a&e features

Gay Holocaust survivor shares life lessons

Alfred Munzer laments ongoing religious, racial hatred

Published

9 years ago

July 22, 2015

Holocaust Munzer, gay news, Washington Blade

Alfred Munzer in his Van Ness apartment. Now retired from his medical career, Munzer devotes much of his time to the Holocaust Museum. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

First Person 2015 Series: Al Munzer

Conversation with a Holocaust Survivor

Wednesday, July 29

11 a.m.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, S.W.

Free

No registration required

ushmm.org

Although the odds were not favorable for Alfred Munzer in the circumstances surrounding his birth, in many ways, he ended up being the luckiest member of his family.

He’s the youngest of three children of Simcha and Gisele Munzer, a family of Jewish immigrants from what is now Poland. His parents were childhood sweethearts and were raising two daughters, Eva (born in July 1936) and Leah (born in November 1938) in the Hague, Netherlands. After World War I, anti-Semitism was rampant in their native land and opportunities were limited, so they moved to Holland where there was a substantial population of Jews, some of whom were from families that had been there since the 15th century. Simcha ran a men’s tailoring business.

When Gisele discovered she was expecting a third child — the pregnancy was unplanned — an abortion was advised and, as Munzer tells it today, his mother was told that, “it would be immoral to bring another Jewish life into the world.” Although not especially religious, she was inspired by the Old Testament story of Hannah, the childless woman who vows to God that if she is given a son, she will give him back to God. Her wish is granted with the birth of Samuel.

Munzer, now 73, was born on Nov. 23, 1941. Before he reached his first birthday, in July of 1942, Germans began mass deportations of nearly 100,000 Jews from the occupied Netherlands to the east, primarily Auschwitz, a network of Nazi concentration camps in German-annexed regions that had previously been part of Poland. It marked the beginning of a harrowing season for his family.

Munzer says growing up, he was often reminded of the circumstances around which he was born.

“Any time I was bad growing up, my mother would remind me of this, how she had prayed to God and requested a son,” Munzer says. “She indoctrinated me with this. It was made very clear that she had made the same pledge as Hannah and that I was here in service of God ultimately.”

It’s one of many biographical stories Munzer will share on Wednesday, July 29 when he does another installment of the Holocaust Museum’s First Person program in which survivors are interviewed about their life experiences. Since retiring from his career as an internist and pulmonologist last year, Munzer has become increasingly active as a volunteer at the museum. The program is free.

Having shared his life story many times over the years, first at an artistic event in Woodstock, N.Y., in the early 1980s, Munzer says it’s important that his story and those of other Holocaust survivors continue to be told.

“The angle I usually take is that even in a sea of evil, it is possible for people to do the right thing and stand up for what is right,” he says.

Unlike, for instance, the Anne Frank family, the Munzers thought they’d fare better if they went into hiding separately. Munzer’s two sisters went to live with a Catholic family. Simcha Munzer had received a notice to report for so-called labor duty, essentially a one-way ticket to a concentration camp, but was able to delay it by first having a hernia operation he’d been putting off and later faking a suicide attempt. Joined by Gisele at a Jewish psychiatric hospital where she was pretending to be a nurse’s aide, the two were eventually deported, in early 1943, to Vught Concentration Camp and then a year later to Auschwitz where they were separated.

Gisele had sold the family’s possessions. Neighbors kept some items such as a silver candelabra and fire dragon puppet that are now in Munzer’s Van Ness apartment where he’s lived for about 25 years with his husband, Joel Wind. Though only married for a year and a half, the two have been together since they met at Bet Mishpachah, a local LGBT-affirming synagogue where Munzer sometimes preaches, in 1980.

Things quickly turned dark for the family. The husband of the family raising Munzer’s two older sisters turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer. He denounced his wife and the two girls and all three were arrested and sent to the Westerbork transit camp. On Feb. 8, 1944, Eva, 8, and Leah, 6, were deported to Auschwitz where they were killed three days later.

Alfred was put in the care of a family friend named Annie Madna who placed him with her sister. After about a month, she became too nervous to keep him and placed little Alfred with her ex-husband Tole, a native of Indonesia. Munzer stayed there for the next three years and was looked after by their housekeeper, Mima Saina, who went to great lengths to care for him.

