What Community Means as a Queer Black Writer

In the spring of 1990, poised at the brink of graduation from Morehouse College, I came out to my girlfriend. A year earlier, she’d chuckled when I declared my desire that we date. Not that she was an unkind person. To this day, she’s one of my closest friends, is one of the most selfless and accommodating people I’ve ever known.

But. She was familiar with “my kind”—a young Black man striving to exist within the frame of societal and familial expectations. She expressed her doubts about who I thought I was becoming, said that the aperture of my objectives might have been out of focus.

But what the hell, we gave it a shot. I struggled with my internal conflict the entire year we dated. When I finally came out, morphed into who she knew I was all along, she hated me for a while.

It was the end of the Reagan era. A rising conservatism warned that rampant premarital sex, abhorrent homosexuality, immoral abortions, and rancid popular culture would destroy America. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority heralded book bans.

Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied and Sapphire’s Wild Thing were cornerstone exhibits in a fear-mongering campaign that ended John Frohnmayer’s tenure at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Ignored by the Reagan Administration, AIDS blazed unchecked, consuming thousands—eventually, millions—of lives.

My life at Morehouse warped into the unrecognizable. The fraternity I’d joined initiated a witch hunt expelling all gay members. Bonds of friendship were broken. “Brotherhood” became a joke. Emotional chaos suffocated me. I barely got out of bed.

How would I tell my parents? Is this why I had attended Morehouse—my same-sex attraction, a lurking, subconscious motivation? The years of sacrifice and labor of my conservative, Southern parents, tens of thousands of dollars later and this was the discovery I’d made?

I was only just beginning to understand. The concept of two men kissing—of me kissing a man—was revolting. And exhilarating. Going further was unimaginable. Black, from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, I understood “gay” to be white, effeminate, and disempowering. I didn’t want to be any of that.

I had a gay uncle—one of my father’s brothers. He worked at a hospital and managed a gay bar in the Bronx. Fun and flashy, he and his roommate lived in a fabulously terraced apartment that overlooked Queens Blvd. Ear hustling family conversations, it sounded like my uncle and his roommate hosted incredible parties.

During Christmas break of my senior year, accompanying his youngest brother—my youngest uncle (who was like an older brother to me)—on a visit, I tried staying for a party that was just about to happen. Grabbed a drink, settled on the couch next to a Latino brother I’d caught checking me out.

Before I could even take a first gulp, my elder uncle blurted, “Oh no-no-no,” he waved at his brother. “Time for y’all to go.” It was with quiet, hushed reserve, the few times I heard my family speak about my uncle’s lifestyle. It sounded sad, lonely, even disappointing. I didn’t want that as part of my reality either.

Ironically, help came from one of the fraternity brothers with whom I had kept in touch. He gifted me a copy of the first volume of the anthology Other Countries: Black Gay Voices. His inscription read:

June 1992

Doug,

If this be ammunition—fire at your enemies from within and without. If this be love—love yourself and at least one other. If this be helpful, tell me so, for that is what I want for you.

That first volume of Other Countries was an awakening, gave me a vision of a Black gay man I could become. Living a fearlessly proud life that I’d encourage my family to embrace. Other Countries led me to In The Life: A Black Gay Anthology and Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men.

I devoured those books. Joseph Beam, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, Assotto Saint, along with a dynamic troop of writer-warriors, had captured multi-dimensional realities of fiercely lived Black gay lives. In me, their work ignited a quest for courageous engagement of my identity, necessitated the importance of clear, unambiguous communication of how I’d interact with my world.

But as they were just getting started, AIDS wiped many of them off the face of the planet. Their abrupt, disruptive absence left me ravenous. And I could feel the hunger of other Black gay men pulse around me. We were (are) starving to be heard.

The second volume of Other Countries: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS published my first poetry piece. For Venus Magazine, I interviewed Phil Wilson, E. Lynn Harris, and James Early Hardy, prominent Black gay men. The seedlings that would become my novel, The Fantasies of Future Things had been planted.

America now finds herself riddled with daily dramatic departures from the logical. Trump’s first presidential term was grotesquely objectionable, lacked the rudimentary fundamentals of a serious, high-functioning, policy-making office working on behalf of the people.

So far, his second term has been worse. Never before has a president looked so petty, so infinitesimally small, so unadorned in his bare-knuckled brazen pursuit of power. Never before have we had a criminal president. Well. At least, never before has the occupant of the Oval Office been a convicted rapist, a draft dodging, thirty-four-count felon, an instigator of insurrection against the United States.

For all but a very select few, this president’s onslaught of legally questionable executive orders has revealed the common fragility of our civil, mental, social, and physical safety. Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters’ outrage, decrying, “You weren’t supposed to do this to us,” translates to “Do this to everyone but us.” A reality with which too many are too familiar.

Our government has been hijacked by lunatic, right-wing rejection of history wrapped in evangelical hypocrisy. But there exists a strong tradition of impassioned, egalitarian confrontations with indefensible injustice: Reconstruction. The Women’s Rights Movement. The fight against McCarthyism. The Civil Rights Movement. The Stonewall Riots. Roe v. Wade. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP).

The Fantasies of Future Things, tells the story of diverse people with different histories and dissimilar futures faced with particular dilemmas. Collectively, they ACT-UP, combat their common foe. Together, they chart a new path forward.

No less is required of us now. If we—the multiplicity of people who constitute the variegated fabric of America—intend to eradicate the machinations of an authoritarian regime led by the cheap trick of a wanna-be dictator supported by the fanaticism of cowardly cronyism, then we, too, must ACT-UP, reject the tribalism this regime instigates among us.

As James Baldwin wrote,

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

These times are not unprecedented. We are more than a handful and we do not traverse these waters alone. Generations before us have defeated similar tyrannical forces with fewer resources. They have left signposts and markers for us to navigate our way. That is my commitment to our future, the mission with which I put pen to paper.

______________________________

The Fantasies of Future Things by Doug Jones is available via Simon & Schuster.