I still very much wanted a family and to be happy with one special person. I felt a great deal of responsibility to be a strong role model for my little brother and other young black men. I had to stop beating myself up about my sexual longings. At a time when black men were being maligned, I would concentrate on things that were honorable about me and the qualities that could be an asset to the black community. I felt strongly that I could be of service without people coming into my bedroom. I guess in a lot of ways I was blessed that I could pass in and out of the heterosexual world. Redirecting my thoughts was something I could control. I had made my sexuality the primary focus of my life for too long; from now on, I would allow it to be only a small part of my identity.
Mom and I didn’t stay at the lavish wedding reception very long. We both wished Sela and Dewayne the best and took our leave. When Sela and I kissed, she whispered, “I heard you’re in love.” I smiled. Besides, it was my twenty-ninth birthday, the age at which I had always dreamed everything would come together in my life. I had no idea how difficult a task it would be.
I asked my parents to keep the birthday celebration minimal. Mom cooked a special dinner and there were cake, champagne and gifts. After dinner I stood in the kitchen as my mother put the dishes in the dishwasher. After closing the door on the machine, she sighed, “Finally.” She looked at me as we faced each other, separated only by the butcher-block island, and smiled. “What are you thinking about, Ray junior?”
“Ma, what did you think when you found out I might be gay?”
“Think about?” she quizzed.
“Yeah, what did you think? Were you upset, disappointed?”
“Baby, as a mother I prayed that when you were born you’d be healthy and when you grew up you’d be happy. Nothing else matters. Your being gay doesn’t make a bit of difference to me and it shouldn’t matter to any parent.”
“Do you think Pops has really accepted it?”
“The bottom line is, your father loves you. He’s just learning what unconditional love is. Lord knows I’ve spent my marriage trying to teach him.”
“Do you think I was born gay, Ma?”
“I don’t know, but why does it matter?”
“What would I do without you, Ma?” I asked, and held her tightly in my arms.
“With God’s grace, you’ll never know,” she responded as she rubbed her warm hands up and down my back.
As I left the kitchen and walked down the hallway to retire from an eventful evening, my father pulled me to the side and told me how proud he was to have me as his son. No matter what choices I made about work or my life, he would support me one hundred percent. It was the best birthday present I could ever have received from him. I felt a great peacefulness as we stood huddled in our family room. Just when I was preparing to tell him how much that meant to me, Mama called from the kitchen.
“Raymond junior, telephone!” she yelled.
When I walked back into the kitchen, Mama was holding the phone and smiling.
“Who is it?” I asked. My mama said nothing. She just walked away, smiling to herself.
“Hello.”
“Happy Birthday, Raymond.” It was Nicole. My stomach started to flutter.
“Nicole, how are you … thank you. Where are you?”
“I’m in New York.”
“How are you?”
“Better than yesterday, hopefully better tomorrow.”
“I’m glad to hear that. This is a wonderful surprise,” I said.
“Well, I couldn’t forget your birthday. How are you doing?”
“Better. Taking it one day at a time.”
“Did you get my letter?” Nicole asked.
“No.”
“Well, you will. I just mailed it a couple of days ago and you know the New York City mail.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” I said.
Nicole and I talked for about ten minutes, each of us tentative about what we said and what we asked. She told me that she had gotten the female lead in a Broadway workshop and that she felt pretty good about the show’s chances. I wished her luck and we talked about the decisions I had to make. She told me something I already knew: our AIDS tests had come back negative. Her doctor had told her to have another test in six months to be sure. Just when we were preparing to say good-bye, Nicole called my name as she had so many nights before: “Raymond.”
“Yes?”
“Well, if the show makes it, you won’t forget your promise?”
“My promise?”
“Yes, did you forget? Remember when you said you would never miss my opening night on Broadway.”
“Of course I do. Do you still want me there?”
“Yes, I couldn’t do it without you.”
“Yes you could. But I’m delighted that you won’t.”
