Tag Archives: Heterosexism

Leaving Mom and Dad Behind

13 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Woodstock Leaving Home (cropped), June 13, 2019. (http://pinterest.com).

There are so many ways to write about the idea that if one is to be a grown-ass adult in this world, it requires, actually requires leaving your mother and/or father and/or any other parents and legal guardians behind. At least, dropping their worldview, their ideologies and disciplines, their ideas about life and relationships, their marital and parenting advice, the loads of abuse, baggage, and bullshit that one learned from spending so much time with them.

Yes, we should all be grateful about whatever good our parents did on our behalf to get us to adulthood and beyond. But that gratefulness should not mean a lifetime’s supply of unquestioning everything that any of us learned from those who raised us. Otherwise, any of us are but carbon copies of imperfect beings at best, total fuckups at world. Yet, somehow, so many of us present our parents to the world as if they are marble statues set on top of alabaster pedestals.

For me, it’s taken 30 years to unlearn much of the lessons and baggage I took on under my parents and legal guardian’s tutelage. My Mom “didn’t take no handouts from no one” and saw labor unions as “them bloodsuckers.” My father Jimme asked about “gettin’ [my] dict wet” from the time I was 14 until I turned 18, and called me a “faggat” everything I told him I didn’t. My idiot late ex-stepfather Maurice/Judah ben Israel talked about “making…men” out of me and Darren. He implored us to “honor thy father and thy mother, that ye may take possession of the land that the Lord thy God hath giveth thee.” Otherwise, he was “gonna whup” our “ass, jus’ like a car burn gas!” So many lessons about manliness, Black hyper-masculinity, heterosexism, homophobia, misogyny and misogynoir, about religion and child abuse, about working and self-reliance. But so many more lessons around willful ignorance as well.

By the time I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, I figured the simplest thing I could do to break free from the thinking of Mary, Maurice, and Jimme was to “just do the opposite of whatever they would do.” That’s what I would say to myself or think about whenever I had a tough-ish decision to make.

But life was never that simple. Those five days of homelessness I had at the beginning of my second year at Pitt in 1988 proved that I needed to scramble and act, and not just think differently from my parents. The most immediate lesson I learned was about needing help and learning how to ask for it. The bigger and most important lesson that took decades for me to learn was how to embrace asking for help, to not be begrudging about the process, and to be gracious when folks who could and should be helpful are not. I am still learning how to be better at embracing help and being graciousness, because, well, people are involved.

Not so with begrudging, though. We are not all on our own deserted island, each expecting to have to do everything on our own. That’s what capitalists steeped in Western individualism and my Mom would expect me to believe. We all need help, for nearly everything we want to do in life. There’s no shame in it, and there’s nothing but success, humility, being grateful and feeling recognized and loved as a result of this help.

This week is underrated in its significance to my past three decades of living this truth. This is the week my Mom and Maurice broke up for good back in 1989. The date of this year’s Father’s Day (it was a Friday in 1989) will be 30 years since the idiot feverishly packed his bags, stole some towels and frozen meats, and moved out of 616. I saw him as he packed up the last of his gear in a suitcase and an army bag. He looked scared, and looked at me with fear and shame. It was probably the only time in the nearly eleven years we lived in the same space (not counting my two years at Pitt and his separations from my Mom) where he showed how lost a person he was. Between that, and my Mom’s post-marriage spin a few months later about how Maurice had “fooled us all,” and I knew. I absolutely knew, spirit, mind, and body, that I needed to craft my own worldview, my own ideas, my own way to deal with ideology, discipline, parenting, marriage, and so many things much more complicated than putting the right amount of seasoning on my fried chicken.

Over the years, this ultimate lesson of leaving behind most of my Mom’s, Jimme’s, and Maurice ways of thinking, doing, and being in the world has made its way into my teaching and writing. It’s why I uphold no sacred cows, and can literally interrogate and question even the most cherished ideas and people in my classrooms and in my pieces. (And yes, in prayer, in between my hallelujahs and my amens, I even question God.) Which may be also why more than a few of my students might cling harder to the lessons of their parents.

A few years ago, I had a young student in one of my UMUC classes who pushed back on a lecture I gave on de-centering Western Europe from the early modern period in world history while taking a closer look at India, China, and the Ottoman Empire.

“That’s not what my parents taught me,” she said.

“Well, maybe it’s time to realize that not everything your parents taught you is true. It’s been three decades, and I’m still learning to unlearn all the things my parents taught me,” I retorted. Most of my over-24-year-old students nodded in agreement, but the not-quite 20-year-old wasn’t receptive. It showed in her evaluation of me at the end of the course.

My soon-to-be 16-year-old son, thankfully, is learning this lesson now. Although that means he will make tons of mistakes and constantly frustrates my efforts at helping him, it also means he can reach out to me and my spouse when he needs help. Being independent requires acknowledging one’s limits and one’s need for help, community, and interdependence. Learning from whom, at what time, for how much, and how deep one can go in all this is a lifelong journey. But none of it can begin without questioning one’s parent or parents, without cutting bait from their baggage and bullshit. Even if it means that we sometimes screw up in the process.

How Did I Know I Was Heterosexual?

09 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by 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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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 Big Wheel and Recovered Memories, Part Two

06 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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It took me until three weeks after the sex assault on the Nathan Hale ES playground before I told my parents. Those three weeks are a blur, but not the blur that the incident with the light-skinned teenager and his three friends would become until three weeks before my forty-fifth birthday

At the beginning of August ’76, my Mom and my dad Jimme were having another one of their vicious arguments. It was that Saturday afternoon when I finally learned that my Mom had filed for a divorce the month before. Anyway, I somehow managed to get myself in the middle of that argument. I complained that Darren’s bigger butt had been the final straw for my Big Wheel. It had broken in half after he tried to ride it earlier that week.

“I told him, it says ‘90-lb limit’,”  I said to my Mom (which I pronounced as “ninety lebs”) while pointing at the inscribed warning label on my now broken Big Wheel, crying.

“You broke that shit weeks ago!,” my Mom yelled.

“I didn’t break it. A bunch of kids did,” I said.

“And you didn’t try to stop ‘em?,” Mom asked.

“I did try to stop ‘em. But they took it and one of them stuck a pee-pee in my mouth,” I explained.

“I done told you not to leave the house when I’m not here! That’s what you get for not listenin’!,” my Mom screamed.

I was so shocked by how angry she was. I was mad, too. I didn’t think. I just ran out the house and out into the middle of the street. I saw a tan Chevy Malibu coming down the street and I just stood there.

1973 tan-ish Chevy Malibu, August 5, 2016. (http://www.autoblog.com).

1973 tan-ish Chevy Malibu, August 5, 2016. (http://www.autoblog.com).

The older, salt-and-pepper bearded and balding Black man didn’t slow down until he realized I wasn’t planning to move. He slammed on the brakes and came to a stop about three feet in front of me. The man put his car in park and got out. He then slammed his driver’s side door really hard, and yelled, “Boy, what’s wrong with you? Are you tryin’ to get yourself killed? Where’s your mama?”

He grabbed me by the back of my chocolate-brown t-shirt and made me show him where I lived. We marched upstairs to the second-floor, where he proceeded to explain my suicidal actions. My Mom then took the older man’s belt and beat me with it in front of him, with Darren and Jimme watching. Afterwards, she said “Thank you” to the older man, and then sent me to bed without dinner. “Don’t you EVER do that again!,” she screamed.

Nine months after that bicentennial summer, we moved across town to 616 East Lincoln, a three-in-one, five-story Tudor-style apartment complex. After a summer camp at Darren’s Clear View School in Dobbs Ferry, we went outside on 616’s grounds for the first time, in August ’77. The kids at 616 and 630 East Lincoln chased us around the vast two-building complex while throwing rocks at us. Scared, we hid behind the big, wooden, dark-brown front door and huddled, hoping that the kids wouldn’t find us.

Instead, a couple of young Black Turks saw us and took us upstairs to my Mom and my eventual stepfather Maurice. The two young men said that they saw us doing “the dukey.” I had no idea what they were talking about. All I knew was that my Mom and stepfather proceeded to whip us as if we’d gone to the grocery store and stolen $100 worth of candy and soda. Both “dukey” and “faggot” were part of my vocabulary — again.

