My father taught me that as much as I feel that straight Black men are often my oppressors, there are moments that I also know they can be my protectors. That the social conditioning that told us to hate our own because of sex and gender can be broken. Much like my father, my community has a second chance, one that gives their Black queer children a chance to survive an anti-Black world already against them. I get bigotry everywhere else. My father made sure I at least didn’t get it at home, by using the tools he had, the best he knew how.
This one single paragraph nearly encapsulates the thematic coverage of the entire book. It is a memoir by a homosexual black man about community and finding aa sense of home and belonging. It is also about the importance of family and fathers within the social fabric of black society. The only thing missing from the paragraph is a reference to women and even that single absence touches lightly upon what the rest of the book spends exploring.
I was very sassy as a little kid. A sissy is what the kids used to call me back then, before they got older and escalated to the word faggot. I remember I used to watch the way women would walk with a switch—that movement of the hips, going side to side as you walk forward. I had a natural switch, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to walk like that, so I tried my best not to—emphasis on tried.
And there it is. The presence of women in the book, thematically speaking, is complicated. When speaking of a heterosexual boy and his father, the connection with masculinity it easy. When speaking of a homosexual boy and his mother, things tend to get really Freudian really fast. For the longest time since the arrival of Freud onto the scene—and probably even before then—a tendency existed to blame the mother for a union producing a gay son. As this passage suggests, the reality may be the just ever so slightly more complicated.
I used to daydream a lot as a little boy. But in my daydreams, I was always a girl. I would daydream about having long hair and wearing dresses. And looking back, it wasn’t because I thought I was in the wrong body, but because of how I acted more girly. I thought a girl was the only thing I could be.
One of the things that is interesting about this passage is that it could literally be lifted word for word and copied directly into a memoir of transgender girl who has always been attracted to girls. In other words, not a gay man. That two people born biologically male could both share the same childhood dreams and desires about wanting to be a girl with one being sexually to men while the other prefers women should be enough to convince both homophobes and transphobes that gender and sexuality is so much more complicated than they desperately want it to be. For a lot of people, the preferred path is the easiest one. And then there are people like the author of this book.
