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Melissa Cardello-Linton is my sista, my friend, my favorite human. In this episode of Black Out Loud, we talk the entertainment industry and the business of surviving it. We testify on being Black in rooms that were never built for us. The pain. The obstacles. The love. And yes, the joy, because we always find the joy.

We go deep. We keep it real.

We walked the runway of life together, swerving, high step, on beat, slaying all in our paths. Friendship never looked so fierce.

The train station was humid, the kind of humid that felt unfair to us humans. Where your clothes stick to your body, and the sweat drips. Like the devil sat his entire ass up on earth and said bitch, burn. The humidity drips some of the Pattern Beauty curl cream down my forehead into my eyes. They sting. I am frustrated at the 181st Street stop, uptown in Washington Heights. It is too damn hot outside, and I got to teach some kids musical theater.

The job is rewarding, yet I get tired of teaching people what I should be doing myself. My brain wanders every moment I start the 8 count and the hunger grumbles in the depths of my belly. I look up at the dirty tunnel, searching for God in the humidity of a train station. I mumble. Words come out the mouth. Words that I understand but no one else would decipher. The way men of a certain age do, when the morning feels like a hammer to the skull.

I breathe. The belly rises and falls. In and out. Weaving through my funky spirit. The air flows and releases all the negative ju ju.

Rebuke. This word is clear. I stomp the devil’s energy out of my morning spirit.

You must take the A train to go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem. The doors open and I drag my legs inside. The train was hollow, and I blurted an irrational laugh out, cracking up over the unusual vacancy. “Thank you, baby Jesus,” I raised my hand in a silent prayer to the universe.

I noise-cancelled the world while hitting play on Olivia Rodrigo. I emptied my soul listening to her new album like a teenage girl scorned. Rewind. This young Latina got bars, the lyrics moved smoothly through my eardrums, flowing like literary liquid. The train moved as if it was in sync with the music’s orchestration. I turned it up. Let the volume go higher than ears are supposed to listen. I didn’t care on this fucked up day.

Deliverance. The wanting of my body lifted out of this tragic morning commute. Refuge was the only bag I wanted to carry.

We made it to 125th Street and the A train stopped like it knew there was something coming for me.

The doors slid open in slow motion like a rom-com on crack. Enters the man, curly black hair, line up on point, dark olive skin, six foot something. Slacks that fit the ass perfectly, as his big muscular round tight glutes swagger into the train. The stark train lights blurred at the edges. Beautiful pink lips puckered at me, aimed right for my Cupid’s bow.

His hazel eyes slipped into my gaze. Seduction is what I gave him as he smirked playfully back into my dare. He smiled with dimples and gorgeous straight teeth. This was the cue for my penis to twitch in my pants.

My heart. Heavy. Beats hard as if my ribs were going to crack open.

My brain did a somersault and a full twist. My mind bloomed like a butterfly out of its cocoon. The brain is a curious place to enter when you have lust and love in its view. No more Bumble. No more Tinder. No more Grindr. No more endorphins and dopamine entering when the notification comes in. No more ghosts. No more playing chase like a kid at recess.

Bells rang in staccato, short and snappy, as they did pirouettes on my heart.

“I’s married now,” like Shug Avery says in The Color Purple. We adopted a baby boy, a mixed-race child so he can have our complexion. We live in a brownstone in Brooklyn, owning every floor, the way Black folks did before gentrification. He works in finance and supports my dreams. He loves. He sees. We erupt with the only climax that matters. His arms protect. I am not alone anymore.

I am love. We are love. Love is us. I am his. All the way down to 125th Street.

The train hits an abrupt stop at 103rd and eighth avenue, which shoots my body forward. I can hear Olivia belting “Stupid Song”. I arrive back into my body’s reality. The beautiful man sitting across from me, leaning forward with his head smack down in his Kindle. The world stops. I stop. The ordinary morning hits me in the gut as I let stillness settle over me. He looks up from the Kindle and gives a devilish smirk.

I melt back into a sudden puddle like Frosty the fucking snowman.

I begin to think. Which isn’t always good for me in these situations. Thinking makes me think, and then I am overthinking. I’ve been climbing out of the dark hole of loneliness for years, and this stranger’s face was the light at the top of it. I am going to listen to my therapist. I am going to put myself out there naked and pass this beautiful creature my business card. He and I came to an agreement that I won’t let moments pass, that I will shoot my shot. It is going down, and I am about to be craving pickles and pregnant.

I grab my business card out of my crisp New Yorker tote bag. I hold the card and my anxiety says beta blocker, bitch.

Somehow I decide to put on my actor face and pretend I am a character. Letting my Rico fierce do the work. Canceling “should of,” “could of,” and “would of” the way we cancel celebrities when their tongues slip.

Fasten your seatbelts, the card becomes my prop, and the performance begins. White gloves. First Black actor on the Broadway stage. Bert Williams is always in my head.

Giving you a minstrel show. I am in blackface. Tap dancing and cooning for the coin.

The A train flies down toward my stop. A is express, so it always zooms, as if you are on a theme park ride holding on for dear life. I exhale and look directly at my future. His legs in a slight second position, knees turned out, pelvis directly in my line. I slowly stand, trying to give butch homo thug with a bougie twist. This will be my Love & Basketball, my Best Man, my Brown Sugar, my Love Jones — the queer version Hollywood hasn’t written yet.

His almond-shaped eyes gently notice me. He pretends to be unbothered, the way we all cat and mouse.

I walk the high-wire toward him, trying to keep my balance as the train races to the tempo of my heart. The card is sweaty in my hand and gooey, but I am determined to get my gold star from my therapist. Inches away, my breath touches his. I notice a sparkle. I examine it like a resident doing a physical while the attending watches.

A diamond band on his ring finger.

The motherfucker is married and I…

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Back in the day, a young queer Black boy with a bubble butt, a big rooster, a fierce grand jeté, a singing voice, and cheekbones for days served the big bad apple. The nineties, before the stage name, before J.R., there was only James Ricardo Whittington, and he was prowling.

Three of us stacked into the smallest apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, conservatory friends who “got off the bus” the same year and carried the same fever out into the city. We were cloudy-eyed and high on the becoming. Not the arriving. The becoming. Back then I knew I was cute and I knew I was talented and I did not care one bit who else was in the room, because none of them woke up and put on my face in the morning. I sit here now and I miss him. I miss that boy running through my blood like something I lost the receipt for.

The day was ordinary, which is the only kind of day that ever changes your life. Summer coming up off the concrete in waves. Sirens somewhere, always somewhere. I was walking to my spot for the two-dollar slice, that greasy folded salvation I lived on, cheese sliding, corner grease running down my wrist, and 42nd Street was doing what 42nd Street did back then. The real one. Peep shows and hustlers and neon and hunger. The block before Disney came and scrubbed the sin off the sidewalk and sold it back to the tourists. I was young and broke and blessed and I did not know it.

Then my pager went off against my hip.

Beep beep. Beep beep.

I knew the number before I finished reading it. My agent. I fed a payphone a quarter with a wet hand and pressed it hard to my ear.

“Final callback for you, baby. Cats. The Winter Garden. Today. Can you get there in a few hours?”

“Yes.”

Cats on Broadway

I was already gone. I ran home screaming into the apartment, I’m in finals for Cats, threw my dance clothes in a bag with my book of sheet music, and I flew crosstown. Like Flo-Jo. Like Carl Lewis with his soul on fire. Like the whole rest of my life was standing at the finish line waiting on me to show up.

I had never stood on a Broadway stage.

The Winter Garden swallowed me whole. Cavernous and cold, the air-conditioning turned up like a meat locker, the house lights low, red velvet drinking what little light there was. It smelled like dust and rosin and a hundred years of other people’s dreams. And the stage. Lord, the stage. Raked. Tilted up and away from me toward the back wall like the whole floor was trying to slide me off the front of it into the pit. I stood at the lip of it and my lower back started climbing a hill I hadn’t asked to climb, and I had not danced a single step yet.

The dancers were already up there stretching under the work lights. I was the only person of color in the room. I am always the only person of color in the room. And the color was Black, chyle Unmistakable. Un-hideable. Un-sorry. But I was mocha, and mocha was the Black they cast in the nineties. The Black that stood next to white and did not frighten it. Light enough to book, dark enough to be interesting, something exotic they thought they were finding in my eyes. Too Black for the white rooms and not Black enough for the mission my own people were carrying. I lived in the inch between. And bitch, this is Cats. We about to paint this mug up with whiskers and shit, glue a wig on it, and crawl around a junkyard on all fours. Ain’t nobody gonna know what color I was under all that yak hair. Race got there before I did anyway. I watched the white theater queens with their arms full of Broadway credits fold their bodies into splits like it was nothing, like they were born on that rake, and the nerves came up my throat. It would take me years to understand that some of them were standing there on less talent than me and more permission.

Because I loved this show. I loved Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the young James did not know it yet, but the future was going to hand him Sir Andrew more than once. The queens looked into my eyes and I could not tell if it was lust or shade, and in this business it is usually both. The isolation sat down next to me and made itself comfortable. Then I remembered whose son I was. And I started to stretch.

They taught the combination fast and they taught it mean. Full out. Leaps that asked your knees a serious question. Kicks snapping past your own ear. Acrobatic as fuck, and all of it uphill on that raked stage, gravity betraying you on every count. And baby, I threw myself into it. I danced like that girl alone in the chair in Flashdance, head thrown back, water and sweat and want, dancing like the room was empty and the room was mine.

Then they sent us out four at a time to show what we made of it. At the end you said your name into the dark and gave them a double pirouette. I landed mine clean and I smiled, teeth and all.

“Do you tumble?”

“Nope. But I’ve got a fierce cart-wheel.”

They laughed. The queens smirked. I filed it away.

Then they read the names. The ones staying. Somebody’s name, and somebody’s name, and somebody’s name.

Not mine.

I did not move at first. I stood there and let the sound of every name that was not mine wash over me and go still. Then I picked up my bag with the sheet music in it, and I walked to that stage door slow, and I pushed it open into the daylight, and 42nd Street was still filthy and alive and did not care, and I cried. Right there on the sidewalk. The way I cried at so many doors back then, before anybody warned me the no was going to become a language I’d speak fluently for the rest of my life. Now the no is second nature and I keep walking. But that afternoon young James wanted one thing on this earth. To be a Cat on Broadway. And Broadway said not you. Not today. Maybe not ever.

Record scratch.

Years pass. And the word starts moving through the city like a rumor too good to be true. Cats is coming back. But not the one I bled for on that rake. A revival. A reimagining. The Jellicle Ball. Black. Queer. Ours. Voguing where the ballet used to be, the whole cathedral of ball culture poured into that score.

The Jellicle Ball On Broadway

And something in my chest that I thought had scarred over cracked wide open with hope. Because by now I am not that boy on the sidewalk anymore. I’ve got the résumé. Broadway. National tours. Television. I have given people exactly what they needed in the dark a hundred times over, because that is the whole job, that is the entire craft. This is my show. This was always going to be my show. I called my agent. I called my manager. I said get me in that room. I could already feel the rake under my feet again, all these years later, waiting to welcome me home.

And they said no.

Because I have never walked in a ballroom.

I said. Wait. What.

I’m an actor. Becoming what I have never been is the gift. That is the sacred thing I do. And you’re telling me the one show built out of my own Black queer body is the one I can’t be seen for, because I learned my craft in a conservatory instead of on a runway?

No.

This time there were no tears. This time it was an eye roll that started at the base of my skull and traveled around slow and strong and dragged the whole neck with it, and honey, maybe a little tfffft escaped on the way out. Fuck them.

So I boycotted. Petty as a church usher. Refused a ticket off-Broadway, refused a ticket on Broadway, as if my one empty seat was going to be felt through the whole house like a missing tooth. Scorpio. We are shady, and we commit. I told everybody I was simply a serious thespian tired of playing flamboyant queens, ready to stretch into something new. Meanwhile every soul who walked out of that theater said it was extraordinary. And I stood ten toes down, flat-footed, arms crossed, doing my very best Effie White in the dressing room mirror. And I am telling you I’m not going. Darling, there’s no way, no no, no no no way. I ain’t going.

Then today I read the closing notice.

