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May 29 - June 21, 2023
Memory is a tricky force, especially when brutality, poverty, self-hatred, and many other unseen hands, which turn beautiful people into monsters and victims, dictate what we remember. I blocked out memories so I could sleep at night.
It is also a quest for history, because we come to be the people we are within the context of a larger world ruled by powerful, insidious forces. The long, collective hatred of blackness, the calculated policing of sexual difference, the intentional ghettoization of urban centers, and the lure of the American dollar are just a few of the strong forces that shaped my senses of self and the way I viewed others.
To discover and name what shapes us is to engage in the work of history. I knew writing an honest memoir would require me to tell the truth about my life, which has been full of hostility and splendor. Discovering the difference between what’s true and all the lies one comes to believe requires a direct confrontation with the past.
Stereotyping black urban cities like Camden as “ghetto” and the people who live within them as leeches sucking the state dry of its capital are lies forged without a commitment to history. If Camden is a ghetto, it is because some force, comprised of many hands, made it so. That, too, must be named.
It’s a book I wanted to read because too many books have yet to be written by and about the rich experiences of black people who are forced to survive on the edges of the margins because they choose to love differently, refuse standards of so-called respectability, make less money, talk more shit, or deny the state its power.
I didn’t learn about the works of Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, Marsha P. Johnson, and Cheryl Clarke
We are James Baldwin, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Richard Bruce Nugent, Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray, June Jordan, and so many more. But in 2018, these are the names some still refuse to remember and celebrate.
“Fly. I know you are heavy. We forgive you. Whatever weights you have been carrying, let them go. Fly.” I only told him what I learned to do in his absence.
Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, people “marked as poor, black, brown, immigrant, queer, or trans” are cast as nobodies caught up in web of interconnected oppression. But zeros are not nothings. They are something. And they are real. They exist, and they matter.
People who are always under siege often have no choice but to conjure their inner powers, to manipulate energies as they walk down streets where they were once beaten, to bend sound waves when invectives are close enough to the ear to cause pain, to suture broken hearts when the people they love refuse to love them back, and to appear again and again after death attempts to disappear them.
Queerness is a way of life people fear because in it they might find freedom. But I was caged for a long time before I took hold of my liberation.
People who have been caged too long will do anything to get free.
What is it that you desire but have been denied? What is it that you need to feel safe? How do you actually feel about the person you had sex with? What is it about him you desire? What are the sources of your pain? Who hurt you? Who first told you that your sexual desires and attractions were wrong? Does it feel better when you use a condom? Do you feel more connected when you don’t use a condom at all? What is about that particular connection that fulfills you? To ask those questions
Black same-sex love is revolutionary because we must first convince ourselves we are deserving of receiving and giving what has been denied us for so long.
The belief that we have all we need within us, individually, to survive is a powerful, poetic idea, but the truth is, no one person can make it through life alone without the presence and support of others who are willing to draw upon their own strength to aid another at their lowest.
I was of two minds, torn apart by two inherent beliefs—an awareness of my human worth and a denial of my sexual difference.
It wasn’t that I was too weak to simply think differently or give a middle finger to hateful people. I wanted to die, which is to say not live, which is to say not have to be strong enough all the time to fight to exist, which is to say fight at all, which is to say, I really want to live without having to fight so damn hard to exist.
She was right. We were lucky to have what most, even the wealthy, didn’t. We were overwhelmed by the richness of love.
But so often love is reserved for those whose presence does not disrupt our comforts.
