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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Attraction

How Did I Know I Was Heterosexual?

09 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Asexuality, Attraction, Bible, Chastity, Colorism, Evangelical Christianity, Heterosexism, Hypermasculinity, Misogynoir, Misogyny, Self-Realization, Self-Reflection, Sexual Orientation, Sexuality, Teenage Angst


Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” 45 single sleeve, circa 1986. (https://medium.com)

This is more than just whether I knew I liked teenage girls and women by the time I was my son’s current age of fifteen, though. Between humping older women’s legs when I was three or four years old (too much information, I suppose), me and Diana slobbering on each other in first grade, and my crush on Ms. Shannon in third grade, that would be enough for most kids to know their orientation. But because I wasn’t “hard” like the boys I lived around at 616 and 630 East Lincoln and the young Turks who lived in public housing on Pearsall Drive, I was often the neighborhood “pussy” or “faggot.” I was mugged four times between April 1979 and the end of 1983. I spent more than one weekend dodging a hail of pebbles and rocks that the neighborhood kids pelted me with. That, and the then buried sexual assault I endured when I was six left me questioning my own sexuality, and with that, my place in the world in terms of friendships and relationships.

The whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, and the additional layers of abuse, hypermasculinity, and misogyny that came with it didn’t help my evolution one bit. One would think that a months-long crush on — really, love for — Wendy in the spring of 1982 would once and for all settle this issue. It didn’t. It didn’t because even I recognized that my love for Wendy was for the version of her who took up space in my imagination. She had become ethereal, and was detached from the flesh-and-blood human being with whom I shared little more than the confines of the classroom in the years between 1981 and 1987. I found her attractive, but had already judged myself unworthy.

Puberty, rebellion, and my switch to Christianity in 1984, and the contradictions that came with this switch over the next year, would tell me more about who I was. This was the beginning of my years of relative asexuality, at least as I presented myself in public. Since I dedicated my life to Jesus, every potential carnal thought I had or action I could take was met with self-doubt and loathing. Mostly, though, I feared for my newborn soul. I feared that somehow, I would go back to being suicidal, Hebrew-Israelite-and-going-to-Hell Donald, the one that got clowned and stoned before reaching six-foot-one.

One of my many attempts at being chaste between September 1984 and May 1985 involved toting my Bible everywhere and breaking it out to read during every idle moment. At school, which got me in trouble with my 10th grade history teacher, Ms. Zini. At home, when I wasn’t distracted by music, my younger siblings, or our fucked up living arrangement with one Balkis Makeda. As sanctimonious as it was, I was really trying to learn, to receive revelation, to understand how this 66-book, 1300-page document could transform me and my mini-apocalyptic world.

I also rode the buses and subways around the city with my red-covered Bible in hand. On many Fridays and Saturdays, whether working for my dad or hunting him down for money, or just because I needed to get away, I’d take the 2 from East 241st in the Bronx to 72nd in Manhattan, or further down, to Times Square, or sometimes, all the way out to Flatbush in Brooklyn.

No matter where I or we (when my older brother Darren would tag along) went, the most interesting part of these outings usually were the people who would be in the cars with me/us. Drunkards who reminded me of Jimme. Older Jamaican women on their way to do domestic work. Middle-aged, haggard-looking White guys who dressed twenty years too young for their faces.

Screenshot from “I Wonder If I Take You Home” video, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam (1984/85). (https://imgue.com).

Frequently, Nuyorican or Dominican girls and young women would board somewhere between 180th and East Tremont and 149th and Grand Concourse (though because of the ethnic tensions I didn’t understand at the time, certainly not at the same time). I would look up from reading II Chronicles or Esther or Ephesians, and before I could comprehend the people my eyes took in, my dick responded. At 15, I already knew that even a mildly warm breeze was enough for me to get a hard on. I didn’t know that four or six young Latinas on a train wearing bright, tight clothes, makeup, lipstick, and perfume, and heels that would accentuate their breasts, hips, and round butts would completely counter my asexual front. Luckily for me, the Bible-toting phase of my life was during wintertime, and I could cover up my woody with my jacket.

Of course, it felt sinful, and I felt ashamed, that a second and a half of staring up from my Bible would lead to carnal stirrings. But it also gave me a sense of who I was and wasn’t attracted to, really and truly. When White girls with their voluminous ’80s hair got on the train, I hardly noticed. They were trying too hard, and their flat butts did nothing for me. When single Black women in their twenties and thirties would board, I noticed, too. I didn’t have what I would learn later to be colorism issues.

