Sex Appeal and Cancer

The sudden death of singer Isaac Hayes reminded me of a conversation I had this spring with actor Richard Roundtree.

Roundtree played the sexy lead in "Shaft," the 1971 hit movie that earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Hayes, who recently died from a stroke, won an Oscar for the theme song, which he also sang.

The film was among the highest-grossing ones that year and made the mustachioed Roundtree a cinematic heartthrob. It made Hayes a sultry sensation. It also boosted the impressive résumé of late photographer Gordon Parks, the movie's director.

Roundtree played private detective John Shaft, a new breed of screen hero. Leather-clad and super-bad, "Shaft" somehow avoided the blaxploitation label and blinged-out buffoonery of the genre.

Roundtree, Hayes and Parks were a triple threat of testosterone for Hollywood. The trio forced Tinseltown to realize the commercial appeal of a strong black-male presence in contemporary film. It opened doors for black filmmakers.

Roundtree has since delivered other memorable performances onstage and on-screen. But thanks to "Shaft," he continually will be objectified as that gun-toting fantasy bed partner.

Such iconic renown explains why Roundtree first kept secret his breast cancer diagnosis in 1993. He didn't know how to accept it and also didn't know how to explain it.

Most people think of women when they think of breast cancer. But because men have breast tissue, cancer also can appear there. It did so in the tissue of a man who went by the name of John Shaft.

"I thought: 'Me? Breast cancer? How can this be? Men don't get this,'" recalled Roundtree when we met at a lunch in his honor at a private residence in Mission Hills, Kan.

He was in Kansas for an earlier appearance in Topeka for a gala to commemorate the 54th anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling in Topeka's Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case.

Having lost many loved ones to cancer, I wasted no time talking to Roundtree about his fight to live.

I also wanted to praise him personally for his activism on behalf of breast cancer education.

"I've since looked back on this as a backhanded blessing," he said of his diagnosis. He means it. It was a blessing because he found his cancer early and survived. Survival allowed him to embark on a personal crusade that could affect the lives of millions of people.

He works closely with the laudable breast cancer foundation Susan G. Komen for the Cure (http://cms.komen.org/komen/index.htm).

Roundtree refused to let image get in the way of his battling this potentially silent killer. After all, the fictional Shaft didn't have cancer; he did.

He found the lump in his right breast and smartly sought medical attention. Unlike men, women are encouraged to do self-examinations in the shower or lying down. All Roundtree knew was that something didn't feel right.

Some symptoms men should look for, according to the Mayo Clinic: skin dimpling or puckering; an indentation of the nipple; changes in the nipple or breast skin, such as scaling or redness; and a nipple discharge, sometimes bloody.

Men and women can be predisposed genetically to breast cancer. Excessive drinking increases the odds. But Roundtree had no such family history and rarely drinks. Two more reasons the diagnosis was shocking.

More than anything, the fear of losing jobs kept him mum, he said. He worried that insurers and underwriters wouldn't support projects that cast an actor with a life-threatening illness and whose chemotherapy might require absences. He survived the stigma and the cancer. His career remains intact.

Roundtree was nominated in 1998 for an NAACP Image Award for outstanding lead actor in a drama series for "413 Hope St." He received a Peabody Award in 2002 for his narration of the PBS series "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow." He appeared recently in the film "Speed Racer."

So the face that launched thousands of women's fantasies in the '70s now could be the face to launch thousands of men's breast cancer screenings. He's helping to save lives.

That makes him sexier than ever.

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (RCLCreators@kc.rr.com) is a contributing editor to The Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss Lokeman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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