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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Bible

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.

Randomness & Faith

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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Agnostic, Atheism, Atheist, Belief, Bible, Buddhism, Evolution, Faith, Forgiveness, God, Grace, Love, Mathematics, Mystery, Physics, Randomness, Reason, Religion, Science, Scientific Method, The Universe, Youth


Randomness equation, Schrage random number generator, December 27, 2012. (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov).

Randomness equation, Schrage random number generator, December 27, 2012. (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov).

Today’s my forty-third birthday (at least, as of 8:37 am EST). It means that I’ve been a spiritual believer of one sort or another for nearly thirty years. With so much that has happened in my life, there are many who wonder why I believe in God, or why I’m a Christian in particular. With my expertise as a historian, my background in math and science (and continuing study of such), there have been many who’ve mocked and questioned my faith in anything other than the randomness of the universe. With the world in seemingly endless turmoil, good people maimed and killed, and evil people able to get away with maiming and killing others, there are those who greet any profession of belief in a higher power with anger and bitterness.

To me, that’s too bad. I can see all sides of this argument. I’ve been a Christian for more than twenty-eight years, and before that, an unwilling, if outwardly obvious, Hebrew-Israelite. In that time, I’ve also been an atheist, agnostic and angry, a bit of a Buddhist and a Muslim to boot. I’ve gone years without prayed and prayed at least once every day for nearly twenty years. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover at least six times in three decades, but also the Torah and the Qur’an. I’ve gone to temple, to Roman Catholic mass, to church, sometimes every week for years, sometimes not at all for years. I’ve had crises of faith and been almost unquestioning in faith over the years.

An actual double-slit experiment (electrons or photons behaving as particles and waves, in two places at same time), December 27, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour)

An actual double-slit experiment (electrons or photons behaving as particles and waves, in two places at same time), December 27, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour)

I’m also a believer in science and the scientific method. I realize that even with all of the advances in biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics, that there is much more we don’t know versus all that we’ve learned in the past two centuries. But that doesn’t mean that I believe that the universe — that life itself — is some random event or a long-chain series of random events. I’m with evolution on everything except the random. I don’t think that the universe can be seen as random. Even as chaotic as our lives may seem, the choices that we make do provide order. It’s never been sheer dumb luck that has determined everything that has occurred in my life, as other people have made their own choices that can easily affect the range of choices in my own life.

Most of all, while I do believe that there are reasons behind the events that occur in our lives and in world, that these reason are neither random nor something that God somehow came down from on high to make possible. Whether it’s Hurricane Sandy or Sandy Hook Elementary School, the civil war in Syria or a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, somehow so many have it that either God’s angry with us or that God allows horrible things to happen to us. Or that there is no God, because a real God would prevent these seemingly random events from occurring at all.

All this proves one thing, and one thing only. That most of us have little understanding of faith, of God, or of the universe itself. Period. Even those of us who are experts in particle physics or theoretical mathematics don’t know enough to dismiss God or to prove their educated guess (otherwise known as belief) in the randomness of the universe. Most of us who do believe in God — at least, those of us who are Christian — treat God as if he were Zeus casting down lightning bolts to keep us in line.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble and bronze (restored), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble/ bronze, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I see God in the universe, in the creation and re-creation of life, and yes, even in the various tragic and apparently chaotic events that have occurred in my life and in this world. That I don’t think these events to be random doesn’t make me any less of a thinker. I just don’t accept the blind faith of scientists in the idea that maybe cosmic rays led to the mutations in the primordial soup of our ancient oceans that led to the spark of life and evolution. I also don’t believe that God is simply presiding over every event on our planet and in the universe, making life-and-death decisions that bring pain and anguish to our lives for enjoyment or as a form of punishment.

Rather, God for me has been about living life by principles like social justice, social and spiritual mobility, love, forgiveness, grace and wisdom. Explaining what may or may not be random, each and every conceivable mystery of the universe or of life? I know that this isn’t in the Bible. But I do know that the reasons behind why bad, ugly, even evil things have happened in my life don’t include the “random nature of the universe.” People made decisions, I’ve made decisions, institutions made decisions, that have had an impact on the course, speed and direction of my life over the last forty-three years.

So, even when I’ve found myself angry with God, I’ve also been cognizant of the role all and each of us play in the heaven and hell that tends to be our lives, separate and together, in this world of ours.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

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