B.Michael (“Bert”) received inspiration for one of his poems, “The Photograph,” from a framed image he had prominently displayed in his living room. William (“Bill”) Wesley Hansard, Jr. [b. August 16, 1937, New York NY; d. May 30, 1989, Boston MA] and Lester (“Les”) Howard Bunyon were both Black gay men and close friends of Bert’s who died of HIV/AIDS prior to 1993.
[L-R] Les, Bill, Bert, most likely in Boston, Massachusetts, some time between September 1981 and July 1987.
Les at Christmas, Bill with Bert. Both pictures taken some time between 1981-89. Both photos, which had been foamcore-mounted, were most likely special to Bert.
Think old-school, three-ring binder (11.5″ x 11″ x 3″) with a glossy, gold-trimmed cover. Inside are removable, double-sided, cardboard inserts with light adhesive to keep photos in place beneath fold-over plastic sheaths. B.Michael had two, the earlier one coffee-colored, the latter the color of cabernet.
Each block of photos below is an album page that was curated by B.Michael. His rich, joy-centering life wove family of origin with chosen family, commuting readily between his multiple roles of son / brother / nephew / grandson / uncle / cousin / godfather, together with friend / lover / brister / classmate / organizer / activist / community member.
The latter binder includes a dozen or so blank pages that he didn’t get around to populating. N.B. The pics are not necessarily in chronological order, and the dimensions of an image in this digital setting sometimes vary from the actual size of the corresponding print image that appears in the album.
Click on each photo for more context. AND, more importantly, if you know who/when/where/why details about an image, we encourage you to contact us here!
Shortly after leaving his job at IBM, B.Michael took a transformative trip to the UK. In London, he took in this extraordinary exhibit. He brought this poster (30″ x 20″) home to New York.
when mommy breaks down nervous you scour the bathroom scrub the floors wash the windows do the laundry dust the living room change the light bulbs when they burn out clean the kitchen buy the food and cook for yourself and mommy broken
you walk through the house quietly trying to be air as if the floors were hot coals broken glass or a bed of needles
you speak at a volume just right tone emotionless watch the news late-night talk shows the late movie listen to the radio at a volume so low you could hear mommy’s breath in the next room and you read about history about triumph about life
you go to school on time late or not at all but you always do well enough so mommy would not have to leave the house ‘cause you know mommy shouldn’t leave the house and when she does you are always by her side at the bank (you wonderin’ where she got the check to cash in the first place) at the doctor’s office the pharmacy some relative’s house by her side always she needing to lean
when mommy breaks you break into fragments but if you are to survive your blood must become glue ‘cause you must pull it together
you look into her eyes around you and guess guess if she needs a blanket something to eat the tv channel or radio station changed or it turned on or off any sign of life while all the plants in the house die or try to but you can’t let them so you take care of them too you answer the phone “oh she’s not in” or “oh she’ll call you right back” or “oh she’s sleeping” or “oh she’s…” you leave your friends at the door and it doesn’t even matter what you tell them
‘cause teenage noise would certainly disturb mommy or you or the stillness and someone something should explain the quiet
“why is mommy…” who cleaned the house worked every day raised four kids single-handedly while going to college bought food gave you and every one such good advice “why is she so broken” so you go through the house looking for clues
you find papers you read them all between and behind every line you uncover pictures books pieces of the puzzle secrets skeletons and lies
you ask questions actually you only ask one at a time or maybe one a day or week or month ‘cause you don’t want to wipe away her surely-to-follow tears
you listen she tells you everything a burden lifted she tells you ‘cause you asked ‘cause there is not noise in the house ‘cause it seems that you and she are the only living things and you hear yourself repeating “it’s alright everything will be alright”
you listen she tells you everything a burden lifted she tells you
‘cause you asked ‘cause there is not noise in the house ‘cause it seems that you and she are the only living things and you hear yourself repeating “it’s alright everything will be alright”
you go to school join a club the track team run in circles for miles a natural high you are good but you never excel no that would mean mommy would have to talk to the coach about allowing you to go out of town to this meet or that meet then he too might ask why she doesn’t come to a meet to see how wonderful you are
“you explain things so well you have so much insight you’re so mature so thoughtful so kind so different” people tell you thank them all smile not too wide ‘cause even the best glue won’t hold together if you pull too hard stretch emotions too far
unknowingly your vision becomes narrow your horizon small and all you remember is mommy head bent shoulders round sitting in a chair or on the side of a bed still alone you remember your mother without you you think without you where would she be what would happen
so you build a wall a very tall wall so impregnable so high no one is able to climb look over or get through it protects you or traps you or traps and protects you it’s in your face your eyes your mouth your gait
yet men approach you in the streets women approach you in the streets then the streets approach you you wonder how everyone and everything know you need so much but you never asked for help you are mommy’s little helper
“When Mommy Breaks Down” was first published in The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets, Ed. Assoto Saint, 1991, which won a Lambda Literary Award the following year; and later in Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology, Ed. Franklin Abbott, 1993. In a letter to Abbott, B.Michael offers some important context for his poem.
