I believe the year I joined Facebook to be around 2007. Since that time, at my peak, I grew to an estimated 15,000 friends and followers combined. A community was borne out of that space whose members I eventually coined the Gipson Gazetters, following the naming of my Facebook profile page as The Gipson Gazette.

During our halcyon days, I hosted live threads for group discussions on shows like Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder and awards shows like The NAACP Image Awards and The Oscars. We could reach more than a 1000 group comments of hilarity and thoughtful commentary. Because of the various careers I'd had in the nonprofit sector, entertainment industry, and through journalism over the last 31 years, the space attracted a mix of critics, writers, artists, academics, organizers, nonprofit workers, and just good souls. Mostly Black and lots of queer folks (and those “allied” with both). Belonging was cultivated and many there became a digital family.

This proved especially precious for people who through mobility issues, neurodivergence, or general continence didn’t have close family or easily make friends “outside.” Over the years, I received messages from Gazetters with cancer, anxiety, depression, physical disability, or just a plain ol’ introverted nature thanking me for that space and the community they found there. Their stories drove me to post daily news items and ensure people enjoyed a mixture of the bitter and the sweet in their diet for digital knowledge and entertainment consumption. It was work, but fun.

That was then. In recent years, Facebook turned into (or expanded into) META and began to more aggressively suppress free speech. First through “community standards” violations that could put you in “Facebook jail.” Later through shadow banning. In recent years, META has been explicit about not wanting hard news posts on their site, particularly if the source isn’t a paying media partner, and has been active in suppressing political posts, particularly from progressive perspectives. It has been more naked about pushing for paid, “boosted” posts and paid verified accounts, neither of which I have indulged. Accordingly, the Gipson Gazette posts have been shadow banned over and over and engagement diminished or eliminated altogether. Audience growth stalled and then declined. For progressive content creators and curators, FB is hardly alone in responding with these negative changes among the social media platforms, undercutting the very communities they claimed they wanted us to cultivate. For several years, I like many others, learned workarounds and fought for posts to be seen and community to be maintained. Lately, the roadblocks have only increased and the fight too time consuming. It’s easier to leave and start anew.

Luckily, a year ago I started this Substack account, but admittedly haven’t been as attentive to it as I have my Facebook space, since FB was my first real digital love after MySpace. That’s over now. I have invited my FB family to join my emerging SubStack family (very different communities, by the way). They have positively responded, but aren’t always clear on how this space works. I want to help all of us navigate this space, since it’s not a very intuitive one. This video will help educate my FB Gazetters transitioning to this new space to access the content I would normally do over at FB:

This article is an example of a long form The Gipson Gazette article, not to be confused with chats or notes. I will post similar daily news items on both my Substack chat and notes to ensure a flow of information and engagement similar to what I did on my FB profile wall for The Gipson Gazette. This will help ease the transition for my formerly FB Gazetters. I encourage all to both follow me (@LMichaelGipson) and subscribe (The Gipson Gazette) to ensure most of the core information on Substack is accessible to you, whether you’re a paid subscriber or a free one. Notes will be used for “Live Thread: Watch Discussions” for TV series, movies, and awards shows that are group watched so that comments are free flowing and easy to follow.

Final Note: if you click on my profile picture you will be taken to my Substack notes, ignore the first post because that will always be whatever was the latest long form article written for The Gipson Gazette. All of the daily bread post available for your replies and restacks will be under that first post marked “Latest Post” (which is a bit of a misnomer, since the latest is under that pinned article). Meet me there daily.

If you’ve moved over here from Facebook, welcome. If you’ve been here, know you’ll be seeing a lot more of me as this will be The Gipson Gazette’s primary home. Until Substack decides to act brand new too. LOL.

Summer can be a fun, yet busily aggressive and an even stressful time of year, especially with all that heat. This mix created more than a decade ago was intended to provide a more chill and relaxing way to experience the summer. As with all of the original LMG Soul Eclectic Mixes, the music podcast’s goal was to celebrate the music of this century that still honored classic Black American Music (BAM) traditions. Going through the original playlist, I’m delighted by the vocal showcases throughout. Enjoy! And, if you enjoy a particular artist or song, please go and support them by purchasing or streaming more of their incredible music.

LMG: The Soul Eclectics’ Summer Soft Playlist

1) Footsteps in the Dark (ft. Frank McComb) – Eric Essix (0:48:05)

2) Punch Drunk Love – Eric Roberson (05:22)

3) Always With Me – The Dangerfeel Newbies (09: 56)

4) Clarity – LaMenga Kafi (13:23)

5) So (feat. Todd Oliver) – Kwabs (18:05)

6) Be Free (DJ Jazzy Jeff & James Poyser Remix) – Moonchild (21:11)

7) Naked Souls – Nick Price (24:54)

8) Don’t Ask My Neighbor/Nothing Even Matters – Aaries (29:14)

9) Loved – James Tillman (32:30)

10) Wait for the People – James Chatburn (37:05)

11) Everything I Need – Jarrod Lawson (41:04)

12) The Same Love That Made Me Laugh (Wah Wah Version) – Ashley Thomas (47:22)

13) Baby This Love I Have (ft. Leon Ware)– The Decoders (51:11)

14) I Promise (M.O.N.E.Y.) (ft. Raul Midon) – Angela Johnson (55:07)

15) No Rhyme, No Reason (ft. Kelly Price) – Al Jarreau (59:27)

16) Nothing To Something – Avery Sunshine (01:03)

17) Give It Up (ft. Leon) – Loretta (01:08)

18) Last Night – Kelly Price (01:12)

19) Stronger – Tank (01:16)

20) Wherever You Are – Gene Nobel (01:22)

21) Perfectly Worthless – Syleena Johnson (01:27)

22) Lie Under You – KeKe Wyatt (01:31)

23) Resentment – Jazmine Sullivan (01:36)

24) 1+1 – Q. Parker (01:39)

25) I Look To You (Medley) – Terrell Carter (01:43)

26) How Will I Know (Live & Acoustic) – Sam Smith (01:50)

27) Green – Coultrain (01:53)

28) What It Takes – N’Dambi (01:57)

29) Paper Heart – Algebra (02:01)

30) Ghosts of Aveiro (ft. Coultrain) – PPP (02:05)

31) Camouflage – Mariah Carey (02:10)

32) Come Into My World – Rogiers (02:14)

33) Love Call – Eric Lau & Taiwah (02:19)

34) Better Than – Anthony David (02:22)

35) That’s Alright (ft. Metropole Orkest) – Laura Mvula (02:26)

36) Buzz Aldrin “Live” (ft. KORK Orchestra) – Bernhoft (02:29)

37) Somewhere Deep in the Night – Swing Out Sister (02:35)

38) Gotta Live My Life (ft. Julie Dexter) – The Dangerfeel Newbies (02:39)

39) Space and Time – Akie Bermiss Trio (02:44)

40) When White Turns To Grey – Bilal (02:49)

41) Beauty Queen – Lemar (02:55)

42) OMG I Miss You – Marsha Ambrosius (02:58)

43) Let Go (ft. Bishop Paul S. Morton) – PJ Morton (03:03)

I just finished the limited series "Imperfect Women" about two friends trying to determine who murdered their third bestie. And ...let me just say upfront that there will be spoilers in this shady review. So, stop now unless you want these reads. You were warned.

First, there are more red herrings in this mystery thang than a Dutch dinner in the Netherlands, which is the writer's manipulation that kept me in for as long as it did. Who murdered Ms. Imposter Syndrome Ma'am had me stomped. But, these women and their "friendship"? Let's just say with frenemies like these...you'll never need another true enemy again. Now, they perform friendship with each other something beautiful, but the bone deep sisterhood this story repeatedly swears they have for each other and that's supposed to anchor the series? Nerp. Not even close.

This is a story of creepy and cringe envy among friends. Coveting each other's husbands (right up to the final shot!), and being jade over each other's orgasms. Literally, wanting to be one another in a "wear their skin" alien creepshow sort of way. Ewww...

And none of these men are that dude for any of these goin's ons. I mean Corey Stoll? Seriously? Though I admit to having a thing for Joel Kinnamen back in his early years with "The Killing," but him looking a lil rough around the eyes. The one true hottie, Rome Flynn, is treated as yesterday's castoffs. When he was indignant over his mistreatment, so was I. But, these are not men worth ruining your life or freedoms over.

On the plus side, I love that Kerry Washington got to play a second or maybe even third generation rich Black girl who has Black parents (hey, Auntie Sheryl Lee Ralph!) and a very down and real Black brother in Leslie Odom, Jr. (who tells it like it T-I-Is about Miss Washington and her proclivities for da others). Usually, the Black girl in white stories has no connections to Blackness. They don't make that mistake here, and I suspect that's because Washington is one of the Executive Producers. So, good on them for making it so, because she was the other reason I stayed.

Watching Washington Olivia Pope strut walk her way through scene after scene delivering fashion, hair, and hopping on literal private jets in a moments notice is the only way and world I want to see Washington in. These whipipo she down got herself attached to from college? They bringing her down bad, and we need it to stop. I think her final moment suggests she returned to the Blacks and left them mediocre, untrustworthy whifolks alone. That said, she still needs to lay prostrate on someone's altar and beg for some forgiveness over her cringe ass actions too. She ain't gon' see the kingdom at her current sin-to-good-deeds ratio, charity or no charity until she takes it to God...or a good therapist.

Elizabeth Moss represented for the big girls in a day dress, but in all the wrong ways. Any stereotype of a big girl you can think of, they had mama play. Luckily, she's such a good actress, you let a lot of it go. Plus between June and Peggy, we're used to Moss's characters doing too much and pissing us off. But, still... Mary needs to love herself mo'. She almost got her and her babies unalived over someone else's husband she stole (how you get 'em...). This is not how you wanna FAFO in your life.

I can't say I recommend the series, but it will keep you guessing for about four or five of the eight episodes. The rest is just watching for Kerry Washington to fashion model, wide eye, and tremble lip her and our way to the lumpy finish line of all these imperfect mofos who need some Jesus and a friendship manual.

Founded to celebrate post-2000 largely independent and foreign R&B/Soul and jazz music, the LMG Soul Eclectics music podcast ran for nearly five years in the 2010s. These Gipson Gazette intermittent music posts celebrates that show’s best mixes.

LMG Soul Eclectics: “Late Spring Drive” Playlist

The Eclectic Groove Machine (starts: 00:49)

1) Nu – Idesia

2) Prototype (starRo Bossa Edit) – OutKast

3) Let It Go – Shaun Escoffery

4) In Your Clouds – MNEK

5) I Will Not Let You Go – Carmen Hendricks

6) All I Wanna Do – D’Sound

7) Being Thru The Eyes of a Child (Prelude) – The Rebirth

8) Fragments – Conya Doss

9) The Other Side – Alex Isley

10) Alright – Jordan Rakei

11) Reach Out – Mad Satta

12) West Coast – Kandace Springs

13) (A)gain – Def Sound

14) This Is Coming To – The Rebirth

15) Smile (feat. Jata) – SoulParlor

16) Anyway – ASH

17) Numbers and Steel – Electric Wire Hustle

18) Be Free – J. Cole

The Neo-Blues Movement (1:12:21)

19) #HoodLove – Jazmine Sullivan

20) Gimme All Your Love – Alabama Shakes

21) Redemption – Samm Henshaw

22) You Don’t Know — Jill Scott

23) Wish I Had Answered (new version) – Mavis Staples

24) House of the Rising Sun — Kimberly Nichole

25) Run Around — Michael McArthur

26) My Heart – Lizz Wright

27) Walk The Line – Ben L’Oncle Soul

Old Soul Made New (1:46:23)

28) No Lie – Sensere

29) Miss You (No More) – Jimmie Reign

30) Gold – Andreya Triana

31) On The Ground – Meaghan Maples

32) Another Day – Jamie Lidell

33) Wake Up To Your Love – Malted Milk & Toni Green

34) You Give Me Something – James Morrison

35) California Roll (ft. Pharrell & Stevie Wonder) – Snoop Dogg

36) I Wanna Love You – Jussie Smollett

37) On Our Way – Christina Aguilera

38) California Dreaming – Sia

Evening Drive (2:27:01)

39) Love Happens – Teri Tobin

40) You’re My Girl – Kenny Lattimore

41) Can’t Stand – K. Avett

42) Charge (ft. Anthony David) – Carmen Rodgers

43) The Line (ft. Darien Dean & Erik Truffaz) – Isma Hill

44) Watch Out – Tawiah

45) Moments (ft. Darien Dean & Mr. E) – Isma Hill

46) Let It Flow (ft. Kay - The Foundation) –Six Minutes Til’ Sunrise

47) Get It Right – Teedra Moses

48) Can We Talk – Jamie Foxx

49) Sweet Life – Frank Ocean

50) Mona Lisa (Live Acoustic) – Jazmine Sullivan

51) Be Free (Live - J. Cole cover) – Faith Evans

I’ve been intending to watch this 2023 documentary about a middle-age, gay Blatino hairdresser who decided to live out Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” in real time, even though I knew it would make me sad. Anti-Blackness and anti-queerness always make me sad, especially when self-directed. It’s wasted, unnecessary energy that can last a lifetime and offers the person drowning in it no obvious benefit or relief, not without the arduous work of self-liberation. More than David, almost everyone in this documentary that had the same botched medical procedure done is a person of color who believes external validation and distance from their natural bodies will provide them with “a new life” and a “fresh start.” A life away from oppression and towards the irresistible sun of public attention, validation, and--the dangling carrots of--possible riches.

And, once done, they do indeed get the empty calories of external attention, the brief thrill of being seen by strangers, for their light eyes’ implants in shades of “frost,” blue, green, and gray. However, their moment in the sun is brief, and reality comes crashing in through vision impairment leading to the prospect of permanent blindness. And, even when told they may rapidly go blind forever without surgical correction, without removing their implants, there is hesitancy in giving up the minor social capital of being viewed as “exotic” and unlike the others by the world.

The subjects’ traumas and insecurities that assist them in driving these decisions are laid bare, as are the trinket rewards and scraps of privilege, but the narration’s connecting of the dots is not. It leaves it up to the viewer to fill in the blanks. No one uses words like racism, anti-Blackness, oppression, etc. By leaving everything in the realm of the personal, the director pulls her punch. Leaving unspoken the systems, culture, and oppressions that co-sign, aide, and abet their self-destruction, that dangles those rhinestones and calls them diamonds, and whispers in their ear with a consistent drum that they are ugly, unworthy, and without power. But, if they can just get those eyes, lose that weight, streamline their nose, lift their breasts, round that ass, sculpt those cheeks...what riches and power might await? What humanity might you finally be afforded. The company is blamed, but so are its customers and exploited volunteers gifted free mutilations in exchange for marketing. Us? Society? We’re left scot-free.

But David and his compatriots aren’t alone in blame for their choices and the self-loathing they harbor that informs them. There is enough blame to go around and no one’s hands are bloodless. All of us as trapped in the binds of beauty aspirations.

We watched “Hedda” and “Love Brooklyn” (the latter being gowns, beautiful gowns) for Thanksgiving (as well as old “Soul Train” and “Midnight Special” episodes), hands down “Hedda” was the crowd favorite by leaps and bounds. How this isn’t the national conversation as THEE Oscar frontrunner speaks to the racism and sexism going on in the industry and country right now. Bar none “Hedda” is the best film I’ve seen in 2025 thus far that’s not named “Sinners.” Almost all of my Turkey Day guests co-signed this sentiment.

Based on Ibsen’s canon classic 19th Century womanist play, “Hedda Gabler,” writer/director Nia Dacosta reimagines the work as a bisexual triangle…no, really a pentagon of lust, love, passion, jealousy, self-loathing and hatred. Hedda is both a world class schemer and the origin story for misery loves company. A treatise on how the societal boxes confining all women, but especially queer women, Black women, and smart women of the 1950s and early ‘60s can lead to the most perverse and tragic destructions out of femme rage and frustration, Hedda checks every second wave feminist philosohical box without once feeling heavy or didactic.

To the contrary, “Hedda” is shady, campy, quick-witted, and more erudite than a 19th century novel. You can’t take your eyes off of the screen or you’ll miss a knife or screw turn that will shift the plot’s kaleidoscope again and again. The visual storytelling is unrelenting, precise, and sumptuous.

