YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Okundaye

lines on the record: 22
first: 2024-03-29
most recent: 2024-03-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There's so much more. I honestly just feel like what I even have written and what I've explored is just like a small fraction of everything that I'm going to know and continue exploring about the past as well. I just find the past and history just so incredibly abundant and just having these memories and recollections from just seven men which have totaled up to a book I just think shows that even just conversations with anyone can lead to like new tidbits of information and new insights and see what Changed in shape forever by looking at and really kind of really centering the voices of those who lived through it basically.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marker told me about okay, good thing I came here and requested this specific year as well of the catalog. And in that he basically he was dying and he had said that he wants to write about his life. He doesn't want his story to die with him. And then I remember thinking I needed to read this actually because yes, I do need to write this guy's name. He didn't want his story to die. He was someone who planned to write a book on his life. And so what I then did was that he had a partner who was also called Mark for a different mark, gets a bit confusing in the book, who I spoke to, who I just said, you know, tell me about Webster, please. Tell me about your relationship, what he was like, what he did, because, you know, I'm writing this book and this is someone who did not want to just be forgotten. So, yeah, there's so much contestation with, you know, remembering people and getting people to actually go and be able to tell their stories. And there is also that kind of tension about, you know,”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is lost, and I don't know for how long he might recite. Well, I still chat to him, I still have a relationship with him. I have not kept a relationship with him thinking, okay, if he recovers, great, I can go and write part two. But it just felt like actually, you know, people not be able to speak for themselves when they are not in the mental state or when they are dead. And I also had this dilemma also when there was a guy in my book called Epson who was a friend of Mark Thompson's who died very young. And I kind of felt conflicted about whether or not I should name him in the book because he had died supposedly of cancer and was the victim of these horrendous homophobic racist arson attacks whilst he was a cancer patient but living at home. And then I found a, literally just by chance, I was looking at the voice archives in the British Library and I wasn't even looking for anything to do with him. I was looking for something completely unrelated. Then I just saw this front page picture of him, of this cancer patient. I was like, oh my God, this is the guy who...”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This old documentary, and they said, Oh, we just remember this. I had the vaguest bit of information and I was trawling online for ages until I found a singular record for the BFI archives and then I was able to watch the documentary tape on the premises and that's it. And he had been talking about his career in fashion on this documentary tape and was very open about his sexuality on the tape as well. And I just thought, you know, this is possibly the only record that we have of this guy of the incredible work that he was doing. Also, this guy is not in a position now where he's able to speak for himself because he's so unwell. And I just thought, you know, if I had been able to find this guy 10 years ago, perhaps I could have learned so many incredible things about what he did for his life and I would have been able to bring that to interested readers who could learn about what it meant to be a black gay man working fashion back in the 1980s. But that opportunity”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They couldn't confirm if he was alive or not, basically. And it was really strange. So I've seen photos of him from like 1990. I don't remember I was walking home from the gym and I just saw a man with a walking stick just walking along really slowly and I stood there for five minutes just staring at him and I was like, you know, I came up to him and he was like, I was like, are you this person? He was just like kind of like, what the hell? How do you know who I am? And I basically just explained who I was. I gave him names of people that I knew that he knew and I started to contact him and chat to him. Very unwell. There was no way that there was no ethical way that I was going to, you know, go and sit this man down and like get an interview out of it. It just would have been completely perverse and wrong. And I don't think someone in that mental state would be able to consent to having their story out there. But I also found like a really old documentary tape, well, people had spoken about the fact that this guy had been.