Dealing with some personal issues of depression has been lifelong and for awhile of late I was really starting to think it was something wrong with me. That I wasn’t strong enough or flexible enough to stand the storms of life when I know I have been bent every which way but broke down. It’s just that the storm has been constant and has become normalized; at least my adjusting to its onslaught.
With black sgl men, depression can become a way of life that few of us ever question, discuss or even think twice about. I remember a line from an old blues song that goes: I’ve been down so long that getting up never crossed my mind. And I believe that’s what depression is like for so many of us black sgl men. It’s the normalization of being down and out and beat down and beat up, and…well you get my meaning.
I heard a black female minister say once that depression was “frozen anger” and maybe she’s right. Maybe it is anger that has nowhere to go so it sits inside of us like stagnant still water. If you have been around stagnant water you know the smell. It reeks! Sometimes announcing itself way before you get to it.
Black folks kill me. They’re apologists for everything, too often not looking at the things that harm us. In our world of pop positivity, pop psychology and pop religion, depression has been reduced to a personal problem that’s really all your fault. I recently had a conversation with someone who stated, “In Africa they don’t have depression.” I was stunned to silence first not knowing how to take the comment and second not sure how to respond without tearing somebody a new asshole.
I’ve been around religious circles that tell you, you aren’t trusting God enough, your perception is negative and if God hasn’t answered you then God isn’t silent… it’s your fault for not listening proper. The last one was from a morbidly obese woman whose husband was physically abusive and who would on occasion go to the park and down an entire cake by herself--she was a diabetic.
I know about eating to compensate for feeling perpetually bad. I binge eat when I can’t figure life out. I’ve always done it, but heading toward 50 it’s become a serious health issue and one I don’t want to haunt me to my final days. But even more disturbing and emergent is paying attention to my thought processes during this time of being off from work. I see how easily it is to fall into a level of depression that can lead to suicide. But even more I’ve had to look at the particular processes that get us (black sgl men) to the point of being self destructive. I was reading an article recently that stated suicide was murder that didn’t break out beyond the individual. It was murder turned inward. Something had so addled the human senses that violence had become an option for facing life and its pressures. Take yourself out!
What impacts our sense of self and lack of community are the very things so many of us hold dear in the gay community at large and by default the black gay community with the extra added dimension of race. These are some of the issues that affect our sense of a viable community which I think is the core cause of depression. No sense of community.
Things like Adam4Adam and Black Gay Chat can really give a body and mind a distorted sense of reality. For example, body parts, your penis size and length, whether or not you have a six pack or keg, height and weight proportionate and whether or not you exercise can become serious distortions as to what’s gay. So often many identify gay, when we can, as sex. They’re pretty much synonyms in this day and time as gay has been co-opted by a larger community fueled by the porn industry and the beauty and health industry or just fickleness of mind; the make up to cover the blotches of our lives. So many of us get messages constantly (even the cutest of us) that we’re somehow deficient as we are. If we’re not tall enough or the right weight or just don’t look like the guy in the porn flick, the layout in the health and body magazine or our favorite hero or heroine on television or the movies or that singer, then we just don’t add up. We’re particularly vulnerable as black sgl men since we’ve the added burden of race to grapple with.
Then we get into light skin/dark skin issues or into penis size. Yes, penis size. Those who are not swinging at least 8 inches and ample width are relegated to female status which says a lot about how gay men feel about women relegated to secondary status. A penis not measured at the modern market size for being considered a “real” man or the “top” gets many of us in trouble with ourselves. Working with so many young guys I saw how they relegated themselves to “bottom” simply because the images they’ve been exposed to in media never included them as hero or the man or the one running things. So they identify with women when they aren’t women and never will be.
