.: True Romance

Sunday, June 22, 2008

True Romance

Week two of operation purge! And I am or more correctly my apartment is 50% lighter and as clean as ever! My last job was my hall closet... a catch all for things that are important to me in some way. I collect things that have been or remind me of significant moments. I came across a piece that in many ways is one of the most important mementos from any of my relationships. First let me start by saying I am a romantic at heart, I believe in happy endings, redemptive endings, walking into the sunset with he one I love... Yeap..I'm straight out of a syrupy sticky Spielberg movie! Being in the life has taught me that men are generally not very romantic in nature so when it happens it carries a fair amount of impact.

So here's my story.. you can judge for your self... It's spring of 2000 and I am on a two city junket, Washington D.C. and New York. The D.C. part of the trip was for pleasure as I wanted to spend a long weekend with my friend Lewis and visit my other bud Reggie. On Friday evening we were at "the rail" (a club in DC) when this guy walks up to me and starts chatting me.. He wanted to know if I was free to hang out with him and I like an idiot declined as I had just gotten in and was trying to have fun with my friends. He asked me for my number and then disappeared. I have never been the type to be picked up at a club... so when it happens I'm like, huh???

No soooner had I gotten back to Lewis's apartment on G street when the phone rings and Lewis is handing me the phone... It's him and he wants to know if he can pick me up tomorrow night... I'm like ...umm ok. Saturday comes around and I am out with friends and enjoying the day.. but thinking about the evening to come. My curiosity has blossomed into anticipation. On the dot 7pm he is there to pick me up and we are off on our little adventure... that is after Lewis gives him a little grilling, where, when , how long... We ended up with some food and DVD's back at his house for the evening and suffice it to say we had a great time. One of the films we watched was the Thomas Crown Affair (more on this in a min.)

We met up the next day to go to the movies with my friends at the theater at Union Station and spent the rest of the day hanging out. Monday morning and my plane to NY is coming fast but I have had a great time and really wish I could stay. I asked him to plan to come to Toronto so I could show him around and we could see where this was going and then we called it a night.

It's Monday morning and I am at Regan National at 5:30 as I'm on the shuttle to JFK where I am meeting coworkers for some meetings at the Ford regional offices. I had grabbed a bagel and juice and was sitting at the gate.. basically by myself as it wasn't a very full flight. I was smiling to myself thinking how cool it was to have seen my friends but more importantly a new freind.... suddenly a hand reached out to my shoulder from behind me and I turned around to see a slightly out of breath Kevin!

I am like wow! what are you doing here? There were two planes to NY at opposite ends of the terminal, he was still catching his breath from his run across the terminal having checked the other plane. (remember this is 2000 and walkin/running from gate to gate with out a ticket to ride was still possible!) He then hands me a stack of magazines... mostly tabloids and a geographic... "here I thought you would need something to read on your flight!" "Uh ok" I stammered... thinking it was so good to see him one last time but old magazines were just a lil weird... We hugged and they called my flight and he hung around long enough to see me off.

The plane takes off and I am still trying to figure out what that was all about... It hit me...the magazines are a cover for something else! The plane is till climbing and those magazines are in the bin above my head and I cant get up... Finally the seat belt light comes off and I practically cracked my head leaping from my seat... I grab the stack and sit back down... and there it was in the copy of the Geographic... a color print out of him in front of a picture he had...the same picture as the one in the Thomas Crown Affair! A little note "Christopher, Someone in D.C. misses you! xoxo Kevin" The smile on my face couldn't be wiped off if I tried... to me this was incredibly romantic and one of the most romantic events in my adult life.

Kevin ended up coming to Toronto a few times... and while we had some great times, long distance relationships aren't easy and our moment passed. Still I think fondly of him when ever I see this picture and that same smile comes to my face.

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

Order your copy today by clicking on the books above!

Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com