When Age and Black and Gay Don’t Add Up

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 21^st 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.

Other Kinds of Praise

The preacher said there was the praise you gave to God in the midst of your trials and tribulations. Okay. I can take that, but he also overlooked another kind of praise: The kind that comes from resisting the evil and mean spiritedness of the day.

So often I hear Christians talk about praising God and giving God the praise. What amazes me is when they don’t exercise that in their relationships and on their jobs. We all know about the difficult co worker (and sometimes that person has been us) who brings their arguments with their spouse to work and tries to get any loss of a sense of power back by deciding they have a good opinion about how the job “really” should be done. 

It’s one thing to have a better suggestion and a good supervisor who will hear it and implement it, but it’s another to stage a coup because you’ve got issues and you didn’t win at home, so you look for a victim at work. 

A friend and I were talking recently about employment issues and dynamics.  I had left a job feeling really put upon (and it wasn’t the first time). Somebody left, I got their job. No raise.  Somebody left again. I got their job. No raise. And when I started saying No, I was difficult and I saw that oncoming train of me being pitted against a black woman while the white woman over both of us could throw up her hand and say I wasn’t being racist. He’s being difficult and making the initial supervisor’s life difficult.

I’ve heard from the old folks more than I care to remember just be thankful you got a job. I know many of those same old folks lived the system of segregation and really took the attitude when they found a “good” job that they should be thankful to God and hold on to it for dear life. And dear life could mean bread and butter in or out of their children’s mouths. 

The here I come gawking at the words falling from their mouths. It was hard for me to get a grip on their point of view in my present situation. Different folks. Different times. I’m still amazed at people who stay in abusive jobs for years then I have to think about those same people will stay in abusive relationships for years. Their faith has shifted from God to fear cloaked under the guise of good sense and being practical.

 Then I had to realize that many of them stayed so I didn’t have to in this day and age.  That’s how I choose to interpret at this point.  Could they have pushed for better? I think so, but I was born later than them and have a mindset built up not only out of what they suffered, that says we don’t have to take that anymore. Many of us are fighting battles that didn’t take place year ago. Sometimes you can’t escape the war, you can only delay it. 

I too am a parent and with that last job I stayed for more reasons to do with my son and paying bills and keeping a roof over our heads. Sometimes I think employers know your personal stuff and think they’ve got you right where they want you especially if you’re a good dependable employee. 

I’m also of the mindset that God would want better for us than abusive job situations.  I don’t think we should have to go along to get along.

Sometimes trying to be cooperative with lowdown just isn’t the thing to do. You give an inch, it will take a mile (several of them and your life too).

Then there is that person who can take it for Jesus or “my God”.  I often wonder who told them their soul was something to be battered against like they were quite human.  Too many black folks have already “taken it” for us.  It’s time to take back and resist. Too much evil is loose in the world.

To resist is to praise. 

I remember at my last job people questioning my sanity for speaking up about the way employees were being treated and most of all bullied. I even complained about it to the board. Nothing was done. I left.

Still unemployed I don’t regret leaving the job or the stressors of being unemployed. I gambled, but I gambled with the expectation that God was going to answer in some kind of way. I’d be lying if I told you that that positive expectation hasn’t been challenged and seriously questioned because it has.  But I still have no regrets looking in expectation for the next and better door to open.

It says somewhere, “resist the devil and he will flee from you.” I know this isn’t what some church folks want to hear especially in the context of jobs, but we need to hear it. There are way too many of us sitting in abusive workplaces more out of fear than necessity, overworked, underpaid and mistaken for things not people. Yeah, you’ve got the light bill and the kids need to eat, but you’re paying for it with high blood pressure, headaches the doctor can’t track to a source, quick tempered in all the wrong situations, and a seething underlying anger at the world who you feel has betrayed you, or you’re angry at yourself for your own predicament and somebody else’s meanness and not fighting back for yourself.

When I resisted at my job there was some back lash. I had to go to the doctor after my three week notice and I was docked that day of work. I didn’t know it was in the PPM that you couldn’t do that. I was reminded of this in a meeting where I was also told I could go ahead and quit that day if I wanted to  as if they were doing me some kind of favor. I told them No. I would end my days of service there as stated on my notice letter and further sent them an email to document that I had talked to a lawyer and had been informed that if they gave me any trouble my last week there that I would seek legal action.

My co workers had played nice with the administration worried about bills, house notes and children like I didn’t have the same concerns. But my son had called me one day out of the blue to tell me that I should quit my job because I was moody, didn’t do anything anymore when I came from work but sit in front of the television, was miserable. I didn’t recognize my own self defeated behavior. I didn’t know my then 17 year old son had seen this in a hurry to get out the door and hang with his friends. My answer to him was I’ve got bills to pay but I appreciated his coming to me with his concern.