I’m pretty much convinced that a lot of the diva worship I see these days is simply woman envy. It’s easier to identify with women who are desired by men, “naturally” as we can live through them vicariously and be desired too without being torn down as unnatural and a faggot because we also want to be desired by men. We can’t be our honest selves in our male black bodies so at core we start to believe something is wrong with us. We weren’t quite born right. Don’t have the right body (and I’m not talking about a transgender person who believes they may have been born in the “wrong” body.) I’m talking about a person who doesn’t want their body because it’s too hard navigating its presence in a world that says same sex desire is not only wrong but wrong before God and creation. A transgender person may feel as if they need to have a sex change operation to be who they feel they fundamentally are. A black sgl male suffering from Dysmorphia thinks it’s something wrong with his body, penis and all and doesn’t want to get out of it so much as not have to deal with the angst other people create about it. The body parts are correct. It’s how it’s to be used and how he feels that’s wrong. He actually prefers being male as he was born. It’s just something wrong with the kind of male he is. This also creates anger toward black women, whether lesbian, bi or hetero, as she’s “got it easy” in their mind. No one wants to destroy her for being born a woman.
It’s not necessarily true, but what some sgl men don’t understand is under patriarchy a woman’s body can still be impregnated and many hetero men get off on seeing lesbian porn because he can imagine himself into the couple and penetrate both. He still remains a man. He can’t necessarily do that with one or two men even if he is penetrating. The fact is he got hard for a man. A man has stepped down from patriarchal status to be with another man. If he sleeps with a lesbian or two, she was never on equal status in the first place. She was only a woman. He can bestow “naturalness” on a lesbian as he could upon a hetero woman. He cannot bestow “naturalness” on another male; he’s given up his presumed superior status. This is stuff we know deep within ourselves and to not own our on deep seated self rejection of our body and a shaky sense of masculinity simply become diva worshippers. This feeds our unique and particular kind of depression.
You need a community to affirm your body for what it is and your desire for what it is. Not disqualify its presence which is what most of us experience all day every day. You cannot tell me that a dick picture on a website is saying I want a date with you. You can’t make me believe it. A nude picture of yourself, or body part, says this is who I am and I want sex or sex is so crucial to my identity I want to say it up front and cut to the chase so we don’t have to deal with the emotional angst of relationships and why we can’t be human beings to one another instead of some perfect gay ideal.
Who builds relationships off of sex only? No one. Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to be sexually compatible, but if it’s the only thing we base relationships on we’re depriving ourselves of other aspects of relationships that also maintain it. But what diverse images of us making love or being romantic do we see in the media and I’m not talking about gratuitous sex. I’m talking about sexual lives that are contextualized in relationships of raising children, breaking bread together, taking care of elderly parents, community involvement.
Sex can never be broken off from the larger community. We may not do sex in public, but our public lives seed the quality of our sexual lives. It’s popularly stated that “I don’t want to know what’s going on in your bedroom.” Understandable, but the laws and attitudes of a community are in our bedroom running things. Sex is power and the power dynamics we experience in the larger community impacts it on so many levels. If we live in fear in the community we bring fear and that desperate longing to connect into the bedroom. “Whose is it?” Maybe you’ve heard it or said it. “It’s yours ____!” You can fill in the blank with Daddy, Papi, a lover’s name and we both get the rush. It’s getting and giving up isolation to belong to somebody else in such simple words because we feel so isolated out in the “real” world where our presence is feared or questioned. I might not belong to y’all it states or you might not want me but in this second or minute he/she wants it, our sexual organs becoming everything we are to establish community. It’s a rush to feel connected and a dangerous one for the communal ground it grows out of. We’re fated to be in one another’s bedrooms, I’m sorry to say. Sex has never been private and it’s the lie we tell ourselves in America while girls get pregnant to own someone (a child) they mistakenly feel will never leave them. Boyfriends and marriages are such fleeting things, but no one can change the fact of a mother. At least she got a piece of who she thought she loved. And the boys running around talking about a piece of ass? It’s ownership too, bragging to possess a body, mistaking it for carte blanche to be one of the boys; unspoken passage into that fraternal order of pussy hounds; those guys now belonging to one another through her body.
Everybody’s trying desperately to make community and belong somewhere and to somebody. To not belong, somewhere and to someone, creates depression and off we go to the therapist to fix it?
I remember a family member looking for a therapist and her only concern was that she found someone black and female like her. I fully supported her thinking it a wise decision because in going into therapy you want someone who can identify on some level with you culturally, comprehending the particular issue you bring to the table. You just don’t want to have to explain yourself from black scratch.
