Mary don’t You weep, and more struggles over sexuality, filth and salvation

“Mary don’t You weep,” and more struggles over sexuality, filth and salvation



“Oh Mary, don’t you weep. Oh Papa don’t you moan,” goes the old Negro Spiritual’s first two lines. For me, these hymns evoke spirituality and resistance simultaneous to the reality of slaves- the progenitors of American music. Like Mary’s tears, these hymns are a meditation on one’s lot in life- whatever that life may be. At least on the surface, Christianity was the religion that the composers of these spirituals sang, in order to survive. The slave shared this religion with even the most brutal slave master; one who liberally dealt lashes, forced slaves to breed like steed, regularly raped women after placating himself by dashing her trinkets to disguise the violence of his monstrosity, and then effortlessly sold babies from these mothers’ arms. An unspeakable amount of men were also sexually brutalized, yet this corner of history is rarely discussed. As slavery began to run its course, more and more Black men were brutalized and castrated by mobs of entire white families. The white children who were forced to watch these atrocities must have been terrified by watching their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and neighbors stuffing the mutilated genitals of a Black man into his mouth, choking out the last bit of life from the brutalized body as it swung from the tree:
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck/For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck/For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop/Here is a strange and bitter crop.1

Black bodies have such a torrid legacy in the New World, simultaneously devoured and despised. Such a reality led many to plead for an afterlife as the only plausible relief from such circumstances, crooning “Soon-ah will be done wit’ da troubles of da world. Goin’ home to live with God.” These words solaced Blacks- to get on while retaining some sense of sanity in insane circumstances.

By the time I joined the city-wide high school choir that sang Soon Ah Will be Done, I was firmly on my way out of the city. I had more or less come to terms with my sexuality, and the reality of leaving home for a school of my choosing, was close at hand. By the end of my coming out summer, and that Fall when I came to choir, I had already come out to several friends at school, my immediate elder first cousin. My mother would not come to hear the words from my mouth until only weeks before we drove up to visit Oberlin College for the first time. The then Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Student Union, known as LGBU, had crafted their sidewalk chalkings, timed especially for prospective students’ weekend, to greet potential Obies and their families at key turns throughout the campus. My mother and I pretended to ignore the bright pink triangle between the humanities classroom building and the theater and dance department, which read: You can come out after your parents leave!” I gave myself a smirk and silent pat on the back for always being ahead of trends- I had come out nearly a month before visiting this odd school that would soon after become my home, and commune with the group whom I know call family.

My coming out was like a balloon bursting. The pressure had build up for many years, my whole in fact, or at least all that I can recall, for I cannot recall not perceiving this difference. The last few years were especially anxious ridden, as the erotic aspects of my sexuality grew passionately. By the tenth grade I would listen to Anita Baker and cry in remorse for a love that I had never felt, and at that point knowingly denied myself. I lived as an ascetic, like an exile forced out of adolescence, yet convinced that my cause was more just than the layman’s. Given the heartache and sorry of teenage love, the hysteria such desires caused at home and at school, I was resided to be more than content with curbing any expression of my own sexuality. I had witnessed girls getting pregnant in middle school by high schools boys, and a great deal of girls and boys using sex to coerce one another, so much so that I would their behavior repulsive. In retrospect I likely reflected what I felt from my environment, and decided that I would beat them at their own game. Yet in private, I mourned for lovers lost, loves never manifest, or even crushes that I dare not let slip past my own lips even if only in my own presence.

I knew every single word and every single bit of melisma of every song on Anita Baker’s Rapture album; I would rewind the tape on the Walkman that I would borrow from my aunt so that I could listen to Anita Baker or Sade over and over, often in tears. I’d cry about how unfair it felt that I could not be more open wit myself amongst my friends and family. This was reinforced by the aggression that any of us, I suppose, would feel, in a macho society. In my world, men were men: They walked a way that I did not walk. Men talked a way that I did not like to speak, yet seemed t don a sheet of confidence, which they so often seemed to need to challenge and defend. Nonetheless, my mere presence seemed to serve as challenge enough to evoke the aggression; in my world, men had an uncanny tendency towards discompassion. I knew that in Kindergarten I was luck y to have that one male friend, but by first grade a best I cold expect to recruit men as allies. Outside of my immediate relatives, I became very careful around boys and men. For so long I also tried t be like them, at least when out numbered. Fortunately by second grade I was stuck in a small liberal school where I stayed until I found another for college.

Women, on the other hand, had far greater options, in terms of both exploring and expressing their gender, if only to distinguish themselves by race and class. As Black boys, I felt that we were expected to become working class, despite the middle class ambitions of school. School and the world of kids was believed to be safe, yet I can recall being called a fag as early as kids could talk. My mother has a photo of me celebrating my second birthday at the day-care center, with a cake misspelling my name. I gaze at the picture and there is an earnest flash of memory that instantaneously passes through my mind. It wasn’t that I didn’t belong; I just knew that I was different. I began to notice differences in gender in the Catholic school I attended for Kindergarten. For restroom breaks we had t be separated by gender, and I noticed that it was the on period of my day, the only time of my life, where I would not go with the girls, where I had to tag along with the boys. I would go into a stall with the only male friend I had I that class, and Star Wars Lifesavers with our urine, and occasionally or tiny penises. When the teacher announced restroom breaks, he and I would never rush so that the others could occupy the urinals and we’d have to take a stall. An aid would come to assist her, and the teacher would call out: Line up single file, girls in one line, boys in another. It was a weird and unnatural division.

Though kids really began to annunciate this difference, it was the first grade, where I was beaten up by a set of twins- two roughlings who lived just a few houses away from the school, named after a famous national civil rights leader from the area. The beating came complete with having to finish the day with the threat of being confronted after school on the playground, so an audience was set; the instigators could not wait to catch the action o the very site where our teacher would lead the class in a game of Duck-Duck-Goose, or we would jump rope or play Jacks as the boys kicked or threw some ball. All I recall is that the rougher twin did most of the beating, and hurled the word fag at me, which hurt much more than her fists. It was then that I began to understand two principles that I would carry with me throughout my life: A fag’s gotta work harder and have a thicker skin because folks will inevitably feel threatened or challenged by our very existence, and B) Make friends and acquaintances early, because nothing is better than an ally. These were all things that my family taught me, ‘Blacks have to work twice as hard to get half as far’, and were central to our survival in a world into which we came as slaves. My revenge came when I learned that the elder, dominant more butch twin didn’t make it out of middle school without becoming pregnant- another Black statistic, but that little bitch had it coming! No wonder the projected number of needed prison spaces in some states in determined by elementary school exams. Several schools in my city virtually fed into the military or the criminal justice system.



