May 14

CAN I USE YOUR RESTROOM?

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I love my adopted city of New York. I believe that I always will. I do have one pet peeve, though. Actually, I have many peeves against the city living, but this one still bugs me whenever I see it happening on the street in public view. What I’m talking about is public exposure to the male genitalia. Years ago, when I first moved to New York, I couldn’t count the number of times I’d be returning from work late and I’d be walking up the street to my room. In the distance, I’d see a man leaning his forehead against the side of a building, his shoulders slightly hunched. Or he’d be leaning against a car with an arm resting on the car’s roof. I’d keep walking the same path because I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I’m from the country. Back home, men didn’t urinate in the street in full view of anybody using the street to go somewhere. Men kept their private parts private. In the 18 years I lived in Ohio, I can’t remember ever seeing a man or a boy urinating in full view of anybody. I’m sure we didn’t have more men’s rooms […]
May 07

SHOPLIFTING WHILE BLACK?

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I watched the Starbuck’s video of the police arresting the two young Black men charged and found guilty of being Black while hanging out in a place that allows it. The video had me thinking about my own experiences. I’m a baby boomer. I’m Black. I’m probably twice as old as the young men in the Starbuck video. I’ve probably had twice as many similar experiences as those young men have. I loved to sew. Years ago, I used to make all my own clothes and my son’s clothes until he was a pre-teenager. I sold the clothes I made, including jumpsuits, business suits, and handbags on consignment in small shops and street fairs. I also made quilts, slipcovers, and upholstered my existing furniture. On a regular basis I bought fabric and trimmings, which included zippers, snaps hooks & eyes, Velcro, fusible hemming material, buttons threads, and iron-on or sew-in interfacings. I’d usually go to my favorite neighborhood fabric stores or go to Delancey Street or West 38th and 39th between 7th and 8th Avenue in the Fashion District. I’d heard of a new store in the Fashion District that specialized in trimmings, handmade lace, piping, iron-on embroidery, decorative patches, […]
Apr 30

Tyson Book Description

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
How far would you go to honor a promise? READ Leonia’s story in TYSON. It will inspire you. TYSON, a sister’s love be limitless is a fictional whodunit written in the voice of a 27-year-old, southern “colored” woman, Leonia Gillette. She and her big brother, Tyson, come north to escape a drunken father who tried to rape her. They settle in Harlem in 1927 during the Harlem Renaissance and just before the Great Depression. In 1932, somebody castrates, then murders Tyson in a Harlem alleyway, supposedly as revenge for his unpaid gambling debts. Leonia doesn’t believe the police report and decides to investigate her brother’s death. Along the way to uncovering Tyson’s killer, Leonia introduces us to a cast of characters–good, bad, and very bad– found only in the Harlem of the thirties. “TYSON, a sister’s love be limitless” is available now on Amazon in print and on Kindle. ASIN: B0795Y11HG (Kindle Version $2.99) ISBN-13: 978-1983996634 (Print Version $13.99) ISBN-10: 1983996637 (Print Version $13.99) Here are the links for: TYSON, a sister’s love be limitless: Amazon Kindle USA: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0795Y11HG Amazon Kindle UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0795Y11HG Createspace: https://www.createspace.com/8021244 Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/782272 Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/PlGVVcusaz8 Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/FB7zA8kIeIg Ask David: http://askdavid.com/reviews/book/lesbian-murder-mystery/15796 Connect with BL Wilson […]
Apr 23

WHY I WROTE SARITA & IMANI

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
  I’ve read many books and seen movies about bad boys. How good girls, nice girls, and naïve girls love them bad, bad boys so much, they’ll do almost anything to get one and keep him. Hollywood’s version of “almost anything” usually includes the good girl deserting her lifelong girlfriends; estrangement from family members; especially estrangement her own children if she has any; and sometimes the good girl loses her job too. I decided that I wanted to explore that possibility. I also want to write about an aggressive; a top; a butch; a wild stud in other words, a bad girl character who was also gay. I wanted to explore why a woman might label herself as an aggressive or a butch dyke or a wild stud. In other words what makes a bad girl bad. What’s her family like? Does she have siblings? If she has siblings, how does she relate to them? Are her parents alive and active in her life? Does she have any children? Does she work? What kind of job would she have? What kind of woman does she find attractive. Is the society that created her just like everybody’s else world or is […]
Apr 09

WHY PEOPLE LIE

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
For most of my life, I’ve been curious about something that seems to be a human phenomenon. Little kids do it. Teenagers do it. And adults do it. Even Disney characters (think Pinocchio) do it. It’s called lying. Lately I find myself wondering why people do it. Most people make such a mess of it. They tell whoppers that can so easily be uncovered. In this age of cellphone videos, body cams, social media, and information breaches, who doesn’t know your business? To me, lying seems worthless or at least more work than it’s worth. Yet people still do it. And I keeping asking myself, why do people lie? Experts Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee say that there are three types of lies. The first one is called a primary lie. This type of lie is told to hide what the teller did but fails to consider the mental state of the listener. Children as young as two and as old as four tell these kinds of lies. By the time children are four, they learn to tell secondary lies. These lies are more plausible. The teller has learned through trial and error to shape the lie to the listener’s […]
Mar 11

BLACK WOMEN AS KRYPTONITE OR ARE THEY CANARIES IN THE COAL MINE?