I was operating out of fear at the same time that I had been resisting the devil so to speak. I’d be lying if I said it was an easy thing to bear resistance against wrong especially when it’s your bread and butter, but I knew that illness and the grave might have the last word if I didn’t do something.  I fought the good fight out the front door on my own terms. I’d stayed too long and felt compelled to pursue other career and dreams.

Nobody ever told me this was praise too. I like David had slung my rock and popped Goliath dead between the eyes. What troubled me was that he was still standing when I left. I felt like the failure and other employees who complained and moaned under duress in my office, getting more time in than my clients kept right on working under the craziness. They stayed. I thought there should have been an insurrection. Many of them lied to cover their ass, pretend like they loved their jobs and lied about how happy they were to be there. A great big wad of spit in the eye of the ancestors who’ve already paid the price for them to say No and mean it and take out looking for another kind of north star in something better for them and their children, not living from pay check to pay check and insult to insult that wasn’t in the job descriptions. And our kids are watching us!

It’s praise. 

Months after I left, several old co workers stepped out on faith and left too looking for something better.  A comment had been made that Conrad’s going to start a domino effect and I guess I have.  Sometimes it’s not just the fight to take Goliath down.  Who knows how many people had already slung rocks between his eyes and it did nothing. Nothing but weaken that spot so somebody down the line would sling the rock and break open what others had already been pounding at for who knows how long. The previous rock slingers probably felt like me that they had failed even after speaking up and out. I guess the universe has its own time.

Don’t be afraid to resist the oppression on your jobs, to speak out for justice, for what’s right, to resist crazy co workers whose job description is to bring hell to work. Draw lines and tell the devil he’ll come no further.  Keep them out of your office or space when you can.  But do your job and do it well.  It’s not an easy thing to do, but the effect on your mental, spiritual and physical health and the real lessons we teach our children about what’s worth fighting for are lost.  Then we sit back and complain about how crazy they all are. They had wonderful teachers in those of us who did not slake our thirst for righteousness.

I had someone to comment that I was not at my last job to resist the foolishness of the upper management.  I differ on this. I was there to serve clients, but I was also there to serve my own best mind which is one that does thirst for righteousness. He thought I’d wasted my time speaking up. I know better. God had me slinging rocks all over the place.

I praised.

Praise isn’t just about jumping pews, waving our hands when the preacher says what we want to hear, that song about Jesus that takes me back to the old way.  Praise has another side and it’s resistance to injustice and mean spiritedness and those persons who would love to undermine your sense of self. 

Praise enough to say No when it means the destruction of somebody else’s life and well being or your own.  See if you can be obedient to the other kinds of praise that don’t always feel so good or having you looking cute. Sometimes praise means bearing your teeth like a good wolf to warn evil, that far and no farther.

You have to remember one thing. Your supervisor isn’t your real boss. God is.

© 2012 Conrad R. Pegues

Depression and Black SGL Men: What’s Wrong with …Us?

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

Why I left work in HIV/AIDS

Why I left work in HIV/AIDS

(or the real reason they don’t want this negro around)

Here I am sitting 16 miles outside the Cincinnati, Ohio area jobless after 6 months.  For those of you who don’t know, I left the city of Memphis as Fannie Lou Hamer put it “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Having gained 60 pounds in five months (I had hit 301 pounds), constantly making doctor’s visits for this or that ailment (how he kept track of my weight gain), the two of us in a tug of war about high blood pressure medicine which I get over 250 pounds, acid reflux, pained knees from too much weight, headaches, not to speak of my back, fluid retention that made me miserable, panic attacks and days where I just couldn’t get out of bed. Anger turned inward. 

I was working primarily with black gay men who were having hard times adjusting to being gay, as much as if not more than, being HIV positive.  I’d be a lie  (and the truth wouldn’t be in me) if I said I didn’t love working with those guys, the vast majority of which were young enough to be my sons and often got on my last nerve more concerned about Beyonce or who lost last night on American Idol than saving their own lives. 

I also enjoyed working with those few young African American women who came in to be tested sitting on pins and needles, our collective two heads working the dude over who possibly infected them.  We were a tag team beating him up and cussing him out, stopping ever so often to unfold fists for prayer to Jesus for a negative result, and once praying hands were split, we’d ball them back up to box him up and down the ring again.  It was a 20 minute stress reliever and serious, cries just behind the laughter.

I’ll never forget the last young African American lady who came in practically in tears that she might be….  I got to hear her story and made it my business to keep her encouraged. Hell she could have been my niece or sister or cousin.  Hell as far as I was concerned she was blood and I had her back. She got her negative result but I also had to remind her of her responsibility which she soaked up knowing we’d been sisters in the trenches for a little while. 