“She really became my mother,” Munzer says. “She was a woman who was completely illiterate, who spoke no Dutch, couldn’t read or write, she spoke only Indonesian, but she had a heart of gold. She would walk — I was in the house illegally, so there were no ration coupons for me — she had to scrounge up milk for me however she could, sometimes walking miles just to get it. I’m told I slept in her bed. She kept a knife under the pillow to kill off any Nazis who might try to get me or even kill me rather than having me fall in their hands. She was an amazing woman who raised me from the time I was about 9 months old till I was about 3 and a half.”

Simcha spent several months in Auschwitz and was then sent to three different camps in Austria. Although eventually freed from one in Ebensee in the Austrian Alps by the U.S. Army, he was so weakened by the ordeal that he died under the care of nuns at a convent just two months later, on July 25, 1945, 70 years ago this weekend. Munzer was told his father had contracted tuberculosis.

Gisele fared better and worked on electronics equipment in a series of camps before she was freed at the Danish border through the intervention of the Swedish Red Cross in early 1945. Although fussy from having been awoken from a nap, being reunited with her is one of Munzer’s earliest memories.

“I was cranky and crying so the whole Matna family was passing me around, like you do with a crying baby, and the only lap I wouldn’t sit on was my own mother’s,” Munzer says. “She was a stranger to me by that point.”

It was decided that his de facto surrogate mother Mima would continue to care for him while Gisele looked for work but Mima had a cerebral hemorrhage about two months later and died. Gisele eventually found work in the garment industry. Although deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, Munzer remembers her as a stoic, matter-of-fact woman. He had no sense growing up that his life was any different from anyone else’s.

“I was surrounded by kids who had lost their parents, who had lost siblings, there really was nothing unusual about that,” he says. “I did not understand as a very young kid what had happened to my sisters. All I knew was that there were these beautiful pictures on the wall of these beautiful girls. Everybody would tell me how wonderful they were. One of my mother’s neighbors would tell me that my older sister could write so perfectly when she was just 6. I was a little bit jealous of them in a sense. I had no comprehension of the fact that they had been killed. I just did not understand why they were missing or just didn’t really think about it.”

Neither, too, did the bombed-out landscape of the Hague, strike young Munzer as unusual.

“My mother had a very good friend who was in a concentration camp with her and she and her husband, well, there was very little housing available there. After my mother closed her store, she had acquired a little cosmetics store, we’d go to visit the Van Der Pols in these few little rooms they had in an attic and we’d walk across these huge fields of rubble to get there. I thought walking through rubble was just a normal thing. Or playing hide and seek in bunkers on the beach. It wasn’t until much later that I came to grips with the Holocaust as such.”

In July 1958, Gisele and then-16-year-old Alfred came to the United States where he became a bit of an overachiever. Located in Brooklyn, he finished high school, college, medical school and advance training at Johns Hopkins. He first came to Washington in 1972 during a two-year tour of duty with the Air Force and an assignment at Andrews Air Force Base.

He has many happy memories of his later years with his mother and says the two enjoyed many trips, including a few to visit his father’s grave, in her later years. A pivotal turning point in his understanding of the Holocaust came in 1978 when the miniseries “The Holocaust” aired on CBS.

“Before, I would hear her in conversations with friends and it was always, ‘so-and-so came back’ or ‘so-and-so did not come back.’ They never used the term survived. She had told me little bits and pieces here and there, actually humorous things mostly. She told me once very late in the game, she was actually cast as Adolf Hitler in a play, that type of thing. But she always had an incredibly positive attitude, which I think is really what kept her alive. She even spoke of being in one of those cattle cars and being able to look out and see the beautiful countryside. She said, ‘After the war, we may not have much money, but at least that was not a bad way to travel around and see nature. … After the ‘Holocaust’ miniseries, I took out a map and had her trace the 12 concentration camps she had been through and she told me the approximate dates and things that had happened at each place.”

Munzer says she was “very matter of fact about it.”

She eventually embraced Wind and on later trips introduced he and Alfred as “her two sons.” She settled in Rockville and enjoyed painting and was “not especially anti-German,” Munzer says. “She judged people individually and felt that was important.” Several of her landscapes hang above Munzer’s sofa now. She died at age 95 about 12 years ago.

Munzer started volunteering at the museum about eight years ago. He conducts tours, helps with Dutch-to-English translation work, gives talks to student groups and more. He says he’s delighted that the museum has remained popular and, although a challenge, is often overwhelmed by the number of people who visit, crowds having far surpassed estimates since its 1993 opening.

Museum staff say the stories from survivors are hugely important and valuable.

“One of the most powerful ways people (understand history) is to engage with someone who witnessed it,” says Diane Saltzman, director of survivor affairs. “Holocaust survivors who volunteer at the museum provide that personal connection for our visitors and bring an incomprehensible past alive and add a unique and powerful dimension to the visitors’ experience.”

Munzer is thrilled the staff — he’s the only LGBT survivor volunteer he knows of — has not raised the slightest issue with him being gay. He also says being out during his medical career was also pleasantly uneventful in that regard.

Last week’s conviction of 94-year-old SS sergeant Oskar Groening, an Auschwitz bookkeeper sentenced to four years imprisonment for his role as an accessory to murder in 300,000 deaths, is “awfully late” in Munzer’s opinion.

“Although I do think it’s important for people to be brought to justice.”

Equally important, Munzer says, is that the Holocaust is not forgotten.

“To me one of the greatest tragedies of the Holocaust is not even what happened but the fact that violence continues and especially genocide continues. The world really did not learn its lesson and the slogan ‘never again’ has really not been upheld. The fact that there is still religious hatred and racial hatred is just really, really sad. The re-emergence of anti-Semitism but even more in general, just not recognizing people as part of the common human race.”

Joel Wind (standing) and Alfred Munzer married in 2013 after more than 30 years together. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

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Full-spectrum funny: an interview with Randy Rainbow

New book ‘Low-Hanging Fruit’ delivers the laughs

Published

1 day ago

October 10, 2024

Gregg Shapiro

Randy Rainbow will discuss his new book on Oct. 20 at Politics & Prose at Sidwell Friends Meeting House.

Can we all agree that there’s nothing worse than reading a book by a humorist and not laughing? Not even once. Fear not, as gay humorist and performer Randy Rainbow more than exceeded my expectations, as he will yours, with his hilarious new book “Low-Hanging Fruit” (St. Martin’s Press, 2024). If you loved his 2022 memoir “Playing With Myself,” you’ll find as much, if not more to love in the new book. His trademark sense of humor from his videos, transfers with ease to the page in the essays. There are multiple laugh-out-loud moments throughout the two-dozen essays. Always a delight to talk to, Randy made time for an interview shortly before the publication of the book.

BLADE: I want to begin by apologizing for putting you on speakerphone so I can get this interview recorded, because I know you are not fond of it as you pointed out in the “And While We’re On the Subject…” essay in your new book.

RANDY RAINBOW: [Laughs] Thank you for paying attention. But yours is a good speakerphone. I would not have known.

BLADE: Your first book, “Playing With Myself,” was a memoir and the new book, “Low-Hanging Fruit,” is a humorous essay collection. Did it feel like you were exercising different writing muscles than you did for the first book – essays versus memoir?

RAINBOW: It did a little bit. I think I had a little more fun writing this book. Save for the fact that I was shlepping around on tour as I also make well known in the book. That wasn’t fun. To not have the, I hate to say burden, but the responsibility of doing a chronological memoir, really getting everything right and then telling your story. I felt like I was just free to shoot the shit and have a little fun.

BLADE: Were these essays written in one creative burst or over the course of years?

RAINBOW: Over the course of a few months. The second half of my tour is when I started doing it. So, probably about five to six months.

BLADE: The first essay “Letter of Resignation” reminded me of Fran Lebowitz…

RAINBOW: I’m so glad.

BLADE: And then, lo and behold, you name-check Fran in the second essay “Gurl, You’re A Karen.” Do you consider her to be an influence on your work?

RAINBOW: Not directly. I’m a fan of hers. But I just feel sympatico with her for all the obvious reasons. I have a problem with everything [laughs] and being able to be funny and creative about it in this book was very cathartic, I felt.

BLADE: Something similar occurred when I was reading the essay “I Feel Bad About My Balls,” which recalled another humor essayist — Nora Ephron, whom you mention at the conclusion of the piece. Is she an influence?

RAINBOW: Again, a fan. I wouldn’t say she ever directly influenced me although I guess since becoming an author myself, I read all of her books, so I love her. But not a direct influence. I think I listened to her audiobook of “I Feel Bad About My Neck” and that’s what inspired that chapter.

BLADE: Do you know if Jacob Elordi is aware of his presence in the book?