It’s the same for me when I’ve put myself in therapy. The problem is I bring extra cultural stuff to the session. I’m a black man. Not a whole lot of those available for therapy. I’m a black gay man. I might have to go down the list of my health provider trying to see who is a black male but rarely does a therapist, especially a black one, say I specialize to the black gay male and lesbian community. If they do you’re still not out of the woods. You have to take into account the nature of the therapist’s world views.
For example as a black man I might want a black male therapist then again I might not. I have to consider is he possibly homophobic or heterosexist? Maybe I’ll just go and find out and feel him out as to his political and religious leanings in a roundabout way seeing if he is. If I’m on a medical plan where I can only get so many therapeutic visits, I might have to waste a few figuring him out. But, you say, you might have to figure a white one out too. Quite possibly, but white men don’t look like me. White men, generally speaking, don’t have the same cultural points of reference in having to deal with race, what it means to be called a nigger in the street (and in my case a nigger in the street and a faggot in home and church). White men have never publicly attacked me as a traitor to the race, having given up my precious manhood to be fucked in the ass “like white men expect us to” since they’re supposedly the arbiters of manhood anyway and who black men have been wrestling with for centuries for the esteemed title. Make myself vulnerable to a black man to wound me again? I don’t think so.
I’ll never forget a radio show in Memphis some years back with callers calling in to seek the advice of a black female therapist. A black gay man called in and she was blunt in that she didn’t counsel in that area. Callers called in to back her up, something psychologically deranged as a black man supposedly in a relationship with another black man. Whoever heard of such?
Memories mark the psyche for life. You’re just glad it wasn’t you. Anonymous or not, you’ve been publicly dismissed from the community—again!
I sat in the counselor’s seat for several years working in HIV/AIDS and I recognized how crucial it was for someone to disclose their sexual history and psychological mindset to someone who looked like them and with whom they could find a common ground of comfort. Black gay guys after either figuring you out or you’re disclosing through general conversation as you’re testing or identifying risky behaviors may take a chance on trusting you. You see the calm come over the guy sitting in the chair across from you and the willingness to disclose more in the sense to find someone to relate to.
I’ve seen straight guys try to find a common ground with me too, the gateway to ease through skin color. I’ve seen white guys get there through the gateway of sexuality and find a common ground to talk freely.
Sometimes skin color isn’t enough of a common ground either.
A year or so ago, I put myself in the therapy chair dealing with some personal issues around being a father, a son, and work. The therapist, a black female, was going down a list of things that were bothering me. One of the major issues was my years-long lack of a relationship.
I went on explaining to her the ins and outs of being a black gay man, particularly one who had never been deeply immersed in the gay “subculture.” Had never been a club queen, or a church queen, spent a lot of my time dealing with my father who was alive at the time and my son who was dealing with some issues too. I told her I would love to have the outlet of a partner and some me-time. After the initial you’ve got to love yourself dictum which has fast become cliché, she asked if I had ever considered a woman? I was initially taken aback. She knew I was a black gay man and I couldn’t believe my ears. I stilled my temper (and a few choice cuss words) because I liked her and saw the honest ignorance of her question. You know like when you meet old folks who are puzzled at seeing two men in a relationship and will ask innocently enough: “Which of you is the man and which is the woman? Ignoring the obvious fact that two men are sitting in front of them. I then asked her had she ever considered a woman? She calmly said “No. But how do you know unless you try it?” Implying how did I know I didn’t like women when I’d never had sex with one or explored one intimately. I don’t need to experiment with a woman to figure I’m not interested. Don’t’ they call those down low brothers anyway? If I did what she suggested then I’m another kind of problem and blight on the community which black women complain about. Damned if I’m gay. Damned if I’m experimenting with being straight.
Needless to say, I saw the therapy going nowhere and I politely sat in the chair because I was caught between embarrassment at the question and the fact that she didn’t get me after all this time and the fact that I had let my guard down with a person who didn’t get what it was like to be a same sex attracted black man in Memphis and America. I didn’t go back (as black folks are prone to do more than act a fool) and haven’t been in therapy since. It’s proven to be a veritable mine field and I don’t feel like negotiating my every foot fall knowing it could be the one to blow my mind and for good.
