Thursday, May 28, 2015

A Conversation With Leonce Gaiter About Black Masculinity, Revenge, Identity, and 'The Old West'

Leonce Gaiter is the guest on this installment of the podcast known as The Chauncey DeVega Show.

Leonce is the author of I Dreamt I Was in Heaven: The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang.

He is a straight shooter and a real talker.

This is a great and honest conversation where Chauncey and Leonce have a real salon. There is no agenda or prepared set of questions in the conversation between Leonce and Chauncey: this is spontaneous, honest, and direct truth-telling without a filter.

We call this "grown folks talk".

The Chauncey DeVega Show has had some generous guests, and amazing moments of learning. This episode is one for the books.

In this episode, Leonce and Chauncey discuss notions of black male honor, revenge, and self-respect. What does it mean to be black, male, and brave? Why is American society afraid of black folks who claim their honor and self-respect?

How do movies that are revenge fantasies like Tarantino's Django, and commercial hip-hop, fit into America's collective imagination, anxiety, and fear about black manhood, respectability, and honor?

How do people of color navigate elite white spaces such as Harvard University, and what does that teach us about the colorline? Why does black male self-respect and honor scare so many white folks?

Leonce also shares some great insights about writing, race, and the Old West.

Chauncey does some sharing in this episode about Memorial Day, Confederate white trash, thug cops, the Waco outlaw motorcycle riot and shooting, Barack Obama, and his recipe for frying pork chops.

Chauncey gives some details regarding his recent appearance on Ring of Fire TV, shares too much personal information, shills for June's fundraising drive to support The Chauncey DeVega Show and the website known as We Are Respectable Negroes, and shows some leg in the online burlesque show for the special guests who will be on the show in the upcoming weeks.

This episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show with Leonce Gaiter can be listened to below or "watched" on the official Youtube channel for chaunceydevega.com

The Chauncey DeVega Show can also be followed on Itunes and listened to via Stitcher on your smart phone or like device.

5 comments:

SW said...

Enjoyed the interview. You are a funny dude.


Growing up we used to have a frying pot that sat on the back of the stove. We would use the same oil over and over until it was black and full of chicken morsels and pieces of french fries. Lol.


We fried food just about everyday of the week back then. Not so much today...


Anyway, got some good learning out of this episode and a few good laughs. And yeah, the embedded with Big Foot is funny. Don't miss the one with High Pitch Eric. Too much.

chauncey devega said...

So sad that Eric the Actor is gone. Bigfoot is unbelievable. He is so real with the folks being trapped in the back of the house on a sit down strike.

SW said...

Yeah man. Eric the Actor was definitely my favorite Wack Packer.


High Pitch. Just about anything he says is funny.

joe manning said...

Part of the problem with the whole Confederate thing is that folks generally feel that war is intrinsically honorific, apart from the cause that is being fought for. As long as this is the case there will be no real peace movement to countervail against endless war. Only in the late 60's and early 70's did the critical mass of people decide that war, carte blanche, was wrong. Everything about war, the reinactments, the icons, soldiering, and the memorials is pathological.

craig said...

I really enjoyed this interview. I went and bought the book "I Dreamt I was in Heaven". Regarding the ease vs difficulty of writing non-fiction vs fiction - I remember, at a reading with Ha Jin, the Chinese novelist, being asked questions from the audience about China's politics and Ha Jin just chuckling and saying "What do I know I'm just a writer!" So for him, I guess discussing bigger social issues was a a lot more difficult than writing fiction. His novels have characters that are experiencing the impact of bigger social issues but they don't, and neither does the author, really have the complex, educated, well researched perspective of how these issues are influencing them.