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of like black history here at all when it's like, you know, they can consult someone to find these materials. It's not like these materials don't exist. They can consult people to try and get more of it. But ultimately it ends up being up to us to kind of like fill in the gap that, you know, recover this history and quite literally before it dies. And do you know what? The urgency of that was actually really spelt out to me whilst I was researching. So when I was trying to come up with my list of contributors and people I wanted to speak to, you know, it was quite a fine process. There were some people I contacted who just didn't want to be involved, which is totally fine. But there was also manual contact and like for privacy sake I won't like give any revealing details about who he was. But I was really interested in contacting him because he had a lot to say about fashion and I'm very into fashion so I thought oh this is brilliant like you would be able to say so much but no one had contact with him actually no one had seen him in years they hadn't heard they weren't even sure”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It definitely feels like that to me, and that's because you know what? When I was doing my preliminary research and trying to find, okay, where can I look for these black gay materials of the past? And I was going to certain archives and institutions and I was just finding nothing. And the place that ended up being most fruitful was the Rutgers Archive in the London metropolitan archives. And the reason why that is so fruitful is because Tover Campbell and Ajumo X said we're going to create a Black Gay archive because no one else is going to do this. And I think they created that in might be wrong on the day, but in the early 2000s. And even since then, these other archives and institutions still don't have their own kind of specific Black gay records. Even when I went to, there was the kind of like first gay museum, which opened up in King's Cross. Is it called the Gay Museum? I actually can't even completely remember right now. And this isn't even to call them out, but I remember visiting it and just there just isn't much by way.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“themselves turning to you know really extreme substances to be able to keep going and then that also if you're then in Brixton which is a place which is incredibly overpoliced and you're a black gay person who is on crack imagine the implications of that in terms of like your exposures to violence in terms of like the pellet on dealers and all of these kind of power relations which happen so broadly speaking yeah I don't personally think like policy is something anyone can opt out of. I mean you can be One of the risks to my life. And if I wake up today, what kind of news am I greeting about people who are like me? So yeah, that's my view on that, I guess. I don't know if that answers the question. No, it's.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the fact that he became really fixated on the millennium, thinking, you know, am I going to actually live until then if that's not because of HIV or AIDS, if I was to contract it, that might also be because the conditions in this country might be so severe that they might cause me to take my life. The story, the book ends, the story of a man who has taken his life because life had become so difficult for him. And whilst, of course, that's tied up in personal struggles and can't purely be deduced as because of the political climate, those things are also not incidental to the fact that life becomes difficult for men in this country. I mean, there is something that I actually didn't explore in the book because I just felt like it was, you know, it was quite sensitive, but also it was something that, you know, wasn't as much my story to tell. And this doesn't pertain to any of the men in this book, but there was also a big crisis in terms of drug use, in terms of crack. People just being so beaten down by the homophobia and bigotry and racism as well that they were finding.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some kind of way, even if they think they're not. Someone like a 17-year-old Mark Thompson who's diagnosed HIV positive at the age of 17 is inevitably immediately politicized or at least becomes relevant as a political entity. He can't just ignore what the government is doing in terms of their strategy on HIV. He can't ignore the Department of Health. He suddenly has to be so hyper aware of all of these different things. So it's almost impossible to think of anybody in who was black and gay openly in the 1980s, 90s who was able to kind of opt out of politics. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they watch Prime Minister's questions or they're really kind of like involved in some kind of arimentary or really official Big Big political discourse, but they are thinking about, you know, their lives, the lives of their friends and surviving as well. And I think that a lot of the men speak about this real fixation on surviving. DJ BEC talks.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get what you're saying, and it's a difficult one to call because not everyone needs a bit to life or not everyone thinks that they're leading a political life, but even when someone might only see themselves as socially involved in the Black Cave scene, they are inevitably impacted by certain political considerations. If you're someone who particularly enjoys going to a nightclub, you might want to consider the fact that institutional racism means that Western clubs might turn away black patrons or not want to license premises to black people. And that might mean that you might have a white club promoter to go and license the premises on your behalf. And then that leads to certain political and financial power relationships between you as Black Countel or black DJs or Black culture makers and this white person who effectively owns you and kind of like can take so much of your profit. So it means that anyone who kind of wants to be involved with Black ACN inevitably is politicized.