Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

The basic concern was always the same: am I really here for this? The big idea, as I saw it, was this: You don’t exist for a long time. Before you arrive, there are ages, eons—an eternity—without you. (Can you imagine? How boring!) And suddenly there you are. Alive. How you doing? How’s it feel? Immaculate? What if it feels bad? Don’t worry; it gets better, right? But what if it doesn’t get better, it just gets. It just keeps getting. What then? You still interested? You still trying to be good, still moisturizing your T-zone, still working through your stack of New Yorkers, still fighting systemic oppression, still speaking truth to power, still attempting to exist? Still? What if I told you, at another point—fixed, supposedly, but totally unknown—you suddenly, mysteriously, immaculately won’t be anymore? Again. Does that sound like something you want to do?

But through it all there was a constant tethering me to the idea of a future: the library. The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was.

Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.”

So when I wonder about the column and the hyperbole I find works well for it, I have to ask if everything about myself is minstrelsy and whether there is any part of me that actually exists in reality, and I don’t have time to sort through that. I am an Internet User and I am trying my best!

Don’t do it, I tell myself. Close your eyes, go to sleep, wake up, show up to work on time for once in your life, do a good job, answer all of your unread emails, donate to charity, vote, care about the world, raise a good kid or a dog (tbd), yell at fewer strangers on Facebook, smile more (unless someone on the street tells you to, in which case don’t smile), have hope (shoutout to Barack!) but also be realistic about what you can expect out of this life (shoutout to systemic oppression!), figure out what a realistic expectation for hope in this life is, be a better person, die eventually. You know, the usual.

ME

And, although I was a very nice child, I absolutely loved the contempt with which Lady Elaine Fairchilde viewed literally everyone else. Her misanthropy was electrifying. To this day I am amazed that someone as chill and Presbyterian as Fred Rogers created someone as over-the-top fabulous as Lady Elaine. She has a royal title and she is constantly in feuds with her brother; she’s essentially a reality star. And like the most successful reality stars, Lady Elaine Fairchilde is the gay icon we need and want.

So, the why of the “nigger” is on that guy. I’m not part of it. And the why of the moment is of less concern to me. It’s like Baldwin says, “What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why.” If it hadn’t been him calling me a nigger for the first time, it would have been someone else someplace else. But in the middle will always be me. I am the one I seek to understand.

So, true to my nature as someone who literally cannot decide if he wants to be in or out (see also: closets, conference calls, the workforce, church choir, fashion), when it came to the colleges, I went to the all-students weekends at Brown and Princeton and the students-of-color weekends at Columbia and Cornell. At Cornell, my host—a student named Fredo—made me sleep under his bed and told me there was a race war on campus, so I shouldn’t talk to any white people. The marching band was really great, though, so all in all it was a fine experience. A little Malcolm X-y, a little Music Man-y. What more could you want? I know you’d like more information on this race war situation. Honey, so would I! Fredo was a light-skinned dude with skinny braids lining his scalp. He had no posters on his walls and literally the only thing he said to me was, “I have no room in here. This is a single. You have to sleep under the bed. There’s a race war going on. Don’t talk to any white people.” So I didn’t! I mean, would you? People would be coming up to me, asking me where I was from, offering to tell me about their majors and the clubs they were in, and I’d just shake my head like “You ain’t bamboozling me, whitey.”

This reminds of when I visited Wesleyan hahahaha

It wasn’t until I received an email from the Black Student Union at the beginning of my sophomore year that I was prompted to move my feet. As you’ll recall, I’d received a surprising email from the BSU at the start of my freshman year. This was a second email. These people were relentless. While the email I’d received my first year had been a simple invitation that I viewed with great suspicion, this second email was completely different. “Congratulations,” the missive from the faceless collective read, “you’re a Black Student Union student mentor this year!” Honestly, who were the black people running this club? Show yourselves! I looked at the email like “Harpo, who dis woman?”

