Looking back at 30 years of ‘B-Boy Blues’
Before there was “B-Boy Blues,” there was an admirer of “The Color Purple” who was so put off by an AmNews reader’s misogynistic critique of the film after its 1985 release, he clapped back in a letter to the editor. A few months later, the letter-writer became an AmNews contributor, expanding the letter into a full-fledged commentary reminding Black consumers of film and TV that there’s more than one way to tell a Black story—and earning his first published byline in the process.
“The AmNews was the only newspaper I purchased; I looked forward to it every Thursday,” says James Earl Hardy, the letter-writer, the commentator, and then-future author of “Blues,” a bona fide classic in Black gay literature. “I loved how the paper covered us and made no apologies for that, so seeing my byline in it was a big deal to me, as well as my family. It felt like I had arrived as a writer, both professionally and culturally.”
Hardy grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant a block away from where Spike Lee filmed “Do the Right Thing,” but has called Kips Bay home for the past 30 years. He’s written for several publications and published book after book along the way, but earned a permanent place on bookshelves with his debut: “B-Boy Blues,” first published in 1994, which is noted as the first hip-hop love story centering Black gay characters.
It hit like a hurricane with young Black gay readers at the time; 30 years later, it still finds its way into the hearts of the generations of readers that came after.
“Back then, I received hand-written letters mailed in envelopes with stamps of Ella Fitzgerald and MLK; today it’s social media posts and DMs,” he said.
Not that it was easy. The 1990s were an uneasy time for Black authors; Alice Walker, “Purple” author, publicly beefed with Terry McMillan after the success of “Waiting to Exhale,” dividing Black readers of more literary-minded works aligned with the former and the rush of contemporary storytelling associated with the latter that came to dominate the decade. Hardy entered the sphere and would go on to be one of the most visible gay authors of the era.
“You were expected to walk through one door—Black or gay—and the novel unapologetically embraced and celebrated both,” he said. “For them, as well as the rest of society, ‘gay’ was a white thing while ‘Black’ was specifically seen through a prism of heterosexuality. ‘B-Boy’ was too gay for some heteros, too Black for some whites—as well as the wrong kind of gay for certain white gay folk and the wrong kind of Black for certain Black hetero folk.”
Hardy added that “The question was always, ‘Who is going to read a Black-on-Black gay love story?’ The answer, it turns out, was everybody. I knew something special, transcendent was happening when I’d travel to Brooklyn and there were sistas reading ‘B-Boy’ on the A train. Many folks who aren’t Black and/or gay and/or male have told me that they got 50, 60 pages into the novel and totally forgot it was about two men.”
“Blues” has spun off into a series penned by Hardy, a film adaptation that debuted on BET+ in 2021, and a stage adaptation off-Broadway in 2022.
Black gay representation in the media is having a little bit of a moment, but is far from saturation. While “Blues” marks 30 years of shelf life, few Black gay authors have been presented alongside Hardy in the same timespan.
“We’ve definitely moved from the ‘Invisible Men’ era of the ’90s; it truly was a desert back then,” he said, referencing his late counterpart, E. Lynn Harris, and Harris’s debut novel, “Invisible Life.”
“Today, we’re featured more in corporate entertainment, but too often we’re the sidekick—if not an outright accessory—to a heterosexual woman. I’m interested in seeing us at the center of our own narratives, where we’re not only presented but represented.”
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