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*There’s a lot going on in the news lately. Death, childbirth, rumors and criminal charges. Some of it has my head spinning and some of it has my stomach churning. But all of it is being talked about, so I’m going to toss in my two cents.

In no particular order, here are my Top Ten Random Thoughts for this week:

More Top Ten Random Thoughts:

1. I was sad indeed to hear about the passing of my fraternity brother, best-selling author E. Lynn Harris.

Harris paved the way for self-publishing authors to be taken seriously and to bridge themselves to the next phase of their career. As for his talent, I didn’t particularly care for the subject matter he wrote about most, but was still strongly drawn to his writing style and read his work anyway. I wanted him to write mysteries, because I love that genre and loved his writing style. He was too young a talent to leave so soon.

2. I’m about sick of losers talking about Michael Jackson.

I didn’t want to say too much while people were still mourning, but many of the so-called “fans” were the same people who had written him off as a child molester and claimed that his career was over. Now, after crying their eyes out, they are all proclaiming themselves his number one fan.

3. How crazy is it that Nas has to shell out more than half a million dollars per year to his estranged wife Kelis?

$44,000 per month is an awful lot of money for one woman and one child. Of course he should support her and the baby, especially if she isn’t working and he has been the breadwinner. I haven’t heard anything from Kelis since “Milkshake.” But why does the settlement have to come in like a lottery ticket just because he has it?

4. I need some of these goofy Black people to decide what they want from President Obama.

Let’s be clear: Barack Obama is the president of the United States, not the president of Black people. And since there is no general consensus from Black people in terms of what we expect from him, how about we just let him do his damned job and focus on trying to fix the nation’s economic nightmare?

5. If the bonehead gay people who responded to my piece on gay racism (“Gay Racism Must End”) are the best the gay community has, they are in some serious trouble.

A bunch of rotten brained gay “activists” decided to email me and post to message boards to tell me I am wrong about gays being silly to blame Blacks for the gay marriage initiative failing. Okay, let’s get this straight—I don’t have a problem with you doing your thing, but I don’t owe you anything to help you get it. And just because you say I’m homophobic doesn’t mean I have any fear. How about either using critical reasoning to make a convincing argument or focus on getting more gay people to support your cause? We don’t call on you for support and you need to not harass us. Some Blacks are gay and some gays are Black—we know that, now move on.

6. How sad is it that Vernon Forrest lost his life after giving money to a person he thought was in need?

I’m a huge advocate of providing spare change for people in need, but I have to admit, I won’t be doling out cash at the gas station anytime soon. Forrest was only 38 years old. He was approached by a man asking for money and his act of kindness went insanely and tragically awry.

7. If the stupid cops who arrested Henry Gates weren’t acting stupidly, the president wouldn’t have said they were acting stupidly.

I’m not mad at the cops for coming to the scene. It’s happened to me before. But once you show that you are the person who lives in the house, they need to move on to the next donut shop. There was obviously something else going on and since this tree didn’t fall in the forest, many of us hear it loud and clear.

8. Michael Jackson’s personal doctor, Dr. Conrad Murray may soon be running a jailhouse clinic.

C’mon dude—you’re living in the house with Jackson and you give him a powerful drug and then leave the room? What did you think? The horrible possibilities were endless and as a doctor, you should have known better. I think this guy was just so happy to be Michael Jackson’s doctor that he would have done anything the singer told him to do. That’s just sad.

9. What a surprise that Michael Vick was reinstated by the NFL commissioner and may actually play as early as October.

America loves its dogs (sometimes more than people), so his reinstatement was quite a shocker. However, there is no shock to learn that both the NY Giants and the NY Jets have expressed a lack of interest in Vick.

10. Who the hell was surprised that Sarah Palin was embroiled in an ethics scandal that forced her to leave the Alaska governor’s mansion?

