“I don’t know if it would have. I wasn’t brought up to believe that it wouldn’t. My mother was very careful about staying on
“I’ve heard that could be hard,” I said. “So you kept your dating a private matter.”
“Yes.”
“And because you were single and forty it was assumed you were gay?”
“Single, forty, educated, bookish, unathletic – do you know I’ve never played a basketball game in my life?”
“A clear betrayal of your heritage,” I said.
“You know, the funny thing, I have no interest in sex with other men, but I am, in many ways, more at home in the gay community than the straight. I found the gay world readily accepting of a black man and a white woman. No one expected me to be Michael Jordan.”
“No one expects anyone to be Michael Jordan,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do. You have a large number of gay friends?”
“Yes. I’m more comfortable in the gay world than I am in the black world.”
I wasn’t sure that worlds divided themselves so neatly as Robinson suggested, but that wasn’t my issue. I nodded encouragingly.
“America expects black men to be macho,” he said.
Again, I wasn’t sure either of us was in a position to know what America expected, and, again, it wasn’t my issue. So I nodded some more.
“Of course,” and he smiled suddenly, “I am also relighting the family fight, you know, the refined mother and the father who trained fighters?”
That sounded a little closer to it and I liked him better for knowing it.
“Yes,” I said. “Being a straight man in a gay circumstance would be a nice way to do that, wouldn’t it.”
His eyes widened and he looked at me.
“Well,” he said, “you’re not…” He made a little oh-I-don’t-know hand wave.
I finished it for him.
“… as stupid as I look,” I said. “In fact I am. But I have a smart girlfriend.”
“I’m impressed,” Robinson said.
I went for the complete show-off.
“For a black man,” I said, “dating white women might be another way of dramatizing his ambivalence.”
“Your girlfriend must have had some therapy,” Robinson said.
“She’s a shrink,” I said.
“Oh,” Robinson said, “well, that’s not fair.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I don’t like to ask this, but may I speak to your current girlfriend?”
“Yes. Her name is Pamela Franklin. I’ll give you her address.”
He took a ballpoint pen and a small notebook from his inside pocket and wrote for a moment and tore the page out and handed it to me.
“Thank you. Do you know Amir Abdullah?”
“Yes.”
“Comment?”
“Amir is a fraud. He’s an intellectually dishonest, manipulative, exploitive charlatan.”
“Know anything bad about him?” I said.
Robinson started to protest, caught himself, looked at me a moment, and smiled without much humor.
“You’re joking.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t so much,” he said.
“Almost certainly,” I said. “Tell me more about Amir?”
“He has created himself in the image of a black revolutionary, without any vestige of a philosophical ground. I am not by nature a revolutionary or an activist, but I can respect people who genuinely are. Amir is not. He is a contrivance. He gets what he wants by accusing anyone who opposes him of being a racist or a homophobe.”
“Or a Tom,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Are you and he politically opposed?”
