Hello Family and welcome new subscribers!
How y’all doing? Fine? I hope so.
The summer solstice is almost here! In the meantime, due to catastrophic climate change and botanical sexism, spring allergy season is out of control.
I was outside, minding my own business, tending to my garden daily, when all of a sudden, I went from a runny nose and itchy throat to an intense allergic reaction to a serious sinus infection. Anyone who has ever had a sinus infection knows just how awful that shit is and how horrible it makes you feel. Aside from being extremely painful, it drains you of vitality and makes it hard to do anything except lay there and feel like someone is taking a wrench to your face.
After weeks of illness, I’m just now beginning to feel better. I have to be very careful, especially since the Ocrevus treatments I take for MS increase my susceptibility to infections. Going forward, I’m going to have to wear a mask and goggles when doing garden work and make sure that I take my allergy medicine beforehand. In other words, I have to take care of myself, like my astrology reading says below.
Anyway: Welcome June! In the United States, June is, among other things, Pride Month, when some people in the country celebrate the history and contributions—and remember the ongoing struggles—of LGBTQIA+ people. Even though this is generally a time of celebration, I find that I also have room to examine other things.
Prejudice
From May 31 to June 1 in 1921, the white residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, based on a lie, declared war on the Black people of Greenwood District of the city, also known as Black Wall Street. It was horrific. They commandeered decommissioned World War I airplanes and bombed the town from the skies. They tried to hide that last bit from posterity. Hundreds of Black people were murdered. A prosperous neighborhood was obliterated. Thank the Ancestors that there are survivors who remain to share their testimonies.
This June, I pay homage to those who were massacred and those who survived.
Y’all heard about that man Ethan Schmidt-Crockett, an anti-LGBTQIA+ bigot who was going around destroying all the LGBTQIA+ merchandising in Target stores? Well, folks are saying that he’s a closeted, self-hating gay man because they’ve found his profiles on gay dating/hook-up sites. Sigh.
While there are tons of stories of self-hating LGBTQIA+ people acting atrociously to other LGBTQIA+ people on behalf of the people who taught them to hate themselves, I want to remind everyone that just because a person has a profile on an LGBTQIA+ dating/hook-up site and interacts with other folks on that site, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Sometimes, criminals create those profiles to lure LGBTQIA+ people into extraordinarily harmful and lethal situations.
In either event: Be very careful out there, Family.
I’m still mourning the death of Jordan Neely. This horror happened in my city, on a train that I ride all the time, at a station I used very frequently. Neely’s murder reminds me how terrified we are as Americans; how we weaponize safety, how we worship safety, how willing we are to give up our rights in order to feel safe, how quickly we abandon our espoused principles in the interest of safety, how easily we root for evil if it is expedient for our safety, and how fast we become killers in the name of safety. And it’s not even actual safety, you know? It’s just the promise of safety. The desire for something unobtainable in an inequitable world. Its unobtainability never curbs our obsession for it, though. Whether we are deluding ourselves or not, we need to feel safe. And that feeling is always, always at someone else’s expense.
James Baldwin put it this way:
“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to [them] from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion.”
(Studs Terkel, “An Interview with James Baldwin,”1961, Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989)
I know a thing or two about safety being an illusion. I have been in harm’s way since the day I was born. Being alive at the intersection of Blackness and queerness is an unsolvable modern quandary as no society knows what to do with me; every society fears me, marks me as dangerous, interprets my very livingness as an existential threat, and, therefore, wants me to do two things: die and disappear. And they are willing to do things—insidious, unnatural things that they market to appear normal, virtuous even—to ensure it.
Americans—frightened down to the blood by the prospect of one day having to actually answer for the crimes that grant us both our piety and our comforts, however meager—despise all outsiders. From that loathing emerges the country’s foreign and domestic policies. What we do over here, we do over there. In the name of God. In the name of Jesus. In the name of Mammon. All of whom, in this country, are merged. Which is the evidence that proves that there are no religions in the United States; only cults. We are a ruthless, senseless, dismal, frivolous, scary, skin-deep, and child-hating people; asinine enough to take great pride in our prejudice.
