Tina Turner and Pride

Whiffs of baking biscuits and frying bacon drift upstairs, eyes blinking open to “Dawn Revisited.” Terrific news from poet Rita Dove—sunrise hands us a blank page for fresh writing. “Imagine you wake up / with a second chance.” Feet on the floor. Who’s cookin’ downstairs? “Shake a leg!”

Rise, too, for a dance with our solar system’s winningest leg shaker and second chance taker. “She had the greatest gams ever seen on a human being, a voice to match, style for days, and an indomitable stage presence” (Soraya Nadia McDonald: “America Loved Tina Turner. But It Wasn’t Good to Her”). Take another bow, Tina Turner. Examining all of her life offers the only way to appreciate her gutsy triumph. Her songs and shimmy will last. And her life, as a herstory textbook, will last. “We don’t need another hero. We need a present and a future that doesn’t make one like Tina Turner necessary.”

McDonald’s (worthy of many readings) article gut punches: “There is a difference between being visible and being seen.” Tina Turner wanted all of her life seen, expecting most would make the easier choice of skipping her hardest truths. “When she got free, she made herself into an icon. How typical, how American, to focus our collective klieg lights on the infectious, feel-good parts of Turner’s story while turning away from the dark circumstances that haunted her to her grave.” Born Anna Mae Bullock, a Black daughter abandoned by her Tennessee sharecropper parents, Turner’s heart and body ache from an early age. Then, when she uses her talents to find a way out of poverty and neglect, her violently abusive husband grooms Anna Mae into Tina Turner. Tina Turner performs “Proud Mary” while fearing for her life. After one suicide attempt to escape sixteen years of captive brutality, proud Tina chooses her exit straight through the door. Bruised and bloody, scooping up 36 cents and a gas card, she flees across a dangerous expressway into a freedom all her own making.

We stare into the darkness. Both Turner and her Mississippian ex-husband lacked the stature of full personhood that patriarchy reserves for whites only. The rot of white male supremacy grinds its nastiest boot on the Black woman. Slavery’s culture did not end in 1865—its trappings still hunt down victims in housing, wages, and education—in state (Tennessee!) legislatures, Congress, the Supreme Court. “Turner was a human souvenir of our country’s greatest shame.”

Too often, I shared an office with Professor T. Turner. Her experience of paralyzing abuse, descent into despair, and daring break for freedom made her an ally to likewise suffering, insecure community college students. Turner knew by heart each of my student’s shame and confusion. While sitting or walking with me before and after class, their faces softened, shoulders pulled back, resolutions stiffened as Turner dispensed courage. Beginnings coughed—nerve sizzled. While serving as teacher’s assistant in my 1988 rookie year, my officemate dazzled 180,000 of her crazy-smitten fans in Rio de Janeiro.

Turner inspired other students for a variety of reasons, but especially students struggling with discovering and expressing their sexual identity. She sang at the opening ceremonies of the 1982 inaugural Gay Games in San Francisco. Always an outspoken LGBTQ advocate, she’s the perfect opening act for June’s Gay Pride Month. Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, issued a state of emergency on June 6 in response to spiraling escalation of anti-LGBTQ threats, violence, and legislation in state houses.

The first Pride March took place in NYC on June 28, 1970, marking the first anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The Library of Congress celebrates “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride Month,” showcasing its seemingly infinite collection in a wide variety of mediums. From the Library’s website welcome to LGBTQ month, an opportunity: “The Library is responsible for making all of its vast collection available to all.”

Jameson Fitzpatrick tumbles tipsily into bed after a front stoop goodnight kiss, their stomachs’ pressing another kiss. “I didn’t let myself feel scared, I kissed him,” and Fitzpatrick falls asleep as one killer with two guns murders forty-nine people in Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub (June 12, 2016). Fitzpatrick writes “A Poem for Pulse” and every syllable pulsates with the refusal to fear and commitment to love. This charged poem’s last line: “Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.” Hello, love. Goodbye, running.

Pride’s summer solstice

prime time for private dancer

shush now, blog writer

With its outhouses and segregated school house, “you have to watch / what you’re puttin’ down in old Nutbush.” Turner parades through her childhood’s “Nutbush City Limits” in an electrifying 1990 Barcelona concert. Speed limit may be 25 in Nutbush, but look at her band and this crowd. “Nutbush, one more time.” One? No way! That old “Highway Number Nineteen” now leads to the Tina Turner Museum, housed in the same one-room Flagg Grove School built in 1889 by her great uncle.

Still on our feet in Barcelona as she belts “The Best,” we’re shoulder to shoulder in the throng. But I want to picture her before the show, Tina seeing Tina looking back at her from the mirror. Nodding and winking, hips slightly swaying: “You’re simply the best / Better than all the rest.” A beloved loner, embodying “the language of love.”

“I will see you in the sky tonight.” Oh, this duet. Tina Turner and David Bowie bewitch us “Tonight.” The laughter, the dancing, the love. “Everything will be alright tonight.”

Two glasses clink tonight—and to tomorrow too. C’mon dawn—let’s get it on.

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