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might have been able to at my age. And even if someone wanted to be really enterprising and start like a nightclub or buy a bar or something or buy a pub, because of the pressures of the housing market, people are sinking that money into a deposit now. There isn't the same kind of like access and resources. And I think that that is such a shame. It was very interesting to therefore think about the way in which, well, I didn't approach this thinking like, oh, everything was so much worse back in the day. So let's look at how things have progressed. I just wanted to know, you know, how were things. Whilst there might be progress in terms of, I don't know, like HIV technologies and AIDS and things like that, there have also been significant backslides in terms of socialization, just being able to meet people and being able to afford the spaces that we have. So I basically kind of wrote those things into the book because I really wanted to show that we can actually take community and scenes and things for granted. The arc of history isn't always, you know, going up and up and positive. Things can get worse.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cruising is more significantly policed. The rise of surveillance technologies means that the spaces where you can cruise are far more limited than the consequences for it are also just as drastic as they were. And also who's got a house now, right? I remember speaking to Mark Thompson who spoke about when he wanted to leave his family home and he basically said that, oh yeah, I went down to the council and I got a flat and I just thought what? That is and you were just able to live by yourself and it's like it was just such a casual thing to be able to just access housing back then. That's not to say that there weren't any difficulties for people, that there was no homelessness or there were no there was no housing crisis but there was just like a kind of easy smoothness to be able to have your own space and just I found that quite fascinating because I thought, you know, I lift my mom at the moment because you know the private renting center just got silly so I wouldn't be able to put on a house party or bring someone back home in the same way that they”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it didn't surprise me in the sense that to be able to bring someone back to your house, you need to be able to meet them in public, right? But what I found quite striking was that it almost felt as if there was more opportunity for that kind of in-person socializing to go and cruise someone and to express that desire in a very physical sense outside in public, whether that's at night time or in the day just crowding around the bunch of toilets. What was interesting about that was that I just felt like, you know what, there's actually a bit of a decline of this kind of socializing now. As you say, in the book, you know, there's a lot of mention of things like youth spaces where people would come together for discussion. There are also cruising grounds outside the toilets. There are also, you know, big house parties where there's almost like a Black Gay family there who are inviting young people to come together and be like, you know, you can come here, sleep here, you can sleep with someone, you can meet people here. And I felt like the things that I've made this, they've got now, the fact that, you know,”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gets along necessarily. Not everyone has the same view, and that is just as important. It's important that the Black Gay movement is presented as a broad church, not as one singular dominant view. I mean, even today, I don't agree with every black person, not every black gay person agrees with me. And that's absolutely fine. Everyone has their own view. Everyone has their own contribution and their own understanding of what it means to live this kind of life and what our lives should look like.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's honest, right? And the history of any kind of like movement institution or whatever will always have different factions and different wings and disagreements. And I didn't want to present any singular black gay life or ideology because, you know, what would the point that be, right? If I'm writing a kind of oral history, everything is going to be colored by each individual's interpretations, their political persuasions, their upbringing, which is why I talk about some of their upbringings where it's relevant to kind of see how their upbringings might have shaped their politics. So someone like Alex Olade grew up in Leicester and was very involved in the striking miners movement as well. So obviously he developed a very radical left-wing politics, which might have come into tension with someone who had a more kind of like professional background and came into activism more kind of thinking about it as a kind of like diverse and inclusion strategy. So I really wanted to basically just get across the fact that, you know, not everyone”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People weren't just having secret house parties, they were also starting to go to the west end, start to take over clubs and start to basically build this really first out generation of Black Day nightlife and clubbing. And that's what I really wanted from this book. I didn't want this book to be about men who just found themselves a minority within the setting. I wanted to be about men who came together and found some strength in numbers and found that they were embracing all parts of their identity. But also reckoning with how that also can lead to tensions and conflicts as well, right? The thing about being a minority, being gay, being black, being both or whatever is that sometimes you might come together with people under the guise of shared identity, but that doesn't always necessarily mean that you see eye to eye or you have this wholly positive experience. So I was just interested in what it means for people to come together under an activist label under a kind of like social community setting, what kind of stories could come out of that. And I was really pleased with the results.