And is anyone else disgusted with the prosperous industries that have sprung up out of the public and broadcast killings of Black men? The audacious monetization of these Black men’s deaths, and the reduction of the murders to spectacle/entertainment/how-to guide is the definition of obscene. Even when Black men are not killed in these snuff films (because that’s what they are), people are titillated by the potential demise of Black men; by the prospect that it might happen before their hungry eyes (Google “Sarah Jane Comrie” crier-on-cue extraordinaire, for example). Their subdermal hatred for Black men can only be satiated first by the fulfillment of their Mandingo fetishes, and then by the extinguishing of our human light.
People are making millions upon millions of dollars atop the dead bodies of hashtagged Black men. Almost everyone is implicated by this and yet no one has the courage to admit it save for the most open and ogre of racists.
I do not and will not share these 21st-century lynching postcards and sacrifice-a-Black-man-death-glamour pornographies. I believe this sharing has more of a deleterious effect on Black people than it has a rallying, educating one as some claim.
My city is split, they say, between regarding Daniel Penny as a hero or as a killer (people of all races and genders were on that train applauding Penny as he murdered Neely, proving that in America, “diversity” is a word with tainted meaning). But the division is faulty math because we have video evidence of the latter and no evidence whatsoever of the former. The media has made up its mind, though; Neely has, of course, been portrayed as a monster (ableism is at the root of that as well) that needed to be put down; his every error, mistake, pathology, and sin highly investigated and put on display as justification for his annihilation.
Penny, on the other hand, has been given the benefit of the doubt—even by New York City’s allegedly Black mayor; regarded as a patriotic soldier and “concerned citizen” doing his duty to keep the public safe from harm. Penny himself, who clearly isn’t even worth his last name, says that the idea that he’s a racist killer is preposterous because he was even “planning a road trip through Africa.” As though invasion isn’t the point of colonization. As though African safari isn’t a perk afforded to the anti-Black. There is an extraordinary scholarly essay on this tragic situation that I think everyone should read.
But why am I thinking about Jordan Neely on the first day of Gay Pride Month? Because I’m thinking about what it means to be interpreted as queer via the lens of autocratic and compulsory cisgender heterosexuality; to move about in a body regarded as a menace to heaven, Earth, whiteness and “family values.” I’m thinking about how the people who fix their faces to even say family values are the same people who have notoriously committed genocides of every form against families throughout time and space, and continue to do so. It’s all doublespeak, with forked tongues. Hypocrisy of the highest order. And they don’t mind being hypocrites. It’s all a part of their extermination strategy.
As a Black man and as a queer man, a Blaqueer (Blacker) man as it were, I’m deemed dangerous because Blackness and queerness are judged individually and specifically nightmarish; one considered inherently criminal and the other inherently perverse; and under the banner of manhood, considered inherently violent. From the moment I was born, I was marked for death. Not a natural death, but the most choreographed and artificial kind: by the hands of everyone from the doctor who delivered me to the people who might have loved me under different circumstances to total and complete strangers—all of whom have invested heavily into the lie that it is their right and obligation to envy/worship my penis before they slander me, dismember me, set me on fire, choke the life out of me, string me up, or riddle my body with bullets—all for their own “safety.”
It is either by a miracle or Ancestral grace that I have survived.
Among the things I celebrate this month, my continued living is most definitely one of them.
Pride
On May 25, 2023, I had the esteemed honor of presenting Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck, with the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, at a ceremony held at the Brooklyn Museum. As the saying goes: “When you’ve been blessed, pass it on…” Also: Get into my outfit. I was trying to give “Rap God.” Did I serve or nah? LOL!
Pride in Your Words, an initiative from Penguin Random House, gathers “an ever-growing collection of literature from queer voices, curated so you can easily find the books you need in this moment.” The goal is to create “a living, breathing testament to LGBTQ+ voices—inclusive, diverse, always open, and never banned.”
The paperback edition of the French translation of The Prophets—Les Prophètes—will be available for purchase on June 14, 2023, via Le Livre de Poche. Check out the cover:
The Prophets was also going to be published in other countries this year, but due to the recent right-wing (which means anti-LGBTQIA+) shifts in the governments of those nations, that is no longer the case.
