LETTER FROM LONDON: 3/20/25

WHAT STARTED OUT AS A PILGRIMAGE HAS BEGUN TO FEEL AS IF I AM NOW LIVING IN EXILE

1.

The above photo was taken of Diahann Carroll and Sidney Poitier at the 1964 Oscars, the year he won the award for Best Actor for his work in Lillies of the Field. They had met on the set of Otto Preminger’s 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess - Poitier portrayed Porgy and Carroll had been cast as Clara - and embarked on a complicated nine-year love affair which Carroll wrote about in her memoir, The Legs Are the Last to Go. I wrote about Poitier in mine, Mississippi Sissy.

Last week I saw the West End production of Ryan Calais Cameron’s Retrograde. It centers on an incident in 1955 that Poitier alludes to in his own memoir, The Measure of a Man, when he was about to be hired to star in The Man is Ten Feet Tall for NBC’s Philco Playhouse which was written by his friend, Robert Alan Aurthur, and directed by Robert Mulligan. Before he signed his contract, however, he was told that he had to sign a loyalty oath also as well as publicly denounce another friend, Paul Robeson, or he would be blacklisted by Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. There is lots of Mamet-like banter in the play if Mamet allowed himself more wit and poetry but it is also filled with political and moral arguments written as spoken arias. Poitier had a kind of bemused detachment about the incident in his memoir. That’s because, I guess, he didn’t sign the oath, denounce Robeson, wasn’t blacklisted, and got the part anyway. But the play delves into why that detachment was so hard-won. In fact, Poitier was then hired to play the same role of a dock worker in the film version a couple of years later. In between, I was born down in Mississippi.

Ivanno Jeremiah strikes the balance between dignity and outrage as Poitier when ambition enters the room not just the dark politics of that American era. As I took a walk after the show the other night, I thought about the times my own ambition as a gay man has thrown me off balance when faced with the manifestations of bigotry and political darkness as they seep into the every-day discourse of a nation, in its cafes, its corporate suites. America is certainly going through a dark time right now but if you’re LGBTQ - especially transgender - or a person of color you feel the brunt of that darkness as once more we are being shunted and shunned over into the darkness’s darker corners.

Gay Americans and Black Americans have been fighting for our civil rights all my life since I was born in that little hospital in that little town in Mississippi in 1956. They are very different fights but they are parallel. When I was a child it felt as if I were living in war zone because in many ways during the early 1960s Mississippi was just that; Black people had taken to the streets and were being met by violence. Many lost their lives, as did their white allies. I was being raised to be a bigot myself because it was threaded into the fabric of my segregated community, and through my family. Even going to the doctor or dentist was an architectural inculcation into the culture since there was a “Colored” entrance to a waiting room and a “Whites” entrance to ours with a nurses station built between them. The n-word was indeed part of the banter I overheard as I tried to decode what it meant to be an adult like the only ones I knew around me. But I had already decoded something deeper: I was different. And that difference made me feel like a spy behind enemy lines. Each time I took to the streets as I continued to decode my adulthood in my 20s and 30s was based on some elemental level of not having the agency as a child to side with those in those streets back then. Each march or demonstration I attended was an amends in some way trying to make up for being from that 1960w Mississippi, the Mississippi that still imbues who I am almost as much as being gay does. They too run along parallel tracks.

I try to have a bemused detachment about the political darkness that has descended upon America since I no longer really live there. There is certainly distance. In some way that is where I now live, in that distance. This pilgrimage I began almost 3 years ago has made me feel recently like that little spy behind enemy lines just trying to find a way to escape to the other side and find a truer home. I did for many decades in New York City when I moved there at 19. America is fifty years later my Mississippi now.

2.