“Raymond, can I ask you one more thing?”
“Please.”
“When do you stop wishing for something that may never happen? When do you stop wishing for that perfect world?”
“Never … Nicole … never,” I responded.
With that, Nicole said good night and wished me Happy Birthday once more. A wish that contained the feelings of unspeakable hope, the hope that a new season brings. Tomorrow was the first day of summer.
THE END FOR NOW
Acknowledgments
In addition to the people I thanked in the first edition of Invisible Life, I must mention several who made this version possible. First of all, to the thousands who purchased the first edition and requested that bookstores carry the book: thanks for all the letters, I’m still answering them.
A special thanks to Doubleday Super Salesman Chris Grimm for discovering me, and my friend Lillian Yeilding at Oxford Bookstore for her help with securing an agent; three special friends whom I forgot to mention in the first edition, Deborah Chambers, Denise (a.k.a. JJ) Johnson and Joyce Ann Brewer; my beautiful cousin, Jacquelyn Johnson; my sounding board and new friend, Valarie Boyd; my former neighbors, Jessica and Paul; and several new friends who gave me parties and sold books before we even met. Thanks a million, Dyanna Williams, Dee Levi, Carl Cromwell, Ed Robinson, Rodney Lofton, Reggie Van Lee, Mel Smith, Renee Logan, Kym Greene, Tracey Sherrod, KaLavell Grayson, Sadki, Ron Ross, Kathy Hampton and BLSA at Harvard Law School, Mark Johnson, Janis Murray, Cheryl Jones, Patrick Bell and Jonathan Pollard. Also special mention to my attorney, Linda Chatman, and my photographer, Martin Christopher.
If I have forgotten somebody, please charge it to my head and not my heart. I close by thanking the bookstores and beauty shops that made this book a hit. So here’s to: Oxford Bookstore, Shrine of Black Madonna, Folktales, Nia Gallery, Mainstreet, Claris, Lambda Rising, Hue-Man, Giovanni’s Room, Insight, First World, Force One, Nelda’s, Therapy Salon and Charles, Inc. Thanks also to: ABC, BUILD and IMANI Book Clubs. Blessings to all!
If you enjoyed reading Invisible Life, Doubleday has just published E. Lynn Harris’s second novel, Just As I Am. The following is the opening chapter from that novel.
Raymond Jr.
I imagine the world was created beneath a canopy of silence. Perfect silence. While in my own personal silence I would create the world I dreamed of. A world full of love and absent of life’s harsh realities. A world where all dreams would come true. A place called Perfect. But I’ve come to realize that some dreams you have to give up. I live in a world that promises to protect me but will not catch me when I fall. In this life I have fallen many times. From these falls I have learned many lessons. Lessons involving lust, loss, love and life. Lessons that hit as hard as an unannounced summer thunderstorm, sudden and sometimes destructive.
One of my life’s unexpected lessons occurred during my senior year in college. It was on the first Friday in October that my brain released a secret it had struggled to protect throughout my adolescence. I learned on that day that my sexual orientation was not a belief or choice, but a fact of my birth. And just like the color of my skin and eyes, these things could
not be changed, at least not permanently.
My name is Raymond Winston Tyler, Jr., and I am a thirty-two- soon to be thirty-three-year-old, second-generation attorney. The son of attorney Raymond Winston Tyler and Marlee Allen Tyler, an elementary school teacher, and big brother to fourteen-year-old Kirby.
I had a happy childhood, growing up deeply ensconced in the black middle class. A child of the integrated New South, born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, a city that in the past was known more for church bombing than being the bedrock of college football.
I returned home after law school and several years of successful practice in a large New York firm. About a year ago I moved two hours south to Atlanta, after a two-year stint of running my pops’s law firm while he followed his lifelong dream and became a member of the Alabama State Senate.