And a wave I did not order came all the way up over my head. Sad as fuck, and I could not name why. I told myself it was age. Gen X, folding up another dream and putting it in the drawer with the rest. Maybe that was it. I carried it around all day like a stone in my coat.

Then the ancestors in my gut, that little light I am always talking about, leaned in close and told me the truth. That is not it. That is not it at all.

I am sad because Broadway finally got a Black gay show. Finally cut the door open for men who spent their whole lives being told to wait in the hall. Broadway got us. Junior LaBeija up there as Gus the Theatre Cat, the man who called the categories in Paris Is Burning now playing the old cat who remembers when he was the whole show, mouth full of history nobody taught in a single school. Broadway got the culture turning it out, gorgeous and unbothered. Got plump asses strutting past the mezzanine. Got big Black roosters strutting the boards like they built the place. Got the whole house pissing all over that stage and calling it holy. Broadway got us performing from the one and only place a Black queer man can perform from, that vein that runs straight down from the legends.

And I am angry, because a little while is all they ever hand us. We do not get to stay. We get the season. We get the standing ovation. We win the Tony, three of them, and still get handed the closing notice, folded neat, slid under the door. We come, we slay, we go. We are the guest and never the host. And I turned my back on the one time it was mine, out of some petty little revenge that cost the show nothing and cost me everything.

So let me say it plain, with my whole chest.

I was wrong.

I am going to run to that theater. I am going to sit down in the dark and witness. I am going to let it wreck me, because it is me, Black and queer and glorious, and we have never once in the history of this world done a single thing halfway. And I am going to walk out of there on fire, because I will write for us and dream for us and fight for us until the last breath leaves my body and the ancestors call me home to the family reunion.

Young James thought a star was a thing you became alone. Cute and talented and better than everybody in the room. He ran across town for it. He cried on a sidewalk for it. He folded his arms and boycotted it. He did not understand yet, and it has taken me all these years and one closing notice to finally understand it for him.

The becoming was never his to do by himself. It belonged to Greg Burge. It belonged to Hinton Battle. It belonged to Gregory and Maurice Hines. It belonged to every ancestor who danced before them and died before the door ever opened. It belonged to the boys on the piers with the boombox and nowhere warm to sleep. It belonged to the houses that raised the children nobody else would claim. It belonged to the legends with the history in their mouths. It belonged to every last one of us who ever walked into a room as the only one and stretched anyway.

The boy on the two-dollar slice was not becoming a star.

He was becoming us.

He still is.

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Dedicated to Trudy J. Lewis-Whittington (Mother)

She held my cousin in her arms.

I reach out my hand.

One baby against her chest.

One baby at her side.

The photograph caught a moment,

but it also caught a lifetime.

I have been reaching for that hand ever since.

Mama’s boy.

Yesterday.

Today.

Always.

Therapy.

A word that seldom finds a home in the mouths of Black men. We inherit silence before we inherit language. We are taught to swallow what hurts, baptize it strength, and call the surviving enough.

But let your Black ass grow up gay.

Then every mouth remembers the word. Every hand points toward a pastor, a pew, a counselor, a prayer. Pray the gay away, they say, as though God misplaced you and shame could lead Him back.

That is not the story I came to tell.

I want to tell the story of two things being true. The way the church says it. The way the deacon mother says it from the third pew, fan going, hat tilted, certain.

My mother is a beautiful woman. High cheekbones. Skin that keeps mistaking her for my sister because youth never moved out, just changed rooms. The same gene she thankfully passed down to me.

The morning started with therapy. The sun came up optimistic, betting against the rain they promised. The clouds scattered like illegal dice across the pavement.

The session was hard.

The button-up white therapist, queer like me but built different, said something that hit me in the gut. Words about my mother. He said it calm, clinical, but my ears heard a yo-mama joke on the playground, Vaseline on the face, earrings off, hands in the air. The trigger went in through my ears, ran down the body, and came back out of my mouth.

She is my ace. I have been through too much with this woman. We overcame like Martin’s dream, so many rocks thrown at our heads, all of them meant to land. We are still here. Still here like Celie at the end of The Color Purple, ugly and grinning and alive. So when you say anything about my mother, I will cut you with words so deep you feel the draft. I see red. My mouth moves before the thought has its shoes on. My therapist was not ready for the full-fledged blackness that came out of this bougie queer man. He had never seen me like that. Neither had I, all the way. I will admit it. I spent years sitting on the anger that raged in my belly. Sat on it like a lid on a pot. Probably the reason I am in his office in the first place.

The next day the sun was nowhere to be found.

The clouds hung heavy. In the sky. On my face. I popped an anxiety pill and asked my bloodstream to remember how to calm the fuck down. It did not. It had forgotten, the way it always forgets. I sat with therapy and I sat with myself, and the remorse came up slow, like water through floorboards. I did not mean to go off on him. I never come out of my face that way, and the day before my face was rolling clean off the side of my head. Lips out. Neck swinging with the swiftness. The whole body deputizing itself to protect my mother.

Then it hit me over the head.

A light. The one the ancestors keep lit in my stomach. The one that tells me what is supposed to be. The one I trusted to keep me walking when I had every right to lie down and be counted out. After all these years on this earth, the light finally opened its mouth.

Your therapist is right.

Two things can be true.

Two things were true.

The first. You and your mother are bound by a love God Herself cosigned. Your mother is the shit. The most stunning woman in the world. Her love carried you when the world had its sleeves rolled up to beat it out of you. The way she respects the man you are is so rare it feels invented. A Black woman who survived the worst of the worst had you, took you, carried you the only way a Black woman knows how. On her hip. On her back. On her knees.

The other.

She had me at seventeen. A child herself. A baby raising a baby, doing the best she could with the little she was handed. And it was little. She raised her own mother, my grandmother, a drunk, by herself. Became a woman at nine years old, before her body had any business being one. Stood in the hood and vowed to rebuke it of its sins. She tried to protect me the only way she knew. But the curse of the lineage does not skip a generation just because you ask it nicely.

I was a boy who knew how to be alone.

Alone with a Barbie and a Power Ranger, pressing them together, making them hump, too young to know the word for what I was already rehearsing. Alone, making up scenes out of thin air, talking to myself in voices that were not mine yet. The actor was already born in that room, before I had a stage, before I had a name for the wanting. Playing house with the boy next door, the straight boy next door, two children keeping a home nobody had handed us, him not yet knowing what he was to me and me not yet knowing the word for it either. And when my little sister came, I raised her too, the way you raise something while you are still being raised yourself.

Mom left. Not gone for good. Left because she had to. She left because she refused to hand me what her mother handed her. She left and the lights stayed on. She left and the plate stayed full.

She left.

And put me in the arms of the devil.

Teachers who touched me in secret, the very ones we were told to trust. The cousin who ground his hips into mine and got called a good babysitter for it. The men who came and went through her house, because she loved sex the way I love it now, and some of those men loved little boys, and they loved on me.

She thought she was seeing. She thought she was holding. And she let the same thing that happened to her come back through the door and happen to me. I do not believe she knew. She trusted people with her child. The child who wet the bed. The child who hid behind her leg, too scared to make a sound. The child who thought touch was love and kept getting taught the lesson wrong. She did not fail to protect me because she stopped caring. She trusted humans. She did not vet them. She could not see. She had her hands full of keeping us alive, both fists, no fingers left over, and somewhere in all that holding on she could not see the boy she pushed out of her own body, standing right there in the dark.

The therapist taught me I am allowed. Allowed to scream. To shake. To be angry. To cry. To touch myself until the pain loosens its hold. To be hurt. To be upset with my mother. To go all the way mad and find my way back. I remember saying it out loud, no, do not leave me, my whole small voice spent on the asking. I remember her not hearing it, because the rent did not care that I was crying. Her days must have been longer than I have ever let myself sit and imagine, and still, even now, I catch myself laying stones across the water so she has somewhere dry to step. A Black child raising children. A girl handed a grown woman’s weight before her own arms had finished growing. I can see all of it. And the therapist taught me the hardest thing last, that I can be furious and gutted and grieving and still love the woman who made me, that the anger does not cancel the love, that I was never required to put one down to carry the other.

And still.

Her being so young was dope. She understood my queerness before I had a word small enough to hold it. Stood beside me. Drove me to dance class, to acting class, foot on the gas, faith in her chest. Went without dinner so the plate in front of me would be full. She is the center of my black queer magic. She can be the arms that held me and the trust that handed me away, and I learned to love her in the space between. She can be the reason I am still standing and the reason I sit up anxious at 3 a.m. fighting a war nobody else can see. She raised a man who was supposed to break. Still here. Still giving. Still great.

Still.

I love my mother out loud, the whole story in my mouth.

Two truths live in my belly. I swallowed them both, the sweet and the rot, took them down together because the body does not get to chew one and spit the other. They have stopped wrestling. They sit in the dark together, one braiding the other’s hair, humming low. I carry them both. There is no door in the body wide enough to put a truth out, so I quit standing at the handle.

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Donald opened his eyes. The burn from the air quality hit first. He wiped, and asked Trudy, his AI, for eye drops. It released the pressure from his eyelids. Then it massaged his temples — the pressure of life leaving with its touch.

He lived in a small one-room apartment, the kind the regime designed for one body and no extras. The window opened on its own at 6am, like an alarm clock that had never needed setting. He yearned. He looked out the window like a prayer. Gratitude first. Then hope.

The buildings looked lonely in their own reflections. Fog crowded the city. America. America always stood tall — ego at the center of every building, built on dark buried bodies the country would never mention.

Down below, the people seemed, on the surface, to be smiling. The smile was big — what America came to be known for. Smiles that flickered like a horror film just seconds from breaking loose. The world called America the place of happy, even if the happiness was law.

America is different in 2090. Everyone is mixed race. Black and white, Black and Asian, Black and Indian, Black and something. Race has reached a mutiny where everyone looks almost the same. Curly-haired olive-colored humans walked the earth.

Donald was a curious young man, sporting an afro and 70s attire — wide-legged jeans, an ancient pick with the black fist lodged in the back of his hair. He walked like a pimp. He did not want to be like the norm. He had high cheekbones and full lips, and a nose pointed straight. The Caucasian in him claimed the nose.

He lived in the space where masculine toughness was his nature but feminine nurture was his inner child. He spoke nerd fluently. He knew words meant power, and power meant freedom. Freedom. To be oneself truly without chains. The wish hovered at the edge of his lips, aching to be made real.

He was an outsider who loved books. Loved history. Loved to know where he came from. The smell of books, the weight of a hardcover — it was something he got off on. Running his hands down the hardcover slowly was a spiritual release. Books aroused him in ways the world couldn’t.

He carried a book most days. Sewn into the lining of his shirt, against his heart, behind a panel of steel cut from an old car — the kind humans used to drive themselves. The old metal still remembered how to keep secrets. His dad had given it to him the year before he died. This book has been carried from lineage to lineage. Your ancestors. And now I give it to you. Hold it close, my son. Donald held it close. He wore it the way other men wear a saint’s medal. He had not been a small boy when his dad died, but he was a small boy now every time he pressed his palm against his shirt and felt the book press back. His dad pressed back through it.

His best friend Trinity was the same kind of strange. She didn’t wear an afro — she let her locs fall down and spiral. She wore no product. Simple in appearance. She had wide eyes, and a nose just as wide as her eyes. She had child-bearing hips with a small waist. The hourglass had nothing on her snatched body. Her Blackness stuck out more than others. She had gotten lasik at birth, normal for this time period, but she still wore glasses because she liked how they looked on her face.

Donald thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Donald was queer. Both things lived in him without arguing.

He loved the smell of men. The masculinity. The heat a man brings was everything to Donald. The muscle in the back. The Adam’s apple. That V that led to the private areas like an arrow. The scent of a man was something that made his organs move. One whiff of man scent and he was tranced like a high from Molly. He didn’t need drugs. Men were his drug. Not all men — but when he saw the right one, his body told him so instantly.

Trinity was asexual. The body was a country she didn’t visit. Emotion was her love language. Where most minds were taxed by want, hers ran clean. Focus was her inheritance. Intimacy without the sex meant intimacy with everything else — books, weather, the cracks in a friend’s voice. Together, they were a unique mix of qualities.

