and the bass player wears a motorcycle jacket. Drummer Ivor Twidell seems to be pretending he's a children's birthday party clown, switching between a multitude of silly hats and pulling comical faces.
So perhaps it makes sense that their most successful song should be a cover. (A March Faxness and March Fadness two-fer.) From start to finish, ATF was trying and not quite succeeding to pull together a coherent self from pieces of other bands.
Here's where not-knowing can be a gift, the space that an untutored imagination populates with a more creative and alluring scene than the one that my peers who could afford cable TV were watching. Beause ATF's video for "Der Kommissar" is, frankly, weak.
Whereas Falco took an enigmatic, minimalist approach in his video, sing-speaking the entire song in a barely furnished studio between drags on his cigarette, ATF acted out the lyrics. The scene: an elegant, old-fashioned nightclub meant to evoke a European cabaret or the kind of hotel bar where spies exchange secrets. A tarantula crawls across the table—wrong climate, surely? Piercy sips his aperitif at a table. A femme fatale saunters over and slips him a matchbox labeled DER KOMMISSAR.
But as with their "One Rule for You" video, the mix of vibes is all wrong. The background characters' teased hair and heavy eyeshadow scream "1980s teenager," a jarring anachronism in this setting. Piercy's bored expression clashes with the words he spits.
The bar is transported to the inside of a train car where the characters continue drinking, quite calmly. Don't turn around, oh oh oh. But they don't need the warning. These aren't people whose desires are unnameable, who self-police their gestures. The song is still supposedly about cocaine, but there isn't a sniff in sight.
Yet, a few moments in the video hint at the campiness of repression, the artistry of the secret life, that which gives the Kommissars of our imagination their erotic charge. The spoken refrain Alles klar, Herr Kommissar? ("Is everything all right, Officer?") is lip-sync'd in the male singer's voice from the mouth of the femme fatale, and then by a woman in male formal wear like Marlene Dietrich. The femme fatale puts her makeup on in reverse, her lipstick behaving like an eraser that wipes the red off. In a drab overcoat and librarian spectacles, a don’t-look-at-me aesthetic like a pre-transition Elliot Page, she returns to the same bar to retrieve a Walkman with orange foam headphones. Re-costumed, or closer to genuine? Don't ask. Clarity isn't queer.
*
My mother didn't vote. Her stated reason was that she didn't want to get called for jury duty. Roberta did whatever my mother made her do. So she didn't vote either. If Roberta were sequestered, she wouldn't be around to clean the house, cook the meals, and dodge the occasional picture frame thrown at her head if the aforementioned chores weren't carried out satisfactorily.
In their political quietism, I discern an ancestral memory of Jewish survival skills, the necessity of being invisible to the State. I may have cared more about whether Richard III killed the Princes in the Tower than the Iran-Contra scandal, but I knew my immigrant history. I read Escape from Warsaw and The Endless Steppe. As a family, we read Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anzia Yezierska, saw "Fiddler on the Roof" on Broadway, and kept our passports current in case we had to emigrate to Israel. Cossacks, Nazis, Soviets, or American racists—take your pick, anyone might kill us. We could never be at home in this world, so why not pretend we were Victorian debutante girls?
These images of the Holocaust and pogroms were the background I brought to "Der Kommissar" when it dominated the airwaves in 1983. What with my portable radio's poor reception and the vagueness of the lyrics, the song's storyline was an enigma that I filled in with my own shadowy anxieties about the Kommissar's identity. He was a Kafka-esque archetype of the authoritarian forces that could come at us from any direction, the past or the future.
However, the dance-party music that accompanied those lyrics took the edge off the menace. If "Der Kommissar" was a Nazi, perhaps he was only the kind from "The Sound of Music," or if we were really lucky, "The Producers"—danger leavened by buffoonish incompetence. An unstable mix that had to be watched carefully, like the moods of a mother who could say to her six-year-old "You're my reason for living" and "A door has closed in my heart to you" on the same day.
And if he talks to you and you don't know why
You say your life is gonna make you die
*
I would have been disappointed to learn that "Der Kommissar" was merely about avoiding cops so you could get high. This was not the work ethic that enabled Fievel to escape the Cossacks in An American Tail. Your boi was going to dissociate productively. Friendship with the stoner boy who gave me a Pink Floyd mixtape would not catapult our family from the ghetto to Harvard. Writing an 80-page paper about T.S. Eliot over summer vacation, on the other hand, just might.
