Joshua Sur­tees

A few days af­ter our in­ter­view at Al­ice Yard, where he has just ap­peared as the first Caiso-en­dorsed artist-in-res­i­dence, Aja­mu e-mails some im­ages of his work. They are black and white pho­tographs with a sense of poignan­cy–per­haps the first time the word "poignant" has been used to de­scribe a self-por­trait of an artist dressed in fish­nets, a leather gimp mask and high heels.

An­oth­er self-por­trait sees Aja­mu made over as the Beard­ed La­dy of the pho­to­graph's ti­tle. Wear­ing a wig and sport­ing his trade­mark long beard, Aja­mu gazes off wist­ful­ly in­to the dis­tance, away from the cam­era lens.

If the first im­age is provoca­tive­ly hu­mor­ous, the sec­ond is tinged with sad­ness.

In the oth­er pic­tures, his mod­els are posed in var­i­ous cos­tumes (some overt­ly sex­u­al, some nude, some more "tra­di­tion­al.")

They rep­re­sent a time­line of his work­ing life.

Aja­mu, the Hud­der­s­field-born British son of black Ja­maican im­mi­grants, adopt­ed his African name in 1991.

"It was giv­en to me by one of my men­tors," he says. He won't re­veal his for­mer name. "That has no bear­ing," he says, then laughs loud­ly, say­ing, "on­ly to my fam­i­ly."

"A lot of black men and women were em­brac­ing a pan-African per­spec­tive in the 80s and 90s," he ex­plains, "get­ting rid of eu­ro­cen­tric names. Aja­mu means He fights for what he be­lieves."

One imag­ines that a gay black man grow­ing up in the grit­ty and ma­cho north of Eng­land in the 1980s might have had a fair few bat­tles to fight, or strug­gles to over­come. But Aja­mu says fam­i­ly life and so­cial life in Hud­der­s­field was quite nor­mal.

His grand­par­ents ar­rived in Eng­land in 1958, the year that vi­cious race ri­ots broke out in Not­ting Hill as white gangs of Ted­dy Boys, urged on by British Fas­cist politi­cian Os­wald Mosley, at­tacked Caribbean im­mi­grants. His par­ents fol­lowed in 1962 and Aja­mu was born a year lat­er in 1963.

He de­scribes Hud­der­s­field as "a small town where, dur­ing the 60s and 70s, a large black pop­u­la­tion, main­ly Ja­maican and Grena­di­an and a small num­ber of Trinida­di­ans and Asians formed a tight-knit com­mu­ni­ty where every­body knew every­body."

He came out to his par­ents, broth­ers and cousins as gay in his late teens.

"They had no prob­lems with it what­so­ev­er. I wasn't sur­prised by their re­ac­tion but I had built it up for months and months and then I came out and it was like, what was all that fear about? They know the work I do, they know my part­ner, he's part of the fam­i­ly."

He says he had a fear of re­jec­tion pri­or to com­ing out. Put to him that Ja­maicans have a ter­ri­ble rep­u­ta­tion for ho­mo­pho­bia and that his fam­i­ly's re­ac­tion was im­pres­sive­ly pro­gres­sive for the times, he says "I chal­lenge that nar­ra­tive of Ja­maican ho­mo­pho­bia be­cause, ac­tu­al­ly, I don't think it's par­tic­u­lar­ly in any spe­cif­ic cul­ture. Ho­mo­pho­bia for me ex­ists in all fam­i­lies, all com­mu­ni­ties, all so­ci­eties and it doesn't serve any­body to say this coun­try is more ho­mo­pho­bic than an­oth­er coun­try. It just sets up these weird par­a­digms. It's an il­lu­sion to think just be­cause West­ern coun­tries have rights every­thing is hunky do­ry. It's a dan­ger­ous nar­ra­tive to cre­ate that hi­er­ar­chy."

He has been to Ja­maica and says next time he goes he would be open­ly gay.

"It's not some­thing I can turn on and off and, al­so, some peo­ple might not read me as be­ing gay." It's a bold stance in a so­ci­ety where open­ly gay and trans­gen­der men are cur­rent­ly liv­ing in a drain in the cap­i­tal, Kingston, shunned and re­ject­ed by so­ci­ety and li­able to be at­tacked.

He says he had a great time there with his fam­i­ly and grand­par­ents in 1999. He even vis­it­ed a gay bar but he thinks it might no longer ex­ist, amidst the rise of an­ti-gay sen­ti­ments. Ho­mo­pho­bia, he says, is on the rise all over the world. Even in the UK.

Giv­ing a voice to the blackBri­tish gay com­mu­ni­ty

Part of his work is to rep­re­sent black LGBT men and women–a sec­tion of British so­ci­ety he feels are of­ten silent or mar­gin­alised.

"We don't hear the voic­es of LGBT peo­ple who are "out" in black fam­i­lies. We don't hear the voic­es of our aunts and un­cles and moth­ers and dads and grand­mas who are per­fect­ly hap­py with their sons and daugh­ters be­ing les­bians and gays. Those nar­ra­tives are miss­ing," he says.

He moved to Lon­don in 1988 in his mid 20s, af­ter a four-year spell in Leeds. The move came af­ter at­tend­ing the first Na­tion­al Gay Black Men's Con­fer­ence at the Black Les­bian and Gay Cen­tre in Cam­den in Oc­to­ber, 1987. An event, he says, which has nev­er been re­peat­ed.

Un­til the con­fer­ence he'd on­ly ever met a hand­ful of gay black peo­ple. One of whom was his first lover, from Hud­der­s­field.