Every morning Donald and Trinity met at a floating park. The fog couldn’t reach the park. Or the park did not let it. Either way, up there the body could be a body. The trees taught them how to breathe. They contemplated life there. Desperate for change that wasn’t taught for them to know how to take.

Eventually the park let them go. The smiling world waited. They walked through it pretending. Forcing a smile on their face even when it wasn’t warranted. This became practice. This became life. This didn’t feel real to them.

The government was watching. The government is always watching. They had to pretend to survive and live.

There was a building they went back to. From the outside it looked condemned, but once you entered, you smelled shea butter and freedom. The room was lit low. It felt ancient in its being. It had a secret door that only The Kept could find.

The Kept were a group of misfit women and queers. A secret society. People with brain powers — memory that couldn’t be erased. Special humans who were outlawed from reading books. No one was the same, but everyone was the same.

Once you got through the passage, the warehouse opened up like an old-fashioned library — hard-copy books floor to ceiling, colors and lights hitting every spine, every book made to feel unique and special. It was a joyful work of art. It looked like a painting of the past, the way a 1983 library might have looked if it had superpowers. The colors helped you smile naturally. The lights you felt from the inside. The books flew to you as if they knew you wanted them before you could even speak it.

The dark world they lived in, with all the smiles, had rules. The biggest rule was that books were banned to women and gays. Which was a sin to Trinity and Donald.

Donald, ironically, was reading about the second civil war — the war that thinned the country like ozempic did. He read about a president of America who had the same name as him. This president refused to leave the White House, causing the most devastating war among its people in years. He went down in history for being not so bright. Yet his ghost still ran the country. This made Donald think of his own name with disdain. He almost didn’t want this name after the knowing. He remembered that it had been passed down from his great-great-grandfather, which helped settle the ill in his stomach.

The warehouse was a direct fuck-you to the establishment. Banning books had always been the first move in history’s playbook, and the legacy continued. Keeping women and queers from reading was a way to keep them from gaining power. A way to keep them raising babies and giving up their bodies for sexual pleasure.

Men will be men no matter what year it is, and now that everyone was fluid, those on the LGBT spectrum got clumped in with women. If caught reading a book, you could be jailed or even put to death. The consequences were severe. Some say this was a direct result of the second civil war, where whiteness lost but misogyny stayed.

Yet Donald and Trinity would hide in this building with all the books and the other women and queers who loved to read. The books were locked behind a forcefield that Patty had built — high-tech geek, superior woman, the smartest person in any room she walked into.

She was the best of women. She was a lesbian. She had spiked hair that stood straight up, and her skin was darker than most in the Americas. She was fuller-figured but muscular at the same time. She had a deep voice for a woman — the bass in it was something that made her unique. Smarter than any man. She was masterful and kind-hearted, but don’t fuck with her — she could fight better than anyone they knew. She was a second mom to Trinity and Donald.

There was a day, when the sun shined a bit and the smiles came, Trinity and Donald went to the secret warehouse and it was hollow. It was empty. It was silent. No one there. Not even Patty.

They sat among the books, their fingers brushing in the hush between pages, carrying a tenderness neither dared name. Trinity only let Donald touch her. She trusted him. Their friendship was deep—a well of cool water drawn from years of knowing.

Langston Hughes came wiggling through the air like Black joy on a Saturday — quick, shameless, already dancing before he hit her palms. Trinity caught him and her chest opened. The book had been waiting on her grip the way a hymn waits on the second verse.

They read his poetry — words from a place called Harlem during a renaissance. They were mesmerized. Short and beautiful. A feeling they hadn’t felt before. The words hit their spirits, and their hearts pulsed to a beat that felt like rhythm and blues.

Out of a dark corner, The Fire Next Time. James Baldwin. They had waited years to read his books. He was a legend almost like a prophet. His books had never flown to them before — Baldwin moved on Baldwin’s time, and Baldwin’s time was not theirs.

Until tonight.

The book lifted slow. Slow as a tortoise that has nowhere to be because everywhere it goes it is already late and on time at once. It floated through the warehouse leaving a dust of green specks behind it — the kind of green that grows in the dark, on the back of leaves the sun forgets. It landed in Donald’s arms like a baby. He cradled it.

Finally, they thought.

Baldwin had been thinking it longer.

They kept reading, but the mood got dark. As if a warning was coming but hadn’t arrived. Trinity started to cry and couldn’t find the why, mourning as if someone had died. Donald’s chest got tight. Both moved through panic.

“Maybe we should put this book down.”

“These words aren’t like any I ever read. I think this maybe voodoo.”

“Or maybe the ancestors want us to read it.”

Donald turned the page. The words white supremacy sat on it like a thing that had been waiting.

A high note entered the room. The kind a human and a dog could hear. The kind a body hears in its molars, in the small bones of the inner ear, in the fillings of the teeth. Not a sound — a frequency. It rose. It rose past where the eardrum stops listening. It rose past where pain begins. Trinity grabbed her own face. Donald felt his jaw lock.

Then the lights went out.

Not dimmed. Out. Sudden and sharp, like the room had been slapped by a hand bigger than the room. The dark sat on them. Two seconds. Three. Five. Long enough for Donald to know that the dark was thinking.

Then the room shook.

The floor moved under them sideways and back, the way they had read about in books — earthquakes, fault lines, the planet remembering it had a body. Neither of them had ever felt one. Neither of them had ever felt the ground refuse to be ground. Glass somewhere shattered. The books that had been floating on the magic of this place stopped floating. They fell. Hardcovers slamming, paperbacks fluttering down like wounded birds, a thousand pages opening in the air at once, and Trinity ducked under her own arms and Donald threw his body over hers without thinking.

The bulbs came back. Low. The wrong color. Yellow where there had been white. The frequency was gone but the air still rang with it, the way a bell rings after the strike, and Trinity’s ears were bleeding from the inside without bleeding on the outside.

The books did not rise again.

“Langston brought joy. This one is bringing demon.”

“No. This one is important.”

Then Baldwin said radical love.

The room hummed.

A different sound this time. Lower. Warmer. The kind of frequency a body recognizes before the ear does. Then the body answered. Trinity’s heart beat against her ribcage like it was trying to leave. Donald’s chest pounded so hard he looked down at his own shirt to see if it was moving. It was. The heartbeat was a pain — not the sweet kind. The kind that comes when a body is being asked to hold more than it was built for.

The light oozed easy like a Sunday morning. Not bright, but open, like a door had been left ajar somewhere they couldn’t see. The books on the floor twitched.

A few of them lifted. Two inches, three. A paperback turning over in the air like a sleeping body deciding whether to wake. Trinity’s shoulders dropped. Donald breathed for the first time in an hour, and his heart — finally — slowed.

Then Baldwin’s words moved on. The warmth went with them. The books fell back to the floor — softly, this time, almost apologetic — and the haunting closed over the room like weather.

But Trinity and Donald had felt it. They knew now what could be done. The medicine had a name.

“This shit is scary.”

They kept reading, and the room and the lights started to flicker. Baldwin’s words were Black, unapologetic, poetic — smarter than anything they had ever read. Each word gripped them and held onto their ribs until they couldn’t breathe. Squeals and squeaks filled the room — sounds that had never been heard there before. The noises showed off. The haunting was crushing like ocean pressure on a submarine. It was as if the world was a mouth and was gobbling them up. The smell of shea butter went away and became a smell of Blue Magic hair grease and relaxer. The smell was a burning. This book was powerful, they agreed. They kept reading. Somewhere across the city, the descendants of President Donald were lacing their boots. The bloodline that lost the war but kept the country.

A cracking noise came from the back. It sounded like fire on a stove and smelled like a hot comb to the head. This smell was something they were not used to, but had imagined when reading books about Black hair. This smell was awful, they thought.

“Somebody is here. Patty?” they screamed. “Patty?”

But no — it wasn’t Patty. It was the armed forces. Men in big smiles, tiny hats, and boots with a high heel. Fashionable, for the government. The smiles, big and painted, showed through the glass that covered their faces. Protective gear peeked out of the uniform with sharp edges. These humans with white teeth gleaming marched outside the soul. Their boots fell where no rhythm lived — not on the 1 and 3, not on the 2 and 4, not anywhere a body could clap to. Which felt purposeful and terrifying at the same time.

They were caught. Caught with a book. Execution was in their future.

Trinity had been here before.

The square. Her parents. The Buried Smile method. Her father’s hand found her mother’s hand — the last thing they chose.

Then the smiles came. Slow, then all at once. Her mother’s mouth curved first. The smile settled in and stayed. The eyes were still her mother’s eyes. That was the part Trinity could not put down. The smile belonged to America. The eyes still belonged to her.

One tear. She did not choose it.

Donald stood beside her the whole time — not watching the square. Watching her.

She memorized those smiles so she would never mistake them for the real ones.

She never did.

The smile execution was their fate. A neural override locked the face into the regime’s standard grin while the body was dismantled, piece by piece, in the open square. The smile would hold. The smile would not know the body was leaving. The smile would be the last thing to fall.

After the eyes.

Broadcast to America. And America would watch and smile, the way America had always watched and smiled. The way it watched the lynchings. The way it watched the fires. The way it watched the bodies fall.

A nation with its mouth open in the same shape as the dying.

The past haunted their body and control was the only want in the room. The loud sound of boots pounding brought the clarity of the now.

For a moment the body froze. The way prey freezes. The way you stop moving and pray the thing in the room can only see motion.

The men marched closer, which caused even more panic. They hit a few buttons that no one could see — the emergency code Patty had given to all The Kept. Donald hit the code with a swiftness while staying locked on Trinity’s eyes.

The smiles fell off the men’s faces. The floor fell out from under them. Then they were falling. Stomach into throat, throat into mouth, mouth open around a scream that did not have time to leave. Feeling as if fear and joy were lovers.

They landed hard. The room was small and looked like an apartment from the past — no tech, just white walls. Cold in appearance. It was isolated and smelled of collard greens, ham hocks, fried chicken, and something soulful. The smell made them hungry. They took a breath together at the same moment, like twins who shared one breath in two bodies.

A light shifted on. Hints of rainbow, but all the colors weren’t a rainbow. The room softened. A voice haunted the room. It was Patty, from an intercom. Her deep resonant voice entered the space.

“If you made it to this room, stay put. We have been found. Do not leave. You must not leave. Hit code beta-beta-dot-alpha-phoenix and food will appear. You are safe now. Sit your ass down. I know my people, and you want to fight. STAY. You are Kept now.”

Trinity and Donald felt solitude. With no books, their spirit was sunken. They wanted out but courage wasn’t their friend yet. Yet. The word they held onto.

Fourteen days went by. Maybe. Who knows. Time was not their friend.

Time stopped meaning what time means. There was no time-keeper in the room. Most people wore a wrist device frozen on the moment that mattered most to them — the only personal possession the regime allowed. Patty had not given them one. Patty had not needed to. So they became the clock.

Trinity sat with her back to the wall. Then Trinity was on the floor. Then Trinity was upside down on the cot, locs spilling toward the ground. Then Trinity was sitting again, arms wrapped around her knees, like maybe holding her own body would teach the body something it did not yet know.

Donald did the same thing in the corner. The same hours. Different positions. A man trying every shape he could remember and finding none of them fit. They did not look at each other. Looking would have made it worse.

Patty was smart — plenty of food and drink and music. But no books. There was a record player, the kind they had only read about in books, with a woman called Sarah Vaughan ready to play. They decided to try this peculiar device. The needle dragged across the record with a rough scratch, the sound sharp enough to make them flinch. Sarah’s voice swarmed the room, haunting their spirits in a way that felt both strange and sacred, as if something deep in the soul had been awakened by the sound. They ate soul food. Their tongues did somersaults and danced as the collard greens, fried chicken, and macaroni and cheese slid down their throats. They had only seen food like this in the pages of a cookbook by a woman named Sylvia from a place called Harlem.

When the music stopped, Trinity started speaking Langston’s poems from memory. They started to smile and forget where they were. Forget what had just happened. Donald recited James Baldwin, and fire grew within them. The words spit out like he had written them himself — like James had come into his body and he was possessed. His eyes would occasionally flip to the back of his head.

They decided the next day to come back up for air and escape. To live above ground or die above it, but not to wait below.

