Land Without Pride

This is my bookend to pride month.

It’s Thanksgiving eve, and I’m in South Louisiana, in the apartment where my best friend Chris lives. I’m socializing with the three “straight” boys he’s currently fucking, none of which are aware that the others are also on the receiving end of his cock. Two of the boys are 19, the third is 28, married, with a two-year-old child. The oldest is sitting next to me while his wife is outside smoking a cigarette. This is an odd situation, I think to myself, but somehow a fitting one for my friend, a 6’4, gregarious gay black male with the charm of a dictator and the resilience of a freedom fighter, who needs both skills to get laid and keep his sanity in an environment where there are more young men in the closet than out of it.

Sex with these guys happens in the dark. Any show of affection is impossible, which makes the situation I’m currently in possible. I hit it off with the married guy, and we talk about cooking (he’s a chef), eastern religions, and modern art. He’s bright and curious in a place where neither of these traits are common, and there’s an instant kinship between us. Because of lies we can’t talk about the vast space between us where gay men live their lives, but our good will allows us to connect despite the distance. His wife comes back into the room and we talk more. I mention I write a blog with some friends, and I pull out a TNG card and hand it over. They are open, but I immediately sense the tension in his wife, and she pulls out a picture of her little girl and shows it to me, trying to prove a point. I tell her she has a beautiful daughter, but there’s nothing I can say that will allay her misdirected insecurity about the fact that I’m getting on fabulously with her husband. She walks outside to smoke another cigarette, and her husband deflates into the couch. I can hear the hiss of air as his chest falls, and his face drops. Unprovoked, he stares straight ahead into the wall and tells me about the struggle to keep his relationship afloat, and how much he loves his daughter, implying that the two are counterweights. He wants to unload his burdens right there on the couch so I can help him carry them, but it's neither the time nor the place. I want to reach out to him and take him to a place where we can talk for hours—explain to him a different world that he can’t see from his current vantage point. Instead, he and wife leave so he can start cooking and preparing late into the night for tomorrow’s thanksgiving family feast, and because they want to check on their baby. As they leave, he seems to sag, and I feel empty as I watch him go.

I bar hop a sleepy Jefferson Street in downtown Lafayette with Chris and his two oblivious young white boys—scrawny and cute as possible—who follow Chris like a messiah. They’re both blue-collar kids who act prototypically straight, yet follow wordlessly as Chris and I visit two different gay bars. The first bar we visit is familiar from my college days. The crowd is similar to what I left behind so many years before—fat drag queens crippled from alcohol and drugs, a hustler missing a front tooth, several stool jockeys drinking their dinner, and an assortment of lisping and prancing young queens choking on the gay flag in an attempt to consume an identity and a place to belong, filling a space left vacant by familial rejection and deferred dreams. I begin to talk about gay life in DC, and while they ask few questions, they hang on every word, intently listening to one who escaped, who informs them of a foreign world where men can be free with their love and live their lives openly. I struggle at times, thinking of topics to talk about, but I force myself, mostly focusing on the stark comparisons between the two worlds. I keep talking, because for those who aren’t free enough to ask questions, it’s the most I can do. Chris tells me later, in a moment of anguish, that one of the boys, a shy, soft spoken young man who tells me that he’s never traveled beyond Louisiana’s border, was gang raped years earlier, and currently struggles with intimacy and who knows how many other issues. Chris’s frustration is palpable. I learn that he’s trying to help him, and may even love him, but he’s getting nowhere. Later, while playing pool, I look at this boy and consider the options of what I can say to him that may be of benefit. He’s wearing a heavy-duty work shirt with his name embroidered in script over his left breast pocket, the practical garb of men for whom stains are an inveterate and common consequence of daily life here, its dark blue color necessary for hiding what can’t be made clean. My entire family has worn shirts just like these. I look at him, so young and unsure. So fucked. It’s all too much to overcome, even with Chris as a life preserver. I know I can’t say anything. He needs to figure this out for himself.