The mind of a child is a strange place. Mine was no different. For years afterward, I’d managed to forget these most painful memories. I managed to bury them without burying all of my other memories, so many memories that I have for the last forty-one out of my forty-five years. I somehow didn’t remember the connections between my Big Wheel, the light-skinned teenager and standing in the middle of South Sixth, waiting to be run over. I didn’t remember my Mom’s response to finding out that her six-year-old son had been sexually assaulted.

It’s ironic. Ironic because I’ve already written my coming-of-age memoir in Boy @ The Window. I spent the better part of a decade researching, writing and revising it before self-publishing it in 2013. I included excruciating details about my family, my Mom, my father Jimme. I included as many relevant and embarrassing events as I could about how I became the person I always wanted to be. And with all that work, I never remembered the moment a teenager forced his penis tip into my mouth.

Buildings/dream in state of collapse, via Inception (2010), August 5, 2016. (http://www.cinemablend.com).

Buildings/dream in state of collapse, via Inception (2010), August 5, 2016. (http://www.cinemablend.com).

I only remembered during the holidays in 2014. One night in early December, I had a really bad trying-to-escape dream — again. This time, though, I remembered the taste of a penis in my mouth, and then I saw the light-skinned teenager. Even in my dream, I said, “That’s him. That’s it.”

After I woke up, a flood of images erupted in my brain. The Chevy Malibu and me standing in the street. Seeing the light-skinned kid who  assaulted me on the playground at 616 on the same day the other kids chased Darren and me around the building while pelting us with pebbles and rocks. The wall of fear that my Mom had on her face when the neighbors told her that they thought Darren and me were “faggots” because we were standing so close to each other that we looked like we were “doing the dukey.”

The now-remembered incident explained so much. My Mom’s constant fear that I’d turn out gay. My father Jimme constantly calling me a “faggat” (as he pronounced it when he was drunk) whenever I stepped out of line or looked at people the wrong way. My Mom giving my one-time idiot stepfather Maurice carte blanche to “turn” me and Darren “into men” through Isshin-ryu karate and draconian physical abuse. Me being terrified at times when around Black guys on the basketball courts or in other social setting. My looking at young women from afar, attainable and yet all but unattainable for me. The sheer desire to save the people in my life from violence and destruction, especially my Mom and Darren, but the inability to do either.

My family’s fear of the mere possibility that I or my brother Darren could be gay drove many of their measures of physical, verbal and emotional abuse. So much so that they ignored all the signs of my actual abuse. Like standing in middle of the street to get run over by a car, were just considered “defiant” or “weird.” Or with me constantly chewing my fingernails right down to nail bed. Or me constantly stuffing sandwiches and other food down into the recesses of my winter coats, having already ripped out the pockets, and leaving the food there. Or the day I stood on Nathan Hale’s playground during recess in May ’77, when I took some string from my red and blue-striped t-shirt, gradually unraveled it, and swallowed nearly a third of it. My Mom figured she could beat the “something’s wrong with you, fool” out of me. My father calling me a “faggat” from the time I turned fourteen was just tough love, not a form of abuse piled on top of abuse.

Now that I remember everything about the physical and the sexual abuse, what do I do next? It’s been forty years since I found out how horrible life could be. It’s not as if I’ll be able to track down and then beat up the light-skinned teenager, who’s now in his early fifties, assuming he’s still alive.

I could start by revising Boy @ The Window. I wasn’t just weird because I wore a kufi, spoke too slowly, or grew up with weird people. I wasn’t just a child of poverty, abuse, and divorce. I was also a sexual abuse victim, all but completely unacknowledged, and yet such a major part of the story.

Forgiving my abuser could be at the top of the list. It would be difficult to be angry at someone whom I’d forgotten about for nearly four decades. But you know what? If I could just punch him in the throat and then knee him in the balls until one fell out and rolled down the street, that would give me some satisfaction.

Mostly, I’m just satisfied that I know my past in full. I already paid the bill. Now that I know what I paid for, I can move forward. I can look at my past, present, and future with more sanity than I thought possible.

