i used to be black, but now i'm gay

on the pains of intersectionality

It’s been a while.

As is usually the case when a large chunk of time passes without me putting out a letter: there’s good news and there’s bad news.

The good news is that I completed and submitted the commission piece mentioned in the intro of my last listicle…with seven full hours to spare. (Who is she?!)

The bad news is that my home state passed a bill this week requiring the display of the “ten commandments” in all public school classrooms and I’m trapped in an indefinite state of processing; every time I reread the article I expect to stumble upon some loophole that my non-politically inclined mind overlooked the first go round. But nope. It’s a law now — as wretched and certain as hurricane season. Louisiana has never been the frontrunner in anything worthwhile, but this is a new low.

Anyhow, when the news broke, I did the first thing many of us do when a controversial story drops — logged into my burner X account to ensure that other people were also gobsmacked. For the most part, they were, with the bulk of the expletives duly directed towards Jeff Landry, white supremacy, America (synonyms, really, but who’s checking?).

Buried deep under the grievance and the crackbrained celebration, I saw the rank, smug comments from people with skin like mine. There were many, but if I had to summarize, they all netted out to iterations of, “Good. Y’all better get right with God.”

Recently, I watched a TikTok that said that most Black people have conservative values, and that the only thing that keeps us from acting upon them is our…blackness.

This person is right.

I want you to think about your family. Your grandparents, your cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings, mother, father. Maybe their views align with yours, in which case…congratulations? But I’m willing to bet that there are some points of friction, some burnt, sticky bits that you talk around instead of through at the kitchen table.

75% of Black American adults identify as Christian. Bizarre to me, personally. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the religion, it is often weaponized to justify hatred in a way that few other things are. For reasons unknown to me, homosexuality is the soapbox that many choose to perch atop, citing verses and passages crudely warped to fit their rancorous sermons.

June drew the short straw and got saddled with both Juneteenth and Pride. While both are certainly cause for revelry, they also lend themselves to the plaguy weight of reflection.

I spent the night of Juneteenth at a screening of James Baldwin’s I Heard it Through the Grapevine and was left heartbroken and determined, as I usually am after engaging with his work. While the previews ran, I waited in line for mediocre popcorn and a cookie for myself, and chocolate-covered raisins for my (apparently) geriatric wife. I somehow forgot to order the cookie, and rather than doubling back and standing in the 14-person-long line for a second time, decided to ask someone in front to buy it for me.

I’d like to think that it’s a universal experience, scanning a new room for a life raft. The person who, should things go wrong, would be most likely to help you out of the situation at hand. This used to be a no-brainer. I’d opt for someone who looked like my mom or dad, sometimes woman, sometimes old, but always Black. After all, it’s the identifier that matters most; the one that is synthesized like sunlight to sprout a premature opinion of me. Black is the color of familiarity, and familiarity is safe.

Things changed when I came out.

The first person to call me a dyke was a Black man who looked a lot like my father.

It was winter of 2016, and I was in the French Quarter, waiting on my then-girlfriend to come out of a shop that I can no longer recall. The sun was setting and as the temperature dropped, I attempted to rub away the goosebumps on my arms with my palms. Just then, my girlfriend came outside and wrapped me in her coat. I leaned down to kiss her forehead and quick as a gust of wind, a voice: “Fuckin’ dyke.” I looked over to see a pudgy, mahogany man in a blue polo, lip jolting, eyes ablaze. Just a few minutes earlier, he’d nodded at me, made a comment about the unnatural chill in the southern air.

“Dyke!” he piped again, upon my eye contact. As if I hadn’t heard him the first time.

My goosebumps stood at attention underneath the coat as we scampered away.

Back in the theater line, I identified two potential life rafts. The first was a white man, visibly gay, sporting a tank top, man bun, and a heavy lisp. The second was a Black woman in flip-flops with box braids and red-rimmed glasses. My eyes flitted with indecision between the two of them, now first and second in line. The man met my eyes and smiled. The woman looked at my shirt, oversized and cream, with The Joys of Lesbian Sex written across it in a bold sans-serif. Her eyes lingered there for a millisecond, reading, before she met my eyes, glowering, and looked back down at her phone.

Who do you think I asked to grab the cookie?

Oftentimes when I am visibly queer — signaled via a t-shirt, a tattoo, my wife’s hand in mine — Black feels colder and more uncertain.

That quiet conservativeness that I mentioned earlier? It reveals itself in the avert of an eye, the tug of a child, the tut of a tongue. “Sistahs!” are swapped for scowls. Disapproval seeps from pores like sweat in August, and suddenly, I am no longer safe; my Blackness is somehow less valid, watered down by my audacity to choose queerness.

Intersectionality is fickle and unbiased in its polarity.

Are all Black people homophobic? No. Are Black people more homophobic than other groups? Also no, but it’s not my business what other groups do. Are queer, white people inherently “safe?” Absolutely not. Is anyone required to be a shelter for anyone else in the individualistic society that we live in? Sadly, no. Do queer, Black spaces exist? Certainly, there just aren’t a ton near me.

Lately I find myself identifying as queer first and Black second, because that’s the order in which I am assessed in this phase of my life, but I will (obviously) always be both. I’m unsure of where to tuck the feelings of fear and inadequacy upon entering spaces that once felt like home.

I don’t know how to end this, but it feels fitting to close with a few words from Baldwin himself, who I’m sure dealt with these feelings on a scale that I cannot comprehend:

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn't want to admit. The discovery of one's sexual preference doesn't have to be a trauma. It's a trauma because it's such a traumatized society.”

Happy (belated) Juneteenth and Happy Pride. Tell your mother that she has bigger problems than where I put my tongue.