As a side note, I often wonder about my praying clients who I figured must know I was gay and wanted to ask on more than one occasion: When you leave are we enemies in the name of the Lord?  But I didn’t push it.  It wouldn’t have been “professional” no matter how human (and real) my question would have been after she’d hugged me tighter than tight in relief.  I did my job and I got to support another human being to a place of peace.

I must admit even when I got a positive result I loved being in the trenches with my boys too. They came in all kinds of packaging: effeminate, super over compensating macho, in the closet to nobody, but themselves (especially their mamas who they often colluded with in a lie rooted in the loss of love or banishment from whole families or beating by brothers or cousins).  They were always preoccupied by the most superficial things.  Their pecs or stomachs or hair “did right”, how they looked and making it to the club or drag show.  They could pop their asses better than any hoochie mama I’d ever heard tell of and could make a microphone or stripper pole out of a broom stick and work it.  Dysmorphia out the wazoo, they’d fight you if you said anything even remotely critical (no matter how true) about their church and pastor or their mama who refused to look at them let alone speak; rarely did I see anyone so sensitive about Dad.

I’ve often told the story about the African American young man (he was really a boy and that’s what really hurt my heart) who came in and got a positive result back.  When I was talking to him in post counseling he practically confessed that he was supposed to be infected because (1) he was gay; (2) he was black;  (3) he was young and all of his friends were positive and he didn’t want to be the outsider again;  (4) God hated gays and HIV was our due—we were cursed from the start!  I broke his face when I explained to him that I was 46 at the time and was not positive. I confused him as much as he left me dumbfounded.

My HIV status is a piece of information I rarely share with anyone.  The only time I’d disclose was when a positive client is disclosing under the assumption that “We” used when my client feels comfortable, are dealing with the exact same issue.  To disclose to me in tears and gnashing of teeth would be unfair if I didn’t disclose that I’m not quite the sister or brother they envisioned bearing witness to their hurt or shame or testimony. It’s a betrayal to my mind so I find a place in the conversation to intersperse the truth gently. I’ve never had anyone to change their mind. Often they were amazed and delighted that someone who wasn’t positive would even listen to them or not judge.  Normally, I just let people assume that I am. 

I came too late with my years and my testimony for that young man.  That was one of those times when I had to do some personal inventory about my own banishment or should I say estrangement from the black gay/sgl community, some imposed upon me and some self imposed.

You see I don’t fit in the black sgl community or the other gay community.  I won’t say larger gay community because it gives a false sense of white society being the point of reference for who I am and my choices when it’s not.  The whole wide world has that honor.

I don’t fit with the white gay community because they think I’m too pro black because I’ve been vocal about their own narrow vision that reeks of assimilation more than justice to me which can leave some people out of the equation.  To exemplify this, a few years back a local university was doing a study on gay parents of adopted children which I am one.  I was like oh I can do this and get my two cents in on what it’s like to be a gay adoptive parent. Reading further along in the flyer I had overlooked that they were looking for couples for their study. I, being a single parent was somehow not worthy of being counted in their study.  The researchers’ real goal was not gays having adoptive rights, but proving to the white heterosexual community that we can make two parent homes too, in effect stable, at least in ideal.  We all know of two parent homes not fit for human beings to thrive from parents to child so two doesn’t always make it better or right. I didn’t correct or scold letting them have their Eden’s dream of equality, their homage to the establishment.  I guessed us single parents were to set our faces against the window panes of their idyllic homes with envy.  I’d rather throw a rock.  I realized a long time ago, I didn’t fit their great white agenda which is an allegiance to their parents and their values, not justice for the sake of justice. And don’t mention the gay marriage thing. It probably puzzles me more than straight people because I’ve seen straight couples that would give wrestle mania a run for its money on a Friday night after payday.  I saw supposedly divinely sanctioned heterosexual couples that should never have married in the first place, shot gun or not.  That should have torn the divorce court door down to sign papers like parting shots at the end of a particularly cruel civil war.  Hell I’ve never even been on a date before let alone got to imagine setting up house with the white picket fence and 2.1 children. At almost a half century, I’ve never been in a relationship. Me and the brothers just don’t get along like that and inter racial dating with a white man just never peeked my interests.

