I Can't Date Jesus Page 19

  He would go on to tell me that “You would want a real relationship, and I cannot give you that.” I got a better understanding of why he hadn’t picked me. His boyfriend, whom he curiously started referring to as his “roommate” not long after this, gave him what he described as “security.” I didn’t know what they had. I didn’t want to know what they had. It is likely for the best that I never know. He made such a big case about what he assumed I would or would not deal with, but the fact was, he never gave me a chance to prove myself. Rejection hurt anyway, but with him, it was all the more painful because I’d never felt so connected to someone, and I wanted him so badly. Painful because I knew it had to end. Painful because regardless of whether or not he declared otherwise, I did have a say as to whether or not he could stick around. He’d admitted that he’d been selfish to an extent, but I had been a willing participant. I wouldn’t be one forever.

  I wish it had been different. I don’t like regrets, but I do wonder if I hadn’t ignored him the first time things might have been different. That it might have been me with him. I might have had the opportunity to show him that I could be whatever he needed, so long as he continued being what he’d been to me. But every choice I’d made was right at the time. And maybe we were only meant to share those moments in order to guide us to the next stages of our lives.

  If time and space will allow it, maybe there will be another chance. If that isn’t meant to be, I’ll carry with me the good feelings he gave me and the faith he restored in me as a result of it. I’m not sure when I’ll settle down with a nice man. It still depends on the market. And, above all, honest communication.

  I Can’t Date Jesus

  “You care too much about what I think,” she said matter-of-factly as I tried to get my emotions back under control.

  Adrián had gone to the bathroom, and the mezcal I had kept ordering had given me the liquid courage to call my mom and get something off my chest. I had told myself that I wasn’t going to bother with her anymore. That she believed what she believed about homosexuality, and no amount of engagement would alter that.

  After coming out to my mom at twenty-five and being met with a disapproving, callous response, I didn’t discuss my sexuality with her any further. That was, until I felt the need to warn her that there would be a personal essay from me appearing in Essence magazine based on something gay-related—one that would include my picture as well as my byline. It was my way of saying, Our last name is not common, and I look exactly like you; therefore, prepare yourself for the likelihood that while you’re getting your hair done, someone is going to pick up a copy of the magazine—with Oprah, of all people, on the cover—read through it, and possibly turn to you and say, “Is this your (gay) son?” It also doubled as my way of making clear that based on this cover and a few other placements of my work around that time, I was actively working on boosting my profile—meaning more folks would know more about my work and the identity that informed it. I was fairly blunt, and, from time to time, that bluntness could be read as vulgarity. For my friends in Houston, that outspokenness could sometimes be a bit much, so they offered a suggestion: before I said something that they might think of as outlandish, I had to say, “Brace yourselves.”

  On this call, I was trying to let my mom know that if all went to plan, more folks would know about me, and that would include knowing about my sexuality. So, yeah, ma’am, get good and ready.

  I tried to be civil with my approach. I tried to talk about God and difference of opinion. I stressed that I thought that no matter how she felt, especially about how I had stopped going to church, I felt that God was using me in some way to help create dialogue. To try to bring people like us together. To not simply regurgitate dogma but to explore it, challenge it, and not be so selective in what we believed. Biblical literalists of convenience had long bothered me. My irritation only heightened upon learning more about the six scriptures in the Bible: how they were idioms of their time; how the analogies and metaphors had largely been misinterpreted; how other Biblical texts had been used to subjugate Black people and women. I was hoping she would see the parallels now with her gay son. She didn’t want to hear any of that. She was a person who missed the pre–Vatican II era in which tradition reigned supreme, down to masses being performed in Latin. She did not want discourse; she wanted me to quit resisting. After I had laid out my thoughts on the call, she offered a response that mirrored the one she had given me three years before.

  “Am I happy that you’re gay? No. I’m sorry it happened to you. Am I hurt that you’re still gay? Yes, because I feel responsible.”

  She then went on to lament about the state of the world, how “people” were trying to “use” folks to make what was “not okay seem okay,” but stressed that in “the eyes of God, it’s still wrong.” I had to put my phone on mute for a second so I could get out every “shit,” “damn,” and “motherfucker” before I could continue this conversation. Did she honestly believe that I was a sucker allowing myself to be made into a prop? Had she met me? She, of all people, should have known that everything I said or did was of my own volition. She oughta have known this because I wouldn’t have been a Howard grad, an ex–LA transient, or a current Harlemite had I listened to her. I could not have done any of those things without her support, but no matter how strongly my mom spoke out against a choice I was making, if it was something I had decided was best for me, no one, including her, would steer me away from what I felt was the right call.

  And there was some bit about “the family” potentially abandoning me. She meant her side of the family, the only extended family I could say I knew well enough. I loved all of them, but I couldn’t have given any less of a fuck if any of them resented me over my being gay. What were they going to do? Tell me that I couldn’t have any of the cornbread dressing at Christmas because dressing was only for people who didn’t commit adultery? I asked my mom what position any of them would be in to judge me anyway. She had no retort, though it didn’t matter anyway, because none of them have said anything to me about my being gay. If anything, they were concerned about my well-being and rooted for me. It wasn’t about them. No, this was her issue. She was more concerned about how a boastful gay son reflected on her.

