Get Ya Mind Right: To Be Black, Gay, and Happy

Question:  They say we're all on the same political boat.  We should be brothers.  But, before I accept his kinship, political, or otherwise, this is what I want to know.  Where does his loyalty lie?  Priorities, that's what I want to know.  Come the final throwback, what is he first, black or gay?

I was going through one of my old notebooks and stumbled across this question.  I am pretty sure I got it from a book somewhere, but I didn't make a note of where I got, but I do remember when I wrote it.  It was about three years ago when I was first struggling with my sexuality and its implications for the rest of my life, my friends, my family.  I had just taken genuine ownership of my Blackness and wore it like a coat of arms, proud and majestically draped in shades of green, red, and ebony.  And yet, here was the possibility that I didn't quite fit the mold of the strong Black man; a splash of fuchsia thrown across my mosaic of afrocentricity.

I was afraid to ask questions of myself or my family.  Afraid of rejection.  Afraid of having to choose between my life and culture for this foreign part of myself that I still didn't really understand.  Then I came across a film called Tongues Untied by Marlon Riggs and he gave me an answer to my unasked question.

How do you choose one eye over another, this half of the brain over that?  Or in words this brother might understand, which does he value most, his left nut or his right?

Simple and yet profound.   As I sit and write I actually think I might have pulled that earlier quote from the same film (and if I didn't it sure as hell would have fit).  For a very long time I kept trying to figure out how I would manage to incorporate this new thing about myself to the life that I had created.  How would I choose and it wasn't really until that film that I stopped to ask who was making me choose.

I came up with a laundry list of society, my culture, my family, but the truth was that the only one who was really making me chose was myself.  I didn't need to change.  I had always been this foreign thing and it didn't detract from the good of my life.  Oh that is not to say that there were not moments of...adjustment.  Like the first time a guy kissed me in public.  Or the moment when I finally told someone other then my first partner.

But those moments came and went.  And I survived.

For anyone still struggling with the question of how to live in both worlds I leave you with these words by Kendall Thomas from his article "Ain't Nothin' Like the Real thing": Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity published in Wahneema Lubiano's anthology The House that Race Built.

For all it's ambivalence, the example of "slender gay" James Baldwin taught some of us ohow to be gay men in, and of, black America.  the life and work of James Baldwin thus give the lie to the notion that black and gay identity are hostile to one another at all points.  They show, too, that while "[i]t is difficult to be despised," black gay men and lesbians must resist the demand (heard in some quarters) that we must choose between these two sources of the self and commit a kind of psychich suicide (Thomas 122).


Peace.

I.M.


Tongues Untied, prod. and dir. Marlon Riggs, 55 min., color, 1985, videocassette.

Thomas, Kendall.  " ' Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing': Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity."  The House that Race Built.  Ed. Wahneema Lubiano.  New York: random House, 1998.  (122).