The issue with the black sgl community is much more complex and is legion so instead of giving you the ugly details of that drama I’ll just give you the why I don’t fit list: (1) I’m not height/weight proportioned.  I don’t go to the gym 3-4 times a week like so many lovelorn on Match.com.  My Ms. Girl will slip out in mixed company and she has a temper; (2) I don’t claim to be a bible totin’ and quotin’ Christian (which has gotten me in trouble and some cat clawing fights with church queens, their pastor’s armor and bible bearers, singing, weeping and wailing at the altar for Jesus to let their punk asses in which I refuse to do.  As far as I’m concerned, God’s gone have to take what She made and get over it; (3) I can’t buy into the sin/redemption of Christianity even if I were heterosexual (which still gets me into tooth and claw fights with the church queens and the reverends and an occasional Grandma (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called demon possessed and confused);  (4) I can’t stand clubs and the freaks come out at night hours (I had a son to raise and get sleepy by midnight); (5) I can’t stand intellectual pretense and I have several degrees.  I’m talking about those guys who think because they have degrees, can use deconstruction and Derrida in sentences that they’re somehow above the common punk herd; (6) the black gays are stunned when the ole folks of the community have made me so mad that I lose my religion (oops I don’t have any).  I should say, my Southern bred manners and cuss them out for hurting my feelings and assuming because they were older they had a right to; (7) I want play dumb or closeted (even if I could) to win a “real” man who only calls after the witching hour and his girlfriend or wife is sound asleep; (8) then there is that group of black sgls who think I’m too smart i.e. white acting and assume I must be or am waiting on my prince to come—a white man—to save me from the doldrums of our colored lives.

That’s the nutshell of my estrangement from the community. I just don’t fit and I’ve got a bit too much of my ornery Mississippi red Mama in me. She wouldn’t go along to get along either. And maybe I’m more like her than I realized.

From time to time she was mistaken for a white woman.  She kept a little white boy back in the day that was going on about niggers. My mother incensed told him, “I’m a nigger,” which shocked the hell out of him.  I never got to ask if she kept that job or got fired.  My mother was a hoot who’d sat up with the preacher and cussed him out on hallowed ground for an incident involving my middle brother.  She cussed Harrie Mae Simon out, a paragon of the black bourgeoisie in Memphis over my sister at Magnolia where she was the principal. My father, more about middle class values and fitting in— educated, a postal worker, and a braggart (which my mother frowned upon)—was horrified; he got cussed out too. She just wouldn’t act right and hated pretense with a passion.   She was the one who distinguished to me that there was no difference between white niggers and black niggers; as far as she was concerned a fool was a fool was a fool no matter their race, class or gender and she’d tell them so.  So you have to understand that I got my “ain’t gone kiss yo ass” stuff honest.

Well being up North, jobless and not working in HIV I have to realize something when after having an interview for an HIV job up here in Ohio, I just don’t fit into the kind of negro they need working in this area.  You can just tell by the way some white folks look at you, under brow, head cocked and drawn up like they’re waiting in quiet panic to swat a cock roach that’s invaded their pristine kitchen.  That kind of seeing is a skill you learn growing up in the South where the sense of racism is sharpened down to a keen spirit of discernment and not necessarily a confrontation; learned from your own who marched through many a back door like soldiers on a mission after sweeping the front and dismissed the word nigger as if they were talking to somebody else.

At 48, maybe I’m just too old and seasoned to play the HIV game. Looks like the rules don’t favor me much these days.  The CDC and local agencies are really making HIV out to be a young people’s disease because of infection rates among the 13—24 age group as if they live in a vacuum.  I guess the rest of us are either immune to infection after 25 or we’re totally irrelevant in the scheme of things; if we don’t know any better by 30, we ought to just die off is the message it sends to me. 

Nobody seems to be paying attention to what I see and experience all the time. Young black sgl guys approach me, but I don’t quite speak their language nor have any remote interest in pop culture which seems to be the brick and mortar of their identities.

I prefer James Baldwin over Beyonce, morphogenetic field theory interests much more than Survivor, the Discovery or History Channel over BET, Toni Morrison over Black Gay Chat, imagination and intuition over facts, engaging conversation over idol gossip about who slept with who and how big it is.  I prefer theoretical speculation over who was in the furnace with the prophet Daniel over somebody’s infallible word of God. 

Often I find that they’ve lacked mentoring (not that I had it) and want somebody to “show me how to do like you, show me how to do,” as Stevie Wonder sang. I must admit I have backed away most often not wanting their Mama or Daddy looking to kill me for “turning them out” as we’re often accused.  Hell, I don’t want to turn them out. Just turn them inward to the realization that no matter what any so called holy book says, a Petri dish, a genetic sample, what their folks say; that they have just as much right to be on the planet as anybody else.  No explanation needed.  Your soul copyrighted the day of your birthday.  It’s insane for anybody to ask you for a permission slip to walk the halls of life on your own terms.  So many of the young want the whole package in sexual affirmation too and when I can’t respond properly they take it as a cosmic rejection. (I’ve got my baggage too). I do understand but, I can’t replace the love the world has denied them nor would I try. It’s too huge a job and I’m bound to fail and I don’t like failing.

