The Gayest Summer Ever
By Keith Boykin, in pop culture
Tuesday, September 2 2003, 9:55AM
Perhaps it was a fitting end to the gayest summer ever. A mummy discovered this summer thought to be Queen Nefertiti turns out to be a man instead of a woman. That's what Egyptian antiquities director Zahi Hawass said over the weekend. Whether this mummy was a queen, a drag queen, or something else, the summer's news has forced us all to confront our issues about sexuality.
Summer ended as it began here in New York -- cold, wet and rainy. A cool Memorial Day in May led to a cool Labor Day weekend in September.
Black gays and lesbians flocked to Washington in May for that city's Black Gay Pride weekend and then flocked to Atlanta last weekend for Black Gay Pride there. I've been to both in the past but chose to skip them this year.
The summer that began with a Supreme Court ruling legalizing homosexual sex in the privacy of the bedroom ended with Madonna's lesbian kiss on national television. From May to September, summer was punctuated by a "queer eye" for sodomy, marriage, bishops, and foie gras.
It was also a season of hate. If we count summer from May to September, we can count Sakia Gunn, Shani Baraka, Rayshon Holmes, Bella Evangelista, Emonie Kiera Spaulding and Dee Andre among the LGBT people of color who were shot or killed. And those are just the names we know.
In politics, summer began with hope that the war in Iraq was won and over and with a sense of inevitability around President Bush's reelection. Now in September, the war continues to drag on, the most anti-war Democratic candidate has surged in the polls, and most Americans think Bush can be beat next fall.
Careful not to repeat the mistakes of his father, the president kicked off the 2004 campaign with a Labor Day speech in Ohio and an appointment of a jobs czar yesterday. The moves were carefully designed to cover up his decision to end a 60-year-old law requiring employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime.
Last Thursday, the reigning queens of pop music -- Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera -- scandalized middle America with a now much publicized kiss on stage during the MTV Video Music Awards. But even that wasn't the end of the summer.
Although summer still continues for several weeks, Labor Day marks the unofficial end to the most relaxing season of the year. The fitting end came this weekend when Egyptian antiquities director Zahi Hawass threw water on the claims that the so-called Nefertiti mummy was even a woman.
Hawass told reporters that a double-piercing in the Nefertiti mummy's ear was common to both sexes, but in Nefertiti's day, it was even more common in men. So much for that old 1970s earring logic that "left is right and right is wrong." "All the queens used to wear earrings in their wigs, not in their ears," Hawass said.
If Hawass can teach us anything, maybe it's that gender identity expressions are not universal. The whole idea that men should dress one way and women dress another is a man-made social construction. Maybe, just maybe, society might learn something from this gay summer other than how corporations can profit off of the commodification of a stereotypical sexual orientation-based lifestyle.
We still have a long way to go. As the Bible says in Jeremiah 8:20, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."
Comments conceal
Caine Hampton
September 2 2003, 10:32AM
Great article, Keith. I'm happy that you mentioned that there are 3 more weeks left to summer. Despite the gloomy New York skyline and pressure from an increasingly aggresive media and a dominant culture that can't handle warm weather - SUMMER STILL AIN'T OVAH and it did not begin on memorial day. Don't know about you, but I'm still wearing white!
Nloco
September 2 2003, 12:10PM
Thank you Keith for this info...you just poured on my already rainy day. I watched the two hour "Reserecting Nefertiti" special on the History chanel recently and was very excited about this new discovery. In any case, I must agree that this summer was for sure the gayest summer yet.
peace
Kola Boof
September 2 2003, 1:07PM
Zahi Hawass is a known racist and his organization of Scholars is one of the key groups that supported the building of Lake Nuba (a man-made lake stretching from Egypt to Sudan that now HIDES from existence several thousand Nubian pyramids--they're underwater!--and caused the resettlement and "death" of several hundred thousand Nubians from the Nuba Mountains)...let us not forget that his (and the Egyptian council's) main objection was the idea that Nefertiti was Black (which she most definitely was).
And now that over 1,000 Pyramids of Sudan (Sudan having more pyramids than Egypt does) are 200 feet underwater...archeologists cannot dig and discover the proof that the Egyptians were an out-growth of Black Nubian and Cushitic civilizations...which existed BEFORE Egypt.
It's a terrible shame that the original Egyptian people (the Afrangi and other Nilotic Blacks) were conquered by Arab Muslim tribes and wiped out by Cleopatra's "intermarriage law" (forbidding Egyptians to marry Egyptian)...and we should never forget that today's modern day Egyptian society is one so fanatical over ISLAM that they loathe the "Pagan" Blacks who ruled in ancient times...this is a terrible issue for that country, which was my father's country.
Keith forgot to mention that Hawaas's claims (for why he believed the mummy was a "male") were proven by a colleague to be outlandish and untrue almost as soon as he made them...the media chose not to cover that part.
It is true...that in ancient Egypt and Sudan (Cush/Nubia), "homosexuality" played a very major role in our religious antiquity and was respected as a natural "component" of heterosexuality. Thus most of the Royals were in heterosexual marriages but proved having "royal blood" by engaging homosexual encounters (for religious reasons!) with their CHAMBER SLAVES. The High Priests of Egypt "ejaculated together". Nefertiti's husband had art work commissioned that portrayed him as hermaphoditic and then another with a "loose", hanging anal hole (Something that is never EVER mentioned).
BUT...don't feel bad Nefertiti...I Kola have been called a MAN too (and even after giving birth to children!). And so has Grace Jones, Iman, Naomi and practically every other black woman whose beauty was too aristocratic and BLACK to be stolen and claimed by White Supremacy.
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alicia banks
September 2 2003, 3:14PM
great recap keith!
this most recent archaeolgical fiasco is further evidence that rigid gender id is a political construct rather than a scientific or biological one...
unlike gaybashing humans, nature is fluid, flexible, and endlessly diverse
peace
ab
Yo'man
September 3 2003, 4:30PM
Keith, is that you in the picture? If it ain't it sure looks like you.
Yo'man is right
September 4 2003, 6:50PM
When I first saw the pic attached to this article I thought it was Keith too. I mean he is rather pretty in the face. I thought maybe he posted a pic he took as a member of the House of Essence.
TheDivine02
September 7 2003, 10:33PM
This was definitely an amusing article. I will agree with all of this. I think, though, that I need to watch the History Channel more! Lol! Keep up the good work. I stop here for my weekly dose of news and happenings.