Tag: Martin Luther King Jr.

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Figures, by Phillip Hoyle

Following a fifth grade public humiliation in art class, I decided I could not draw figures. I was slightly interested but never liked what I drew after that. In seventh grade I signed up for wood shop to be in class with my best friend Keith. The only thing I actually liked in that class, besides cleaning varnish brushes (I liked the way twirling bristles full of soap felt on the palms of my hands), was drawing and wood burning a design onto the bookends I made. I should have signed up for art but I just knew I wasn’t an artist.

Due to my responsibilities in religious education I organized art programs for children. One teacher taught figure drawing. She made sure it included things like crosses and globes so the parents would understand why. Mostly I was interested that children grow artistically (music, drama, and visual arts) seeing them as religious expression, skills they would never forget from their childhood years in church.

Eventually I knew I needed to draw, so I bought a book on how to draw in a natural way, a large drawing tablet, and a set of art pencils. I worked at it and learned. Still I wasn’t a strong drawer. When I later signed up for a drawing workshop the thing didn’t get enough enrollees. I kept at my own figure drawing, even used my slight skills in my work.

Figures of speech were much more familiar to me. I had learned speech and some rhetoric in college and graduate school, wrote many papers to satisfy my professors, used the assigned topics in my own way in order to do research related to what intrigued me in the classes, preached a bit and eventually wrote professionally (probably a figure of speech itself although I did get paid for my work). I wasn’t a strong speaker, but I did enjoy turning ideas into written pieces.

Important figures in my life, you know those special people known or read about, include: my parents and grandparents, Lakota leader Sitting Bull, local minister W. F. Lown, a family friend who took me to powwows, The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor James Van Buren, several other profs, two music performance teachers, late-in-life art teachers, Myrna Hoyle my long-time wife and mother of our children, a few other partners in my gay life, many authors, some editors, the late Winston Weathers, and now some creative writing teachers.

I figure it has taken a village of thinkers, writers, musicians, and artists to make me into what I have become these days. I celebrate them and the many, many people who have put up with me in the home, work, friendships, general community, and of course, in the SAGE Telling Your Story group at the GLBT Center of Colorado. And I add; these last tributes are not just figures of speech, but rather, real live influences and personal realities that I appreciate and revere.

© 5 Jun 2017

About the Author 

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general, he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Hero – Heroine, by Phillip Hoyle

My dad deeply respected two ministers who pastored the
church I grew up in: Brother W.F. Lown and Brother Charles Cook. Both highly
educated men were skillful preachers, fine administrators, and dedicated
ministers. Brother Lown baptized me at a rather early age because I insisted on
it. Several years later he spoke to me about becoming a minister. I was eight
years old when he planted that seed. I started paying attention to what was
being said around the church—sermons, lessons, conversations, and discussions.
When Lown left to become the president of a nearby church-related college, I
got to know Brother Cook, our new minister. I watched him carefully and was
surprised (and probably disappointed) one weekday afternoon at junior high
choir rehearsal when some girls were paying no attention and talking mindlessly
while we were practicing. He yelled, “What in the Sam Hill do you think you are
doing?” He made it clear he wanted us to work not gab. Although I was mildly
shocked, I realized that ministers were people with a full range of emotions.
That was probably the main experience that made it possible for me to actually
become a minister. That day I realized that ministers are human beings not
heroes, well all but one of them.
My hero a minister I started hearing about when I was
a few years older: The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior. I paid
attention to his career, preaching, and activism. He eclipsed my attraction to
Billy Graham whom I also greatly respected. King’s power as a speaker got my attention,
but mostly his message of equality for all people made great sense out of the
old gospel message of salvation I had heard since the first Sunday after my
birth. And his message of racial equality filled a void made in my life by our
family’s move from the Army town where I was born to a small county seat town
where there were no African Americans, no persons of Asian descent, and only
two Hispanic people—a mother and her daughter. I missed people who looked,
thought, and lived differently. I missed people who were recent immigrants from
Germany, Japan or Puerto Rico. I missed many friends and neighbors who, thanks
to Kings preaching, I realized weren’t getting a fair shake in America. I liked
the practical, daily, living, moral message of his preaching. And of course I
liked his oratory and forceful leadership. I had a real hero—one who was a
warrior, a leader, a strategist, a public figure who served his people—the
whole people of the United States of America—and who paid the ultimate price
for his courage and leadership.
Years later, when my African Son whom I was visiting
in Memphis, Tennessee took me to the MLK Memorial at the place King was
murdered, I realized this man, unlike activists I met in the late 1970s, was
not living high on the hog. He was staying in an old motel in downtown Memphis.
Nothing fancy. He lived with the least of these his brothers and sisters. And
he was a real human being with the full range of human emotions and experience.
King became my first hero and to date my only one.
© 30 January 2017 
About the Author 
Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his
time writing, painting, and socializing. In general, he keeps busy with groups
of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen
in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He
volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com
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I Have a Dream, by Phillip Hoyle

I was asked to contact Colorado Public Radio for an interview—something related to the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr’s, “I Have a Dream” sermon. I heard that speech on television. I believe I watched it in Clay Center, Kansas. We moved there in 1962, the summer before I entered my sophomore year of high school. I loved the strongly rhetorical and emotional delivery of this handsome African American preacher. The move from an Army town with integrated schools to a small all-white county seat town made me race-conscious in a wholly new way. The presence of deep racial prejudice against coloreds in that rural setting seemed misplaced. These people seemed more prejudiced in their white society. They didn’t know the reality of working with, studying with, or playing with people of color. They didn’t have Negro friends or acquaintances. Dr. King’s call for an American vision of racial equality and justice rang true in my ears. I truly missed my African American class mates like Yolanda Dozier, Jay Self, Oscar Smith, Harlene Gilliam, and even Von Quinn. I missed packing groceries for the many African-American customers at the store. Like an ancient Hebrew prophet, King was calling the presumably Judeo-Christian America to repentance, to get right with God, to find justice by providing justice in every town from sea to shining sea. His voice rang true to biblical tradition. I was thrilled. A preacher was saying these things with great courage and creativity. He seemed a kind of hero for me.

