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My grandmother and I, without knowing it, were faithfully following a script that had already been written for us. A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.
By the time Matthew Shepard’s life and death made it to the classrooms of my high school in 2002, my feelings about him and James Byrd Jr. had started to swirl and converge. I was walking through a dusty, fluorescent-lit hallway—halfway to the assembly hall, trying with every filament of my body to look cool—when the two truths finally collided: Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is a death wish.
The older I got, the more frequently my mother and I would push each other to the precipice of what we actually needed to say, only to back off just before either of us was forced to get more specific than vague allusions to “feelings” and “questions.” But this only meant that the unanswered questions became ever more loaded.
someone who saw what I saw whenever he looked at the bodies of other men. I couldn’t be afraid or innocent, knowing what I knew about myself. I’d been looking for trouble, and I probably deserved whatever happened to me when I finally found it. Three minutes. I stood up from my chair and walked right through the question hovering in the air between my body and the body waiting for me in that restroom stall: What exactly did he see when he saw me?