I think of my transgender brothers and sisters back in America each time I walk by the National Portrait Gallery here in London and look at this banner of ceramicist and weaver of tapestries and narratives, Grayson Perry. One of the narratives he artfully weaves is for the character Claire seen in the banner. He as she loves to make an appearance at the kinds of parties where photographers are not invited as other guest but to ply their trade. Grayson-as-Claire is certainly a pop cultural presence here. I don’t really know that much about his work but am certainly aware of that presence. He is more Milton Berle than Cindy Sherman - or Cindy Sherman dressing up like Milton Berle. Perry is not transgender. More transgender adjacent. But we all are if we are talking about transgender people as citizens who deserve equal rights. Trump in his shaping and sharpening of the cruelty of his fascist regime has demonized them to appeal to those who always need to demonize the other. They are always fascism’s first-adapters.

Trump has now begun the denationalizing process by denying the very existence of transgender people. The invaluable Masha Gessen, who is transgender, writes about this in their latest New York Times op-ed column. This is how she wraps it up:

“You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population, the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights, the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. (Trump spent about five minutes of his recent address to Congress specifically attacking trans people and 10 minutes attacking immigrants; the Democratic rebuttal mentioned immigrants once and trans people not at all.) Then I finish with the standard exhortation: The attacks won’t stop here. If you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you.

“But I find that line of argument both distasteful and disingenuous. It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.”

In 2017, Grayson-as-Claire gave the inaugural lecture in the north of England for The Orwell Foundation. He titled it “I have read all the academic texts on empathy.” The thrust of it seemed to be that society has failed to find a way to tackle its rampant diaphobia, a term he learned from his wife, psychoanalyst and author, Phillipa Perry. Diaphobia is the fear of dialogue, of being affected, or directly influenced by the “other.”

Lack of empathy is not only a signal for sociopathy, but also for fascism. It doesn’t run on a parallel track though. It’s on the same one.

3.

“Hello, I’m Rebecca,” said the young woman who.came up to join me in the kitchen yesterday. If she were an artist who created narratives, I would think she was creating an exhibition of characters from cartoons who have come to life. This one she’s working on would be someone from the work of The New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast in human form. That’s the first panel above of a Roz Chast sketchbook titled “The Inescapable Thingness: On the Deep and Universal Desire for Connection” published by The New Yorker last year. “Are you the other Airbnb person?” Rebecca asked, yet another “other” for me to be in my own created narrative.

Rebecca was having trouble getting her adapter to work in her room across the hall from me and was wondering if I could help her figure it out. I told her I was better being an adapter myself than figuring out how one works because I was not good with technical stuff but I’d give it a try. I even offered her one of my extra ones before I realized she hadn’t connected her phone’s charger to the adapter. I got it all to work for her.

Rebecca is 27 and from Florida. This is not only her first time to travel internationally but also to travel alone. She told me she just had to get out of Florida and America if only for a week. This morning she got up early to get to the bus that was taking a tour group to Stonehenge. “I am slowly getting over my fear,” she said of this maiden voyage into the wider world all by herself when we were talking about our lives a bit once we’d gotten her adapted. “I’d be afraid to live like you do.”

“Fear is a waste of energy,” I told her. “Just another thing I had to let go of to live this life.”

4.

A decade ago when I was on my book tour for my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain, I was having a dinner alone in West Hollywood and realized I was sitting right next to Diahann Carroll less than an arm's length away at the adjoining table. I have posted about this before on social media so it’s a bit like singing one of my old hits - Diahann Carroll, lets say, singing “The Sweetest Sounds” from the Broadway musical No Strings during a stand at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago. She was with a young woman who seemed to be an assistant of some sort, one that didn’t require the feeling of warmth between them. "You've sung some of the sweetest songs I've ever heard," I said to her which made her laugh.

And then I confessed. "I just posted on Facebook that I was sitting next to you here at the restaurant."

In her best Dominique Devereaux intonation from Dynasty, she said, "I know you did, darling. I know you did."

That, in turn, made me laugh.

"You should see all the love you're getting in these comments on here," I told her. "There is an outpouring of love for you coming your way here on my phone."

"Well, that's nice to know."