Atlanta struck me as a vibrant city. A cross between country and cosmopolitan, a city where popular eateries still took personal checks, that is with a valid driver’s license. A city consumed with sports and the dream of becoming the Motown of the nineties. Atlanta was a city on the move and even though it didn’t have the flash and energy of New York City, it was more conducive to my life than Birmingham. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my family and my birthplace, but I knew it was time to move on and continue my search for Perfect.
I was living in a trendy Buckhead condo and working for Battle, Carroll & Myers, a black, female-owned law firm specializing in entertainment and sports law. I had originally moved to Atlanta with the understanding that I would go to work for the city government, but a few days before I was to start, I received word that a hiring freeze had been put into effect. I later found out from a friend of my father that the reason for the freeze was because someone in the mayor’s office wanted the position promised to me to go to an openly gay, black attorney. Now wasn’t that just the shit. My Columbia Law School education and major New York firm experience didn’t amount to anything. Just my sexual orientation and then only if I was willing to make it public, which I wasn’t. So with the help of my good friend Jared Stovall, I went to work for Battle, Carroll & Myers. My position created an ironic dilemma. I was hired in part because of my love and knowledge of college sports. The firm was actively seeking college athletes about to turn professional and it was my job to convince these young men, mostly black and from black colleges, that the firm would be looking out for their best interests. I had just entered a period in my life when I was practicing celibacy and trying very hard to put the male body out of my mind, but now I was constantly in steamy locker rooms with some of the most beautiful bodies in the world.
Our firm also represented a number of rappers and singers, but Gilliam Battle, the founder and only remaining partner, handled the majority of them along with the recording executives. Though an extremely smart woman, Gilliam didn’t know jack about sports, other than the fact that pro athletes made a great deal of money and didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do with it. Gilliam not only assembled a top team of attorneys but also a staff of investment counselors, speech coaches, doctors, and whatever it took to make sure our clients represented us as well as we represented them.
My social life in Atlanta was in a lot of respects similar to life in Birmingham, back in the closet. Atlanta did have a visible gay community but it was visibly white. I wasn’t forced into the closet, it was just a choice I’d made out of respect for my family, especially my pops. My parents knew about and tried to accept my sexuality, but the fact that they knew didn’t mean they wanted to discuss it around the dinner table or with my little brother. So like my parents, I too decided to ignore my sexuality and went back to my old straight act the minute I left New York. Talk about your safe sex. Besides, men were basically dogs—couldn’t tell the truth if their life depended on it. And now your life does depend on it. Trust me I know. In my past I too have been guilty of not being totally truthful either with men or women. But men never expect honesty. Women, on the other hand, say that they want the truth, but then they act like they don’t hear you when you try to tell it like it is. Sometimes in the heat of passion men are not the only ones who let their sex do the thinking.
Currently there is not a female in my life besides my mother and Gilliam, but there was a man, a good man. I’d met Jared Taylor Stovall in Birmingham when he’d come to run my pops’s political campaign. Jared was a political consultant who had been highly recommended when Pops’s victory was in doubt. Jared became a member of our family, practically moving into my parents’ home during the race. Jared actually convinced me to move to Atlanta by offering me a place to stay and remarking with a devilish smile, “I want my niggah around me all the time.”
Jared was quite handsome in a rugged sort of way. His looks inspired confidence—tall and strapping, six foot three and two hundred and ten pounds of slightly bowlegged, biscuit-brown masculinity. Large bittersweet brown eyes, and a smile that would have lit up the Atlanta skyline. He was as smart as he was good-looking, finishing at the top of his class at Morris Brown College and later getting an MBA at Clark-Atlanta University. He was the oldest child and the only son of a devoted mother who had raised him and his two sisters alone in southwest Atlanta. Jared never mentioned his father.
I hadn’t shared my sexuality with Jared mainly because it had never come up. I hadn’t determined if Jared himself was gay or straight, just as I couldn’t tell if his closely cropped hair was naturally curly or mildly relaxed. Only when I felt lonely did Jared’s sexuality cross my mind. Sleeping alone with just my pillows for comfort created an insatiable void in my life. Our relationship wavered between brotherly love and romantic love, though it was a romance without sex. A romance in my mind only, at least as far as I knew.
