The second black man I loved was similar to my father in many ways. So I loved black men as a form of radical protest. Had I believed the lies others believed to be true about black men, white supremacy would have scored a new victory. I made a choice to love other black men in my life because I despised the ways our society praised white men, whether imagined in the bed or on the cross, while withholding love from black men like my daddy. White men were the idols, allowed to be wiped clean of their mistakes, the ones I was supposed to love. And even though I lived in a city among poor white men who lacked decorum, who were still imagined as having respectability, their white maleness positioned them as better than black boys like me. I was expected-by those who knew us both-to rise above his seeming failed humanity. He might have even had a chance to run for president and win, but such luxuries are not afforded to most black men, especially those who refuse to become the trope we are taught to replicate before we are encouraged to love ourselves. The heavy words I used to eulogize him could have been used to describe his wins in a country that bends its love in the direction of white manhood, but I mostly defended his right to be loved.
The fact of America is that black people’s lives and mistakes are individual and collective, the fault always of the man and never the world around him, but those faults are used to pathologize not just the man but those who look like him, too. Any heart that beats overtime to compensate for what it is denied is one sure to break too soon. He might be alive at 55 and not dead, too young, from heart complications. Had he been a white man who failed as much as he excelled, he would have been deemed worthy of love still. If he were an abusive white man, like Donald Trump, who came from generational wealth, with wealth that means power, he would have been afforded visibility and acclaim. Had he been an imperfect white man, because all men are imperfect, the world may have loved him still. But he was the first black man who loved me and I loved him back. The beatings he meted out, like the time he twisted my mom’s arm until she cried in my presence when I was a boy because she talked back, were common. He held me in the same hands that were often used to hurt my mother. He was not always aware of others’ plights to render him invisible, and sometimes he did a good job of discarding himself.
He was not always the best at showing care, but when he did his care was generous. prisons and a rental home in Camden made him something of an absence to be derided and desired. His hands were sometimes scaly and calloused from too much physical labor performed for little pay when he could land jobs, whose split-time between U.S.
#OLD BLACK GAY MEN CODE#
He was a black man whose belly sometimes protruded far beyond his waistline, who spoke in a poetic vernacular that allowed him to communicate in code to the people he encountered on the streets of our black hood in New Jersey, his words holding different meanings to those inside and outside the community. He was not America’s fabled monstrous buck nor was he an icon of meritocracy. The first black man I loved wasn’t an accumulation of white America’s long-held fears.