I opened an email and began to compose an invitation to Quentin to meet, but I was immediately struck by the same question that had been plaguing me from the start: What sort of (presumably black) experience was I to offer this boy? How does one even start such a thing? “Glad tidings! I, a black, am to offer you guidance and wisdom for your journey, like the eccentric good witch Miss One in the movie The Wiz. You know The Wiz? It’s the all-black version of The Wizard of Oz, but don’t refer to it like that. It diminishes it. ‘Home’? Ever heard of it? At every grade school talent show ever, somewhere between ‘The Greatest Love of All’ and ‘Hero’? It’s a real delight.”

I asked him what the Black Student Union meetings were like. He gave an embarrassed smile and admitted he’d never been. “They just emailed me with an assignment,” he said. Who were these sociopaths?!

Kenya was also the first person I ever encountered who carried hot sauce in her purse. She was full-time black. Once, she was headed off to some fancy Columbia dinner with, I don’t know, Yo-Yo Ma and Maya Angelou, and she stopped in the doorway of her office to ensure that her little bottle of Frank’s was in her bag. I literally said aloud, “That is the blackest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.” I was awed. Kenya was definitely someone who wouldn’t even think of allowing hateration in a dancery.

Hateration in the dancery is a term others use besides Dan? Not a vibe! (But really actually a vibe)

I am currently bald. I say currently because I am holding out for medical science. Yes, I have heard of Rogaine; no, I haven’t tried it. I don’t want my hair back. I want to take a pill and get John Legend’s hair. I know you’re thinking, Have I been sleeping on John Legend’s hair? Is it extraordinary? No. It is fine. It’s very nice hair. It looks good all the time without being showy about it. I’m not asking for a crown of glory; I just want a nice, unremarkable full head of hair that does its job competently and attractively like the third lead on a crime procedural. Is that too much for modern science to give? Other people seem to notice my baldness more than me, which makes sense because I am incredibly humble and never look in a mirror. Also, I just kind of don’t care. But it’s still a surprise to me when little kids draw me as a round-faced bald man. Are little kids drawing me a lot? Why, yes, they are, thanks for asking. I’m a kindergarten art model. It’s a living. I look at these drawings and I see Gordon from Sesame Street or Steve Harvey but never myself. I suppose I don’t know what I look like, or maybe I’m just waiting to memorize my look after I get my John Legend treatment.

Baldness is a legitimate black hair choice, too. Why don’t I make Taye Diggs my hair idol and keep it moving? Do I look like Taye Diggs? No, but has the tyranny of facts ever stopped me before? Again, no. One year for Halloween, I went as Kanye West. Sort of. I wore sunglasses and a sports coat because I am the laziest Halloween dresser known to man. Did my bald ass look like Kanye West? No. Somebody asked me if I was Lex Luthor. This was hilarious to me because this person was obviously costume color-blind and very woke. But still, let’s not be ridiculous about this. You see my bald ass walking down the street on Halloween wearing a suit, you don’t think, Hey, that’s Lex Luthor! I can tell from the context clues. You also don’t think, Hey, that’s Kanye West. More likely, you think, That guy is dressed as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Or, most likely, Why is that bald man going to a job interview at 8 P.M. on Halloween night? And why does the suit have shorts?! The suit has shorts because I’m dressed up as Sexy Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Also known as Lex Luthor Vandross.

Regardless, this kind of talk absolutely did not stand with Neddra and Connie. They were fearless and all too willing to escalate their objections to incidents, whether it was through management or through verbal takedowns. They were my heroines. And during our time working together, I learned how to embrace a kind of fearlessness myself and saw the same lioness streak grow in Lisa, too. And so the community of a restaurant, the watchful eye of the veterans, the idea of a future, even the caustic relationship with the other side of the kitchen, it all rescued me.

I was also extremely worried because, as I mentioned, I’m not sold on the idea of meeting anyone I haven’t yet met, and I find myself at a loss during conversations in unfamiliar settings. I also hate small talk. What am I supposed to do with it? Small talk is always shouted. “Nice weather we’re having!” Okay, well, the ice caps are melting, so lower your voice, honey. Small talk is purposefully avoiding every interesting thing there is to say.