I then introduced myself. "Kevin Simmons?" she said. "Simmons? At first I thought you said Kevin Sessums - you know, the east coast writer."

"That's who I am," I told her.

"Really? How funny. Well, thank God," she intoned as herself. "Another New Yorker."

We hit it off and talked for about half an hour. I'll keep most of it off-the-record. But we discussed her parents, the south, Julia, her early days in the theatre, San Francisco where she too lived for a time, our mutual love of NY, and, yes, Sidney Poitier, which led me to tell her about my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy, and his place in that because of what he had meant to my maid, Matty May.

She squared me in her sight. "Why is it that all gay men of a certain age always have to tell me about their nannies and maids - as if I care."

That made me really laugh - and her as well - and we bonded even more.

We talked more about show business and men. And then she asked me why I was in LA right now and I told her I was on book tour. She wanted to know what this new book was about. "It's about how I became a drug addict and was homeless and fought my way back to sobriety and to this very moment, in a way, sitting at this table talking to you," I said.

She brightened and grabbed my hand. "Good! That's much more interesting than a story about your fakakta maid."

God she was so great tonight. No bullshit. And still beautiful.

"Sidney is a gentleman," she said at one point. "But I'm no lady." It was the only thing she was wrong about all night. And lord what a lady she was.

5.

For those of you who have read, Mississippi Sissy, you know that Poitier becomes a kind of motif in it, his very name the incantation that Matty would say to herself whenever she heard the n-word in her presence, a word she even heard from me the morning after Poitier won the Oscar. He was the first African American to win the award for Best Actor and I asked Matty May, as she was making the my bed the next morning before I went to second grade, if she could "believe a n----r won Best Actor." It was a pivotal moment in my life and it is a pivotal scene in the book - as is my seeing Matty May a few years later as we both picked cotton on my uncle's farm and I overheard her quietly saying his name, "poitierpoitierpoitier" over and over, it having become a kind of mantra to calm herself with each boll that she reached for and belligerently wrenched forth to put into her sack.

Indeed, when Oprah Winfrey called me one Sunday to talk about Mississippi Sissy after having read it she told me that she was seeing Mr Poitier that coming Thursday and was going to take the book with her and read to him the passages she had marked, especially the post-Oscar and cotton field ones. The thought of Oprah reading to Mr. Poitier my words moved me beyond measure - not just for me, but for sweet dear brave proud Matty May, who changed my life by being a part of it.

During one of my Oscar weekends when I was still living my Vanity Fair life, I was out in LA to attend the magazine’s Oscar party and the one thrown by CAA’s Bryan Lourd at his home on that Friday and the Saturday afternoon picnic that Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg gave on the grounds of their home in Beverly Hills. I've seen Oprah a few times at those parties and at that picnic. When she told me she was going to read to Mr. Poitier from my book I told her about that one picnic afternoon when I spotted him sitting at one of those picnic tables. I gathered up my courage and went and knelt at his side and began to tell him about Matty May and my book and how much he had meant to her. In the middle of my telling him all this Penny Marshall came up to say hello to him and I rose to leave them but he grabbed my hand and asked me to stay. Penny said her helloes and went to sit with some other friends at a neighboring table. I continued to kneel by Mr. Poitier's side and he continued to hold my hand. "Now finish telling me all about Matty May," he said softly, her name now coming from him as his had so often come from hers. It truly was a moment of grace to have arrived at that moment from that earlier moment back in Mississippi when as a little southern boy I had broken Matty May's heart with my use of the n-word to describe this dignified man who now held my hand.

6.