The woman was a fluke to begin with. I never thought she was the sharpest pencil in the box and I was less than impressed with the beauty people kept referring to. What I am impressed with is the fact that we may finally be hearing the last from this foolish woman who helped the Republican Party make a foolish mess of itself.

As random as they are, those are my top ten thoughts for this week. Please feel free to add your own.

Darryl James is an award-winning author of the powerful new anthology “Notes From The Edge.” He released his first mini-movie, “Crack,” and will soon release his first full-length documentary. View previous installments of this column at www.bridgecolumn.proboards36.com. Reach James at djames@theblackgendergap.com.

THE JOURNAL OF STEFFANIE RIVERS: Unofficially Committed

*With the passing of each generation it seems the term ‘committed relationship’ moves farther away from what it used to be.
Marriage, in its traditional connotation, is when two mature heterosexual people publically avow to live together in love and harmony with a legal and binding document called a marriage certificate.

According to a Time Magazine report, more than 5 million unmarried couples cohabit in the United States. That’s nearly eight times the statistic in 1970. Also, forty percent of babies born in
2007 had unmarried parents, up 25% since 2002.

So if couples are willing to go half on living expenses and a baby, what could be holding them back from walking down the matrimonial isle? If you like the cow so much that you taste the milk on the regular, you might as well put a contract on it, right?

My first thought is fear: Fear of the unknown or fear that their relationship could end like most others in America – in divorce court.

Then there are those people who say they don’t need a marriage certificate to create commitment for them. And the money they save on a wedding is better used to pay for the cost of living and child care.
You can’t argue with that.

But if two people care enough about each other to do all the things that married people do – and they’ve been doing it successfully for years – they should make it official.

For those couples trying to avoid the legal consequences of a failed marriage, they might be surprised to learn that some state laws consider them to be married because of the amount of time they have lived together as a couple, and they are parties in a common law marriage contract.

You can run but you can’t hide.

Send questions, comments or requests for speaking engagements to Steffanie at teamtcbadvertising@hotmail.com. And view the video version of her journal at youtube.com/steffanierivers.

THE ILL PROFESSORS: Visible Life, Remembering E. Lynn Harris

*This week, Phill Boogie remembers E. Lynn Harris. He shares a little bit of his personal experience with E. Lynn’s work and how it impacted his life. Randy Bandit also wishes to express his respect for and condolences to Mr. Harris’ loved ones.

I’d never had a physical reaction to a book before. I’d always been an avid reader. As a child, I spent many afternoons communing with friends reading Encyclopedia Brown. In high school I moved on to James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Donald Goines. Still, while I had emotional reactions to many of the books that I spent time with, I’d never physically responded.

I moved to Los Angeles a few months after graduating from Hampton University. Saying that I “moved” is actually a generous description of my arrival in L.A. I was a squatter. I had very little money and stayed on the floor of my friends’ apartment. The whole experience was overwhelming. Beyond the ordinary adjustments we all make after leaving the nest, I became increasingly restless with myself as I struggled with my identity.

I wanted to start over in L.A., but it’s hard to do that when so much of your past still lingers in your present. I was a popular guy at Hampton. Literally, I was voted “most popular” the week before graduation. I pledged. I was class president. I was “that” guy.

I was also lonely as hell. I was trapped between two worlds. In my public life, I was confident, smart and affable. Privately, I was uncertain.

Instead of starting over in Los Angeles, I found myself having to be “that” guy again. Surrounded by old schoolmates, I was crushed by the weight of expectation of being what I’d imagined people wanted and needed me to be. I didn’t know what it would take to jump start my real life, as opposed to the imagined one I’d created. Oddly enough, it wasn’t some spiritual event that helped push me forward. It was a rent payment.

My first apartment in L.A. was a shared three bedroom in a complex called Park LaBrea. Park LaBrea is not cheap. My roommates and I wanted to live in Venice Beach like the cast of “The Real World;”
but one look at the then dusty Venice neighborhoods, sent us headed towards greener and too expensive pastures. One night, as I was writing my rent check, I realized that there was no way I needed to be paying this much money to live in hiding.

