Finding a Family of Boys
In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs. Columbia was an all-boys school then. Old oak desks and a million cigarettes. (You could smoke in class.) I didn’t know much about the university—not even that it was an all-boys university—until I got there. It was a new world for me. I had lived most of my life until then in a family of girls. Now there was a family of boys.
I didn’t live on campus. I lived with my aunt, my uncle, and an adored older female cousin in Brooklyn. At around that time, Our Ma, inspired by her sister and eldest daughter, was planning on moving from Brooklyn, where I grew up, to Atlanta. A new start. She was just over fifty then. She made it clear that there were certain rules I had to follow if I was going to stay with my aunt’s family. I had to pay rent, twenty dollars a week. “Nobody lives for free,” Our Ma said.
At first, my aunt objected to the mandate: I was just a schoolkid. But Our Ma was adamant; it was either that or I would come and live with her and my little brother in Georgia. There were several reasons that my mother put her foot down. One was Daddy. As long as she’d known him, he’d lived rent-free with his mother, whose economic smarts my mother revered. “Mrs. Williams could throw a handful of peas in a pot and feed a whole army,” Our Ma said. Mrs. Williams had a husband and two other children—two girls—but, for her, Daddy always came first.
Our Ma did not want me to be some version of my father, a guy who could love women less and get more from them because of that—not if she had anything to do with it. And she did have something to do with it, with everything. She was raised in a society—a West Indian society—that did not put much of a premium on women’s bodies, where any kind of intimacy was a joke. People made fun of you for expressing longing, or, if you were a man, for being involved with just one woman, or for showing affection to your children.
For a long stretch of his life, Daddy had two women to nurture him—Mrs. Williams and my mother—but Our Ma had only one enormous love: others. She believed in community, and wanted us all to belong to it, even Daddy, despite the fact that he was living at his mother’s house and had been born into a family that laughed at her goodness.
Our Ma may have had a devalued body, in the world she came from, but she fought for and retained her right to put her foot down. And, when she put it down, the world was different. After she put her foot down, I went to school and went to work. Every week I paid my aunt rent. In my room in her house, I had a desk, piles of books, and a typewriter. I tried to write. I was going to write.
Life at Columbia was strange. All those boys. I could smell them. So many of them in their bodies, careless with their scent. They lifted their arms up and, kingdom come, the air was different. The gay ones were less apt to reek. That would be impolite, and already life had proved to be impolite, having produced queer bodies in 1981, for instance. We gay boys were only a decade or so removed from Stonewall and two decades removed from being blackmailed or jailed for “solicitation,” so caution and madness were in our bones. Sometimes we committed great acts of love or rage in private, while the only public trespass we allowed ourselves was to throw glittering hard words into the air, hoping they would not rebound and chop us off at the knees.
I had never seen so many rich, or rich to me, people in one place before. I was amazed, first, by their hair. For years, Our Ma had made her, and our, living as a hairdresser. Her clients were all Black women. So many words and worries in their hair. The Columbia boys’ hair was so lustrous and well nourished. They had good teeth and healthy bodies and strong nipples that were on display on sunny days when, sitting on the campus steps, they removed their shirts, and not one of them, among the straight ones, at least, looked ashamed. They’d grown up playing tennis or squash in Connecticut, or Rhode Island, or farther north. In the summer, they went to the Cape. Their families knew one another and this was a source of casual pride among them, not of bitter jokes or distancing resentments.
Manhattan had always belonged to my father. He used to take me and my little brother to foreign movies and then to eat foreign food. He was deeply unconcerned about the staring white people wondering what we were doing in a tearoom, say, on the Upper East Side. We ate blintzes in Germantown, and caught Liv Ullmann in “The Emigrants.” Then Daddy took us home to Crown Heights, and, for a while, it felt like Sweden.
At Columbia, I didn’t have to pretend that I was somewhere else; I was somewhere else. All of it—the grand buildings, the wave upon wave of stone steps—was like a stage set for becoming. But becoming what? Daddy had given me Manhattan, and now I took to it without him. He had no active role in this New York—in my New York—and perhaps that in itself was an act of becoming for me.
Everything was so queer, or I wanted it to be. I don’t mean queer like camp—a loyal adherence to the artificial—but queer like my mind, which was interested in all that was misshapen. In this new, unfamiliar place, I felt freer to go on about the things that excited me, just as I had with my older sisters when I was a boy, before they put an end to all that—because what was I turning into, some kind of faggot?
In my family, I never answered the what-are-you-some-kind-of-faggot question, because I couldn’t trust anyone with the answer. There’s not a fag who grew up in East New York or Crown Heights in the nineteen-sixties and seventies who would have trusted the inhabitants of those worlds with the knowledge that he was gay.
