I didn’t sleep well last night. It’s an issue of wondering how my age impacts my interactions with younger black gay men in this world. Maybe I’ve become more sensitive as I’m heading toward 50 in a couple of years and I’ve had to look back on the price, high price, I’ve paid for being me, for not being allowed a closet (I’ve been called out of my name all my life), and for having sacrificed so much for others to be comfortable with the secret I couldn’t keep if my life depended on it. All I could hope for was some interim of silence on occasion, not to be called out of my name; those blessed points of cease fire waged upon the souls of the different.
As I get older I realize there is a serious deficit between who I am as a person and who I see younger guys trying to be. I was a 1964 baby and gushed through the strait of my mother’s legs riding a wave on the end of the Civil Rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated four years later, the same year my mother said it snowed in May which I think was nature’s way of trying to cleanse Memphis. But those things and memories are a part of me like familial and tribal heirlooms.
I may not have those memories of seeing Dr. King on the Lorraine Motel balcony, but I did grow up around people who embodied that history. I knew the black men like my father who’d been pulled over by racist white cops to be asked why they were driving a Caddy or a Deuce and a Quarter? Or the black men pulled over mistaken for having a white woman in the car when she was just a light skinned black woman. I remember the white kid, Egbert, who went on and on about niggers in my mother’s presence until she had to check him; he thought my mother was white. Or the narrative that runs through my head of the black men riding the train (must have been my grandfather’s era and I can’t track the origin of this story down in our personal history but it was told) who witnessed another black man being literally skinned alive by whites in a passing through town. They huddled away in the darkness of the box car to blind themselves from that witness, but the mind and memory recorded enough to intoxicate my mind today, the mystery of that man and whatever happened to him.
I hear about the Stonewall Riots as being the Rosa Parks fuse to explode the so called Gay Movement. I’m not so convinced and never have been and I believe it’s an attempt to parallel The Civil Rights movement more than anything. But a lot of younger guys black and white believe it historical law that cannot be transgressed.
Unlike The Civil Rights movement, I don’t have embodied experiences of people around me who had experienced the trauma and humiliation of being gay like I had those all around me every day who knew what is was to say “Yes, sir or Yes Ma’am” to people they secretly thought of as ridiculously immoral for thinking it was okay to see themselves as superior. So many of those folks have died off and long gone have taken the wealth of their embodied history with them. And people like me are caught in between that generation who lived in that madness and a generation who either don’t know it at all or don’t want to know. Who think somebody who chooses not to be in an interracial relationship is automatically racist and don’t want the history behind it because it might make them feel or think. Who never see that you’re caught between the old world of deep hurt and the new ones of erasure and even deeper hurts and the flesh is left to be healed by the present lover who doesn’t exist because he thinks he’s evolved beyond the elders who he believes are so completely defined by the six foot deep world beneath his foot. No imagination!
The more I interact with younger black gay guys the more I begin to believe I’m a relic and want to pull away all my insights and history and experience. Then I think about a line from the sci fi series Babylon 5 when Ambassador Kosh, a member of an older race, was confronted by a human who wanted to know what he would do in the war between two younger races hell bent on one another’s destruction. Ambassador Kosh said, “Let them destroy one another.” It was a cold response from a being that thought the whole war for annihilation silly and had nothing to do with him if they wanted to wipe one another out. I feel that way sometimes looking at my younger same sex attracted brothers whose level of consciousness raising is who fucks who first and who plays the man and who plays the woman. It’s an ahistorical approach to life. And when I say ahistorical I mean someone who may be so disconnected from their own feelings that they’ve lost them in reality television shows and the latest soap opera. They’ve lost the potential for deeper self reflection of their own propensity for wanting more power to be in control over things that are so beyond them as opposed to being in control of the worlds and feelings that they contain within themselves. So much of the internal life any human being should have access to and is needful to aspire toward wholeness is not there. The ability to dream is lost, replaced with the dreams of not just oppressors but with fantasies infused into the soul by forces that thrive off of ignorance, pain and suffering. People who have not faced their own suffering and shortcomings and own them cannot be fully alive. The pain is too much for them and the illusion of peace is an opiate. You’ll hear them claim anything that calls for deeper work to get beyond the depression and gloom to be “negative” when it’s necessary work to reclaim one’s soul and feelings from forgetfulness.
And I don’t know how to speak to this generation without stepping on feelings, crushing assumptions about themselves and asking them to rework the reality they thought of so completely in safety the dead, known and unknown, created for them without proper respect for the labor and love upon which they stand. So much has been taken for granted.
At the same time I recognize the lessons still to be learned from the present generation. Wisdom doesn’t belong to any one generation or group of people. It gives itself to any who would desire it as the writer of Proverbs claims it calls out on the street. It’s just that available.
But I can’t wait forever and can’t intersperse myself in the dreams of youth who do not find introspection as exciting an adventure as worrying about the latest girl singer or who’re coming out the closet when they’re still so deeply cloistered in their own oppression.
I guess I’ll have to bag my good opinions and stories up in my medicine bag like ancient tribal healers and only offer to those with the audacity to ask if I might have something for them to cure forgetfulness, the stave off hardheartedness to their own desperate plight or remind them that their souls belong to them, a gift from God, not some plaything to kill time with in the 21st century until death is their final bed.
I don’t have an answer for my younger brothers at this point in time. It looks like the questions imposing upon their very lives aren’t too important to them anyway. And I can't really tell them what they don't want to know.