***



A chill would move through my body as Anita Baker sang: Now don't you understand/I'm in need of your comfort/The comfort of your hand in mine/And what I feel inside/Why didn't you come closer/I can't hide/Can’t hide. And she repeatedly riffs “can’t hide” with such resolve; it’s the confession that I could no longer hide who I was, despite the disappointment I would face. In a true Blue Note coup, the song relishes in its sadness, taking me to the depths of these emotions and in that way minimized any anxieties I felt about the unfair everyday pains. Kids had called me fag, sissy, sugar pants- nothing they could thing of- and it was all passively sanctioned in our environment. Anita repeated can’t hide, not as an apology, but as stating to sets of competing facts, two contradictory realities: I need you but I will not be oppressed by you. Your love won’t suffocate me, and I willingly face any consequences of this decision. This perspective articulated what I could not, which was my growing relationship to my culture- mutual love and adoration on the one hand, yet homophobia and hatred on the other. Externally, I was having a grand time, but inside I was anxious, insecure and disappointed. I was full of rage from feeling abandoned by my culture, and Anita crooned mournfully:
See about me/Come on see about me/‘Cause I keep telling you that I can’t do without you/Without you, oh, don’t ask me to/To do without you, love/‘Cause I wont do it/You can’t make me do it/Stay with me!1

Pop culture always led me to believe that Black culture was entirely homophobic. Kids would tease and prod, and adults around me in no visible way indicted that these were as brutal as they felt, at least to me. From my perspective, the hisses, mocking and chatter fell upon my back like lashes dealt out from a bitter and sour whip. Why did they hate me so? Why was being effeminate so threatening as to warrant constant retaliation, especially on the part of males.

It is important to understand the reality described above, for several reasons. First, from an ethnographic perspective, that which invites you, the reader, to experience what is described below, it is necessary to know that slavery is well embedded in the African-American imagination, much as described above. These histories, yet with focus upon our resistance, is knitted throughout our life’s lessons, and color how we approach the contemporary world, not as victims, at least increasingly, but as resilient survivors. And I must accept that this is a part of my heritage. Given my experiences in wider/whiter America, I am lead to believe that many Americans still only relate to Slavery through the desire to distance themselves from victimhood, and any responsibility as perpetrators and their descendents and our collective complicity in effacing the trauma and ignoring its wake. It’s like sitting on the 70th floor in the middle of Tokyo during a massive earthquake and ignoring the shaking and trembles, despite the chaos and flying objects around, just because you have full faith in the architectural integrity of the high-rise.

Middle school is chaotic for everyone, and particularly tumultuous for me, I felt, as my senses were prematurely awakened to social difference and hierarchy. While my peers busily explored their bodies, getting accustomed to their skin, their own bodies, their own senses of pleasure and power. All of this was retarded for me, as I had no guidance, no role models, no affirmation that my course was in any way normal.
You go to the fields on weekdays/And have a picnic on Labor Day/You go to town on Saturday/And go to church every Sunday/They call it Nutbush, oh Nutbush/They call it Nutbush city limits

Viewing Christianity as an outsider has since my childhood been an obsessive pastime. Driving down Jefferson Street between downtown and the predominantly African-American, mixed-class “West End,” one experiences an awing sense of the institutionalization of Black spirituality. This particular pattern is repeated throughout Black communities in America: A menagerie of massive to mundane churches, a variety of protestant sects, spanning blocks along the broad road, each boasting massive, congregations and boisterous clergy- one of which my grandparents helped found.

For much of the last century, ‘domestic work’ was the work most available to Black women, and was fraught with the looming threat of sexual exploitation, and the retaliation from the masters’ wives. My grandmother is slowly arriving at the point to be able to tell us stories about that period of her life, where her first few jobs working for sympathetic white families. According to her, white sexual exploitation of domestic workers was common knowledge and practice. In such close-knit communities, and given a lack of birth control meant that the children of these liaisons were also common, and any Black who tried to establish (white) paternity was met with the typical violence of the day. More commonly, however, white families would employ their kids as one means to extend their race and class privilege to their young without acknowledging actual paternity, which of course would make them vulnerable to socio-economic recourse today. Interestingly, white women had to face this sort of infidelity as a fact of their marriage, as anyone with eyes could see the family resemblance. The reputation and relative class privilege as landowners of my grandmother’s family protected her and her sisters from such exploitation. My grandfather faced a radically different reality even within the same space.

Men were humiliated by indemnifying work and labor conditions that were unfulfilling and low-wage earning. Under and unemployment among Blacks continues to be exuberant. Like many of their contemporaries, my mother’s parents had transitioned from cotton fields to the urban south as soon as they could. After WWII, southern Blacks, many of whom had heard first hand accounts of the (broken) promise of America from former slaves, migrated to northern ghettos in places like Detroit, Chicago and New York in hoards. Even the Confederacy/Union split state of Kentucky was ‘north’ of sharecropping- the indentured servitude that replaced slavery for most Blacks in the south, including my mother’s father and his family.

In Louisville, Kentucky, the great flood of 1937 initiated a wave of wealthy whites to abandon the richest soil in the extreme west for higher ground in the east, a migration hastened again after the Civil Rights’ riots when the safety of whites west of 18th street could no longer be secured (white flight), many church flocks of these migrants eventually cemented between 27th and 18th streets on Jefferson. Naturally, we count the street numbers ‘backwards’, from the West End to downtown.

For Blacks in the south, kin was understood and traced through church affiliation. Phrases like, whose your pastor, which church you ‘long to, or which congregation you ‘part of, pervade each new introduction in our vernacular. Churches serve as spiritual safe-spaces of communal solace and mobilization. In fact, in the New World Christian churches were the only spaces where we could peacefully congregate- not biological family. Though traumatic, at least our African sense of kinship readily allowed us to build communities beyond the confines of biology, as is still characteristic of Africa and her Diaspora.

Even as a non-Christian, the Christian ethos was inescapable. For eleven years I attended an intentionally schematized liberal, multi-cultural and artistic oriented school, which purposefully worked to confront difference. The endeavor of that institution was to bring together so-called races and classes so divided across the city; less attention was given to religion, and even less to sexuality- though liberals are rather tacitly assumed to be relatively less homophobic. Our teachers and curriculum overtly acknowledged and celebrated Jewish people as a minority, yet offered little education about Judaism beyond the superficial set of facts deemed necessary to know by the Euro-Christian dominant culture- one which Blacks consistently subverted due to its intrinsic inequality, and yet strangely many buy into for its promise to reward discipline and diligence with power. In the same light then, the entire story of the entire African Diaspora in America was summed under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where we learn that somehow Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had lead some vague amount of people over a vague amount of time through peaceful demonstration. Hence, to build any real sense of confidence in self in America as a visible minority, concerted education outside of the mainstream is absolutely necessary!