Before I could answer, another woman called out from across the room. “I couldn’t stop staring! Girl, he was flaming!” It was true, but sometimes things are just too real.

Physical activity had never been my bag. Gym class was abhorrent in my nascently gay youth. Sweating, competing, keeping score, knowing what a first down was, moving: they were all atrocities to me. You can imagine my horror when I became an adult, came out of the closet, and found out that one of the central tenets of homosexuality is that all gays have gym memberships. I protested to the governing board, of course, noting that I’d seen Death Becomes Her twenty times and I owned one of those blue HRC bumper stickers with the yellow equal sign even though I didn’t own a car. Unfortunately, rules are rules and so I had to either join a gym or turn straight. I can only assume that I was on some spin-class-related endorphin high when EJ said, “Join that softball team with me,” and I said, “Sure!” when I really meant to say, “That’s gay.”

Hahahaha - I have that sticker

The idea was intriguing to me but only in the way that television is intriguing to a cat. I was pretty sure I didn’t give a shit about it, but because it was so foreign and yet so close to me, it piqued my interest. Softball? Full of gays? Every Sunday all summer long? Surely you’re misinformed. On Sundays, gays go to brunch and then put together IKEA furniture. In the evening they watch Desperate Housewives and write checks to charity.

But after paying my dues and getting assigned to a team, it did occur to me that there might be some benefits to participating in this farce, that this inscrutable thing called sports might not be so bad. I was under the impression that there was a masculine energy that I had somehow missed because all my interests are fun and have award shows.

It felt safer—and to be honest, more comfortable—to perform a kind of camp and use gayness as a punchline like a problematic eighties comedian. Better to be thought a queen than to open your purse and remove all doubt, isn’t that how the saying goes? I never felt that I was particularly flaming—would that I were; I feel like I’d be more interesting! But I knew that I wasn’t overtly masculine either.

When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one. I don’t know that I’ll ever be finished. I don’t know that I’ll ever be fully there. But I’ve learned I can’t be the first person out there calling myself a faggot just to get it out of the way. That’s not how one stays safe and that’s not how one creates community. That energy doesn’t go out into the world lightly or without cost.

For years, I thought that the way to keep from getting burned was to set myself on fire first or to snuff out my light. I didn’t know that I was a phoenix, growing more powerful with every unsuccessful attempt at the drag of presentability, every hurled insult, every strike, and every split. The flame is not my liability but my strength. It was inside me all along. (That’s what he said.)

At this point in my life, I wasn’t so much a hero struggling as a man immobile, trapped between who I was and who I wanted to be, between mistakes and goals, between life and death. And so I played and replayed the album, and went to work, and nothing changed. Nothing changed. Nothing changed. Until a car in Baltimore showed up out of the darkness and I felt my fingers graze fate’s throat.

We’d had a really stunning meet-cute. He worked in a supermarket and I was in a season where I was eating all of my feelings, so I saw him multiple times a week. I had saved up for months to buy myself a stand mixer, and I was putting it to use on the regular: cakes, brownies, biscuits. I had a lot of feelings. Plus, a stand mixer had been my dream for so long, I didn’t want to waste a second of our time together. There’s little that I love as much as a kitchen appliance. For years, I’d dreamed of a melon-colored stand mixer and a Vitamix, the superpowered blender that can make everything from yogurt to soup. After some arduous months of saving and working overtime, I had one of the two and I was living half of my best, Great British Bake Off life.

I never spoke to him, because I have no game whatsoever and I was really focused on buying a bunch of ingredients for a complicated cake that wouldn’t taste as good as one from a box.

God ain’t it the truth

Plus, I was a storyteller and not everything is funny, despite my best efforts. But a friend had convinced me that I needed to be bolder if I was going to make something of myself. “If you wanna be somebody,” my friend told me, “if you wanna go somewhere, you better wake up and pay attention!” (My friend is Sister Mary Clarence from Sister Act II.)

