Actors often wonder if they’ve breathed life into a character at least satisfactorily if not brilliantly.

I don’t know where my performance fell in that range in a play called Passing Ceremonies but I suspected early on that I had somewhat captured the essence of one Richard “Bruce” Nugent.

Ernie McCray

Delving into Bruce’s soul I had to travel to places inside me I had never been. See, in a walk down the street Bruce would tend to ogle handsome sailor boys and in my early years my head would be spinning like the girl’s in the Exorcist everytime a beautiful maiden walked by.

But when I, as Bruce, looked at Rafael, my nurse and friend, lustily, and proclaimed “Off-now! Before we have an unwarranted moment of tenderness” to a healthy round of laughter - well, in those moments, I sensed I had crossed the divide between hetero and homosexuality and brought Bruce to life on the Diversionary Theatre stage.

And, in the process, I validated my notion that our humanity should trump our sexuality. I mean unlike Bruce I could never, of course, speak, from my own experiences, about having sex with men “On docks and on ships and in bushes and in beds.” But what difference does it make? Substitute women for men and eliminate “docks” and you’d find my lips, like one of the characters in one of Bruce’s poems, twisting “In the smile that passion brings.” Hey, sexuality is just one component of a human don’t you agree?

What was most satisfying to me in playing Bruce was tapping into our commonalities and laying out our differences beyond what gets our testosterone bubbling. He was intellectual and a keen observor of life as am I. He claims to never have been an activist or a political being whereas my very life constitutes one campaign after another, politically and otherwise. But Bruce had his causes and issues and when I broke it all down I found no gaping degrees of separation between us.

As I prepared myself for the role I could hear Bruce in my mind dissecting his world with the likes of Wally Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes - while the 20’s and the Harlem Renaissance roared in the background.

And I could visualize myself doing the same thing although, admittedly, with less prominent peers than Bruce’s, save a few precious moments of stimulating dialogue with Angela Davis - while the 60’s and the Great Civil Rights era roared in the background.

We both experienced, in our lifetimes, “Everything goes” kinds of worlds that constituted dynamic and important eras in American History.

Bruce, who “loved freely,” was fortunate to have lived 81 years as a painter and illustrator as well as a writer. In Passing Ceremonies he finds himself caught between “earth life” and “paradise” with Essex Hemphill, a writer, poet, and cultural activist whose life was cut much too short by AIDS (1957-1995). In this middle passage they converse about what it meant to be black, gay, and artists.

As I got deep into their story, especially since the play celebrated LGBT Black History Month, I couldn’t help but think how prevalent homophobia is in the black community. And this particularly saddens me because if anyone on the planet knows how devastating it is to be discriminated against it should be African Americans.

Bruce laughingly says at one point in the play: “I’m probably most remembered for my carnal conquests.”

But it’s no laughing matter that the world, as a whole, looks past who gay people are and the wonderful gifts so many of them offer humanity and fixates on their sexuality - as if their sexual orientation is the measure of who they are as human beings.

At the end of the play, Rafael, Bruce and Essex make a toast to “life” and “beauty” and “friends who make the universe more bearable.”

And I only hope after playing in such a production that the world becomes more friendly to gay people, of all colors, so that life can become more beautiful to them. Such a wish comes from having existed out here in the universe as a black man for nearly 70 years. I can’t help but dream a better world.

Ernie has appeared off and on over the years in San Diego in a number of plays on several stages including the role of Slowdrag, in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, at the Lyceum; Seth, in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, at the Grove; a number of roles for the Playwrights Project at the old Gaslamp Theatre, Cassius Carter Centre Stage and North Coast Repertory. He was the elderly tapdancer in Oldtimers which toured San Diego County in the summer of 2000 as part of Playwrights Project’s outreach to senior audiences.

Ernie created the role of Black Swallow for the San Diego Black Ensemble Theatre’s world premiere production, Bodacious and Black Swallow.

“Theater,” Ernie, a retired educator, says, “is a wonderful way for me to go about my mission of rising each day to make the world a better place.” He retired in 1999 as a principal with the San Diego school system, but he’s still involved with teachers and children in the areas of drama and writing --- often using these arts to encourage them to think of how they can create a peaceful world.