I Can't Date Jesus Read online

  I snapped out of it. Once we both got into the venue and the concert started, Jordan and his boyfriend stood near us, but I didn’t look their way. I wanted to enjoy the show in front of me rather than fixate, yet again, on a distraction.

  Diana Ross

  I didn’t know there was a National Coming Out Day until my late twenties. This makes sense, given that the holiday had been conceived the decade I was born. It also doesn’t help that I wasn’t brought up in an environment that would welcome such celebrations. The same can be said of society at large. After all, the first president I actually paid attention to was Bill Clinton, the architect of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” We now live in an age in which social media magnifies the most trivial of celebrations, such as National Pancake Day or National Chicken Wing Day (to be fair, chicken wings are one of the greatest gifts to the modern carnivore), so thankfully, in the midst of learning about celebrations like National Jalapeño Popper Day and You Can Remember Buying Cassette Maxi-Singles Day, I also learn about days like National Coming Out Day. Perhaps this is how a lot of folks feel about Juneteenth, which I learned was not as commonly known outside of Texas as I thought. However, no one challenges that day after learning about it, yet every single October 11, some bemoan the necessity of the occasion in the first place. The critics all use different phrasing to plead their case, but their arguments are all roughly the same:

  Why does anyone need to come out? Straight people don’t come out, so why should anyone else? Why is it anyone’s business, anyway? Doesn’t National Coming Out Day help perpetuate the notion that heterosexuality is the norm? Aren’t members of the LGBTQSWV community much safer now than in the past?

  It’s the most annoying pop quiz ever.

  Nonstraight people come out because the world continues to render everyone straight until otherwise noted. Straight people don’t have to come out because there are more of them than there are of us. It’s not anyone’s business, and no one is obligated to hold a press conference to reveal their sexual orientation, but in terms of visibility and raising awareness on a human level, “coming out” continues to matter. As for being safer, that depends on who you are and where you are. Even in this country, which, with the assistance of voter suppression, sexism, racism, xenophobia, a hostile foreign government, and a complicit for-profit media, elected a bigot—a bigot who, in the past, may not have been overtly homophobic or transphobic, but like the opportunistic, careless person that he is, quickly sacrificed our safety and our basic human rights for his political interests.

  I largely hear complaints about National Coming Out Day only from those who may not necessarily be in the closet but who nevertheless don’t overtly profess their sexuality for careerist reasons. That, or they’re people who see society through the lens of an early-1990s Mariah Carey ballad rather than seeing the horror flick directly in front of them. So, yes, National Coming Out Day continues to matter. The day Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” stops slapping at a gay bar is the day we can band together and put National Coming Out Day in rice—not a second sooner.

  I myself came out in stages.

  By the time I had settled in New York to intern for the summer, I went ahead and told Lawrence directly what I had only alluded to mere months beforehand. Not long after that confession, Lawrence took me to my first gay club—Luke & Leroy’s in the West Village.

  Back in high school, quite a few of my friends—mostly lesbians or bisexual girls—used to go to this club in Houston called Big Yo’s! The club used to advertise on television specifically during BET’s Uncut—which played music videos that in no way could air during daytime or even prime time, like Black Jesus’s “What That Thang Smell Like”—or on the local public-access station, which played all the Southern rap videos that were not getting national airplay. The club was technically eighteen and up, but like many gay clubs of yore, if you had a fake ID, knew how to present older, or, frankly, the person at the door didn’t give that great a fuck, you could routinely get in. I never went, though. My mom was strict and enforced an oppressive curfew. As for sneaking out, well, we had burglar bars on the door, so it wasn’t exactly easy to do. (My brother sure tried, and he got popped in the mouth a few times as a consequence.)

  So, having absolutely no experience in a gay club before this night out with Lawrence, I immediately expressed confusion to him over the scene before me: two hurly-burly dudes dancing in the dark with each other. To which Lawrence replied, “Fool, we’re in a gay club.” And we would go to this club every Thursday night, me stupidly using the credit card I had no business owning in order to drink excessive amounts of alcohol. Part of this was to loosen me up, but much of it was rooted in my attraction to Chris the Bartender. Chris the Bartender went to Princeton, where he majored in mechanical engineering. I knew this because when I wasn’t dancing excessively to Destiny’s Child’s “Lose My Breath,” to nearly every song in Lil’ Kim’s catalog, and thankfully, to selections from the snap music era, I was talking to Chris the Bartender. Chris the Bartender told me he was straight, but he thought I was funny and I thought he should have my babies, so I kept talking to him. I also tipped well, which explains why he both engaged with me and sometimes gave me extra alcohol or free shots. I convinced myself that he loved me but that he was afraid of commitment. Once, I left the club for a second and returned with a Ring Pop to propose to him. He was flattered, but I am not married. We became Facebook friends, if that’s anything.

  As all this was going on, I completely avoided all my friends from Howard. Most of them were women. I imagine they had their suspicions about me, given that I had never tried to smash any of them and the only woman I talked about with enthusiasm was named Beyoncé. Still, I didn’t feel ready to confirm their suspicions. That all changed, however, after the way I carried myself during Pride events that same summer. I initially had an aversion to going and was practically coerced into doing so. I was so petrified of being found out—and lo and behold, it happened within minutes of my being there. There were so many different folks from so many separate parts of my life—more people from high school, people from college, people from the Taylor Michaels Scholarship program, founded by Magic Johnson, for which we were flown out from separate cities across the country and housed together for a week—and all of them randomly popped up on me, one after the other.

  I remember being at the Christopher Street Pier laughing and smoking a Black & Mild with Lawrence and his friends when I saw a bunch of folks from our high school heading our way. I immediately took off. I had always regretted not running track in high school, and the speed with which I sprinted away yielded another reason why. I knew that if they saw me, they would report me to people back home, and it would get back to my brother, who I had heard was gay too. Despite our closeness in age, we were not especially close at the time, so I didn’t bother inquiring further about him and I didn’t want him to know anything about me either. It may have been my own paranoia, but I feared that he would run off and tell my folks.

  After escaping, I ran into the girl from the scholarship program who, almost immediately upon meeting me two years prior, had kept making pointed remarks about my sexuality. She was sitting on a step on Christopher Street. She used to whisper behind my back to our shared group of friends in the program. Some defended me, some didn’t; most didn’t care either way. The irony was that, as much as she worried about me, I had a sneaking suspicion that she was gay too. I suppose fixating on me was a solid way to deflect from her own struggle with accepting her sexual identity.

  Yet here she was, standing before me with a smug grin on her face. Initially I thought to speed by, but after quickly turning my back to her, I stopped in my tracks. It was then that I asked myself what exactly I was running from. Better yet, was I really about to let this messy motherfucker have one over on me? For as much shame as I still carried with me, I did not like other people thinking they had something on me. I’d known I liked boys since being caught at daycare trying to ge
t this boy to show me his lil’ cupcakes. Of all people to hide from, it was not going to be her.

  Now, here on Christopher Street, I walked up to her directly.

  “Hi. Now you have it confirmed.”

  She feigned shock and reached for a hug. I gave her fake ass the fake-ass church hug she deserved. Then I went back to the pier to apologize for scattering away like a damn fool. While walking back, I spotted someone I knew from Howard. I walked up to him with a smile on my face.

  “Hey. Don’t you go to Howard?”

  He ran from me as I had run away from others minutes prior. It hurt, but I understood it. I had almost done the same thing back-to-back.

  —

  While I was interning at MTV, there was a girl there named Brooke who worked as the executive assistant for the president of MTV News. The day I started that internship, I got on the wrong Q train and headed to Brooklyn rather than 1515 Broadway. I still managed to make it to work on time, but the head of the news division sat me down and said, “Give me a few minutes. I’m going to get you settled.” He never did. I had to find my own work, so I walked around the office and constantly asked people what they did and how I could be of use. While doing my routine tours, I finally talked to Brooke; from then on, I was constantly walking by her desk. I didn’t know what it was about her, but I felt more comfortable with her than I did some of my actual friends. During one of our chats, she randomly inserted that I should “just be free.” Usually, I would dismiss that as some hippy jargon to which my cynical ass couldn’t relate. However, in that moment, I just smiled. The woman had a point, and the more I thought about that nugget of advice, the more eager I became to apply it.

  That led to my finally deciding to tell one person from Howard about my sexuality: Maiya.

  I asked Mai if she wanted to go to lunch, and we went to Sylvia’s in Harlem. (It’s still the only time I’ve ever eaten at Sylvia’s, despite the fact that I’ve lived by it for years.) There, over catfish and macaroni and cheese, I stumbled over something I had fought to say out loud for all of my life.

  “I’m gay.”

  “Oh, I knew that. My mom is a psychiatrist.”

  Girl, that is not the response you’re supposed to give! Now, I imagine what truly tipped her off (you know, besides whatever mannerisms she deemed obvious: obsessing over the first half of Dangerously in Love; not hearing anything about my dick in some Howard girl’s vagina) was when I once heard a very loud display of homophobia in class and promptly raised my hand to shut the dumb shit the fuck down.

  Right at the start of the fall semester, I told a second person from Howard—Nakisha, another I forever will adore. We were in the iLab and she wanted to know why we didn’t hang out. After I told her, she playfully slapped my face and said, “Duh! Why didn’t you tell me? We could’ve went to the gay clubs together!” I love my friend dearly, but for future reference, “DUH” is not the preferred response. You don’t have to feign shock (although sometimes a little theatrics helps), but generally speaking, you never know what anyone is until they tell you explicitly. Even if Kish had seen me doing the Bunny Hop (a dance, non-southerners) on the rainbow flag while juggling dicks, as a courtesy, I would prefer to be given the benefit of the doubt. Then again, she is from The Bay and has fully functional eyes. There’s only so much I can ask of a good friend.

  After a while, Lawrence went back to Houston for a break, and I was going to Luke & Leroy’s, as well as other gay clubs in the area, solo dolo. In hindsight, I should have brought Nakisha, as she was bait for gay men.

