Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  After the ceremony, most of the family headed to our cousin Kadeem’s house around the corner from the church.

  “I know you don’t want any,” Kadeem said after he brought out a case of beer and began to roll a blunt. “You’re Kṛṣṇanandini’s kids.” Your God doesn’t let you grieve like us.

  Kadeem doesn’t really know me well, and I guess he also didn’t know you were gone yet. So I told him. I asked for a drink.

  “Damn, what happened?!” he replied with a nervous laugh as he poured me a whiskey cranberry. I wanted to tell him how you were suffocated by limiting ideas about what boys like you should do, and sometimes that drives me to drink too much. Instead, I just laughed along with him. Then he asked me how I liked the girls in New York.

  “They’re cool,” I said, before making up an excuse to escape the conversation, grateful for the Jameson.

  Later that night, our cousin Richard grabbed my shoulder. I am closer to him, and he knows about my queerness.

  “Step outside with me, Hari, man,” Richard said, running his hands awkwardly through his locs. I gulped down the last of my drink and headed to the patio, unsure what to expect. I carried my empty cup as if it weren’t empty at all, indistinctly aware of a strange hope that I might look down and see it had magically refilled itself.

  “I been meaning to ask you,” Richard said through a graceless chuckle. “What made you like boys?”

  I wanted to tell him, “I didn’t have a choice.” That you had been attracted to boys for as long as I could remember. It’s the same thing I told my parents in the letter I sent them in college explaining that I was queer. I assured them that nothing they could have done would have changed that fact. Lady Gaga proclaimed “Born This Way” was the answer to all my concerns around my sexuality, and I wanted so hard to believe this message, like so many of my gay NYU peers had in their deification of her, because that would make navigating this so much easier.

  If you were born with your gayness, then the fact that everyone seemed to pick up on it just to pick it apart made sense. That it felt like your performance of gender was targeted every single day—that the only whupping I remember you receiving from Daddy was after you jokingly danced on a male friend, that it seemed like our parents made sure to criticize everything that could possibly be interpreted as queer in front of you—felt logical.

  “You had to know,” I wrote in the letter, but Mata insists that she didn’t. None of our family admits that they knew, or that they could have ever even guessed.

  I used to think they were all lying, that this just gave them plausible deniability for me turning out this way. Your queerness felt so loud to me. It was in everything you did. I wanted to tell Richard this, that he knew why I liked boys. That I didn’t have a choice. That I was born this way. But the collar of the button-down was suddenly so tight I couldn’t get the words out. At that moment, all my scars were visible again, and I was reminded that you are gone and I cannot speak for you—not without repairing the fracture caused by this carceral dissonance.

  What is the story beneath this lie that the world tells about the certainty of sexuality? What made you like boys? Even in my earliest memories of experiencing what I interpret as attraction today, I’m not sure it was always entirely sexual. Did you want to have sex with everyone you were attracted to? Were you even completely sure what sex consisted of? Were you really born gay?

  “Born This Way” made sense of the violence that had always targeted me, but claiming it never stopped that violence. Being Black and making sense in an anti-Black world hardly does. Even if my sexuality couldn’t be changed, that wouldn’t prevent anyone from forcing me to try to silence or deny it—any more than never naming my desires had prevented my parents from policing anything that might resemble queerness, even while I was presumably straight. Taylor could just pretend I hadn’t claimed I was gay at all, until the opportunity arose to convincingly point out my demons. Our parents could wield their valid skepticism of Eurocentric science, the same science that had justified our enslavement, to disregard any proof I offered that I had always been this way, especially since the science is inconclusive at best—after all, studies with identical twins do strongly imply sexuality is not entirely genetic.32 And while “Born This Way” couldn’t save me from these attacks, it also didn’t leave room for anyone whose journey to their sexuality was flexible, or just less cut and dried. Even if being born this way is the answer for some gay people, it could not be the answer for everyone. I wanted to wield it as if it were.

  But what if you weren’t born with any static sexuality? What if what I found so loud and impossible to ignore was just you wanting to be free to share intimacy with people you loved and not be told that this was unclean? Even today, only sometimes is my desire for the intimacy I need physical. Sometimes I have felt these desires for intimacy with women as well. It’s just that the world prohibits me from asking it of men, and you kept asking for that intimacy anyway.

  Your courage to ask for the intimacy you needed, despite the ways this intimacy was criminalized and punished, is what I think Richard was really asking about—almost as if he hoped to find that courage, too. Almost as if he hadn’t even platonically touched another man in years, but his aunt had just died and he really could have used a fucking hug from any one of those of us he considered men who were standing around him. I was afraid giving one to him might risk me looking even softer than I already felt, might risk revealing that I don’t consider myself a man, though I think I needed a hug, too. I can be a coward. Your courage is what I am starting to understand queerness really is, and it takes brave choices that I don’t always make.