My school, for example, was located in the heart of downtown on the corner of First Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard. Ali (ah-lee), as locals call him, is our most infamous native son and we remember him as subversive and outspoken opponent of the dominant, warmongering culture that continues to enslave the minds of many everywhere. The wider whiter America would rather relegate Ali to his superbly unmatched sportsmanship, ignoring all his vivid claims about Islam as a theology of peace and liberation from racism. Since, as public intellectual bell hooks succinctly posits, “practically every black male in the United States has been forced at some point in his life to hold back the self he wants to express, to repress and contain for fear of being attacked, slaughtered, destroyed” (“We Real Cool” Xii). Icons such as Ali may have attacked our people’s self-hatred around issues of race, but his message very clearly spoke to me about sexuality, and so I realized at a very young age that the repression I felt then would eventually pass. Music was the only place that I could code and express these growing aspects of my being. The passionate and loving person that the world seemed to reject, could find resolution in the words and work of Black music.

Naturally Muhammad Ali is a fixture in local folklore, along with tales of his bravery and suaveness and flamboyance around the ring: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. In stark contrast to the dull athlete, Ali was charismatic and expressive both in and outside of his moneymaking discipline, raising the bar for public figures and their social responsibilities. He converted to Islam and renounced the invasion of Vietnam as imperialism, where again poor bodies (on both sides) were placed on the frontlines, linking the invasion to the lot of Black and poor people in America.

Much before his conversion as a marker of socio-political consciousness, he was denied service at a downtown soda counter not far from my school, decades before the road bore his name. He was so enraged that he immediately walked to one of the bridges that link Indiana and Kentucky, and threw his Olympic Gold Medal into the Ohio River, lamenting that while he could go to Italy and represent his nation with glowing results, for which all asserted a national pride, his people lived in Apartheid at home.

Fellow Kentuckian bell hooks shares my adoration of Ali:

If patriarchal standards for manhood prized being silent and unemotional, Ali dared to speak out loudly, to be bold and boisterous, and express emotions, embodying joy, laughing, daring to be sad, to feel pain, and to express hurt. Photographs capture Ali smiling, hugging black males, daring to be physically close (“We Real Cool” 22).


The concept of a dumb jock, for Black people, has always had less to do with mentally inept steroid junkies like The Governator, and more to do with structural violence against Blacks, one example of which is the challenge to Black boys to prove their manhood within this white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, and are therefore rewarded for all sorts of demonstrations of physical prowess, while discouraged from free thought! The perfect subjects.

The Euro-American Christian ethos justified the exploitation and continued disempowerment of Black people in America. To begin, a racist theology determined that we were deemed descendents of Ham- the fallen son of Noah. Guilty of immodesty, we were destined to an eternity of servitude and complete deference towards white patriarchs, one severe consequence of which is shame around the hair and skin we don. “Patriarchal masculinity,” as hooks contends, “which says that if a man is not a worker he is nothing, assaults the self-esteem of any man who absorbs this thinking” (“We Real Cool” 30). Ali treads against this grain. Even in retirement, I find Ali to be a handsome and proud brown skin man.

Despite the lessons of tolerance and compassion that continue to serve as dominant themes of Black theology, thunderous leaders of large local African-American congregations used the same Christian-fundamentalist doctrine to resist initiatives to protect queer people from hate-crimes and discrimination in employment and housing that white supremacists use/d to justify Slavery, Jim and Jane Crow (American Apartheid), contemporary social segregation, white-skin privilege, discrimination, as well as the so-called redemptive penal system. In principle, it is that religion that ws supposed to redeem us. Now it seems as if the whole world looks and laughs at our American antics: The systematic race and class bias of our penal system contrast deeply with pop cultural reward for the poor, the Black and the meager all just laughing and smiling on stage as if none of this has happened. Generic American commercially available commoditized culture, or Generica, would have us believe that systematic disenfranchisement is not the definitive pattern and basis for power and wealth in America. The rhetoric simultaneously encourages alterity while demonizing the Other, capitalizing on the ‘coolness’ of the transgressive, and somehow Black is automatically transgressive- the Other. Today’s hyper sexed images of Black entertainers are like minstrels in cages, tooted around the globe to dance and make a buck. As 50 Cent says: America got a thang for dis gangsta shit! They love me! And 50 loves having women and money.

By the mid 1980’s multi-culturalism had become a national obsession. Like a trend, multi-culturalism slowly took hold in urban and eventually rural communities alike. This was reflected in revised curricula at all levels of education, which in numerous ways only meant changing some of the illustrations accompanying texts to visually reflect the students subjected to its biases. Religious communities quickly joined in on the trend and formalized annual events such as inter-faith roundtables amongst local leaders, parishes and congregations. I was raised Buddhist.

Multi-culturalism was a buzzword that our teachers would throw in any lesson, but every lesson failed to change fundamentally. The variety of cultures that make up our nation, mine included, were simply added on as if we were somehow newcomers to a long running show. Our histories were side notes to the main story, and there was rarely a mention of alternate world views: We were spoken for and about, which only changed slightly in high school when we were offered a course in Black history. Our English teachers always delved meagerly into the writings of Black authors, but it mostly felt like they were just board of Greek tragedies and other stale textbook favorites. Fortunately, I come from a family of readers, but I suspect that many of my cohorts were only exposed to formal Black thinking through regurgitated images in the media- images that serve to sell goods. This was a difference that I felt very early amongst my friends; the teachers could tell the difference, too, and those of use with more committed adults in our lives outside of school received more committed teaching and attention in school. It was clearly by the middle of the second grade who would end up entwined in our criminal justice system.

After over a decade of number one R&B hits, Aretha sang:
We gonna review the story of two sisters/ Called Mary and Martha/They had a brother/ Named Lazarus/One day while Jesus was away/ That dear, their dear, that dear, poor brother died/Yeah, yeah/Well now Mary went running to Jesus/She said “Master/My my my…sweet lord!/Oh, if you had a been here, my brother wouldn’t died/Oh yes she said/Jesus said “Come on and show me, show me where you, show me where buried him, show me where you laid him down/And when he got there, Jesus said, “For the benefit of you who do not believe, who don’t believe in me this evening/ “I’m gon’ call his name three times.”/ “Oh, yes I am! Yes I am!”/ He said, “Lazarus!/Hmm…/”Lazarus, hear my, hear my voice!”/ Lazarus! Oh yeah/He got up and walking like a natural man/Oh yes he did!...Jesus said, “Oh Mary, don’t you weep. Go on home and don’t you and your sister moan, because you see, Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea/Oh Mary, don’t you weep/Mary, tell Martha, “Don’t you moan.”

