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BROTHERHOOD TV! WE ARE BACK PART ONE: TRENDING TOPICS- Transgender, Eddie Long, Penn State
WE ARE BACK! PLEASE RATE COMMENT AND SHARE!
We'll Be Right Back....
Hey Family,
We first would like to thank all of our supporters and viewers! We are so excited about launching Season Two next year January. We have sooo much in store for you guys. Please send your "Dear Brother Letters" to letstalk@brotherhoodtv.com and any show topic suggestions are also welcomed.
This coming week there will not be an episode of Brotherhood TV, please check out our favorite moments "so far" episode! We will be right back the week of December 19th!. Also please make sure you add us at Facebook.com/brotherhoodtv and Twitter.com/brotherhoodtv! and tell a friend to tell a friend.
Always,
Brotherhood TV Team
KNOWING OUR HISTORY:Ortez Alderson
Born in Buffalo, New York, and reared on Chicago's South Side, Ortez Alderson became involved in gay causes in 1969 with the emergence of the Chicago Gay Liberation Front. He became a leader of the Third World Gay Revolutionaries and was involved with bringing gay issues into the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention (organized by the Black Panther Party) in 1971. He was also an anti draft and antiwar activist; as a member of the Pontiac Four, he spent almost a year in prison for breaking into a draft board and destroying files.
Born in Buffalo, New York, and reared on Chicago's South Side, Ortez Alderson became involved in gay causes in 1969 with the emergence of the Chicago Gay Liberation Front. He became a leader of the Third World Gay Revolutionaries and was involved with bringing gay issues into the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention (organized by the Black Panther Party) in 1971. He was also an anti draft and antiwar activist; as a member of the Pontiac Four, he spent almost a year in prison for breaking into a draft board and destroying files.
During the '70s, Alderson studied acting; he appeared in numerous productions in Chicago throughout the remainder of the decade, specifically dedicating himself to the promotion of the gay, Black male.
Alderson moved to New York in 1981 and continued his work in the theater, adding directing to his acting talents. He joined ACTUP/ New York in 1987, and he helped to organize numerous sit-ins and demonstrations. He also took part in the 1987 National March on Washington, where he was arrested at the sit-in at the Supreme Court.
Alderson and his life partner, Arthur Gursch, returned to Chicago in March 1989. A month later, Alderson was hospitalized with PCP. After recovering, he became active in ACT-UP/Chicago. In April 1990, Alderson helped to organize the People of Color AIDS Conference in Chicago. He also participated in and demonstrated at the VIth International AIDS Conference in San Francisco in June 1990. Shortly after returning from California, however, Alderson's health began to decline rapidly.
Ortez Alderson died on December 21, 1990. article credited to Chicago Gay and lesbian Hall Of Fame
Brotherhood TV Live From DC + Lincoln Memorial + Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial + Reflections
Check out BTV's visit to DC! Check back for pictures + our uncut video of our trip!
NEW ON Brotherhood TV ONE on ONE Interracial Dating + Race Relations PART 2
Here is part two to last weeks episode! Please share!Taking me back: My “Ambitious” Experience
By Shane’a Thomas
90s babies, it’s over. This path on my way to my 30s is starting to get really interesting, where the script in my head has copyrighted the horrid words of my parents when I was younger. “Back in the day when I was younger…”, “Shoooot, when WE were younger, we used to…”, “See, y’all have it good because when I was your age, we used to…”, and I love the team approach, (after being insulted or called ‘old’ by a kid, you look at a nearby person of same age and try to save face) “Old?! Boy, watch this! Johnny, you remember [ this dance/song/article of clothing/embarrassing moment in history that just makes you seem older]? We are starting to feel the aches and pains of being athlete in high school, popping out kids, and trying to avoid looking like the old person in the club trying to pick up young’uns (what’s your cut-off age? Anything you say after this question was possibly inappropriate), and the music we listen to is starting to sound like “garbage” and “boom boom music” and decide to pop in an old Tribe Called Quest cd reminiscing on the Native Tongues. Music has changed as we didn’t think it was going to. We were hoping it would wait forever before it was unrecognizable, and made us feel old.