  I wanted to tell Richard that I didn’t have a choice in being queer, because if I did have one, I would have to answer for why I didn’t choose queerness more often, why I didn’t choose to embrace you and your freedoms, and why I don’t choose that over and over again knowing that the alternative is a cage of abusing myself in order to conform to normative roles I will never completely fit. I would have to explain why I was in this button-down that you would have never worn without being forced. So instead of answering I fidgeted with the collar of the uncomfortably male shirt, took a sip of my uncomfortably empty drink.

  “I mean,” Richard clarified nervously, “I don’t have a problem with you being gay. I just know you can get hella pussy. You’re giving it all up!”

  “I don’t know if it works like that,” I tried. He just gave me another puzzled look, so I made up an excuse to end the conversation and headed to the driveway, where a basketball hoop was set up.

  “Three on three?” I offered the five cousins—all boys—shooting around. They accepted. I played in my dress clothes but had to take off my shoes. I left my socks on because my toenails were still painted black from the pedicure I got before my brother’s wedding. When we were tied 10–10 with the game going to 11, I took off the button-down shirt, too, sweat forcing me to wrench it from my body. I hoped it ripped on the way off. It didn’t. I did not choose to rip it.

  But I could win this game, and at least that was certain. I could grunt and push just to score a point like the manliest man with the most pronounced Adam’s apple. I could watch my feet bleed a plash against the concrete and say it’s all worth it. I didn’t give this up, even if you would have.

  I could show my cousin: Here is my cleanliness. Here is a performance of toughness we were both taught as boys is the same thing as love. When I was knocked headfirst into the garage door, I shook it off. I knocked the next cousin who posted up against me into the garage door as payback. Two players had to leave the court due to injuries, but my team won. A conspicuously drunk uncle clapped approvingly from the back porch.

  “That was a good game,” he said, with more than a hint of surprise. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, pouring me another drink. I put the button-down back on and walked inside Kadeem’s house. I looked at the scars on my feet, thought of you and how far gone you were.
/>   I try to avoid drawing attention to the scars on my body that remind me of how you were lost, because many of them I played a hand in creating. Many were caused by trying to prove something to the world, to my family, that never needed proving. Many were caused by trying to show I was man enough to defend myself, or gay enough never to have to question my sexuality at all, when to you, questions had been okay.

  I am ashamed to admit that I do not always choose to be queer. I do not always choose to question how I police my own intimacy, even within the context of my gayness. I do not always ask what it means when I desire thin, light-skinned, able-bodied partners (and friends) in a fatphobic, white-supremacist, ableist society. I do not always consider that there have been times I was attracted to a person I initially assumed was male who turned out later to be a transgender woman or a genderqueer person, and whether that means I was ever really attracted to a “man” in the first place, or just to my rigid ideas of manhood.

  There are so many other questions I should be asking, about how my limited ideas around what I think real men look like limit how I define myself and my sexuality, and thus my ability to find the intimacy I need. Do my attractions change when I know what influences them? Do I want them to change?

  As I become closer to you, I am increasingly aware of my attractions to other people who aren’t men. I find myself noticing sexual attractions to queer women, to genderqueer people, and to other non-men who offer new ways for me to love them and live freely. I also find myself noticing a type of romance in relationships that would never be described as sexual. But none of this makes for an identity that is legible in this world, and being illegible here is terrifying—and life threatening. I am not always courageous enough to face my fears.

  Hari-Gaura, I find myself back in the same churches in which our family has become a pillar despite the measures I take to avoid them, because the truth is that I am not always so different from cousins who don’t seem to be able to wrap their minds around not wanting to “get hella pussy” or not wanting to run through all the girls in New York. As gay as my dating practices have proved me to be, sometimes I just want to fit into a normative role, just like I think they do.

  I’m not so different from our parents, who shake their heads at the inflexibility of this carceral world—at the inflexibility of the church hosting their sister’s funeral or of the wife who pressures their child not to use their left hand—while being complicit in its limitations in other ways. Sometimes I want life to be easy, but resistance never is. I do not always choose to be queer, even though I know that I have to choose it consistently in order to get back to you.

  Toward the end of the night, my little cousin Justus and I really hit it off. You might have been gone by the time she was born. She stayed with us at the Cleveland Heights house for a summer when she was five, and she’s seventeen now.

  “You were a fucking terror!” I told her with a laugh, remembering a scene of her cackling while running around and spraying a fire extinguisher through our very dry and not-on-fire home.

  “I wasn’t bad!” she insisted. And she wasn’t. What I’ve been trying to tell you is that children shouldn’t be flattened into one-dimensional concepts like “bad.” But she was a fucking terror.

  “You gonna have to take me to a gay club when I come visit you in New York, Hari,” she said.

  “For sure,” I replied, assuming this was her attempt at affirming me in the midst of a family she sees as not affirming enough. I appreciated it.

  “You know I’m like you, right?” she pushed.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “What do you mean, what do I mean? I’m gay!”

  “Oh my God! Finally, another one!”

  We broke out in laughter together like two glasses shattering after meeting too hard at the end of an overeager toast.

  As far as I know, no one else in the family openly identifies as anything other than straight, and it was a momentous relief to share this load.