I’m what you would call a romantic, a severe romantic, yet lasting romance has eluded me. I grew up believing that you really fell in love only once and that that love would last forever, like in the movies. I now know that most people consider themselves lucky if they fall in love once and have that love returned. But I wasn’t even that lucky; the truth of my present situation was a love life that consisted only of daydreams about Jared and listening to R&B songs about love dreamed but never attained. I longed for a love that would make me feel like the soothing love songs that caused an involuntary smile to linger not only on my face but in my heart. A love life that was an eternal “quiet storm.”
My love life had included a quartet of lovers—two men, Kelvin and Quinn, sandwiched between my first love, Sela, and Nicole, the woman who had broken my heart because I hadn’t told the truth. A lie that sent me packing back to Birmingham, back into the closet, and into my present celibate state.
Now even though I hate labels, I still consider myself bisexual. A sexual mulatto. I mean how else could I explain how members of the singing group En Vogue and certain members of the Atlanta Braves aroused my sexual desires with equal measure?
I didn’t feel comfortable in a totally gay environment or in a totally straight environment. I often wondered where the term gay came from. Lonely would better describe the life for me. There was absolutely nothing gay about being a black man and living life attracted to members of your own sex in this imperfect world I called home. For now a place called Perfect remained a dream.
Nicole
When I was in the fourth grade, the boy who sat behind me would always pull my hair any time he thought no one was looking. He would really get on my nerves. One day instead of pulling my braids he slipped a note in my hand. It read, “Will you go with me? Yes … No … Maybe. Please circle one.”
Since I didn’t know where he wanted me to go, I placed the note in my knee socks and took it home to my daddy, asking him what I should do. He gave me some advice I’ve always tried to live by. “Listen to your heart,” he said.
From my daddy’s words of wisdom I realized that my heart has a voice. It speaks to me with each beat. My heart protects me, shielding me from the things I can’t see or lack the courage to face. My heart knows who
I am and who I’ll turn out to be.
My name is Nicole Marie Springer, former beauty queen, Broadway actress, and sometime word processor. Thirty years of age, but that’s twenty-five in show biz years. Born and raised in Sweet Home, Arkansas, right outside of Little Rock, population five hundred and eighty-five, and one stoplight. Daughter of cotton farmers James and Idella Springer, older sister of Michael. A small-town girl with big-city goals.
They say in every life some rain must fall, but I’ve just come through a couple of years dominated by thunderstorms. Right now my life is cloudy and overcast, anxiously awaiting the sun.
In the last three years I lost my beloved father to a sudden heart attack, my best friend Candance to AIDS, and Raymond, the brief love of my life, to another man.
The death of my daddy, though sudden, was not quite a surprise. He was seventy-seven years old and had spent his twilight years defying his doctor by not taking his high blood pressure medication. But the loss of my college sorority sister and closest confidante was devastating. Candance, the first person I had met at Spelman College, was not only beautiful and brilliant, but was just months away from her dream of becoming a physician. Her sudden illness hit like a ton of bricks. Candance, who told me hours after our initial meeting that she was going to become a doctor, marry, and have two children. She lived to see only one of those dreams come true, marrying Kelvin on her deathbed. Kelvin Ellis, the suspected culprit of Candance’s demise. Kelvin, the same man who introduced me to Raymond, whom I fell quickly and deeply in love with, the love I thought my heart had led me to. I never found out if Kelvin was in fact the man in Raymond’s secret life. I was too distraught to even think about it.
After the breakup with Raymond, I began to doubt my own sexuality. Had I not been enough woman to satisfy him, or had I been too much? I spent night after night crying myself to sleep, praying that my daddy and Candance would send down some advice, since I could no longer count on my heart.
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