Getting Your Rocks Off

Reading clouds beyond the road
I calculate our distance, survey
the space between our clothes
where rising curves and mountain
tug for air, touch, release.

You drive to the hairpin slope,
hesitate, turn up and in. We ride
on every naked fear you have
and discover that men like us
are not all granite, shale,
deceptive quartz, or
glittering layers of mica.

From here you see the whole world
differently: brownskin,
tufts of black grass.
And many times I have given myself
to summits like these.
Ride in, ride high.
Ride until the clouds break.

You will learn to read rain. You will
follow the white gravel it leaves.

Melvin Dixon

Poet Details

1950–1992

Scholar, novelist, and poet Melvin Dixon was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He earned a BA from Wesleyan University and an MA and a PhD from Brown University. Dixon wrote the poetry collections Change of Territory (1983) and Love’s Instruments (1995, published posthumously) and two novels, Trouble the Water (1989), winner of a Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction, and Vanishing Rooms (1991). Influenced by James Baldwin, Dixon wrote extensively about his homosexuality, specifically about the complexities of being a gay black man. Speaking on this topic at a speech to the Third National Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference, Dixon said, “As white gays deny multiculturalism among gays, so too do black communities deny multisexualism among their members. Against this double cremation, we must leave the legacy of our writing and our perspectives on gay and straight experiences.”

Dixon produced scholarship on and translated writing by several African American writers, including Leopold Sedar Senghor, Geneviève Fabre, and Jacques Roumain. Dixon taught at the City University of New York, Fordham University, Columbia University, and Williams College before dying of complications of AIDS at age 42.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/survivingandthriving/img/photo-exhibition-OB2269-home.jpg

“If you really love him…Rubbers—Every Time!” poster, Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum, Los Angeles, 1985

Courtesy National Library of Medicine

In response to a pervasive myth that AIDS was a white gay disease, black gay and lesbian organizations created campaigns targeting black men who had sex with men. They encouraged men to protect one another, insisting that love—although not in the form of marriage or even commitment—and condoms were critical for AIDS prevention.