Sheilah Mabry: He was the first family member who said he loved me because I was “fresh” — thought I was grown at six. When I was seven, he showed me how to toss eggs into convertibles from the 15th floor of the Wilson projects. At eight, he taught me how to cheat at Monopoly, slipping $100 and $500 bills under my robe when he was the banker so that I could beat his brother David. He used to braid my hair — both plaits and cornrows — since I could remember. My cousin Bertram (who the family calls Michael) was always accessible to me for the things that most concerned my life: school, family, romance. I can’t quite explain it, but it seemed we were bound from youth by both love and our future selves — by what made us “different” from others.
B.Michael Hunter: It was easy to say I loved her: my mother’s namesake, my cousin Sheilah — Little Sheilah. Besides myself, she was the only other person who questioned my father, our great aunt — authority. I cannot recall the first time I saw her. (There are pictures we are both in when she was one and I was four.) But I can recall the incidents which bonded our lifelong friendship.
One day my mother took us to visit her sister — Sheilah’s mother. It was an early Saturday morning and neither she nor my other cousins were up. When Sheilah did awaken, she realized she had wet the bed. To my knowledge, at the time, there were no other bedwetters except myself in the family. For a child, it’s the type of thing that friendships are made of. The clincher for me was when she came to visit us and stayed the night — bedwetters were not allowed to spend the night. She told my father,
S: “No!!”
B: She did not eat tuna fish — with or without mayonnaise in it. “So you don’t want it? Too damn bad. Eat it!” he boomed. Once raised above his speaking tone, my father’s voice would intimidate any normal adult. Most children would obey him, or cry, as soon as he gave an order.
S: “No, you fucking bastard!”
B: … squeaked Sheilah, as she raced to hide under the cast-iron bed, three rooms away from the kitchen. How she survived this is another story, but it’s safe to say that it helped to be someone else’s child — and female.
I had always figured out ways to get around him, which set me apart from both my older brother and sister and my younger brother. I often wonder if this is a third child’s trait. Sheilah, too, is the third child in her family. But I was never as direct as Sheilah. We were both different, and our difference made us natural allies.
S: Each of the two girlfriends Michael had his first three years of college he brought home to the city to meet his family. Pulling me to the side, it was always important to him that I liked her and that she liked his favorite cousin, Sheilah. But starting his senior year of college, and throughout his entire term of law school, whenever he came home to visit and I would ask where he was going, he would always say,
B: “Out”
S: I remember clearly asking Michael, when I was fourteen and he was seventeen, if he was Gay. I reminded him of this recently, and he was clear that he remembers the question being “Are you a faggot?” To which his reply was “No.” So, having gotten what was a comfortable response for me at the time, I blocked my curiosity about Michael’s sexuality out of my mind, and threw myself quite rapidly — prematurely I might add — into heterosexuality.
B: From when she was ten until she was twenty-three, Sheilah and I saw each other two or three times a year, which was always enough time for us to pick up where we left off. She could always tell a story and would give torrid details of any facet of her life. It seemed her life was infinitely more dramatic than mine. She lived to shock you, so when in one of her moments she asked me at seventeen if I was a faggot, I quite calmly answered no. Had she asked me about my dreams, I would have given a different answer.
It’s incidents like these that allow me to say she was one of the many people who knew me before I knew myself. But, not trusting myself, I didn’t include her in as many aspects of my life as I had done in the past. She, too, would receive the standard answer to where I was going — “Out.”
Had I suspected that much of my behavior was overcompensation for my own guilt as a Black man about possibly being Gay, I might have been a little more honest — at least with Sheilah. When her mother died, she had tried to be mother to her siblings — older and younger. She had spent all her energy, even her reserves, trying to be a woman — something no child, without the proper stimulus, can be. It is painful to realize that for us inner-city kids, childhood is a luxury you might enjoy if your mamma is living, but one you will surely miss if she ain’t there and you’re facing your fourteenth birthday. Sheilah had worked seriously since she was fourteen, so I did not foresee any economic problems with her living with me.