*
Last summer, shortly after my 50th birthday, my husband and I spent a weekend clearing some boxes from our basement that had been in storage since the Berlin Wall fell. They turned out to contain lots of cut-out and coloring books from my childhood. You're looking at the only Gen-X'er who had both Rudolf Nureyev and Rudolph Valentino paper dolls (#transitiongoals, am I right?). I was struck by how thoroughly my tastes had been merged with my mother's. Not that I didn't genuinely like 19th-century advertising posters and Princess Diana, but that I was shamed out of any other interests—paintball, "The Jeffersons," MAD Magazine—that didn't appeal to a middle-aged white lady with class insecurity.
Before I was a person, I was a cover band.
He's got the power and you're so weak
And your frustration will not let you speak
*
Where are they now? Falco is dead. A few days before his 41st birthday, he fatally crashed his car into a bus in the Dominican Republic, where he had been living as an expat while he tried to re-launch his musical career. His fan site alludes discreetly to drug and alcohol addiction and an acrimonious divorce.
ATF lead singer Andy Piercy returned to his CCM roots. According to his website, "Andy Piercy: Investing in Worship," from 1993-2006 he was the music director at Holy Trinity Brompton, where Rev. Nicky Gumbel started the globally successful ALPHA Christian education curriculum. If you can imagine such a thing as an Anglican charismatic megachurch, Holy Trinity Brompton is it.
Roberta is a queer film archivist in the lesbian capital of America. Our homes are a 15-minute walk apart. In 2011 we went no-contact with my mother, who's now in a nursing home in Riverdale. (The one where the Russian Embassy to the U.N. is, not the one where Archie takes off his shirt every week.) There's a whole other essay to be written about the playlist for that breakup, and how hearing the right song on the radio at the right moment can literally save a battered woman's life, and you might get to read that story if Kelly Clarkson's "Breakaway" is ever a March Xness pick.
By the time March Fadness 80s Edition is down to its Final Four, I will (knock wood!) be recovering from top surgery. Please keep voting for "Der Kommissar" in case I am too stoned to do so.
"Der Kommissar" isn't a great song, but it's one we can't forget. Like my childhood. And maybe yours too?
Jendi Reiter is the author of the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), and five poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022). Their awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Poetry, the New Letters Prize for Fiction, the Wag's Revue Poetry Prize, the Bayou Magazine Editor's Prize in Fiction, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America. Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction and was a finalist for the Book Excellence Awards and the Lascaux Prize for Fiction. They are the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site with contests and markets for creative writers.
nope: terrance flynn on “and i am telling you i am not going”
Not many songs start in the middle of a yelling match. That is the case with “And I Am Telling You, I’m Not Going.” The song topped the R&B charts and won Jennifer Holliday both a well-deserved Grammy and a Tony Award in 1982 and, over twenty years later in 2006, won Jennifer Hudson an Oscar for singing the movie version of the same song. Even so, people struggle to remember the name of the song and refer to it as “that one from Dreamgirls.” When people attempt the title, they often mess it up, like “And I’m Not Going to Leave,” or “You’re Gonna Love me,” or my favorite misapproximation from an actor friend of mine, “And Just Where Do You Think You’re Going?”
I first saw it performed on TV when I was 17. Killing time in what my mom called our finished basement, I stared at our little TV. My plan was to jumpstart my summer later that night by sneaking the car down the driveway, picking up my best friend Drew, and going to Detroit to see a band at St. Andrew’s Hall. Meanwhile, the one clear channel was CBS, which was airing the 36th Annual Tony Awards. Infra-red remotes weren’t yet common in 1982, and I was too comfortable wedged between two beanbag chairs to get up and turn it off.
Before the song, the Dreamgirls cast acted out a loud ambush scene. Jennifer Holliday played the character Effie White, who is being maligned by the other three black women singers, her brother, and most importantly, Curtis, her lover and manager. They all have their complaints about Effie, but Curtis calls her too mean and too fat to be the lead singer in the band. He tells Effie he has already replaced her not only in the band, but in his bed with Deena (played by Beyonce in the movie version). Effie denies she’s gained weight and calls Deena “common.” The audience later learns Effie is pregnant with Curtis’ child. She snaps at all of them repeatedly, “I ain’t going,” to which they yell, “It’s all over,” before leaving her alone on the stage with Curtis. She has been ganged up on, insulted, fired, and dumped. She is pregnant with Curtis’s baby and holding her stomach, complaining of pain. To make matters worse, Curtis will soon move in with and marry Deena, grooming her to become the star he was supposed to make Effie. As hopeless as things look for Effie, she’s having none of it.