I lose the group for a short while, and I end up at the other gay bar—an empty shell occupied by bad house music and a dozen people, two of which were the stars of the most significant and formative romantic relationships of my life before moving to DC. I walk through the front door and back out again in 10 minutes, saying hello to both briefly, minutes apart in a random twilight zone moment—significant, inspiring, and creepy—like walking through the mist of an empty graveyard at midnight and meeting the smiling ghost of heartaches past, shaking its cold hand, and continuing on my way. Once outside I turn to walk to another bar, and I’m immediately joined by a young black man with the build of a middle linebacker and a mouth full of shiny pennies. His name is “Shanoe,” and his accent is a thick mix of creole and rural blackspeak. He engages me in conversation, asking me where I went to high school. I tell him but I leave out the part about attending only a few months before dropping out and opting for home schooling due to the type of mental breakdown known too well by small town southern closet cases born in a bubble of country-fried religious fanaticism. Shanoe claims he went to the same school and that he’s seen me before, but I know he hasn’t. Our conversation lasts less than a minute before I duck into a straight bar to escape. He asks me for my phone number so we can “hang out” the following night, and in a moment of inebriated judgment, I give it to him with the immediate intention of ignoring his calls. Despite the empty street, at the door he drops eye contact and furtively asks me to call his cell so he doesn’t need to take the phone from his pocket. I do so. He hears his phone ring, says “ok got it,” and returns quickly to the shadows of the street—successfully concluding the clandestine affair.

South Louisiana is notorious for its debauchery and spirit of “Laissez les bon temps rouler,” but less press is given to the dark side of this mindset—what it hides, and what it doesn’t want to know. Excess doesn’t take a holiday. It stays here when the tourists go home. When I return to the bayou my typically healthful lifestyle of monitored diet and physical fitness reverts to the requirements of Rome, often to the detriment of sound judgment. I drive home in my parent’s Ford F-150 down a dark two-lane country road on a moonless night, without benefit of civilization’s finer progresses, such as streetlights, road shoulders, or maintained lane markers. I’m freshly sober from a night of varied excess that I wouldn’t replicate in DC if later behind the wheel of an America-sized monster truck, yet in a place where drunks are more common than seatbelts, I feel equilibrium with my environment, despite the out of body experience of reconnecting to the mores of life here.

The side roads are narrow and the light poor, so I miss my turn. I’m driving into deep nothingness looking for a place to backtrack when I see an upward shaft of light pierce the darkness from the ditch on my left, and I reflexively slam on the brakes at the recognition of a glass scattered roadway. I step down from the cab of the truck and take several steps forward into the heavy smell of a gasoline lacquered roadway glistening in my headlights. There’s a tow-truck completely upside down in a deep ditch, the beam of it’s right headlight peeking above the road at a 45 degree angle—joining my headlights to provide the only light amidst the darkness. I see that the truck isn’t towing anything, and I’m relieved. I reach into my leather jacket for my cell phone, but I can’t find it among the pockets. I look around in the cab—nothing. I rummage through the toolbox in the back of the truck for a flashlight—nothing. My idling engine is the only sound on the landscape, and I welcome it’s meditative hum as I crunch glass under my cowboy boots and consider the options. Minimal light, no traffic, no phone, lost in the middle of nowhere, a flipped truck possibly containing people who are trapped or dead, gasoline and glass everywhere, on an evening where enough Jack Daniels has passed through my mouth to legally be considered an act of oral sex. I surmise that getting back in the truck and driving away is probably the smart option.

I’m in the ditch, ankle deep in mud on the far side of the truck. The headlights are of little use at this angle. I struggle to make my way in the dark, but I reach the passenger side door without incident. I can’t open it, so I stoop low to peer inside the cab and immediately see a shoe lying on the inside roof by the door. As I brace myself for what I might find inside, my cell beeps. I locate it in an inner jacket pocket and find a text message from Shanoe:

“Hey bruh, whut u doin”

I kneel and look inside the cab. No one inside. Relieved, I pull myself up from the muck and hear the sound of a car hitting its breaks from the opposite direction of my truck. My phone beeps again.

“U fine as hell”

I make my way up the steep side of the ditch and find a woman in her late 20s walking toward me through the hi-beams of my truck. She’s wearing a skin tight pink cashmere jogging suit, holding a red Dixie cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In a flat Cajun accent she asks me what happened and I tell her that I just arrived and that the cab is empty, adding that the cigarette probably isn’t a good idea. I tell her that the driver may have been thrown from the car, and she goes back to her vehicle to call the police and then scan the ditch on the opposite side of the road for a body, while I do the same on the crash side. More messages arrive from Shanoe:

“What u doin”

“I wan 2 hang witchu”

“You wan 2 be friend wit Shanoe?”