  As the conversation went on, she went there: she said she knew that I had been born gay and that I couldn’t help who I was. She was a nurse. She liked science. She was smart. She got that people were who they were. But she was a devout Catholic. Religion could make you suspend your better sensibilities. Its success in making the faithful fall in line no matter how foolhardy a position appeared was rooted in how great a role faith played in people’s lives.

  I admired my mother for a number of reasons, but what I admired most about her was her strength. She was the strongest human being I had ever met. She did not need to be loud to be commanding. She did not have to be aggressive to convey how tough she was. I knew that strength stemmed from her faith. Her religion kept her going. It was her guiding light as she steered through all the murkiness her life had faced. I appreciated her dedication to her faith. I respected it. Sadly, she refused to see that her religion stifled me. I couldn’t follow Catholicism the way she did. Her version of Jesus suggested that though He may have loved me, He merely tolerated me. The mantra “Hate the sin, love the sinner” troubled me, because if you were under the impression that being gay was inherently wrong, you were operating from the frame of mind that I was inherently wrong. You thought I was the human equivalent of irregular denim bought at an outlet mall. I was nobody’s clearance-ass jean; my packaging was fine.

  She didn’t think that way because she fell in line with the church’s teachings. It was why despite admitting for the first time to me that she knew I couldn’t help who I was, she advocated for suppression. She cautioned me to not act on my urges. She remained afraid of what could happen to me after I died if I dared to live.

  “You could act on them, go outside, and get hit by a bus—and I won’t k
now where you’re going.”

  She didn’t want me to go to hell but couldn’t see that to not be wholly human might fit my own version of hell on earth. Why would I acquiesce to the Catholic Church anyway? They were still trying to clean up the mess they had made by knowingly shuffling all those boy fondlers around for decades instead of rightly expelling them. A mess that could have been cleaned up much sooner if they had abandoned that silly vow of chastity they forced on priests and that even sillier clinging to patriarchy that prevented them from recruiting from the big pool of women who majorly populated their churches. The only insight I could get from the Vatican at this point included shoe recommendations and where to buy one of those bad-bitch dresses priests were required to wear while performing mass if I ever decided to switch up my style.

  Knowing all this, I told her that I hadn’t a doubt in my mind that if a bus hit me in the next few minutes and I died, hell was not my next and final stop. She wasn’t convinced. She stayed on that “please, baby-baby, please accede to church doctrine” stance.

  I so desperately wanted to scream back, Well, girl, I can’t date Jesus.

  My mom always talked about heaven. She loved the idea that no matter how much suffering we endured in this world, we would be rewarded in the afterlife if we just lived up to certain ideals. Once, I stopped her in the middle of one of those paeans to say, “It sounds like you’re waiting to die to live. You can have a bit of heaven now before life here ends.” She smiled but didn’t really offer a real response. We were alike in many ways, but therein lay the difference between us: I didn’t want to wait until I was dead to get what I felt my soul was due. I preferred to go for it now rather than live life by rules I found restrictive and that, based on one gigantic maybe, may yield a reward once I was dead.

  The call ended with my mom telling me that she loved me and wouldn’t abandon me. Even so, her discomfort was palpable. She couldn’t understand why I felt compelled to “tell everybody my business.” That registered as code for “I don’t get why you have to tell the world you’re gay and embarrass me.”

  After that conversation, we once again found ourselves not speaking. My mom usually called me every year on my birthday a little after 3:27 p.m. Central Standard Time—the time of my birth. As she said year after year, it was not my birthday until that moment. I looked forward to those calls so much. But that exchange we had was a few weeks before my birthday. My thirtieth birthday rolled around, and she did not call me. Hours went by and not a word from my mom. Even my dad called! I ended up calling her. She didn’t hide her disapproval and lingering irritation with me, enraging me and nearly ruining what thankfully turned out to be a birthday full of love. My friends made up for it, and I ended up enjoying the night in spite of the hurt.

  That hurt didn’t go away, though. I felt it the next morning. And the one after that. And the one after that. It took time to shake that off. True enough, she never technically abandoned me. In her own way, she was always pushing me to keep going. She didn’t want me to flounder. But even if someone loves you, it’s not the same thing as loving all that you are.

  I know my mom loves me, but I’m just as aware that she always had a different vision for my life. Ideally, I’d be working in a more secure field (finance, corporate law, medicine), one that would make all her sacrifices worth it. I would also be straight and married with kids. We’d all attend mass regularly, and she’d have us over for Sunday dinners. I might even be back in Houston. Maybe not directly under her, but close enough (in Houston, traveling long distances within the city limits is normal). But I am none of these things. I will never be any of these things.

