“MARY, don’t you weep. Oh Papa don’t you moan,” goes the old Negro spiritual’s first few lines. For me, these hymns evoke spirituality and resistance simultaneous to the reality of slaves—the progenitors of American music. Like Mary’s tears, these hymns are a meditation on one’s lot in life—whatever that life may be. At least on the surface, Christianity was the religion that the composers of these spirituals sang, in order to survive. The slave shared this religion with even the most brutal slave master, one who liberally dealt lashes, forced slaves to breed like steed, regularly raped women after placating himself by giving her trinkets to disguise his monstrosity, and then effortlessly sold babies from these mothers’ arms. An unspeakable number of men were also sexually brutalized, yet this corner of history is rarely discussed.
As slavery began to run its course, more and more black men were brutalized and castrated by mobs of entire white families. The white children who were forced to witness these atrocities must have been terrified to watch their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and neighbors stuffing the mutilated genitals of a black man into his mouth, choking out the last bit of life from the brutalized body as it swung from the tree. Lyrics of resistance remind us: “Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop. Here is a strange and bitter crop” (from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”).
Viewing Christianity as an outsider has been an obsessive pastime of mine since childhood. Driving down Jefferson Street between downtown Louisville and the predominantly African-American, mixed-class “West End,” one experiences an awesome institution of religion. This particular pattern is repeated throughout black communities in America: a menagerie of massive to mundane churches—one of which my grandparents helped found—all the various Protestant sects, spanning blocks along the broad road, each boasting a huge congregation and boisterous clergy. Domestic work, the employment most available to black women, was fraught with the looming threat of sexual exploitation and resentment from the master’s wife. Men were humiliated by tolerating work that was unfulfilling and underpaid, labor conditions that were substandard. Under- and unemployment among blacks continues to be robust. Like many of their contemporaries, my grandparents had transitioned from cotton fields to the urban south as soon as they could. After World War II, southern blacks, many of whom had heard firsthand account from former slaves, migrated north in droves. In Louisville, Kentucky, many flocks of church eventually congregated between 27th and 18th streets on Jefferson. For blacks in the South, kin was understood and traced through church affiliation. Questions like “Who’s your pastor?” or “Which church you ’long to?” were the ones that people asked with any new introduction. Churches served as spiritual safe spaces of communal solace and mobilization. In fact, in the New World it was the only space where we could peacefully congregate.
Even for a non-Christian, the Christian ethos was inescapable. As a black child in Kentucky, and educated in a liberal, multicultural, art-oriented school, I was constantly confronted with difference. The goal of this institution was to bring together so-called races and classes that carved-up the city, socially indistinct from the days of more formal segregation. Less attention was given to religion, and even less to sexuality. Our teachers and curriculum overtly acknowledged and celebrated Jewish people as a minority, yet offered little education about Judaism beyond the superficial set of facts deemed necessary to know by the Euro-Christian hegemony—one that blacks consistently assailed for its inequality, yet often bought into for its promise of tangible rewards through diligence. The Euro-American Christian ethos justified the exploitation and continued disempowerment of black people in America, as we were deemed descendents of Ham, the fallen son of Noah. Thunderous leaders of large local African-American congregations used the same fundamentalist doctrine to denounce GLBT equality that white supremacists used (and use) to justify slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the so-called redemptive penal system.
By the mid 1980’s multiculturalism had become a national obsession, a trend that was slowly taking hold in urban and eventually rural communities alike. I was raised as a Buddhist. My family is religiously mixed, which facilitated early acculturation to the idea of loving and respecting one another despite fundamental, radically important theological and cosmological differences, which extended to one’s responses to present-day suffering. At a very early age I became aware of what I then considered my “deviant” sexuality. In my mind, it made sense that since people of such conflicting and deep ideological difference could seamlessly consider one another as kin, then wider acculturation of difference in sexuality should certainly follow.
Popular culture continually provides us with scripts that often say what we find difficult to articulate, or do so only grudgingly. Lacking any other guidance, I hungrily looked to pop music and images to help make sense of my changing world. Tina Turner belted out, “I was fully matured by the time I reached the age o’ ten/ A mulatto girl is what they called me/ And us mulattos had no trouble at all with men/ All men say that I’m as sweet as honey/ I’m 34, 38, and 22 at the tummy” (“Sweet Rhode Island Red”).
By the seventh grade, around the time I started to contemplate and attempt to understand my effeminacy and its potential link to queerness, my best girlfriend grew breasts. Frankly, by Thanksgiving Alicia was voluptuous. Her breasts were huge, larger even than several of our teachers, most of whom were slender and white. I believe that more than a few resented this. It was as if the presence of my best girlfriend fed their angst. I resisted believing that the hostility could be envy, for Alicia and I were only kids; I did not want to believe that we were threatening. Yet, I could not ignore how many adults began to relate to her with contempt. Her presence evoked a defensiveness and aggression, which inevitably was eventually reciprocated. Given our youthful innocence, it is clearly determined that such contempt finds its roots elsewhere than our actual selves.