And, that’s before we get to how lush and opulent those visual landscapes all are. Cinematographer Sean Bobbit, set director Stella Fox, and art director Andrew Ackland-Snow collude to deliver the most decadent 20th Century UK party ever filmed that wasn’t an orgy. Costume designer Lindsay Pugh created gowns and suits that each told their own stories and revealed who each character was and evolved into as the evening progressed. The entire crew of “Hedda” brings their A-game and is nomination worthy.

As is the astonishing Tessa Thompson in her best performance since “Passing.” Channeling the ghost of Margo Channing from “All About Eve” and Regina Giddens from “The Little Foxes,” Thompson sports the posh Transatlantic accent that was all the rage during the Golden Age of Hollywood and resurrects the truly complex and layered villainess that hasn’t seen the light of day since Kathleen Turner as the femme fatale in “Body Heat.” Thompson’s every acting beat counts, not a single moment of her screen time is wasted or superfluous (shout out to editor Jacob Schulsinger for making sure the timing of her acting was flawlessly captured throughout), every gesture with Thompson’s Hedda matters, every calculation and expression purposeful. It’s a master class supported by the most glorious lines of Ibsen and Dacosta.

Thompson in her tour de force role has plenty of support by pentagon members Nina Hoss as her husband’s professional rival and her past…lets say “companion,” Imogen Poots as her romantic rival, Nicholas Pinnock as the Addison Dewitt powerhouse who will not be denied, and Tom Bateman as the love lost husband who tried and failed to cage the force of nature that cannot be contained. Each goes toe to toe with Thompson’s Martha (think Albee) of the British elite and walks away limping. It’s all so delicious and rich, that you’ll have to watch it twice to take it all in.

A Black woman director, a Black queer woman lead, and a story fired up by lesbian and bisexual lust, love, and control in an anti-DEI age? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised it’s not on everyone’s lips. But, it should be, because this film is the personification of “they just don’t make them like this anymore.” For their part, critics have sung its praises. Now the rest is up to you.

The Gipson Gazette subscriber chat is where it’s at. Come dish with us. Good book, music, and article recommendations welcome. Feedback on my posts are also appreciated.

Exclusively for subscribers (both paid and free) — it’s a group chat or live hangout you’ll actually want to participate in. I’ll be sharing my interests. You’re invited to do the same. Just remember that the Gipson Gazette is a pro-Black, pro-LGBTQ+, pro-womanist, pro-sex work, pro-immigrant, pro-all bodies, pro-disabilities space. So come correct. No name calling and no trolling of one another are my only chat rules. Don’t get cussed out! LOL.

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1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Founded to celebrate post-2000 largely independent and foreign R&B/Soul and jazz music, the LMG Soul Eclectics music podcast ran for nearly five years in the 2010s. These Gipson Gazette intermittent music posts celebrates that show’s best mixes.

LMG’s Soul Eclectics – “Autumn” Playlist
Soft – (00:52)
1) Without You – R’Mone Entonio
2) All The Things You Are – Tony Momrelle
3) Whole Again – Marcell & The Truth
4) Every Day ft. Aaron Marcellus, Jean Baylor, & Kirk Whalum (Aiko Roh Mix) – Meeco
5) Fly Away – PJ Morton
6) Distance – Emily King
7) Out Of The Clouds – Emily King
8) Not Today – Andra Day
9) You Go To My Head – Cassandra Wilson
10) WonderLove (ft. Chris Turner) – Kris Bowers
11) Every Time I See You (ft. Gwen Bunn) – Darryl Reeves
12) I Really Don’t Care – Bilal
13) Tenderly – José James
14) You Don’t Know Me – Jon Bibbs
15) When Your Life Was Low (Live) – Lalah Hathaway
16) Left Alone (Live) – Frank McComb
17) All The Time (ft. Jarrod Lawson) – Tahirah Asha Memory

Retro Soul Pop – (starts @ 01:20:06)
18) Midnight – Lianne La Havas
19) Wanderlust – The Milk
20) Yeah – Lewis Taylor
21) Money Is King – Lee Fields & The Expressions
22) Love You – Aaries
23) Hold On – Maverick Sabre
24) We Won’t Need Anything But Love – Sam Sparro
25) Hello – Adele
26) Hallelujah (ft. Charlie Sexton) – Justin Timberlake
27) Take Me To Church (ft. Morgan James) – Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox
28) Remember – Tony Momrelle
29) Younger (Acoustic) – Seinabo Sey
30) All Of Me – Tank

From These Roots – (starts @ 02:12:17)
31) Forgiven – Kwabs
32) Strange Fruit – José James
33) Walk With Me ft. George McCullum (A capella) – Rickey Payton
34) Carry You (ft. Kyla Jade, Pam Mark Hall, & Patsy Moore) – Tim Dillinger
35) Way Down in the Hole (“The Wire” Theme) – Tom Waits
36) Your Good Fortune – Mavis Staples
37) Brother – Kwabs
38) Favourite Worry – The Milk
39) Something Inside of Me – Robert Bradley
40) Summertime (Live) – Mica Paris
41) Love Reign O’er Me (Live) – Bettye LaVette
42) Ways of Light (ft. José James) – Kris Bowers

*A couple of the artists listed here have since been “canceled” for supporting causes and ideologies this space doesn’t co-sign. This 10 year old mix is an uninterrupted time capsule of its era, particularly of indie and rare mainstream performances and has been preserved in its original form.

“It’s about showing up and having the courage to create your own projects, to create your own space, to create your own work… If you’re not interested in doing a play in a living room, then you can’t be interested in doing a play on Broadway.” – Billy Porter

Overlooking a sparkling spring view of the Atlantic Ocean from a Fort Lauderdale hotel conference room, I sat among a group of activists and community service workers talking about art as activism and what makes that igniting mix possible when it strikes. Several minutes deep into this discussion, we began exploring the idea of something that seems obvious now but felt profound to us as we unpacked what the boom-bust history of creative movements had in common with one another when each began. For instance, what did the works of Black women writers in the ‘70s, authors and poets who formed a new era in Black women’s fiction, have in common with the Harlem Renaissance-era workers who peopled Wallace Thurman’s “Niggerati Manor” and would go on to create the iconically single-issued Fire? Or, the Black gay men and feminist women of the East Coast who comprised the first wave of Black gay and lesbian literature and documentary film in the ‘80s through the early ‘90s have in common with Georgia’s Dungeon Family that helped launch Southern hip hop and R&B in Atlanta in the ‘90s? What did socially conscious people who produced, however temporarily, societally challenging work that impacted both their culture and communities have in common?

Well, one, we determined, they weren’t the work of grand soloists operating in isolation. They were the products of collective nurturing and relationships formed by creatives for a period that helped several of its members emerge with some of their best work and shine. We also noted that each later or concurrently reached back to bring others along with them for the spoils as they happened. These short-lived crews, camps, and collectives were the origins of individual greatness and collective consciousness raising. Further, they were often done in the unassuming beginnings of living rooms and basements. Or, nightclubs and coffeehouses, as was the case with Philadelphia’s “Black Lily” series at the Five Spot or Atlanta’s Ying Yang Café that would nurture the formation of Groovement in the A and the ladies and gents who would populate DJ Jazzy Jeff’s Touch of Jazz productions in Philly. A similar thing happened beginning in 2007 with Odd Future (e.g., Syd, Frank Ocean, The Internet, Tyler the Creator, etc.) in L.A. whose genesis began in a room in Syd tha Kyd and Taco’s South Central home known as “The Trap.”

None of them began with deep pockets and sign-off from gatekeepers. These creatives gave themselves permission to just do what they could with what they had. And, while the well-heeled patron might have eventually put some duckets in the pockets of the Zora Neale Hurstons and Langston Hughes of Niggerati Manor to help further the Renaissance’s work or the major label connect that changed everything for Rico Wade and the rest of Organized Noise who’d go on to produce OutKast, Goodie Mob, and Joi in that basement, to name but a few, no one was waiting for that patron or that record deal to begin doing their work. The creatively hungry just showed up humbly in the basements and living rooms accessible to them as sites for training, critiquing, loving, collaborating, and growing. They showed up to do their work and the rest followed.

In his now viral 2013 interview at his Carnegie Mellon alma mater, actor/singer/director (and gay man extraordinaire) Billy Porter paraphrased a fellow legendary black gay elder, George C. Wolfe, to expound on his idea of the magic of living rooms:

“You cannot wait for anyone to give you permission to practice your art. You have to be practicing it all the time, whether people are listening or not. And, trust me, they’re not always listening. You have to have the courage to even speak when nobody’s listening. And, very often, most of the time nobody cares.”

Now, Porter was speaking to would-be actors and playwrights when the sage delivered these timeless nuggets for eager, milk-wet ears, but he could have just as easily been speaking to “The Sisterhood” in Toni Morrison’s literary New York who babysat one another’s children, delivered groceries to one another’s bare cupboards, and took care of each other creatively, critically, and financially, to give each other the space necessary to birth the works that would make Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and Sonia Sanchez,, among others, literary figures of incredible accomplishment when little was speaking to, for, and about Black women of the times. This movement was started in the tiny living rooms of the Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn, not in an MFA program or a Northeastern writer’s residency or Southern writers retreat funded through a comfortable fellowship, though some of those things would later come for some among them. The launch of their sweat equity didn’t rely on external affirmation or resource validation from those on high looking low to get started. They just did their work both alone, as formative creation is a solitary pursuit, and, later, with one another.

Porter could have just as easily been talking about my fledgling Black Bear Brotherhood (BBB), a social collective that was founded to provide safe space, affirmation, and fellowship for black gay/bi/SGL and gender non-conforming men of size and their allies. It started in my living room as a potluck in May 2017 with 12 attendees and now has four chapters in four different cities serving hundreds across the United States, touching the lives of thousands of socially marginalized men who get to see themselves celebrated through our various platforms. Weekly, BBB is now fielding requests looking for chapters in the areas where BGM live, for the living room or basement where they too can connect, create, and flourish among others of like minds and values. Those who have answered the call to start chapters are cautioned to think simply, to think a handful of people of like minds in a living room. I now regularly speak BBB’s origin story in speeches and interviews, not only because it’s a good narrative to have for a toddler movement whose ultimate potential has yet to be experienced, but because it reinforces the power and impacts possible with the humblest of beginnings. There is little more humbling than a basement or living room. Yet, there is magic in their modesty. Trust me on this.

Giving yourself permission to do your art or meet a community need doesn’t require an army, grant, fellowship, or sign-off from a funder, university, institution, or gatekeeper. All it requires is giving oneself that “yes,” the talents of a small group of committed people of like minds and aspirations, a little bit of hunger, a dash of resourcefulness, and a basement or living room to change the world. Indeed, it’s all that was ever needed to begin your work. Now, go do it.

Update: A version of this personal narrative essay was written and published in 2019. I’m happy to say that since its March publication in The Reckoning, Black Bear Brotherhood has celebrated its 8^th anniversary and continues in Detroit and Cincinnati, with some interest in a new Atlanta chapter forging ahead. I’ve since left Detroit and my leadership position as the head of BBB and, after a couple of years, my Board position as well. Ensuring that those who were part of the group’s formation from the very beginning, setting expectations of collective responsibility for the nurturing and maintenance of the group, and gradually relinquishing the reins to the next generation of leadership helped ensure a seamless transition and continuation of the group’s succession. Operating without ego, using the language of “our” and “we” rather than “me” and “I,” as well as creating space and structure for continuous input by stakeholders and utilizing their ideas, recommendations, and vision for themselves is critical for a group’s sense of ownership and investment in a shared community space. Those have been the critical community development and sustainability lessons taken since this essay was first published to encourage everyday people to take on the reins of community development, collective care, and mutual aid, whether for creative purposes or community well-being. In the years since, I have developed a semi-monthly Black history/culture/politics class for Black American immigrant teens in Mérida and a monthly discussion circle/game night for primarily heterosexual Black American men there as well. Both developed and maintained in my living room. Sharing this piece felt like an important kick-off for our community development learning lab in this Substack space.

This is a film about marriage. What fans of the “War of the Roses” novel by Warren Adler and original 1989 film by director Danny DeVito want is a film about the messiness and violence of divorce. No amount of great acting by this dynamic duo, and there's plenty, or witty repartee of the highest shade, of which there is also much, can change that fact. Far too sentimental when it should be acerbic and far too verbally vicious when what's desired are scenes with set piece actions, not another mean word salad. This film spends far too much time on setup and then rushes the payoff in ways that makes you wonder why they didn't just eschew the Roses moniker altogether and just tell the story that they wanted to tell: a rom com on the brutal days after "I do."

Because, the story they want to tell is only tangentially related to The Roses as we've known them before this effort. Gender swap aside, there aren’t enough violations on balance on each side of this equation to make the war of the sexes aspect of this tale work. Little to make the audience's respective sexes root for their own team. She's spiteful, with limited cause for being so. He's lost, but for reasons that have little to do with her or her actions. Both need independent therapy to work on their individual issues, not a family counselor to salvage this marriage of mutually narcissistic curmudgeons.

The supporting cast for their part is overused and hit and miss. Their so-called friends make no sense, are heavy on cringe, and distract more than add to the film's humorous mix. The kids are believable and inject some humor before being unceremoniously disappeared as a plot mechanic. The high tech house is funnier than everyone except the more than capable leads. Both Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman deserve better in plotting and overall storytelling, no matter how juicy the quick quips may be for them both.

Remaking a dark classic like "The War of the Roses" was always going to be a tall order for those who enjoyed its bleak comedy. Trying to give it more heart and less of the delicious actions that made the original such a fun watch, one that absolutely forced audiences to take sides, is too much of an overall miss. As the UK TV show, "Vicious," which it often reflects in head scratching reads masquerading as misunderstood affection, two hours of clever, takedown banter can only go so far and entertain so much before audiences start checking their watches and wondering what's the point of it all? Wait for streaming...and copious amounts of wine to wash it down.

I hate that I predicted the ending right from the start. I also am conflicted by the role of David Jonsson (Alien Romulus, Rye Lane) who both is a typical King Magical Negro, saving and teaching the white protagonist over and over in the piece, but also has that trope complicated as the plot progressed.

Jonsson also does the lion’s share of the good acting here in what amounts to a two-hander with Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza, Saturday Night), so thinly written are the other walking meat bags. Not that Phillip Seymour Hoffman wouldn’t have been proud of his son’s performance, Cooper is just no match for Jonsson in screen presence or charisma. He also expresses a more likited range of reactions than Jonsson, gj ing him less to play with even though he’s technically the lead.

I liked it overall, but can understand why NPR critic Glenn Weldon didn’t. As he mentioned, most of the other characters are archetypes whose dialogue wouldn’t have been out of place in a WWII movie. It is emotionally manipulative in ways you may resent as the body count adds up. Knowing I was being played, it still got me to a moment or two of the ugly cry. I don’t know how anyone empathetic or compassionate isn’t hurt by some of these young deaths, even as you know everyone for the most part has to go for this plot to work.

I think this could have worked even better and been more enriched as a limited series where you got to spend time with a handful of these boys in their real lives and in the dystopian story world they inhabit to break up the monotony of the walk and repetition of the kills. They only offer one glimpse of that for one character and I think the weight of the piece is poorer for it. Nonetheless, this lean and mean version still is effective, harrowing, and unrelentingly bleak, right to the end. It’s worth your time. Just remember to bring your tissues.

As I previously mentioned on a Substack post, I was 19 years old when I began writing these Black gay short stories of what are largely tales of darkness and revenge. I didn’t know it then, but would later realize once I was done, some 13 months later, that the works allowed me to cleanse and purge myself of the traumas I had experienced throughout childhood and from having been kicked out of my family home just three years before. Out into the cold Chicago streets, not unlike the fate that awaited young Ezra at the end of “Conviction,” though for him at an even younger age. Through Ezra’s tale, I could work through the church hurt I felt at the time that was at the source of why my family displaced me into this ominous adult world at such an early age. Christianity had been at the heart of the excuse given to me as to why my family would not accept from me and of me what they’d always known to be true about me, that this son, this nephew, this cousin, and grandson was not like the rest of the boy children in our family. I was something apart.

But, “Conviction” was not intended to be autobiographical, though it borrows liberally from my childhood experiences with religion and the Black church. As a child, my family were indeed heavy church goers. My then first stepfather was not a part of the ministry as is Ezra’s father, Reverend Jacobs. Yet, my stepfather as a business owner, was well respected in a church that had its own class-based system of belonging within its hallowed walls.

My mother, on the other hand, was part of the youth ministry. She was also part of the choir, often singing leads. As her only child at the time, I was part of both youth choir and ministry, often getting assigned the lead in my mother’s church plays. From the outside looking in, we made a pretty Black middle class church family living honorable respectable lives. Its facade hid marital abuse and paternal neglect, among other quiet trials and tribulations untold by our gilded family picture frames.