A large sugarcane transport truck pulls up behind my truck, boxing me in. Five minutes of searching pass, and the steel magnolia walks over and slurs that the police are on their way and mentions that some guy tried to flag her down about a half-mile up the road. She asks me, without a twinkle of reflection in her wide brown eyes, “Do you think that might be the driver?” I look at her blankly.

“Yeah. Probably.”

A police car and an ambulance light up the road behind her. “Go back to your car,” I tell her. “I’ll talk to the cops, since you’ve had a few drinks.” She smiles and laughs, casually, as if I've just informed her that jaywalking is a crime and that frogs have waterproof assholes. “ok darlin’….you’re not from around here, are you?” I smile and tell her that I ran away for a while, and she moves quickly back to her car leaving a trail of pink and a genteel reminder that for reasons older than me yet understood, in this place, the self-medicated people are the normal ones. My phone beeps.

“Why u don wan talk to Shanoe?”

Driving home, I softly mouth a familiar phrase once, entering it into my otherwise empty thoughts like a zen koan:



Three days later, I’m back in DC having a cocktail with my boyfriend at a local gay bar, and I receive my 16th text message from Shanoe. I finally respond to him, saying “I’m back in DC now, sorry,” thinking 1,037 miles is distant enough to dissuade his advances.

I’m wrong. Including the following three weeks, I receive 46 texts and three voicemail messages, the overwhelming majority being short requests for information relating to my health and activities. At the end of the third week I’m walking home from a happy hour when my curiosity compels me to respond to his latest message. I text back, inquiring of his unflappable persistence in the face of negligible affirmation. Over the course of two dozen text messages I soon learn that Shanoe is only 20 years old, a virgin, closeted, and in need of a friend. He’s never heard of “OUT” magazine, and he doesn’t know a single fully out and proud gay person. He tells me that he’s recently met a clique of young gay black men in his area, but says he can’t talk to them in any meaningful way. He’s also too afraid to enter a gay bar. At one point in our mediated conversation I physically feel his lonely cry of frustration. He tells me that it isn’t sex he’s interested in, and begs me to be a friend. To talk. To listen. My gut tells me I can’t be his lifeline, that he needs more help than I can provide. I’m torn and slightly ashamed, but the best I can do is tell him to save some cash and get out, and do it as soon as possible. It’s the best advice I can give him. I haven’t heard from him since.

As of this writing, Pride month has concluded. I’ve followed the various posts and subsequent conversations submitted regarding the many opinions on what pride is, what it has become, and what it should be. I’m still not sure how I should feel about parades, street fairs, or even how many of my people find comfort and direction in a narrowly defined, pre-packaged culture and identity. All I know for sure is that I’ve run hard and strong down a lot of bad road, taking me far from the world that Shanoe and my friend Chris’ fuck buddies live in—a place of self-hatred, self-medication, hopelessness and self-destruction. I know that I kept on running through my first several years in DC, realizing that the fallout from living more years in mud than in ether takes time to heal, and that the world I left still manifests in the one I found in the culture our pioneers created after they circled the wagons around urban areas. I know that I fought back all the demons and worked my way through the gay minefields with the aid of a DC bubble of tolerance and progressive thought that sticks out in a world that for the most part, doesn’t match it. I know that I have an amazing boyfriend who has fought similar battles—and loves me and allows me to wake each morning feeling like the luckiest guy in DC, a few good friends who are brilliant and respect themselves and allow me to reflect the best in my own nature, and an environment of opportunities and social identities not limited by my sexual preference. I know that I live in a place where my sexuality usually doesn’t matter. I also know that young men and women outside gay meccas deserve the benefit of my comfort and the “new gay” sensibility that is possible when given the freedom to live, think, and manifest in a way of their choosing.

Everything I know is through experience, and its sum total informs me that debates about celebrations—be they parades, fairs, or dance parties—and the way they manifest, don’t amount to much in terms of pride. Love them, hate them, ignore them, piss on them. The only thing that matters is pride itself, and finding enough of it in yourself to carry you to that moment when you decide you deserve better, pack your bags, and get the fuck out and go to the city.