  I got more surprising remarks from other classmates—one of whom expressed immediate disappointment because she thought I was cute. A few more echoed that sentiment, but I was like, “Uh, when I tried girls, y’all didn’t want me, so let me just go work through this boy thing I’ve been bottling down since Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers.” My coming out became more real when I told my best friend back home.

  “Kimmie, I’m gay.”

  Kim expressed legitimate shock, but, as expected, delivered a sharp, memorable response.

  “It was that bitch Alicia, wasn’t it?”

  I had to explain to Kim that while it did feel like Alicia had run over my heart with her Dodge Neon, that was not how it worked. After that, she just accepted it, as did the other friends from high school with whom I maintained contact. I told my friends first because they were my chosen family. That’s not to say that I didn’t love my family, but I had also gone far away from Houston for college for multiple reasons—though one large motivating factor was escaping what had always felt like an environment mired in chaos.

  My brother did hear about me and called me about it. At first, I told him to mind his own fucking business and that he didn’t know what in the fuck he was talking about. Knowing that response was mean as hell and totally unwarranted, I called him back, apologized, and explained the truth calmly (I do not like to be met with gossip, much less from my own brother).

  The family member whose opinion mattered most to me was my sister, Nicole. I was, and am, obsessed with my sister. Growing up, she was nine years older than I was, but because our mom often worked long hours overnight or twelve-hour day shifts, my sister had a large hand in taking care of us.

  I can barely put into words how much I fell before the altar of my big sister. My appreciation for music came largely from diving into her massive CD collection. My appearance grew majorly from her helping me shop. My parents were incredibly hard workers, but the way my sister managed to get pregnant at twenty-two with my oldest niece, continue to have both a full-time job and a full course load, and still graduate with good grades inspired me beyond belief. How she continued to work tirelessly as others failed in their responsibilities left me in awe. And she cared so much for her children and worked relentlessly not to repeat any of our parents’ mistakes. We were both so hard on ourselves, but she was nothing short of impeccable, so if she had not accepted my being gay, it would have broken me.

  I didn’t tell her until a year after I told my friends and my brother.

  I was back in New York on a random trip to see Jordan. At some bar, drunk and tired, I let the liquid courage direct me to call my sister out of the blue to tell her the complete truth about me. Sensing my anxiety, she said, “Uh, okay. I mean, I kind of wondered at one point, but I wasn’t totally sure. Are you all right?” I wasn’t sure if she was in total acceptance in that moment, but the fact that her main concern was whether or not I was okay was another reason why I love her so much. Today, I still talk to her more than any other member of my family.

  —

  My parents were another story.

  My friends were top priority. My sister was next. My parents . . . always knew that conversation would be difficult. So I waited. And waited. Then waited some more. A few years went by before any discussions were had about it, and each time, I felt that the chats stemmed from coercion.

  As for my father, he asked me about my sexuality in a way that would have been unsurprising to anyone who had ever met him. He pulled me to the side in the living room of the house in which I had grown up and asked me if I was “funny.” When he uttered the word “funny,” his left hand moved swiftly side to side. This country-ass way of describing homosexuality immediately turned me off. My first instinct was to repeat the hand gesture and declare, “I’m hilarious.” But I did something else instead: I didn’t confirm or deny. This was not about denying who I was; it was about punishing a man who I felt had made all our lives a living hell. Of course, remembering how he talked about his own brother, I was not sure how he would handle the news, but I did have my suspicions.

  He will blame my mother.

  He will get angry.

  He will say something hurtful.

  He will piss me the fuck off.

  We might likely fight.

  As an adult, I had to be separated from him once after calling him a bitch to his face over the way he spoke to my mother. Between his volatility and my
repressed anger issues—ones shaped squarely by him—that would have ended very badly. The same can be said for this line of questioning.

  Even so, none of this was my ultimate concern or why I didn’t say anything one way or the other. I knew he knew. He knew that I knew that he knew. I just looked at him with utter disdain for asking me because I knew it would hurt him. All I said was “I don’t like anything,” and added that no matter if I was the gayest or the straightest man within a twenty-mile radius, I didn’t owe anyone an explanation and that I would tell my mother anything before I told him. He would complain that my sister and I “hated him” and that we only talked to our mother. Never did he make note that his actions may have led to such allegiances.

  I let years go by before telling my mom. What prompted my doing so was the publication of an essay that I had written about two young boys who reportedly committed suicide within the same month after being bullied for being gay. This was before the “It Gets Better” movement. These were two young Black boys, and the world wasn’t often as responsive to their needs as it was to those of white kids. For The Root, I wrote about my own history of taunts over being gay and how I wish I could have told each bullied boy that he would overcome these challenges. Back then, The Root had a relationship with MSN, and some of my pieces would be picked up on their homepage—sometimes only for a few hours. But in the case of this essay, it was up for much of the whole day, and squarely in the center of the homepage. MSN’s site used to be my mom’s homepage. I wasn’t certain, but I had a strong belief that it was likely she would see the piece, read it, and be disgusted. Such reasoning was why the piece almost hadn’t happened, in fact. My editor had me speak to a colleague at the site—another gay Black man—to gauge whether or not I was ready for the potential consequences of publicly outing myself in my work. By the time he called me, my decision was already made—and he picked up on that quickly.