• BlankSpaces (Mid-Wilshire)
• Boxaplex (WeHo)
• Coloft (Santa Monica)
• Indie Desk
• Next Space (Culver City)
• Office & Company (Pasadena)

Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

New Orleans. And I mean that in both physical and virtual terms. I have visited the city three times in 12 months. I am getting married there in May of 2011. My soul has been in love with that place since my first visit in 2002.

On Twitter, the only online space in which I really engage and connect with people, I follow close to a dozen New Orleanians. I follow almost that many NOLA blogs. And I check the Times-Picayune site about nice a week. I have even started rooting for the Saints.

In 2011, I want to get to know Los Angeles, particularly its artists and its black people. I love the sense of warmth and familiarity that comes from being around people who share your history. I hope to make at least a partial living by making art one day. Feeling emotionally rooted to a place is so important. Cultivating those roots will be my top priority.

Also see: Part I and Part II

Now since my revelation, I also fell in love with and became engaged to a man who lives in a city that I never wanted to visit, let alone live in.

But visit I did. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I kind of like Los Angeles.

Los Angeles has palm trees, (mostly) 70-degree winters, and scads of beaches. It has amazing art museums and at least one dope art gallery.

L.A. has a more robust transit system than it gets credit for, and a food culture that mixes haute cuisine, food trucks, ethnic food, and mash-up eats with fresh-from-the-next-county farmers markets.

It has walkable neighborhoods. It has a growing bicycle infrastructure. When I step out of my apartment-to-be, I see mountains. There are recreation opportunities like a mother-f*cker out here and I’ll have friends to do them with. It’s kind of incredible.

In short, Los Angeles, has most of what I’m looking for in a city. I know! I’m shocked too!

I’m leaving Atlanta in about two-and-a-half weeks to shack up with Jason. Early next year, I will start a new job. Then in May, 2011 after what will be a 15 month and three days-long engagement, Jason and I will make our partnership legal.

Truth be told, despite Jason, I’d still be leaving. I just reached a point where I can’t do this any more. I doubt I would have moved to Los Angeles, but I would not have stayed in Atlanta. Ten years in a place that doesn’t motivate you to happiness is enough.

I am scared as hell. The next six months are chock-full of HUGE life changes. But I am also looking forward to leaving Atlanta. I have made a few friends here and I will miss them. I have my favorite restaurants, and I will miss those. I know much of Atlanta and DeKalb County like the back of my hand, so I am a bit unnerved by the prospect of having to learn my way around a new city.

But it’s time.

I attended a screening of 41st & Central last night, as part of the National Black Arts Festival. It’s a quite moving documentary about the rise of the Los Angeles branch of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, especially its founder, Bunchy Carter.

Filmmaker Gregory Everett did a marvelous job of contextualizing the movement as an outgrowth of westward black migration to escape Jim Crow, a response to white brutality towards these newcomers, and resistance of Gestapo-like LAPD police tactics.

I don’t think Everett used as critical an eye as he could have, however. I suspect that’s because of his proximity to the subject matter. Everett is a Los Angeles native, and his father, with whom he didn’t have much of a relationship, was an active Panther. His reverence and awe is palpable.

That lack of distance made the film better in some ways; I doubt the interviews would have been as intimate otherwise. But I think it caused Everett to leave a few questions unasked, unanswered, or under-examined namely: age, gender, and the criminal histories and ties of its membership.

That’s what struck me most about the Black Panther Party while watching this documentary: the leadership’s youth, its gender, and its relationship to Los Angeles street gangs.

Bunchy Carter was 27 when he was killed. Huey P. Newton was 24 when he founded the Black Panther Party. Many of the members who had been killed, were between 17 and 23. These were young men — emphasis on young.

And these were young men — emphasis on men. Although three women figured prominently in this documentary (Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins, and Eldridge Cleaver’s ex-wife Kathleen), the Panther’s leadership was male. The only time women were explicitly mentioned in the documentary were as people — along with children — to be protected. Most photos of the Black Panthers were of black men wearing all black, sometimes holding weapons.

I suspect this gendering of the movement was tied to the fact that its founders were young men with criminal and gang histories. Bunchy Carter, for example, was part of the Slausons street gang, and founded a breakaway faction known as the Renegade Slausons before founding the Los Angeles chapter of the Panthers. Minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, had served time for assault with intent to kill. Huey P. Newton, who founded the main branch of the party in Oakland, was also an ex-convict.