I admired this man, agreed with his gospel, and had no perspective how this liberation movement would eventually spell freedom for me. Still, his voice alerted me to human potential and the need for social change in our country and towns. But the life of a teen, the day-to-day discoveries, the forging of a fledgling adult identity, the move towards jobs and careers intervened. I knew I had music, knew I had a religious motivation, but knew only one church that while it was not sectarian by intent, was often sectarian in practice. I dove deeply into its tides of education, ministry, work, and identity. Sadly like the county seat town, it too was mostly white, missed the richness of racial diversity and leadership. Still, king’s themes colored my reading, my concerns, my sense of myself, and kept me open to this larger and smaller vision of freedom. So now I am going to celebrate it on public radio. Is this a grand opportunity? It certainly presents a challenge for creativity, heart, ardor, and love not only for me but for America with its growing diversity and wilting idealism.

To the young I say listen to the creative, challenging, opening voice within. Never let go of its potential. Let it guide you down creative paths of participation in your personal and public life. Keep open to the way it can inform your decisions in the changing adult experiences related to age, relationships, and social change. Honor the voices of democracy, justice, and love. Recognize the responsibilities of freedom, the partial realization of advancement, the constant tendency not to share, and the ever-present fears. Build communities of loving support but not at the cost of forgetting the larger picture. Always the larger picture. You are in it. It is in you.

The interview brought together a young gay man and an old one (me). Hear it at www.cpr.org/news/audio/two-gay-men-two-different-generations

Denver, © 2013

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Multi-Racial, by Lewis

I am actually ashamed to say that I have almost nothing worthwhile to say about the subject of racial diversity. I have heard the demographers’ predictions about the U.S. becoming a “majority minority” racial country within 30-40 years. The America I grew up with was so heterogeneously white that it was more common to see pastel linen sheets on the clothesline than it was to pass a person of color on the street. Hutchinson, Kansas, was bisected by two sets of railroad tracks. Anything south of the “lower” set of tracks might as well have been Mexico, as far as my family and friends were concerned.

One notable exception was the one black family that lived about two blocks away on the same street. Theirs was the old, white wood-sided farmhouse with the detached garage that was probably the oldest property on our long street. No doubt they were there before any of us white folk or else they wouldn’t have been at all welcome. Their kids were older and I never attended school with any of them. When I passed by, I usually paid them no mind, unless someone was in the yard and then I would stare to see what they looked like. Seemed nice enough. Had no horns that I could see.

When I was about 10, my parents paid the family’s teenage daughter to babysit me. Of all my babysitters, she is the only one I remember. I think I was feeling very uncertain of myself and stayed pretty much in my bedroom. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her other than, “Hi”.

All through primary and secondary school, I didn’t have a single friend of color. My elementary and junior high schools were all-white. The junior high was so white, I almost made the 9th grade basketball team. The first time I ever looked out at a group of kids my age and saw a black face was when I gave the invocation at a junior high school exchange assembly. Sherman Junior High was south of the color line.

I’m almost positive I was in high school before I ever passed a student of a different race in the hall. Rarely did I ever share a classroom with one. As I type this, it seems so dehumanizing to refer to human beings of a different color as “ones”, as if I were talking about aliens or primates. Yet, I never gave it a thought. That’s just the way the world was. Whites ruled and that’s the way God intended it.

Even in junior college and college, nothing happened to change my views on race. I was either a pre-med major or in engineering. Those are not majors whereby one was likely to sit next to a person of color in those days.

I was shaken by the Detroit riots in 1967, not because I thought the “niggers were getting uppity” but because somewhere, deep inside, I understood. How was it that I felt that way? Why wasn’t I outraged like most of my friends and the folks quoted in the newspapers? After all, wasn’t I a person who enjoyed the perks of “white privilege” (though white folk would never acknowledge such a thing existed)? When Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated the following spring, I wished the white on my skin would wash off. I saw my own race as filled with hate and spite and a sense of entitlement.

You can imagine how uncomfortable, how awkward it was for me not to know anything about what being black was like and resenting the color that I was stuck with. It was kind of like—shit, it’s just hitting me now—it was like knowing that I wasn’t attracted to the gender that I was supposed to be attracted to but instead having feelings of deep attraction for members of the gender that was “verboten”. If my friends and family knew that I was “queer”, a “homo”, a “fag”, wouldn’t they treat me as badly or even worse than if I were black?

The experience of knowing how badly people of color had been treated for centuries colored forever my perceptions of American history and the differences among the races economically, socially, and politically. My politics became almost radicalized, though the demands of school and then finding employment kept my activity to a minimum for a few years. Although I grew up in a state that was purple and is now deep red, I still cannot understand how any human being who has felt what I felt—the deep sense of rejection for what I held to be most true in the deepest recesses of my heart—could possibly vote Republican. All of those who have been victimized by prejudice by the powerful should stand shoulder-to-shoulder until such time as justice for one means justice for all.
© 13 April 2015

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.