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think that particularly in the activist sense, there were some of these movements. So in the book, I talk about this man Alex Awenade, who was leading a lot of activism, which was loudly in conversation with straight black people and trying to say, you know, homophobia that plagues our communities is not too dissimilar from the racism which plagues all of us. And to show that there is an interconnectedness and solidarity between the press groups. And also that on the flip side, that institutions of oppression and brigotry are also going to work together as well. So what I really showed in these men is that these weren't men who found themselves exiled from the black community and they decided, well, you know, I'm just going to go to like the white gay community or something and live my life openly and proudly there. These were men who kind of said, you know what, we are open and proud black gay men and we are also going to live as open and proud black gay men and we are going to integrate ourselves and not be rejected from the black community. And I thought that was quite incredible and quite striking. And it was a determination which meant that”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He'd been living in Manchester all his life, and then he came down to Brixton and came to this one Black Gay House Party. And then within the month, you know, moved down there because he was like, you know, this is why I need to live my life. He was able to go there and just be really open. Like on the back of his car, he used to have a black gay man number one written on the back. And he was able to just be really open and boisterous with it. And sometimes, you know, people say like, actually, that would rub people up the wrong way sometimes because they would think, well, you're able to have this freedom because you've come from Manchester. You don't have any family here. You know, the friends here or the friends you've made here is an openly gay man, but we can't do that because we've grown up in this place and we still feel constrained. So I was quite interested in Brixen as that kind of geography and like who gets to be open and out and loud in this context.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in Brixton, obviously, you have the South London Gay Liberation Front, which was mainly made up of white gay men and lesbians, and they would kind of put on these theatric productions in the streets and have big public demonstrations. But of course, if you're someone who is a black gay person within the community in Brixton, you know, you have your family there, you have your church there, you have friends there, and you might not be willing to commit yourself to come out in such a public way, you might feel safer going to an underground house party, which has a certain knock or code to get admission. So it meant that there was this kind of distinction where you had the kind of more openly activist movement, which was bright, colorful and vivid, then you kind of like out and loud. And that was sometimes coming into tension with some of the black gay men who were off the area and wanted to express themselves but perhaps felt more confined by the fact that they would have to do this right in front of their community. But that did also mean that for some of the black gay men who came from different parts of the country, so one of the men, Dennis Carney, came from Manchester. And the reason why is that, you know,”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Brixton, and there were so many people who were still there as well. And I just felt like those narratives of Black history and queer history weren't being reconciled, even though there were people who not only straddled both but literally were both and were present at moments relevant to queer communities, black communities, black queer communities. And also in writing this book, I just realized, you know, it would be really important for me to have a setting as well. I think sometimes with the form of nonfiction, there's this idea that, you know, nonfiction has to be quite broad and as general as general as possible, but I wanted to be more creative and say, you know what, I'm going to really orient this in a place in South London and have a really focused narrative and look at just how much a scene can thrive in a place which is sometimes associated with like aggression and masculinity and homophobia. So Brixton was a very intentional choice for me and as you said, you know, all of the men had lived there, either still lived there or have lived there full.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so I introduced the book talking about this guy called Ivo Cummings, who is his gay father Winrush, who helped to resettle Windrush migrants into Clapham, who then migrated into Brixton. And I didn't start it because I had any more information on this man, but to kind of set up the fact that, you know, there are reasons why Brixton has been this particularly importance base for Afro-Caribbean and African communities and their descendants and why even decades after those when Russian rivals there has still been this attraction to Brixen as a space. And the way that we think about Brixton in our more popular understanding is that we think about the uprisings that have happened there. We think about things like police brutality. We might think about the Brixton Nail bombings. And some people might have some knowledge of Brixton's queer history in terms of the South London Gay Liberation Front and the squatting movement that took place on Belton Road and Mail Road. But what I found was that there was such a rich black gay history.”
2024-03-29 · Intelligence Squared · Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, with Jason Okundaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT