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“You’ve got the right to suck anything you want!” With three sentences, Pryor had outflanked all the other performers on the bill – some of whom, like Tomlin, had open ties to the gay community – by stripping away the airy talk of “human rights”. “You don’t want the police to kick your ass if you’re sucking the dick, and that’s fair,” Pryor continued. Then he pounced: “I came here for human rights,” he said, “and I found out what it was really about was about not getting caught with a dick in your mouth.” The crowd erupted in laughter. When he finally walked in front of the audience, Pryor didn’t speak for a little while he prowled back and forth like a pent-up animal.
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Backstage Pryor saw the fire marshal dress-down a Locker for setting off a small explosive onstage as a special effect, and he saw the show’s promoters refuse to come to the dancer’s defence. An hour later, just before Pryor was set to perform, the formerly indifferent stagehands leapt to fix the lights for two white ballet dancers and the formerly blasé audience applauded them as if they were “some bad motherfuckers”. When the dancers asked stagehands for help with the lights, the stagehands paid no notice when the dancers performed onstage – one jumped over six chairs in a single bound – the audience sat in their seats. And he noticed that the Lockers, a young black dance group on the bill, kept suffering from poor treatment. He scanned the sea of faces in the audience and spotted only a handful of black people. He felt the victim of a bait and switch like at least one other black artist on the programme, he’d originally been asked to perform for a human rights rally, pure and simple.
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He despised euphemisms, and yet here he was headlining a gay rights benefit that couldn’t put the word gay in its title. Over the course of the evening, Pryor grew increasingly allergic to the atmosphere of moral superiority. and, of course, no one was gay, only shy”. Richard’s friend Lily Tomlin came the closest to striking a direct chord when she reminisced about the 1950s as a time “when sex was dirty. Performers avoided specific mention of gay life, much less gay sex in the words of another observer, it was “an evening of unspoken assumptions”. The 17,000 people assembled at the Bowl, mostly gay men, sang the national anthem “with the volume and fervour usually associated with conventions of the veterans of foreign wars”. It was like watching a person come unglued in front of you and then, as in a cartoon, disappear piece by piece.” “To call what happened bizarre would not, for me, do it justice. “In more than 14 years of covering the great, near-great and terrible of show business, I have never seen anything like it,” wrote John Wasserman in the San Francisco Chronicle. Still others sat poleaxed, trying to grasp how, in coming to the Hollywood Bowl, they had taken a detour into the Twilight Zone.
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Many in the crowd booed or shouted abuse: “Richard Pryor, you just committed professional suicide!” or “Kiss your ass, hell! I’d like to put a hot poker up it!” Others cheered a provocateur who, before he had dismissed the crowd as self-serving “faggots”, had spoken bravely about the joy of gay sex and exposed the fault lines of the gay rights movement. The good vibes had dispersed a night of unity had turned into a hot, steaming mess. Less than 15 minutes later, when Pryor ended by asking the audience to “kiss my happy, rich black ass”, the concert was closer to a cabaret version of Altamont. O n 18 September 1977, when Richard Pryor took the stage of the Hollywood Bowl as a headliner of the Star-Spangled Night for Rights – a benefit promoted by an early gay rights group – the event had, according to one journalist, “all the makings of a cabaret version of Woodstock”.