I knew she was tired and suggested that she move from New York City, away from everyone else’s problems, to Boston to live with me. Those who have lived in Boston know you don’t suggest someone move there unless it’s really necessary or they are going to college. For Sheilah, it was both.
S: I remember telling Michael about a year before he asked me to move to Boston that I was tired of men and was going to find me a woman. The way I said it, however, it might seem to an outsider that my disenchantment with men was what sparked my interest in women. My interest in women — in girls for that matter, when I consider how early I noticed them sexually — predated this. And the feeling of disenchantment, I now know, was a result of unhealthy relationships in general, and not heterosexual relationships per se. I remember Michael saying that was not the way or the reason to explore. I don’t recall his saying, however, what were the good reasons. We just laughed it off.
One day as we were walking outside the Museum of Science, while he was telling me a story about a former roommate, he said something like, “He said he loved me” (which I could have quite comfortably interpreted as: This guy came on to Michael, who isn’t Gay — because I asked him when he was seventeen and he said no). Instead — and I did not share this with him — the next two weeks of my life were traumatic. It was painful for me to realize that Michael was Gay and had been for some time — not so much because of his earlier denial, but because I wasn’t comfortable yet with my own sexuality and hadn’t fully dealt with that.
B: As I said, her move benefitted us both. Until she actually moved, I hadn’t dealt with how I was going to be a “fag.” She had been in Boston two weeks, and I still was going “out.” I didn’t come right out and say I was Gay, but I alluded to it so that she would know. Leaving no stone unturned, she asked me again. This time I said yes.
S: I went to my first Gay bar, the Haymarket, with Michael. He met me at my first women’s bar — Campus — for moral support. I met my first woman lover at a party I attended with Michael — a relationship which, incidentally, made me realize that unhealthy relationships could be found in all communities.
B: I told her that I always thought she was a dyke. (I was not politically correct then.) She helped me believe in and respect bisexuality. We talked about the pressure from the Lesbian and Gay community to make a “more definite” choice than bisexuality. And about the invisibility she felt in both homosexual and heterosexual communities. We felt that, after all, at least as Lesbians, Gays and Bisexual women and men, we could try to liberate ourselves from these rigid sexual definitions.
S: I don’t by any means want it to seem that my relationship with my cousin has been all collards and candied yams. There was a period within that first year I lived in Boston that we did not get along.
B: She talks about the period when we hated each other. (It really was the period she hated me.)
S: Michael and I had sat down and made a semester by semester plan for my next year and a half in school. I was sure I could not handle an accelerated courseload and told him this, but he insisted I could. At the end of the second semester, I found myself drowning, but didn’t seek out the necessary help. Quite frankly, I lied about getting the work done. When Michael asked how I was doing, I told him I was doing terribly. Flippantly, he suggested I needed counseling. I screamed a lot of hateful words …
B: … bringing up all the family dirt, she told me ten different ways that I was sick for being, among other things, Gay.
S: And I called him a faggot — because I wanted to hurt him.
B: The bitch was feelin’ it! I had known Sheilah to go off on other people, but never — never — never on me. She is painfully honest. I felt like shattered glass. The truth, no matter what package it comes in, is truth. I had become the perfect son/cousin/brother/employee/citizen/invisible respectable homosexual — all things good: to compensate for my own guilt. I had given her much, had in my own sexist way made her my child. And no grown woman, standing on the verge of her own self, needs a daddy. Even if he’s Gay.
S: Looking back at the period and being more aware of myself today, there was probably a great deal of self-hatred going on that I had not yet gotten in touch with.
The event that salvaged our year and a half together in Boston was Michael’s decision to get a roommate. I had become an economic and emotional strain on him and he told me that I would have to give up my room and share his. Part of his rationalization for his decision was a transfer to New York he had put in for at his job.
It was the first time he had mentioned the transfer to me.
The roommate’s attempt to divide-and-conquer brought us closer together — in an effort to reclaim what sanctity we had had in the household. We were on better speaking terms and Michael was still preparing for his New York transfer. He would be leaving at the very end of December. I had gotten a copy of Joe Beam’s In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology for Christmas and told him to check it out. He said it was “fierce,” so I bought him his own copy. That was a turning point for him.
B: Not wanting to lose my ally and the only person I’d been honest with, I picked up the charred pieces of my ego and began to s-l-o-w-l-y let go. I began to let go of my controlling, closeted lifestyle. My sexist and homophobic attitudes. My guilt for not being there for my straight Black sisters. My exclusion of my family from my life. Letting go was a turning point in my development and our friendship, and it helped Sheilah to take control of her life.