But does the CDC and so many of these agencies understand the need for holistic affirmation. Not to just tell somebody to not have sex, but to teach them the whole value of their sex, the genitalia and teach them how to connect being a part of an affirming community as a counter against soaring infection rates.  But I forget the CDC can’t put love and culture, history and mental health and human frailty, the heart and affirmation in a Petri dish. How can you measure it?  Nobody knows how to harvest intimacy and give it away or sell it on aisle 19 at Wal-mart.  It just isn’t science. It’s only reality.   It’s how people feel.   

So nobody stops to look at the youngsters going after older guys like myself who not having dealt with their own stuff i.e. hurt, pain and rejection and have no sense of a historical or human connection and are not likely to use condoms. Why should they? Every message and signal they get all day is that they don’t matter; the same as the young guys, but much longer. All that’s left is kamikaze sex from young to old and back again.

When sitting with my guys every day and in trainings like Many Men Many Voices, I saw clearly what the real problem was. It wasn’t sex.  I heard people say both out loud, under platitudes and jest that nobody loves or wants me or I don’t know how to love and what do us older heads say when we’re on the kindergarten page of that instruction book too.

And race is an issue by and of itself.  I’ve watched agencies more often run by straight or lesbian white women who have no idea in their wildest dreams what it’s like to be colored gay me.  They have no idea when they have an agency full of white people what it’s like to come in and see nobody like you. They have no idea what it’s like to sit and try to bridge some common ground with a white counselor who in his or her ignorance (but well intentioned) says that race doesn’t matter and we’re just all people under the skin.  We’re all just the same.  And they’re right until you’re walking down the street in your black skin with a hoodie on or get followed through Macy’s because you’re black and have dreadlocks and hear the undercover say under his breath, “it’s a faggot.”  You’ve gone from one kind of criminal who might snatch and grab the Sean Jean jeans and make a mad dash for the exit to a waiting car of thugs to a criminal who might snatch and grab a set of Martha Stewart collection cookware and make a mad dash to a car full of hungry queens. Can’t win for losing.

Some of those same white women have no idea what it’s like to be a black man in America and dependent upon the demographics will hire black males to be out front to pull in other black males. If you’re black and gay that’s a plus!  I know I’m being used in such a fashion but where you run into problems is when the white female thinks she knows more than you do not only about black folks but about black gay men and you find yourself in a tug o war for control over who black sgl men and women are and how they don’t fit into the nice CDC guidelines. Real people rarely fit into nice neat categories and nobody believes they do but scientific theorists. 

They’ll speak to high heaven about CDC policy and what we’re supposed to do and the initial test results for this or that intervention or prevention program which you find yourself wondering who they tested it on because seemingly it has little to do with the young black guy who came in for testing whose uncle is “turning him out” and on to threesomes with his girlfriend.  Nephew is confused trying hard to figure himself out and prove to the only father figure he’s known and respected that he can hang and not use condoms as they take turns because only faggots get AIDS (nobody ever says HIV). 

Contrary to popular belief, I’m a man—a black man. I’m a sgl man.  I instinctively know what’s going on with him.  He’s questioning and his uncle (only a few years older and more like a brother) is aware like me that there’s something “different” about him.  And in his honest concern to save his nephew from a life of faggotry, getting screwed in the ass like a bitch, and public scorn of their family name, he must expose him to the only affirmation of manhood he knows: Pussy.  And he’s bold enough to show him in real time on the spot; “show me how to do like you, show me how to do.”  It haunts.  I understand and don’t say, but let him know that even though his test results came back negative I’d love for him to come back and see me and talk about whatever, whenever he feels like it.  I never scold the brokenhearted, their esteem already on the ground.  How could I? Tears welled up in his eyes for more reasons than the fear of HIV.  He’s afraid of who he is. I never intimate that I’ve read his tea leaves.  I feel for him not as a CDC statistic or a potential infection risk which I know is where he’s headed via his uncle’s best efforts and his own fear around his sexuality.  Where is this in the intervention book?  Such knowledge is written in the heart.  Outside the book and the box, maybe I am too old for the game.

I may be black and gay but I get the nephew and my heart goes out to him. I would even say I love him and like his uncle I want to protect him too. He really does need it.  I get this overwhelming desire to hold him and rock him back in time to the first of us enslaved on these shores and let them tell him, show him the shackles and scars, sing to him the hurt; how high a price has been paid for him with flesh and blood, not money, to contemplate himself.  Inappropriate.  Unprofessional.  Rocking folks to the ancestors isn’t something of value in the HIV prevention world skating into a wall like a car on black ice, desperate, grasping at straws and redirecting its efforts to the assumption that all our black asses including black women are outright heading toward positive.  Looks like they’ve thrown up their proverbial hands and people of color and women will pay the most for that easy surrender.