The Hypocrisy of Religion As A Weapon of Fear

12 Saturday May 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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My Bible (KJV) combined with a French mace (circa 16th century, on display at Morges military museum, August 20, 2010), May 12, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins; Rama via Wikipedia). In public domain.

During my three years as a Hebrew-Israelite (between April ’81 and April ’84), I found more than a few of our ideas and practices confounding. So many issues around issues of blood, kosherizing food, the dangers of using Ivory Soap or saying “Hello” to callers on a telephone. I was in a cult during the most out-of-sorts periods any of us face — middle school and puberty (see my post “Balkis Makeda’s 2nd Coming” from May ’11). Not good, as anyone who knew me during my A.B. Davis Middle School years can attest, for better and worse.

One of the most puzzling practices at 616 and even at the Hebrew-Israelite temple in Mount Vernon was in what my idiot stepfather and the rabbis would have us read. We read more than simply the Torah, the Prophets (or Nevi’im), the Writings (or Ketuvim) or the Talmud. No, on rare occasions, we cracked open the good old King James, and found ourselves in the middle of Matthew or Mark.

The passages that our fearless religious leaders assigned were very specific. They were only assigned for the purposes of showing us what ancient Israelite life had become in the centuries since the fall of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the enslavement and scattering of the ten Lost Tribes. That was it. No discussion of Jesus’ miracles, his defiant sense of social justice and protest, his life, death and resurrection. The rabbis didn’t even publicly acknowledge Jesus as a prophet, much less the son of God.

I asked, more than once over those three years, “If we are Hebrew-Israelites, then why are we reading the New Testament?” I never got a straight answer. “Oh, Jesus is among the men of Judah, like Moses or Saul or David.” Or “Jesus was like a prophet, in the tradition of Jeremiah or Daniel.” Or “Because I’m the man of this house, and you do what I tell you to do, BOY!,” as  “Judah ben Israel,” my idiot stepfather, would yell.

I knew enough back then to know that the ancient Israelites, ten of those Twelve Tribes, were enslaved and dispersed during the time of the Assyrian Empire, not to mention the Babylonians that conquered the Assyrians. And all between 722 and 586 BCE. By the time the Persians freed the remaining two tribes (Judah and Levi) in 539 BCE, the others were lost to history. So why would Jesus be relevant in a religion based on the history of a group that was scattered centuries before Jesus was born? Why focus on the New Testament in low dosages? Why care about any passages from the gospels at all?

Fast forward twenty-eight years from my Christian conversion to the age of pseudo-Christian evangelical fundamentalism as a proxy for prejudice, hatred and fear. So much of this social issues garbage comes from literal Christian interpretations of the Old Testament. Last I checked, the Old Testament in question here is the Torah, and I haven’t met a whole lot of pastors or priest who are Judaism experts.

The burning of the knight of Hohenberg with his servant before the walls of Zürich, for sodomy, by Diebold Schilling (1482), February 17, 2005. (Lysis via Wikipedia). In public domain.

We’ve been fighting for half a century over abortion — which is essentially addressed for pro-life advocates in Exodus and Leviticus as “Thou shalt not kill.” Lethal levels of disgust and hatred directed at gays and lesbians because of three passages in Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus, and one of them over what amounts to attempted gang rape. Really? Our strength as Christians is defined by how well we understand and practice what’s in the Old Testament? Any Christian that believes that this is more important than the Gospels or Jesus’ charge to us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves is a really hateful person. Period.

Though Vice President Joe Biden forced his hand through his support of gay marriage on NBC’s Meet The Press this past Sunday, President Barack Obama did the right thing on Wednesday by outing his truer pro-gay rights and marriage self. You know, the president’s evolving view that took him right back to where he was in ’96. Still, it was a historic moment to see President Obama with ABC’s Robin Roberts proclaim his personal support for gay and lesbian marriage and LGBT rights in general.

