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michelletheemann-blog · 5 years ago

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The Irony

There is no space more aptly named than the sanctuary in a black church. It is a meeting space, a room of creation and inspiration, a refuge from a country that often refuses to acknowledge your humanity.

At my church, our pastor can sing very, very well, and he can conjure the holy spirit at the drop of a hat in that truly Southern Baptist way. As a kid, I loved to look at the photo of Jesus—loose black curls, milk chocolate skin, and a short wooly beard—hanging crooked in the stairwell. My best friend from youth choir’s granny always sat in the same seat crowned with a new hat. With fondness, I used to look around at the giants, black kings and queens, clothed in their finest royal Sunday garb and always with a smile and hug to give to Tony and Colette’s baby girl. After service, I would lollygag between the pews, poorly helping my dad, the head usher, pick up any forgotten bulletins and whine about going to McDonald’s when I knew good and well I ain’t have no McDonald’s money. On special Sunday’s the smell of fried chicken and greens would waft up from the basement into the sanctuary, flirting with my nose, and when my friends and I would rush down the stairs to be the first in line we were chastised by Mrs. Somebody for running only to have an Auntie save us with a definitive, “let the babies eat, girl.”

This is a village that raises many a child, myself included, and reminds us children that it is our duty to honor those that have come before and work hard to make things better in the future. I grew up in love with everything church and it has always been my home and foundation, my sanctuary. So, one day in college when I finally stopped pushing down those dark, omnipresent feelings and said “I’m gay” out loud I knew I was going to have a few problems.

Twenty or so years ago my parents carefully chose a church, a village, to balance the experiences that my younger sister and I would have in the suburban life they hesitantly birthed us into. Yes, they wanted us to know God for ourselves and for us to have a strong sense of religion but they also wanted to make sure their kids would have a taste of the blackness they were raised on. They knew that our upper-middle-class, white education wouldn’t teach us about Henrietta Lacks or Madam CJ Walker and the name Fannie Lou Hamer wasn’t going to make it into our lessons about black history. Instead, my understanding of blackness and black excellence came from the Vacation Bible School talks, Sunday School Black History Month celebrations, and the pulpit. I was to have examples of all sorts of black people in my church and role models for me to look up to, a village to raise me. Though in the suburbs schools may have been better and the crime rates low, my parents made sure I knew that these white people were never supposed to be my everything because them white folks is crazy and my church, my people, are my real foundation in this world.

But herein lies the problem. “The fact that this particular child had been born when and where he was born had dictated certain expectations” (“Introduction”, xvi). For most of my life, these invisible expectations felt like simple—unachievable—goals and the drive to meet them was fueled by an incessant desire for perfection and affirmation. Follow your parents’ footsteps. Be successful. Achieve even more than your parents and your grandparents, they have worked so hard. Help your people prosper. You’re going to make us all so proud. As a girl, I remember that one lady who always dressed a little different, the woman with the short-cut who was whispered about at book clubs and post-church brunches. She was raised here too and she very quickly hauled ass out of the church, occasionally slipping into the back row on holidays. Yes, there was an expectation for her, an expectation for people like that, which I did not know how to articulate, but I knew that she was doing something wrong. “The child does not really know what these expectations are—does not know how real they are—until he begins to fail, challenge, or defeat them” (“Introduction”, xvi). I had a sense of these expectations and still one day I came home and broke my mother’s heart. Apparently, I had been keeping up my farce a little too well, both for hers and my own sake. “Since when??? How can you want this for yourself???” she pleaded. I am sorry, Mom, but when you imported boys from church for me to take to homecoming dances (the black boys at white schools “don’t go for black girls”, but that is another essay) I was looking over their shoulders at Grace, the only openly black lesbian at my school who, paradoxically, wanted nothing to do with me.

Anyway, there is indeed a difference for when black people are gay than for white people. It is not that black people are more homophobic nor do I believe that the black struggle can be compared to the white, queer struggle. The difference is that when a young black person is gay there is something more at stake: the possibility of losing the only community that accepts you. As a black geek articulated, “Blackness can be a rigid, didactic identity, with people stepping out of line facing ridicule and admonishment or, worse, condemnation. Those who reject the perceived identity of Blackness can be seen as rejecting the whole of black worth itself” (Johnson, 15).

Personally, I gained my entire sense of self, associated all my blackness with an organization that had very specific rules for what it meant to be black. The politics of respectability once disguised as a coat of armor and nobility now choked me like a straitjacket, locked into an idea of who I was supposed to be one day: a successful career woman, a role model in my church just as my parents had been, and, most importantly, a wife to a strong black man. I have always been gay but it is only recently that I have begun to accept and love myself for being gay, for changing a small yet fundamental part of that vision. Still, for a long while, I thought that I had betrayed my people and felt the need to hide that which would make me a stranger in my own village. I would return to the sanctuary and look upon the kings and queens with fear and sadness as “…they move[d] with an authority which I shall never have” (“Stranger”, 83). Instead, I would avoid going to church, stay at school for breaks, drop my girlfriend’s hand every time anyone who knew my family walked by. When I did go to church I felt like everyone could see all the lies pulsing just beneath my skin. My sanctuary became a jungle in which I did not know where to hide and where the possibility of being eaten alive felt invisibly imminent.

Then one day I met Audre Lorde. And Bayard Rustin. I learned that there is quite a bit more to Angela Davis’ story than just having a sick afro. Suddenly I had a new village and I had a reason to hope. After a lot of self-reflection, a very simple yet revolutionary idea crossed my mind. I realized, really considered for the first time, that I could be just as gay as I am black. I learned that the person whose love is most important in my life is that which I have for myself. “Coming out to yourself and to others, and then staying out as you walk out the door brings strength in its action,” and, yes, I could feel my strength beginning to build (Johnson, 17). At times the old thinking that lurks on the fringes of my memory, that which is embedded in my reflexes, begins to creep up and make me doubt myself and my wholeness once again, but now more than ever I refuse to let it control or define me. One day far from now my soul will look back and wonder how I got over.

Works Cited Baldwin, James. "Introduction: The Price of the Ticket." The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non Fiction. New York:St. Martin's/Marek, 1985. Print.

Baldwin, James. "Stranger in the Village" The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction. New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1985. Print.

Walker, Rebecca and Mat Johnson, “The Geek” Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness. Berkeley, Soft Skull Press, 2012. Print.

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