Now no longer at the agency, I wonder if the nephew comes back will he see me the betrayer, having struck out North, no star to guide me, abandoning him. Will he be as honest with the next person as he was with me, dropping his guards, confessing his shame, asking for guidance with his eyes not words he’s never been taught by another black man. 

I’ve lost my little brother, whose angst is so deep because he can’t figure where he wants to stick it (or be stuck for that matter and I honestly believe looking back on it that the youngster is bi or that other emergent species the CDC hasn’t even sighted—the “if I’m feeling him/her I’m down” crowd, both male and female).  As is often the case with emergent behaviors there aren’t many rules, certainly not to protect hurt feelings or be concerned about HIV rates as the thing is too new, unnamed and nebulous as a community. 

That young man and being an HIV/AIDS counselor taught me that judgment was so irrelevant in the face of learning. That anguished young man along with the other one who came back positive have taught me so many invaluable lessons about what it means to be black and gay or questioning or bisexual or whatever in the early 21^st century. A change is going on.  When I’ve spoken at public forums/panels about what I’m seeing my heart sinks to the collective gasp of a room full of black folks who think our children have lost all sense of direction, moral fiber and biblical home training and gone to hell in a safer sex kit.

I’m seeing a bunch of young people questioning the limits set in response to racism, sexism, abuse, antique church views that have really served no one, outright unadulterated ignorance and mean spiritedness.   The younger generations ought to question us, but we ought to have some honest answers and guidance not rooted in our own unresolved issues around sex and sexuality and regret.  I owed my young brother my ear and to listen, not judgment, to see what it was he was trying to work out and support him in that process whether he comes back and tells me he’s straight, crooked or turned around exclusively to his own sex.  That’s really what HIV counseling should be about, helping the person find themselves so they’ll know they are worth protecting. Not towing the line of fitting people into boxes so we can get the grants and money and are so totally lacking in love and compassion for that person’s all too human journey.

And let me say this about black folks running agencies. We can be just as much the problem when we don’t understand the nature of power that has historically undermined us.  It can shift forms and races and genders and sexual persuasions, not respecting the neat boundaries of pain we’d like to fence it in. Power is a spirit and dependent upon the strength of character or lack thereof it can always corrupt in the presence of a victim and in the victimizer’s fear of a loss of control of a reality that doesn’t even belong to him or her. Which of us can control the sun or the turning of the earth? We can barely get a grip on a feeling. But human beings so often in the face of fears, their own and their groups whether racial, regional or national, succumb to it; to be anything but the outsider and the stranger.

Racism comes out of a distorted view of power and perception—we (whoever that vaunted group is at that particular time in history) are the real human beings not those other different people.  It’s about power when you don’t feel good about yourself or have lied to yourself about your own importance in the scheme of things that you, black person, become an honorary problem too, sometimes worst.  I can’t tell you how many so called black leaders I’ve met who haven’t or refuse to grapple with their fears and shortcomings.  The need to dominate and mentally or verbally strong arm people into towing the line with their good opinion and berate them if they differ is the same distortion of power that created slavery and said women didn’t have souls. It’s still an ism (racism, sexism, isms…isms…isms).  Just different drag for that day.  To be black and make a criticism of the black or gay community is not betrayal. The truth is the truth no matter what quarters it comes from.  The test is how you handle it.  As I stated earlier, my mother taught me about critiquing everybody when she saw white niggers and black niggers and put them all in the same trick bag of fools.   None of us is helpful if we come through the door assuming we’ve got the answer and the person sitting across from us is void of any good conclusions about their life or pat them on the head like a good dog. It’s a lesson people of color have had to learn but so many of us have forgotten thinking we’ve got the degree or have bought into our own hype about being a “success” and reaching for “excellence.

Don’t let me forget my straight black guys who’ve come for testing to sit in my chair and they have been legion. It’s amazing how people can get over their street props homophobia and the biggest macho man ever will slump down in my chair to tell me why he’s really there.  HIV testing brought him in of course, but it’s so fulfilling to watch that brother prodded by my questions plot his way through the last 6 females he slept with (and he’s married), most of them black, with which he’s used no condoms to figure out why he can’t keep it zipped up.   He rises up moving to the edge of the chair contemplating himself and his behavior tracing the long road of personal history back to the same hurts and distortions his sgl brothers have suffered differently.  Contrary to popular belief all men aren’t dogs. I’ve seen brothers tear up, and come clean trying to work out their father’s issues with their mothers through women who don’t even know what truck him them and why.  I’ve sat with straight guys at three hour intervals, through lunch and breaks, to figure he’s not his mama’s savior thirty or forty years later and he’s not his daddy son.  He’s his own man. And no amount of saving women with his sex will make him or her whole.  He realizes she’s not the damsel in distress. He is. His journey to himself must be his own with few guides in this world and plenty of tricksters even amongst women who want him to be the big strong man!  I remind him he’s only human.