“Patty, we love you, but we got to go back,” Donald said to the hollow walls.

Trinity hugged Donald — the first time he had ever gotten a full embrace from his friend. The first hug from his sister in spirit. It was a powerful uprising of two souls finally touching each other’s light. Shining bright in the blood flow, creating more energy than blood relation itself.

The decision was made. Their bodies refused them. Then their bodies came back, slower. But the ones who came before them had not survived for this. They had survived for them.

The next day came, and they hit the code that zapped them back up to the streets of the world. Nothing had changed. Everyone smiling, walking by, as if America was perfection.

They walked down the alley that leads to the smoke lands. This land was for all the misfits — the place where gays and women were free. They decided to be brave and go. Patty had a way to get there, but they couldn’t find Patty in her usual spots. They decided to cross on their own.

The smoke ate them.

They had been walking — they had been walking for what felt like an hour, maybe two, maybe their whole lives. The smoke was not weather. It was a substance. It got into the lungs and stayed. It made the eyes water and the skin slick and the brain forget what the last sentence had been.

The government had killed the GPS signals in 2050. You crossed with help, or you did not cross. Patty was the help. Patty was not here.

Donald coughed. The cough came up wrong. There was iron in his throat. He looked at his hand and saw a smear of red and could not remember when the bleeding started.

The smoke did not care.

“Trinity.”

She had stopped.

Her face was tilted up toward something he could not see. Her eyes had closed. Her shoulders rose, slow, the way a wave rises before it knows it is a wave. Her hips swayed once, twice — not hers, not exactly, like a hand he could not see was rocking her from underneath.

The smoke around her went still.

The birds in the smoke — there had been birds, he had not heard them, but now he heard them stop — went quiet. The trees, ghostly in the gray, halted whatever sway the wind had been giving them. Mother Earth pushed up through the dirt and laid herself against Trinity’s back like a woman holding her daughter.

Trinity breathed out.

Lightning hit her in three places. Frontal lobe. Parietal. The hippocampus humming behind her ears. Three branches of one tree striking at once, white-hot, and where the heat passed she could see — not with her eyes — the path, the wire, the thin spot where the smoke gave up. A map made of knowing. The knowing had always been there. Every woman before her had carried it folded in the body, unused, because they had been told the body was for other things. Trinity unfolded it.

Donald saw her face come back. He saw what she was now.

He grabbed her hips with both hands like a child grabbing a mother’s coat in a crowd. He did not ask. She did not explain. She moved in quiet spirals, grounded as roots beneath wet soil, her body remembering a language older than sight. Like an animal that trusted the earth before the air. She moved, and he moved, and the smoke around them—for the first time since they had stepped into it—moved out of the way.

The smoke thinned. A figure stood waiting where the smoke had been. Mixed race like the rest, but his whiteness was more apparent — strange-colored blonde hair, blue eyes, olive skin. This man was assembled wrong.

“Hey, kids. Where you headed?” he said.

“To the smoke land.”

“The smoke land? Why do you want to go there?”

“To read. And be free.”

“My name is Belial. I can help you get there.”

“Nah, we’re okay. We know our way.”

Belial smiled. He held the smile too long. The silence stretched until it was an instrument. Then he opened his mouth, and the voice was not from now.

“You are The Kept. We have watched you — quiet as dust settling on a forgotten altar, patient as night pressing its ear to the door.”

Trinity and Donald grabbed each other’s hand. Sweat slick, grip iron.

“And now the hour has come for you to reckon with what you owe.”

Donald pulled Trinity behind him. Protector was a language he had never spoken, but his body knew the verbs.

“The debt remembers, even when you pretend not to. And it has come to collect.”

But they didn’t know it — Belial was the head of the American military.

Trinity grabbed Donald like a cheetah.

She did not decide to. Her body did. The same body that had read the smoke. The same body that had read the earth. Now it read the gun, and she pulled Donald sideways, and the first bullet split the air where his face had been.

Belial fired again. Trinity moved. Belial fired. Trinity moved. The bullets came up out of his fingernails — long, lacquered, snapping like little snakes — and Trinity’s brain ran ahead of his hand by half a second every time. Her cortex was lit up the way it had been in the smoke, but tighter now, more violent, the lightning hitting one branch of the tree at a time as Belial chose his next round. Extreme focus. The asexual brain that had never spent its bandwidth on hunger was spending it now on living.

Until.

Belial fired from his shoe.

The bullet came up from the toe of his boot, and Trinity — her eyes on his hands, his face, his mouth — did not see it coming. None of the women before her had ever needed to watch a man’s foot. The shot caught Donald in the chest like a punch from God. The bullet pushed through the steel plate he carried next to his heart. It hit Kindred right in the center. Octavia ate the bullet.

Then the force came.

Donald flew back. The faces came with him. His great-great-grandfather first — a face he had only seen in photographs, dark-skinned, stern, alive in a way photographs are not. The original Donald. Then his dad — close enough to touch. One tear moved out the corner of Donald’s eye. Then the book absorbed the metal but not the velocity, and Donald slammed into Trinity hard enough that she heard her own wrist before she felt it.

They went down together. Tangled. Trinity hit the pavement on her hip. Her wrist bent in a direction wrists do not. White heat ran up her arm. Donald’s weight was on her chest. He was breathing wrong.

Belial was already on them.

He shoved Trinity back into the ground with the flat of his hand, and the wrist screamed, and Trinity made a sound that was not a sound — something underneath language. Donald heard it. Donald grunted low, animal, and threw his body onto Belial with the weight of every man he had not been allowed to be.

They rolled. They wrestled. Belial got Donald under him.

Donald, as if in slow motion, looked into Belial’s blue eyes — the gaze more tender than it had any right to be.

Belial stayed on top of him, holding him down, their pelvises pressed together. The world tilted, slipped into something darker. He lay there, eyes deep in Donald’s soul, muscles tight against his. It was erotic danger — an impossible collision — something that slid into the moment before it could be stopped.

Donald had never seen a man look like this, and Belial looked ready to take him. All of him. The sensation in Donald’s body confused him; the body reacts to scent and breath before the mind can name it.

Then he saw Trinity.

Three feet away. On her side. Her wrist twisted under her. Her eyes already on his — and the horror in them cut through the haze the way a slap cuts through water.

Their faces came together across the pavement, dirt in their mouths, eyes meeting eyes, and the words came out of both of them at the same second — words they had swallowed the day they read Baldwin, words that had hummed the room into glow, words their bodies had been carrying since that afternoon waiting for the moment the bodies would need them.

“Radical love.”

The air around them hummed.

Donald came back into himself.

His knee drove up into Belial’s groin with everything Donald had ever been told he was not. Belial roared. Donald shoved him off. Belial swung. The fist passed where Donald’s jaw had been one heartbeat earlier and hit only air.

A frequency moved through the smoke. Lower than the gun. Warmer than the dirt. The kind a body recognizes before the ear does. The smoke around them shifted sideways. Something opened in the gray.

Patty came out of it.

Her voice came first. The deep resonant bass of her, the bass that had haunted them in the safe room, now bigger because it was in the open air, now unfiltered by intercom, now here.

“Get the fuck up off my children.”

Then her body — soot-streaked, blood on her shirt that was not hers, gold tooth catching what light the smoke would give. She hit Belial like a verdict made flesh.

He went down.

He stayed down for one whole second.

“Get out of here,” she said.

Belial got back up. Patty said, “Go, children, go!”

Donald said, “No. I can’t leave you.”

“The smoke land is near. I got this. Go, my child.”

He ran through the smoke, through the smiles, and through the pain, and got to the other side. Patty’s face in the distance. Out of breath and tearful — that was the moment. Fear was the breaking.

Trinity found Donald in the midst of this land. Smoke land was the opposite of a wound. Flying cars left color behind them in the sky. Faces did what faces do when nobody is watching for the wrong expression. Books floated in windows through air. Movies on the sides of buildings. AI walking amongst the people — voices made of static and music, sitting in cafés arguing about poems alongside humans, picking apart a stanza like family at a Sunday table. Canada, they called it. Smoke land was no longer a myth.

Every year on October 29th, they lit a candle, ate soul food, listened to Sarah Vaughan. Both lifting a glass.

Trinity said, “Never forgotten.”

Donald looked silently and clinked his glass to hers.

They would begin to speak to the ancestors together in prayer, in gratitude, asking for a sign from the heavens. Trinity’s voice cracked open the silence. She asked God: “Is she still alive?”

She couldn’t bring herself to say her name. The tears would come.

Donald sat pretending to stay strong in the asking.

The wind blew. Each year, just the sound of soil hitting rock. The silence had learned their faces.

This year was different.

This year a low-pitched voice said, “My children.”

They turned and looked out — ominous, hardened — drawing breath because air was the only thing left to hold. No one was there. Only smoke rising from the soil, and —

END

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We get into all of it. The difference between Black queer culture and white queer culture. Religion and how we hold it or let it go. Shame and whether it ever leaves. Desire, the scene, family, representation, sex, and the things we are tired of explaining. Then rapid fire, then a wild card that catches everybody off guard.

No press release. No safe answers. Three men telling the truth out loud.

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Black gay pride is more than a rainbow and a fist.

Black gay pride is everyday.

Black gay pride is the boy who survived.

Black gay pride is Trump not in office.

Black gay pride is touching a Black man’s hand and holding it tight, not letting anything get between it.

Black gay pride is Moonlight. The play and the movie.

Black gay pride is Black skin on Black skin. Two men intertwined. Hearts beating next to each other. The breath that enters my tongue when we kiss.

Black gay pride is the black gay scene that has gone extinct.

RIP the Warehouse.

RIP the Octagon.

Black gay pride is reading E. Lynn Harris in your mama’s living room, hard as a hymnal, scandalized and saved at the same time.

Black gay pride is the bruise and the balm of my friendships—the proof that we kept loving each other with knives at our backs.

Black gay pride comes in all shapes and sizes and colors and religions and politics and ways of thinking.

Black gay pride is my mom, when I was seventeen, buying me a Valentine’s present to give to my boyfriend.

Black gay pride is the choir sanging on a Sunday — the ones running your church while you pretend not to know.

Black gay pride is the pastors who celebrate us and don’t give a shit what people think.

Black gay pride is watching Black men kiss in the middle of the park like history never once told us not to.

Black gay pride is a soulful brunch with the homies.

Black Gay Pride is Brooklyn swagger and Harlem memory—our joy dressed loud enough to survive the century.

Black gay pride is loving trans humans.

Black gay pride is the trans and brown folks who stepped in front of the po-po at Stonewall.

Black gay pride is a holiness too authentic to perform, too alive to be anything but itself.

Black gay pride is surviving their stereotype without shrinking our shine.

Black gay pride is writing Black queer fiction.

Black gay pride is Lena Waithe.

Black gay pride is Jackie “Moms” Mabley.

Black gay pride is rolling my neck, but only when I want to. And ready to beat your ass if you step to me wrong.

Black gay pride is Dreamgirls. The Wiz. Once on This Island.

Black Gay Pride is a revolving door that won’t stop turning—Black, curious, and ungovernable—refusing every careful hand that calls it broken when it is only free.

Black gay pride loves sports and Alvin Ailey.

Black gay pride is the smell of a Black man. The fullness in his lips. The wide nose. The round ass. The muscle in his thighs.

Black gay pride is soft and hard.

Black gay pride is Paris Is Burning.

Black gay pride is the allies who aren’t afraid to open their mouths.

Black gay pride is the curl in my hair. The bass in my voice and the falsetto that floats clear.

Black gay pride is the Jellicle Ball on Broadway.

Black gay pride is Bayard Rustin.

Black gay pride is James Baldwin.

Black gay pride is RuPaul.

Black gay pride is Colman Domingo, Billy Porter, Justice Smith, Jeremy Pope, Tituss Burgess.

Black gay pride is me.

Pride is me.

Black is me.

Black gay is me.

I am the motherfucking Pride march this year.

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WITNESS ME WRAP MY BREATH AROUND THESE WORDS.
YOU DESERVE TO HEAR THEM OUT LOUD.
YOUTUBE LINK BELOW.

YouTube

The curtain does not fall on me.

It waits.

Has been waiting on me for years.