But there are questions beyond the historical significance (see John F. Kennedy’s June 11, ’63 speech in support of Black activism and civil rights — on the eve of Medgar Evers’ assassination — for more) or the politics of making this announcement six months before the ’12 election. Like, why does anyone who isn’t gay care at all? Because a pastor who spends more time dealing in fear and misinterpreting the Old Testament says to care? Because you don’t want your hyper-heterosexual sense of masculinity (Black or otherwise) or femininity questioned? Or because you and other people in your life love using your Neanderthal sense of Christianity and spirituality as a club to bludgeon others, to blame others for your lot in life?

“Enthusiasms” scene screen shot from The Untouchables (1987), March 30, 2012. (http://loonpond.blogspot.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to picture’s low resolution and cropped nature.

I don’t expect anyone vehemently on the other side of this issue to answer these questions, any more than I ever expected my idiot stepfather to explain why we studied the New Testament as practicing Hebrew-Israelites. I love Jesus and what and who he stood for and I believe would stand for today. But these so-called Torah-practicing Christians are very difficult to love.

Black Male Id-entity & the F-Bomb

26 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Gay Rights Month isn’t for another six days, as it’s still May. But in light of Joakim Noah’s unfortunate anti-gay slur outburst, “Fuck you, faggot!,” it makes sense to start this year’s conversation a week early.

This is more than about the NBA, gay athletes in the closet or what professional athletes should and shouldn’t say to fans and to each other. The behind-the-curtain issue here could just as well be about Black male identity (whether heterosexual or gay) and how Black males express themselves to each other and to the rest of the world.

My first memories playing with a group of Black males in Mount Vernon, New York are all negative. When I was six in ’76, a group of preteens on the neighborhood playground near Nathan Hale Elementary on South 6th Avenue tried to force me into sucking one of their dicks, practically sticking it in my face to do so. I got away before being truly scarred for life. After we moved to 616 East Lincoln Avenue in April ’77, our first time playing outside was spent running away from the other kids, who greeted us by throwing rocks at us and calling me and my brother Darren “faggots.” (see my June 1, 2009 post, “In the Closet, On the Down Low” for more).

When I was nine, I played basketball on a court near 616 for the first time with a group of kids from my building. After throwing up an awkward brick and an air ball, I got five minutes of “You terrible!,” “You need to sit down!,” “You’re never gonna be an athlete!,” “You need to get back to reading them books of yours!,” and “You shoot like a faggot!”

Even though I eventually learned how to dribble with both hands, shoot a j, make layups, block shots, and on rare occasions, dunk a basketball, I’ve been leery being around other Black males on the basketball court. One would think after playing pickup with former Pitt basketball players while in grad school that I’d completely forgotten what happened to me back in the spring of ’79. But I hadn’t, at least on an unconscious level. I often watched what I said, I mean, down to every single word. Not to mention how I walked, where my arms were, and how I held my head. Still, I sometimes felt inadequate on the court, whether I went 8-for-9 or 2-for-7, blocked a shot, stole a ball, or got knocked down guarding someone six-foot-six and 260 pounds.

But I figured out something in those years of playing pickup at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon and other places in Pittsburgh and DC over the years. That blending in doesn’t matter. Fools — even ones with momentary lapses in judgment like Joakim Noah — will be fools because on the playground or court, it makes them cool in the minds of their peers.

Yes, this isn’t just a Black male issue. Sean Miller, currently coach of the University of Arizona men’s basketball team — not to mention an all-time Pitt basketball great — once played a prank on me our freshmen year. He called me up in my Lothrop Hall dorm room late one night, offered me a blow job, and called me a “faggot” in the process.  So being called a “faggot” or saying that something or someone is “gay” is part of our culture on and off the basketball court, for Black and White males to be sure.

But unlike Michael Wilbon, I can’t excuse it because it’s commonplace and therefore it may be difficult for some young men to immediately stop themselves from saying “faggot.” Nor can I rationalize this like Touré (a.k.a. TouréX on Twitter) attempted to do in a Twitter exchange with me a couple of days ago. He compared the use of “faggot” to “nigga,” with the idea that both words have more than one meaning and that the meaning can sometimes be positive, depending on context.

I can see the argument for “nigga,” even though I don’t like it when younger men use it to affirm each other and especially me. But “faggot” meaning “less than a man?” Or “stupid” or “dumb?” So is Noah or Kobe more of a man for telling someone else they’re not a man? Even in context, this isn’t positive — it’s potentially soul-destroying, and not just for someone being called a faggot.