As a school social worker, I learned fast that I was not only old, but uncool. As much as I still hold onto the love of my sweatshirts and sneakers, the kids were always newer and they were already plotting for the next pair of reissued Jordans (“Back in the day when I was younger, we wore the ORIGINAL Penny Hardaways! And don’t get me on those Grant Hills!”). I caught onto slang late, comparing notes with other coworkers, and even shamelessly have the kids give us a 101. DC is different from going up in the suburbs. A bit harder, rougher, more critical. There is an elitist attitude no matter what you look like. There is a standard you must meet, and if you from out of town, you have a put on a good performance to let people know you down. DC natives can smell bammas from a mile away. There is a line of time where the kids and I connected over music, but it always turned into an argument of Jay-Z versus Biggie, and both parties leave mad, mostly over wasted time.
As much as people from DC are critical of outsiders, the insiders don’t get a break either. If you’re from out of town and you are talking rough about the Redskins, you’re asking for pain. But if the Redskins lose a game (which is pretty often), dead silence lies in the city. It’s like someone died. Really. So, when I was counseling in a middle school, I had asked a DC native, “So! What do you think about Tabi Bonney?”, a little too cheery to know a bit of DC culture. “Tabi Bonney? Yo, he sucks.” I honestly enjoyed him, and I was rooting him as someone to be on top. But I am not from there, my opinion doesn’t matter. I thought things looked up for him when “Nuthin but a Hero”, a song very “VH1Soul”, didn’t bat an eye it seemed like.
That’s why I am a cheerleader for Wale. If I saw Wale on the street to this day, I would have no idea what he looked like. He is DC. Dreads, white T-shirts and Nike Boots. And drive. ‘Ambition”. Hunger. This guy says he has no days off and means it. Kinda makes you question your own work ethic. He had to catch his footing in the beginning (ie Lady Gaga?), and packaging go-go into something the nation can get a taste of, despite the eye rolls and boos in New York clubs I went to, he found his wave to ride on this new album. As vulnerable as he is and the topics he chooses to discuss (the skin color discussion and trying to understand a women’s self-esteem ), he is straining every word out of him. ”Turn the music up, I wanna fight the music” he says on “Illest Bitch”, and he does. It’s as if he is being conscious of his timing (or just being conscious. Would Malcolm or Martin support him calling his sister a “bitch” over a nice beat? Doubt it. But your determination to shape what is right, truth and history laced by your intention makes the idea, cute.), remember his lyrics, and imitating, or rather beating, whoever he is trying to beat to be number one. Hunger. A gritty rawness and fight to beat yourself, after you beat your city. You can feel the hard work he put into this album, whether you think his album is a classic, success or flop. That doesn’t matter. For someone who respects and guiltily loves a good “rose growing in concrete” story (in an admittedly privileged social worker type way), I respect the hustle. As the less fortunate on the side of the roads asking for money, or creating their own clothing lines or selling homemade print shirts for Howard Homecoming or Gay Pride doesn’t bring as much money as an entertainer, the hustle is the same, and doesn’t work other people believe it’s worth it. Prove to me I’m going to come up if I use this, and we have a deal. I miss that in rap. I believe us 80s babies don’t mind the flashy clothes (remember Cross Colours?) or even the half-nude women in the videos (I wasn’t really allowed to watch the “Pumps in a Bumps” video for obvious reasons, but I found a way), but it’s because no one works hard anymore. Everyone recycles a beat and talks about the same thing over and over again. Nas was hungry, Talib Kweli, Fat Joe and the Fugees starved too. Wale knows that he is behind in the game, and fighting a place in rap nationally is not going to be an easy road without the plethora of stars coming from one place (ie Brooklyn, Chicago, Compton, Miami), using unknown elements. “Bait” makes me smile because I remember hearing my kids in the school talk about the girls they wanted to pull, “bait”, and realizing that no one else really uses that slang. Wale holds a heavy load, not just trying to fight his way to the top, with or without his city, he’s trying to stomp his foot in pop culture for DC.
So, I have set “Watch the Throne” to the side finally after months of repeated plays, and I have an album work listening to a little closer than recent releases. It’s like I either don’t want the feeling of “work” to go away because who knows when it will come again, or I want to see if I can conceptualize this passion in my head. To realize how humanly possible is it to want something. I maybe be old, I can appreciate the effort of another. But whether I think that his new album is a classic, success or a flop actually doesn’t matter. It’s the voice of DC that rises, all outsiders step back.