***

My family is religiously mixed. This facilitated early organic, acculturation to the idea of loving and respecting another, despite fundamental, important theological and cosmological rifts, and therefore our radically divergent responses to present day suffering. Confounding alterity in my world, as a small child I related effeminacy to gender, which clarified in my mind a distinction between gender and sex; later I would also add sexuality to the variety of forms of gender expression, and suspected that I may not have matched most of my peers in this regard. I could never relate to the boys talking about doing the oochie coochie with girls, or even imagine why they didn’t prefer being their friends instead. I picked up from my peers that I acted like a girl, but it was pop culture that sexualized gender for me: Females were sex objects which males conquered against a backdrop of violence. The girl, no matter how she dressed, no matter what qualifications she may have held, was always a slut, whore or otherwise sexually available and subordinate to whichever leading man. Women had been dealt the short end of the overt genderized division of power, I reasoned, and they therefore had to more directly ‘deal’, in thought and action, with their sex. Or was it vice-versa? At the time I had no idea. Hip-Hop dominated the music and images of our generation, and its lyrics provided ample homophobic material for kids to repeat, while at the same time promoting an attitude of resistance. These were very conflicting times.

By the seventh grade it was clear to me that I most fit the female gender role, given that in such a highly genderized spaces, women were free to express themselves “loudly, passionately [and] outrageously” (“Talking Back” 128). I naturally took my cues from the women and girls around me. Men and boys seemed the most off put by my effeminate nature. Given the way most men and boys fumbled with their feelings in every other situation (socialized to detach from emotion), I mostly classified males as unreliable brutes. I knew that most of what I witnessed of men and boys, masculinity and maleness, had little to do with my male clan and me. Luckily, my mother taught me to always look beyond the rainbow with the understanding that only I can take me there. Moreover, I was not taught to seek comfort in sameness: In my mind, it made sense that since people of such conflicting and deep ideological differences could seamlessly consider one another as kin, then wider acculturation of differences in sexuality should certainly follow in the very same thread. There is such a great deal of ‘survival’ rhetoric embedded in the African-American imagination that in theory gender difference should have sat comfortably within these mores.
I was fully matured by the time I reached the age o’ ten/A mulatto girl is what they called me/And us mulattos had no trouble at all with men/All men say that I'm as sweet as honey/I’m 34, 38, and 22 at the tummy2

By the seventh grade, around the time I started to actively contemplate and attempt to understand my effeminacy and its potential link to queerness, my best girlfriend grew breasts. Of course, at that time I could only ask myself, “Am I gay!” The resounding answer would always be no, yet the question would haunt me, to the point of becoming a fixation, one that I felt uncomfortable sharing with any other being. No, I was not a fag. No, I was not one of those guys that wished he were a woman. No, I was not a boy who acted like a girl, walked like a girl, talked like a hair, scratched my head like a girl, ate like a girl, thought like a girl! No, I was not one of those over-dressed cosmetologist who worked in Black hair salons throughout the town- good enough to do their hair, but not good enough to warrant their respect. No, I could not be any of those things. I also could not figure out why being any of these things would be so bad; we all liked girls, so why was this so insulting for a boy. But I could sense the fire in their words when they are hurled at my face. It was around this time that I began to resent straight young males for having the freedom to freely move and explore the world, while the rest of us were busy trying to withstand their wrath. It continues to amaze me how much freedom we all accord boys, apparently we just let them be.

Frankly, by Thanksgiving Alicia was voluptuous. I took refuge in the fact that her offense’ was visible and apparent, and undeniable, unlike the ascetic stasis of my own sexuality. Her breasts were huge, larger even than several of our teachers, most of whom were slender and white. I believe that more than a few resented this. It was as if the presence of my best girlfriend fed them angst- though just a child. I resisted believing that the hostility could be envy; for Alicia and I were only kids; I did not want to believe that we were threatening. Yet, I could not ignore the way in which many adults began to relate to her with contempt. It was as if she was guilty of some unspeakable wrongdoing, yet had no one to read out her misdeed, no one to run to her defense, and certainly no one to help her understand her crime. Her presence evoked a defensiveness and aggression that Alicia inevitably, eventually reciprocated. Given our youthful innocence, or t least youth if not innocence for this hostile climate in many ways destroys innocence, it is clearly that such contempt finds its roots elsewhere than our actual selves, as bell hooks writes:

Euro-Americans seeking to leave behind a history of their brutal torture, rape, and enslavement of black bodies projected all their fears onto black bodies. If black women were raped in slavery it was because they were licentious and seductive, or so white men told themselves. If white men has an unusual obsession with black male genitalia it was because they had to understand the sexual primitive, the demonic beast in their midst. And if during lynchings they touched burnt flesh, exposed private parts, and cut off bits and pieces of black male bodies, white folks saw this ritualistic sacrifice as in no way a commentary on their obsession with black bodies, naked flesh, sexuality (“We Real Cool” 67)


I was always on the look out for the same response of contempt, which I generally only received from kids who were ephemeral in my immediate environment. I worked very hard to avoid provoking the hostility I often felt when meeting strangers. Kids were clearly the cruelest by virtue of being crude ambassadors of a culture of intolerance. As soon as they heard my funny African name, or perceived that I was effeminate, their look and tone would shift to convey such great contempt, projecting all sorts of fantasies upon my juvenile body. I developed many successful strategies to disarm adults, much of which depended on our culture of total silence around homosexuality: Mostly queer people were not good or bad, just totally invisible. Hence, just like many in the developing world, my first images of ‘Gay’ were necessarily white, either through the total absence (visually and in content) of people of color, or minstrel acts of sissies as the comic relief or ridiculed like Eddie Murphy’s infamous feature stand-up comedy movie Raw.
I did a lot of jokes about homosexuals a couple years ago and faggots were mad. There's nothing like having a nation of fags looking for you.
I can't travel the country freely no more.
I can't go to San Francisco. They got a 24 -hour homo watch waiting for me in the airport. Soon as I got off the plane, they'd be like: [lisping] "He's here, yes. Yes, it's him. Yes, it's him!"
And the cars would come rushing across town. And it won't be no siren, it'll be a real fag sitting on the roof going: "Pull over. Pull over.”



To roaring laughs, the comic repeated pull over pull over again and again, with a heavy lisp, pitching his voice up several tones, wildly waving his wrists as he switched back and forth across the stage. Whew whew, Murphy said, mocking the sound of an approaching emergency vehicle before continuing the story, which eventually led to the fags trying to molest him right there in the middle of the street, we are left to suppose. Even Backs, who had t face a similarly dehumanizing hatred and silence around the very existence of the hatred, could be co-opted into ostracizing queers.

My elder cousin had taken a group of us to see Raw at the cinema shortly after the film’s Christmas season debut. I remember him clashing with the cinema attendants who tried to forbid admission to unaccompanied minors due to Raw’s “R” rating. How dey know I ain’t the guardian, my cousin said. I was twelve and he was seventeen. I was, however, old enough to understand that fags were disgusting; everybody hated fags.