I came out.

It was a slow process. It started with my roommates and a couple of friends. Still, even after taking that step, I was uneasy. What had I done? I knew that I’d changed the course of my life and wasn’t quite prepared for the consequences. I thought I would be less lonely and freer; but I felt more trapped. I felt exposed and I didn’t have anyone to talk to; at least not anyone who I thought would understand.

My friend Danielle, one of the people whose floor I’d once slept on, recommended that I read a book called Invisible Life, by this guy named E. Lynn Harris. She told me it would help, but I was resistant.
I had led a “normal” life I thought. I wasn’t teased, or ostracized and made to feel different in the way that I’d heard most gay men had been. I didn’t think Invisible Life could do anything for me. However, weeks later, I found myself in the bookstore looking for it.

It’s hard to imagine now, but I was actually nervous about picking the book up. What if someone I knew walked up on me? How would I explain? I crept up on the book as if we were playing hide and seek.
I went to the store a couple times before I finally bought it. I went home, jumped on to my foam, eggshell temporary mattress and began reading.

About twenty pages into the book, I’d cried, laughed and gotten an erection. I felt like I’d been under surveillance for the last five years of my life and someone told my story. When I read of his protagonist Raymond’s fear of everyone knowing he’d just had his first gay experience, my stomach was in knots. Raymond contemplated the humiliation his family and fraternity brothers would feel. He’s consumed with paranoia and goes as far as considering dropping out of school.

E. Lynn was writing my life.

After reading that one paragraph of Raymond’s morning-after, fear laden regret, I literally threw the book against the wall. I let it sit there on the floor for a while. All of the feelings I had after my first experience came rushing back to me. I too, felt sick the next day. I thought that everyone was looking at me. I was so physically ill; my father had to pick me up from school. It was the flu, I told everyone. I almost did not go back to school the next semester.

After taking a moment to process the idea of not being alone and having what I now knew was a shared experience, I picked the book back up. By the time I finished it a couple hours later, my life was changed. While I can appreciate depictions of gay life that explore the perspective of people who are immersed in the culture, E. Lynn’s books were more representative of my experience. His books were about the whole person, as opposed to just the individual parts.

I am a man; a black man, an educated black man, a son, brother and writer. I am many things including being gay. E. Lynn’s work, especially his first two books, examines what it means to be all of those things and the difficulty in finding balance. Invisible Life didn’t give me answers, but it gave me hope. It gave me the courage to be able to write this piece and not be afraid.

E. Lynn Harris will be remembered in many different ways. For some he will be the author who exposed women to the “D.L.” For others he will be a commercially successful author who opened doors. I had an opportunity to tell him how much his work means to me. I’m sure he’s heard this a million times over. Still, he responded like he’d heard this for the first time and was appreciative of my admiration.

We call everyone a pioneer, or a legend nowadays and it’s become a bit pedestrian. Instead, I’ll be more personal and say E. Lynn Harris was a gift. I am thankful that he shared a piece of himself with the world and I hope that his work and life continues to be an inspiration.

~Phill Boogie

To hear more, please visit illprofessors.com and listen to our podcasts on literature, film and music. Subscribe and please leave comments. This article is courtesy of Written Magazine and appears in a special insert honoring E. Lynn Harris.

TURNER’S TWO CENTS: TOP COPS CRITICIZE CROWLEY

By Cameron Turner

OBAMA OWES NO APOLOGY

*Police unions in Cambridge, Massachusetts and elsewhere should be content with President Obama’s conditional retraction of his original comments on the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates.

Personally, I think Mr. Obama was accurate when he said the Cambridge cops “acted stupidly” when they arrested Dr. Gates at his own house on a clearly trumped-up disorderly conduct charge. But, as President, Mr. Obama should have been more diplomatic in his phrasing.
On the other hand, the President was mad because an American citizen was wrongfully arrested – under circumstances that hinted at possible racial bias. Every American should all feel angry when that happens.