EXISTENCE
Written by: Shane'a Thomas
I don’t know what I’m fighting for anymore.
The amount of fear I experience every day as a queer person of color is unnatural. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is the overwhelming threat to our own psyches, so dangerous enough to change our everyday patterns and how we forever see and feel the world (moreso or not). I had a good friend make a profound observation one day, “we are all traumatized beings colliding with other traumatized beings.” As members of our society, we have lost feeling for the amount of violence we take in everyday, we cannot hear the severity in the harsh curse words of our neighbors, and the constant abuse upon ourselves comes in all forms, at all times. Tell me a day you have looked in the mirror and didn’t see your dark skin as a mark, or your accent as noise, or your presence as someone else’s waste. Disposable waste. I don’t know what I’m fighting for anymore.
There is one phenomenon of the history of humanity that takes me into the dark, damp realm of fear and hopelessness. As a social worker, I chose (then paid a lot of money for a degree) to ram into trauma head-on. Sexual abuse, neglect and all out inhumane wrongness are the things that I help people steer into another direction. For it to be positive is a tossup, and honestly a choice, I’m just providing a space for the person to do the driving. Usually individuals struggling with everyday issues, are no different than I. We are two people with the task of an intimate wrestle with life that we try to hold together.
Yet again, one thing that frightens me deep into my core that I can’t and hopefully, never will comprehend. To me, the day that I do, the day that I understand why it happens, is the day my consciousness dies and I accept it as an experience commonplace in the world with no solution. Mass extermination of a collective group of people. The constant and consistent extermination of a presence and population that one or many we know may belong to, along with ourselves, and there is nothing we can do to change it. The Metropolitan Area of DC (including Virginia and Maryland) has been hit hard particularly recently with a horrifying rash of killings, attacks and mishandlings of crimes against queer people, particularly transwomen. It has even gotten to the point where the people who are supposed to protect us, laugh in our faces. To them, our cries and pleads aren’t real. Our ability to express ourselves, the very essence of our souls through material things such as clothes and makeup, the unbelievable ability to embrace our feminine no matter how we came into the world, leads to death. Each loss makes me pray harder with bleeding knees for what has happened and what there may be to come. I’m terrified for my friends, people I know and people with whom I don’t know yet. I cross my heart my brother holds his temper in public and understands that yes, we all have a right to speak about injustice, but being a 6’7’ black man, some people feel the only way to bring you down is a bullet right through you. I am nervous to walk down streets even in the daytime as a smaller stature black woman, in hopes that may today, my path won’t be riddled with street harassment. How much longer can I stay in panic hoping my friends who are trans, or even appear to be trans, aren’t pulled into the slaughter of young lives expressing their inner most truths. It’s getting to the point where I can’t feel anymore.
What is there, with hope, left to fight for?
Existence. The right to exist. The ability to step out of our doors and breathe, knowing that our next breath won’t be taken by someone else. If there a capability to own the freedom is there to express the you that only you feel like you can see, to the world? What does that even feel like? Why can’t I feel that? Why can’t I know my place is right here, right now? But the thing is, everyone else thinks their right to exist doesn’t include us. The ideals that we have to existence are removable and can easily be exterminated.
Yet, we can’t cry freedom without sacrifice. I have been told some words recently that have changed my perspective on any and every activity that I put my energy into. That I must “fight for my healing and transformation”. That if I want to make space for change, I have to fight for it. Just making time for it doesn’t count anymore. If I want a sacred hour, I must push away all the distractions, silence the noise inside and outside my head. Gather my materials and work. Work every second of those 60 minutes, then make space again. Each step has to be 2 steps ahead. Our well-being is not a part-time job. “When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime,” says Angela Davis. “We persevere,” says bell hooks, “because we believe our presence is needed, is important.”
We have to remember, what we do, has a reward, and a consequence behind us. Many more of us will die before the rest of us will get to live. But let us all unselfishly live as if our presence, our footsteps, are making space for the next person behind us. The thing to fight for is you because is it making space for us. The right to believe is to seek, the right to exist is to do.