My heart skips like a scratched record.

I face ninety-nine problems and a mirror daring me to break it.

And that mirror is the only thing in this building still willing to look me in the face.

Shame wears a crown it sharpened itself. Older than me. Older than the woman who birthed the man who taught me how to wear it.

My step daddy’s fists wrote hymns on my skin and called the bruises love.

Said it like scripture.

Said it like he meant it.

And maybe he did.

That is the part that will not let me sleep.

I carry his house on my back the way my grandmother carried her good china. Careful. Two-handed. Knowing one wrong step would shatter something nobody in this family could afford to replace.

Nobody asked me to carry it.

I woke up one morning already holding it.

Worthy.

That word went extinct in this house.

Silence ate it.

Silence does not blink. Silence does not breathe. Silence waits. And waiting is its own kind of teeth.

People call. Voices thick with a tenderness they cannot translate. They call me lazy.

They do not know my body has staged a mutiny and my mind is the one holding the gun.

I am not lazy.

I sit in the chair by the window.

I do not open the window.

I do not close the curtain.

I watch the light move across the floor the way other people watch television.

Hours pass.

The light leaves.

I stay.

The chair is warm where I have been sitting.

The chair is warm where I have not.

And now I know what has been sitting beside me.

Now I know what has been wearing the second warm spot like a coat.

Depression is a hustler in a tailored suit. Soft hands. Slick mouth. Talks you out of your own soul before you notice the deed got signed.

It gentrifies your mind. Evicts your joy. Calls the ruin progress.

It glides in. A thief with keys. Smooth and silent.

Depression does not rob you all at once. It takes the music first. Then the appetite. Then the names of the people who love you, one by one, until the phone is just a piece of glass that lights up and asks nothing of you that you can answer.

It takes so gently you mistake the taking for rest.

You thank it. That is the part that should scare you. You thank the thing that robbed you because it left you too tired to count what is gone.

Depression is the voice at the back of the ear whispering die slow, baby, take your time, while your thumb is still scrolling, still smiling, still posting the selfie with the good light.

Depression does not knock.

Depression already had the keys.

I have been sitting here a long time.

Longer than today.

Longer than this body.

The man in the window is watching me back now.

He has my face.

He is smiling with it.

I am not.

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GO SIP THE COMPANION PIECE BELOW

I. PRETTY RUIN

Boyce James Richardson was born with whiteness swimming in his blood. Just enough to make his skin the color of summer wheat, his hair a mess of loose curls that caught light like wire. But his nose, his lips, the width of his shoulders—those told the truth.

Blackness lived in him loud as church bells, even when the rest of him whispered.

Homewood raised him rough. The kind of Pittsburgh neighborhood where you learned to move like water between parked cars, where running wasn’t exercise but survival. Boyce ran every day after school, a private spy ducking low, heart hammering against his ribs.

Not feminine, this boy.

Not obvious.

But something about him registered as different in a way the neighborhood didn’t have language for yet. The kind of different that made certain men look twice.

The kind that made him a target.

His mother did what she could. Worked doubles at the hospital, left dinner in the microwave, kissed his forehead before her overnight shifts. She thought she was protecting him.

She didn’t know her boyfriends waited until her car turned the corner. Didn’t know about the hands that found him in the dark—hands that moved like they had permission, like his small body was something they’d already paid for.

Touch meant love.

That’s what Boyce learned.

In seventh grade, Mr. Haynes kept him after art class. Told him his drawings were special, that he had talent—the first time anyone had said the word to him like it mattered. When Mr. Haynes’s hand moved from his shoulder to his lower back, Boyce froze. When it moved lower still, something in Boyce’s belly went hot. Not quite pleasure. Not quite fear. Confusion thick as August air.

He didn’t tell anyone.

The touch felt like caring. Like finally being seen.

By high school, Boyce had built walls. Quiet but edged, the kind of boy you didn’t test. Still, his face betrayed him—pretty in a way that made people uncomfortable, made them want to break something in him just to prove they could.

Pretty like a girl, a boy hissed once, fist connecting with Boyce’s jaw while his other hand lingered on Boyce’s hip, squeezing.

Violence and tenderness knotted so tight Boyce couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

He graduated barely. His GPA was trash, but his art portfolio got him into a state school on scholarship. Painting became his religion. He studied Basquiat like scripture—those wild crowns, that urban mythology, the way Jean-Michel turned pain into power on canvas.

Boyce wanted that. Wanted to be seen through his work while staying invisible in his body.

And sometimes, late at night in his dorm room, Boyce felt watched. Not by danger. By something older. A warmth in his chest he couldn’t name. Shadows that moved with him, protective. He’d shake it off, blame it on too much coffee, not enough sleep.

He didn’t know his dead were already gathering.

II. TENDER POISON

Ten years later, Boyce was someone. Not famous, but known. His paintings hung in galleries from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn—raw, visceral work that made critics uncomfortable in the best way. Urban landscapes where graffiti bled into portraiture, where Black boys wore crowns made of barbed wire and broken glass.

He met Belial at an opening in Manhattan.

Belial moved through the crowd like heat—light-skinned, eyes that burned amber in certain light, sex written across his body in a language Boyce thought he’d sworn off. Models were never Boyce’s type. Too polished. Too aware of their own beauty. He liked his men dark—deep, rich brown that made him want to stare—and steady. Smart. Present.

Belial was none of those things.

But when Belial touched his arm—just a hand on his wrist, casual—Boyce felt that old heat rise in his belly.

That old lie:

touch means love.

Your work makes me feel something, Belial said, voice smooth as cognac. I don’t know what yet, but something.

The relationship built faster than Boyce had words for. Lesbian fast—toothbrush in the bathroom by morning, keys on the counter by week two. Belial moved into Boyce’s Bed-Stuy loft without asking, filled the space with his laughter, his body, his need. And Boyce let him. Made room. Made excuses when Belial stopped looking for modeling gigs, when the couch became his permanent station while Boyce worked fourteen-hour days in the studio.

Boyce had spent thirty years building walls. The kind Black boys learn to build when the world teaches them their bodies belong to anyone with hands and a hunger.

Then Belial’s hands.

They burned.

Skin so hot it should have been impossible, but Boyce pressed into the heat anyway. Let those feverish palms map his body—neck, spine, chest, the soft parts he’d learned to protect. The burning spread through him like something holy. Like laying on of hands. Like deliverance.

Every place Belial touched, the past caught fire and burned away.

Boyce breathed. Deep. The kind of breath his people know—the one that comes after surviving, after making it through one more thing you weren’t supposed to make it through.

This was love.

Had to be.

What else could feel like this?

When Belial held him, Boyce didn’t ask questions. Didn’t wonder if burning was supposed to feel this good. He just was—Black, alive, held, free.

For the first time in his life, touch felt like burning freedom.

Sex was complicated. Boyce liked touch—needed it, even—but penetration froze him. The memories came back too fast: hands in the dark, Mr. Haynes whispering you’re special, that boy’s fist and palm working him over. So they did everything else. Mouths and hands and friction, Belial’s skin always feverish against his own, always unnaturally warm.

Belial never pushed.

Until he did.

The night before Boyce’s big commission—the MTA wanted his work in six subway stations across the city, his art made public for millions—Boyce was in the studio, sketching. He was painting love. The kind that transcended. The city and Belial tangled together in bold strokes, something beautiful and unbreakable.

Belial came up behind him. Hands on his shoulders, lips on his neck. That familiar heat spreading through Boyce’s chest.

Tonight, Belial whispered. Let me have all of you tonight.

Boyce turned from the canvas. Belial’s mouth tasted like smoke when they kissed—gentle but insistent, like something had burned its way between them and became breath.

His body held contradictions: skin dark as wet earth where shadow fell, catching light like polished stone everywhere else. Face echoing a dozen ancestors at once. The kind of Black beauty that made Boyce forget to be careful.

They moved to the floor, paint-stained canvas beneath them. Belial touched him like prayer—fingers tracing collarbone, palms pressed to chest, mapping every inch with reverence Boyce had never known. Their bodies moved together, that friction Boyce had always kept as his boundary, suddenly feeling like home.

Belial’s skin burned against his own—feverish, persistent. Like standing too close to July sun.

You feel that? Belial whispered against his throat. That’s us.

It felt holy. Black on Black, skin on skin, a love the world had spent centuries calling crime. Pressed together on paint-stained cloth, it felt like what salvation should be. Like maybe Boyce had finally found someone who wouldn’t take more than offered.

Belial worshiped him with mouth and hands until Boyce’s breath came ragged, until trust built where suspicion used to live. The warmth in his chest expanded—not the ancestor warmth, something softer.

Permission to want this.

Until Belial shifted, hands gripping Boyce’s hips.

The pressure now felt like poison.

Boyce tensed.

Wait—

Belial pushed.

No. Stop.

Belial’s hands tightened on his hips, holding him down. Boyce tried to twist away, but Belial was stronger than he should have been.

Unmovably strong.

Unnaturally strong.

Stop—please—

Belial pushed harder, something dark flickering behind his eyes, something that didn’t look human anymore—

And then the world stopped.

Light poured into the room from nowhere, from everywhere. Boyce’s body convulsed, not with pain but with power. He felt them before he saw them.

His mother, her face young and terrified, a man’s weight on top of her.

His grandmother, the mailman’s hands ripping her dress in the alley behind the church.

His great-grandmother, dragged into an alley on a Pittsburgh street, a white man’s breath hot on her neck.

His great-great-grandmother, bleeding in the big house, Massa walking away like nothing happened.

Four women.

Four violations.

Four generations of stolen choice.

They formed a chain—hands linked, eyes blazing—and the chain wrapped around Boyce like armor.

No more, they said without speaking.

This ends with you.

The power surged through him, volcanic, unstoppable. Belial flew backward, slammed against the wall hard enough to crack plaster. His eyes flashed red—actually red, like coals—and his skin started to smoke. Not metaphorically. Actual smoke, curling up from his arms, his chest, like he was burning from the inside out.

Boyce— Belial’s voice fractured, layered with something else underneath. Something ancient and furious.

The light intensified.

Belial screamed—a sound too big for his body, too many voices at once—and then he was gone.

Not running.

Gone.

Ash where he’d been standing. The smell of sulfur and burnt roses.

Boyce collapsed on the studio floor, shaking. The women were still there, translucent now, watching him with eyes full of grief and pride.

His mother touched his face. He couldn’t feel it, but he felt the weight of it.

You carry us now, she said.

Use it well.

Then they faded.

And Boyce was alone.

III. GENTLE WEAPON

The MTA commission became something else after that night.

Boyce painted protection. He painted the women who saved him, their chain unbreakable across six subway platforms. Four women holding hands, stretched across tile and concrete—faces rendered in bold strokes, eyes that followed you no matter where you stood on the platform. Their mouths set in determination, their linked hands forming an unbreakable circle.

Some commuters walked past without noticing.

But others stopped. Stared. The ones who knew what it meant to need ancestors you’d never met to save you from becoming another statistic, another silence.

Survivors stood in front of Boyce’s murals and wept.

Boyce didn’t paint love anymore. Not romantic love, anyway. He’d stopped believing in that particular myth.

But he painted power.

He painted survival.

He taught workshops for kids in Homewood, in Bed-Stuy, in all the neighborhoods where boys like him learned to run.

He could feel the chain now, always. A warmth in his chest, a watching presence. The ancestors didn’t leave. They lived in him, moving through his hands when he painted, rising in his belly when he sensed danger nearby.

One night, many years later, Boyce walked through Homewood for the first time since he’d left for college. The streets looked smaller now, less threatening.

He saw a boy—maybe thirteen, light-skinned, pretty in a way that would get him hurt—running between parked cars, fear etched across his face.

Boyce stopped walking.

The boy glanced at him, ready to run.

Boyce held up one hand. Palm out.

Friendly.

Safe.

The boy stopped.

Something passed between them—recognition, maybe. The way survivors can spot each other across a crowded room. The way people who carry chains in their chests know when they’re standing in front of someone who carries them too.

The boy’s shoulders dropped. Just slightly. The fear didn’t leave his face but something else arrived.

He wasn’t alone.

They stood there. Just looking. Witnessing each other.

Then the boy nodded—small, almost imperceptible—and walked away.