Of the preteens and young boys who called me “faggot” growing up, at least three have served hard time. Is there a direct connection? Of course not. Still, it seems that a culture steeped in the requirement of being cool, finding quick and easy success and putting down others while doing so lends itself well to a crash-and-burn mentality that so many of us have about our lives.

In the Closet, On the Down Low

01 Monday Jun 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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The rainbow flag waving in the wind at San Francisco's Castro District, San Francisco, CA, August 5, 2010. (Benson Kua via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-2.0.

The rainbow flag waving in the wind at San Francisco’s Castro District, San Francisco, CA, August 5, 2010. (Benson Kua via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-2.0.

It’s Gay Pride Month, or LGBT Month, or GLBT Month, I guess, depending on one’s perspective. I have nothing directly to contribute, being the semi-well-adjusted heterosexual I am. But I do have something to say about what it means to me to have moved from a world where homophobia and heterosexism was a part of everyday speech (and sometimes action) to a place where it’s actually easy for me to embrace others of a different sexual orientation. Of course, I’m not talking about the world at large. I’m talking about 616 and the folks I knew growing up in Mount Vernon.

This isn’t easy for me to discuss. It means revealing more about myself and some painful memories growing up than even I’m used to doing. Still, it’s important for me and for others to understand that uncomfortable as folks may be about the reality that some people aren’t strictly male, female or heterosexual, these so-called others exist, and are a part of our family, among our co-workers, and deserve our acceptance, love, friendship and support. Or at least, our tolerance.

This story starts with an exchange I had with my father Jimme a couple of weeks before the start of my senior year in high school, August ’86. In a summer when my sexuality was no longer a question — at least to me — my father still had his doubts. I’d hardly seen Jimme most of the summer, only coming over occasionally to see how he was doing or to bum a few bucks off of him. I saved enough money from my job to cover the cost of my three AP classes — $159 to cover the $53 fee for each of the three classes. The College Board and MVHS didn’t grant fee waivers for these courses. Even though I had put that money in my mother’s checking account, I knew that with our money issues my savings were gone. So I found Jimme one Saturday morning near the end of August hanging out on the street corner and having drunk his fill.

His mood was especially foul that day, like his body odor. He refused to give me any money. “I don’ give my money to no faggats!” Jimme yelled at me as he came walking down his block toward me. He’d seen me come out of the front yard of the house he lived in. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. “I’m not a faggot and I’m not gay,” I yelled back. When he got closer, I could see that he’d been out too long already. Jimme’s clothes were a mess, and his face was in a twisted rage. He grabbed me by my arm.

“Did you get yo’ dict wet?,” he asked as usual.

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” I said.

“YOU’RE A FAGGAT,” he yelled again.

I was so pissed with him that I said, “Forget it. I don’t want your money. I’ll find a job somewhere.”

That was when the conversation got ugly.

“Ain’t no one gonna giv’ a faggat like you no job.”

“You’re a drunk and you’ve had a job for years.”

“Watch who you talkin’ to bo’. I da boss of the bosses. No one tell me what to do.”

“Why should I? I’m a faggot, right? Faggots don’t have to listen to an alcoholic like you”

“I yo’ father, an’ if you want my money, you do what I say.”

“I don’t have to listen to you or anybody else.”

“Come here bo’!”

At that point, I came over and Jimme grabbed my arm. Then he tried to punch me in the face. I caught his right arm, twisted it away from me and toward him, and then pushed him away. The push sent him to the ground, tipsy as he was.

“I can’ believe you hit yo’ dad”

“I didn’t hit you, I pushed you. Besides, you tried to hit me first. You’re not acting like much of a dad right now, anyway.”

I started to walk away, only to be hit in the head with folded up money, about $200 in all. “Take it all, faggat. I don’ want you aroun’ here no more,” he said.

This time I grabbed him and stuffed half the money in his pocket.

“Don’t you still have to eat, pay rent, get some more to drink?”

I kept all of the rest because I figured I earned it that day. Darren, par for the course, just stood around and watched.