  “Yeah, my dad was trying me when he found out. Had me call Auntie Kṛṣṇanandini because she dealt with it already with you.”

  “What did my mother say?” I asked.

  “She asked if I was sure it wasn’t a phase.” Justus rolled her eyes. “She said she can’t judge me because she has a son like me. That she will be praying for both of us.”

  I spent so much time looking one way, at my own shame around my journey to understanding my sexuality, that hearing Justus talk about hers felt like being blindsided by a truck. I never knew that any kind of crash could feel like love. Ain’t God funny indeed.

  I don’t know if I was born gay, but I know making space for the way you manifested queerness in my life is a choice. A difficult choice. An everyday choice. Sometimes, choosing queerness feels like digging and digging and digging so deep inside myself to try to find freedom from the restrictions of this violently normative world that I can no longer see the light above. One second, I’m stuck in the dark, all alone, looking up at others who refuse to dig with me. Who choose heteronormativity instead. I can’t witness anything without being reminded of how everything in this world upholds oppression, and I just want a new world entirely, but no one outside this hole wants to hear that shit. And I’m stuck in the darkest of places with just my most horrible mistakes and unimaginable desires to reckon with.

  Sometimes, I want to pop my head out of this hole and play the normative role, too, at least for a little, because I’m just so tired of being lonely and afraid of who I really am when I ask myself the difficult questions freedom requires. I’m afraid I’ll be so stuck down here under all the piles and piles of trauma I unburied trying to find myself that I won’t be able to breathe.

  But there was Justus, illustrating the truth that I can’t ever really be alone doing this self-work. That choosing queerness always provides more beneficial possibilities to meet our needs for intimacy, even when we ourselves have previously made the mistake of criminalizing that choice. That my very real fear of and sadness in facing my traumas don’t have to preclude joy. That sometimes you need to feel the fear and the sadness deeply in order to feel all the joy. That there is always a better option than the ones this world provides. And if we choose it, despite how difficult it may be to do so, we can always be better people than this world dictates us to be.

  Hari-Gaura, if we listen hard enough, there are others singing down in the dark with us, doing this self-work, too, even when we can’t see them.

  Others who exist as annotations and redactions. Others who are digging, or who have been buried. Perhaps knowing that you could never truly be alone in this space of queerness is why you chose not to conform in a world that would kill you for your refusal. Perhaps learning that I can never truly be alone in this space of queerness is how I overcome my anxiety, the colonization of my mind. Wholeness has never been a matter of stability. It’s a matter of being able to lose your footing, to question and doubt and waver with enough balance to avoid tipping over. And maybe yours can be another one of those deaths that brings the family together, for good this time, if I keep at the questions you left behind.

  I couldn’t fully answer his question then, but I worked up the courage to hug Richard tighter than I ever have at the end of that night. There is a world where the disappointment I interpreted in his eyes was less about the fact that I didn’t take advantage of getting “hella pussy,” and more about how I could not demonstrate to him your courage, which he wants to have as well. It may not be this world, but it is a world that I can build. I want to build it for him, for me, for Justus. She and I have been in touch regularly since the funeral. I hate FaceTime, but she FaceTimes me almost every day, like the fucking terror she has always been. I don’t tell her that I hate it, though. She asks about my fiancé and shows me her girlfriend over the phone.

  “Isn’t she cute?” she asks. She is.

  Justus doesn’t let me hide my scars, but with her I know I don’t need to. There should be no sham
e in these marks. They remind me that you are gone, but they also remind me how to reconnect with you. The scars of losing our childhoods show us how we have failed at staying whole historically, and so they are the best place for us to begin to repair the fracture caused by our carceral dissonance in the present. I won’t always follow their lessons, but I can always choose to try harder next time. I can always choose queerness.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MY GENDER IS BLACK

  A few weeks after Aunt Cheryl’s funeral, I was back on the train in Brooklyn, once again struggling to stay on track with making the choices I’d been reassured I needed to make to feel whole again. My calls with Justus had already begun to taper off, and the anxiety was creeping back. By the time I reached my stop, the white faces had mostly seeped out of the subway. Nostrand Avenue acts as the Brooklyn-bound C Train’s water purifier, and white folks are the residue extracted through distillation, but there’s no one to change the filter when it stops working. When gentrification really comes for us.

  I was exhausted from a day of meeting with agents about screenwriting representation, followed by a session of being grilled by my therapist. He said I beat myself up too much. That I was taking on a lot with this whole “I always have to choose queerness” thing. I tried explaining that there’s a crucial difference between beating myself up and holding myself accountable, between shame and self-reflection. He asked me what that difference was, and the words melted into formlessness like warm butter in my mouth. I tasted them, though. They were there.

  My dog couldn’t have cared less about my exhaustion, hopping up and down in excitement as soon as I opened the door. I changed into something more appropriate for the weather as she followed me to every room I walked through, waiting patiently at each entrance, tail infused with a jolt of life whenever I happened to make even the briefest eye contact.