I’m good, with no counseling or public health degree, but not fit for today’s HIV/AIDS climate. 

So you see I’m becoming painfully aware that I may be obsolete, a has-been, a relic from the past who needs to be put out to pasture, my mind burnished to a fiery glow in a black gay man’s pain and experience. 

It’s tough out here being colored gay me.  I’ve seen some things in my day that no one seems to see as valuable.  

I also have to take inventory of my stuff. 

The older I’ve gotten the less bullshit I can tolerate. Sociopaths and fools find me a loose cannon and difficult.  I speak my mind, won’t tolerate abuse, refuse to abuse, won’t scream at other adults in the workplace, will not be screamed at, expect adults to act like adults and children like children.  Trouble doesn’t’ have to make you bad as the blues singer crooned, but it will give you a piercing eye for mundane evil in everyday life, deception, the simple quality of joy and an honest heart. And a quick tongue dividing the lie from the truth and discerning where the two are so completely intertwined they’re better left alone for time and God to tease out with her comb. 

It’s hard living in your truth. 

In the end, this I know, my heart was in what I gave and not for grant money, numbers and bragging rights (which my mother would frown on from West Tennessee cemetery).   I know supporting those guided to me was crucial in some round about mystical way having nothing to do with HIV.  Strangers that they were, I loved them all. 

Obsolete, maybe I need to simplify life at 48 in a bad economy and stand at the I-275 exit with a homemade cardboard sign that reads:  Will work for food.

© 2012 Conrad R. Pegues

What a Body Remembers

What a Body Remembers

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1929-1968)


Well it’s happened. My adoption is threatened in the sense that my child’s foster mother has been harassing him about me and my sexuality. She suspects I’m gay and my son has confessed that, “She calls you that word.” I said, “That word?” He said, “Yeah, you know that word.” He confessed this after telling me of a recent episode that took place with her where she accused him of “liking men too much.” He said, “You know what I mean?” I said, “Yeah.” This “liking men too much” has become conflated with the fact that he has started to become very emotionally attached to me (faster than he has with anyone before), so I had to work with him on this matter amongst many until 2 a.m. Sunday morning.

To say that another human being (especially a minister's wife) would try to manipulate a child to use him as a weapon is off the scale evil to me. I had been warned that this woman wanted to keep my son for the check and I would have to be on guard for sabotage. Well, it’s come down to that.

I reported it to one of the workers. Now because of suspicions the foster mother is throwing upon me about “is he” or “isn’t he” one of the social workers is now talking about having a meeting because “we’re all adults here”. She wants to talk about issues around sexuality (I guess mine if I am gay) and how this might impact my son who does have issues around sex and sexuality. He’s had past homophobic experiences in foster homes including the one he’s in now. So now out of all of this I’ve become suspect, but suspect for being gay? Or suspect for being effeminate? Or suspect for being gay and workers not wanting to place him with a possibly gay man since the child has issues around his sexuality and is asking questions? What’s suspect here? Who’s suspect or should be? The nature of the question itself?

I’ve sat with this and turned it over in my mind, but this morning it was like Spirit came to me with an answer or should I say with a reminder of an incident in Nashville when I was going through PATH (Parents As Tender Healers) classes for adoption in 2005.

I had to have a physical to complete my home study. I randomly chose a physician in Nashville who was not far from my apartment as many of my co-workers’ physicians were out of county. I went to this stranger’s office and we introduced ourselves. I told him that I needed a physical pursuant to what was requested on the form from DCS and he looked it over and looked at me. “You’re not married?” he asked. I said, “No.” “You’ve never been married?” he asked. I said, “No.” He checked my birthday. I was 41. He then said, “Well I have to give you an HIV test.” I said, “No, you don’t. That’s not on the list of things to cover in the physical.” We went back and forth until he finally looked over the form to see that I was right. He wanted to give me one anyway, but I told him, No. He proceeded with the physical and found nothing wrong. Finally, he says, “When’s the last time you had your lower colon checked since you’re in the age and racial group for high incidence of cancer and cancer runs in your family.” I said, “It’s been two years.” An alarm went off in my head and I became nervous. “Well, let’s check you for that, drop your pants.” I was reluctant and something in me was like he’s trying to figure if you’ve been penetrated since you won’t do an HIV test. At the mercy of my own fear of not being able to adopt, I pulled my pants down and bent over, my body tense as he put on rubber gloves and lubricated his finger. I remember thinking this is no gay sexual fantasy to me thinking about jokes people make about gay men and proctologists. It was horrible. He probed with his finger as I resisted with my sphincter tight, not wanting him inside of me. He pushed in, telling me to relax and part of me went out of my body counting time, wanting this to end fast. I remember thinking it’s for the child and the adoption. I had no evidence to accuse him of wrong behavior. I was a grown man submitting to his finger. He finished and smiled contentedly. “Alright Mr. Pegues, everything looks fine.” He took the anal specimen and packaged it although he and I knew he neither needed it nor wanted it; it was his insurance against accusation of wrongdoing. I could see he was happy with his findings. My anus showed no signs of scar tissue or my having been penetrated. I left his office feeling low and violated and began to think of women I’d known who had felt violated by doctors doing pelvic exams. I knew solidarity with them I never could have guessed at in a hundred years.

I got home and called my insurance company to ask when I could change doctors as I was not happy with the service I’d been given with this particular physician. I remember the woman on the phone asking me, “Mr. Pegues what happened? Is there something we need to know about?” I said, “No ma’am…well, ah no ma’am…nothing really.” She pushed, “Mr. Pegues if something happened we need to know about it.” How could I prove he’d done anything wrong? I was a grown man. He was a grown man. They could easily accuse me of being paranoid or just plain crazy. I had no proof, only what I felt and knew in my heart and who’d ever heard of a 220 pound, 6 foot tall, black man being assaulted in the ass with an index finger? I backed off and said, “No that’s alright. I just need to know how long I need to wait before he files his claim so I can change physicians.” She gave me the information and I hung up. It bothered me so that when I went back to work I told my supervisor at the time what had happened. She shook her head and said, “Conrad you don’t let anyone violate you like that. Even if it just feels wrong don’t do it.” She said, “I’ve gone to get pelvic exams and if the doctor gave me a bad vibe I got up and walked out.” I knew she was right. I had betrayed myself out of fear; it wouldn’t be the first or last time and the hardest lesson of my life.

The thing about self betrayal is that it leaves you angry with yourself more than any other. You can’t set yourself out enough. You can’t walk away from yourself disgusted. You have to live with your actions and your anger 24/7. It’s not an easy thing to do and it’s hard to forgive and takes work to do so which makes the experience stick in your flesh and blood like that irritating splinter you can’t quite dig out of your finger. You have to tear up healthy flesh to get to it and get it out before it infects and ruins more of you. Your allegiance has wrongfully been to church, tradition, shame and guilt or what your mama might think to defeat your best self and mind. I’ve done it too many times thinking that if I defend myself or take up for myself I’m going to be the villain, they’ll know who I really am and I’m not always nice, then no one will defend me or back me up.

I had to go back to pick up my tuberculin skin test and sign off on my paperwork a few days later. The nurse saw me come in and immediately handed me my form. She looked at me and smiled and there was a knowing between us which I can only describe as sympathy. I said, “Shouldn’t you all mail this to DCS?” She said, “No, you take it,” and hurried me out of the office. No mention was made of the results for the specimen. I felt relieved when I saw that he had signed approval for me to adopt. I also felt like I’d dodged multiple bullets, especially with him, my desire for a child held in the tightness of my sphincter.

Spirit reminded me of this episode I’d forgotten that took place in 2005. I’d wondered how I’d forgotten so easily when I promised myself to let no one violate my body like that again. Now, I come to another level of suspicion because I’m not butch masculine and I’m unmarried at 43 and a worker wants me to have a conference between myself, my son and his therapist. I’m not so sure about this drudging up old issues of being judged, not quite a human being and not quite worthy to raise a child who others have traumatized around his sexuality.

I thought about it this morning and decided I’m not going to do it after Nashville 2005 was brought to my remembrance with a physician who has worked under the banner “Do no harm.” I may not get my son, but if I lose him I’ll just have to stand on principle that I did what was right for me. I know he’s a child and many would deem him worthy of such sacrifice, but to be bent over a table again, even figuratively, is more than I’m willing to bear. I recognize the kind of world we live in and its rampant homophobia and what the Christian church teaches about gays and lesbians all over the world and how those in and out of church hate people like me and don’t think we should be adopting children. I refuse to be crucified again laid over an examination bed, a white man’s finger probing up in my ass for signs of homosexual practice.
I’m not ashamed of my sexuality and I’m not going to be remade to feel any shame of my sexuality that I’ve worked hard and long for years to counter within myself. The system is too fucked up for words. I won’t be violated again--not even for a son’s love.
c. Raphael—God has healed
5/11/07