That was a scary conversation and confrontation for me. It meant seeing myself for the first time as someone not only defending myself, but defending unnamed others. I could’ve easily said that I love women, and only women, that there was something wrong with gays and being gay. But I didn’t. I guess because at least gays hadn’t chased me down the street, calling me a “faggat” in the process.

I was also ambivalent, though. My mother, for all of her quietness about my lack of dating and friends in the five years before I went off to college, would make weird statements basically daring me to say that I was gay just so she could somehow un-gay me if I was. For her, the mixed signals she received from me started when I was seven. We had just moved to 616, and after a summer camp at Darren’s Clearview School, we went outside on 616’s grounds for the first time, in August ’77. The kids at 616 and 630 harrassed us, chased us around while throwing rocks at us. Scared, we hid behind the big, wooden, dark brown front door and huddled, hoping that the kids wouldn’t find us.

Instead, a couple of young Black Turks saw us, took us to my mother and stepfather, and declared that they saw us doing “the dukey.” I had no idea what they were talking about. All I knew was that my mother and stepfather proceeded to whip us as if we’d gone to the grocery store and stolen $100 worth of candy and soda. Besides “dukey,” the only other new word I picked up that day was “faggot.” That, and an incident one year earlier, one in which an older boy attempted to force me to suck his penis, was about all I knew about how others were “different” and how others saw difference until high school. Even then, I understood at some level the difference between someone attempting to force you to into a sexual act and someone simply being themselves. It didn’t necessarily make me feel better, though.

There were others who dropped the F-bomb on me over the years. Most of them were Black and Afro-Caribbean guys whom I’d shown up in the classroom or in gym class. All of it made me feel as if there were something wrong with me, like a target had been painted on my forehead that said this fool is so different that we can see in him the worst of our homophobic fears.

Even when I started to date, and even after I started having sex, I would occassionally run into women and men who assumed I was gay. Or at least, “asexual,” “sober,” “boring.” It was partly due to my overintellectualizing sex as a distraction, combined with a well-developed habit of protecting myself emotionally, that led to others making these cosmic-leap assumptions.

By the time I had reached my junior year at Pitt, I knew full well that not only I wasn’t gay, but that I was comfortable being around gays, lesbians, even transgender folk. And that made me uncomfortable. I was also a Christian, and between my mother, televangelists like Frederick K.C. Price, Kenneth Copeland, Jimmy Swaggert, Oral Roberts, as well as some of my friends, I found it difficult to reconcile their interpretations of scripture with my own natural comfortability with people of different sexual orientations. Even in grad school, if someone asked me — I certainly didn’t volunteer this — I’d trip over my own words quoting scripture while saying that it’s none of my business what other people do in their private lives.

It took an interview I did with an office at the University of Maryland in ’98 to finally see what I was doing. They asked me flat out if I had a problem advising LGBT students. I actually didn’t, but I also didn’t want to come off as gay myself. So I kind of tripped all over the place while answering the question. Not only did I not get the job. The phone clicked about five seconds after I gave my answer.

I realized that I was still being heterosexist myself, that I had yet to confront the issues I had around sexuality growing up. I made a few decisions around this issue after that interview. One was to stop spouting out-of-context scriptural rhetoric about homosexuality, and to stop attending churches where gays and lesbian were blamed for high crime rates and poverty, like the church I used to attend in Wilkinsburg back in the ’90s. I realized that there was a higher law, one that says “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and “do unto others…” Beyond that, it’s okay to say “I don’t know” when it comes to Christianity and to say “I’m comfortable” when I’m at work or in conversation with someone who happens to be gay or lesbian.

For those wholly uncomfortable with what they’ve been reading, let me say this. Uncomfortability with someone different is hardly unusual. But your uncomfortability shouldn’t mean that someone else’s human and civil rights should be trampled in the process. On the spiritual front, we aren’t supposed to pass judgment on others because we’re uncomfortable with who they are or even how they live as Christians. What do we know, anyway? Otherwise, we’re no different from the White bigots who rapped themselves around a Confederate flag while killing, maiming and intimidating Blacks and others of color out of their rights. Oh well! I guess I’m out of the closet now myself.