I anticipated the same response of contempt and hostility, which I frequently received from kids who were not from my immediate environment. I worked very hard to avoid provoking the hostility I often felt when meeting strangers—kids were the cruelest by virtue of being uncensored ambassadors from a culture of intolerance. As soon as they heard my funny, African name, or perceived that I was effeminate, their look and tone would shift and convey such contempt. I developed many successful strategies to discourage this response from adults, who largely recognized the general inappropriateness of contempt and hostility towards a child, notably one that showed reverence toward adults. Furthermore, most adults with whom I interacted knew of my accomplishments and accolades: that I was a product of the most socially progressive and academically challenging public school in the city; that I spoke both vernacular and Standard American English with great articulateness. Adults either exoticized or romanticized my African heritage: I belonged to an infamously inter-cultural and inter-class religio-spiritual community. I was active in various artistic, academic, and athletic groups; and I didn’t shy away from engaging adults in conversation. Compared to most black people in that city, I was relatively “progressive” and well-off in the localized cultural currency. To this day, most people I meet freely assume that I come from a solidly middle-class family.
By this time my best friend was suiting up with her armor as well. Her breasts and my effeminacy evoked negative sexual connotations and many responded as if we were very threatening. Attending the same school since the second grade, she and I had been longtime friends, so it was easy for us to side with one another over the issue of public scrutiny of our emerging sexualities. Many of my earliest memories of any issues surrounding sexuality involve her and me gradually coming to terms with the discord between the innocence and curiosity with which we saw ourselves and what our world expected of us.
Even as early as the second grade when we referred to intercourse as “doin’ the oochie-coochie,” most of my male classmates had already been socialized to relate to sex as a conquest over females—as if it were our duty as males to conquer in any way, by any means, her untamed sexual prowess. Perhaps we were curious and creative, for our discursiveness brought relief to otherwise muted hues, particularly in times and in places adverse to comprehensive sexual health education. Though at that age we lacked any language to discuss these circumstances outside of our juvenile understanding of racism, I believe that Alicia also felt that we were unjustly treated. After all, just as in the praxis of racism, we had no say in the matter; it was simply nature taking its course. Alicia’s family was also deeply Christian, and not reluctant to accept a universal hierarchy that simultaneously justified the system of oppression in which we are entwined, and offered no respite.
I will never forget one particular late autumn afternoon during English class. It must have been the last class of the day as Alicia and I had hurried through our assignments. We raced to the teacher’s desk, handed in the papers and just as quickly returned to our seats, anxious to continue our usual chatter. In a hushed voice, Alicia revealed to me that her conservative Christian denomination neither fêted on Christmas and Easter nor worshiped any idols such as flags. I felt like swinging from the lights as she explained this, because finally there was someone who could articulate what I felt.
By then I was beginning to question patriotism and the purpose of the nation-state system; I was repulsed by its symbols, none of which reflected positive views of me or anyone like me. The whole thing seemed artificial—a sham. We all knew that blacks were not even legally a hundred percent human for most of our time here in the New World. She and I also talked about “August the Eighth,” which is when we in Kentucky mark the Emancipation Proclamation. Alicia gave me a sly grin as I told her about my summer trips down to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, just to be black and celebrate “August the Eighth” with other black people for a week each year.
I was elated by her rejection of the “good ole boy” system—that white, Christian, patriarchal, wealth-based monopolization of regional, state, county, and local politics, much to the disenfranchisement of our communities and people. In social studies class, we had spent months on sanitized white-American history, weeks on European history, days on African-American history (as if it were somehow separate from “American” history), and just hours on the histories and cultures of non-Western peoples. Though the city boasted neighborhoods and parks with names like Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seneca, and Iroquois, there was not even a mention of the Trail of Tears in all of my education in Kentucky.
Most of what we learned about the world outside of Western Europe, Russia, North America, and Israel revolved around the colonial experience. Absolutely no information was presented in any of my public school education regarding nonwhite and non-wealthy peoples and places outside of the colonial experience. Hence, the “Third World” conditions of the poor blacks in the West End of Louisville, the poor whites toward the north, and the isolated southeast Asian slum in the south were all justified by this universal position of dominance of those seeking wealth at any expense.