My cultural calendar has been full as usual here in London. There is no other city like it for the amount of performances from which you can choose each night - and their array. I saw Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Ballet on Monday night. I have forgotten how many times I’ve seen it. But that performance had my two favorite dancers in the company in the lead roles, Matty Ball and Yasmine Naghdi. I was culturally raised in my early 20s on the precise abstractions of Balanchine based on what distracted him to the point of creating a ballet about it but it could be about my own distractions, too, I discovered as I surrendered to his work in those first years of living in New York, ballet and Balanchine signaling to me that I had finally found a place where I felt I belonged having been distracted by my need to find one since I was a sissy child behind those enemy lines wondering if there really were such a place in the world: home. When New York City Ballet was not in residence at Lincoln Center, American Ballet Theatre would have a season across the way at the Metropolitan Opera. . It programmed a lot of story ballets which I found rather clunky and too clad with convention. My narrative-driven life has always been about stories, living them, writing them, seeing the through lines, weaving some narrative threads myself, other times unraveling them. I built a writing career based on the ones that magazines put on their covers. Ballet was the one place where I could escape my incessant need for stories. It wasn’t until I began to go to the Royal and discovered the genius of MacMillan and his story ballets that I was more than won over. I was swept away. He was a weaver of narrative, too. And the Royal Ballet, his own home, performs them brilliantly. Balanchine doesn’t sit on them as well - isn’t a part of their bodies the way MacMillan is - but the company is about to do an evening of his work titled Balanchine: Three Signature Works, which includes his Serenade, Symphony in C, and Prodigal Son. My last couple of cultural outings this stay in London are attending two performances of that Balanchine evening, , on the 29th and the 31st.

I saw Cate Blanchett as Arkadina in The Seagull last Friday at the Barbican but I am going back to see it again on my birthday on the 28th and will write more about it then. I had a bit of a Cate weekend because I also saw her new film Black Bag which costars Michael Fassbinder as her husband and was directed by Steven Soderbergh. She and Fassbinder play British spies who seemed to be trained not only in black ops but also in a pointed kind of sophistication that is marked by their ability to make acerbic assertions carried on as conversation in forced social settings of their own making. I told a friend it felt like a spy movie that Edward Albee could have written. I kept thinking while watching it what a great George and Martha the two of them would make in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

On Saturday I saw the last matinee of Otherland at the Almeida. It is a wonderful play - topical and moving and gentle but not afraid of its anger - about what it is like to be transgender and a woman and a transgender woman at this moment in time. It can even handle the magic realism of its second act. Written by Chris Bush and directed by Ann Yee, the play is important without making you feel as if it is. And it has a glorious performance by Fizz Sinclair as the transgender woman. I kept wishing that J. K. Rowling had had the balls to see it.

After its matinee, I headed over to Crazy Coqs in the West End to catch a performance of Liz Calloway’s sold-out run. She is a master at the cabaret form. Her presence in that rarified world is important without making you feel as if she knows it is, which she surely must. So much of her interpretive artistry is based not only on her voice but also on her empathy. She doesn’t exactly act a song; she empathizes with it.

Her special guest on Saturday was Julian Ovenden. They sang “Move On” from Sunday in the Park with George. I always keep finding ways myself to move on - from that 19-year-old boy who arrived in New York City from Mississippi to attend Juilliard’s Drama Division to this man fifty years later turning 69 soon sitting in a London theatre watching Cate Blanchett for a second time in some Chekhov. When I walked the Camino across Spain - the first time I ever thought of myself as a pilgrim - I would start each daybreak back on the path by first playing the Mississippi Mass Choir’s rousing gospel version of “When I Rose This Morning” that would get my feet moving in dance-like ways as the sun rose and then I would listen to Bernadette Peters singing “Move On.’ and calmly with determination do just that as the calm and determined light of day arrived yet again.

Tomorrow I am heading to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Luke Thallon in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s newest production of Hamlet. It will my first time seeing the company there. And Luke is one of my favorite young actors. When I auditioned for Juilliard, one of my pieces was Hamlet’s “Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I … ” soliloquy. That was the key in its way that unlocked the first door to a world filled with locked ones I’ve tried to make my way through trying to find a home as much as I was trying to find success.

“Stop worrying where you're going-
Move on
If you can know where you're going
You've gone
Just keep moving on … “

7.

Onward.