Not running this time.

Just walking.

Boyce stood there a long time, feeling the chain hum beneath his skin. The ancestors were watching. They were always watching now.

He walked back to his hotel, and just for a moment—less than a heartbeat—he thought he saw Belial’s reflection in a darkened storefront window. Those amber eyes. That cruel mouth.

When he turned, nothing. Just his own reflection staring back.

He touched the glass.

It was warm under his palm. Feverish, even.

Boyce smiled, something sharp and knowing.

I see you, he whispered to the empty street.

The warmth in his chest answered.

Not comfort.

Readiness.

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ORIGIN

Author’s note below.

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The hallway wasn’t long. The hallway is never long until it is.

He signed in at the desk. A skinny white woman with glasses came out.

J.R.?

He said yes.

You’re up next.

The way they always say it. Like the next thing coming for you is something you asked for.

He nodded and started his ritual. A little prayer mumbled like grandmothers used to mumble over pots, asking nobody and everybody at once. Headphones in. He made playlists for every character, songs the character would listen to, a way to block out the noise before walking into the room.

A handsome guy came out smiling, almost his doppelgänger, curly hair, lean muscular, racially ambiguous, the type of pretty that made you understand the industry’s appetite at a glance. It was time.

He had done this so many times. He was ready to shine.

The skinny white lady walked him into the room. It was cold. One camera. An X on the floor for him to stand on, the way they used to mark the spot where the body fell. He took a breath, smiled at the casting directors, the smile he had practiced in mirrors since he was a child, the one that said

I am not a threat. I am the answer.

They asked him to slate his name.

The room went blank.

He said his slate in slow motion. The room spun. Flashes of want and need flooded him. All the work of finding the character through music went out the window. Something else came in. Something older. Desperation, that old church lady who shows up uninvited and sits in your seat. Money wasn’t flowing. He had gotten fat. Opportunity wasn’t what it used to be. The thoughts flashed in the cold of that room like lightning in a house with the windows open.

The head of casting leaned in.

Are you okay, J.R.? Any questions about the scene?

She had a foreign look about her. Short hair. Cool vibe. The kind of edgy chick he loved. His people. This should have relaxed his spirit. It didn’t. Nothing relaxes a body that has been holding its breath since boyhood.

He started the scene. The red light from the camera watched him like a sniper from a long distance, the way the world has always watched Black boys, waiting to see what they’ll do with the rope they’ve been handed. He stared at the light. Words came out of his mouth. Until they didn’t.

Breath was lost. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. A seesaw. Words took a back seat in the car. Stopped coming. Did not come.

The skinny white girl and the edgy foreign woman blurred into one mouth, opening, closing, opening, sound coming out the wrong way. The walls leaned in. The X under his feet started to drift. His tongue swelled and his throat closed and his palms went wet like a fever breaking the wrong direction. His heart was not in his chest anymore. His heart was in his ears, knocking, knocking, knocking on a door nobody was answering. The cold of the room turned hot. The hot turned to drowning. He could not find the bottom of a single breath.

What the fuck is happening?

Why can’t I do the job I have been doing since fourteen?

Why am I failing when I need it the most?

That is what the doctors call it. What I call it is the body finally telling the truth the mouth has been lying about for thirty years.

She came into his spirit and took him out like a voodoo doll being poked by an enemy nobody could see, an enemy who had been there the whole time, sitting in the back pew, waiting. He started to cry. Body slopped over. All he remembered was casting saying,

Go out in the hall and get some water.

He left feeling the world had ended.

He is me.

Me is J.R.

J.R. is I.

I am him.

I was panic.

I am not my disorder.

I didn't know myself.

I had no name.

Rock Bottom.

And rock bottom was Hennessy on an alcoholic’s breath.

You fuck with my career and my money, I run for help. I ran. I ran to God first. That's what the people said do. God. She couldn't handle it alone. I ran to therapy. Together they danced.

I had no idea how trauma could show up under pressure, how it could sit folded up inside a man for decades like a love letter he never opened, only to bloom in the cold of an audition room with a stranger asking his name. Trauma I had never looked in the face of. Black. Gay. Hit, punched, jumped, touched, passed down, abused, and convinced I was okay. Hiding behind Broadway shows and TV gigs, behind the eight count and the off-book, behind the standing ovation and the reel cut tight enough to convince even me. When that dried up, the disorder sat down across from me and refused to leave.

So I did the work. Hard work. The kind that empties a man before it fills him.

To stand here and write this today.

I am not perfect.

Honestly.

HONESTLY.

Honestly a third time for those in the back.

It is mental health awareness month and I am fighting for air. Social media lies. I won’t. I fight for breath sometimes more than others, and right now, as I write this, the spiral is present and the darkness is in the room with me. I take my drugs. There is no shame in the bottle on my nightstand.

I am here though. Standing. Day by day. Moment to moment. The truth is the only thing that has ever kept me alive.

I have lost too many to suicide. Black men who said see you Sunday and did not. Black men have a stigma about therapy, and my voice, I hope, finds someone who needs to hear that it is okay to get help. That the room you are afraid to walk into may be the only room with a window.

The hallway is still there. The X on the floor. The red light. I walk past it every day now, the memory of that room, and some days the door is closed and some days it is wide open and the cold comes through. I do not pretend the hallway is gone. I just keep walking. And on the days I cannot walk, I sit. And on the days I cannot sit, I call somebody. And on the days I cannot call, I write. And the writing is a hallway too, but this one I built myself, and the light at the end of it is not red and it is not watching me. It is mine.

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Read what happened after the audition.

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Oh Travis,

my heart’s runaway, the one I lost back in the day. I was singin’ in Mamma Mia, you were rockin’ Hairspray. We loved — so real, so raw, so deep. You touched parts of me no one could reach, memories I still keep.

✦

You had me rollin' with laughter, you made me believe. You were my anchor, my dream, the love I couldn't conceive. I adored your shy smile, that unbreakable grit, how you'd stammer, then storm the stage with pure fire lit. When you sang, it was holy, like a blessing from above — a voice wrapped in kindness, a spirit stitched with love.

✦

But then, your mama’s words hit like stones from the sky: “If you’re gay, I’ll disown you” — her voice rang high. She called you a sinner, forced you to flee, and just like that, you slipped away from me.

✦

Now you’re wearin’ a ring, a wife by your side, three kids in tow, and a life you can’t hide. I don’t wanna assume, don’t know if you’re bi, but you chose to live mom’s truth, and that I can’t deny. Now I’m left here wonderin’, empty, still bruised — if I’ll ever feel what you lit, if my heart will be used.

Do you think of me, Trav?

Do I linger, just a ghost?

Are you happy, at peace, or do I haunt you the most?

When you hold her close, do memories stray?

Do you kiss her, but feel our yesterday?

Damn, Travis.

You got away.

Bi? or Gay?

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AUTHORS NOTE:

Behind the Poem: What I Never Said Out Loud

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I walked into the dark gay space already bracing for whatever version of myself was about to show up.

They print your face on the ticket. High tech. Credit card. Bougie right up my alley. The gays are doing the damn thing. I paid, collected my portrait, and turned into the hallway. The smell hit me first. Sweat and poppers. That specific combination that means you have arrived somewhere honest. The music was old school house with a beat that did not ask permission, it just moved through the floor and up into your chest and settled there like it lived there. The hallway was dark the way a secret is dark. Not absence of light. Presence of something else. I let my eyes adjust and kept walking.

I decided to go upstairs where the crowd thinned and the air had a little more room.

There was a sling.

I whispered Werk to myself and kept walking. Curious about the contraption in my face but not ready to be curious out loud. At my age I am something like born again. New sexual journey. Judgment had to wait outside with the coat check. My insides clutched their pearls and gasped but I did not let the sound be audible. I looked. I have always been a voyeur.

By the time I got my drink the sling was in use. A blink one second too long and there it was. A man in a harness, leather, jockstrap, suspended and open while another man worked a furry whip across his ass with the kind of authority that said this was not their first conversation. That ass was turning red. I mean red red. Nobody around me looked. I looked. Not from arousal but from the specific awe you feel watching someone live inside a freedom you are still learning to pronounce. Damn, I hope that poor ass did not hurt. Although by the look of things, that was entirely the point.

Then my brain slipped. This some white people shit.

The man turned around and was decidedly not white. Biracial, beautiful, unbothered. And there I was, a whole Black gay man, perpetuating the exact stereotype I spend dinner conversations dismantling. The club was already teaching me things and I had not finished my first drink.

The harness confused me when I was younger. Now I see one on the right body and something in my chest understands a language I was never formally taught. The leather sits in a way that even writing about it does something to me.

A man approached me later in the night. Muscles. Dark olive skin, beautiful dark skin, the kind that made you think Egypt or somewhere ancient and warm. A smile that arrived before the rest of him. He looked at me and asked, easy as breathing, are you into frotting? Frotting? What the fuck is that? I blurted it before I could stop myself. He laughed. Not at me, with me, the way beautiful men do when they find your ignorance charming instead of disqualifying. He explained it. Two men. Bodies pressed together. Friction without penetration. Intimacy without the permission slip people assume gay sex always requires.

I filed it away next to everything else I am learning. Frot. Side. Pig play. Wolf. Soft Top. Sounding. Gooning. The vocabulary of desire keeps expanding and I am keeping up the best I can. The community is getting savvy and specific and I respect it. Figuring out what you like has always been the project. The terminology just makes the map more honest. I go where the body leaves me. My best understanding of myself right now is that I am a side until I am in love. Foreplay is the whole country. When you get my heart I will cross the border.

The drinks plus the anxiety medication crept into my spirit the way warmth does, slow then all at once. Next thing I knew I was dancing. The floor was packed with every kind of body. White, Black, bears, twinks, jockstraps, skin, old, young, all of it moving in the same heat. I felt the music in my bloodstream. I gyrated my hips. I watched people, some off the beat, some locked in, some barely stepping, all of them free. And for one moment I was free too.

Until I wasn’t.

A man put his hand on my dick and I removed it. I kept dancing. Another man pressed himself hard against me from behind and called it dancing. I turned around. I moved away. I found another pocket of floor and stood there trying to locate the feeling I had just had, the one that felt like freedom, because it was gone and I needed to know where it went. The music kept playing. Bodies kept moving. The lights kept doing what lights do in those spaces, suggesting rather than revealing. And I was standing in the middle of all of it, surrounded by liberation, and felt like the loneliest animal in the woods.

I left that night with one question I could not put down.

How do we build consent into gay spaces without dismantling the very freedom that makes them sacred.

I say this as a walking contradiction and I want to own that before I go any further.

In my young abandoned exploration of Black queerness, I am almost certain I reached for an ass before I ever offered a hello—like greeting and desire had been pressed into the same breath. I was never taught otherwise. That is an explanation, not an excuse, and I do not want to make excuses for myself. I knew better then, even if I did not yet know how to live inside that knowing. I could say it was just some “cakes,” as if naming it lightly made it less real, but it doesn’t. I am choosing, now, to know better out loud.

Here is the other contradiction. If the man pressing against me that night had turned around and I was drawn to him, I might have let him stay. I might have wanted him there. That wanting would have arrived without ceremony, without words, and I would have called it desire and kept moving. So where does the line live when attraction can quietly convert violation into invitation without either person saying a single word.

We spend so much time demanding consent from the world that refuses to see us. We fight for the right to exist in public, to hold hands on a subway, to not be a target. And then we walk into the one space built entirely for us and replicate the exact dynamic we have been running from. We become the thing we survived.

I am a survivor of sexual abuse. Consent is not theoretical to me. It is architectural. It holds the whole structure up or nothing stands.

We have built languages before.

The handkerchief code, flagging, was a system born in the 1970s when gay men needed to communicate desire across a crowded room without saying a word the wrong person might hear. A colored bandana in the back left pocket meant top. Right meant bottom. The colors did the rest. Dark blue for anal. Light blue for oral. Black for sadomasochism. Red for fisting. Yellow for watersports. Each color a full sentence. Each pocket a declared position. An entire grammar of want, worn on the body, readable only by those who knew the language.

We built that. Inside spaces the rest of the world refused to acknowledge we existed in at all. We built a consent language from scratch because we had to. Because our survival depended on being able to say what we wanted without saying it to the wrong person. We were that precise about desire when precision meant staying alive.

