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November 10, 2005
terri hearts jonanthan
Didja catch Terry McMillan and her gay ex-husband Jonathan on Oprah yesterday? A few thoughts:
1 - Read at the most superficial (and therefore untrustworthy) level possible, dude came off as pretty queer, raising the question of what Terry could possibly have been thinking. While it's likely Jonathan has amped his vibe up since coming out, I have a knee-jerk inability to fully sympathize with (i.e., believe) cosmopolitan, college-educated, middle-class women who claim to wake up one morning shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to find their husband/boyfriend of 5 years has (doh!) a trunk full of gay S&M pROn in the garage. Is it really any surprise that the half-your-age rent-boy found recumbent on the burning sands of Jamaica is gay? Any gigolo - black or white, from here to Richard Gere - is always already tainted by bitchery, something any romance novelist worth their salt should know even if they'd never say so in public.
2 - In Terry's defense, though, black men are trained by history to police their public-facing boundaries with particular care and enthusiasm, so if anyone can put one over, it's likely the properly motivated brother.
These days the interesting action vis-à-vis the DL is seem to being played out in class-bounded arenas, this by thug-loving brothers whose aesthetic/safety hangs on the accurate interpolation of the gullier strains of black hyper-masculinity. Nelson George once wondered (and I'm recollecting/paraphrasing, so lay the blame for any issues on my game of telephone) if the drug war and its incarceration of vast numbers of black men in their sexually formative years was creating a new category of SSL (same sex loving) men that sat outside the boundaries of trad gay/bi identity. I'm inclined to believe him think there might be a connection there, and there's likely a world of self-published lit out there (on the shelf next to the books about the 15 year old drug dealer baby momma) that is less the lush, glossy stuff of E. Lynn Harris and more the grimey stuff of Oz.
2- On another register entirely, I'd like to see two, maybe, three parallel tracking black remakes of Bravo's Boy Meets Boy: one for college-educated, big city types over 35, one for younger, bling-minded street soldiers (post-millennial banji realness), and one for Southern church-going, choir-ish types. Unlike the actual Bravo series, which encouraged mercenary straight actors to break the hearts of poor defenseless gay actors, this version would be more observational, teams of black women competing to spot the gents on the DL. Prizes TBD.
3 - Message to Stedman - DO NOT FUCK WITH OPRAH'S MONEY. Of all the outrages to which the decidedly pro-Terry Oprah had the opportunity to react, it was Jonathan's attempt to nullify his pre-nup that most visibly incensed her. She about barked at gay ex-husband to explain why he should expect to get a cent from Terry. While I agree with her POV and loved the Judge Judy imitation, I also have a hard time imagining O going all bare knuckle on the empty-headed trophy bride of a famous black male author the same way. In so much as Jonathan Plummer imagines he has any rights to Terry McMillan's ducats, it clearly has to do not just with his sexual service, but with the fact that How Stella Got her Groove Back, roman and cine, is the couple's combined story. That seems fairly straightforward (along with the fact that people do all kinds of dumb shit while mad, divorcing and lawyered-up), but Oprah would have none of it.
5 - Oprah's on-air shrink Robin Smith was actually pretty good. Did O replace that wayward money-changing whore in the temple of mental health - Dr. Phil - with Smith?
5 - I started the episode feeling mock bad for Jonathan - poor Jonathan! Trapped like every call girl is trapped between the john and a payday! - but ended up feeling genuinely bad for Terry. Her boy toy had clearly betrayed her to the core on numerous fronts - as a wife, as a woman, as an aging woman, as a celebrity, as a fifty-and -loving-it success story, as a romance expert, a technician of black love. (Her books have always struck me more a fictionalized self-help than literature.) McMillan's taut, contorted face, her leaned-back, protective body-language all suggested that so many months later she was still in a kind of shock. And you know what? Every time the camera pulled away from her traumatized carriage for commercial you would catch the wall came tumbling down as she turned towards her cheating, gay, money-grubbing ex-husband - patting him, flicking at him, leaning in to make an off-mike, probably off-color joke whose terms only he would understand. She's obviously still in love with dude. It'd be cruel to call that pathetic, but it was definitely sad.
Posted by ebogjonson in screened, on November 10, 2005 4:04 PM
Comments
I'm trying really hard to feel bad for her, but I just can't do it. Perhaps that's because I have minimal respect for what she does for a living--I hate her hustle, but I respect her as a hustler--but what Oprah never asked her to answer about were the slurs that Plummer said on camera that she made and the bizarre, batshit crazy (Hi Jenn) allegations he made in the divorce proceedings. Maybe that stuff was proven false long ago, but writing "fag" on the hot sauce bottle should have been addressed by somebody.
So much of what's listed on item 5 is about ego, and I just have minimal tolerance for that. hear that answering machine message--"you've got a lot of fucking nerve..." Do what?
Trust me--she can find plenty of more twenty-year old men. Contrary to what many have heard, young niggaz just ain't that picky.
And she ain't that bad if you can ignore her insanity.
Posted by: Bomani at November 12, 2005 4:27 PM
I feel bad for her in that generic "everybody hurts.... (some time)" kind of way. It's hard for someone who believes their own PR to get caught out so public like. She really thought she was living out Stella when actually she was living something significantly more low rent.
Posted by: your humble narrator Ebog at November 13, 2005 4:13 AM
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