In the West Indian community, Our Ma knew one sort-of-out guy. He never said that he was gay, but he communicated it through his fastidious love of women and the fact that he lived in Manhattan. He loved my mother—they were distant cousins, I think—and when he came to visit I heard family members, neighbors, and the like refer to him as an “auntie man.” To them, he wasn’t just a queen. He was every queen they had ever known and despised, been disgusted and amused by, secretly had and then spat upon, dismissed and jeered at. Because that’s how prejudice works: you are one thing that represents all bad things to others. Didn’t the elders describe racism that way? But gay was not a skin color. It was a state of being, a consciousness that took your race—or anything else that life had given you—and made it different. My ability, as an auntie man, to love those who considered me a pariah, or some kind of wicked novelty act, told me that fags were made of different stuff—but what stuff?
It happened the way love happens—while you’re least expecting it though wanting everything. I had been at Columbia for a semester or so when I fell in with a small group of guys, most of whom, like me, were studying art history. The most interesting of them was from Orange County, California, the son of a single mother who worked as a nurse at Disneyland. He had pale skin that flushed easily, curly dark-blond hair, and beautiful hands—thick Daddy hands, but gestural, femme like that. He was a brilliant reader of philosophy, and made me want to read more seriously and widely.
Roland Barthes had landed with a boom on Columbia’s academic planet years before and he was beloved by that group of guys. My smart friend read him and imitated his aphoristic style—a new way of being an “author.” But, for me, Barthes’s writing was like the finest embroidery stitched in the air: only the author could see it. And what did all this talk about the “other” actually mean?
One reason those queens loved Barthes, I think, without entirely understanding structuralism as a discipline, was that he was so elusive about being queer. They were, too. Despite Stonewall and other political advances, my new friends were barely out of the closet (and some never left it). They had grown up in parts of America that, in 1981, were still ideologically 1956.
We had an intense philological relationship, my blond friend and I. I remember how delicately he handled the paperback copy of Toni Morrison’s “Sula” I lent him, and how interested he was to hear about my father and how he had been spoiled by his mother, just as Milkman Dead had in Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.”
We passed books back and forth, back and forth, and the words in them made the ground more solid beneath our feet. I kept trying with Barthes because I loved my friend and found something I recognized in the emotional language in “Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes” and “A Lover’s Discourse.” Actually, in the former book, it was really just a photograph and the line introducing it that got me. The picture, black-and-white, showed a young Barthes being held in his mother’s arms. He was too big to be carried, but his mother managed him with no sign of complaint or surprise. The four words—“The demand for love”—expressed a world: this was me, and all of us, with Our Mas. What soul doesn’t want to be carried, held, well past the carrying age?
In “A Lover’s Discourse,” I was taken by Barthes’s interpretation of the “cry of love”: “I want to understand myself, to make myself understood, make myself known, be embraced; I want someone to take me with him.” Indeed, I wanted my bookish friend to take me into his mind, to discover stories with me, to elevate me with his thought, and to join me in my disco of community. In that imagined disco, there was a select crowd, largely queer. The hall was small, and honestly what it looked like was a home. At my disco of community, the d.j. played Chaka Khan, Prince, Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach,” Jane Olivor singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” the Voices of East Harlem declaring, “Right On Be Free,” Dionne Warwick asking us to take a “Message to Michael,” Bowie, of course, singing “Station to Station,” Labelle describing how ‘‘Going Down Makes Me Shiver,” and Elton, Elton singing so many things. All these songs were, of course, one song—a song of wishing—and they filled the room so mightily it was as if God were stepping tall around our dance hall. God could be your own queer self, too, and you could even do the Latin hustle with Her, surrounded by all the other folks and things you loved that made you feel panic-stricken because wasn’t love a panic?
My book buddy had a boyfriend. Let’s call him LES. He had grown up in a block of buildings known as “affordable housing” on the Lower East Side, with his white single mother, a social worker. LES did not know his father, who was Black. He was the only other person of color in that group of gay boys at Columbia, and, given the cultural loneliness I presumed he felt and Our Ma’s fidelity to spiritual strays, I felt obliged to love him. For a long time I thought I did because I thought I should.
We were not attracted to each other sexually. From the first, our connection and uneasiness were familial, not romantic. LES was interested in class, not as a way of eradicating his race but as a way of catapulting himself out of his background. At Columbia, he wanted not to be his origin story; he was all about the arrival myth. He outdid the white boys at being a white boy. Brusque in manner, he embraced capitalism’s lack of charity: there was room for only one class, and that class was acquisitive and brutal in its grab for the world—more was more. This was in the era of Lacoste shirts, chinos, and L. L. Bean leather bags and boots. Somehow, LES’s Lacoste shirt collars stood up straighter and stiffer than any of those other guys’.