I spoke with the Seattle Gay News about my journey as a Black queer writer:
“The reason why [I wrote The Prophets] is because I wanted to strike back at this false notion that Black American people are Queer because slavery corrupted us. I wanted to show that slavery did not make us Queer. Queerness is just a natural part of the human experience. In fact, what slavery and colonialism introduced us to, truly, is anti-Queerness and anti-Transness."
I have the great pleasure of being in conversation with David Santos Donaldson, the author of Greenland, as a part of an event hosted by the Bureau of General Services - Queer Division at the LGBT Community Center in New York, NY, on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. ET. Seating is first-come, first-served. For those who cannot make it in person, the event will be livestreamed. Come through! For more information, please click: HERE.
The banning of books by LGBTQIA+ authors or featuring LGBTQIA+ characters and themes has been happening proudly and heavily in the United States. Ron DeSatan and his minions in Florida have been so especially egregious in the war against marginalized people being waged in this country, that the NAACP had to warn Black people not to visit the state. The march toward totalitarianism continues full steam ahead. Resistance is mandatory.
Here are some more books that you should definitely cop for Pride Month and beyond:
Revolutionary Acts: Black Gay Men in Britain by Jason Okundaye. “Championing deeply personal engagement with those who have paved the way before us, Revolutionary Acts reveals the power of resilience in the face of hostile circumstances and heralds the desire for happiness, joy, and brotherhood as a radical act.”
Horse Barbie: A Memoir by Geena Rocero. “The heartfelt memoir of a trans pageant queen from the Philippines who went back into the closet to model in New York City—until she realized that living her truth was the only way to step into her full power.”
The People Who Report More Stress by Alejandro Varela. “The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected stories brimming with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins, acutely aware of the stresses that modern life takes upon the body and the body politic.”
The Prophets is scheduled to released in Brazil this coming August courtesy of Companhia das Letras. I’ve waited a long time for this. It is incredibly meaningful to me because I feel a deep and abiding kinship with all members of the African Diaspora wherever they reside in the world, and so many of them reside in Brazil. I’m hoping to be able to visit the country to promote the book. I’ve been to Brazil once before and I had a most wonderful time there. It was like visiting home, somehow; which I think speaks to that larger sense of connection.
My excitement for my book being published in Brazil led me to immersing myself in Brazilian art. I saw this very heartbreaking film short from Brazil called Socrates. It’s a film about loneliness, longing, dispossession, and exploitation. Its lead actor, Christian Malheiros, who went on to star in another heartbreaking film I saw recently called 7 Prisoners, is an exceptional talent.
Socrates had me thinking a great deal about love’s possibilities in a patriarchal society. I have concluded that the possibilities are exceedingly rare.
Baldwin said that love has never been a popular movement and I imagine that he was correct. But why? Perhaps because the world demands that no one be vulnerable enough to embody it. Those who ascribe to the patriarchal demand that men and boys, in particular, be nothing more than providers, protectors, producers, penises (and most importantly, disposable)—reducing us such that we definitely have a function, but certainly not a purpose. I imagine that this dehumanization, this turning of men into machines, has everything to do with the resulting and extreme violence and despair connected to the very idea of manhood.
And because that peculiar construction has benefits for so many—including those who claim they wish to dismantle patriarchy—we often make self-serving concessions and pretend that the evil is necessary. But love—real love; not the Hollywood or greedy or possessive or selfish kind—reveals that falsehood. Which is why, I imagine, so few people are actually capable of love, and why, despite all the books and movies and TV shows and cards and toys and desires and rituals, we haven’t the faintest idea what real love is. Thus, real love remains so damn elusive.
A shame, too. For love in its proper form—which is to say, the form that allows us to see and embrace the whole of somebody, not just the pieces that might feed our egos, enslave themselves to our most totalitarian impulses, make our imaginations swoon, get our privates wet, or, in some sense, “save” us; I’m talking about the sort of love that is turned inward first and, therefore, cannot dream of dehumanizing or destroying another, and allows us to save ourselves—is transcendent.
And love is the only thing—the ONLY thing—that can set us free.
May your Pride Month be enlightening, inspiring, and liberating.
May no one try to abuse your kindness and may you not try to abuse anyone else’s.
And may someone love you like these parents love their child; by which I mean, may someone actually love you.
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert