Finding a Family of Boys

In 1981, I was a student in art history at Columbia University. I was 21 years old and I worked to support myself in a variety of jobs. Columbia was then a school of boys. Old oak offices and a million cigarettes. (You could smoke in class.) I didn’t know much at university – not even that it was a university of boys – 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 did not live on campus. I lived with my aunt, uncle and an older cousin adored in Brooklyn. About that time, our master’s degree, inspired by her sister and eldest daughter, planned to move Brooklyn, where I grew up, in Atlanta. A new start. She was then a little over fifty years. She clearly indicated that there were certain rules that I should follow if I was going to stay with my aunt’s family. I had to pay the rent, twenty dollars a week. “No one lives for free,” said our MA.

At the beginning, my aunt opposed the mandate: I was only a schoolgirl. But our MA was categorical; It was either that or I came to live with her and my little brother in Georgia. There were several reasons why my mother set foot. One was dad. As long as she had known him, he had lived without rent with his mother, including my economic intelligence that my mother venerated. “Ms. Williams could throw a handful of pea in a pot and feed an entire army,” said our mastery. Ms. Williams had a husband and two other children – two girls – but for her, Dad has always come first.

Our MA did not want me to be a version of my father, a guy who could like women less and get more because of that – not if she had something to do with that. And she had something to do with that, with everything. It was raised in a society – a West Indian company – which has not raised much the body of women, where all kinds of intimacy was a joke. People were laughing at you to express desire, or, if you were a man, to get a single woman to you or to show affection for your children.

For a long period of his life, Dad had two women to feed him – Mrs. Williams and my mother – but our MA had only one enormous love: the others. She believed in the community and wanted us to belong to it, even dad, despite the fact that he lived in his mother and was born in a family that laughed at his kindness.

Our MA may have had a devalued body, in the world of which she came, but she fought and has retained her right to lower her foot. And, when she put it, the world was different. After setting off, I went to school and went to work. Every week I paid my aunt rent. In my room in her house, I had an office, lots of books and a typewriter. I tried to write. I was going to write.

Life in Columbia was strange. All these boys. I could feel them. Many of them in their bodies, carefree with their perfume. They raised their arms and, the kingdom came, the air was different. Homosexuals were less able to shake. It would be rude, and already life had turned out to be rude, having produced queer bodies in 1981, for example. We, the gay boys, were only about a decade of Stonewall and two decades removed from blackmail or imprisonment for “solicitation”, therefore prudence and madness were in our bones. Sometimes, we have committed great acts of love or rage in private, while the only public intrusion that we allowed ourselves was to throw hard scintillating words in the air, hoping that they did not bounce and would not cut us to the knees.

I had never seen so many rich or rich people in one place before. I was surprised, first, by their hair. For years, our mastery had done it and our, living as a hairdresser. Her customers were all black women. So many words and worries in their hair. Columbia’s boys’ hair was so shiny and well -fed. They had good teeth and healthy bodies and strong nipples that were exposed on sunny days when, seated on the campuses, they withdrew their shirts, and none of them, among the rights, at least, looked ashamed. They had grown up playing tennis or squash in Connecticut, or Rhode Island, or further north. In summer, they went to Cape Town. Their families knew each other and it was an occasional source of pride among them, not bitter jokes or resentment of distancing.

Manhattan had always belonged to my father. He used to take me, me and my little brother, to foreign films, then to eat foreign food. He was deeply carefree about the looking whites wondering what we were doing in a tea room, let’s say, in the Upper East Side. We ate blintzes to Germantown and caught Liv Ullmann in “The emigrants”. Then Dad brought us home to Crown Heights and, for a while, it was like Sweden.

In Columbia, I did not have to claim that I was elsewhere; I was elsewhere. All this – the big buildings, the wave on the wave of stone steps – was like a scene takes place to become. But what to become? Dad had given me Manhattan, and now I took him without him. He had no active role in this New York – in my New York – and perhaps in itself an act of becoming for me.

Everything was so strange, or I wanted it to be. I do not mean queer like camp – a faithful adhesion to the artificial – but queer like my mind, which was interested in everything that was distorted. In this new unknown place, I felt more free to continue the things that excited me, just as I had done with my older sisters when I was a boy, before putting an end to all this – because I transformed myself into a kind of fagot?