Which means the argument that it cannot be done now is not an argument. It is a choice.

My friends say don’t go to those kinds of clubs if you don’t want to be touched. I have sat with that advice longer than I want to admit. And I reject it. Not because it isn’t practical. Because it places the entire burden of safety on the person who deserves to feel free. It tells the danger to stay and hands you a blindfold. The freedom of those spaces is not a privilege reserved for the uninhibited. It is supposed to be for all of us. And if we built an entire silent language out of colored cloth to protect and communicate desire, we can build something now to protect the people inside it.

I do not have the answer. I am not sure we are ready to want one badly enough to build it. I fear we have been here so long, in the dark, in the want, in the intoxicating permission of it all, that we have confused freedom with the right to take.

Gay liberation was never supposed to mean free to take. It was supposed to mean free to choose.

And the difference between those two things is exactly the size of a no that nobody waited to hear.

The body keeps its own record. Not in the mind. Not in memory. In the tissue. In the hips. In the flinch. In the way you move to a different part of the floor and tell yourself you are just dancing. Every unconsented touch laid down like sediment, year by year, until something in you has been rearranged so slowly you mistook the shifting for your own nature. The way wood holds the shape of a nail long after the nail is gone. Long after the hand that drove it has moved on to other surfaces. Long after the wood has learned to call the hole its own.

We knew how to ask once. We wrote the question in cloth and wore the answer on our bodies like scripture. Desire made wearable. Want made visible only to the ones already looking. We moved through rooms the rest of the world pretended did not exist and found each other anyway — not by accident, not by force, but by the specific literacy of people who had learned to read what others refused to see.

We were that tender with each other once. That deliberate. That holy.

Somewhere between liberation and entitlement, we forgot how to ask.

I want to know when we forgot that.

I want to know when we stopped believing we were worth asking for.

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What Happened After the Jungle.

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The breath kicked me in the chest before my eyes opened. Not the tender kind of waking — the kind that eases you from sleep like a hand on your back. The kind that finds you already mid-sentence with whatever is breaking you. Career. Love. The audition season that has been producing silence the way only certain silences know how to multiply — quietly, generously, everywhere you look.

I laid there and let it come.

I booked the guest spot. One episode. Showed up, was excellent, left everything on that set — and when it was over it was over the way fleeting things are always over, clean and fast, already composing itself into past tense before you’ve caught your breath. The work ended and the waiting resumed its natural position: right on top of me, in the dark, touching everything.

My agent is not God. I have practiced saying this to myself the way people practice saying things they cannot yet believe. My agent is not God. I cannot reach into the phone and rearrange somebody’s desire to call my name. I cannot build a room and then force myself inside it.

And the room I was in — this apartment, this particular morning, this life — closed in around me like it was deciding something.

I said one word to it. One word. And it was not amen.

Then I pulled the curtain back and let the Hudson in.

The George Washington Bridge was out there doing what it always does — holding. Just holding. Indifferent to weather, indifferent to what crosses it, bearing the load of the world without one complaint, without one press release about how much it has endured. I pressed my face close to the glass and whispered to this city the way you whisper to something that has put you on your back before and will again. You will not defeat me. A threat or a prayer — I genuinely could not tell you which.

I wanted to be that bridge. I have always wanted to be that bridge. The Black gay man who holds, who bears, who absorbs and does not collapse.

But the water does not care what you call yourself. The water just rises.

The painkiller called. My oldest one. The one that lives below the waist and has never once asked how I was doing before offering to make me feel better. A whole pharmacy of self I have been filling since I learned what my body could do for my mind. Not today. I closed that door. Went to my knees instead.

Not the reverent kind of kneeling. The ugly kind. The kind that has no interest in appearing to have it together, the kind that has bled through the dignity and reached whatever is honest on the other side. The kind of prayer that does not begin with gratitude because you have not found the gratitude yet and you are done performing a peace you have not earned.

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I told the universe what it already knows. I work. I have always worked the way Black people learn to work — past the point of fair, past the point of enough, past the point where the effort should have been recognized by now. I put blood in. I put planning in when the planning produces nothing. I show up to rooms that do not call me back and I suit up and I show up anyway because that is the only theology I inherited that makes any sense.

And sometimes, after all of that, I get nothing.

I said it out loud on the floor of my apartment with the bridge holding steady outside my window. The truth did not save me. But it stopped pretending to be anything other than what it was.

Then the phone pinged.

A new match. From the matchmaker.

I want to be honest about what happened in my chest in that exact second. It was not hope. Hope is too gentle a word for what moves through a Black gay man on his knees in the grey of a morning that has already tried to take him. It was something more animal than hope. Something that does not have a polite name. Something that says: see? The universe heard you. The universe was listening the whole time.

I opened the bio.

Handsome. Late fifties. An artist — the real kind, not the kind who calls himself an artist, but the kind whose work has been decided by institutions that do not make those decisions lightly. Work in acclaimed museums. Owns things. Has built things. In my head a voice arrived — one syllable, viral, accurate — oh, he got money. I laughed at myself. That is still what I am: a whole man having a whole feeling, laughing at himself for having it.

A good man, from the sound of it. I was soft that morning. I was willing.

And then I read the last word.

Caucasian.

The word hit my stomach the way certain words hit the stomach — not like pain, exactly, but like the moment before pain, when the body knows what is coming and decides whether to brace or go limp. I told that matchmaker what I wanted. I said it plainly. A person of color. I was not ambiguous because I know what ambiguity costs in a world where the default is always somebody else.

Let me be precise about what I know. I have dated white men. I have done the labor of that in a way that is not abstract — the explaining, the translating, the carrying of a context that should not be mine alone to carry. And in this particular political moment, I am too full of a specific kind of grief to make that labor look like love. I would hurt his feelings. Probably at dinner. Probably over something he thought was neutral and I could not pretend was.

Late fifties on a white man is a different country than late fifties on a Black man. That is not opinion. That is pigment and collagen and the particular mercy that melanin extends to those who carry it. Black don’t crack is not a saying. It is a family photo going back generations. It is your grandmother at seventy looking like somebody’s fine ass auntie at forty-five. It is evidence that God had a favorite and did not feel like hiding it.

Sorry to that man. He deserved someone who could meet him without all of this in the room.

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But then the other voice came in. The one that sounds like reason and is actually panic wearing reason’s coat. Nobody else is calling. Nothing else is working. What if you are building a prison out of your own preferences and calling it standards? What if loneliness and principle have been sharing a bed so long you cannot tell them apart anymore?

I put on Samara Joy.

The vinyl. The real kind with the weight of it, the warmth of it, the needle finding the groove the way certain things find each other — not by accident, not by force, but by the specific gravity of what belongs together. My young sista’s voice came into the room and did what her voice does: rearranged the furniture of my chest without asking permission, without apologizing for the sound of the moving.

She hit a note that made me jump.

I almost scratched the record.

Hell no. Not today. Not this season. Not this man.

I replied to the matchmaker. One word. He thanked me the way service providers thank you when they have already moved on — warm, brief, professional, gone. I hope we find you someone soon. The same gentle sentence. The same gentle nothing. The database he claims he has is either missing what I need or has not yet developed the language to recognize it.

Then the punch that had nothing to do with the matchmaker. It arrived the way the truest things always arrive — not from the outside, not from a bio or a rejection or a phone that will not ring. From inside. From somewhere below the ribs where the honest things live before you are ready to say them out loud.

I have been running down a flight of stairs for years. Fast and reckless, taking two at a time, grabbing at the railing and missing, hitting my head on the landing, standing up, running again. I gave it different names depending on the year — ambition, hustle, discipline, faith, the relentless beautiful refusing-to-quit that I was taught to call a virtue. It looked like strength from the outside. On the inside, it was a man falling in a controlled direction and calling it a plan.

You cannot sprint your way to grace. The stairs do not care about your credentials. The stairs only want to know if your foot knows where it’s landing.

I went back to my knees.

The second prayer was not a list. It was a release. I put the timeline down. I put the match down. I put down the beautiful arrogance of believing that effort, stacked high enough, becomes a guarantee — as if grace is something you earn rather than something that finds you on the floor when you have finally stopped running toward it.

SURRENDER

The bridge outside my window holding like it has always held, whether I was watching or not. Not everything that holds is made of steel. Some things hold in the breaking. I found a man I almost did not recognize. Tired. Still here.

The floor knew my name.

The floor can fucking lose my number.

Ten essays. A Black gay man refusing to be neat about his longing. If you have been here from the beginning, thank you. If you found your way in somewhere in the middle and went back to the beginning, thank you twice. If someone forwarded this to you and you read the whole thing in one sitting at two in the morning, baby, I see you and I love you for it.

I am taking a little time to live. To remember what it feels like to have an experience before I have to write about it. To get back to my fiction. To touch some grass. Maybe touch some other things. Don’t ask.

Go back and read from Essay 1 if you haven’t. These things stack. You cannot walk into episode seven of a telenovela and act like you know what’s happening.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. Thank you for letting a lonely Black gay man be loud about it.

That meant everything.

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(Photo taken in Barcelona—caught by accident, my chin lifted, eyes reaching for God inside La Sagrada Familia).

The release was more than I expected—the sex, the forgiveness, the letting go of everything that once held me back. Creating this audio felt both sacred and seductive, like truth with a pulse. I loved writing this essay because it is the closest thing to me—unfiltered, unafraid—and as I spoke the words, the images of that day rose up, vivid and insistent. I felt it. I released it. I lived it again. Listen—hear the heartbeat beneath it all.

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He had been circling for weeks.

The way men circle in spaces like this — eyes that say everything, mouth that says nothing, plausible deniability stitched into every glance like a garment he could take off whenever the room was empty enough. Short. Dominican. The kind of body that is built by genetics and confirmed by discipline. A regular. One of the ones who knows your schedule before you do.

The gym is my sanctuary. Not the hands locked in prayer kind. Not the bleeding at the altar kind. The real kind. The kind where anxiety enters with you at the door and somewhere between the second set and the third, it loosens its fingers from your throat and lets you breathe. The kind where your spirit migrates — dark to light, heavy to weightless, clenched to open — rep by rep, like prayer without having to find the words. The gym I go to up in Washington Heights is full of Dominican men carrying secrets the way some men carry wallets — close to the body, never far from reach, always knowing exactly what’s inside but never showing you unless the room is empty enough.

I do not kiss, he told me once. Said it like a commandment. Like the eleventh rule Moses forgot to carry down the mountain.

But everything else? Everything south of the mouth, south of the confession, south of the place where honesty lives?

That was on the table.

I let him set the table.

He knelt like a man who had done this praying before. Not to God — to gravity. To the pull of something lower than faith and more honest than any scripture I have memorized. I stood as the congregation of one. The sermon had no words. Just warmth arriving where cold had lived so long I forgot what temperature my body was supposed to be.

I became a river he followed upstream. Every nerve a tributary he found without a map. My hands gripped iron — not weights this time, just something solid to remind me I was still in a room and not dissolving into the sound I was making that I did not recognize as my own voice. A hymn I never learned. A language my body spoke fluently that my mouth had been too proud to admit it knew.

His mouth did not take — it anointed. As if I were a body brought to the altar, half-written and waiting, and he came with a knowing older than my name. The ink was not hurried; it moved with purpose, with covenant. And I felt the borders of myself give way, my edges loosed and overflowing, until there was nothing left in me that had not been touched, marked, made whole in the undoing.

My body arched without asking permission, answering a rhythm that felt inherited, remembered — like standing too close to a fire and realizing too late you were the thing being lit.

It came like a commandment. Not asked. Not negotiated. Delivered. The kind that splits the sky and leaves you no choice but to fall to your knees and call it holy.

I grabbed his head like I was laying hands — and everything I had been holding, every prayer I had swallowed, every unnamed thing living in the dark of me, released into the universe like a soul finally finding its way out of the body that had been keeping it.

There was a moment — and I am not exaggerating, diary, I swear on my ancestors — where the architecture of the room folded in on itself. The mirrors stopped reflecting. The fluorescent guilt above us flickered and gave up. And I was somewhere above the earth. Suspended. Carried on the back of something that tasted like recklessness and absolution at the same time. Just the present tense. Just the verb. Just the doing of a thing I needed done.