Mr. Obama lost no time in re-phrasing his criticism. In an ABC News interview and then in a brief appearance in the White House press room, the President acknowledged that both Dr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley became overly emotional. But, Mr. Obama stood firm (appropriately) on his assertion that Gates should not have been arrested. He even called Crowley and Gates personally and invited them to discuss the incident over a beer at the White House.

The President has gone the extra mile to cool this thing out.
Now, it’s time for the police to be accountable.

President Obama does not owe America’s police an apology. But Sgt. Crowley, the Cambridge Police Department and their backers should apologize to Dr. Gates and to the American People. Why? Because Sgt.
Crowley was wrong and he alone bears the legal responsibility for this terrible and unnecessary incident which may have worsened complicated police-community relations nationwide.

COPS SAY CROWLEY WAS WRONG

Sgt. Crowley’s conduct has been publicly criticized by police professionals from across the U.S., including active and retired chiefs and cops-turned educators. For example:

-- Miami Police Chief John Timoney told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “There’s a fine line between disorderly conduct and freedom of speech. It can get tough out there, but I tell my officers, ‘Don’t make matters worse by throwing handcuffs on someone. Bite your tongue and just leave.’ ”

-- San Jose, California’s retired police chief, Joseph McNamara, told the Los Angeles Times: “The law is clear. You can’t be guilty of disorderly conduct simply because you are saying bad things to a police officer.”

-- Jon Shane, 17-year veteran of the Newark, N.J. police department who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, tells TIME magazine, “…a police officer can't go out and lock you up for disorderly conduct because you were disrespectful toward them. The First Amendment allows you to say pretty much anything to the police. You could tell them to go (expletive) themselves and that's fine."

-- Norm Stamper, ex-chief of the Seattle PD, told the L.A. Times that Sgt. Crowley “lured (Gates) outside…and cuffed him up.” Stamper added that Dr. Gates’ anger at Crowley was typical of “a true American” with “a healthy skepticism about authority.”

Dr. Richard Weinblatt, a former North Carolina police chief who oversees the education of would-be police officers as director of Central Ohio Technical College’s Institute for Public Safety, studied Crowley’s arrest report and concluded that the sergeant provoked Dr.
Gates by continuing to question him after he established that Gates was inside the house legally. Weinblatt wrote on his blog
(http://richardweinblatt.blogspot.com): “While perhaps the Professor was overly agitated, it was the police presence that was creating the agitation. Remove the police presence, and the agitation is gone.”

Weinblatt believes that Sgt. Crowley lost sight of his duty as a peace officer.

“We in policing are supposed to be professional problem solvers…We are supposed to deescalate situations even if it means walking away,” Weinblatt writes. “While I believe in officer discretion, I do not believe that it was executed wisely here. I feel that (Sgt. Crowley) should have seen that the big picture of what we do and why we are here was forgotten for the heat of the moment. We in law enforcement are supposed to be above that.”

Weinblatt believes that Sgt. Crowley’s actions will damage the public image of police, making it harder for cops to do their jobs.
He closes his blog by lamenting: “Officers nationwide will have to contend with folks that have yet another seed of discontent with law enforcers. All because the big picture was not heeded here.”

Defending Crowley at this point is stubborn, thin-skinned and, perhaps, agenda-driven. So, instead of sweating the President for an undeserved apology, police unions in Cambridge and elsewhere should admit that Sgt. Crowley messed up and then go about reassuring the public that emotional, unprofessional reactions will not be accepted from our men and women in blue.

Thanks for listening. I’m Cameron Turner and that’s my two cents.

THINK! IT AIN’T ILLEGAL…YET!

Cameron Turner is a veteran entertainment reporter and columnist based in Monrovia, CA. Contact him at turnerstwocents@verizon.net and read more of his “Turner’s Two Cents” editorials at www.UrbanThoughtCollective.com.

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THE BRIDGE: More Top Ten Random Thoughts