S: Once he moved away, I had to deal with myself more and learned not to expect someone to take care of me. I can look back now and see his frustration with me. I had been living on my own for four and a half years before I moved in with him, yet once I arrived in Boston, a definite sense of helplessness came over me. It wasn’t something deliberate, but after years of taking care of others and myself, his invitation to me said someone was finally going to do this for me.
After a great deal of introspection and at the suggestion of a friend, I went to counseling and worked diligently on my life. I attended many readings in the Boston/Cambridge area, did the needed backtracking to fix up my college transcript, and dealt more constructively with family issues.
B: I was forced to reevaluate my self-imposed exile from New York. After five years away, I began to make arrangements for my return. Sheilah, as I knew she would, spread her wings and was in flight. It was up to her to find sanctuary. I had to excavate muted feelings about what I really wanted to be and find a way to make my reality happen. But it was Sheilah who introduced me to the work of Kate Rushin, Lorraine Bethel, and Audre Lorde, as well as Joseph Beam’s Black Gay anthology In the Life. I met many of my closest New York friends as a result of Joe Beam’s book.
S: Over the next year and a half I told Michael how aware I was becoming of the destructive patterns that had bound me and the necessary steps I was taking to rid myself of them. I remember the inscription on the birthday card he gave me that year: “I’m proud that you are taking the time to love yourself. Love, Michael.” I was proud that he had taken the time to acknowledge it.
B: I still get choked up thinking about the day Sheilah graduated from college, about the joy and pain we shared.
S: We have both set up boundaries in our lives so that we can better deal with ourselves …
B: I think about all the work we still have to do …
S: … not always rigid boundaries, but boundaries nonetheless.
B: … and as we continue to grow, I thank the Goddess for her blessings and for my cousin Sheilah …
B & S: … AND WE ARE LOVING OURSELVES BECAUSE OF IT.
Performed on 29 September 1989 at the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center as part of Other Countries’ A Page From A Black Child’s Diary.
Full version published in the We Are Family issue of BLACK/OUT: The Magazine of the National Coalition for Black Lesbians and Gays, Volume 2, Number 2, Summer 1989. Performance text above is edited down from the original.
Also published in the Queer City issue of The Portable Lower East Side, 1991.
Two weeks shy of turning 31, B.Michael visited Barbados in the West Indies for his first and only time. Below are some memorabilia from his trip, including a tourist map, receipts associated with his accommodations and currency exchange, and an accounting of his incidental expenses.
While swimming on the beach, B.Michael almost drowned, but came away with an important epiphany about which he wrote “Bridgetown” — one of his most powerful poems.
These three pages were tucked away in a folder that B.Michael had brought to an Other Countries workshop, most likely in December 1988.
Per the practice of the standing, bimonthly Saturday workshop, he would have made copies of his poem for distribution to workshop participants (see version A). Then he would have taken notes on folks’ comments (see version B), and then rewritten it, incorporating their feedback (see version C), which appears along with B.Michael’s other writing here.
On version B, B.Michael jotted the date and address of what sounds like a New Year’s Eve gathering. Did you attend either this workshop or that party? If so, please let us know!
I WANT TO SEE YOU IN THE DAYLIGHT NAKED PLAYING INNOCENTLY LIKE CHILDREN
SKETCHING SLOWLY — THE MURAL OF OUR LIVES
I WENT DOWN INTO MYSELF TO SURFACE THE PARTS OF MYSELF I KEEP QUIET/SILENT
MY FEELINGS ABOUT YOU TAKE FLIGHT WHAT SHELTER CAN I GIVE THEM? IN THE THICK OF MY BROW, I WONDER WHAT YOU THINK/FEEL I FEEL/THINK ABOUT US THOUGHTLESSLY — YOU FEEL SO RIGHT NEXT TO ME
WITH STRENGTH — I AM HELPLESSLY MOVED TO TEARS — TO WRITE — TO YOU AND I CAN’T HELP BUT ADORN YOUR FEET YOUR FOUNDATION NOR TRY TO ENCASE YOUR GOODLOVE THAT WHICH SPAWNS AND LETS NOURISHMENT DEPART WITH GIFTS
I HEAR YOUR VOICE/WORDS/INNER SELF AND KNOW YOU ARE RIGHT AND WHILE IN MOTION I WAIT FOR US TO GO TO SHARE YOUR SPACE
B.Michael championed the academic and artistic endeavors of young people, including those in his extended family. At this dance concert (see pages 4-5 below) of his younger, high school-age cousin, Nicole, he was undoubtedly one of her loudest fans in attendance.
