Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir

by Brian Broome

Nothing spells “faggot” like being in a spelling bee.

Black boys don’t get a long boyhood. It ends where white fear begins, brought on by deepening voices, broadening backs, and coarsening hair in new places beneath our clothing.

Between its teachings at home and social life at school, I learned that the whiter you acted, the better liked you were. So I changed the way that I spoke to mimic the characters on television. I concealed every part of myself that I deemed to be too “Black.”

Because my life up until then had shown me that white wasn’t just a race, it was a goal.

White children became indignant when their television parents did not raise these allowances or withheld them as punishment for some adorable mistake they’d made.

Homosexuality, as it so often does, attacked me in my bed in the middle of the night. I resisted with every fiber of my being until I could resist no longer.

When I was a kid, I thought that the key to being a Black man was to learn how to properly lean on things to look cool. What I didn’t know at the time is that what Black men lean on the most, whether we want to admit it or not, is Black women. People

Growing up, it didn’t take me long to learn that my gayness detracted from my Blackness. Black, gay men are punch lines to the Black community. An anomaly to be ridiculed. Relegated to the role of church choir directors. We are a nationwide family secret, courtesy of masculinity and religion.

What do you do when your own people don’t want you? How do you become anything?

I don’t want that for Tuan. I don’t want him to have to rely on empty platitudes like “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” That’s what I used to say to people who said I was too black. I never really meant it, but it was the only thing I could grasp at. The only thing that made me feel any semblance of pride.

We learn that white boys are people and Asian boys are exotic and Hispanic boys are luxurious and Black boys are for sex. I have learned this the hard way each time I’m told to leave after not fulfilling a white man’s fantasy. I have learned this from the white men who invite me over only when their white boyfriends are out of town. From the white men who have expected me to be more “athletic.” I have learned this from every creepy-faced white man who has ever thought they were giving me a compliment by allowing the oiliest, most lascivious racism to slide from their lips.

I wonder who taught me that white men were so beautiful and that I am so ugly.

Maybe it’s the cold, but I am wondering what it would feel like to be as enchanted with my brownness as I am with Phil’s whiteness. What if I believed brown boys to be just as worthy as white ones?

And it occurs to me for the first time that maybe I have somehow learned that Black men aren’t valuable. Aren’t worthy of love. Including myself.

I used to believe, with the help of drinking and drugs, that I was a people person. Now, absent those crutches, I find people laid bare for what they really are. They are desperate for something, anything to cling to. I find that I am better off on my own, where there is no one to disappoint me but me. I want no more of the pain that people cause.

I have laid my problems at the feet of too many Black women. I have asked them to do too much of my emotional heavy lifting.

I had plans that were sprouts that never had a chance to grow.

the old, pitiful men sat; sallow-skinned, rooted to barstools all in a row like onions, heads hung low, looking deeply into their drinks, as if their glasses were wells in which they’d accidentally dropped their hope.

My mother once told me that, when she was a child in the Jim Crow south, a Black parent showing affection toward their children was a sure-fire way to let white people know what your weakness was.

They are afraid, and fear often trumps judgment. It isn’t as if they don’t have reasons in America to be afraid for their Black children. We Die Soon

The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. —JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time

So many white people in America are “afraid for their lives” all the time. Far too many of them seem to prefer being “white” to being human.