"I met him at the bar at the Gem­i­ni club." A quick Google search turns up ref­er­ences to this club on the Hud­der­s­field Dai­ly Ex­am­in­er's Web site un­der a list of "Great lost night clubs". It is al­so re­ferred to in a book called The Ho­mo­sex­u­al(ity) of Law by Leslie Moran in which the law pro­fes­sor de­scribes how it was raid­ed re­peat­ed­ly by po­lice in the ear­ly 80s who were at­tempt­ing to gath­er de­tailed in­for­ma­tion about the gay com­mu­ni­ty in York­shire, a coun­ty syn­ony­mous in the UK with be­ing in­tol­er­ant of any­body who ap­pears to be dif­fer­ent.

"It was a small town, there was a whis­per­ing cul­ture which was how you would find out about oth­er gay peo­ple," Aja­mu says.

But most peo­ple who are "dif­fer­ent" in Eng­land in­evitably leave for the big city soon­er or lat­er.

He stud­ied black his­to­ry and then pho­tog­ra­phy in Leeds. In 1985, with two oth­er friends, he cre­at­ed a mag­a­zine called BLAC. The acronym stood for Black Lib­er­a­tion Ac­tivist Core.

"That was some of the pol­i­tics I was get­ting in­to at the time," he ex­plains.

He need­ed to cre­ate an im­age for an ar­ti­cle and de­scribes him­self as "falling" in­to pho­tog­ra­phy that way.

His ca­reer brought him all the way to Trinidad for a two-week res­i­den­cy at Al­ice Yard, an artis­tic space for nur­tur­ing tal­ent.

While here, he fa­cil­i­tat­ed a two-day pho­tog­ra­phy work­shop. Aja­mu led the par­tic­i­pants in a di­a­logue about the so­cio-cul­tur­al bi­as­es–gen­der, race, class–a pho­tog­ra­ph­er can bring to the act of tak­ing a pho­to­graph.

The themes of his work he de­scribes as "black im­agery with a fo­cus on sex­u­al­i­ty, race, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, iden­ti­ty, plea­sure and de­sire."

There is a sex­u­al na­ture to the im­ages. The leather, the nu­di­ty, the taut mus­cles, pout­ing lips, se­duc­tive gazes and even graph­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the body (a 1993 close-up of an erect pe­nis, called Cock and Glove, is star­tling in as much as it takes a sec­ond to work out what it is. Per­haps that's the point.)

I ask whether fo­cus­ing on black phys­i­cal­i­ty and iden­ti­ty in an pre­dom­i­nant­ly white Eu­ro­pean so­ci­ety like the UK speaks to the pol­i­tics of dis­place­ment and be­long­ing. I put it to him that French pho­tog­ra­ph­er Fred­erique Bornier spent years in Paris doc­u­ment­ing black im­mi­grants from West Africa, North Africa and the Mid­dle East be­cause she felt their de­meanours and fa­cial ex­pres­sions spoke of a deep un­hap­pi­ness, ten­sion or frus­tra­tion.

But his work has a much more pos­i­tive at­ti­tude than that.

"It's about cel­e­bra­tion and as­pi­ra­tion," he says. "Grow­ing up in the UK in the 1970s and ear­ly 80s, in main­stream pop­u­lar cul­ture, all the im­ages of gay men were white. John In­man, Frankie How­erd, Ken­neth Williams and so forth. Im­ages of black men were al­ways sports stars or in re­la­tion to con­fronta­tions with au­thor­i­ty. So for me there were very few im­ages I could re­late to. So in a vague kind of way I cre­at­ed im­ages that just weren't there."

In the gen­tle and sen­su­al ap­proach to his work we al­so see a chal­lenge to the stereo­typ­i­cal im­ages of black mas­culin­i­ty which he de­scribes as "fear, threat and fas­ci­na­tion." He talks about icon­ic im­ages like the beat­ing of Rod­ney King, the vi­o­lence of Mike Tyson or the one-di­men­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions of black men in porn.

"These ideas didn't gen­er­al­ly come from black men them­selves. So my work is what I need to see, as a black gay man."

He says there's a his­to­ry of nar­row stereo­types he is born in­to which he has to un­pack. Par­tic­u­lar­ly prob­lem­at­ic for him is the ap­pli­ca­tion of stereo­types to all black men and there­by cre­at­ing a dom­i­nant, un­chal­lenged nar­ra­tive.

Near the end of the in­ter­view he's asked about his self-de­scribed "sex ac­tivism." He had men­tioned it in his in­tro­duc­to­ry speech at Al­ice Yard and it's a phrase that sticks in your head. But what does it mean?

"I run pri­vate sex par­ties for men who want to have sex with men. Since the late 90s, on and off," he says blunt­ly. The can­did­ness is re­fresh­ing. There's none of the cagi­ness which usu­al­ly ac­com­pa­nies such state­ments. No tabloid style de­scrip­tions of murky sex­u­al un­der­worlds.

"Part of my work is aca­d­e­m­ic, an­oth­er part is about how we ac­tu­al­ly ex­pe­ri­ence our own de­sires and fan­tasies phys­i­cal­ly through the body. And al­so com­ing to­geth­er to talk about our de­sires and play­ing them out."

How many men? "I can get about 30 peo­ple, 50 peo­ple. It de­pends on the lo­ca­tion."

Af­ter prob­ing fur­ther, for want of a bet­ter word, Aja­mu ad­mits that he is care­ful about what he says. It's not just his life but oth­er peo­ple's pri­va­cy at stake.

For him, how­ev­er, the phys­i­cal side is one as­pect of the cre­ative side, not too dif­fer­ent in his eyes from a spo­ken word po­et­ry slam. The ex­pres­sion of sex­u­al­i­ty is part of his art. It's what he does.

�2 To see Aja­mu's pho­tog­ra­phy vis­it the Web site aja­mu-fin­eart­pho­tog­ra­phy.co.uk/