And blowing our mind is a constant battle black sgl men have to deal with daily. Sometimes you don’t know if people are trying to kick your ass for being black or gay or black and gay, or you’re just the day’s designated victim because you happen to be in the vicinity. Maybe I’m morbid, but I’d at least like the courtesy of knowing why someone wants me dead or brutalized. Or why I want me dead or brutalized.
At this point I’m not open to therapy, depression or no depression, and it’s not because of what happened with my last therapeutic session. It’s because I don’t have any faith in therapy anymore. I need more. James Hilllman wrote a book entitled, We’ve Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy...And the World’s Getting Worse. This is how I feel at the moment since psychotherapy cannot deal with my sexuality as my sexuality and my blackness (if there is any such a thing that can be put in a nutshell all nice and neat). My race and sexuality aren’t the problems. The world is. (I hear that old echo in the back of my mind: You can’t change the world. But in actuality you can. Just be yourself.) Psychotherapy as I realized sitting in that therapist’s chair cannot help me with the problem because the problem isn’t me. It’s living in a world that’s not made for someone like me. It’s a hotbed of readymade depression when I was born.
Back to the thing about loving yourself. How do you do that when you learn to love yourself from others? They’re your teachers, but it’s a truth we don’t want to deal with in a world that teaches us rugged individualism, that we’re born alone and die alone. We really don’t.
We’re the one species that has the longest time to grow and learn which we don’t stop at 18 mind you. We needed help inside our mothers for nine months. We come out needing help, looking for tit or bottle a dry diaper and somebody to coo at us. We learn language from our own and if we didn’t we’d all be a bunch of stark raving mad idiots walking around not knowing the sky from the ground, night from day, that love and murder aren’t the same thing. We learn human culture in its myriad forms from one another. It just doesn’t fall out the sky. We learn who we are and who we can or cannot be from the people who raise and influence us. We learn from the natural world who we are and who it is. We’re constantly in a matrix making us and remaking us and we don’t even see it because we take it for granted. We’re not alone. We’re just not taking responsibility for not being alone and the parents and neighbors and culture and nation that make us.
We can only be depressed if we’re truly awake and the most sensitive ones see this denied connection and become addicted to one thing or another to alleviate the pain of that awful truth that we do really need one another. None of us is born or exists in a vacuum and we really are our brother and sisters’ keeper contrary to popular and an oh so convenient belief in individualism. To put someone in therapy and expect them to get better oriented for the world is a fool’s errand. Good therapy can only make you maladjusted.
I don’t know if there is any such thing as maladjustment therapy and maybe I’ve been doing it with the clients I had at my former job. The guy who comes in and tells me he’s just getting tested just to be tested; who progresses to confess he’s getting tested because he let a bunch of thugs run a train on him; who progresses to confessing that he has body issues; who progresses to telling me that he feels that being gay is wrong because the Bible tells him so; who progresses to looking at me dumbfounded when I tell him God loves him anyway; who progresses to a distrusting and hard pressed “Thank you,” for listening to him in the first place.
I’ve just maladjusted him and made his life a little harder telling him that he is not a cosmic mistake, God’s joke, a curse on a wayward nation or his family. I’ve put him at odds with the whole black community and the world by telling him he has just as much right to be here as anybody else.
Still I may have failed him. I can offer him no shelter from this life’s storm and have set him on the road to his own personal angst. Unless he can learn to weather the storm and so many of us aren’t equipped, he won’t make it. The only other option under my hand was to let him continue to think he was cursed and let the “real” men, the thugs, run trains on him, a certain death sentence of mind and body on delay. I’ve sent him, a sheep, out amongst rabid wolves to make his own second chance.
And this is the failure of psychotherapy and the failure of the whole community and the grounds for depression. I don’t know how to alleviate it. I can’t find safety as one person did in some golden Africa claiming they don’t’ have depression or never had it. Anybody who is human and rejected from a group, a home, a village, a mother or father, from those who are supposed to love us, is vulnerable to depression. We may lose something in the translation or the understanding of it may be a casualty of culture wars, but a human being will know it when he or she sees it and I’m sure we can find remnants in any soul’s loss of a sense of belonging long before the destruction of colonialism hit the African continent.
