The Black Flamingo

by Dean Atta

I don’t tell Emily that when no one else can see, behind the big tree, I kiss Callum and Jamal and Toby.

Anna gets Phoebe, my old Barbie doll, and my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Anna gets my overalls and all my other old clothes, too. I notice when Anna plays with my Turtles, no one asks her why. I notice when Anna wears my overalls, no one comments. I’m glad she is free to play and dress however she feels happy.

No one at my school knows that it’s my birthday today. In the toilets at lunch, I eat the whole batch of Skittles cookies mum made for me to share with my friends. Mum doesn’t know I don’t have any friends. I know if I keep my head down then I can look forward to stargazing, peacefully, with Uncle B this evening.

Uncle B says, “Pegasus, the horse with wings in Greek mythology, was born after the beheading of Medusa, when a drop of her blood fell to Earth.”

Flamingos fighting can look just like kissing, pecking beak-to-beak. Freeze frame and you may see a love heart in the shape of their two necks arching out and together again.

Laughter and chatter rattle around the rest of the bus but I feel a strange

sort of safety in this silence with Daisy.

“That’s okay. Anyway, are you gay?” “Yes,” I say. Finally, we’re gonna talk about it. “Cool,” she says, and goes back to her book.

How Christian is Kieran? When God made Kieran, did He make him for me? I imagine us in Eden— two black boys in Paradise, naked, no fig leaves. Adam and Eve are long gone, so Kieran and Michael inherit the garden and the serpent is forgotten and the fruit on the tree

Broken / Home Because the turtle carries its home on its back, it does not have to search for one. It is born with a soft shell that hardens as it grows. The turtle’s backbone is part of its shell, meaning an accident or attack could break the turtle’s back, leaving the turtle with a broken home it cannot escape from.

“Leventis,” I repeat, once again. Handsome man, beautiful boy or brave. But am I any of these things?

I don’t feel handsome, I don’t feel beautiful, and I don’t feel brave.

An expert on screen explaining it is the opposite of an albino. “Too much melanin,” he says. Camera pans the salt lake full of pink but my eye is drawn to that one black body in the flamboyance.

In my dream that night, Kieran and I are on TV together; we are a pair of black flamingos. The camera zooms out and we’re just two of many black flamingos standing in the salt lake.

I recognize the longing for a man, a father, a lover.

just so intimate, it almost feels like I’m really falling for you.” I could have broken that line in so many ways. Take what I want from it. I could have latched on to “feels like I’m really falling for you” or “I’m really falling for you.” But “almost” makes it all untrue.

“Neither,” I say. “I’m just a man and I want to wear a dress and makeup onstage. I want to know how it feels to publicly express a side of me I’ve only felt privately when playing with my Barbie as a boy.

“Before I came here I didn’t want to wear a dress, I didn’t want to be that stereotype. I know that’s wrong, my thinking was wrong; the different ones are often the most strong. I know trans and gender-nonconforming people started our movements, won our freedoms. I’m a man and I want to be a free one. I’m a man and I want to put a dress on.”

I come from being given permission to dream but choosing to wake up instead. I come from wherever I lay my head. I come from unanswered questions and unread books, unnoticed effort and undelivered apologies and thanks. I come from who I trust and who I have left.

Men are sandcastles made out of pebbles and the bucket is patriarchy: if you remove it, we fear we won’t be able to hold ourselves together, we pour in cement to fill the gaps to make ourselves concrete constructions.

We are all—black and white alike —shown a beauty standard of light skin and ‘good hair,’ maybe big lips, maybe a big bum, but hardly ever on someone with darker skin.

To have a loving family is to feel afraid and yet believe you are going to be all right.

You’re not trying to be that person, you’re using their words to say something new.

but when I am naked and plainly spoken I don’t feel so worthy of attention.

It’s giving up worrying about being universal and being you. It’s doing what feels true. It’s knowing that doing drag and being trans are not the same.

‘Where is love?’ Wear his love. Despair is love for what isn’t here anymore, or never was.

Be a beautiful thing. Be the moonlight, too.