Her response is the song, “And I Am Telling You, I’m Not Going.” As elusive as the awkward title may be, the theme of this ballsy torch song is clear enough to be summed up in a word: nope. It’s a fierce rejection of rejection. The word “no” or “not” is repeated 43 times in a song that lasts roughly five minutes. She starts by calmly saying, “I’m staying, I’m staying,” but soon doubles down and denies not only his attempt to break up right away, but the possibility of their ever breaking up: “There’s no way I can ever, ever, ever go.” Rejecting his rejection is one thing, but she goes a step further by demanding, in what feels like an incantation, that he reciprocate her feelings: “And you, and you, and you, you’re gonna love me.”
In the early ‘80s, my weekends were spent hanging out with my high school friends, drinking, and listening to R.E.M., The Replacements, Hüsker Dü—bands that Drew and I felt we discovered because we introduced them first to our group of friends. That was only because Drew’s 30-something uncle had introduced the bands to us. With our fake IDs, we went to the live shows at small clubs when they played Detroit. When Drew’s uncle wasn’t there, he and I explored edgier punk or new wave venues like Todd’s or Harpo’s or Traxx. These places often featured hardcore groups known more for their provocative names than their music—Butthole Surfers, Suicidal Tendencies, Dead Kennedys, and the like. I didn’t consider myself hardcore or even punk, but I acquired a taste for the aggressive energy of the music.
Something that surprised me was the way I gravitated to mosh pits. How to explain the intimate understanding of not taking a split lip personally? The violence inside the pit was real, but it was somehow directed at a common enemy outside the pit. I related to the spasming, sweaty crush of male energy next to the stage. I liked how my insides vibrated from the power of the speakers. I’d take my shirt off and throw myself around for what seemed like five minutes, but that Drew, fishing me out and giving me a concerned look, would later tell me was an hour. In the humid middle of the pit, I could sublimate my attraction to other boys with aggression. I could lay my hands on them with impunity, shoving a particularly beautiful guy to the ground, colliding with a thick-necked skinhead, backing into a black guy’s sweaty chest—sanctioned straight bashing that, for me, was preemptive rejection, a way to hurt what I couldn’t have. More importantly, I could absorb their many blows, the kicks from combat boots, the sharp retaliation of an elbow to my ribs, or the unpredictable push that sent me to the ground. I took it all with a grudging recognition of hatred for what I feared I was—a queer teenager, which no doubt some of them were too, though at the time we were all hiding from each other in plain sight. I was convinced the world of men was straight, and that I was alone and doomed to stay that way.
The emotional intensity in Jennifer Holliday’s voice in “And I Am Telling You…” was like a gathering storm. The staging of the song revealed the impossibility of her task. (You can see the Tony performance on You Tube, just google Holliday and 36th Tony Awards and look for her pink dress). The more Effie advances on Curtis, the more he rejects her. She clings to a positive vision of their relationship which seems to exist only in her head. She tries everything to make him see it: begging, coaxing, bullying, being sexy, even alerting him to the fact that she doesn’t recognize any boundary between him and her: “We’re both share the same blood; We both have the same mind.” When Curtis heads to the door, she physically blocks him, taking his face in her hands. She asks Curtis repeatedly to hold her and when he doesn’t, she helps herself by hugging him, then grabbing him by his shoulders and kissing him, demanding that her love not only be recognized as powerful and persuasive, but that it be reckoned with and requited. Period.
I scooted closer to the little TV, spellbound at her audacity, rooting for her, worried for her. Curtis, however, remains unmoved, hands by his sides.
Two gay white men, Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger, wrote “And I Am Telling You, I’m Not Going” for Nell Carter who dropped out of the workshop to take a role in the soap opera, Ryan’s Hope. She soon became distracted, like many celebrities at the time, by a substantial coke habit. Tom Eyen who wrote the lyrics and the book for Dreamgirls grew up in Cambridge, Ohio, then dropped out of Ohio State University to move to New York City with his older brother (also gay). The brothers lived openly gay lives as successful theater artists. Tom Eyen was an early gay rights activist and may have been involved in the Stonewall Riots. Even so, he never came out to his devout Catholic parents or family. When Tom died of AIDS in 1991, his family believed being gay was something to be ashamed of, so they insisted his cause of death be recorded as cardiac arrest.
