How We Fight For Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

because you’re young and don’t know the difference between abandoned and alone just like your mother’s heart won’t know the difference between beat and attack.

Caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly; gay boy, gay man, AIDS.

Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is a death wish. And one day, if you’re lucky, your life and death will become some artist’s new “project.”

the job that didn’t pay: raising me.

For those women, it may well have just been another night out, but for me it was something more. That night was the first time in my life I felt like the words “gay” and “alone” weren’t synonyms for each other.

I felt my body and realized that my body could be a passport or a key, maybe even a weapon. A body like a brick thrown through a sleeping house’s window.

The sons of single mothers inevitably encounter well-meaning family members who like to remind us about our role as “the man of the house.” The statement usually made me wince, the way it implicitly merged the roles of son, father, and husband; the way it erased the grown woman to whom the house actually belonged. But standing in our living room, watching her gasp, I realized that the two paramedics were looking at me, as if a question had already been asked and they were patiently waiting for an answer. My mother, hunched forward, resting her elbows on her legs, was also staring up at me. I felt larger than I had any right being, encased in the body of an adult but ignorant of how to use it.

How many versions of myself I’d perform by week’s end was anyone’s guess.

a testament perhaps to the unique talent Americans have for talking all the way around exactly what needs to be said. I remember the orientation leaders continually emphasizing the perils of binge drinking; I don’t remember words like “rape,” “sexual assault,” or “consent.” Katie Autry was a specter between the lines. Her story haunted the room, all of us hearing and not hearing her at the same time.

At times, I was proud of my sluttiness. I liked to think that it was radical, as if the act of fucking another man and then bragging to my friends about it was a form of protest against the shame I’d grown up with, and against the shame I felt silently radiating from the new people in my life. But just as often, I found myself pushed to wonder, by the wide eyes around me, whether something was wrong with me. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel accepted by my friends; rather, I was beginning to worry that I was being welcomed into the fold in spite of some flaw everyone had already decided to forgive. “What the fuck haven’t you done?” was the kind of question that shadowed me on my walks back to campus after the hookups I was learning not to talk about with friends. It followed me into the shower where, just as often as not, I’d feel like I was trying to scrub away much more than the smell of sex.

“I forgot to say that I love you,” she said, almost frantically, like she was racing to catch the comet’s tail end of our previous conversation. For a moment, it felt like we were both catching our breath. “I love you, Saeed,” she said. “And honestly, you sound happy. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

However many masks we invent and deploy, in the end, we cannot control what other people see when they look at us. Lower your voice, change your posture, call yourself Cody, dress differently if you want. A man might still decide that when he looks at you, all he sees is a nigger, a faggot, or both.

We both allowed too deep of a contrast between our interiors and our exteriors. We both clung to self-assured masks that actually allowed us to cause ourselves more unseen harm.

And then I did exactly what I thought all people who love each other do: I changed the subject; I changed myself; I erased everything I had just said; I erased myself so I could be her son again.

Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.

I wanted to look how I felt: somehow both drowned and washed up, a survivor and a whore who got exactly what he deserved.

It’s just too easy for a gay black man to drown amid the names of dead black gay men. Since I had started my graduate studies, it seemed that just as soon as I looked up the name of a gay black poet whose work I aspired to one day see my own work read alongside, I’d learn that the poet had died of AIDS, or poverty, or some other tragedy that left him abandoned on the margins of literature’s memory.

Boys like us never really got away, it seemed. We just bought ourselves time. A few more gasps of air, a few more poems, a few more years.

I was proud of my exhaustion, as if the darkness circling my eyes was proof of my adulthood.

The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing.

A story became a memory became a guilt-laced question before finally, there at the bottom of the sea, I’d find the same fact waiting for me: I was never going to see her again.