Young men tend towards knuckleheadedness in our society. Being a knucklehead will bring you in more frequent contact with cops. Being a known, repeated knucklehead will get yo’ ass whupped by the police every single time. Mind you, to merely get your ass whupped by LAPD was to get off lucky.*

Black Panther Party members had more experience with the penal system. They were more likely to encounter the police, and therefore more likely to be brutalized by them. While several interviewees mentioned the gang history and conviction histories of party members, neither they nor Everett examined the problems this may have caused for party acceptance and growth. And the gendering of the party’s leadership was not mentioned, nor were reasons for it discussed in the documentary.

In fact, the gendering of black liberation movements was significant, problematic, and could indded have caused a rift in the movement had CoIntelPro not beat them to it. Black women were starting to question this male domination of leadership, and fight for full male privilege. For example, the Combahee River Collective Statement, released in 1973, articulates a black feminist critique that explicitly names black male sexism as a barrier to female participation in these movements. Again: it’s a question that wasn’t asked or answered by the documentary, despite three women being featured in it.

Despite my quibbles, I would recommend seeing the film if you can. It captures the passions and reasons behind a little-known corner of the movement.

* I can’t overstate the brutality of the Los Angeles Police Department at the time. Chief William H. Parker had recruited officers from the Jim Crow south. Between 1968 and 1969 (according to this documentary) at least two-dozen black people were killed under questionable circumstances. Several had been shot in the back while running away. Panther member Wayne Pharr recounted a story in the movie about getting beat up by the LAPD. He said they kept telling him to run, but he wouldn’t. At the time, running was a justifiable reason for shooting a suspect.

I learned this lesson the hard way. I blogged about my breakup that started in February 2007, here, on Vox, and on Yahoo! 360. This was shortly before SXSW 2007.

Blogging was cathartic for me. But it also put my ex on blast, and opened us both up to a lot of questions about why we were splitting. I distinctly remember having uncomfortable conversations at SXSW about what was happening, especially since most of my SXSW crew had met the ex at SXSW 2006. The ex was also drilled by his rather large circle of friends and acquaintances.

I even argued with the ex about whether and where I should blog — Vox was the community where my peoples played; Yahoo! 360 was where his friend’s stayed, though I was connected to his friends there. If I had to blog, he wanted to know, why did I have to blog there and not where my friends were?

It made an uncomfortable situation worse — more for him than for me (win!) — but I decided that I’d rethink being so public about relationships in the future.

Then came Twitter, which, thanks to its ambient intimacy, made staying involved in my friend’s lives a lot easier. Even though we were, in some cases, separated by 2,100+ miles and three time zones, we still had this wonderful sense of connection.

SXSW 2008, then, was markedly different. I didn’t need to catch up on what was happening with my friends. We could just enjoy some real-world face time. I felt my online friendships slowly melting into offline ones.

One friendship in particular had changed in a palpable way. After some Twitter conversations, surprising dreams, and a series of private-plurks, I found myself on a plane to Los Angeles for Labor Day Weekend.

First and foremost, our trip was about seeing each other and having fun as friends. We have always had an easy way with each other, and some of the absolute best times I’ve had since 2005 — the year we met at SXSW — have involved him.

But we also knew this was about a potential love thing shaped by, if not directly attributable, to Twitter and Plurk.

We both live our lives in the digital public, and are generally open about things. We also, however, have a sense of privacy and boundaries. This tension came out in weird ways, particularly around whether and what to tweet. Is it an innocent tweet, or a double-entendre? Do I mention our visit to Frederick’s of Hollywood? What about those hilarious one-liners that are almost too good not to share, but would reveal what we did and how?

Ultimately, we were both concerned with how things would be (mis)construed. And what kinds of intrusive questions would arise from those who know us, and those who think they know us?

And while I’m at it, what about us? I’m not sure I was ready to officially state what was up between us, even though our friends knew instinctively. What’s said offline and hinted at through a carefully-crafted, semi-private tweet is, still, in many ways, deniable. If things didn’t work out, the details would be obscured if not concealed.

But what’s expressed publicly and tagged with my name? That’s big. And brave. And Google-able. And cache-able. It’s a huge leap of faith in our friends, our acquaintances, and most of all, in whatever this is between us.