Cartoon by Glen Baxter

In my family, I have never answered the question of what you are yourself, because I could not trust anyone with the answer. There is no pede who grew up at East New York or Crown Heights in the nineteen and 1970s who would have trusted the inhabitants of these worlds knowing that he was gay.

In the Antilles community, our MA knew a guy so. He never said he was gay, but he communicated it through his tedious love for 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 others refer to him as an “aunt”. For them, he was not only a queen. He was every queen that they had ever known and despised, was disgusted and amused by, secretly, then spit, rejected and laughed. Because this is how prejudices work: you are something that represents all the bad things for others. Didn’t the ancients describe racism this way? But gay was not a skin color. It was a state of being, a conscience that took your race – or all that life had given you – and made it different. My ability, as a aunt, to love those who considered me a pariah, or a kind of act of nasty novelty, told me that pestes were made of different things – but what things?

It happened the way love happens – while you expect the least, although you wanted everything. I was in Columbia from about a semester when I fell with a small group of guys, most of whom, like me, studied art history. The most interesting of them came from Orange County, California, the son of a single mother who worked as a nurse in Disneyland. He had pale skin that rinsed easily, curly hair styled and beautiful hands – from daddy’s hands, but gestural, a woman like that. He was a brilliant reader of philosophy, and made me want to read more seriously and largely.

Roland Barthes had landed with a boom on the academic planet of Columbia for years before and he was loved by this group of guys. My intelligent friend read her and imitated her aphoristic style – a new way of being a “author”. But, for me, Barthes’ writing was like the best embroidery sewn in the air: only the author could see him. And what did all this speech really mean on “the other”?

One of the reasons why these queens loved Barthes, I think, without entirely understanding structuralism as a discipline, was that it was so elusive to be strange. They were too. Despite Stonewall and other political advances, my new friends were barely out of the closet (and some never left him). They had grown up in certain parts of America which, in 1981, were still ideologically 1956.

We had an intense philological relationship, my blond friend and I.

We passed books from front to back, front and back, and the words in them made the ground more solid under our feet. I continued to try with Barthes because I loved my friend and I found something that I recognized in the emotional language in “Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes” and “A Lover’s Discourse”. In fact, in the old book, it was only a photograph and the line introducing it that made me. The photo, in black and white, showed a young Barthes held in his mother’s arms. He was too big to be transported, but his mother managed him without any sign of complaints or surprises. The four words – “The request for love– Expressed a world: it was me, and all of us, with our mas. What soul does not want to be transported, held, far beyond the age of transport?

In “A Lover’s Discourse”, I was taken by the interpretation of Barthes of “Cry of Love”: “I want to understand myself, to make myself understood, to make myself known, to be embraced; I want someone to take me with him. ” Indeed, I wanted my bookish friend to take me into her mind, to discover stories with me, to rise with her thought and to join me in my nightclub of the community. In this imagined disco, there was a selected crowd, largely queer. The room was small, and honestly, what it looked like was a house. In my community nightclub, the DJ played Chaka Khan, prince, “Einstein on the Beach” by Philip Glass, Jane Olivor singing “Some Enchanted Evening”, the voices of East Harlem declaring, “well on Be Gree”, Dionne Warwick asking us to describe How “ Owie “and the station, Elton, Elton singing so much.

My book boyfriend had a boyfriend. Let’s call it. He had grown up in a block of buildings known as “affordable housing” in the Lower East Side, with his white single mother, a social worker. Did not know his father, who was black. He was the only other person in color in this group of gay boys from Columbia, and, taking into account the cultural solitude that I presumed that he felt and the loyalty of our mastery to spiritual wanders, I felt forced to love him. For a long time, I thought I did it because I thought I should.

We were not attracted to others sexually. From the first one, our bond and our discomfort were family, not romantic. The was interested in the class, not as a way to eradicate your breed but as a means of catapulting itself with your history. In Columbia, he did not want to be his original story; He was all about the myth of arrival. He surpassed the white boys to be a white boy. Suddenly in the manner, he kissed the lack of charity of capitalism: there was no room for only one class, and this class was acquired and brutal in his take for the world – more was more. It was in the era of lacoste shirts, chino chinos and ll bean leather bags and boots. In one way or another, Lacoste’s shirt necklaces of them stood more straight and more rigid than all these other guys.