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I keep thinking about a newscaster guest expert I watched. I believe it was on AM Joy’s show sometime in November of 2017, when MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson said Black women were kryptonite to the Trump administration. I think not. I believe Black women are “canaries in the coal mine.” Just as canaries warned coal miners when there were poisonous gases inside the mines by chirping until they died, Black women are issuing early warning signals that this country is in serious trouble. In April 2017, Mr. Johnson had written an article about Black women being natural enemies to the Republican party and to the Trump administration in particular. In the article, he mentioned how Susan Rice was used by the Republicans in the mini-unmasking scandal. Remember how Ms. Rice, as a part of her job as national security advisor, asked to unmask the names of Trump’s transition officials? She wanted the names revealed to find out who on Trump’s team was talking to Russian spies that were meddling in US elections. President Trump and his Republican allies tried to distract the public from the truth about Russian meddling in our elections. He replaced it with a trumped-up theory that […]
Feb 26

WHY I WROTE “TYSON, a sister’s love be limitless”

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I’ve always wondered what Black lesbian life was like in the Harlem of the 20s and 30s. I decided to do some research before I started writing “TYSON” a bittersweet tale of loyalty, murder and romance during Harlem’s Renaissance. My purpose was to write a fictional murder mystery that takes place during that time. What I discovered was nothing. There were volumes written about white gays and lesbians living in New York during that time but very little, usually one or two paragraphs sometimes an entire page or two about Black gay life in Harlem. I found even less information, mainly antidotal information about Black lesbians living during the time period I was interested in. I enjoyed the research I’ve done on the subject of Black lesbians of Harlem in the 20s and 30s. Back in 2003, when I began researching this novel, I worked full time for the city so I did research at local libraries, cultural organizations like Herstory (lesbian archives) in Brooklyn, the LGBT Community Center’s historical collections at 13th Street in lower Manhattan, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th Street and Malcolm X Blvd after work and on weekends. I should also mention […]
Feb 19

WHAT BLACK HISTORY MONTH MEANS TO ME

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I read an article in a recent Southern Poverty Law Center1 newsletter that mentioned a survey SPLC2 conducted targeting approximately 1000 senior high schooler’s knowledge about American slavery. The SPLC survey also involved social studies teachers and reviewed the history textbooks they used. This is what the survey found. Would you believe only 8% of the high school seniors surveyed could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War? It gets worse. The Washington Post read the same survey and summarized it by saying this: • 68% of the students didn’t known slavery was formally ended by a Constitutional amendment. • 22% of the students could identify how provisions in the Constitution gave advantages to slaver holders. • 44% students knew that slavery was legal in all colonies during the American revolution. The survey also evaluated ten popular history textbooks. Even the best history textbook score was 70 points out of 100 points based on a rubric of what should be in a history book about American slavery. The remaining textbooks accumulated 46 points out of 100 points. Why am I telling you all this when Black History Month is half over? ____________________________ 1 I donate to Southern […]
Feb 12

LETTER TO MY GRANDDAUGHTER

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
The photograph on the left was taken last year on the way to my sister’s Going Home Service in Maryland in December. That’s my 100-year old mother reading a menu at a seafood restaurant. She has a cellphone in the pocket of the jacket she’s wearing. She never leaves home without it and the emergency medical alert chain around her neck. She uses her cellphone to call folks like me; her two other children; six grandchildren; her AKA sorority sisters; friends and her neighbors. The photograph on the right was also taken last in December. That’s my 3-year old granddaughter in reindeer clown makeup. We’d just returned from the main branch of the NY public library at Fifth Avenue. We had gone to NYPL’s Christmas Open House for children. There she is relaxing with her mother’s cellphone in a chair made just her. (That’s what I told her as her mother and I put the two chairs together). As she sometimes does, my granddaughter is watching one of her favorite movies. She loves Sophia, Frozen, Pound Puppies and so many more kiddie movies I can’t remember. At three, she can scroll down screens; she can enlarge or reduce objects on […]
Jan 22

PLAYGROUND GAMES

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
As a kid, if anybody asked me what my favorite elementary school class was, I’d always answer how much I loved recess. My mother would interrupt the conversation to correct me. She’d say recess wasn’t a class, but I remained steadfast. I’d mumble under my breath, “If recess isn’t a class, it oughta be.” The reason I loved recess in the wintertime so much was that I had the freedom to release the tomboy I felt screaming to be outside. That part of me wasn’t allowed be out any other time. I should explain. I came from a family and a time when young girls were expected to wear dresses to school, at home, at church, and even at play. Girls wore dresses everywhere. Of course, since girls dressed like miniature ladies, they were supposed to act like them as well. That meant no ball playing, including foot races, baseball, football, or basketball. In my elementary school, nobody knew what soccer was, so I didn’t play that game either. Girls could play dodgeball, red rover, jump rope, tag, hide ‘n’ seek, and jacks, but no marbles, a game in which I excelled, and other games that didn’t involve the running […]
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