RAINBOW:I would assume that word has gotten back to him. This is gonna make him!

BLADE: In “Rider? I Hardly Know Her,” you wrote about being on tour as you are about to, once again, embark on a tour throughout October. Do you consider this more of a book tour, as opposed to one of your stage tours?

RAINBOW: It absolutely is. The way it worked out was I’m doing two of my concert shows in Palm Desert. I start my book events here with Harvey Fierstein in New York and then fly to the West Coast and do two musical concerts and then I embark on the rest of my book tour as I make my way back to New York. In that regard, it’s a little less nauseating … taxing.

Yes, although I just finished an eight-month tour. I’ve only had the summer off, and I find myself having to remind myself, “You’re just going for a week, going for a week, and then you come home, and that’s it. I have PTSD from all that travel. I’m not built for it.

BLADE: I’m based in Fort Lauderdale. Are there additional dates in the works, including one in your former home of South Florida?

RAINBOW: That’s where I’m from! That’s where my mother is still located.

BLADE: Yes, we saw you here at the Broward Center, and your mom was there.

RAINBOW: That’s right! No South Florida dates for this tour, but there’s always next year. We’re already planning a few strategically placed tour dates for summer and fall of next year. I’ll definitely be in Florida then, but you’ll have to wait for it.

BLADE: “Notes From A Litter Box,” written in the voice of your cat Tippi, made me wonder if you’d agree that there has never been a better time than now to be a childless cat person.

RAINBOW: Isn’t it funny? That was the least political chapter in the book, the least controversial chapter, and now it’s all anyone’s talking about. It’s our time! What with Taylor Swift and everything, it’s terrific. I wrote that long before all of this J.D. Vance nonsense, but it certainly has put some wind in our sails. And Tippi’s! Who heard her name and she’s looking for treats. Here you go, dear. In the audiobook, the great actress Pamela Adlon voices Tippi.

BLADE: Could you foresee writing a children’s book about Tippi?

RAINBOW: Well, what can I say? I don’t know how much I’m at liberty to discuss. Fuck it, I’ll discuss it! I did write a children’s book, and I’m saying it to whoever asks me. It comes out next year, and that’s actually what we’re planning the tour around, when it comes out around Pride next year. I won’t get into exactly what it’s about, but I will be revealing that very soon. And Tippi is a major character in it.

BLADE: Fantastic! As a 10-year resident of Fort Lauderdale, I especially enjoyed your mother’s takedown of DeSantis in “Ladies and Gentlemen…My Mother (the Sequel).” I take it she didn’t need any prodding from you.

RAINBOW: No. No, she did not. I actually asked her ahead of time – we did a little pre-interview like it was “The Tonight Show” – and I asked her about her topics, so she had her DeSantis material all laid out.

BLADE: Would you please tell my husband Rick there’s a right way to load the dishwasher? He won’t listen to me, but he’ll definitely listen to you.

RAINBOW: I, sadly, do not have a husband, so that is one example that I don’t actually have specifics on. How does he do it?

BLADE: Just wrong!

RAINBOW: Wrong for you.

BLADE: For example, the silverware is just pell-mell in the rack, instead of being grouped, spoons with spoons, forks with forks, and so on.

RAINBOW: He’s not putting mugs or glassware on the bottom, is he?

BLADE: No, not at all. But the plates should go in the same direction, right?

RAINBOW: Absolutely, yes.

BLADE: Thank you!

RAINBOW: I would get rid of him [laughs].

BLADE: “Low-Hanging Fruit” arrives in advance of Election Day 2024 and includes the “Randy Rainbow For President” and “My Gay Agenda” essays, along with running political commentary, as well as a dig at “Donald Jessica Trump” which you say you couldn’t resist. All kidding aside, please share your thoughts on the 2024 election.

RAINBOW: Oh God, kidding aside? How dare you! I have no thoughts that are not kidding because I have to kid to keep my sanity. It’s literally insane. I’ve left my body over it. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what to expect. I try to be positive, but I don’t know what that means anymore. I cannot wait for it to be fucking over!

BLADE: Finally, when it comes to “hot tea,” which you write about in the essay “Do I Hear A Schmaltz?”, may I also recommend Harney & Sons’ “Victorian London Fog?” I’m savoring it as we speak.

RAINBOW: Good one! Thank you! I’m very into Harney and Sons now. I have just a few from their catalog, but that’s the next one I’ll try.

a&e features

Author of new book empowers Black ‘fat’ femme voices

After suicidal thoughts, attacks from far right, a roadmap to happiness

Published

1 week ago

October 3, 2024

Eden Harris

(Book cover image via Amazon)

In 2017, Jon Paul was suicidal. In nearly every place Paul encountered, there were signs that consistently reminded the transgender community that their presence in America by the far right is unwelcomed.

Former President Donald Trump’s anti-trans rhetoric is “partly” responsible for Paul’s suicidal contemplation.

“I’m driving out of work, and I’m seeing all of these Trump flags that are telling me that I could potentially lose my life over just being me and wanting to be who I am,” Paul said. “So, were they explicitly the issue? No, but did they add to it? I highly would say yes.”

During Trump’s time as president, he often disapproved of those who identified as transgender in America; the former president imposed a ban on transgender individuals who wanted to join the U.S. military.

“If the world keeps telling me that I don’t have a reason for me to be here and the world is going to keep shaming me for being here. Then why live?” Paul added.

The rhetoric hasn’t slowed and has been a messaging tool Trump uses to galvanize his base by saying that Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris “want to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” Trump made that claim at the presidential debate against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Not only do Trump’s actions hurt Paul, but they also affect 17-year-old Jacie Michelleé, a transgender person at Friendly Senior High School.

“When former President Donald J. Trump speaks on transgender [individuals] in a negative light, it saddens my heart and makes me wonder what he thinks his personal gain is from making these comments will be,” Michelleé said.

“When these comments are made toward trans immigrants or the transgender community, it baffles me because it shows me that the times are changing and not for the better,” Michelleé added.

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation responded to Trump’s rhetoric that opposes the transgender community and how it affects democracy through programming at its Annual Legislative Conference in Washington.

“Our agendas are not set by what other groups are saying we should or shouldn’t do. It is set by our communities and what we know the needs and the most pressing needs are for the Black community, and we know that our global LGBTQAI+ communities have needs; they are a part of our community,” said Nicole Austin-Hillery, president and CEO of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

One pressing need is suicide prevention, which the National Institute of Health deems necessary, as 82% of transgender individuals have reported having suicidal thoughts, while 40% have attempted suicide. This research applies to individuals like Paul, who reported contemplating suicide.

But instead of choosing to self-harm, Paul met Latrice Royale, a fourth-season contestant on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who was awarded the title of Miss Congeniality while on the show. Paul said that meeting brought meaning when there was barely any left.

“It was like I met them at a time where I really, truly, not only needed to see them, but I needed to be able to actively know ‘girl’ you can live and you can have a really a good life, right? And Latrice was that for me,” Paul said.

Though Trump is representative of a lot of movements that are clashing with society, the Democratic Party is actively pushing back against anti-transgender movements and says there is “still much work to be done.”

Not only did Royale model success for Paul, but they also share the same appearance. Paul proudly identifies as “fat” and uses this descriptor as a political vehicle to empower others in the book “Black Fat Femme, Revealing the Power of Visibly Queer Voices in the Media and Learning to Love Yourself.”

“My book, my work as a Black, fat femme, is inherently political. I say this at the very front of my book,” Paul said. “All three of those monikers are all three things in this world that the world hates and is working overtime to get rid of.”

“They’re trying to kill me as a Black person; they’re trying to get rid of me as a fat person. They are trying to get rid of me as a queer person,” Paul added.

Besides Paul’s political statements, the book’s mission is to give those without resources a blueprint to make it across the finish line.

“I want them to look at all the stories that I share in this and be able to say, ‘wow,’ not only do I see myself, but now I have a roadmap and how I can navigate all of these things that life throws at me that I never had, and I think that’s why I was so passionate about selling and writing the book,” Paul said.

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a&e features

Jussie Smollett asserts innocence while promoting new film

‘I know what happened and soon you all will too’

Published

1 month ago

September 5, 2024

Erkki Forster

Jussie Smollett’s case remains on appeal. His new film is out later this month. (Photo by Starfrenzy/Bigstock)

Jussie Smollett, the actor and musician who was convicted of lying to the police about being the victim of a homophobic and racist hate crime that he staged in 2019, attended a screening of his latest film “The Lost Holliday” in a packed auditorium of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library on Aug. 28.

In an interview with the Washington Blade that took place before the screening, he continued to assert his innocence and responded to concerns within the LGBTQ community that his case has discouraged real victims from reporting hate crimes.