Alicia realized that these slightly non-mainstream aspects of her life unclouded the lenses often worn by those in the world around us. We were minorities within minorities, in a place where we knew that we were expected by all the adults in both our families and at school to be different and to make a difference. Adults in our environment never accorded us the simplicity of just “being.” Whenever we exited our homes, we carried the responsibility of representing. Right there, in the seventh grade, as Alicia fumbled through endless ways of folding her arms to hide her new chest, I realized that if I thought about boys the way that our guy friends boasted about their conquests of girls, I could somewhat relate to their juvenile sexual sentiments. From somewhere deep in the corners of my mind I started to eroticize males the way the guys around me eroticized females, and it felt good. Nonetheless, I knew that I did not relate to conquering or boasting about my erotic interests.
Alicia lived in a family that staunchly discouraged the very thought of sex. While my family was relatively forward-thinking about sexuality among young people, I never encountered an adult who was ready to approach the topic of homosexuality. Despite this, I knew that I was surrounded by a lot of love. I had visited Alicia’s home several times after school and knew her elder siblings who attended the same school. I realized that Alicia was insecure about any support for her searching for understanding. Though we could not offer each other any information, we offered each other acceptance. In the circumstances in which we lived in Louisville, I have always been cognizant that I am extremely fortunate to have known such acceptance at such a young age. Clearly, Alicia helped to teach me to give that in return. We knew that we were vulnerable, but she helped train me to be tough in spite of it all—and to act wicked and love every minute of it.
In our eighth grade Physical Education course, we were offered the new and improved sexual education curriculum, which had been totally re-invented that year to include comprehensive contraception information, responding to the increasing incidence of teenage pregnancy and, at that time, the onset of the AIDS epidemic. I started to pray that none of my friends would get pregnant, raped, or contract some disease. Protectively, I even dated one girl whom I often walked home from school, knowing that with me she would never have intercourse, so she’d be safe from all three of these dangers. Most of her peers were preyed upon by older heterosexual boys, and many girls were easily coerced into unprotected sex. This “sexperimentation” without appropriate information was their introduction to sex.
I experienced many first, second, and perhaps tenth sexual experiences vicariously through the network I had developed by middle school. I believed, as I do now, that my female peers earnestly sensed that I was gay and wouldn’t judge or label me, so they made me privy to their rather informative chatter. I collected a great many facts about female adolescent sexuality among urban blacks in Louisville in the mid-80’s and 90’s. This insight led me to conclude that my emerging sexuality was threatening and taboo.
In the early days, I worked tirelessly to maintain an image of a high-achieving, well-adjusted adolescent in order to distract from my sexuality and perhaps compensate (or pay penance) for effeminacy. Sometimes I felt I should not have any sexuality, especially not one resembling my own homosexuality. I sustained this façade for many years to come. In my environment, women and girls demonstrated healthy relationships based on open communication among themselves, mutual consent, acceptance, consistency, and respect. With the notable exception of my mother’s parents and their relationship to me, in my environment and in popular culture, many relationships between women and men, adults and children, were based on domination, and few did little to question that. By the time it became evident to me that I was gay, I had been able to surround myself with enough caring women and girls, be they family or friends, who were prepared to accept knowing about my gayness and continue to support me.
Every now and again, I think of my best girlfriend Alicia. On one trip home from college, I bumped into her at a burger joint. There she was, still smiling, happy as ever to see me. I tried my best not to make her feel embarrassed. She had been bitterly cast away from the school where I had graduated as a star student. She was working the cash register at a second rate fast-food chain in an obscure neighborhood while I was away excelling at an exclusive small liberal arts college. We spoke for a while and caught up. I don’t remember if she had any kids. Her high, full cheeks shone as I recounted the past few years of my life. Her ever-cheerful, glazed-over eyes betrayed the fact that she had faced her share of adversity in the short lives we had lived thus far. (“Two roads diverged … and sorry I could not travel both…”)
I left the greasy burger joint and hurriedly trailed down the street. Once I knew that I had cleared eyeshot of the restaurant, tears burst forth, as they do now as I recount this story. All Alicia knew that she could rely on was her church. Even that community was not able to supplement whatever tools she lacked to overcome her circumstances, which I first sensed when we both became conscious of our sexualities. Upon that chance meeting, Alicia showed me that her head was barely above water as she fought her environment for even a chance break the cycle of poverty. Social rejection from peers and adults, as well as lack of positive role models and appropriate information, leads many to such an enormous deficit in self-confidence as to reduce their life choices. Cognizance of such a systematic deficit can lead to ambivalence or rage. I still try to sift through the factors that push the lives of two people in such different directions, whose lives cross paths for such a good while. We shared the scope of the planet, and it is as clear now as it was then that there exists little space for deviation from the norm. Yet for those years in elementary and middle school, we both had a chance to give and receive love.
Diepiriye S. Kuku-Siemons is pursuing his doctorate in sociology in New Delhi, India.