That young boy in West African lore must have felt some sense of alienation and depression when he the youngest of his brothers asked “where is my father.” Or the woman in Timbuktu lore who meeting two soldiers on a road snatched her baby nursing at her breast and fed it to their dog must have felt something of a depressing angst. Or the boy soldiers armed and killing and raping, to the gays and lesbians reeling under the yoke of oppressive anti gay legislation fueled by the missionary work of the West’s religious right. Depression is not new to Africa or African Americans. Depression by any other name is still depression. What are we going to do about it so many of us committing suicide (the vast majority in the most subtle ways) unable to navigate pain and hurt and rejection that was never meant to be born alone because none of us is ever wounded alone.
I swear there are days I feel like a voice crying in the wilderness to remind us all of the power we have to heal one another just as potent and less used as the power to destroy one another.
And to my own depression? I know the cure: Community. Or let me break I down further. Adoption—again—my own home, taking care of myself and children and in a job I actually like, giving something back to the community like continuing to be a tester. Black and gay? I just asked for way too much by the world’s standards and some gay folks too and by default some more depression. I keep bucking the black gay mold somebody else thinks I ought to fit and I just won’t stay in my place (the place some think I should be in).
That’s my idea of community, the cure for depression. It seems that no one knows how to reduce, encapsulate and sell it for $19.95 in our capitalistic world. Then I have to remember that capitalism doesn’t thrive off of healthy relationships. It thrives off of us being enemies, commonly called competition which in my world means competing to keep me from getting decent housing or job protection under the law or some love. It’s the only way good capitalists can pick all of our pockets while we lynch the proverbial scapegoat of the day. In the black gay community it just happens to be the fat guy or the one with the little penis or the one who is too fem to get past parents and friends as just the roommate or the old guys or the young ones who everybody is convinced ain’t got no sense.
Am I depressed? As long as there in no thirst for righteousness in this world I may be perpetually fated to be. It’s the healthy way to be. Not to blow your brains out or go jump off the bridge or the curb into rush hour traffic. What depression should do is send you out looking for your pack. Those men and women of a like mind who can remind you that it is crazy out there and it’s not your job to adjust to it and that the packaging you happened to come in is acceptable because the universe made you, not the world.
Psychotherapy for me has to come outside the small entitled rooms and language it has built for itself, for a not so modest fee or insurance if you’ve got it (go to jail and it’s free) and out into the beleaguered neighborhoods where I roam called a punk, a faggot, or maybe a nigger; where grown men smile and offer to let me suck them in the alleyway behind the Kroger as if they’re doing me a favor. Where men have taken to the internet to make a language out of their penis and can’t comprehend the war they wage upon their own freedom that leaves them mute and walking suicides.
But psychotherapy was never there for black folks in the first place. My father wasn’t an alcoholic because he didn’t get therapy. He was alcoholic because he was a black man in a racist world who didn’t quite know who to take that anger out on so he drank it away and argued with my mother. Why should I expect it to be anything more now than a sounding board to the aches and pains of my life, some of which I’ve caused, many of which I’ve inherited like cancer causing genes from the society at large.
I write this knowing I don’t have all the answers, but there are some observations I needed to make since it looks like everybody is running blind these days. I’m not saying psychotherapy is totally useless. I just think for a black sgl man it needs to be seasoned more because as it stands, it’s mighty selfish and bland. I’m from southern cooks from the South and we don’t like bland food and don’t care too much for bland people and bland conversations.
The world’s making us all sick and to think that therapy alone will fix it is delusional. To think that black sgl men’s healing will take place in a therapeutic session is laughable. Depression is never an isolated condition or incident. We never get depressed alone. Many of us are pregnant with the hurt of all of us. How can any of us as sgl brothers and sisters heal when the churches we attend are sick, our jobs are sick, the electorate is sick, the people we invite into our beds are sick; the institutions we all depend on including the government are sick, our eye for ourselves is sick. Sick is the norm and too many of us have adjusted to it as the norm. We’ve lost all sense of community and relationships (if we ever had it) and that’s the real tragedy here.
As one black gay guy said about therapy: Sitting down talking to someone about your problems? Hell that’s what we use to call a friend.
© 2012 Conrad R. Pegues
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