The former “Empire” star wrote, produced, and directed “The Lost Holliday,” his second feature film to direct following 2021’s “B-Boy Blues.” Produced through Smollett’s company, SuperMassive Movies, he stars in the film alongside Vivica A. Fox, who also served as a producer and attended the library screening with other cast members.

In the film, Smollett plays Jason Holliday, a man grappling with the sudden death of his husband Damien (Jabari Redd). Things are complicated when Damien’s estranged mother, Cassandra Marshall (Fox), arrives in Los Angeles from Detroit for the funeral, unaware of Damien’s marriage to Jason or of their adopted daughter. Initially, Jason and Cassandra clash — Cassandra’s subtle homophobia and Jason’s lingering resentment over her treatment of Damien fuel their tension –– but they begin to bond as they navigate their grief together.

Smollett, Fox, Redd, and Brittany S. Hall, who plays Jason’s sister Cheyenne, discussed the film in an interview with the Washington Blade. Highlighting the wide representation of queer identities in the film and among the cast, they stressed that the story is fundamentally about family and love.

“What we really want people to get from this movie is love,” Smollett said. “It’s beneficial for people to see other people that are not like themselves, living the life that they can identify with. Because somehow, what it does is that it opens up the world a little bit.”

Smollett drew from personal experiences with familial estrangement and grief during the making of the film, which delves into themes of parenthood, reconciliation, and the complexities of family relationships.

“I grew up with a father who was not necessarily the most accepting of gay people, and I grew up with a mother who was rather the opposite. I had a safe space in my home to go to, but I also had a not-so-safe space in my home, which was my father,” he said.

“The moment that he actually heard the words that his son was gay, as disconnected and estranged as we were, he instantly changed. He called me, after not speaking to him for years, and apologized for how difficult it must have been all of those years of me growing up. And then a couple years later, he passed away.”

Smollett began working on “The Lost Holliday” eight years ago, with Fox in mind for the role of Cassandra from the outset. He said that he had started collaborating on the project with one of the biggest producers in Hollywood when “‘2019’ happened.”

In January 2019, Smollett told Chicago police that he had been physically attacked in a homophobic and racist hate crime. He initially received an outpouring of support, in particular from the LGBTQ and Black communities. However, police soon charged him with filing a false police report, alleging that he had staged the attack.

After prosecutors controversially dismissed the initial charges in exchange for community service and the forfeiture of his $10,000 bond, Smollett was recharged with the same offenses in 2020. Meanwhile, his character in “Empire” was written out of the show.

In 2021, a Cook County jury found him guilty on five of the six charges of disorderly conduct for lying to police, and he was sentenced to 150 days in jail and 30 months of probation, along with a $120,000 restitution payment to the city of Chicago for the overtime costs incurred by police investigating his initial hate crime claim.

LGBTQ people are nine times more likely than non-LGBTQ people to be victims of violent hate crimes, according to a study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. Upon Smollett’s conviction, some in the LGBTQ community felt that the case would discredit victims of hate crimes and make it more difficult to report future such crimes.

Smollett seemed to acknowledge these concerns, but denied that he staged the attack.

“I know what happened and soon you all will too,” he told the Blade. “If someone reported a crime and it wasn’t the truth, that would actually make it more difficult [to report future crimes], but I didn’t. Any belief that they have about the person that I’ve been played out to be, sure, but that person is not me, never has been,” he said. “So I stand with my community. I love my community and I protect and defend my community until I’m bloody in my fist.”

“And for all the people who, in fact, have been assaulted or attacked and then have been lied upon and made it to seem like they made it up, I’m sorry that you have to constantly prove your trauma, and I wish that it wasn’t that way, and I completely identify with you,” he added.

An Illinois Appellate Court upheld his guilty verdict last year, but Smollett has since appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court, which in March agreed to hear the case. He has served six days in jail so far, as his sentence has been put on hold pending the results of his appeals.

The screening at the MLK Jr. Library concluded with a conversation between Smollett, Fox, and David J. Johns, CEO and executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition. Smollett discussed his current mindset and his plans for the future, revealing he is working on a third movie and will be releasing new music soon.

“I’m in a space where life is being kind,” he said.

“The Lost Holliday” recently secured a distribution deal for a limited release with AMC Theatres and will be out in theaters on Sept. 27.