  Not being those things makes me worry about how much I may be disappointing her. I fear that I have because I’ve chosen a much more difficult path. One that requires a lot of sacrifices for a reward that may or may not come; and if it does, it will come a lot later than expected. To add “being gay” to the list and knowing that as a gay Black man certain health risks remain only heightens that worry.

  —

  During the summer of 2011, I was going through one of the most difficult periods of my life. I was abruptly let go from a site I was writing for in a permalance capacity (that means they want nearly or exactly full-time work but are too cheap to give you benefits, so you have to buy your own), and though I found freelance roles elsewhere, most of the outlets were not paying in a timely manner, and I was owed thousands of dollars. Such was the life of a contractor at times. Beyond those headaches, I noticed that I was experiencing actual headaches that made it difficult to stand up without wanting to fall back down in a ball of pain. On top of that, I was breaking out into rashes. They started on my hands and arms and then quickly spread to other parts of my body. The rashes on my arms did not look like the ones on my legs. The rashes on my legs did not resemble the rashes on my back. My lips started to have black spots too.

  Thankfully, I had insurance by this time. A couple of months prior to this, an ear infection had led me to a county hospital in Torrance, California, as I had been recently been kicked off my mom’s plan. The first time I went to the ER, I was told the wait would be so long that it would probably make more sense for me to come very early the next morning to make certain that I would get treated. So I did, and I was, but while speaking to my mom about insurance in the parking lot, I noticed a bunch of juveniles circling my car. Those badass kids didn’t think I knew what was happening. I almost ran all of their asses over. My mom said it was time for me to get a gun; I reminded her that California’s gun laws were stricter than the ones in Texas, so in the interim, I just needed to go ahead and call Blue Shield back.

  Pre-Obamacare insurance for a single gay man in his twenties was pretty great at the time, so I went to see a dermatologist fast. Bless my heart, I didn’t ask Black people for a recommendation first. That gave way to some polite white woman who looked like Diane Keaton’s second cousin but treated me as if she got her medical degree from the Damn Fool School of Medicine.

  “Oh, my God! You look just like Chris Rock. I bet you get that all the time!”

  Actually, no, I don’t. Back during All-Star Weekend there was a little boy at the bus stop outside of my apartment complex running behind me yelling, “Chris Brown! Chris Brown!” A few bus drivers and waiters made the same mistake back in 2009. That’s the only Chris I’ve been compared to in the past, and to be honest, I don’t see that one either, outside of us both being lanky and brothers in big teeth. After settling her underlying question—DO ALL BLACK PEOPLE LOOK ALIKE?—she said something about sun allergies and then offered another opinion: my rashes might be related to syphilis.

  “Don’t you have to have sex to get an STD?”

  I wasn’t a virgin, but I was not fucking a soul. She said she was just “throwing it out there,” but that I should get it checked all the same. She also suggested that I might suffer from a common inflammatory disease and that I should have a biopsy done. I came back for that, and before they scraped my skin to get tested, she turned to the nurse and said, “Doesn’t he look like Chris Rock?” Madam, why are you back on this nonsense? The Latina nurse shook her head no. I did not have whatever skin disease she talked about. I also did not have syphilis. I told her that’s a good thing, as it would be unfair to have the effects of relentless weed smoking without the benefits of any high, and the same goes for having symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease without any of the fun first. She laughed. I was serious. Maybe she knew that. At least all that was settled. Unfortunately, the migraines were still there, and fatigue coupled with body aches tagged themselves in for a pile-on. After giving me a cream for the rashes, she recommended that I go see a doctor downstairs about the rest.

  That doctor was an old white man who looked elderly enough to long for the days he could say “colored” instead of “African American.” Additionally, he appeared surprised that I—this young Black boy—was in his office. As he asked me to describe my symptoms, he suddenly made an interjection.


  “Are you a homosexual?”

  I told him yes, and then he proceeded to tell me that I should have some blood work done in order to check out if I had hepatitis C. I didn’t know where that had come from, but it spooked the shit out of me. He said it so cavalierly too. As if that was what happened to people like me.

  I had been keeping my mom abreast of everything that was happening, but when I heard “hepatitis C,” I panicked. That doctor’s office was in the Larchmont area of Los Angeles. As soon as I walked out of that building, I sat on the sidewalk directly in front to call my mom. My mom was one of the few people I felt comfortable being emotional with. I wasted no time in starting to cry. My mom may have introduced me to Black doctors and dentists as a child, but over time, I’d had other doctors of different backgrounds. However, she only took me to doctors whom she knew and who knew her as a nurse. So, as I was describing the way he spoke to me and the shift in tone and demeanor after he asked if I was gay, she tried to be comforting but nonetheless noted that the reality was, with that admission came the chance that you would be subjected to people’s prejudices—prejudices that multiplied when you were dually Other.

  As for the hepatitis C, I was mortified. All that suppression of urges. All that denying myself pleasure out of fear of contracting something that could end my life prematurely. All the damn blue balls I had given folks initiating something sexual only to pull my dick away as a result of my outstanding paranoia. Imagine not giving in to your feelings out of a protectionist mind-set only to find yourself in a feared scenario anyway.