Largely, adults recognized the general inappropriateness of expressing their discomfort, contempt and hostility towards a child, notably one like me, so preoccupied with showing reverence and respect to adults. Further, most adults with whom I interacted as a child were either aware or would be presented with my accolades: I was a ‘product’ of the most socially progressive local public school, which was reputedly and disputably the most academically challenging institution in the city; I spoke vernacular and Standard American English both with great articulation; white adults exoticized and Black adults romanticized my African heritage; I belonged to a famously inter-cultural and inter-class alternative religio-spiritual community; I was active in various artistic, academic and athletic groups; and I did not shy away from engaging and sharply, yet respectfully challenging grown people in conversation about grown people topics. Compared to most Black people in that city, I was relatively well-off in the localized cultural currency. To this day most people I meet freely assume that I come from a solidly middle class family- known in urban India as “a good family.”

This is the social currency with which we contend in the South, and for which Black families nudge and fight over either collectively, but seemingly overwhelmingly discursively- hoping to gain acceptance, success and perhaps affirmation in what bell hooks has coined as a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal system. By virtue, patriarchy, and the hedonistic consumerism that promotes its values, incessantly dehumanizes us- the non-white, poor, colored, queer outcasts. This highly commercialized and increasingly globalized ideology teaches us to mimic the same patterns of dominance/subordination in all aspects of our lives.

This it is not our culture; it cannot be. Simply, it is not life-affirming for women, people of color, and anyone else whose very existence challenges its status of control, despite any amount of cultural currency we may gain in order to play and succeed at the game. “Hedonistic material consumerism,” as hooks challenges, “with its overemphasis on having money to waste has been a central cause of the demoralization among working men of all races” (“We Real Cool” 29).

It is also not safe for men, as my life shows, for it forces us, too, in such narrow boxes most loosely defined as macho- it’s not a myth. Likewise, homophobia, and machismo are expressed forms of sexism. As hooks offers:

Sexism is unique. It is unlike other forms of domination- racism or classism- where the exploited and oppressed do not live in large numbers intimately with their oppressors or develop their primary love relationships (familial and/or romantic) with individuals who oppress and dominate or share in the privileges attained by domination.3


Patriarchal masculinity is not just prejudice. Prejudices based on perceived racial or class differences, for example, inform everyday interactions- repeating and therefore reinforcing the patriarchal power-oriented paradigm of dominance to mediate relationships. It extends beyond the ability that one individual has to oppress another- for example an adult slapping a child, an employer threatening at his/her employees, didactic teaching styles, or even lovers resolving conflict through deception, coercion or various forms of violence. Patriarchal masculinity informs each of these interactions, affirming individual power to oppress another through repeating the pattern of violence, intimidation, dominance/superiority and underlying subversion of intimacy in order to create and maintain (power) distance. Moreover, as sister hooks explains in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, "If we are unable to resist and end domination in relations where there is care, it seems totally unimaginable that we can resist and end it in other institutionalized relations of power."

‘Prejudice plus power’ is the reasoning and ability of one group of people to determine the destiny of another group of people. We in America have a culture of endemic violence, intimidation coercion and entitlement, which manifests as systematic discrimination and oppression that structural maintenance of an underclass, of untouchables. It is not safe. It deems that even basic communication between people becomes a power play- a threat of humiliation, assertion of authority or even violence, where one must win and one must loose. All Americans, at least, are subject to these all pervasive messages, yet our culture dismisses any attempt to charge ourselves with any responsibility:

Few studies examine the link between black male fascination with gangsta culture and early childhood consumption of unchecked television and movies that glamorize brute patriarchal maleness. A biased imperialist white –supremacist patriarchal mass media teaches young black males that the street will be their only home. And it lets mainstream black males know that they are just an arrest away from being on the street. This media teaches young black males that the patriarchal man is a predator, that only the strong and the violent survive (“We Real Cool” 27)

I have consoled women and girls from the grade school cafeteria to any corporate office on surviving a male attack. When she challenges him to be a man, to be like pop group Destiny’s Child’s Soldier, to which rappers like 50 Cent gladly conform, he is comfortable, and as likely she will be as well. They have both learned that domination/subordination power game. Masculinity is reaffirmed through shows of courage that lead him to win or loose her challenge; men are taught to win. Our culture virtually trains girls to accept this fallibility of men and to see their ability to compromise as mature. Yet deep down, they both realize it hurts. And our culture supplies neither with real tools of compromise beyond self-sacrifice like Sita, in Hindu mythology, having to walk through fire to prove her fidelity, or even that Christian virgin. Sadly, we do not hail from a dominant culture of dialogue as conflict resolution.
Forget Mississippi, Kentucky, goddamn!

All are armed and shielded, inevitably at some point turning those defenses and that armament inwards. Patriarchal masculinity often ‘reads’ this armor as cockiness on the part of women and people of color, ‘bitchiness’ on Queer men, butch on queer women (a further eroticized challenge to the straight men to conquer female sexuality- to get some!), or even read as belligerence on Black men. Black women as a whole, of course, are simply wanton whores in that paradigm. This armor was, and still is necessary for any non-mainstream child growing up in America and especially in the so-called ‘Commonwealth’ of Kentucky. American democracy relies majority/minority polarization. And mirroring the interpersonal win/loose situation, someone is always bound to get screwed. Interesting that screwed and fucked on top of their sexual connotations, also mean ‘to be exploited’ in a major (fucking) way.

In comparing the contemporary experience, this is a marked difference between Africa-Americans and more recent arrivals to the United States: The immigrant ethic. We, as a people, did not immigrate to the new world. Yet though we live in its wake, the hegemonic ethos of the nation refuses to acknowledge its legacy, destining itself to repeat past ills, yet with modern and refined skills. Therefore, the American hegemony was born and steeped in annihilation, destruction and consistent and purposeful demonization of one another to construct ‘the other’, varying with time, yet consistent in its execution. This is so ingrained in our dominant culture that we blindly eschew any discourse of meaningful racial harmony: There can be no meaningful peace in this perpetual power play for the dominate/subordinate paradigm ultimately colors all interactions, validating egotistical competition at the expense of others.

‘This is another man’s country’, my uncle in London says as he honks to hurry the pedestrians as we scurry though the narrow city roads. ‘Flat bums’, he shouts at the pedestrians in his melodic tongue, a mélange of Nigerian/English accents, both relatively foreign to me, having grown up in the US. My father feels much the same way about his nearly 40 years in the United States. On a recent trip to Nigeria, my first in fact, my father came to terms with the fact that most of his life had been spent away from his native land, though Africa is still home: America, he feels, is just a comfy staging round. For many immigrants not fleeing war, and particularly from Asia where many more enjoy stable economies, relatively dependable (if not predictable) systems of governance (save for some striking examples like Pakistan, which is still relatively stable) likely have a similar, romanticized collection of memories from home which only gain momentum given the backdrop of the broken promises filling the American dream despite its continued promotion as a viable life goal. Yet what do you do when even your imagination of your place of origin was crushed, ancestors demonized and homeland represented in total peril, in constant decay and stages of underdevelopment? Tarzan, for many, is the only civilized African, where many fail to realize that there actually are cities on ‘the dark continent’.
‘Get us out from under, Wonder woman’4

By the seventh grade, my best friend was suiting up with her armor as well. Alicia’s breasts and my effeminacy apparently evoked strong sexual connotations in both young people and adults, and few were mature enough to handle themselves. Many responded as if we were very threatening. Sharing classes together since the second grade, Alicia and I had been longtime friends so it was easy for us to side with one another over the issue of public scrutiny of our emerging sexualities. Many of my earliest memories of any issues surrounding sexuality involve she and I gradually coming to terms with the discord between the innocence and curiosity with which we saw ourselves and what our world expected of us. Even as early as the second grade when we referred to sex as doin’ the oochie coochie, most of my male classmates had already been socialized to relate to sex as a conquest over females- as if it were our duty as males to conquer in any way, by any means, the other. We were to brave the wild: Her untamed sexual prowess.