The irony lodges somewhere between my sternum and my conscience and refuses to move. He drew a border in permanent ink and called it intimacy. As if a line in the sand is the same thing as a soul. As if a man can refuse a country with his mouth and still claim citizenship with his knees.

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I relaxed. For the first time in months — maybe longer — I relaxed. Let Mr. Chocolate go. Let the loneliness go. Let the matchmaker and his empty promises and his spring fever prophecy go. The moment was fleeting. Temporary. A window opened and closed in the same breath.

It was what I needed.

Not love. Not romance. Not the forever I keep writing about and praying for and building altars to in every essay. Just this. Just a body that asked nothing of me except to be present. Just a man who did not need saving and did not need to be saved. Just release. Pure. Thoughtless. The kind of quiet that only arrives after the noise has been fucked out of you — and I mean that in every sense of the word.

The gym. Sanctuary. The place I go to remember I still live here. In this body. In this fight. In this life I keep choosing even when it does not choose me back. And now this too. This unnamed room I did not know was there until I needed it. Sanctuary is wider than you think. It opens as you enter it. Starting tight until it becomes holy. The body takes what it needs in the dark. Speaks in tongues that only you and God know from the soul. And it reminds you — without apology — that you are still here. Still alive. Still hungry in all the ways that matter. The body does not make promises. It only makes memory. And some memories live in the muscle long after the moment is gone.

I walk back into the world. Muscles gleaming. Carrying something new in the body that the face does not show.

Usually after release I kneel. Turn to God. Let the guilt arrive like a chaperone who was waiting outside the whole time. Let the shame do what shame has always done — remind me what I was taught and who taught it and how long I have been carrying the lesson like a stone I forgot I picked up.

Not today.

Today I stood. Upright. Unashamed. Baptized in something that had no church and no doctrine and no elder to tell me it was wrong. My body had preached its own gospel and I had listened and for once — for one unrepeatable, unreligious, unrepentant moment — I believed every word.

Becoming.

The question that haunts me.

I don’t know.

And God forgive me—

I don’t care.

THE READ: (because reading is fundamental, chyle)

One more Sunday left to taste my entire body of loneliness. Open up and get ready as I end this series.

If you just found this — go back. You can’t walk into the finale of a telenovela and act like you know what’s happening. Start from Essay 1 and work your way to me.

Share my gay shit with your lonely ass friend.

I am so naked after this essay. But worth every piece of anatomy because you deserve the entire inches of truth.

See you next Sunday, boo.

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LOVE! LIGHT!

In Memory of Clifton Oliver (RIP). John and I miss you.

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Months went by.

Say it with me like a funeral.

No call. No text. No bio sliding into my inbox with a stranger’s measurements and hopes attached. No “we found someone we think you’d love.” No nothing. Just silence from a man I paid actual money to find me love, and the slow realization that I might have been scammed by cupid’s unlicensed contractor.

I sent emails. Polite ones at first. The kind where you use words like “following up” and “at your earliest convenience” because you are a grown man who handles disappointment with dignity and grace.

Then I texted my friend. The one who gave me the card. The one who said “broke actor discount” like he was doing me a favor while sliding me toward financial ruin disguised as romance.

And then the rage came.

Not the cute kind. Not the performative kind you post about on social media with a filter and a caption about boundaries. The real kind. The kind I recognize from my youth — from my hood, from Homewood, from the concrete that raised me before it tried to bury me. I was the queer kid. But I put the Vaseline on my face and threw hands like the rest of them. You learn early. Pretty don’t protect you. So you protect the pretty and then you fight. When the rage came it did not arrive soft. It arrived with a whole address and a list of names.

That kind of rage. The kind that lives in your knuckles before it reaches your brain. The kind that tastes like iron and sounds like your mother’s voice telling you to come inside before something happens.

Okay. I am being dramatic as fuck.

But hey — at least the imagery is there.

The truth is, the rage was real but the man holding it is different now. Peaceful. Adult. Rational. The kind of angry where you don’t break things — you write strongly worded emails at two in the morning and CC yourself so there’s a record. The kind where you rehearse your argument in the shower like closing statements at a trial nobody asked for.

I emailed the matchmaker. Told him I wanted my money back. One date. One. In four months. ONE DATE. I paid for a service and received one date with a man my body refused to want and a receipt that mocks me every time I check my bank account.

And yes — it was the discount rate. The broke actor special. But let me tell you something about broke actor money: it is not less valuable because there is less of it. That money was a sacrifice. A gamble placed with funds I could have used for headshots, for acting workshops, for the subway rides to auditions that are slower than my love life. I teach acting to pay the bills between television gigs, and teaching does not pay like television. Every dollar I gave that man was a dollar I pulled from the part of my life that keeps the lights on and the dream breathing.

So yeah. I wanted my money back.

But here is the part I did not want to admit — not to the matchmaker, not to my friend, not even to this diary that has heard everything else.

The rage was not just about the money.

Mr. Chocolate broke something open in me. I said it last essay — my self-worth is shit. The confidence is a costume. I wrote those words and meant them and now I have to wake up every morning and live inside the man who admitted that out loud. Honesty? It does not heal you. It just rearranges the furniture so you can see the mess you have been stepping over for years.

I check his Instagram. He posted something. Looking like that. Looking like everything I want and nothing I deserve and I hate that I divided those two things in my head just now without even trying. I close the app. Open it again. Close it. My thumb has its own agenda and my dignity is losing the vote.

That queen owes me money, though. Where are my dates?

See — that. Right there. That is what my brain does. I am mid-spiral about my self-worth and my brain snaps to the matchmaker like a channel somebody changed without asking. Welcome to the architecture of a day inside my head when the depression finds a key I forgot I gave it.

I am angry. No — I am sad. No — I am angry about being sad. No — I am sad that anger is the only emotion that makes me feel like I have a spine. Wait. Mr. Chocolate. Why am I thinking about Mr. Chocolate? I should eat something. When did I last eat? I should call my mother. I should not call my mother because she will hear it in my voice and ask questions I cannot answer without crying and I refuse — REFUSE — to cry before noon on a weekday.

This is what it sounds like inside my head, diary. This right here. This erratic, spinning, sharp-then-soft thing that changes direction before the sentence ends. I am sitting in one chair but my mind is in seven rooms and every room has a different version of me pacing the floor. One room is furious. One room is bargaining. One room is checking Instagram again. One room is praying. One room is laughing at the absurdity of a grown man falling apart over a matchmaker and a stranger with good skin. One room is completely empty and somehow that is the loudest one.

Maybe I am not angry at the matchmaker. Maybe I am angry at myself. For still believing. For still being this man — older, still inside this dream, still rehearsing for a role the universe has not cast me in yet. My becoming feels far away. Not around the corner. Not on the horizon. Far. The kind of far where you squint and convince yourself you see it moving toward you but it might just be heat rising off the pavement. A mirage dressed as a future.

Hope left today. Did not pack a bag. Did not leave a note. Just walked out like it had somewhere better to be. Sunk to the bottom of something deep and cold, and me standing at the surface watching the last bubbles rise where breath used to be.

But I could go to the gym. I could shower. I could put on something sharp and trick the mirror into believing I am fine.

But Mr. Chocolate, though.

Stop.

Spring seems impossible from here. And I am supposed to believe in love? The number lives in my knees before it lives in my mouth. It lives in the way I calculate risk now. In the way I do the math on how much time is left versus how much I have already spent waiting. Still becoming at this point in the game. Still. As if the body does not know what the soul refuses to confess. As if want were not its own kind of weather. Most mornings I cannot tell the difference between faith and a wound that learned how to walk.

Black boy joy is out there somewhere. I know it is. I can see it spinning in the distance like light through a kaleidoscope — bright and fractured and always just one turn away from forming something whole. But today it teases me. Stays close enough to touch and pulls away the second I reach. Like a hand on my thigh that never grabs. Just rests there. Warm and useless and cruel in its almost.

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I need God. I need meditation. I need peace. I need something to break so I can stop breaking quietly.

Or maybe what I need is already in my own hands. Maybe the star does not wait to be named. Maybe it has been burning this whole time and I keep mistaking the heat for damage. Keep calling the light a problem. Keep apologizing for taking up sky. As if the sky ever asked permission. As if the soul was made to shrink into the space somebody else decided it deserved. The light left home thousands of years before anybody looked up. Which means it was already here. Already survived the dark. Already made it. Before the witness. Before the name. Before anybody decided it was worth seeing.

Every thought arriving like a guest who did not RSVP — some bringing wine, some bringing weapons, all of them expecting to be seated, fed, and validated before midnight. This is what grief does when it moves through a body that has not been told it is grieving yet. It does not announce itself. It just occupies. Moves in like it owns the deed. Hangs its coat on a nail you did not put there. Sleeps on your side of the bed. Marrow-deep and surface-loud. Erratic and clear. Lost and articulate. The kind of pain that does not break you open — it just makes itself at home in the cracks you forgot you had.

I am the host. I did not plan this party. I did not clean for this party. I do not have enough chairs for this party. I do not even want to go to this damn party. And somebody just walked through my door with potato salad with raisins in it, a bottle of something cheap, and the audacity of a people who have never been told no.

Do I sit in this shit? This gay shit? This familiar, warm, terrible shit that I have been swimming in long enough to know the temperature by heart? Do I let it comfort me because the dark knows my name and calls it softer than any man has in months?

Or do I get up and fight like that kid from the hood who never had the luxury of choosing to stay down?

Sometimes knowing and doing are two different countries and you do not have a passport for either.

I sit in it. I let depression win today.

I refuse. I work too hard to drown in a pool I built with my own hands. Love. Worth. Dreams. All three sit on my chest while I write, heavy as a verdict I did not ask to hear.

I call the matchmaker. And I let him have it.

Not the hood version. Not the knuckles. The grown version — the one that is somehow worse because it is controlled and articulate and delivers every word like a blade wrapped in a napkin. I read him with the full weight of my Blackness, my frustration, my Broadway-trained projection, and the righteous indignation of a man who has been waiting for love in a city of eight million people and cannot get a second date from a service he is paying for.

He promises it is the holidays. Winter. Things pick up in the spring. Spring fever, he calls it. Like love is seasonal. Like my loneliness runs on a calendar I did not agree to.

I do not trust him. But I listen. I adult. I let the man finish his sentence even though every cell in my body wants to hang up and call the bank.

After I blow his hair back, I hang up the phone.

And the world feels better.

Why does cursing someone out with your full Blackness feel this good? It should not. It is not evolved or enlightened or any of the things I tell myself I am becoming. But the soul is not interested in who you are trying to become. The soul only knows what it has been waiting to say. And when it finally says it — lord. It lands like putting down a bag you forgot you were carrying. Like your shoulders remembering they were not built to hold all of that.

Then the guilt rushes in. That poor gay human on the other end of the phone just trying to do his job. I said things. Strong things. True things. But still.

But Mr. Chocolate still creeps into my mind. I smile. I reach for the painkiller. And my hand hovers. Not reaching. Not retreating. Just suspended in the space between want and will, between the man I am and the man I keep promising myself I am becoming. My body knows something my brain hasn’t finished deciding. The wanting and the withholding living in the same three inches of air between my palm and the bottle. Flesh memory. Old hunger. The kind that was here before him and will be here after.

I sit.

And I say —

God. Ancestors.

THE READ: (because reading is fundamental, chyle)

New Black Gay & Lonely AF essays drop every Sunday night at 7pm. Subscribe. Don’t miss this.

And listen, if you missed an essay, go back. These things stack. You can’t walk into episode seven of a telenovela and act like you know what’s happening. Start from Essay 1 and work your way to me.

Share my gay shit with someone who needs it. Forward it to your lonely ass friend. Post it. Let it breathe beyond this page.

Look—writing this series makes me feel naked as hell. Exposed in ways I can’t take back. But I’m doing it anyway because somebody needs to see themselves in these words. Needs to know they’re not the only one sitting alone wondering if they’re too much or not enough or just cursed.

You being here? That means everything.

See you next Sunday, boo.

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to you,

to the truth—

so it lingers, ringing in your ears long after I’ve gone quiet.

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