When “Waiting to Exhale” came out, Terry McMillan’s breakout novel of four black women searching in vain for love, it gave voice to what so many women had been struggling with.
It was 1992, a time when black women could recite the statistic: One out of every three black men were either in prison, on parole or on probation.
Black women pushed themselves into the middle class only to find they outnumbered black men. Finding an educated, stable man to date took work. I consoled plenty of black female friends who wondered: Is it just me?
McMillan’s book validated the experiences of African-American women. Later, when the movie version came out, sisters cheered on Angela Bassett when she torched her cheating husband’s car.
But sisterhood be damned. There’s only so much bonding any woman wants to have with other women on the subject.
That’s one reason why when the film of McMillan’s “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” came out in 1998, women flocked to see it. (Another is that Hollywood has no problem producing slapstick comedies with black characters, but romantic comedies starring African-Americans are a rarity.)
The novel was inspired by McMillan’s real-life story of meeting a man half her age who pledged unconditional love to her while on a vacation in Jamaica. That the movie wasn’t complete fiction gave many women hope that somewhere out there was a brother as charming and handsome as Taye Diggs waiting to woo them with a romantic accent.
Now, we’re learning it was all a lie.
Last week, news about McMillan’s pending divorce stunned fans. It turns out that McMillan’s Jamaican-born husband of six years, Jonathan Plummer, is gay.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, which broke the story, McMillan said in court papers that she believes Plummer knew all along he was gay. She believes he was just using her to get U.S. citizenship and a cushy lifestyle. (McMillan’s home alone is reportedly worth $4 million.)
The two met 10 years ago when McMillan was 44 and Plummer was 20.
“It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicized to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit,” McMillan said in court papers.
Many women I know reacted as if they too had been betrayed. They’ve been there and can relate.
Men I know had a different take. Over dinner the other night, I asked my friend Miguel what he thought. He told me he doesn’t know any man who would date a woman twice his age.
Another male friend, Louis, put it more bluntly in an e-mail: “Any 44-year-old who believes that a 20-year-old is marrying you purely because of your good soul and sex has delusions of grandeur.”
They are right. But when the well has been dry for years, even muddy water tastes good. That is the uneasy truth about being a single black woman, or so I’m told, over and over again, by the dozens of single African-American women I know. (And it’s a reality for educated Latinas, as well, considering the socioeconomic stats for Latino men mirror those of black men.)
It might as well be 1992. The statistics haven’t changed much. Black professional women still outnumber their black male peers. But black women don’t need numbers to prove what they see – or don’t see – in their offices, churches, nightclubs.
That’s why so many women were saddened by the news that McMillan’s marriage might as well have been fiction.
But after reading the torrid details, and pondering them, not too many of us were all that surprised.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays and Thursdays in Scene. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
