With the onset of the AIDS epidemic and its infiltration into the Black community, scholar Mark Anthony Neal notes, “… ‘queer’ Black bodies were no longer simply to be tolerated, excused, and humored, but were now going to be culturally and politically quarantined as diseased Black bodies.”* Before It Hits Home grapples with this notion and asks the audience to consider how they are each situated in this context, “before it hits home.” 

 

In 2015 when I began to study an under-researched figure, Ernie McClintock (1937-2003), I came across West’s play. Ernie McClintock was a director, actor, teacher, and a visionary of the 1960s and 1970s Black Theatre Movement. Being part of the queer community in the 1980s, he and his partner witnessed their brethren perishing before their very eyes from “the plague.” There were few plays about queer Black identity and AIDS, and because of his own identity and grave losses in the 1980s, this play became a critical part of his repertoire. McClintock was awarded the coveted Living Legend Award at the 1997 National Black Theatre Festival where his Jazz Actors Theatre performed West’s moving and poignant play. Through this production in his lived moment, McClintock produced a show that discussed the taboo subject, which takes a bold self-determined individual to bring to a public forum. The production queried notions of Black masculinity and queerness, all using his Jazz Acting aesthetic to rupture heteronormative assumptions about AIDS and homosexuality.

 

Artist-scholar E. Patrick Johnson argues that masculinity is not more of a signifier of Blackness than femininity, and heterosexuality is no blacker than gayness.† As a result, “Some people view black homosexuality as the final break in masculinity and don’t see the love, don’t see the empowerment, don’t see the caring, the sharing, don’t see the contributions.”‡ However, Before it Hits Home concludes with a father demonstrating unconditional love for his son, despite the Christian doctrine and pressures of Black masculinity. And although West’s play is firmly set in 1991, Before It Hits Home can still open up conversations for communities of various creeds, cultures, genders, and races. Through the play we can reflect on our own preconceived notions and access compassion and empathy for all those that suffer in silence.

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-Ibby Cizmar

Assistant Professor Theatre & Acting

Vanderbilt University