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Internet searches reveal nothing.Īs I understand it, Tony’s real name was Anthony Menson Amuah. Yet in absence of records of such letters or any newspaper clippings, I’m left to speculate on just how he was received. But it’s also likely that the national broadcaster would have drawn homophobic complaints for airing such content before the watershed.
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Tony was clearly popular, as in one segment he thanks the nation for their fan mail. Tony fascinates me because the adoration and sexualisation with which he’s been received by social media audiences today seems similar to how he was received in his time. But still, the same pain I felt after watching Paris Is Burning and Tongues Untied and discovering that the lion’s share of their respective casts died early returns as acutely whenever I’ve come across an archived picture, text or film by a Black queer person. Referring to archives and engaging in memory work has always been key in developing a cultural sense of my racial and sexual identity, but when I come across people like me, they’re often dead men who would only have been in their 60s if alive today.
#1980S AEROBIC DANCE VIDEO TV#
I wondered how the British public, at the time under the thumb of Thatcherism and its sexually conservative ethics, reacted to a Black man dancing on national TV as if he were among Black African and Caribbean queers in an underground shebeen in Brixton. As instantly as I felt affection for Tony, I also felt a desire to reconstruct his life in my thoughts. Rather than feeling contrived or parodistic as such juxtapositions often do, there’s a genuine sense that Tony’s performance commands admiration and respect.īut that simple cutaway also locks the scene within its specific socio-political context - the 1980s, a time of national moral judgement and social neglect. The scene then cuts to the formally dressed Breakfast Time presenters watching on. As a young and occasionally vain Black homosexual, his outfits reminded me of what I wear to the club or what I’d planned to wear to this year’s Black Pride - that same combination of a cropped mesh vest and striped sport shorts that say, “look, but don’t touch.” Swinging his hips to an 80s synth funk soundtrack, Tony reminds us to “enjoy it, because it’s all fun”. On first seeing Tony - an incredibly sexy, muscular, camp Black man - I felt an instant pang of congenial affection.