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That changed as I read further into the books in my pile. All the books I found about being gay were also about AIDS. Gay men dying of AIDS like it was a logical sequence of events, a mathematical formula, or a life cycle. Caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly; gay boy, gay man, AIDS. It was certain. Mom’s friend got AIDS because he was gay. Because he was gay, he killed himself. Because he knew he was dying anyway.
Just as some cultures have a hundred words for “snow,” there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night.
People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us.
A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.
The women at my table howled and then gave me some dollar bills so I could tip my first drag queen.
That night was the first time in my life I felt like the words “gay” and “alone” weren’t synonyms for each other.
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.
I wasn’t innocent, a naïve boy admitting that he had been wrestling with complicated feelings he didn’t really understand. My feelings were clear as daylight. I had passed the moment when I could’ve innocently confessed myself out into the open.
In retrospect, I think I didn’t feel as if a burden had been lifted because my being gay was never actually the burden.
However many masks we invent and deploy, in the end, we cannot control what other people see when they look at us.
I buried myself in the bodies of other men so I could feel something other than the depression that was rolling in like a fog bank.
If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.
