Different = Beautiful

I have never fit in. It started when I was younger, and I liked playing with He-Man and Barbie. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses back then, so He-Man was definitely a no-go. And Barbie… Well, let’s just say there are few things that challenge black hypermasculinity like seeing a black boy play with a doll. Later, when I began to get out to observe other kids and realized just how different I was. And I began to feel at odds with myself. This was in the Eighties, before the days of Facebook and Google, so people were often left up to their own devices to figure things out. So I spent vast amounts of time alone—writing, imagining, questioning, analyzing, drawing, imagining, and writing some more… I noticed the adults around me seemed to be pretty miserable most of the time; so while I was not like them, I made up my mind that I didn’t want to be, either.

But I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be—short of a Silverhawk or some Batman sidekick like Robin but cooler.

Then came grade school. At first, I was excited about it, because I thought surely someone in all these new people I met would be like me. Or at least accept me. I was wrong. Mom realized how important it was for us to get a decent education, and she knew from her own experiences that that just didn’t happen in some schools, even in a place as progressive as Maryland. So she did what she needed to make sure we could attend the best schools within our means. When you’re black and barely making ends meet, private school isn’t really an option. So we used different addresses and stayed with different relatives to be able to attend better schools than the ones we would have attended if we had played by the rules. So here we were, poor black kids attending these predominantly white upper-middle class schools.

Back then, I remember the message was all about colorblindness and that all people were equal. But it sure seemed like some people were more equal than others. If you exhibited certain sets of characteristics that allowed you to be typecast, you had an easier time of things. Adults and other kids could predict your behavior most of the time when you fell into one of these types, and, because it was basically a caste system, there was a definite pecking order, regardless of what anyone told you. I was artistic but analytical, quiet but not disturbed, brown-skinned but not “black,” effeminate but not flamboyant. Add to that a few other complications—selective mutism up until the seventh grade or so and then the onset of narcolepsy in my adolescence—and you have a recipe for isolation. And, keep in mind, this was before Google, so most people (particularly poor black people) didn’t know what selective mutism or narcolepsy were at that time. Even the teachers, guidance counselors and social workers around me didn’t pick up on those things.

I can’t really blame them, though. At our core, we are these beings of light and consciousness and energy; but the body is an animal. And animals often operate by instinct and ritual. Look or behave differently from the other animals in your pack, and the pack assumes you’re sick or demented.

So I did what animals do: I evolved. I adapted to become a changeling—to camouflage myself invisible in the world. I did this at home and at school. At home, it kept everyone away from me so that I wasn’t caught up in the dysfunctional dynamics. It also gave me solitude—which was the only time I felt I could be myself. At school, it kept the other kids away. It let them and the adults around me know that I was different, but it didn’t make me vulnerable by exposing exactly how I was different—even though some people, guardian angels and bullies, have ways of sniffing such things out nonetheless.

I tolerated both the angels and the bullies. My angels came in the forms of adults mostly. The biggest of those was Mrs. Todd, the guidance counselor who was the first person in the world to whom I said the words, “I am gay.” If it wasn’t for her, I’m not sure I would be alive, let alone healthy. Bullies came in the form of Amanda and Carolyn, who made fun of my high-pitched voice and effeminate manner. They were among the ones who sniffed out that I was gay before I knew the meaning of the word. And I think they attributed my voice to that. In reality, “the voice” happened only when I was around strangers and away from family. I was so terrified and anxious that my vocal cords felt like they turned to stone, not to be moved by any wind from my lungs. I managed to eek out what little voice I could by visualizing my breath as blades against the stone. That little, high-pitched voice was like Wolverine’s claws--hurting every time it came out. But it was a hell of a lot less impressive.

The voice went away the first day of school in seventh grade when my family moved again, this time into the school district. I boarded the bus that morning to find Amanda and Carolyn sitting behind the only empty seat. I remember the glints in their eyes and the grins on their faces as they spotted me and exchanged glances. I felt my vocal cords frosting, petrifying. My heart fluttered like a panicked bird in my ribcage. All I could think was, “No, I won’t go through this another year.”

Amanda and Carolyn could hardly contain themselves, malicious giggles bubbling out of them as I paused at the empty seat before them. I tried not to hate them. My grandmother told me we shouldn’t hate people, and to me that made sense, because, well, I figured that if people knew the truth of me, everyone would hate me. And I thought for a moment how, well, Amanda and Carolyn didn’t really look like people, more like wolves or jackals... It made me angry. As I took off my backpack, I thought about how bad everyone says anger is. Anger was fire. Safety is darkness. We just wanted to be safe. But the only time I felt safe was when I was alone. There had to be some other way—something between fire and darkness.

It started to rain.

Water.

Water flows, adapts, transforms and is transformed…

Water also cuts stone.

So I decided to become the rain. I became water.

I said a single word in my own voice—water cutting through stone—and Amanda and Carolyn never so much as looked at me anymore. That word was, “Hello.”

It was then that I began to notice how my being different enhanced my survival. Because I acted “white” and “like a faggot,” my black male peers shunned me. Because I didn’t look or act the part, I was excluded from playing it. That meant that as a black man, I had to find my own path.

But it didn’t stop there. The one place I thought I would truly fit in was the gay community. I spent the better part of fifteen years looking for some sparkling pink door where all the glitter girls and glimmer boys hung out. What I encountered was just a different kind of hierarchy, where skinny and young and white and conventionally beautiful were the cream of the crop and everything else was fetish. Men couched exclusion and intolerance in preference: “No blacks, no femmes, no fatties.” Just a preference, no offense.

I understand now that this is a product of the hypersexualization many gay men develop in response to traumas they have suffered, that when you use sex as a salutation—as ubiquitous as a handshake—you come to think of people, not just men, as meat: Cut or uncut, light or dark, fatty or lean. It’s simple consumption. But back in my teens and twenties, I had yet to develop that level of understanding. It felt like I was too gay or whatever to be black and too black to be gay or whatever. All I knew was that not making the cut—or, worse, being objectified and used—stung to my marrow. To avoid the sting, I stopped searching for validation outside and did what came naturally to me. I went within. Experiencing rejection in the black and gay communities led me away from some of the pitfalls common to those scenes—substance abuse, toxic masculinity, illness, and more trauma, just for starters. More importantly, though, I grew to understand that it isn’t about being gay or whatever. Or being black or whatever. We are called forth out of nothing against incalculable odds to be here in this form as we are, on this little rock, floating in this vast universe of dimensions beyond dream for one reason and one only: To be who we are.

And who we are is whoever we choose to be. In the end, it means everything and yet nothing at all. It means everything, because only you have experienced the unique combination of events, feelings, thoughts, and entanglements that make up your life. It colors the creations that manifest out of nothing through you. Only you can tell your truth—your story—in the colors, shapes, dimensions, moods and modes that are uniquely you. And yet, it means nothing, because at our deepest core—that nothing we all are drawn and draw from—isn’t a nothing, a void. It’s all of us, one spirit from which everything we see, touch, taste, feel, hear, believe, do and are is but a vibration, an echo. We and everything around us are simply different frequencies refracted out of a single, magnificent light. The body is just the vehicle— an animal too crude to perceive the Reality behind reality.

Do you see? You are different. Yes. You are different. And it’s beautiful. You are beautiful.