Dan Fishback: Comfort in books, not TV

Someone was lonely before you... and yet miraculously... someone has survived." Maya Angelou was talking about poetry.

Last Tuesday, in Irvine Auditorium, she spoke about healing, art and identification -- about seeing your reflection on a page of beautiful words and realizing that you're in good company. That, she said, was why we should read poetry.

But people don't read poetry anymore. They watch TV.

They don't find comfort and community in Paul Lawrence Dunbar -- they find it in Danny Roberts of The Real World.

They don't look for answers in Audre Lorde -- they drive hours to Houston Hall to seek advice from a man who is famous for no reason, a man who's only qualifications are beauty and celebrity.

Last Monday, they came to bear their souls to this media construction and took life-advice from a man who offered his own life to MTV.

Maya Angelou also said, "Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt."

There are so many words out there. "Alone" is one of them, but it seems so silly amongst its cousins -- all the exaltations and lamentations, all the voices that shiver everywhere, waiting to be heard. There are simply too many poems, too many books, too many songs out there for people to choose Danny Roberts as their voice of solace. There are too many truly inspirational voices, just dripping with insight and comfort, too many fierce arguments for the tenacity of the human spirit for people to turn on MTV in times of emotional crisis.

Could it be that they don't know?

Could it be that no one told them, "That's what books are for. That's what libraries are for" -- could it be that so many English teachers failed so miserably?

Perhaps not. Because, for those boys who drove miles and miles to catch a glimpse of their savior, libraries themselves are probably a failure. Their schools are probably failures, as are their churches and synagogues and mosques and temples and any other places where voices converge and texts are read. Because the voices that will save these boys -- the voices that will let them know, without a doubt, "Someone was lonely before you," -- those voices are frigidly absent from most shelves, most reading lists, most curricula.

These boys look to Danny as one of the only prominent gay men in their lives, more inspiring than NBC's Will Truman because Danny is a real person -- a gay man with the respectable stamp of fame plastered across his grin.

It makes me wonder if a poem by Essex Hemphill or a novel by Michael Cunningham could pull a faulty quest for answers out of a hypnotizing television screen and into printed pages.

That's pretty much what happened with me. Granted, the MTV of 1995 was slightly more intelligent than it is now (which is saying so little it barely needs to be said at all), and granted, The Real World's Pedro Zamora was just as inspiring as your poet or novelist, but he was an activist before he was a celebrity and therefore, a disappointingly rare phenomenon on a network so whorishly driven by commerce.

When I fled from the tube into the words of writers who sound like me, the feeling of solace put television identification to shame. People on TV walk around, and you watch. Voices on a page speak directly to you, stretch further out to your mind, unaided by pictures. Through their lack of glitzy adornment, they must struggle harder to reach you, so when they do, the embrace is sweeter, and the connection true. In their effort is a specific intent, a very purposeful trajectory towards your heart.

Television doesn't reach out -- it sucks in. And more than that, it just sucks.

So while I'd be glad if anyone who came to see Danny Roberts left Houston Hall feeling more fulfilled, more confident and perhaps less alone, I only wish they knew the other paths towards hope.

And while I hope www.dannyandpaul.com, a site dedicated to Danny and his boyfriend, is run by a webmaster who finds some sort of happiness in his shrine to these purposeless celebrities, I only wish he knew the possibilities resting in the closed books on the untouched shelves of the unvisited section of the near-empty library that no one bothered to tell him about -- a place where voices awfully similar to his remind each other, in lieu of an audience, how not-alone they are, how strong, how stylin', how beautiful.

Dan Fishback is a junior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

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