For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough: Coming of Age, Coming Out, and Coming Home

243 Pages·2014·1.27 MB·English

by  Keith Boykin

Copyright © 2012 by Keith Boykin, Contributors retain the rights to their
individual pieces of work.
Magnus Books
An Imprint of Riverdale Avenue Books
5676 Riverside Drive, Suite 101
Riverdale, NY 10471
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
First Magnus Books edition 2012
Cover by: Linda Kosarin
ISBN: 978-1-936833-97-9
www.riverdaleavebooks.com
Submission Review Editors
La Marr Jurelle Bruce
Clay Cane
Mark Corece
Frank Roberts
Contents
Introduction
GROWING PAINS
Back to School - Craig Washington
Guys and Dolls - Jarrett Neal
Pop Quiz - Kevin E. Taylor
Bathtubs and Hot Water - Shaun Lockhart
Strange Fruit - Antonio Brown
THE FAMILY THAT PREYS
Teaspoons of December Alabama - Rodney Terich Leonard
A House is Not a Home - Rob Smith
Mother to Son - Chaz Barracks
I'M COMING OUT!
Pride - James Earl Hardy
Age of Consent - Alphonso Morgan
The Luckiest Gay Son in the World - David Bridgeforth
When I Dare to Be Powerful - Keith Boykin
FOR COLORED BOYS
To Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide - Hassan Beyah
Mariconcito - Emanuel Xavier
Chicago - Phill Branch
Better Days - Jamal Brown
One Day a DJ Saved My Life - Jonathan Kidd
WHEN THE RAINBOW IS NOT ENOUGH
No Asians, Blacks, Fats, or Femmes - Indie Harper
Alone, Outside - G. Winston James
When the Strong Grow Weak - Kenyon Farrow
FAITH UNDER FIRE
The Holy Redeemer - Victor Yates
Coventry, Christ, and Coming of Age - Topher Campbell
Religious Zombies - Clay Cane
Preacher's Kid - Nathan Hale Williams
LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD
I Still Think of You - Jason Haas
Bad Romance - Darian Aaron
Afraid of My Own Reflection - Antron Reshaud Olukayode
Just the Two of Us - Curtis Pate III
Hey, You - Erick Johnson
My Night with the Sun - Mark Corece
Love Your Truth - B. Scott
BOYS LIKE GIRLS
The Night Diana Died - Daren J. Fleming
Many Rivers to Cross - André St. Clair Thompson
Becoming Jessica Wild - José David Sierra
IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH
Umm... Okay - Tim'm T. West
Thank You, CNN - David Malebranche
The Test - Charles Stephens
The Voice - Ron Simmons
It's Only Love that Gets You Through - Robert E. Penn
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
We Cannot Forget - Victor Yates
Poetry of the Flesh - Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano
Casualties of War - L. Michael Gipson
How Do You Start a Revolution? - Keith Boykin
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
In the fall of 2010, eighteen-year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi
was secretly videotaped by his roommate during an intimate encounter with
another man. On September 22, Clementi drove to the George Washington
Bridge, got out of his car, and leapt to his death.
On the same day, in a different part of the country, lawyers for a young black
man named Jamal Parris walked into the DeKalb County Courthouse in Georgia
and filed a lawsuit against Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary
Baptist Church, accusing the pastor of using his influence to coerce Parris into a
sexual relationship.
These two unrelated incidents revealed dramatic differences in the way our
society responds to race and sexuality. The killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon
Martin in February 2012 and the death of a Florida A&M drama major in
November 2011 confirm this trend.
Meanwhile, the abuse charges by Jamal Parris and several other young black
men were met with attacks and criticism by members of Long’s church and other
religious supporters who questioned the credibility of the accusers. Despite the
media attention to the story in Atlanta, there was no real organized effort to
protect young black men from harm or sexual abuse, no YouTube video
campaign, and no support mechanisms put in place to provide counseling and
assistance for others.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the news that our
society has a tendency to dismiss the grievous experiences of young men of
color. A tragic shooting on a suburban campus, for example, provokes a sense of
shock and outrage while similar tragedies at inner city schools often go ignored.
Perhaps the best example may be the way in which society and the media dealt
with several other youth suicides in the same time period as Clementi’s death.
In April 2009, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an eleven-year-old black student
in Massachusetts, hanged himself in his bedroom. Carl was a young football
player and Boy Scout who had endured months of harassment and anti-gay
bullying. He was just one week shy of his twelfth birthday when he committed
suicide.
In the same month, another eleven-year-old, Jaheem Herrera of Atlanta, took
his own life after suffering constant anti-gay bullying at his DeKalb County
school. He too was African American.
Then, in September 2010, the same month in which Tyler Clementi killed
himself, nineteen-year-old Raymond Chase, a black openly gay college student
studying culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode
Island, committed suicide by hanging himself in his dorm room.
In the following month, a twenty-six-year-old black gay youth activist named
Joseph Jefferson took his own life. Joseph had worked with HIV/AIDS charities
and helped to promote black LGBT events. “I could not bear the burden of living
as a gay man of color in a world grown cold and hateful towards those of us who
live and love differently than the so-called ‘social mainstream,’” he wrote on his
Facebook page the day he killed himself.
Sadly, these suicides did not generate much attention in the mainstream
media or action in the larger community.
I was covering the 2010-midterm elections for CNBC when I first heard
about Tyler Clementi and Raymond Chase and the other suicides. As I drove
across the George Washington Bridge one night from Manhattan to the CNBC
World Headquarters in New Jersey, I looked down over the bridge and imagined
what it must have felt like to jump 212 feet into the raging Hudson River below.
I’ve known friends who have committed or considered suicide, but I had never
contemplated it for myself.
That’s when I decided to put together this book. Despite the well-intentioned
messaging in response to Clementi’s death, life doesn’t always “get better”
anytime soon, especially for people of color who are disproportionately affected
by many challenging socioeconomic conditions.
When it came time to start this project, the title would prove obvious. In
1974, playwright Ntozake Shange published her famous choreopoem, For
Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf, which
later became the subject of a popular film in 2010. As young boys of color were
literally committing suicide in the same year when the movie was released, it
underscored that the LGBT community’s promise of the rainbow was clearly not
enough for many to sustain themselves.
To put together this book, I wondered what it would take for a young man to
get to the point where he felt he had nothing left to live for. I didn’t have to
wonder very long. A few days after we put out the call for submissions, I
planned to ask a young friend to serve as an editor of the book. David, an Ivy
League-educated black gay man, had worked with me on several projects in the
past and had once served as my personal assistant as well. But before I could
contact him with my request, I received a disturbing phone call from a mutual
friend. I discovered that David had taken his own life.
The police found a suicide note written on an envelope in David’s car. It
simply said that he wanted to be cremated and buried next to his mother. He
never explained what drove him to kill himself, but for some reason I always
knew that he, like so many others, didn’t completely fit in with the rest of the
crowd.
That experience reminded me that men of color—especially gay men of
color—must speak out and share our stories of how we have faced obstacles in
our own lives. Many of us have endured and sometimes overcome experiences
with racism, homophobia, abuse, molestation, violence, and disease. We’ve
struggled with religion, self-acceptance, gender identity, love, relationships, and
intimacy, and we’ve sometimes internalized the prejudices and biases directed
against us.
Our stories are rarely told, except in sensationalistic tones that demonize us
as predators and villains. And, so, we must tell our own stories in a way that
represents us as full human beings.
I was fortunate to come out into a world where those stories were just
starting to be told. While I was a student at Harvard in 1991, I came across a
book called Brother To Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, edited by
Essex Hemphill. I went to see Hemphill at a book reading event at nearby MIT,
and his book quickly became a bible for me. But Hemphill, like many of the
young black authors in his anthology, died of AIDS-related complications within
a few years. That’s why so much of our history has disappeared. Back then there
was no real treatment for AIDS.
There were also no openly gay TV anchors like Don Lemon or comedians
like Wanda Sykes, and E. Lynn Harris was just getting started as a novelist. And
the idea of gay marriage was unthinkable even to gay people. There was no
Internet, no hookup websites and no cell phone apps to connect you to the
closest date. No one even had a cell phone back then.
In the decades since Brother to Brother was published, we’ve elected our
first black president, appointed the first Latina to the Supreme Court, repealed
the ban on gays in the military, and developed life-saving treatments for people
living with HIV/AIDS. At the same time, however, independent community
bookstores have vanished, magazines and publications have gone out of
business, and neighborhoods that once serviced the needs of minority
communities have slowly disappeared.
The world is changing rapidly, and so too is our literature. The diversity of
this book reflects some of those changes. We received hundreds of submissions
for this anthology, and many outstanding pieces could not be included. But this
collection includes writers who are African American, Latino, Asian American,
British, and Jamaican. Their ages range from their early twenties to their sixties,