We were curious and creative, for our discursiveness brought relief to otherwise muted hues, particularly in times and in places adverse to comprehensive sexual health education. In the third grade, some boys were caught peeing in the electrical socket in the restroom. That year, our teacher was male, a rarity in that school, and practically throughout my education save for my biochemistry major in college- and then, only that major! I will never forget the conversation that he facilitated while the girls went ahead to music class. He explained to the group of 3rd grade boys that electricity could travel up the stream of urine and… You get the point. I remember watching the boys as they did this silly act, pitying them for having no other outlet to explore their sex. Like practicing for adult masculinity, peeing in the socket quickly descended into a competitive mob frenzy. Next door, I thought, was the janitor’s closet, and that Black lady who smiles and says hi to me everyday would be left to mop up this nasty mess. There I was, standing in the restroom during break time, realizing that I’d much rather identify with the girls.

At that age we lacked any language to discuss these circumstances outside of our juvenile understanding of racism. Even still, we could identify racists even beneath the multi-cultural and later political correctness rhetoric. I believe that Alicia also felt that we were unduly treated despite our lack of redress. After all, just as in the praxis of racism; it was simply being Black that was the matter. Alicia’s family was also deeply Christian, and non-reticent to accept a universal hierarchy that simultaneously justified the system of oppression in which we are entwined, and offered no respite.
‘Sweetie’ is what they said about Sweet Rhode Island Red.’5

As the leaves turned and fell, chatter had long since started in the school about the Christmas vacation and the concomitant partying throughout all classes, ‘secret Santa’ gift exchanges, and decorations that filled the school. It must have been the last class of the day as Alicia and I had hurried through our assignments with great anticipation. We raced to the teacher’s desk, handed in the assignment and just as quickly returned to our seats, anxious to continue our usual goings on.

The school system had re-branded the holiday as ‘Winter Vacation’, Christmas was for most kids the intended commercial titillation that made them feel wanted, likely training for confounding retail therapy later in life- drowning our contemporaries in the all too easily accessible credit. In a hushed voice, Alicia revealed to me that her conservative Christian denomination neither fêted on Christmas and Easter nor worshiped any idols such as flags or Santa Claus. It was a shame, we both agreed, that most of those around us made no connection between faith and the commercialized winter break- about which the façade of supporting diversity forbade us from discussing.

I felt a like swinging from the lights as we discussed this, because finally there was someone who could help me to articulate what I felt. By then I was beginning to question American patriotism and the purpose of the nation-state system; it all seemed so political and unnatural. A political map of the US shows many states with names indigenous to the area, yet most borders are geometric, contradictory, I felt, to how people would occupy any an area. Moreover, the people whose cultures gave rise to many of these state appropriated names, were no where to be seen. I was repulsed by the symbols of the American nation-state, none of which reflected positive views of me or anyone like me. The whole thing seemed artificial and hypocritical- a sham. Besides, we (the Black kids) all knew that Blacks were legally three quarters human for most of our time here in this chunk of the New World, hence we are innately suspicious of its power.

Alicia and I also talked about the August the Eighth, which is when we in Kentucky mark the Emancipation Proclamation Declaration. Alicia gave me a sly grin as I told her about my summer road trips down to my godfather’s hometown, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to just be Black and celebrate August the Eighth with other Black people for a week each year. I was enamored at Alicia’s rejection of the good ole boy system of nepotism that continued to keep us all in our respective places. This is how we referred to what I now name as the white Christian patriarchal masculine middle-class monopolization of regional, state, national and clearly, as I now understand, international politics, much to the disenfranchisement of our communities and people.
What’s his story and what’s historical fact?

In Social Studies class, we had spent months on sanitized white-American history, weeks on European history, days on African-American history (as if it were somehow separate from ’American’ history) and just hours on the histories and cultures of non-Western peoples, including those native to that very plot of land. Nestled along the falls of the river that the Iroquois named Ohio, meaning big river, the city boasted neighborhoods and parks with names like Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Algonquin, Seneca and Iroquois. Yet, there was not even a mention of the Trail of Tears in all of my education in Kentucky. What’s more, most of what we learnt about the world outside of Western Europe, Russia, North America and Israel revolved around the colonial experience. Absolutely no information was presented in any of my public school education regarding non-white and non-wealthy people and places outside of the colonial experience. Hence, the Third World/non-aligned socio-economic disparities of poor Blacks in the West End of Louisville, poor whites towards the north, and the isolated southeast Asian slum-like community in the south-many of whom were ‘displaced’ during our ‘conflict’ in that region, was all justified by this universal position of dominance of those gaining wealth at any expense. The demographics of the city continue to shift with geo-political will in Washington, and the area increasingly houses poor Africans, Asians and those from ‘south of the border’ including poor whites and African-Americans- all f those least likely to invest in progressive multi-culturalism partially due to a lack thereof in their places of origin, and partially due to the mendacity and rapture of survival in the new world.

Alicia and I both realized that the slightly non-mainstream characteristics of our lives unclouded the lenses often worn by those in the world around me and her. According to ‘his story’, only white people had contributed to modern humanity- that only whites were of any relevance. Moreover, we were minorities within minorities, in a place where we knew that we were expected to be different and to make a difference, by all of the adults in both our families and in school. Adults in our environment never accorded us the simplicity of ‘being’. Whenever we exited our homes, we carried the responsibility of representing.

Right there, in the seventh grade, as Alicia fumbled through endless ways of folding her arms to hide her new chest, I realized that if I thought about boys the way that middle school boys boasted about their conquests over girls, I could somewhat relate to their juvenile erotic sentiments. Buried and hidden deep in the corners of my mind I started to eroticize males, with a fraction of the permissiveness that the world around us sexualized girls and women. It felt good, too. Yet even then I knew that I did not (nor wish to) relate to conquering or boasting over my erotic interests.
I tried to live the life I thought God wanted me to. I went to church, been to school … But ole Pastor Childs and Deacon Jones, they was just too hard headed to leave me alone. They said that I was as sweet as honey, cause I was 34, 38, and 22 at the tummy. They call me Sweet Rhode Island Red.6

Alicia grew up in a religious community that staunchly discouraged the very thought of sex. Though my family was relatively forward thinking about sexuality among young people, I never encountered an adult who was ready to approach the topic of homosexuality in general, and especially, it felt, with me. Despite this, I knew that I was surrounded by a plethora of love.