Hahahaha

The next day I walked into the market, pranced up to the deli counter, and told him, “I saved your life last night.” “You did?” he replied. I decided not to entertain his befuddlement. “So I think it’s only appropriate that you give me your number,” I said. The boldness! In the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Who did I think I was? She’s America’s Masc Straight Businessmince Icon, that’s who!

It should be said, I am very averse to horror movies. Horror movies are at the top of a very long list of things that I grew up believing were the devil. At various points in my life, that list also included fortune-telling, psychics, the lottery, episodes of DuckTales with the witch duck Magica De Spell, rock music, Santa Claus, particularly creepy laughs…I could go on.

Our home. In the middle of the floor, I saw something new: two pieces of carpet scraps we’d found left over from the previous tenant, arranged into a heart. And on top of that heart, a Vitamix. I let loose an audible gasp. Jay had secretly saved and worked overtime for months to buy it for me. He may have misread me as straight prior to our relationship, but over the course of our years together, he consistently saw me for who I was and showed his love for that person through small kindnesses and large gestures alike. I knelt on the kitchen floor of the apartment we’d soon share and marveled at the person I’d stumbled upon.

Here are the stages of winter. Please print this out and warn your loved ones. 1. Ooh! Scarves and cardigans! Cuddle weather! 2. Yes! Kids in Halloween costumes! Cuteness overload! 3. Aw, changing leaves! Smells of cider! Let’s go hiking like Caucasians! 4. Really, Christmas carols this early? Where do I store my gloves? Why don’t I have a better system of organization in my own damn house? Do I own gloves? What is my life even? 5. GIVE ME ALL THE TURKEY! Give it to me! GIVE IT TO MEEEEE! 6. Christmas carols! Yay! Am I enjoying this? I am! I am enjoying this. 7. Christmas carols? Still? Oh, look, Love, Actually is on. All right, enough with the Christmas carols! You know, Love, Actually is kind of sad. Laura Linney can’t have sex with the hottest man on the planet and actually, now that I think about it, every single person in this movie is a different, new kind of asshole, and it’s infuriating. 8. Oh. Now it’s just cold and dark. Forever.

There is not a moment of my day when I am not irate about Love, Actually. It’s the most nihilist romcom ever made. Every single person is making terrible choices except Emma Thompson, and she’s so rightfully sad. That movie makes me so angry, and yet every time I watch it (once a week from October through May), I’m like, “This is so me. This is so true.” It’s because of winter! It gets in your mind. It short-circuits you! It makes you think that Colin Firth isn’t just creating a hostile work environment because he’s lonely. I get it. But we have to tell the truth.

One night, on the ride home from church, I asked my father, “Why does God give us free will if He’s just going to punish us for doing bad things?” My father answered that free will gave us the opportunity to make choices and, in so doing, to show our devotion. “Yeah, but why?” I responded. My father patiently reiterated his point. He quoted Scripture. He gave his theories. I responded, “Okay, I see what you’re saying but also why?” This went on for quite a while.

The meetings were meant to confront sin, to call it out, and to provide a venue for the girls to ask for forgiveness from the community. As far as agendas go, it wasn’t the most boring I’d ever encountered, but it was troubling nonetheless. I saw what they were trying to do, yet I couldn’t help but ask, over and over again, “But why?”

The pastor pointed to me. “I don’t understand what we’re talking about,” I said. “I don’t understand why we have to know anything about anyone. It’s not like they’re going to bleed into our macaroni and cheese at church dinners,” I said. After church, the pastor pulled me aside. “You have to understand that people need time to come around to some ideas, son.” I nodded. I said nothing. I was not his son. My father was the man who puzzled through questions with me for hours, whose house had open doors and open arms inside, and who welcomed the doubt that is necessary for true belief.