My mother, having come from more humble, near secular beginnings, married into a middle-class, devout family with a long lineage in that first church home and who were well respected tithers in it. This provided both an elevated stature for us as a family, but also an elevated perch to more easily fall from grace from and into the pits of church gossip should we falter (and, boy, did we ever falter!). Having had me young and us growing up together, my mother spoke often to me as a best friend and confidant on the precariousness of her position and how uncomfortable a fit it could be for someone who didn’t always know what was expected of a churched, middle class Black woman. Especially in a setting where women’s roles were strictly outlined and respectability were the dictates of the day. She also shared with me far too much about the abuse she was enduring and the insecurities that eventually fed into a nervous breakdown that preceded the end of her marriage when I was nine. But, that would come later.

Throughout, I understood, to the extent a precocious elementary schoolboy could about both the prestige and the pitfalls of her plight, and, by extension, our plight as a respectable Black family in this small, conservative Evangelical South Side church with all its COGIC expectations and prejudices (even though this first church was a non-denominational one, helmed by a woman pastor—a rarity in those late ‘70s through mid-80s years). We all had roles we were expected to publicly play. And we did, until my mother couldn’t perform normalcy in the midst of the abnormal anymore. A lesson I would later take to heart. My mother’s abuser used the Bible to justify his abuse, pointing out passages of female submission and male head of household to force my mother into behaviors she’d been taught to believe were perverse, ‘causing a dissonance that would later be the start of her mental unraveling as their marriage progressed. Similarly, Ezra repeatedly describes himself as being abused by those who used the Bible to justify their beatings of his body as a form of righteous correction. This is reinforced in the story to add a layer of humiliation Ezra feels when he realizes he’s been beaten by those who are not, in fact, more righteous than him at all and makes his leaving a home filled with unrestrained abuse and disdain for him that much easier.

As a publicly pious family, we were expected to be seen in the church and at noon day prayer, when possible, several times a week. Sundays were an all-day affair. Whole church fastings were annual, but, as a child forced to participate, it felt like they occurred more often than they did. Choir rehearsals for fundraising concerts for the church were so frequent that it felt like just as one was ending, another was beginning. As a family we were expected to be active in recruiting others to the church. My mother did so with the zealous earnestness of a true believer, bringing both of my uncles into the fold and helping them to meet their wives. We were expected to comply with strict rules about attire (no pants for women, dress clothes for men in service), makeup (none allowed), adornments (earrings on men; surely you jest), and resisting worldly things (a restricted gospel diet from worldly music, television, and films; though my mother never really adhered to this rule as she did the others). We were expected to never cuss, so I didn’t know any curse words, or at the very least their meanings, until I was in fifth grade. By then, we’d left that church world as a consequence of my mother’s separation and divorce. So, the rules and rhythms of an old school, Southern inspired Black church presented here are baked into the etches of my soul from those early days. So are the many rituals and sayings that are now Black culture content on social media platforms, dictating an essentialist form of Blackness that only those who know will know. These elements pepper and flower the colors of the story.

The church itself, as described in “Conviction,” was my grandmother’s church, where I attended as a pre-teen after my mother left her husband and was shamed by his family’s church for doing so. My mother was also compelled to leave that initial church home, because the pastor and leadership had been complicit in knowing she’d been in an abusive relationship with her first husband and had pressured her to stay long past the marriage’s expiration date when she’d turned to them for help. Offering her perpetrator tepid counseling that he failed to attend with little consequences. She had a brief time of agnosticism thereafter, during which my mother’s mother, now a full-fledged Holy Roller after years of boys and booze, swooped in on Jesus wings to whisk me off to her church, which I promptly laid on the altar and joined. To hear Gran tell it, this was to ensure that I did not fall into whatever sin my mother was expected to be cooking up as a newly divorced woman and single mother in the world. For me, I’d begun to awaken to my sexuality and was afraid, running to her church was a way for me to be around corrective spirits who wouldn’t let me turn from God to the sin I just knew was beginning to flourish in me. Or, so my pre-teen mind believed.

Gran’s dark, wood paneled church with the padded, red clothed church pews was a clear evangelical denominational establishment where women were not allowed near the pulpit, outside of song and nursing (a role my grandmother performed in the church before eventually being elevated to the revered Mother status). The even more patriarchal shift was stunning for me given that it boasted such prominent women members as Mamie Till, the mother of the infamously murdered Emmet Till, and that Black women seemed to essentially run things even more here than at the woman-led church I’d grown up in, where men had often appeared to be in charge of the day to day tasks of running the church. Gran’s sanctuary was a wealthier church to be sure and more uptight on its face, though less strict in how its church body behaved and connected after hours. Gran’s was a house of worship that people came to and performed “church” in, while my first church home was a younger, more interconnected community that was all in one another’s lives. It was one that created its own bubble against a worldly plane of demons and darkness to be feared. I don’t remember whole church fastings or exorcisms at my grandmother’s church (though it’s possible they happened, and children were just not as expected to participate). People got the Holy Ghost with alarming regularity, keeping the white adorned ushers busy with prayer cloths and protection circles. The parishioners also often spoke in tongues, but demons were largely more referenced than seen or experienced among the congregants. So, for “Conviction,” I used the formal spaces and hallways of my Gran’s church, as well as the performative nature of parishioners who felt less “saved” to me at my prepubescent age. For the condemning energy, setting, and exorcism in the story, I turned to my childhood church, where exorcisms were a ritual I’d experienced many times and were the most feared as the purest evidence of the presence of the Devil and his minions among the body of Christ.

Though set in the small-town Midwest, there is something distinctly Southern about “Conviction.” Midwestern churches in that era of the 1970s and ‘80s still possessed the energy and culture of the South, especially in Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit. Brought upriver from members who themselves were either part of the second Great Migration from states like Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi to Chicago or just a generation removed, Midwestern churches maintained all the hallmarks of their ancestral homes. By using a small town in Missouri in the early 1970s, I could keep the familiar country rituals and language rhythms I’d grown up with, while further isolating Ezra and his feelings to a space even less informed about sexuality and more conservative in its expectations and the prominence of the church in his community’s life. To leave that space wasn’t just leaving his family or a church, but a life and a way of lensing a world you’d been taught to see as demonic, “worldly,” and out to get you at every turn over the slightest misstep. A space of sheer danger outside of the safety and sanctuary of the Black church community, which to Ezra would feel like the only community coming from where he’s from.

This is what it feels like for many Black LGBTQ+ people who grew up in the Black church, especially from that era. It’s also why leaving those spaces is so hard, even when you know the truth of who and what you are, whether you’re 14 or 74. More than walking away from the music, characters, and drama that you love, whether walking out on your own or being forced out; you’re leaving a life, not just a church. You’re stepping away from a whole world whose rules, expectations, and even hypocrises you know inside and out for a world that is foreboding in all that is unknown and unforeseen. It might be exciting and exhilarating in its offerings of various kinds of freedom, but no less terrifying in its lack of predictability. To step out of that comfort to a path laced with the fog of uncertainty takes risk and bravery, and maybe a little bit of crazy, it seems like before it’s done and even for a while thereafter.

It was important to me that readers understood that Ezra’s break from performative respectability to authentic self-love, however liberating in its final moments’ of adrenaline and epiphanies, was also one that would be deeply traumatic and difficult to navigate. Especially for someone as naïve and unfamiliar with the world outside of the Black church as this sheltered kid. Even more so if you’re coming from a small and insular Black community. I’ve been that kid and have met him many times over since in grown bodies. Coming out of these patriarchal, homophobic spaces is indeed a kind of deliverance, but deliverance into what? And what self-hating residue remains within after years or even decades of church indoctrination? Those answers take time and experience to be uncovered and can lead to the very darkness ever church prophesized against you as much as it can lead to a life of positive enlightenment and a sweet freedom, if you’re not careful and discerning. Many paths are made available for the offering and not everyone appreciates having to take on the responsibilities and accountabilities of making those choices. Not when there is a clear and ordered path already laid out for you, one where you don’t have to think, but just be obedient to. Why think for yourself and be responsible for your choices, if you don’t have to? Not that the church path is easy, but at least you know it and how to walk it.

And so some choose like Joseph. To play the game expected of them and to take the predicted road already laid out, where choice is not an option and little is left to chance. Even without fully knowing the road he’s taking at such a young age in the choice that he’s making by performing his expected role in the exorcism, Joe reveals that he doesn’t truly believe in any of these rituals or their power, only in what is to be gained and lost in not meeting others’ expectations. He has no plans to lose his place in this cherished world or in his family, at least not for long, and performs accordingly.

When I created Joe, I wanted a character that represented the person on the political Right, one who knew the church, at its worst, could be a hypocritical charade, but who performed as expected within the confines of its rules as both a form of self-protection but also as an easier path to respectability and social ascension, regardless of any interior truths to the contrary. Ezra, on the other hand, represents the Left. Those who are often true believers and are the most hurt and shocked when they realize the rules and values they were sold are not expected to be adhered to in the dark, after hours. That a game is being played and that integrity can be flexible when status or personal and professional gain is on the line. At 19, I felt that these were the ones who were the most hurt by the church (or really most institutions they believed most wholeheartedly in). Those who really believed in its preachings and teachings, and didn’t look at being a part of the church world as a strategic means to other, more enriching ends, be they power and stature or money and professional gain.

In many deliberate ways, Joe and Ezra are intentional contrasts in both text and subtext. One light, one dark. One too skinny, the other too chubby. One learned, the other illiterate. One clear eyed, the other myopic. One considered to adjacent to whiteness, the other likely treated different for being too dark. Both Joe and Ezra are avatars as much as characters for these ideas that I was toying with at a time when I was going through my own split with myself and my own spiritual and religious journey of “what now, if not Christianity?”

The decision to make Ezra neurodivergent and learning disabled was also intentional. At the time that I wrote this story, adult literacy rates were hovering around the 50% mark when combining low and middle levels of literacy proficiency. This meant that much like now, at least half the country was not proficient in literacy and reading comprehension at more than a sixth-grade level, if that. In 1972, in Ezra’s time, national measures for literacy were even less comprehensive, misleading, and incomplete, though it’s assumed to be an even worse era in many respects for adult literacy. In the 1990s, the low literacy rates of Americans were making the news and concerns about the poor quality of education abounded in newspapers and print magazines, which I ravenously consumed at the time to pick up weight in my political knowledge. Couple that with new studies being reported in the news about Americans’ Biblical illiteracy, including ones in 1994 by the Barna Group and Gallup, respectively, that showed roughly half of churchgoing Americans couldn’t correctly name the Ten Commandments or even identify who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Yet, there was an insistent demand from pulpits throughout the land for Biblical fundamentalism and literacy from people who often didn’t or couldn’t read the Bible or wouldn’t be able to understand what they read and interpret it correctly even if they could. Which meant everything most churchgoing Americans know from their Bible, they know from the culture of church or directly from the pastor’s sermons and counseling. This is why so many believe “God works in mysterious ways” is a real scripture, when it’s not. But, they’d swear they read it in there…somewhere.

The minds of teenagers’ see the world in black and white, passionately so, which time erodes with experience, restraint, reasoning, and, ideally, wisdom. There is still something to the purity of teenage logic that is beautiful and worthwhile. At 19, I asked myself how this literacy thing works if Psalms 146:3 directed something along the lines of “put not your trust in man,” particularly men in leadership and power, especially not for your salvation. So, what were the illiterate to do if the only way to heaven was to know God through a book whose rules and principles they couldn’t read? What other choice did they have but to place their faith in men they were not supposed to trust, much less entrust with their salvation, to read and interpret the word for them? And, if most of the world is illiterate and has, indeed, always been illiterate, why would God place their salvation in something half and sometimes more than half of the people of the world could never read and interpret for themselves? That would leave the vast majorities of the world’s salvation in the hands of a learned few, who could exploit that faith and belief for their own gain, which is exactly what the Bible warns people of. Which is exactly the kind of exploitation many have charged the Catholic church of committing for centuries. Still, even as it removes the middleman between Mother-Father God and God’s people, the Protestant tradition still dictates Biblical fundamentalism and adherence to its knowledge as necessary for ones’ salvation. But, how, Sway? This tension, this conundrum, this nonsensical limerick was how Ezra came to be. Someone ideal enough to be a true believer, but young enough to still question what had always been handed to him by people whose masks are slipping as inconsistent and unreliable narrators in their own lives, much less his. And yet, a boy who was also illiterate due to an undiagnosed learning disability at a time when little was understood and done about these developmental hurdles for Black boys. Ezra represented every person who couldn’t read the damn book they’d been told was essential to their salvation by people they weren’t supposed to trust, and perhaps should never trust given the evidence of their collective plunder and exploitation of this fundamentalist loophole over the centuries.

What Ezra also represents is an understanding that was then nascent as a teenage writer but is now in full effect as a 50-year-old man. That God would never require one book to be the only way to know and understand God. That God lives within you and is constantly speaking to you, whether you choose to hear God or not, or even call it God or not. Maybe you prefer to call it your gut, or intuition, or the ancestors, or, heaven forbid, “vibes.” Whatever that spirit is, it doesn’t have prerequisite courses and required reading to get to the graduation podium of heaven or enlightenment. Spirit is constantly teaching and guiding as we learn from observation and experience, no literacy tests required. Literacy is good, a skilled gift one can grant to oneself in most instances, even if denied by society. Knowledge of the Bible can be good, even helpful, just as much as it can be harmful and debilitating. Like any rich resource, it can cut both ways. And, even with all that, it’s not the only way to know God. It never has been. God is more than a book penned by “divinely instructed” men. Ezra comes to know that without the words to articulate that. He comes to an understanding of his own divinity and a belief in God’s unconditional love for him. It’s the faith of the size of a mustard seed, which is why he repeats it as he runs, as much a reassurance to himself to keep the wind at his back as it is a declaration to those who’d see this child be condemned.

I have a special love for Ezra, because I’ve been him. Unlike Ezra, I was an avid reader at an early age and highly literate. Which only meant I was asking some earnest and inconvenient questions at an even earlier age, not just about sexuality or Biblical inconsistencies, but about the hateration nature of missionary work (why are we bothering people overseas who don’t know Christ, if they get to heaven and are not penalized for not knowing him? Isn’t the goal for all of us: to go to heaven? I asked at age seven). And, why are our church rules different from other churches if we were all supposed to be Christian churches that worship the same God? And why are there so many denominations if they read from the same Bible and believe and receive that Jesus is Lord? I thought that was all we had to believe for salvation? And, doesn’t the King James Version we use (the only one we were allowed to read or reference at my momma’s church) have words different from the New International Version of the Bible that they use at Gran’s church and were these “new” writers also inspired by God too since they’re different? And, and, and... The precocious one asked a mother not well versed in any of these things at the theological level I demanded at elementary school ages. Those questions would only grow deeper and more complex with age and even more knowledge of history, linguistics, culture, and power and how they shaped such this sacred text that ruled and provided comfort to as many as it destroyed.

But, like Ezra, as a kid I was a true believer, I just thought the feelings I was expected to feel and gifts like getting the Holy Ghost or speaking in tongues would take hold once I got grown (they never did, though I did once experience some spiritual transcendence without it coming through a song. Once.). By my teenage years, I wasn’t as sure of anything, but the dogma that had been poured into me. And my spiritual liberation came through far more secular circumstances, if similarly simple teenage logic: I never felt sinful when I was actually being intimate with any boy; only afterwards upon “spiritual” reflection was there anything akin to guilt or shame. During my time experiencing male on male affection, it was as natural to me as breathing. Conversely, the only time I felt “unnatural” was when I tried to be with other girls. It was then I felt the fraud, the pretender, the performer, the sinner... And, so, I came out, first to myself and then to my family, because I understood to believe something natural to me was sin would mean my doom, and I’d already unsuccessfully attempted suicide once the year before. I wasn’t interested in repeat performances with more decisive ends. Besides, exorcisms, prayer, begging, pleading, and negotiating with God hadn’t worked in the four years I’d tried since I first was sexual with a boy at age 12. If four years hadn’t done the trick by the time I was 16, a lifetime of penance for the innate and natural was unlikely to change anything in the future. Better to accept me just as I am, which is exactly what I did. I’m forever grateful to the simple logic of a teenage mind for rescuing me, having seen so many decades older still trapped in the cycle I escaped.