Over the years, I had visited Alicia’s home after school, and knew her elder sister who attended the same school. I realized that Alicia was insecure about any support for her searching for understanding and making sense of how things were changing for us and why so many alluded to sex through crude taunts and teasing, and did so covertly. Though we could not offer each other much information, we offered each other acceptance. In the circumstances in which we lived in Louisville, I have always been cognizant that I am extremely fortunate to have known such acceptance at such a young age. Clearly, Alicia helped to teach me to give that in return. We knew that we were vulnerable. Alicia helped train me to be tough like her in spite, and despite of it all, and to act wicked and love every minute.

By the end of the seventh grade, it was clear that my best girlfriend would be labeled a problem child. In addition to smart-talking the teachers, Alicia had been involved in several occurrences of violence in school, and wasn’t managing her academic performance very well. I knew that she was just acting out against a world that demonized her to her face, continually ignoring and effacing her voice. I wanted to act much more, if not for the strong presence of my mother and her determination, as a praxis of her spirituality, to development me to know and love myself, relish in the freedom of mobility, mentally free of class oppression and lust to know and engage the world. I knew that I would inevitably leave Kentucky, which I did at 17 only months after high-school graduation. In the seventh grade, however, my best friend, the first ally, one who had consistently stood up to those who would gay bash me, was not encouraged to develop her own self-esteem. Her mother worked overtime, had several children, little other parental or communal support besides the church, which was unforgiving and left little time for parenting past strict disciplining. This, it was clear even to a twelve year old, would not suffice to polish my best friend into a vibrant woman who would be comfortable with her body and her sexuality in a patriarchal, racist and misogynistic environment.



I was 17 when I moved to New Orleans/'Cos living in the city has always been my dream/People laughed, said it was a shame and a pity/When old mayor Daley gave me the key to the city/He too said that I was as sweet as honey/’Cause on 34 38 and 22 at the tummy.7


It was years after her expulsion from our school that I heard any concrete news about my best friend. Apparently, she had been shuffled from public school to public school, and was rumored to have ultimately shot a teacher in the ear at the school for ill-behaved students. This was a time and in a place where a child was more likely to have access to a gun than a condom or a book that was not required or on deep discount. The word was that Alicia would be expelled from that school, which then left those youth with little opportunities in life in general, and a severely retarded opportunity to earn a high school or equivalent degree. Our school system was apt, effective and efficient at producing poor, mal-educated, Black youth with criminal ‘record and resonance’ with local cops!

In our eighth grade Physical Education course, we were offered the new and improved sexual education curricula, which had been totally re-invented that year to include comprehensive contraception information, responding to the increasing incidence of teenage pregnancy and, at that time, the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I began praying that none of my girlfriends would get pregnant, raped or contract some disease, though honestly the odds were/are stacked against the poor, the Black and the feminine, especially in any combination. Protectively, I even dated one girl whom I often walked home from school, knowing that with me she would never have intercourse, and that my masculinity had no intention of dominating, conquering or coercing her.

Most of our peers were preyed upon by older, presumably heterosexual, boys; many such girls were easily coerced into unprotected sex. This pre-mature Sexperimentation and lack of any appropriate information on sexuality, constituted their sexual debut. In retrospect, both the girls and their elder male counterparts lacked positive modeling of behavior in our environment as well as any sexual guidance appropriate to their level of physical and mental maturity. I still remember that first girl to leave our school for the teen-mothers’ school, which simply left me wondering who would follow suit. I’d known her since the second grade and when I was told, there was no doubt: Her period comes like clockwork, one friend said. If she was late, then something had to be up, another concurred. We were otherwise speechless.

Naturally, there was nowhere in my life, and no peer to whom I could even comment on any aspect of my emotive erotic life, including even the attractiveness of another guy. This includes that one sissy in my first grade class. I remember seeing his apt buttocks as he’d switch down the street. I knew that I had a big butt, and was prone to switch. It was heart wrenching for me to see someone like that.

Even though I walked past his house on the way to and from school everyday, I would cross the street to avoid meeting him outside of the watchful gaze of others at school. I certainly never talked to him in school, and even avoided eye contact, or sitting near him at lunch. I certainly avoided going anywhere near him during restroom breaks, but could not resist wondering what happened in the big people’s toilet/lounge next door. Walking past that lounge on the way back to class, we would sometime here great laughter and smell cigarette smoke. They even had special drinks that kids couldn’t have that came in special cups with handles. The teacher’s lounge caused a great deal less angst for me than the segregated boy’s toilet where I was more vulnerable to persecution- where the boys could call me sissy, or worse, fag, which sexualized my body, in the boys bathrooms, in a way that I was deeply unprepared to confront.
Smokin' cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall (you nasty boy)/Teacher sends you to the principal's office down the hall/You grow up and learn that kinda thing ain't right/But while you were doing it-it sure felt outta sight8

Our teacher, Mrs. Meyers, who called me “Die peer re ay,” for a whole freaking year, could not accompany the boys into the restroom during breaks. Yet, every so often, when our break coincided with that of a few other classes, a male teacher would pop in. His very presence, whomever he was, would bust up any raucous ruckus. I was saved. Outside of Mrs. Meyers’ gaze, the boys acted a mess. In class I tried to become popular, not by being myself, but by associating myself with the most popular boy and girl. Freddy was a rough-mouthed white boy who played soccer. He always brought a packed lunch to school everyday, complete with freshly made sandwiches, chips, candy and the all-time favorite, Capri Sun- a relatively expensive, single serve fruit drink in a bag with a straw.

Renee was the prettiest girls in the class- par none. Basically, she was a light-skinned, long-haired Black girl, which carried a great amount of currency even then, still now and in every part of the world I’ve ever known, the worst being northern India. Compared to the other Black girls, none of whom were as fair as she, Renee seemed generally more carefree. She also smiled and played with her hair a lot, which was always neatly braided. She was also the first girl in the class to get a perm, so she quickly became the envy of many- or was that because she was heavily in Mrs. Meyers’ favor?

Despite his average academic performance, Mrs. Meyers doted on Freddy. Freddy taught me a very valuable lesson about men, which I will not share here, though I shall share one prominent incident.

Bad-mouthed Freddy liked to curse, tease others, and talk about sex. He would always be the last kid to line up for class after recess. Even at that age, we were all fascinated with the bad boy, including our teacher, who had been visited on many occasions by Freddy’s mother. Freddy and I were friends and sat next to one another.

