Women Who Helped Me See Me
I want to give my ‘I made it’ speech before my Oscar win. Before my book award win. Before my (Fill in the blank) recognition. I want to do it now, tonight, at 1:40 in the morning while the truth burns the backs of my eyelids as I see the goings on in this country. I want to do it now, while the iron is hot. While the words needing to be said are waiting for an ear (or eyes). I want to say these words as a white man because it is long past over due and before any bling alights my mantel place. And I swear to God, I’ll say it aloud if and when it’s my time.
((Lord, let this come out the way I mean it and not let me sound like a dork. Amen))
So here we go:
There is no feeling in the world worse than the feeling of invisibility. That you don’t matter. That you have no purpose and that no one cares about you good or bad. In that grey nebulous space, even negative attention is good attention.
As a gay, white, preachers’ kid growing up in Southwest Detroit in the 1980s/1990’s, trust me there was a lot of negative attention directed at me.
As a human being in THAT space — I had no inherent value.
I never wanted to be the ‘old geezer’ in a conversation talking about “…in my day I had to walk a mile to school in the snow.” I never wanted to be him but I was queer ( closeted but still queer) when it wasn’t cool. When it wasn’t on prime time television bumping bellies with a female co-star. It wasn’t on Star Trek: Discovery hopping galaxies. It wasn’t some middle eastern djinn on American Gods layin’ the pipe down for some poor immigrant down on his luck.
Now everyone is coming out the closet. I mean, gay people are everywhere now and lovin’ life. Don’t get me twisted, I’m not trying to say that the struggle isn’t there anymore, it is. But the world has opened its arms to gay people in a way that would have made a HUGE difference in my life back as a gay youth.
Because back then: I was alone. I was alone and I was scared.
The world around me was mean. It had teeth. And I am not just talking outside of my home, inside of my home was also brutal and unforgiving and chaotically unpredictable.
But in the midst of all that, in the midst of all that hell that I had to learn to navigate for my life — women, and more importantly Black women — saw me and were kind to me.
That’s it. That’s the story. Because for someone so underneath the heels of society, underneath the disdain, underneath the pain, underneath the opinions and dogma of other people and other people’s faiths, kindness was the only thing that kept me from killing myself.
Kindness is what kept me grounded to the earth and prevented me from disappearing into the ether.
Women, especially Black Women, showed me through their kindness that there was something more out there than just what I was experiencing. There was hope and I saw through the lives that they lived, through their struggle, through their innate ability to survive and thrive in this racists ass world, my own inherent worth.
I’m a novelist. I’ve written eight books since 2012, I’ve had one of them, The Haunting of Timber Manor, adapted in a screenplay by my friend Andrea Carlisle and one book, Hallelujah with my co-author, Kim Fielding, that has been recommended for a nomination for a Bram Stoker Award. But my book series, ‘The Memoirs of the Human Wraiths’ is about a super hero black woman who goes about saving people’s lives from paranormal evil.
These books, including Hallelujah, which provided me an opportunity to revisit the character from the first three — Francine Decoudreau Basil-, are, have been, and always will be a love letter to black women for the role that they played in my life.
See, when all the bullshit is set aside. When all the divisions that we create such as gender, race, political affiliations, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. are all wiped away — we are human beings trying our damndest to make it in the world with a little bit of dignity and a little bit of style. And to those black women out there who may feel like I felt, especially due TO the color of their skin and black people’s history in this country, someone sees you. You are not invisible.
As this past election cycle proved conclusively, women — and black women especially — have power that when it moves collectively can change the course of a nation. But even in your independent lives, the history of who you are, the legacy of where you’ve been, the essence of yourself is enough to stay the hand of someone who feels like they days are too long and the nights are too lonely and no one will ever see them.
You were kind to me. That’s it.
That’s all it took.
Thank you.
I’m thriving now and I hope you are too.