Still, self-liberation came with couture price tags and no credit cards to pay for it. No church home. Only a couple of members of accepting family. And, most scarily, a life out in the world as a kid without the cover of my family and community’s protection at an age and during an era of crack and AIDS when I needed that coverage most. Luckily, the Black gay community thought I was cute and clever and embraced me, and I can’t put too fine a point on how much that first part was essential to that communal acceptance that helped spare my life. It may have been as much a part of saving me as the ancestors were in sparing me for later purpose. But that’s another story for another time.

While “Conviction” is about a time, place, and a culture set in the distant past, one far removed from our more permissive now, even 30 years later its themes and characters will still resonate with far more than they should. There are still those who prefer dictated paths than ones forged on their own with creativity and courage, despite no guarantee of positive ends. But, who are nonetheless better equipped to roll with the unrelenting, and expectant tides of change. Those who’d rather live by the rules and rule of others, rather than to self-direct their own life’s journey and spirituality. To be responsible for determining what steps feel true to them and their purpose.

Since the days of “Conviction,” there are even higher rates of illiteracy, including Biblical illiteracy, and even less effort to address either. While the nation’s churchgoing is at an all-time low, particularly among the Black and the young, the power of the white Evangelical Church in policy, practice, and, eventually, culture is at an American peak for this century and possibly the next. The nation’s people seem to be demanding more patriarchal strong-arming in their lives and paternalistic edicts that promise the illusion of safety and security in exchange for the right to determine every aspect of its people’s bodies, lives, safety, and insecurities. A Bible Belt still exists that touts a conservative version of God and Country in the daylight, exalting itself as Christlike in all deeds and behaviors, even as its states boast the among the highest rates of poverty, food insecurity, substance use disorder, HIV and other STIs, runaway porn consumption, teen pregnancy and birth rates, and some of the poorest health outcomes in the lands, in the dark. A land of perfect performance on the outside, and rot from within, forever denying the truth about itself and its history as a country, praise dancing with patriotic streamers and ill-supported faiths towards its own certain doom. Ezra’s church would be proud.

50 Year Old Creative Writing Teacher Notes to the Young Writer of “Conviction”: 1) get into the room of Ezra and Joesph faster, attention spans ain’t what they were in 1994; 2) use more smell and touch senses throughout the piece to bring readers closer into the space and its feels; 3) increase the claustrophobia and tension in the room beyond Joe’s crying and stated concerns; 4) you’re bold to expect the reader to trust you with those opening pages of interiors of an illiterate character written in the first person in dialect (that’s a lot to chew, especially for a writer readers don’t know if they can trust for a payoff); 5) there’s too much repetition in the middle, edit some of that out and trust your readers more; and 6) as an exercise you may want to write the same story in the third person and see what new things you’d add or adjust in this first person account now that you’ve got this draft of the story off your chest and out of your head. Just some suggestions to consider.

They tell me it says I’m going to hell. They say it tells them that I’m an abomination...whatever that means. I don’t always understand big words like “abomination.” I don’t know why that book uses so many big words nobody can understand anyhow, if it wants people to learn it and use it like they say. Seems to me it would want people to be able to understand it.

Wiping away the sweat caused by this hot box of a room, I look at it staring back at me all shiny and Black with gold lined pages from on top of Sister Shaw’s Sunday School desk; that “Good Book,” they call it. But, let me tell yah, it ain’t been that good to me. Every time I look up, I’m gettin’ beat for doin’ something it tells my parents I shouldn’t be doin’.

I look over at its cover and can’t help but shake a little, thinkin’ ‘bout all the times it said I was sinnin’ and I got that strap for it. I ain’t ‘fraid. Probably just the Devil climbing up my back, givin’ me the shakes. That’s what folks say anyhow, that I gots the Devil in me, or at least one of his lil demons. Hear them tell it, if I don’t straighten up and fly right soon, I ain’t gon’ have much in my future but a lake of fire. Maybe that’s why I get scared or feel funny whenever I look at that book; feel ‘shamed that I can’t ever seem to get it together and make people happy with me. All ‘cause of my lil demon.

Still, I sometimes think to myself how does somethin’ written hundreds or thousands of years ago an ocean away know anything about little ol’ me, in 1972 in the middle of nowhere Willamstown, Missouri? How could the disciples who wrote it know anything about Ezra McIntire from Cannery Street?

But, Momma swears it knows me alright. The preacher too. Since I seen my name in it befo’ as a chapter, I reckon maybe it does. I can’t say for sure. Honestly, I kinda just take folks word for it, like I do for most things. Even though my Daddy always say that a man shouldn’t take anybody’s word for anything. He say a man should know or find out what he needs to know for hisself. But, I don’t know how I’m ‘pposed to do that since I can’t read the darn thing from jump. Or any darn thing for that matter.

See unlike most folks in these here pews, I don’t have much choice, but to take folks word for it, since I’m not so good with my letters and reading and whatnot. It ain’t like I ain’t tried to know what’s in that Bible for my ownself. I tried to read what it had to say about me plenty of times. Heck, Daddy don’t even let us leave the house without reading a Bible verse out loud for God’s protection for the day, though sometimes my stumbling over the words gets them so frustrated they let me gon’ ‘head out the door without it. But, even if he didn’t I for real wanna know what it says. I wanna know what all the books the other kids read says. I’m sicka them laughing at me all the time and calling me slow and whatnot.

After momma showed me my name was in it when I was littler, made me want to read the story of my namesake, instead of havin’ to listen to the Reverend or my Momma tell me what it had to say. I picked it up and tried to read the letters, but I didn’t understand but a few of the words. Letters sometimes get jumbled up for me on the page, and folks get to whisperin’ and callin’ me retarded. Still, I try my best to make out those words over and over again since Daddy says a real man don’t ever quit. He right too, since the more I’m able to understand, the better I feel about gettin’ more of my words together. One day, I reckon, I’ll get it right.

The problem is I’m almost fifteen now and I’m so far behind everybody. Seems to me I’m far behind everybody in everything, including my Bible study. People say to me if I don’t read it, learn it, and follow its teachings, God gon’ get me. Ain’t much I can do about that today or tomorrow. I can only do what I can do and hope that God knows my heart. For now, I listen real hard to my pastor and the church elders to learn what it says and hope that’s gon’ be enough to get me to heaven. I just hope they know what they talkin’ ‘bout. Though right now everyone says if I keep carryin’ on with Joe like I do, I’m finna bust hell wide open.

Joseph is my play cousin. And, we is waitin’ in this hot as hell Sunday School room for the pastor to send us out to the prayer warriors of the church. They say that what they caught us doing is so sinful that they gots to lay hands on us. They say a lot of other things that I’m not trying to think about right now. I’d rather sit here by this window and try to catch me a breeze, since they got it so hot up in here. And, this lil paper church fan I’m flappin’ ain’t hardly helpin’. It’s so hot in here I already feel like they got me in hell, ‘stead of it being where I’m finna go. Joseph over there, sweating out his good shirt, sitting all the way across the room from me, like he scared of me or something. In between getting up to get him some water from the fountain, he rockin’ and tearin’ in the corner of that long bench, lookin’ crazy as a Betsy Bug.

Truth be told, I can’t stand to look at him. When I do, I cut my eyes, but he act like he don’t see me. What I know is, he gon’ make me get up and punch him in his chest if he don’t stop makin’ all that noise. My Daddy would say that a man ain’t gots no business cryin’ and carryin’ on like that. Lookin’ at Joe right now I gotta agree. ‘Sides, I don’t understand why he cryin’ so much for now anyway. We both done already got our whippin’s for messing with each other. We got caught and we got beat. I cried when my Daddy beat me, but there ain’t no reason to cry about it now. What’s done is done.

Maybe I’m just being stubborn, like my Daddy, or maybe I’m being a lil too proud like the passa preach against in the church. Not letting them see me shake and beg and carryin’ on. Tryin’ to act like I don’t get just how bad things really is for us right now. But, I really don’t see the point. These grown folks gon’ do what they gon’ do. I mean...I get Joe being worried ‘cause both our mommas is real mad and our daddies keep going back and forth between being real quiet and getting’ real loud. And neither one of our parents is talkin’ to the other after all this, even though they been friends for years. But, they been mad at us ‘fore now and being that we always getting’ into some kinda trouble they probably gon’ be mad at us plenty mo’ given enough time. I don’t know what to do about them being mad, but I know all that cryin’ ain’t gon’ help it none.

To tell you the truth, I’m sick of being scared and cryin’ over how I feel and what I think about when I think nobody’s watchin’ me. Sick of feelin’ sad and bad and disappointin’ all the time... Shooooooot...I feel like I cried mo’ than a body has water when they started in with that extension cord. As far as I’m concerned, they can’t do no worse to me than that. The marks on my legs still sting from my Daddy’s swing.

Joseph coughs a bit, startling me.

Once I see he’s fine, I look around the room for something that might make them feel better. But, all I see in this room is washed out pictures talkin’ ‘bout Jesus’s life, the chalkboard behind Sister Shaw’s desk, that there’s the lil porcelain water fountain with that funny tastin’ water, and our old rickety Sunday school benches that don’t ever seem to get level with the flo’. Joe gets up to get him some more water from that lil fountain, I guess to clear up his throat. But, he better watch it before he burst from all that nasty water he drankin’. Don’t nobody like the taste of that there water. Somethin’ been wrong with it for years, and Joe should know betta than to get full from it. Big dummy.

I cut my eyes at him again and start looking at the picture of Jesus up on that cross, all cut up and bleedin’ from the stakes in his hands and feet and the thorns pushin’ in on his head, just looking at all them cuts make me wish I had some of Grandma’s ointment or something to rub on my legs. I lift my dress shorts up my legs for the third time today, to see the purple and red marks crisscrossing my legs like railroad tracks. Like if I look at ‘em they gon’ hurt less. I know it sounds silly, but them marks do hurt a lil less every time I look at ‘em since looking at ‘em makes me mad. The madder I get, the less it hurts.

I’ll tell you anotha thing. The madder I get, the less scared I feel about why Joseph and I are sitting up in this hot room waiting on them grown folks to get it together. Maybe that’s another reason I ain’t cryin’ and whatnot like Joe over there. I’m too mad to cry. Every time I think about the beatings I keep gettin’ and the reasons I’m in trouble this time, I get mad at that book. I know I ain’t supposed tah have evil thoughts like these, but I can’t help it. Guess that’s the devil itchin’ after my soul again. But, I know if it wasn’t for that book, I wouldn’t keep getting’ so many whippings! Seems like lately that’s all my parents do is whup on me.

Spare the rod and spoil the child.

Well, that’s one scripture that book say that my Momma and Daddy follow to the letter. I ain’t never known what it is to be spoilt and it seems to me that I’m always feelin’ plenty of my Momma’s rod, belt, house shoe, fly swatter, you name it. But, believe me when I say it’s better to feel hers than my Daddy’s, him being so heavy-handed and all. I been tryin’ to tell Momma and Daddy that at fourteen and a half years old, I’m too old for all these whippings. I tell them that by being almost able to kiss fifteen, I’m almost grown. But, they don’t ever want to hear what I gots tah say. They tell me that I ain’t never gon’ to be too grown to get ah whippin’. I wonder if the Good Book tells them that too.

“You know we going to hell for what we did,” Joseph says, sniffling. His golden face is all red and puffy from cryin’. Ain’t said two words to me since the Reverend brought us up in here for “counselin’,” and the first thing he want to do is doom me to a lake of fire, ain’t that nigga got some nerve?

“No, we ain’t stupid. Reverend Lee says all we gots to do is repent,” I say feeling a little mean. “You need to clean all that wax out yo’ ears, and then you’d have heard the man say that to you, while you talkin’ all that mess.”

“If all we had to do was repent, then I can repent from right here. I repented after we was finished messing around anyway. I always repent after we mess around. Naw, what we did gonna take more than just us repenting. If that was all we had to do then they wouldn’t be taking us out in front of the whole congregation to lay hands on us in front of everybody we know,” Joseph says shaking his head. “Uh, uh I know what we did going to take more than repenting.”

I think about what Joseph had to say about everybody seeing the Pastor and them old prayer warriors layin’ hands on us, and I suddenly feel a bit sick in my stomach. All this time I just been thinkin’ about my parents and the people from the church knowin’ about what me and Joseph did. I ain’t even start thinkin’ about all the kids from school who was sitting out in them pews waiting to hear why Joe and me was in trouble. Now what we did was not only going to be all around the church, but it was going to be all around the school too. I pray that they don’t tell them people the reason why our parents asked the church to lay hands on us. Please, Lord, don’t let them kids find out why we in trouble. Please, Lawd!

“I don’t care what you say, Joseph! You may think you know better than me, since you got that book learnin’. But, I know you don’t know better than the Reverend, Mr. Know It All, and the Reverend say that to save our souls all we had to do was repent. And, since we both already did that, I don’t know why you over there carryin’ on like you deaf or somethin’. We gon’ be all right with God. You need to be worried about what them kids gone say about us tomorrow at school,” I say, but I sound like I know more than what I really know. A part of me wonders, whether Joseph did know something more than me about all ah this. Maybe we wasn’t gon’ be alright with God. If all we had to do was repent, then why was we in here waiting on Reverend Lee and the deacons to take us to the prayer warriors? Why was we waiting on my Daddy to embarrass us in front of the whole congregation?

I look at the door of the Sunday School room and I start feeling a little scared again. I start wondering when they gon’ to come get us. Would it be after testimony? After the choir sang? During the sermon? I prayed that they didn’t lay hands on us during pastor’s sermon. Anybody the pastor and the prayer warriors laid hands on during sermon always got embarrassed the worst. Then, they would tell the kids at school what we did for sure.

“It’s all your fault. I wouldn’t have even let you do those things to me unless you hadn’t told me it was going to feel so good. Reverend Lee is right about you: you got a demon in you!” He screams.

Now Joe makin’ me want to sock him again. He better quit yellin’ at me like that. I gets tired of people yellin’ at me, like I ain’t got good ears.

“Tuh. If I gots one in me, then you gots one too. I didn’t hear you complainin’ when I was doing it to you. And, you definitely ain’t had nothin’ to say when you was doin’ stuff to me. ‘Sides, you was the one that was always trying to rub your booty all up against me when you spent da night at my house. So, don’t try to act like it’s all my fault,” I hiss back at him.

Then, I remember where I am and get real quiet. I know we ain’t suppose tah talk about sex and stuff like that in da church, much less boy sex. I know the Lord can hear me. They say that the Good Book say that he can hear all things. I wonder if he heard Joe when he was calling out his name while we was doin’ it on Grandma’s old mattress in the attic. I can’t help but be a lil bit mo’ scared for Joseph than I am for myself. At least I didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.

“If you say we gots to do more than repent, what else you think it is we gots to do?” I ask more quiet-like.

“Well, I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess we got to promise never to do it again,” Joe says uncurling his legs from underneath his arms to look at me. I’m glad that he at least stopped crying.

“But, we both promised when my Daddy was giving us whippings. Why we got to promise again?” I ask. My Daddy said to me after he beat us with that extension cord that Joseph and me had committed the worst sin a Black man could ever commit against his family and God. I wonder why the Good Book don’t say it’s a sin for white boys to do what Joseph and I done. I bet good money if we was white, we wouldn’t have gotten beat, either. Seem to me that white boys get to do everything fun, and that us black boys always get beat if we try to do the same thing. Why the Good Book say stuff different for them than for us?

Joseph thinks about what I said about them making us promise again, ‘fore he speaks. “I guess they want us to promise again, so they know that it counted, and we wasn’t just sayin’ it to say. I mean, anybody liable to say anything when they gettin’ beat. They probably want to see if we mean it.”

“But, we both know that if we don’t say we promise again that means we just gonna get another whippin’. So, ain’t we basically promisin’ the same thing, the same way?” I ask confused.

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know,” Joe says dropping his peanut head between his knees and covering it up with his chubby little arms. I guess he don’t feel like talking about it no more. I turn to look out the window to see the sun hitting all the different colored cars parked around our church making even the dirtiest of them cars shine. Most of ‘em are used up and old. Only the pastor and some of the deacons drive nice cars, like long, shiny Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles. I can’ t wait till the next six months is over, so I’ll be old enough to get my learners and can start driving. After I get my license, maybe Joseph and me can just drive away from here, where nobody will bother us about what we did. I start thinking about if a place like that even exist, where we could go and what it’d be like for us not to talk about demons and sin no more.

“Ezra?”

“Yeah?” I say turning back to him.

“Did you mean it when you promised not to do it again?” he asks me while staring at the ground. At first I get mad, ‘cause I don’t know why he wanna be askin’ me about that now. But, then I think about it a bit mo’ and I start to smile. I know I shouldn’t wanna smile ‘cause Daddy say that the Good Book say that pride is one of the worst of all sins, I reckon second on the list after messing around with boys. And, right now I’m feelin’ real prideful, so I bite the inside of my jaw to keep from smilin’. I’m in enough trouble with God without needing to make it any worse.

“Yeah, I guess,” I say after I finally get myself to stop smiling. “Why you ask?”

“‘Cause, if you keep your promise then I’ll be able to keep my promise too, since you the only person I ever wanted to do that with. I ain’t never want to do that with anybody else but you, so now I ain’t gotta worry about doing it again,” he says looking up at me with those pretty gray eyes.

“For reals?” I ask. Him saying that makes me feel real funny inside, almost like I’m happy, but I’m scared to be happy ‘cause I know that my Daddy wouldn’t like me being happy about something like that. But, Daddy don’t know how thick and soft Joseph feel in my hand. Daddy don’t see how pretty Joe’s face is for a boy with a peanut head. And, here pretty boy Joe is saying that he only wants to do “it” with a skinny, rusty butt Black boy like me. I mean I know what he said shouldn’t matter when we in trouble and all, but hearin’ Joseph say all that about me makes me feel good, real good. It makes me want to hug him again, like I used to hug him in the attic. I start feeling sad ‘cause I don’t know if we ever gon’ to be able to hug in the attic ever again. I don’t know if my Daddy will even let Joseph come over to our house anymore, since I heard him tell my Momma that he blames Joseph for what we did. He say its cause Joe’s grandmamma was white, and her white blood done made Joe go “that way.”

“Yeah, I mean I know if you won’t try to do it to me no more, then I ain’t gon’ do it with nobody else,” Joe says to me.

“What if I can’t keep my promise?” I ask under my breath. His eyes get real big and they fill again.

“But, you promised! You gotta keep your promise to your Daddy, Ez. And, if not your Daddy, you at least got to keep your promise to God! If you don’t keep your promise then you didn’t mean it when you repented. Pastor always says that repentin’ don’t mean nothing if you gon’ commit the sin again. You ain’t even ‘pose to think about sinnin’ again like that. Yeah, you got that demon alright. I bet you sittin’ in here wantin’ to do it right now, ain’t cha?!” Joseph starts shaking his head again when I don’t say nothin’ back to him. “See, I told you that you got the Devil in you. Now you gone see to it that we both go straight to hell,” he says not really accusing me or even talking to me anymore. He just talking to the air now.

I can feel myself getting’ mad again. I don’t want to keep my promise to my Momma, or my Daddy, or to God. I like touching Joseph’s soft, golden skin. I like the way he squirm and move about underneath me when I’m in him. I like the way he feels on the inside. And, the way I feel when he say my name and he lookin’ up at me with his gray eyes. We ain’t even gotta be messin’ around, and I feel good when we together. He more than just my play cousin, Joe’s my best friend too. I ain’t never want to touch no girl the way I want to touch him. And, I ain’t never had no girl make me feel like Joseph makes me feel.

But, everyone keeps telling me that the Bible says this and the Bible says that. Everyone keeps trying to tell me that what I feel is wrong. I don’t know; it’s all just confusing me. I guess that’s the demon inside me trying to confuse me. Pastor always tellin’ me that the Good Book says that the flesh will lie to you and that the Devil is a lie, I guess that means that I’m a bad saint for listenin’. Maybe Joe is right, and we both gon’ end up in hell cause of me. ‘Cause I ain’t strong enough not to listen. ‘Cause lately all I wanna do is listen to Joe, pretty, sweet Joe.

Joe still balled up in that corner, all chubby and wrinkling up his clothes. His sobs are more quiet now. I look at the door a good long time, ‘cause I want to get up and give him a hug so he’ll stop all together, but I know if the saints walk in and see me touching Joseph there’ll be hell to pay. Suddenly, Joe jumps off that hard wooden bench and gets on his knees and starts praying. His big booty is sitting on the heels of his good Buster Brown dress shoes. The heels of his Busters are digging into the back of his blue dress pants. Looking at his blue booty makes me remember what it feels like to be inside him, and I feel my Johnson startin’ to get hard. I feel like God is watchin’ me, and I don’t want to disrespect God by getting no hard-on in church.

So, I look back out the window and begin singing a Latin church song I learned in the school chorus, until I feel my hard-on go away. I had to teach myself that trick after my teacher made me stand up in my special ed classes and I got caught standing at attention making all the kids laugh at me. Standing there listening to them laugh, I got so embarrassed that I tried to come up with some way to help me control my little man. That Latin song just popped in my head and I kept repeating the lyrics over and over, concentratin’ real hard until my hard-on disappeared. I get hard-ons all the time these days, most of the times I don’t even be thinking about messing around and I get ‘em. I wonder if the demon inside me keeps my lil man hard, or if other boys get these hard-ons all the time too? I get scared to look at theirs to see, ‘cause I don’t want the boys at school to think that I’m “that way.” I wish I could ask somebody other than, Joseph, somebody who ain’t got the same demon I got.

Joe knows why I’m singin’ my Latin song under my breath, ‘cause I told him how I got my Johnson to keep from getting hard. But, he act like he don’t hear me. He tries to whisper his prayer, but the room is so small that I can still hear everything he got to say in between his sniffling.

“Lord, please take these unholy desires away from me. And please forgive me for my sins and fornications-sniff- Lord, I try to obey your will, but my mind is weak and the flesh is strong. It’s so strong. Please give me the strength to do your will, so that I can ignore the demons inside of me that make me sin against you. Sniff! Oh, Lord, please take these demons from me so I can be whole again. Give me the will to fight; give me the strength to keep my promise to you. Give Ezra the strength to keep his promise to you too. Oh, Lord, so that we can both do your will. Sniff! Lord, please forgive us both for all our sins and please have mercy on our souls. Amen,” he says snotting between every pslams.

After Joe finish prayin’, he gets up to get him some more of that nasty water from the fountain. He drinks that water in big gulps like he is dying ah thirst or somethin’. I don’t care how hot I get in this here room. I ain’t drinkin’ none of that nasty water. The smell and taste of it is something foul and everyone knows it. After he finish gulping that mess down, he gets back on his knees and pray some mo’.

I watch him rocking and praying and praying and rocking and feel myself envying him for always being so sure. I don’t ever feel sure about anything, not about who I am, what I like, where I want to be. I don’t ever feel sure about nothing. Joseph always carries himself like he’s so sure about his faith and his feelings. I wonder if it’s because I’m too dumb, not being able to read and learn proper and all, or just too much of a sinner to ever feel the same way he feels. I wonder if I could read what he reads in the Good Book would I be able to feel like he feels and be as sure about everything as he is. If I could learn as much about God as he learned about God from them scriptures, would I believe like he believes?

Joseph reads his scriptures every night before he goes to bed. I know ‘cause even at my house he would read those scriptures before going to bed with me. But, then I think about how reading all those scriptures didn’t stop him from messing around with me in the middle of the night, so maybe just reading them scriptures ain’t enough. Maybe reading the Good Book just make you feel sure that you’re a bad person for doing what you do. I don’t know what to believe. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.

All I know is that I don’t feel like he feels about what we did. I know that I should feel that way because everybody who loves me and everybody I love says that I should. I’m scared that if I don’t feel the way that everybody says I’m suppose tah feel, the way that Joseph feels, that means that something is wrong with me. When I think about some of the things that we did to each other in the attic, then I think that something must be wrong with me ‘cause other boys don’t do to each other what Joseph and I did. Do they? I don’t think other boys even know how. I’m not even sure how we knew how to do some of the things that we did to each other, except for the names we heard the boys at school call each other when they get mad with each other. Them words they use is what my tutor calls “action words” or verbs. Daddy told us that white people taught us how to do what Joe and I did to each other. But, I don’t see how since don’t no white people live around us or go to our school. When I say that to him, he just shoot me a look and say that I must have got that white boy demon from watching faggots on TV. I knew not to say anything else to him about it, but I know that in our Christian home we ain’t never been allowed to watch no TV shows with nothing like that on it. I’m barely allowed to watch TV at all, since Momma and Grandmama say its full of worldly sin. So, I don’t know what Daddy talkin’ about. Sometime my Daddy just be talkin’. He don’t know where I got it from and I don’t know neither. My Momma say that Daddy don’t like to talk about what he don’t know, but I ain’t seen too much ah that.

I look at the big black book sitting on the Sunday school teacher’s desk and take a deep breath to keep the tears from comin’. Maybe I don’t feel like everybody say I’m suppose to feel ‘cause I don’t ever seem to understand what everybody else understands. I wonder if my not understanding like everybody else, even my not being able to read like normal people read is a demon too. I wish the saints could lay hands on me, so I didn’t have to go to special education classes and feel and understand like everybody else. But, I’m just not sure that I want them to lay hands on me to stop liking Joseph. Truth be told, a part of me likes liking Joe. Sometimes I think my liking Joe might even be the best part of me.

I look back at Joseph and look at him and look at him until I can’t stand it no more. I get up and walk over to him and kneel next to him. I wrap my arms around him and I hide my face in his shoulder. I can feel his body trembling beneath my hands as he tears and rocks and prays. He don’t push me away though, and that make me feel glad. He even moves closer to me when we hear the choir singin’ and shoutin’ as the white floor beneath our knees shake from the congregation stompin’ its feet. I can hear Preston, the Minister of Music, playin’ the organ keys until them keys are moaning behind Sister Shelby’s hollerin’ as she leads the church into worship. I hear tambourines ringin’ and the church member’s clappin’ hands smack so hard it sounds like its thunderin’ in the church. And, for the first time I can remember, I’m afraid of its sound, the sound of the church coming to get me and Joseph. I hug him tighter and close my eyes against the noise. I press my cheek against Joseph’s soft skin, and—on account of me stayin’ up all night worrying—I accidentally begin to fall asleep.

Sometime later, the door to the little Sunday school room flys open. I feel Joseph shove me to the ground and watch him with the sleep still in my eyes as he jumps up in surprise. His shove lays me flat on my back as two of the ushers and one of the deacon’s angrily lean over my body. All three of them look real mad, standing tall as oaks over us.

“What are ya’ll doing in here?” Brother Johnson asks me, causing me to remember my mother’s scream after she flung open the attic door to see Joseph laying underneath me on that old, bare mattress. She saw my face come from behind his neck. She saw that his shirt was off and both our jeans were wrapped around our ankles. When I saw her face, I stopped moving between Joseph’s legs, scared to death, and not really knowing what I should do. And still she asked us in the same voice that the usher was askin’ me.

“What are ya’ll doing in here?!” She say it in a voice that told me that she already knew what we was doing but couldn’t believe what we was doing.

“Nothing,” I quickly say to her. I think I say this too quickly. I think to myself that I sound guilty to my own ears. I didn’t know why I sound so guilty when I say it this time to the usher, since I know that the only thing I was doing was hugging Joseph and tryin’ tah sleep.

“The blood of Jesus!” the deacon curses at us “THE BLOOD Of JESUS AGAINST YOU! Even in the church the devil gots ya’ll up in here fornicatin’. Wait till I tell Pastor, what goes on here today!”

“It wasn’t like that ya’ll! Joseph, tell them it wasn’t like that!” I beg. I look to Joseph to back me up, but he is quiet and bawling with his head bowed. Ignoring him, I try to get them to see that we wasn’t doing nothin’ wrong.

“I swear to God, it wasn’t like that! We ain’t do nothin’.”

“Liar! Blasphemer! The blood of Jesus against you,” the deacon shouts, bending down into my face. I wipe the spit that accidentally flew out of his mouth off my face and try to keep from crying. I don’t even know why I try and I really don’t know why I’m surprised since adults don’t ever listen to me. I’m hot and tired and sweatin’ and I just don’t care anymore. I let out one long breath and give up. Let them believe what they want to believe. I could understand why Joseph didn’t back me up, he smarter than me. Joseph already know’d there weren’t no point arguing with adults that don’t think you have anything honest to say. At least, I hope that’s why he didn’t back me up. I looks back at him, huddled in the corner.

“I really hopes,” I whispers to myself.

“Come on both of you!” the ushers say while pulling me up from the ground. They march us out of the room, down a wood paneled hallway covered with bulletin boards filled with announcements and pictures of church revivals and socials. The hallway is lit by bright bulbs dangling from light fixtures in the ceiling that remind me of this jail movie I once saw of this prisoner walkin’ down death row to the electric chair. As I try to think about how the movie ended, I slow down my walk a little bit, since I ain’t exactly in a hurry to see the kids from school watch me fry. One of the ushers’ push me into Joseph, tryin’ to get me to hurry up just like the cops did to that prisoner in the movie. I want to get an attitude about it, but in the heat I can feel my anger quit on me again and the fear settle in my chest as the bright lights of the sanctuary hits me on my head and the eyes of the whole congregation fall on Joe and me.

Before we walked into the sanctuary the only thing I can hear in the room is the handmade fans swaying back and forth trying to fight the July heat, but the second we walk in front of the pulpit, the sanctuary fills up with the buzz of all the folks’ whisperings. From the sounds of all that whisperin’, I can see that Reverend Lee done already clued them in on what me and Joe up here for.

I think about what they must be saying under they breath and suddenly I begins to feel that sick in my stomach again. I bite the inside of my jaw again and push back on them bad nerves tryin’ to do me in.

Lookin’ at all the people’s faces in this heat, I feel like I can’t breathe, so I try to do what they taught us in choir practice and look over the heads of the people to the back wall of the church. That way I don’t have to see they faces judgin’ me, and they don’t have to know that I ain’t being judged.

I can feel the sweat dripping off my face and down the collar of my shirt when I hear the Reverend Lee’s scratchy voice begin to speak. I close my eyes to keep from crying as he calls me and Joseph “sissies.” I don’t want my Daddy to see me cry in this room in front of all these people, he disappointed in me enough as it is and I don’t wanna make it worse. Without opening my eyes, I know my Daddy sitting to the left of Reverend Lee in his preacher’s robe, looking down on me in judgment. I’m usually sittin’ behind him, with the choir and admiring him from the rafters. Today, I gets to be the one who gets watched, and I know there ain’t no admiration on nobody’s face.

“In the Old Testament, Leviticus 20:13 reads: If a man lies with a man as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them. Leviticus 18:22 says that you shall not lie with a man as with a woman, it is an abomination. Now, that’s scripture. But, the boys before you are not yet men. They are children. Children who have turned from God and have been corrupted by the evils of this world; children who have been possessed by the demons of Satan,” the Pastor says before taking one his long pauses.

I can’t see Pastor’s face, since he got us facing the congregation. Since I don’t wanna feel them folks eyes on me, I try to imagine in my head what Pastor is doing between his sermon breaks. Usually, Mother Sheldon gives Pastor some water for him to sip in between his breaks or Pastor busies hisself wipin’ up all that sweat pouring out of his face and under his thick neck with one of the handkerchiefs sitting in the pulpit. His face always swells up like a beach ball when he preach, and his voice goes back and forth from being real loud and hoarse to real soft and hoarse. Reverend Lee always sounds to me like he needs him some cough syrup. I try to concentrate on the funny pictures in my head of what I think he doing, so I don’t have to hear what more he gots to say about me.

“Now I know some of you are saying to yourself as you look at these boys. Pastor, I know them two boys, you say, them is good boys raised by fine, upstanding, righteous Christian families. You may even say to me, Reverend Lee, one of them boys, Ezra, is the son of your right hand, the youngest son of one of the most spiritually gifted pastors of this church! That the other, Joseph, is the grandson of one of oldest deacons in the history of this church! You might even say to me that children raised on the knee of God, reared and loved under the watchful eye of saints, don’t just turn from God and his word. Not children like these, not good boys like these! You shout in disbelief!!! ‘Cause if these children can’t do God’s will then what about my child? If the sons of pastors and deacons are laying with one another as they would with women, committing acts of fornication and homosexuality, then what hope is there for my child?! What hope is there for children who are not sitting in the church like these boys! Children who don’t read the Bible, who don’t sit in Sunday school, prayer meetings, revivals, and Bible studies three, four, five days out of the week! If the Devil can get to children like these, then what hope is there for our children when the sons of righteous men are secretly wallowing in sin! And, let there be no question these boys have sinned!! These boys have willfully, knowingly sinned before God!!” The Reverend shouts while pointing his finger at Joseph and me. Joseph is standing next to me bawling with his head bowed and I try to keep looking over the paper fans at that back wall, I keep tryin’ not to cry. I know my Daddy don’t want me to shame him no more by cryin’. I dig my fingernails into my palms to help stifle myself.

“But, I want you to look at these two children and see not the children of ministers and deacons. I want you to look at these two children and know that the Devil is real! That the Devil is alive and well in the houses of the Lord and if you don’t keep your house in order, if you don’t lean on God’s everlasting arm and pray for protection, pray for mercy, pray for wisdom!!! Then the Devil is going to take advantage of whatever weakness you got in your home and in your heart!! A house not in order, a house not abiding by God’s will is an invitation for the Devil to come into your life. Saints, I’m telling you that the Devil will be in your home with your wives and your husbands while you spending too much time at work, the Devil will be in your finances when you ain’t tithin’, and as the Lord has revealed to us today, a house not in order will even be an invitation for the Devil to teach your children the wicked ways of the world, the wages of sin, when you too busy to spend time with them!! I tell you that if you don’t get your house in order, the Devil will turn your children into liars, cheaters, backstabbers, fornicators, adulterers, or worst of all homosexuals!! First Corinthians 6:9 says that the effeminate and the abusers of themselves with mankind shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven!! Church, I’m a living witness today that the Devil will even use your children to destroy the houses of the Lord!!” Reverend Lee breaks and I can hear over the mic his handkerchief travelin’ over his Moon Pie face.

“But, never fear church! The Devil ain’t goin’ win here today, cause this church is a righteous church. This church believes in God and his word. The saints in this church are about taking care of the business of delivering souls to Christ. Ain’t none among you who ain’t done battle with Satan and claimed the victory. Satan get thee behind cause the Lord said victory! Victory! Say it with me saint’s, VICTORY! VICTORY! Shall Be Mine! This church is gone get its house in order today! We gone root out Satan and his evil spirits!”

Joseph falls to his knees next to me and begins to cry and pray like he did in the Sunday school room. Three, then four of the church’s prayer warriors fall down beside Joe, pushing me out of the way, until they’re all around him. They all start whispering prayers on top of each other as they lay hands on his head and body, with one or two of them shouting “Halleluiahs!” and “Have Mercy Jesus!!!” I stumble away from them and I look back at my Daddy. He’s lookin’ at Joseph with a look of hate so strong that I fall to my knees in surprise and fear. I ain’t never, never, ever seen my Daddy look at anybody, but white folks, the way he lookin’ at Joseph. I know from that look that Joseph ain’t gon’ never be welcome in our house again. Then my Daddy turns and looks at me, but the look in his eyes is the same look he had for Joe, and I begin to tremble.

“When Reverend Jacobs came to me about his son, his heart was heavy. For saints, he thought that he had kept his house in order. Reverend Jacobs has raised his son, Ezra, to know God, to worship God, to love God. And, still Ezra sinned, but I tell you that all among us have sinned. Others in the church, people in this very church—Hallelujah—that Reverend Jacobs had confided in had advised him to keep Ezra and Joseph’s sin a secret. They told Reverend Jacobs that his son’s sin would be seen in the eyes of this congregation as a reflection of him as a father and a pastor! See saints, Reverend Jacobs knew that some of ya’ll was going to question whether or not you wanted to follow a pastor who cannot keep Satan out of his own home, a reverend who had not kept his house in order according to the word of God. But, Reverend Jacobs knew in his heart that in all secrets lie the work of the Devil, Reverend Jacobs loves this church too much to allow Satan to get an invitation into the hearts and minds of the children of this church, through the Satanic demon in these children. God had revealed to Reverend Jacobs—through the Devil’s work with Ezra—that he had been negligent in his duties as a father and a husband; that he was in violation of God’s divine order. You see Reverend Jacobs had become too busy, and had like many of us men do, and let the women in our homes take up the slack. Reverend Jacobs had begun to let his wife serve as the head of his household while he was busy doing the work he was called to do in his father’s house. You see saints, Reverend Jacobs house, like many of the houses in this church, was not in order!! Reverend Jacobs thought his house was in order because he was doing the Lord’s work, but in Reverend Jacobs experience we see a testimony, a lesson from God, of what happens when God’s divine order is not heeded as a man’s highest calling. Reverend Jacobs wanted you all to see what can happen when you allow the Devil an invitation into our homes. Get your houses in order saints! Get them in order! Women, let your men be the men God intended them to be, and stop following the ways of the world by trying to be the man of your house! Let me say it again for those of you who didn’t understand me clearly. Sistahs! Stop trying to be the men in your household, that ain’t yo’ job. You can see the result when the will of the Lord is defied,” Pastor says motioning toward Joseph and me.

I look at my Momma after Pastor say those things about us and I see her sitting in the pew looking real stiff like in her yellow hat and suit. Behind the veil on her hat, I can see the tears sliding down her cheek, but she don’t look sad. She got her lips pressed together so that they looks real thin, like a white woman. She lookin’ real mad, I reckon she mad about the way Pastor talking about her in front of everybody. Maybe God getting her back today for all the times I hear her and the other sisters in the church talking about the other women in the church. Seem like I done heard everything about everybody up in the church from the doorway of my Momma’s kitchen. From Usher Parker’s husband cheating on her with the sisters of the church to Mother Adam’s gamblin’ problem, I done heard it all. I guess now I done give them church women something to talk about her fo’. I wasn’t tryin’ tah hurt her; I didn’t expect her to get called out like that. I feel bad about that, ‘cause I know my Momma don’t like to be gossiped about. She always sayin’ that Christians shouldn’t gossip. Looking at the pain in her face, I guess now I can see why. She know she ain’t gon’ be treated like a First Lady of the church no more, not after what Pastor done said in here this afternoon.

“Saints, you are a living witness to what happens to your children when they do not witness God’s divine order in the home. Yes, these boys have sinned, but they have asked to be delivered from their sins! They have begged to be delivered from the homosexual demons that are consuming their souls. They have asked for God’s forgiveness and his mercy!”

I open my eyes and turn around to look at Reverend Lee, because I cannot believe the words that have just come outta his mouth. I cannot believe that pastor just lied to the whole congregation. He lied! I never told nobody that I wanted to be delivered from nothing including no homosexwhatever. I don’t even know if I am that. I just know that I like being with Joseph, that I love being his best friend and him being my play cousin. I don’t understand why the pastor would lie on me like that. Why the pastor would commit a sin about something like that? Why would he lie over a sinner like me?

“Saints, cover yourself with the blood of Jesus!” Pastor orders after he hears that Joseph’s cries are turning into screams. The members of the church open their hands and move them back and forth over their heads and repeat ‘the blood of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, the blood of Jesus’ over and over to ward off the demons coming from Joseph’s deliverance.

The prayer warriors’ prayers start getting louder and it seems like the whole church is shouting and rebuking Joseph.

“ I rebuke you spirit in the name of Jesus…”

“…in the name of Jesus…”

“...loose that spirit, oh, Lord…”

“I demand that you loose that child, Satan, in the name of Jesus!!!”

“Hallelujah!!”

“Glory! Glooooorrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!”

I look at Joseph through the powerful, hiding hands of the prayer warriors on what my Gran calls “the wailing floor” and I see Joe scream a loud piercing scream right before he sticks his fingers down his throat. His head is bowed and the others are too busy praying and shouting to see what I see. Real easily, Joseph starts to throw up clear liquid with chunks of what looks like eggs. But, Joseph hates eggs; they always make him sick. I look at the clear vomit sliding down his shirt onto the floor and I remember all that water he drank. He throws up some more in between crying and screaming, just like we had both seen tons of people do on this floor during their deliverance from the Devil’s evil spirits. Only they didn’t have to stick they fingers down their throat to make the demons come out, at least I didn’t think they did.

Then, it hits me. Joe is faking! Joseph knew what the pastor and ‘em expected, and he was givin’ the saints exactly the show they wanted. Joseph, who read the scripture every night and who could quote scripture better than any girl in church, was fakin’ his deliverance. As I gets tah thinkin’ ‘bout it some mo’, I can see that Joseph planned on fakin’ this the whole time. My head starts spinning and I feel weak, ‘cause I don’t know what to believe anymore. I don’t know what to do anymore.

Why is the pastor lying? And, my Daddy watching him lie and ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about the lying? Why is Joseph faking if he really believes that he got a demon inside of him? Does he want to keep his demon? Does he even believe that he got ah demon?

Then Joseph screams a real high-pitched scream that sounded like one of them F sharps he was always showing off and hittin’ in choir. And, the Pastor shouts, “SHE’S out of his body! Saints get on your knees and pray! Children plead the blood, so that you cannot receive Satan’s unholy spirit! THE BLOOD OF JESUS AGAINST YOU DEMON! I rebuke you in the name of Jesus! The blood of Jesus against you! This child has been saved, delivered from his sins! Delivered from her, delivered from hell!” Pastor shouted “Hallelujah! Thank you, God!”

I look at the Pastor and wonder why the demon gotta be a “she?” And, how he know the demon is a “she?” I start believin’ that maybe Joseph ain’t the only one faking, that maybe the Reverend is fakin’ too! I ain’t never been no sissified boy, so I know that I ain’t got no “her” or “she” in me. I ain’t feel like no she when I was holding Joseph or when I was inside of ‘em! So, how is my demon a she? None of this makes sense to me.

“Now, what about your sins, saints? How many of you are inviting Satan to your home by not having your house in order? Get your house in order! As the Pastor of this church I’m going to start right here and right now to get my house in order, and I’m gone start with Reverend Jacob’s child. Reverend Jacobs come down here, so we can lay hands on Ezra. We getting’ the Devil out of this church today. Hallelujah! Yes, Lawd!”

I look at Joseph—and I mean really look at him—as the saints in the church lift him up. And, I see the throw-up on his shirt and the tear stains on his face and his wrinkled clothes. I look at him and think about all the times that we played video games and softball and wrestled and did roundhouses and cartwheels on old mattresses in the field. I think about our late-night talks and secret late-night trips to the fridge and even our nights fornicatin’ in the attic and sometimes right in my bed when we thought everyone was asleep. Then, I think about what Joe did. I think about him fakin’ it and how that don’t fit with what he say, and my Momma and how her attitude and gossip don’t fit with what she say the Bible say, and my Daddy and how his sayin’ about white folks and manhood don’t always fit with what he say God say, and even my Pastor and how his lyin’ goes against everything he taught me about being a Christian. And, I can’t believe what they gots tah say about me no mo’. I can’t believe that they can truthfully tell me what’s in that Good Book, no mo’. I know I gotta listen to what my heart tells me, nah. And, it tells me I ain’t gots nobody’s demon. It tells me there ain’t nothin’ wrong with how I feel about Joe. It says there ain’t nothin’ wrong with love, ‘cause I know I love Joseph.

And, so I say it to them in that room with the eyes of the church pressin’ against my back. I say loud enough for everybody to hear me.

“I love him!”

My Daddy stops dead in front of me, with Reverend Lee at his side.

“What you jus’ say tah me, boy?” Daddy whispers. His face looks like he done just seen my dead granddaddy walk clean across this sanctuary.

“I said I love him. It can’t be a sin, ‘cause I love him.” And, I do love Joe, I knew the second I saw him standing there lookin’ a mess that I loved him, in spite of himself.

My Daddy slaps me down in front of the church and I can feel the taste of blood fill my mouth. I look up at him from the wailing floor with tears in my eyes.

“You goin’ repent, boy, and we gone get you delivered from that demon, Ezra! I ain’t gon’ have no sinnin’ faggots in my house. Or, in the Lawd’s house,” he hisses to me in a deep, rumblin’ drawl.

“Daddy, I need you to hear me. Please, Daddy,” I plead, fightin’ the tears I want to wipe from my eyes cause I want my Daddy to see me stand up as the man he taught me how to be. A man who stands up for what he knows is the truth and don’t take nobody else’s word for it. A man that don’t quit or give up on what he knows is right just ‘cause he gets frustrated or ‘cause it gets too hard. It can’t get no harder than this. But, I want him to see that I’m the man he raised me to be.

“I love Joseph, and you told me where there is love there is no hate. Where there is love there is no sin. ‘cause God is love. That’s what you always told me, Daddy. God is love, and I love God. And I love Joe,” I say.

“You ain’t my child, you belong to the Devil!” my Daddy says spittin’ these words at me. “Either you get delivered from your wretchedness, these white folk afflictions, or I ain’t gots no son named, Ezra. Ya’ hear me? Do as I say or I ain’t gots no son named, Ezra! Nah, either do as I say this minute boy or so help me…” He raises his hand high over his head, looking down on me as if I was less than the bait we used to fish. As if I was less than the dirt beneath his feet.

“What you sayin’ to me, Daddy?” I ask, not wantin’ to understand him. I look desperately to Momma, who won’t meet my eyes.

“You gone obey me or you gon’ find your grown, sinnin’ self anotha place to live, boy.”

“That ain’t Christlike, Daddy! What you saying to me ain’t in love. It ain’t no Christ love in that! Is what you sayin to me…is your kind of love in that Bible too?” I ask as I stands up on shaky legs, with my lips tremblin’, my voice crackin’, and my chest throbbin so loud I can hear it ringin’ in my ears. I stands up and I looks at my Daddy like its for the first time. The room is filled with noise, but me and my Daddy are still.

“Reverend Jacobs you know that the Devil is a liar and manipulator of words, don’t you listen to the demon in that child talk to you like that. Rebuke him in the name of Jesus! You make that child get delivered, nah!” Reverend Lee seethes to my Daddy while lookin’ at me. My Daddy stands there looking at me dumbfounded.

Ignoring my Daddy, Reverend Lee waves to the prayer warriors to come and get me. They grab at me and I begin kicking and screaming as my Daddy just stands there watchin’ me. I scramble off the floor, kicking one of the deacons in the mouth and slappin’ the hands of the prayer warriors off me as they reach for me. I get up and run past my brothers and sisters in Christ, their hands waving back and forth over their heads as they chant the “Blood of Jesus” against me. I look back at my Momma who is still sitting stiff with her back to me. Ramrod straight. And, I ask my brothers and sisters in Christ “Don’t ya’ll know love no more? How can ya’ll say my lovin’ him is a sin, when ya’ll was the ones who taught me that God is love. I can’t get why ya’ll can’t see nothing,’ but sin no more. Why can’t ya’ll see love?” But, I could tell from the horror slapped across their faces that they ain’t wanna see and they ain’t wanna hear nothin’ else from no retarded chile like me. And, so I ran out of my father’s house, away from their sin, so I could love. My Daddy didn’t know it yet, maybe he’d never know it, but I did get delivered that day. I gots delivered to God’s love.

But, once outside in the crisp, clean air away from all that was heavy and sad, I could see that the once bright, blue sky had since turned gray. It was filling fast with black clouds from an approaching storm. And, as I ran past the old, parked church cars down the dark, uncertain road, I kept shouting for all who could hear me “God is love, and he loves me. God is love and he loves me,” I shouted it until I could believe it, ‘cause now God’s love was the only love I knew for sure I had. The only one I had to protect me from all that was to come on the dark, scary walk ahead. Just me and God. Amen.

*an earlier version of “Conviction” was published in 2010 in “Mighty Real: An Anthology of African-American Same Gender Loving Writing” edited by R. Bryant Smith and Darius Omar Williams.
** the personal narrative essay is separately published on Substack as “Looking Back on Conviction”

A pursed lip. A crossed leg. The flick of a wrist while talking with one’s hands. The too intense, near unblinking holding of another man’s or woman’s discomforted gaze. The tilted head. Or, one whose neck seems to allow the head to move a shade too much. The spread of legs that are expected to be skirted. The holding of the body in ways that appears to run counter to its musculature or its expected softness. The rumbling, roughened timbre from a feminine face. The countertenor, soprano-ish notes ringing to the sky from masculine lips. The too wide stance or the too swaying hip. The seeming hyperactive, too “muchness” of one, and the relaxed chill, authoritative confident “cool” of the other. The sensitive, nurturing instinct of him, and the too coarse, dismissive reductionism of her. Manners that are undeniably innate and radiating from the molten cores of these beings most human expressions, yet are equally as disconcerting and confounding to the brains of the processors taking those beings in. Trying to digest, comprehend, consume… All of it, the entire essence of that person reading to them as “something off, something not quite right, something a little queer...”

Just my using the word “queer” will make some of y’all not read any further. And, I understand and receive that. We still cool though. Especially, if you’re a paid subscriber (love you much, hope we win!). Yet, I really do get that for those of a certain age, “queer” is a slur to be ducked in childhood like ninja stars, and those wounds, while hopefully scabbed over in the ensuing years, can still run soul deep and ooze. For others of a later generation, like myself, the word hasn’t the power or weight to move any emotional mountains. Certainly not the way “faggot,”“punk,” “bulldagger,”“sissy,” “tranny,” “he-she,” or “dyke” can still feel like hot grease popping on bare skin from caste iron skillets when heard. Yeah, no matter how much I can perform a stoic countenance in the face of hearing the F-bomb, inside I’m going to experience a visceral reaction ranging from needling irritation to unbridled rage at that provocateur. Then there’s the camp for whom the Q-word is “too white” or “academic,” a turn of phrase that doesn’t have any real world application to the lived experience of same gender loving people of color, especially not Black ones. Critiques, I’ve heard and received many, many, MANY times over the years. Yet, I persist.

I do partially because, as an editor, I like familiar shorthand to convey big ideas to the most possible people using the least amount of space (though the adjective heavy paragraphs above belies this assertion). As a writer, my agreement with language is that I respect that it is never stuck in amber, but lives, breathes, and sometimes even dies based on the culture and times, what it means in the now, not only grandma’s then. Words have a life outside of our preferences and restrictions, and are constantly wiggling out of our ideological straitjackets. Then there is that most precious of ideas: the one who has permission to use a word without “consequences.” Yeaaaaahhhh…

In any case, back to the point. Some of us who are homosexual in our romantic and sexual orientations are indeed queer. Though not everyone who is engaged in homosexual behavior is queer. Read that again. Because too often in the national and international conversation about homosexuality, it’s the sex of the word that leads and is assumed to be doing the heavy lifting in the hate and discriminatory policies of others. But, it is not.

How we fuck is not why folks hate queers no matter how many times you hear them say “when I think of what they do in the bedroom…*faux shuddering*” It’s a proven lie. Not when there is no sexual behavior that two men or two women or any trans and non-binary folks engage in that cannot also be found in the bedrooms of billions of heterosexual couplings globally. Not a single one. The Madonna/Whore days of women not being expected to orally worship between men’s legs and men not burying their face in the bush of life have largely evaporated. As have taboos around backdoor entries for male milking or even women pegging their kings for that matter. While not everyone is having porno grade sex, the intimacies they are having ain’t all about producing the next family jewels or even trying to. Though even the idea that the fall of those erected sexual barriers of bodily exploration are largely new is not borne out by literature, sexual histories, and the ancestral artworks of heteros that go back to the centuries of the Kama Sutra, the Marquis de Sade, the ceramics of the Greeks and Romans, and wall hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. Humans be fucking. In every possible manner and configuration. And, non-procreative heterosexual intimacies have never been immune to those variances. So, any pearl clutching about queer sex is performative at best and hypocritical at worst.

So, then what IS the issue with the queers?

I posit it's that “something not right” of it all, and not so much the canards of gay or lesbian sex. These are red herrings for selective violence. It’s not the intimacies, it’s the subversive energies. The manner. The boldness. The intensities. The vulnerabilities. That which is so outside of societal and tribal cultural and visual expectations as to be defined as “other.”

Merriam-Webster defines queer in the following ways:

”1.a: differing in some way from what is usual or normal: ODD, STRANGE, WEIRD

b: ECCENTRIC, UNCONVENTIONAL

2. sometimes disparaging + offensive

a: of, relating to, or characterized by sexual or romantic attraction to members of one's own sex: GAY

c: of, relating to, or being a person whose sexual orientation is not heterosexual and/or whose gender identity is not cisgender

d: of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as solely male or female: GENDERQUEER, NONBINARY

e: of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person was identified as having at birth: TRANSGENDER”

“Odd, strange, weird, eccentric, unconventional…” these are the words I want to further unpack when we talk about queerness, because I believe this is what people are responding to even more than anything sexual when it comes to us odd fellows and lady men. In much the way the Black body is automatically politicized the second it enters any equation, whether in the physical, metaphysical, or imagined realms, so does the queer body invoke a knee-jerk, sometimes even uncontrolled reaction just by expressing their very being. Even in stillness, the queer body can provoke rage. And, while how we homos, lezzies, or trans folk fuck does eventually come to their far too visual minds, or rather how they assume we fuck does anyway, it’s not the first entry that arrives at the stations of their toxic trains. Rather, the first is that thing, that energy, that spirit, that je ne sais quoi that every day language fails to fully describe, but is obvious to all upon its arrival. As are the immediacies of the feelings they inspire behind every widened, suspicious eye.

Now this state of being is what old school evangelicals would pejoratively assume is just “that demon.” Apparently, the God in them can detect that demonic spirit in the “other” that is making that grown man, that grown woman, or even that baby act “that way.” But, those of us who are sane and uncolonized (or better still, decolonized) understand that what is emanating from that person before us is not the start of an exorcism film or the elevation of the black hole of hetero egos. It’s actually something pre-colonial ancestral people understood to be something divine. As one who has undergone an exorcism, I can assure you that much like this Black skin, the queerness doesn’t come off or out, not even at the behest of the mightiest prayer warriors or their favorite demon slayer conduit of extra virgin olive oil. That thing persists. That which is unspeakable to so many really is here, really is queer, and the only thing we all can do is get used to it. Especially those who hate to see it in the mirror the most.

Though it’s not really the only thing one can do, now is it? What most try to do upon the arrival of the queer body to otherwise pristine, heteronormative shores is to vanquish it from the sight from these virgin lands. Masculine expression in femme bodies, feminine expression in masculine bodies, or sometimes that which dares to be so dastardly, so depraved as to express BOTH (¡Dios mío!) is an affront to the very universe, one would think based on the reactions that queerness provokes. How else does one explain the global violence perpetrated on bodies that everyone more or less acknowledges seemingly comes out of the womb with an operational guide on how to be “odd, strange, weird, eccentric, unconventional…” in the exact same way all over the world. Having lived in and visited multiple countries and experienced cultures presented in every hue, what is perhaps most astonishing is how much queerness looks exactly alike across every culture. You can find that feminine boy, tomboy girl, and that which cannot be named or clearly processed in every land showing up in the exact same ways. Especially in the children who have not yet mastered performing gender expectations in the way that grown folks will eventually demand of them. In the ways other children will police in them. And, the church will pray for their deliverance to. This distant land of selves untrue to the defiant spirit of that child whose very presence gives proof to the lie that there are only one or two ways of acceptable being. Only one or two ways that are natural, normal, and whose steps are to be ordered. Who in their very presence says that God is more than any one thing you’d have it be, and these babies of variance is the greatest evidence of these truths.

And, it’s not like we are unclear about this. Not really. That it’s the queerness that is seen, experienced, and resistant to collective, Herculean efforts of “correction” long before any sexual awakening or experience occurs in the bodies of queer children.

Before I ever thought about sucking my first dick, the elders were pointing at three year old me in my flowing towel wigs and telling my mama “that baby got too much sugar in his drawers.” By the time I’d graduated to my girl cousins’ Barbies at age six and telling my mother I wanted to be a girl because “they stayed clean, had tea parties, and didn’t fist fight all the time,” you’d think that someone might have come to an understanding that I wasn’t going to be course corrected into patriarchy. Undeterred, to my ever lasting regret, my mother pulled me out of piano lessons and put me in Little League Baseball (where I never played a single game) and Little League Basketball (where a bigger boy chased and bullied me at every practice and I never made a single basket or proper assist on the court), because the church ladies told her it would help “butch me up.” By the time “Dynasty,” “Falcon Crest,” “Knots Landing,” “The Colbys,” and Harlequin Romance and V.C. Andrews novels were part of my weekly middle school age diet, I think it was safe to say that those efforts had failed.

Certainly, the boys at school and on the block believed so. They knew before I did, what I was. Children’s eyes don’t lie. I had the nerve to believe that because I had a few crushes on some girls at school over those years that I might be a heterosexual. An admittedly “sensitive” one or as one boy determined “on the softer side of Sears,” but surely one that would make someone’s daughter an adequate boyfriend or later husband yet. This remembrance has had a chokehold on certain members of my family ever since, with them believing it to be evidence that I was once a heterosexual boy. Bless their hearts.

If only they knew how six to nine-year-old me used to stare at my older cousin by marriage in his sleep when I’d have sleepovers and found his pouty lips, smooth caramel skin, and dominating height so beautiful to behold. The way I’d lose wrestling matches on purpose after faking the old college try so I could experience the intense feeling of a sweaty, muscular frame between my legs, holding me down by age 11. Or, how I could draw classmate Chitunda Tillman’s high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and square jaw from memory in middle school. Or how by age 12, a 2 am sleepover game of footsies with yet another cousin, by a second marriage this time, ended with my first sexual experience with a boy who was himself only 13. Long before I knew the taste of my peer’s skin, I’d already been labeled “other” by the children in every playground I entered from the third grade on. They were on to me and my energy long before I understood what the problem was. And, trust, I knew that I was clearly a problem to others.

How could I not? There were certainly efforts made to eradicate this otherness. “Boy, put some bass in yo’ voice.” “Boy, hold your books to your side, not at yo’ chest.” “Boy, take that switch out yo’ walk.” “Why you reading that? Watching that? Singing that? Dancin’ like that? Doin’ that?” “Being like that?” This chorus dogged every day that I had not learned how to properly perform patriarchy and a narrow masculinity that came naturally to other boys, but would never be natural in me. From my toddler years to my high school ones, over a decade, every. single. day. Even after my voice finally and belatedly deepened far enough to a baritone that stole away all of my first tenor high notes; my frame lengthened and thinned out to a more boyish, athletic frame instead of my formerly chubby, womanish curves; and body hair seemed to grow from every pore, the elusive way of being a man in the way that would make other men stop starring at me with disdain, disgust, bemused weariness, or lust still managed to elude me. By sophomore year, it was more of a persistent whisper campaign than an outright accusation, but the idea of me as “normal” or “masculine” in the ways that made others comfortable never disappeared.

Though my masculine performance improved by my sophomore year, it didn’t stop one of my dad’s army wives friends from asking/declaring “your mama wanted a girl, didn’t she?/.” Blinking at her sympathetic face, I told her what my mother had said to six year old me when I innocently asked if I could be a girl, “my mother asked God for a boy and that’s what God gave her.” To this day, I don’t think that lady, who would later hire and entrust me to regularly babysit her children, meant any harm. She was just observing the queerness before her out loud, and reaching for an explanation that could make sense to her. The fact that I grew up in houses with not one, not two, but three different fathers over the span of my upbringing couldn’t square with her assumptions of an absentee father and a overbearing mother. So, those men were erased from the equation that explained why I was “that way.”

They all were trying to make sense of me. To answer “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?” in the Rodgers and Hammerstein key of heterosexual confusion. From my church to the block to the playground to overseas on the military bases: somethin’ “ain’t right” with that boy was a haunting refrain that only stopped ringing in my ears the day I accepted that one of these kids are indeed not like the others, and that I perhaps would never fully and truly belong. At least, not among them.

Some kill themselves at this self-aware recognition. I did at 15. Try, I mean. Before ultimately coming out one year later at age 16 and deciding instead to “live, live, live!" and try to find others like me, invested in living in the skin that they were born in. Others who embraced themselves and did not, to paraphrase Dr. Daniel Black in his Black on Black essay collection, “seek to be their lesser selves.”

Black further articulates that we queer folks are put on this earth, on this plane for purpose on purpose. There is a reason for every being on this planet, a divine purpose. And, it is not any less true for us queer folks. We are intended to do and be something that helps smooth the edges, to keep the engines running, to make community a safer, softer, more sanctified space of sanctuary for us all, but especially our most vulnerable. It’s why elders and children embrace the grown versions of ourselves most. We are a lesson to be learned. Teachers intended to share a holy, healing word. A balm. We are the bridge between the feminine and the masculine and a recognition of the spectrum that does and has always existed in between. We are here to remind them that all things are possible and there is never only any one or two ways of being or doing in the world. We are the representation of personal liberation from a bondage of dictates that we were absent from the origin story of, giving us no say in how our sex, bodies, lives, spirituality, adornments, worship, and contributions are governed. We are the permission granted for new questions, new traditions, new expectations, and to view with a lens askew just enough to bear witness to what lies beneath the sometimes sinister mask of the expected. We are an answer to a way forward from the old, the controlled, the “supposed to,” the too easily shamed and too readily oppressed. And, for those subversions that our bodies, manners, essence, and spirit represents, we are hated by those who seek the illusory safety of the controlled, the sureness of a stale answer and dead ideologies, the unquestioned rules and regulations delivered by humans and presumed celestials on high, and the narrowness of prescriptive thought that claims with the promise of a used car salesman to prevent us all from the chaotic abyss of self-determination and collective forms of care that actually demand something of us. Expects and accounts for something of us. We certainly are inconvenient for those who’d like to be the marionette pulling the strings of the willing, the frightened, the insecure, and the believers of safety in a world whose only guarantee, whose only psalm is change.

And, sadly, as is true among all oppressed people, there are those who don’t know who they are, how divine they are, who don’t want to be what they are and study mightily at the halls of performance to present something approximate, if not exact to and of their oppressors. Ones who would sell their souls and those of their fellow queers into gas chambers to touch the very hem of the garment of those who will never recognize their humanity and are reviled by and jealous of their divinity and the freedoms that lie dormant there. Ones who think its the sex and chose abstinence, not knowing its not your abstinence they seek. No, baby. That’s just a cruel punishment to deny you the possibility of a love they themselves may never know. You see, baby, it’s that thing inside of you that oozes from your every pore and manner, even in stillness, that they want disappeared. Not your sex. Hell, they’ll have sex with you and still throw you before the altar of the church and demand your exorcism, if not your execution. Remember, not all that is homosexual in behavior is queer in being. It’s the odd, strange, weird, eccentric, unconventional thing within you that your spiritual immaturity is not allowing to blossom and bloom to your fullest purpose, your most honest reason for being, that they want to leave from here. From you. And no amount of Oscar worthy performance and earnest prayer can deliver you from the why of your very presence on this plane. So, stop it. And claim your inheritance. Claim your reward. Be here. Be queer. And, dammit, get used to it. Even if they never can, even if they never do. You must. You must learn to love that which reflects back to you in that mirror or the souls of your fellow queers’ eyes. Or perish forever longing in vain for an inheritance never meant for you.

Just as this society, this very community will wither away and die if they don’t accept that all are called for purpose. All have a why in this community that is required for the synchronicity of all of its parts to work in unity for our good. And, without that. Without us. There is no community. No society. No us that gets to survive. Asé.

It happened at the dentist office today. I was going in for an emergency cavity filling replacement and impromptu teeth cleaning after dealing with a bit of discomfort for a couple of days that I didn’t want to get out of hand. One of the great things about living in Mérida is how affordable it is to get serious dental work done without worrying that it will cost you the price of a kidney…or your first born child. While sitting in the waiting room with my Mexican assistant, a tall, distinguished Black man walked into the room from the back where the dental work is done.

Now, usually in Mexico, when Black people see one another, we do the same thing we would in the States. We do the Black man “head nod thing” or, when we are in close, extended proximity to one another, as I was to this man that we’ll call “Trey,” we speak. Since he was standing right in front of me waiting to pay, I spoke and extended my hand.

”Michael”
”Trey”
”How long have you been in Mérida?”
”About a year and half, two years. You?”
”More than four and a half, nearly five.”
”Oh, wow.”

This went on like this for a minute or two, as it usually does between immigrants in a foreign country who recognized one another from home. Discussions of residency and visas are normative, as are asking how well one is settling in, and such. Since he was a brother around my age and he appeared relatively sane, I told him about my monthly “Black Men’s Game Night,” and asked would be interested in attending? And, that’s when it took a turn. A rather jarring one.

”Why it gotta be a Black Men’s Game Night and not just a Men’s Game Night?”
”Wha—”
”You wouldn’t have a White Men’s Game Night would you? Why can’t it be a night where Black men and white men and Mexican men all come together? I mean didn’t we move down here to get away from that kind of thing?”

I tightened. I immediately knew who this brother was and instantly regretted being too familiar, too assuming. I tried to regain my mental balance.

”Well, white men and Mexican men ARE invited and do attend, but the event centers Black men and that’s who the majority of the attendees are.”

”Then why call it the Black Men’s Game Night? Seems kind of 1940s segregation to me. Just like I don’t understand why we do that. I mean we have Black only social media groups down here, which is just…”

My assistant interrupts him.