Of course, I learned that I was heterosexual, which I knew would please my Mom to no end. Which actually pissed me off. So, if I had discovered I was gay, she wouldn’t accept me? Wow!, I thought one April Saturday on way back to East 241st. At that point, my evangelical zeal for setting myself apart from the rest of world with my Bible as a baseball bat had waned. I was nowhere near ready to be involved in any kind of relationship that would lead to sex. But, I was ready to drop the idea that my eternal life completely depended on me ignoring both women and my attraction to women. I would remain publicly asexual for a few more years and endure f-bombs from my dad. Truly, it took until I was twenty to understand that whatever my orientation, no one has the right to tell me that my sexuality was anathema to my Christianity.

A Dream That Had to Die

23 Monday Jul 2007

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Attraction, Blackness, Crush #2, Depression, Fear, Galleria, Manhood, Obsession, Relationships, White Plains New York


I’m approaching another Boy At The Window related milestone this week, a not-so-fun twenty years since experiencing an obsession-driven heartbreak. This involved another crush, another young woman out of my league, one which left me scarred for a little more than a year.

She was one of those mid- to late-80s cool Black girls, attractive and popular, yet one of the nicest people I’d known during my middle school and high school days. The things I remember about her most are kind of silly and sensuous. I remember her long legs, her long dark hair, her always wearing skirts in public. I remember her lips and bright white smile most of all. She was all of 5’7″, and seemed to be always there to pick up my spirits. I guess that was why I ended up wanting to date her by the middle of my junior year.

But images of the mind, no matter how powerful and complex, can only begin to capture the reality of the person who could be the object of your affection. So it was with shy and pitiful me our senior year and the summer before college. I tried but I could never figure out a way to ask her out, to tell her that I liked her, to tell her that I was terrified of my own emotions about her and about her learning about my family. After a few weeks of stifled attempts at conversation, I accidentally ended up overhearing a bitter conversation about me between my crush and her sister outside of a mall in White Plains. I wasn’t a man, I certainly wasn’t a Black man, so she kept saying to her sister.

I was devastated. I didn’t have the greatest opinion of myself to begin with. I went into my freshman year of college at the University of Pittsburgh more protective of my heart than I’d ever been. Still, with the help of a female friend that I’d made during the summer, I decided to confront my obsession, leading to a letter that brought me more despair and heartache. She had all but destroyed my image of her as someone who could save me from the horrors of my world, someone who I could pour all of my confidence and aspirations into.

I finished that semester with a C+ average, homesick and not sure about people or my future. I completely distrusted anything any woman had to say about me that semester. Most of all, I distrusted myself. How could I allow this “triflin’ ass” — as one of my friends described her — affect my grades, my life like she had? I took all of that anger and focused it on my classes, and pulled my over GPA back up to a B in the process.

You could say that I learned my lesson. But that would be a lie. I had to go through a summer of unemployment and a week of homelessness my sophomore year at Pitt before I learned one of life’s most important lessons. Trust is a decision that we all have to make, even if it does mean heartbreak, because trust — especially in yourself — allows you to see people as they are and as you would hope they could be. Trust means taking risks with your heart, means being honest with yourself about why you may be terrified to date or for someone to know about your dark past. Trust means that people, even people you may know fairly well, may betray you in some way, but trusting anyway, because it’s the only way to live a great life.

I also learned that much of what I thought I saw in my second crush reminded me a lot of my mother. Especially around definitions of manhood and being a Black male. We were supposed to be bold, even arrogant. We were expected to make the first move, in dating or otherwise. We were supposed to break away from our families but be there for them at the same time, to succeed in the world but never forget where we came from. I realized that my mother and my obsession were both wrong, that they didn’t know me, and had no right to lay their expectations on me. I figured out, for the first time in my life, that having a mind as powerful as mine brought with it the responsibility to tame it, especially when it came to figuring out men and women. I needed to trust my instincts, that a bright smile and wonderful lips didn’t equal a sense of seriousness or integrity or actual kindness. I could still dream of a kiss. I just needed to make sure that the rest of the person in that dream was worth kissing.

Still, I have to thank her, my second infatuation. I wouldn’t have known what not to look for in women or in friends without this experience. I learned as much about what attracted me to my first crush as I did about what kept me from going after my second one. The women I’ve dated and the woman I married all benefitted from my period of mindful obsession. My college education, formal and informal, became that much sweeter once I let go and allowed myself the opportunities that only trust in myself could bring.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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