I had helped my mom with the basement renovation in the late ‘70s. It was one of the projects she had thrown herself into between depressions. She came home one day with uncharacteristic enthusiasm and splayed swatches onto the kitchen table trying to get my brothers and sisters interested to no avail. They never trusted my mother when she got swept up in a new project. They all left. As usual when alone with my mom, I wasn’t at all sure if she knew I was there. I had an annoying habit of staying very still, even forgetting to breathe while waiting for a cue from her, anything like an invitation. When she finally noticed me, she sighed. I seemed to be an afterthought like, oh, that’s right, the quiet middle kid—always alone and waiting for me to look at him.
“You want to help me pick out some swatches, Ter?”
It’s disturbing how, when we’re young, whole dormant parts of ourselves, both wonderful and problematic, can be summoned into existence by simple questions, by someone’s random consideration or curiosity about us.
Do you want to come over after school to work out?
Do you want a hit of this?
Do you like to write?
Can you sleep over?
Do you want to see Echo and The Bunnymen with my uncle?
Do you like guys or something?
Will you sing a song at my wedding?
“Yes,” I said to my mom who began arranging the swatches for me to choose. I’m not sure I have ever felt more special. At first, I pretended to have an opinion about this plaid wallpaper or that yellow vinyl upholstery. When she didn’t question them, I allowed my opinions to became real. She seemed less depressed when talking about the basement décor with me. It wasn’t long before I began using words like “fixtures” and “wainscotting” with a straight face, though my brothers accused me of being “fancy.” I didn’t care. I wanted the basement to never be finished. My mother had always complained that with five kids, she could never have anything nice, and why bother? I wanted to prove her wrong. After the orange shag carpeting was installed, I raked it for like a year to keep it looking good—that was a thing people had, shag carpet rakes.
The song got more intense. At 17 I knew nothing (yet) of New York City or Broadway, or theater critics, but the New York audience’s reaction was evident, even through the bad reception of our little TV in Michigan. As her voice swelled with emotion, I could hear audible cheers and clamoring from the audience, even an occasional roar—a sound I associated with packed football games at my Catholic all boys’ high school. Frank Rich in The New York Times said that on opening night, Jennifer Holliday’s performance of “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” made instant Broadway history, calling it a “seismic jolt that sends the audience, as one, right out of its wits.” Newsweek critic Jack Kroll said, “Holliday’s singing is a triumph of emotion over technique” and praised her “staggering vocal power.” New York Magazine called her “incandescent” and said that her voice “literally shakes the theater.”
In 1991, the same year Tom Eyen died of AIDS, it would be a year before the CDC used the word AIDS for the first time. 1991 was also the year that Bonnie Raitt’s hit song “I Can’t Make You Love Me” was released—another song about unrequited love, but with the opposite message as Tom Eyen’s lyrics. A less awkward title for the song from Dreamgirls may have been “I Will Make You Love Me.” 1991 was also the same year I moved to New York City, and the same year my mother discovered I was gay by reading my journal. I was 23 and home in Detroit for the holidays, so I escaped to the basement—by then mostly abandoned and musty—to write in my journal, away from the chaos of 18 nephews and nieces. The orange shag carpet was matted and discolored; the beanbag chairs had been crisscrossed with electrical tape.
I must have written about how hard it was that Drew, my best friend, had asked me to sing at his wedding that summer. About how mind-numbing unrequited love is: unexpressed, smothered, silent. I have a friend who says the worst thing about unrequited love is you don’t get credit for it as a relationship. It doesn’t count in others’ eyes, so when it ends (if it even begins), the grief you feel is disenfranchised, like for the loss of a pet or an uncle in their 90s. You don’t feel deserving of others’ support, and the condolences, if they are spoken, are lip service at most. In my case, before I was outed, I didn’t dare mention my love for Drew, requited or not. This was a time when artists like Tom Oyen stayed firmly in the closet: Michael Stipe, K.D. Lang, John Grant, Jodi Foster, George Michael, Melissa Etheridge, Ricky Martin, Frank Ocean, Little Richard, Brandi Carlile, Lil Nas X, and even Judas Priest frontman, Rob Halford.
My mother did her best to accept, but it was a long road for her and my siblings, as it had been for me. Of course, they were all worried I had AIDS, but my dad’s concern was, not unreasonably, that if word got out I was gay, it would scare his dental patients away; it would harm his practice. AIDS hysteria was real, and even though I wasn’t HIV positive, people treated all gay men, for years as if they were lepers. I felt like a family tragedy.