”Other men do I attend. I attend. Whites, Mexicans, it’s just that the majority of people who attend are Black. It’s not excluding anyone.”

I jump in.

”It’s just a way for us to be in community with one another, man. The sisters have a ton of events, from Sip and Paints to their own social groups and events, and for the longest time there were only like five of us brothers down here. So, now we’ve got our own thing for us to come together as a community. Just like we have an annual Kwanzaa celebration to come together as a—.”

He scoff/laughs at the mention of Kwanzaa, and my eyes narrow further registering its unspoken meaning.

”I just don’t understand the point of coming down here to recreate the same things from back home. I understand that we may have some cultural things here and there in common, but at the end of the day we’re not that different from one another. And, I just don’t see the point of…”

I cut him off.

“Well, part of the point is to share information, resources, and to be in community with one another. Look out for one another’s safe—”

”I hear you. That’s just not something…”

The dentist calls me to the back interrupting him. He then continues.

”How do I…we can exchange information…”

"If you’re interested in attending, my assistant can exchange my information with you. I’ve gotta go get this work done. Take care”

I shake his hand and leave. Shaken.

I hadn’t encountered what felt to me like anti-Blackness in Black bodies in person for a while. My world is pretty insular with people who share similar values and are squarely pro-Black. So, to meet a mature-aged brother with a wooly salt and pepper beard and streamlined attire pretty squarely say in so many words, “I moved down here to just be human, not a Black human” startled me.

He wasn’t the first I’d encountered with those views, just the most recent. They almost all speak from the same script, one that makes it clear that distancing themselves from Blackness and “segregated” Black community is a personal goal. Some moved down to Mexico for that expressed purpose. “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.” “Okay.” Looking back, I’m surprised he spoke back to me at all, but for good manners and what appeared to be a congenial nature.

While getting drilled in none of the best ways by my handsome dentist, I couldn’t stop thinking about this brother and his words. I kept being incensed by both what was said, but also by what wasn’t said.

The irony was not lost on me that my Men’s Game Night was a spin-off from what was the first Black men’s collective in Mérida, one that had briefly tried to change their attendance rules after a year to become exclusively Black AFTER whites and Latinos had not only participated, but also had hosted some of the men’s monthly gatherings at expense to themselves. I was all for exclusive Black communal events for us by us, and had founded several such unapologetic spaces throughout my public service career. But, in those instances, I and my co-founders laid the ground rules out from the start, not after a diversity of invited people had spent money, settled in, communed with us without incident, and been received as comfortable allies, if not co-conspirators only to be told, without cause, that they were no longer welcome. A midway switch up without an inciting incident to justify the shift felt wrong to me. And, so my space was deliberately multicultural with a stated emphasis and centering of Black men, who would be and had always been 90% of both rooms anyway. Which is why I led with “Black Men’s Game Night” with Trey, even though its stated name is indeed the far more generic “Men’s Game Night” that Trey was seeking. My intention in my re-naming was to signal to him that there would be other brothers there for him to be in community with, if that was what he wanted or had been missing.

Clearly, he had not.

And, while I’d just met him. It was difficult not to put him in boxes I had known before. Brothers and sisters who would mimic their white counterparts about the “only race is the human race” and “why aren’t we allowing whites in the ‘people of color caucus’ space.” I knew those same Black and white folks had no problem with Jews attending the Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) that pepper the land or their synagogues for that matter. I knew they didn’t think twice about why there might be Chinatowns or Korea Towns in many major cities, particularly coastal ones, and knew those “humans” would defend those Asian Americans right to those sites of culture and safety for themselves. That having a women’s group or a men’s group was not seen as suspect.

But, the second anything is exclusively Black, it’s a problem that must be policed, interrogated, its intentions compared to white power movements, despite having no equivocal history of violence, anti-other propaganda, or hostilely utilized political power. No one would dare question “why are all the white kids sitting together,” but the second Black people do there is a range of responses from “concern” to hysteria. And, I’m immediately reminded of the laws that made it illegal for Black people to commune in more than groups of two for most of our time in the United States, and question how much these anti-Black folks are epigenetically responding to colonial memory of fear of and obedience to those racist laws at an unconscious level.

”Didn’t we move down here to get away from that?” From what? Being Black? How does one get away from one’s self? I didn’t move to Mexico to get away from being Black. I moved here to have a more affordable, higher quality of life without the threat of police or state violence. Plus, the fascists were coming. It’s why many of us are down here. Not to escape Blackness.

While it is true that Black American immigrants have, in general, a more welcoming, less overtly racist experience here in Mexico than we would back in the States. That here, we are Americans first and Black second, anti-Blackness is global and Mexico is part of that globe. Ask Cubans, Haitians, Africans, Afro-Mexicanos, or the indigenous here about their experience with race and ethnicity in Mexico and they will sing a different, yet familiar song than the one you hear from many Black American immigrants who are enjoying not being treated negatively for their skin color. There is colorism all over the place and anti-Blackness still lives in these welcoming lands, Black Americans just aren’t generally on the receiving end of it. We are not their Negroes. We are “gringos” to them.

And yet, our school age children still have to contend with other Mexican kids cavalierly using the “N-word” as connective banter, thanks to the globalization of hip hop culture. Those Black kids and their parents further experience a minimization of their concern about it when confronting the administrations of international schools here. Don’t be one of the stories that get spread on social media of a Black American breaking a lease or disputing a service charge, and you will see how quickly slurs find homes in once welcoming mouths across the digital landscape. Just because the racism is not as acute or in your face, doesn’t mean that Mexicans in Mexico “don’t see color.” To the contrary, those colonized for centuries by Spanish conquistadors and whose descendants openly claim “whiteness” on all of their formal applications and social media profiles, absolutely do see color.

They also see cash, and they assume Black Americans have it, easing our way to the elite and professional rungs of Mexico’s class and caste system. So, while we may have “moved here to get away from that,” it’s not like we are totally devoid of the vestiges of racism by crossing a border closer to the Equator. It just doesn’t look like what it looks like in the States, and by comparison is a relief for many of us here. But, we are not fooled into believing we fully belong.

Which is why we so many of us down here have done the work of being in community with one another as guests in a land, culture, and language that is foreign to us. Why Black American immigrants in Mérida are so consistently organized with weekly to monthly events, social media groups, meet-ups, and the like. Why we have each other’s emergency contact numbers and organize food trains for individuals and families in grief, sick, or shut-in. Why we share the numbers of service workers who we trust, had good experiences with, and don’t feel will try to “gringo price us.” Why we know each others personal business, for better or worse, and can rapidly respond to someone having a negative experience with the police (a rarity here), immigration, or just a bad landlord giving us the blues. Why we know where the good food is that knows how to “season” their food right and won’t make you sick. Why we know where we can send our kids to safely volunteer or socialize without fearing for their lives. It’s why Black people have always worked to find one another to help ensure safety and protection within shared community no matter where in the globe we may be. It’s what every immigrant group does that moves to a foreign country: find one another and build community. That is especially true for Black folks since no matter where we are, so is anti-Blackness (even in Africa, among Africans of a certain colonial mindset). It doesn’t matter if we are also in good community with whites or the local populace in whatever foreign country we reside. One can’t just get away from racism or anti-Blackness through magical thinking and proximity to others in the warmth of other suns. Maybe from the worst of it, like what’s going on back home, but never completely away from it entirely. No matter how many multi-cultural, “human but not Black human” events one attends and groups one joins, everywhere you go, there you are.

But, that which is understood doesn’t need to be explained. And, it’s sad when it does. It hurts. Because those with that myopic mindset are laying themselves wide open and vulnerable to all manner of pain, while thinking their progressiveness and inclusivity will protect them. God bless them, it won’t. I wish it did. Be in the world, by all means, but know where home is and always make sure you can return to it, because you never know when you might need it. Might need us.

So, I sent Trey the invitation anyway, despite his “stuff.” We’ll see if he decides to come home. The door will be open.

For 13 months, from the summer of 1994 to the fall of 1995, a very angry, emotionally traumatized Black gay boy from ChiTown poured his heart and soul into the fictional lives of characters and tales that spoke to him and his circumstances. Originally entitled “Reckonings,” the collection was largely a male-centric, dark anthology of stories about mostly Black gay men and boys who were dealing with a collision of their identity intersections in different, often macabre ways. It was written at a time before cellphones and when the Internet was only just beginning to mean AOL dial up service. It was a time when death from HIV-related complications and violent crime was rampant. When Black boys were being told that Black men were an endangered species and we weren’t going to live past 25, if we were lucky enough to even see that brain matured age. A time when taking a taxicab in the middle of the night for Black men was a dangerous exercise in trust and frustration and Uber wasn’t even an embryonic dream. It was an age when far fewer of us were out of the closet, and those like me who were out and proud were largely resented, envied, and mocked by those trapped in those soul stealing confines.

Back then, LGBTQ+ bookstores were still in existence in most major cities, but most of the stories found there were about white boys in Castro or Chelsea or the Village. Or, if the story was written by a Black author, it was about the Black men in those same cities who lusted over those same white or Latino men, culturally divorced from Black gay community, as in the works of Larry Duplechan, Steven Corbin, and Melvin Dixon. Essex Hemphill, Assoto Saint, and Joseph Beam existed, but they were lonely on those shelves. E. Lynn Harris and James Earl Hardy were just on the cusp of their later commercial renown. And I, a 19 year old BGM reader, wanted to see myself, hear myself, manifest myself and the young men I knew on the pages of works that professed to be about my “gay life.”

And, so I did what I was told to do: write what I wanted to read. As a child of violence in a violent land, the work itself couldn’t help but be violent in a lot of disturbing ways. I’d already survived rape, racism, sex work, bullying, the hood, the closet, coming out, family displacement, parental abuse and addiction, housing instability, low wage exploitation, and internalized racism and internalized homophobia by my 19th birthday. Of course, there was a violence in me. And, by the time I finished writing that final story in my 20th year, that rage was gone. All on the page. The collection had cleansed me. Purified me back to sanity and mental wellness. But, then there was this work that only had one light, romantic story in a barbershop between a barber and his longtime customer to break up the monotony of darkness. When asked, I didn’t know how to talk about the collection or explain it, though I was proud of having finished it. I hadn’t been known as one who finished things back then.

So, I didn’t really talk about it outside of my close friendship circle. Then, inexplicably, through professional relationships, I met a small press publisher at age 25, and told him I had a book and he asked to read it. I reluctantly sent it. He loved it. A deal was struck and I got all the way to seeing my galley copy and advertisement for it when I was told the press had unexpectedly folded and the book was back to being my own. And, so the collection went back to a place of anonymous darkness for several more years. Until, that is, I needed the stories as class assignments to help me finish my Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from Goddard College. After I’d learned a lot more about craft from Goddard and my writing voice matured through decades of journalistic practice, I was pretty sure those stories would never see the light of day again. Too much time had passed and I knew too much about craft now to feel comfortable with those nascent verses kissing critical modern eyes.

Cut to the 2010s and a close author friend with a vanity press, who had heard I’d once written a collection, asking to read them and deciding to publish them. I was hesitant, by now having developed a name for my journalistic voice through tons of magazine and entertainment site articles and for my fiction and essay contributions to several anthologies. I wasn’t sure I wanted my first author titled work of fiction to be one from my pre-trained, 19 year old angry self. My voice wasn’t the same, nor were my politics, or my point of view. But, he insisted and made copy edit suggestions and sent them to me to finalize. And, I stared at that manuscript he sent waiting for my final edits. We sent the unedited version around to trusted, esteemed writers and influencers for blurbs. And, I stared at that untouched manuscript. We launched a contest for the cover art model as a publicity stunt. And I stared at that untouched manuscript. We finalized the cover art and let the model know he’d won. And, I put that untouched manuscript away into a box and ignored it until my author friend stopped asking me about it. I didn’t want this book to be my first foray into the world as an author, I was too changed and I didn’t want THAT THEN to represent me NOW. It read well enough, as all the blurb writers complimented, but it wasn’t me anymore.

Then, inexplicably, a few weeks ago, one of those blurb writers called me out on my Facebook wall through an intrusive post asking “where was the damn book?” (paraphrasing, but not by much). It had been more than 10 years since that book had gone out, and I’d forgotten he’d even read it. I laughed at him for not making this public attack a private DM posting and for trying to embarrass me. But, then a long time follower joined in on that thread saying she has a new imprint launching this fall and what book are we talking about? I still found it funny, though more uncomfortably so, and told her to DM me and ignore the troll trying me on my wall.

She did. So, I explained the work’s journey and told her a suggestion by Darnell Moore, who’d been one of the blurb writers and who I’d shared my apprehensions with back then. His suggestion was the only way I’d feel comfortable for the work to come out, I resolutely stated. Moore recommended doing what Ta-Nehisi Coates did with his “We Were Eight Years in Power” collection, which was to write a personal narrative essay commenting on each of the older works. Coates had splendidly done this for each of his early Atlantic articles from the Obama administration years in that collection. That way my contemporary voice could be heard as part of my first published author work and reflect on the boy writer I had been, without trying to interfere too much with or not be true to my early voice by a bunch of 30 year later corrections that would undo the integrity of that work. She listened to the idea and loved it. A writer at 50 commenting on the fledgling work of his 19 and 20 year old self, unpacking what was sadly still relevant, what had changed, and where I and we are now. So, I agreed.

Here’s where you come into the story. I’ll share with you subscribers a story or two here on Substack with an accompanying personal narrative essay commenting on the work to test drive this idea of ours. This way, I'll see how you respond to both the original story and my post-story commentary on it. Meaning, you’ll be the first to read any short fiction by me in an age and the first fiction I ever attempted as a young writer. It’s a vulnerable space for me to be in, but by age 50 I have developed a tough enough skin to take it. My soon-to-be publisher gave me the deadline of the end of August for this Substack experiment. So, be on the lookout this month for one of the more risky, yet less scary stories in the bunch, “Conviction.” Fingers crossed, prayers high that it still has something to say to you now. It certainly did to me back then.

Regardless, I’ll forever be grateful for what was eventually entitled “Collisions: A Collection of Intersections” for saving my life and placing me on my path as a writer of all kinds of mediums and genres. And, most of all, for making that angry man-boy into a peaceful grown man. Maybe one of its macabre tales can be lucky enough to do that for someone else too. One never knows.

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I decided to use this space to share more of my work and myself with my Gipson Gazette family.

1. Why this, why now

Facebook has become more difficult and cumbersome to reach most of you in meaningful ways and the other social media platforms don’t feel like me and what I do. So, hopefully, Substack can and will be a better space to connect with and engage with you. Substack also feels more private, intimate, and quiet than the rest of social media, if only as a feeling.

2. What kind of community are you looking to build here

The kind of community I’m looking to both transport from my other social media spaces and build here is one that is kind, funny, informed, empathetic, sometimes shady and messy, but always one that loves Black people and community from every walk of life.

I’m an old school Pan Africanist. I’m an out Black gay man. I’m a neurodivergent person with a formal Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) diagnosis who is on meds and in talk therapy. I’m a 50-year-old fat man with all the challenges and joys that comes with that. I’m a tall, hulking man with all the privileges and dangers that comes with that. I’m a former teenage sex worker and someone who was displaced from his family for nearly eight years as a result of coming out of the closet to a conservative Evangelical Christian family. I’m also someone who managed to graduate from both undergrad and graduate school with honors. I’m a 31-year public servant (and counting) that worked in non-profit, government, and the foundation space, but who also pulled off a parallel career in journalism for 18 years as a features writer, music and cultural critic, and ultimately an editor. I’m the founder or co-founder of Black people helping or affirming institutions that are 21, 11, 8, and 4 years old this year (and counting). I’m also a lazy couch potato who watches too much TV and buys more books than I’ll ever have time to read. I’m a Black American immigrant living in Mérida instead of his home country and will likely never live in the U.S. again. I am the intersections of so many multitudes. And, so are you, that’s who I want to be in community with. Those who are more and understand themselves to be more.

There are only three community rules:
1) No name calling
2) No trolling one another
3) Ask for clarity before assuming the worst of one another (e.g., can you unpack that for me so I can make sure I’m clear on what you meant by your post?)

3. The Gipson Gazette Post Frequency

I will try to post here often. I cannot at this moment guarantee a set schedule, but I will work at it. I’m still running my consulting firm working with nonprofit charities in the States, and sometimes those cutting my rent checks win out for my time and attention. Clients are demanding like that. You know how we Americans are.

Blessings.

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