I call my senator, a lot. Just to chat. I write letters and commentary to stake a claim for the things I believe in. I vote. I march. I tap-dance for justice. And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

“Hear me out,” she says, waving her hands in the face of my disgust. You think you know some people. She continues: “I’ve been trying to figure out ways I can go back and warn Hillary.” Okay, I am on board the train now. I’ll bring my smelling salts. Kristen says, “I keep thinking if I go back to the beginning of the campaign and I say, ‘You need to just release all of your emails right now,’ it’ll be fine. But then I think I should go back further, so I go back to when she’s secretary of state and tell her, ‘Oh, girl, a private server, no.’ But then I remember, LOL, misogyny is the reason we’re here, so I need to go back to whenever that didn’t exist and I keep going back further and further until I’m all the way back before the Big Bang, and when I get there I whisper to the cloud of dust, ‘It’s not worth it.’ And then I fade away like I’m Marty McFly’s siblings.”

Listen. Here’s my living will, okay? I have no desire to survive the apocalypse. The minute the cable goes out, I’m gone. If I can’t watch rebooted versions of television shows I used to love, what even is the point? What even?! I do not understand the people in disaster movies who want to survive so that they can rebuild society. That sounds terrible. So boring, and yet so much work. Haven’t these people ever worked at a small nonprofit? It’s that. But with, like, zombies. No thanks.

I am mouthy, and I get easily annoyed, and I don’t know how to shoot a bow and arrow, so dystopias are a solid no from me. I’m basically Peeta from The Hunger Games, except gay. I am here for the baked goods and then basically I’m going to be dead weight. Cut your losses.

David is always far too willing to follow me on flights of fancy and actually considered having someone sing the national anthem at our wedding. Bless his heart. Can you imagine, “The Star-Spangled Banner” at an interracial gay wedding in the heart of a Sanctuary City with attendees ranging from a World War II vet to the mayor’s black LGBTQ liaison to Martin, my cousin who did multiple tours of Afghanistan, to our nephew Michael, a mixed-race boy, then three years old, growing up in South Carolina? Child, that place would have looked like a game of whack-a-mole, with some people standing up and some people taking a knee and some people looking around like “Honey, what is happening in

At one point in the ceremony, as is common in the Presbyterian tradition, Ken asked the congregation to stand as he read vows that our community was making to us. “Do all of you pledge your support and encouragement to the covenant commitment that Eric and David are making together? If so, please say, ‘We do.’ ” “We do,” they all replied as one. Michael’s tiny voice followed a second later: “We do!” he cried. And if ever there was a time to play the national anthem, it’s then. It’s in this place where something new is being built, where people are united in one goal, with one voice, where the future is hard to make out but, yes, it’s there. We’re there. Better and more complicated. That’s the only country I can survive in. I don’t live in that country, but every day by existing, by speaking, by loving, by writing, I make a vow to get there, step-by-step. To knit together the pieces inside that don’t coalesce; to find a community that is generative, or, short of that, to make one; to see the future. This is why I treasure Whitney’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” It does the miraculous in that it finds something beneath the words that is true and halcyon and greater than the failings of the nation it represents.

The horns and guitar start to vamp. Ashli launches into “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” with wild abandon. And this is church. For this song is about keeping alive the hope that you will find someone with whom you can express your joy. And isn’t that worship? Isn’t that a declaration? Isn’t it?

catch sight of our nephew Michael and a crush of other children—those of our friends and David’s congregants—darting through the crowd with glow necklaces on every appendage. I realize that this night in this church is the world that they will know, this is the world they will see as normal, this is the world they will inherit. A world made by people of all colors and sexualities and ages and faiths and gender expressions who have traveled many roads toward hope. And though we crowd the dance floor in the space that has been made specifically for us, our presence seems to create even more space, for those like us, for those yet to be. All heaven has broken out. And this is why, I think to myself as past and present and future collapse on themselves. Hope. This is the liberation that waits for us through the smoke. And isn’t that holy? Isn’t that love? Isn’t that worth living for?