There’s a turning point in “And I Am Telling You.” After Effie takes matters into her own hands and kisses Curtis full on the lips while holding his face, he doesn’t just leave her, he breaks out of her grasp and runs off the stage and out of her life. Instead of collapsing in defeat, she triples down. This is the tragedy the audience witnesses, that the more gone Curtis is, the more Effie’s mind goes. She tells Curtis (no longer on stage) to save his breath because even if he would “yell, scream, and shout,” she’s not walking out. She also tells Curtis to save his physical strength: even if he were to “push, strike” and kill” (Kill!), it wouldn’t make her leave. Even if he had God-like strength, like if he could “tear down the mountains, stop all the rivers”—still, Effie reminds him, “I’m not walking out.” She is a pregnant black woman in the 1960s and now without support of a job or any current love from a man or recognition for her talent, or even the love of an audience—she fully rejects the reality of her situation. The price for her inability to Live and Let Leave is that she is confined to the only place her fantasy can be real, her own head. She gasps before she sings her long last note, which is on the word, “Me!”
Gay men in the mid ‘80s and ‘90s also had to hold on to fantasy for all it was worth. A whole generation of men and women who had sex for all the reasons humans have been having sex since forever—connection, love, fun, transcendence, youth, impulsivity, fear of death, procreation, boredom, money, addictions, to feel alive—were told they deserved to die. There are good reasons for denial. There are reasons to demand love and respect. Some don’t have to demand. Some can merely ask. Some don’t even have to ask. And some of us know the answer is no, so they hold steadfast to fantasy.
“I Can’t Make You Love Me,” was written by two white, straight country songwriters Mike Ried and Allen Shamblin. The former was a pro football player who then went into music. Reid got the idea for the song by reading an article about a man who got in trouble with the law for getting drunk and shooting at his ex-wife’s car. At sentencing, the judge asked him if he had learned anything and the man said: “Your Honor, I learned you can’t make a woman love you if she don’t.” “I Can’t Make you Love Me” was written as an upbeat song first, then turned into a mournful ballad and given to Bonnie Raitt. In her hands, it reflects the crushing moment of deciding to let go of fantasy, the difficult return to a sober reality. Bonnie Raitt begs her lover too, but she has the luxury of dignity: “Don’t patronize me.” She also has a plan: “Morning will come, and I’ll do what’s right. Just give me ‘til then, to give up this fight.” The next line is Raitt’s most anguished; “And I will give up this fight!” an aching acceptance, the inverse echo of the title of the song from Dreamgirls, “And I am telling You, I’m not Going.” Raitt’s persona however, is a person who feels enough support, from whatever internal and external resources, to take the leap of faith that she will be ok in the world without this person’s love. Nice work if you can get it.
Jennifer Holliday’s performance, though, believes in the persuasive power of desperation. This power spoke to my seventeen-year-old self, inflaming me with a sense of justified rebellion, like Yes! Why the hell should the brave have to leave? The YouTube version of this song from the 1982 Tony Awards is the only version I recommend the reader watches. Jennifer Hudson’s 2006 movie performance is vocally perfect, but the performance lacks desperation. The audience never has to worry about her Effie. In Holliday’s performance, her desperation proves her point, as if to say to Curtis, see the lengths I go to? See what you make me do? Her vulnerability is pure courage, and she means it to be inspirational, instructive, fortifying. She knows the easiest thing for him to do, the weakest thing for him to do, is to leave. It is the power of her persistence that she hopes will be contagious. This can be heroic in a culture that rewards emotional withdrawal, promotes the cool over the candid, lionizes the leavers while it vilifies the lovers.
If we are honest, many of us have used the same emotional logic by maintaining the belief that our romantic love can’t possibly occur in a vacuum, that the very fact of our strong feelings for a person argues for the high probability that this person must—Dear God, please—must feel it too. If only we knew how our love would land before we felt it. But there is no knowing before the feeling; there’s no loving before the falling. In New York City by the late 90s, I had mercifully fallen out of love with Drew. I was with a boyfriend who dragged me to a bad Off-Broadway play starring one of his friends. He had recently told me he loved me and as I sat mulling over how I could end it, hopefully later that night, the one good line from the play was said in a breakup scene by a woman who got dumped. The man asked her to leave, and she was leaving. She headed out the door saying, “In love there is always a winner and a loser. But the winner—" she turned to him, just before slamming the door, her voice slightly breaking, “Should be careful!”
Terrance Flynn is a writer and psychotherapist working in downtown Los Angeles. He’s been awarded writing fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, PEN America, The Sustainable Arts Foundation among others. He contributes to The Wall Street Journal, was noted in Best American Essays. His Moth story is featured in the latest Moth book, the New York Times- bestseller How To Tell A Story. He is working on an essay collection called, Belonging Expires: Stories on Disconnection and Recovery.