I am a child of the south- a Black child of the south. And, honey, one thing anyone should know is that we, above any other mode of verbal communication, can curse. Our Gentile comes from the fact that we very selectively do so, and generally in closed circles, until there is conflict. It is akin to ‘queening it up’ nowadays, or the SNAP! Queen, such as Miss Roj, in George C. Wolfe’s 1986 award winning play, The Colored Museum. With two fingers and a sharp tongue, Miss Roj could snap a homophobe out of existence. Indeed, after an entire childhood of physical and mental abuse and two days locked in a closet in the house, Miss Roj, “spelled: Are-a Oh Jay,” snapped her father into a heart attack! Such life stories did not exist for me until much later in life.

I decided to show Freddy, once and for all, that I could curse like him. Since it seemed so unnatural coming out of my mouth, and anyway Freddy hardly gave anyone else the chance to talk, I wrote down all of the curses and abuses I could think of, for homework, and presented it to Freddy the next day. He’ll be so impressed, I thought; he was. Freddy was so impressed at my handy work, that he laughed aloud while reading it during class, then promptly handed it over to Mrs. Meyers who did not, at least appear so impressed. End of lesson. Fortunately, I spent the next eleven years in a more liberal educational environment, where I got to know Alicia.

Like many closeted gay youth, I buried this entire aspect of myself so deep inside that I would later have a great deal to salvage. I had long since resided to live like an ascetic, watching my peers fumble through their adolescent sexualities, while mine lay dormant, surfacing only occasionally, yet consistently betraying exile into the self, my silence, in front of others. Vicariously, I experienced many first, second, and perhaps tenth sexual experiences through the network I had developed by middle school. I believed, as I do now, that my female peers earnestly sensed my sexuality was not one of dominance vis-à-vis theirs and therefore concluded that my masculinity was of no threat to them as they would not be judged or labeled; this made me privy to their rather informative conversations. Certainly, I also wanted to date and rush to indulge my friends with the details of those crush-induced heart palpitations like everyone else in all my entire eighth grade class. Like everyone else, I may have also wanted to experiment with sex. Having several slightly elder female cousins, I was also able to see how the onset of puberty and experimentation with sex played out at home. I collected a great many facts about female adolescent sexuality among urban Blacks in Louisville in the mid-eighties to nineties. This insight led me to conclude that any normative pattern of sexuality and especially my emerging sexuality, was threatening and taboo. The queer bashing that I had suffered throughout my life left an indelible mark early on. Even now I mentally prepare myself to face the ignorance of blatant homophobia with even my most sophisticated contemporary counterparts just as one can expect racism from the most enlightened liberal. It takes more than talk to walk in someone else’s shoes.

In the early days, I worked tirelessly to maintain an image of a high-achieving, well-adjusted adolescent in order to detract from my sexuality and perhaps compensate (or my penance) for effeminacy. Sometimes I felt that I should not have any sexuality, especially not one resembling my own homosexuality. I sustained this facade for many years to come. In my environment, women and girls more often demonstrated healthy relationships based on open communication amongst one another, mutual consent, acceptance, consistency and respect. Since these elements seemed consistent with my family’s values, I was even content to be effeminate since it meant coming closer to women. By the time it became evident to me that I was gay, I had managed to surround myself with enough caring women and girls, be they family or friends, who were prepared to accept knowing about my gayness and continue to support me.

Every now and again, I think of my bestest girlfriend, Alicia, and have relayed one particular story involving her to friends around the world. Several members of the visiting team taunted me as they waited in the school bus. He got sugar in his pants, along with the more common Fag and Sissy were hurled unprovoked from the bus. I stood with my back to the bus, trying to ignore the delinquents- trying to hide my humiliation. I was not even safe standing in front of my own school. As Alicia and I spoke, I forced back the tears, as I do now retelling the story. I was so embarrassed that this happened in front of my school, with my friend, threatening to ruin the great excitement of the game, which I had assumed that we all shared. Alicia pretended to ignore them, though after the fifth or sixth ‘sissy’, the frustration started to show on her face. Nonetheless, my friend just continued to talk and laugh with me as if nothing was happening- as if boys like that were for ignoring only- as if she were well versed in their sort of behavior. This was the eighth grade, and Alicia’s last year at our school.

On one trip home from college, I bumped into Alicia at a burger joint in the seedy central business district of downtown. There she was, still smiling, happy as ever to see me. I wanted to reach over the counter and give her a great hug; she looked like she needed it, and I wanted to show her my appreciation, which ultimately I had no courage to express. Did she even know that she was my first ally? I tried my best not to make her feel embarrassed. She had been bitterly cast away from the school where I later graduated as a star student. She was working the cash register at a second rate fast-food chain in an obscure neighborhood while I was away excelling at an exclusive small liberal arts college in northern Ohio. We spoke for a while and caught up, but it was all so superficial. I do not remember if she had any kids. Her high and full cheeks shone as I recounted the past few years of my life. Her ever cheerful, glossed-over eyes betrayed the fact that she had faced her share of adversity is what short lives we had lived thus far.
Two roads diverged…and sorry I could not travel both9

I left the greasy burger joint and hurriedly trailed down the street. Once I knew that I had cleared eyeshot of the restaurant, tears burst from my eyes, as they do now as I recount this story to myself. All Alicia knew that she could rely upon was her church, and even that community, apparently, was unable to supplement whatever tools she lacked to overcome her circumstances, which I first sensed when we both became conscious of our sexualities. At that chance meeting, Alicia showed me that her life was barely above water, fighting her environment for even a chance at breaking the gender and racialized cycle of poverty and ensuing violence bestowed onto us. Social rejection from peers and adults, as well as lack of positive role models, in a vacuum of appropriate information leads many to such an enormous deficit in self-confidence- a deficit that reduces life-choices. Cognizance of such a systematic deficit can lead to ambivalence or rage- often the two remain ambivalent unless purposefully mediated, unless we decolonize our minds. I still try to sift through the factors that push the lives of two people in such different directions, whose lives cross paths during such an important portion of life, like adolescence. We shared the scope of the planet and it as clear now as it was then that the nexus of race, gender and class in America leaves little space for alterity, despite the rhetoric surrounding diversity. Yet, for those years in elementary and middle school however, we both had a chance to give and receive love.


1 From “Been So Long, performed by Anita Baker, 1986

1 Strange Fruit, lyrics by Lewis Allen, originally performed by Billy Holiday

2 Sweet Rhode Island Red, by Ike and Tina Turner, on Sweet Rhode Island Red, 1974

3From bell hooks. Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston, South End Press.

4 From the theme to Wonder Woman

5 Sweet Rhode Island Red, by Ike and Tina Turner, on Sweet Rhode Island Red, 1974

6 Sweet Rhode Island Red, by Ike and Tina Turner, on Sweet Rhode Island Red, 1974

7 Sweet Rhode Island Red, by Ike and Tina Turner, on Sweet Rhode Island Red, 1974

8 I Wish, by Stevie Wonder, on ‘Songs in the Key of Life’, 1976

9 From Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Less Traveled”