Revisiting I: An essay on Examining Maleness, Sexuality, and Black Masculinity
In part of my sheltered upbringing, most of my life, I had never thought about myself being a man, why I was a man, why it mattered that I am a man, and what it meant to be a man.
There’d be times where, I, as a child growing into a teenager, I hated emotions, hated my emotions. I hated feeling. I hated myself for feeling feelings, immediately demarcating these feelings as inherently weak and made this my justification for ritualistic self-deprecation and victimization. I just acted as I did, I guess. I’m twenty-five now and I’m still putting the pieces together. Years ago, I’ve had little curiosities here and there, and fears that I could be sexually attracted to men. I remember the first time I talked to my aunt about this. I was between about fourteen to seventeen-ish years old. She was accepting of it as if I were to be, as was my other aunt. My mother at one point had a gay friend over her house a few times. I think it was, (in Chester, we were living in one of those condominiums at the time?) I remember being passive-aggressively homophobic toward him, to the extent that I refused to sit at the same dinner table as him. Over the years, I left it behind me.
But for some time now, I’ve had fleeting thoughts about what it means to just “be a man.” Because as a Black male, collectively we do not think about Black maleness, and because we do not think about Black maleness, we subserviently accept the colloquially patriarchal phrase, “be a man”, whether we are told this phrase by our Black mothers, Black fathers, and anyone else who uncritically follows this toxic adage. We are in this confined box, hurting ourselves without our knowing it. Often do I muse on my Black existence, but I haven’t even thought, spoke, or acted on my sexuality, my maleness, my gender, except for what I’ve been socialized to believe about it.
Although I’ve been in and out of receiving help because I was either unemployed, or because my mother was paying for the therapy and she could no longer afford it, the therapists I’ve spoken to helped me acknowledge that I haven’t allowed myself the patience, the energy, the time, to even allow myself to feel that I was feeling pain, that I was feeling feelings. Guesstimating from about 2013 to 2015, I used to talk to someone who was both a Neurofeedback practitioner and a psychotherapist. In one of my sessions, we were talking about domestic violence between my mother and my father, and my father, specifically, abusing me. From what I’ve told my therapist, she told me something that kind of stuck with me. I didn’t permit myself to feel angry, afraid, weak. I internalized all the pain inside — the pain, in which I had been physically, emotionally, and mentally abused, the pain that my father caused me, the pain, and the apprehension that my mother and father had a parasitic relationship for years.
So I guess you could say, learning what I did not know that I know now, I’ve revisited my masculinity. I began questioning it.
What does being a man have anything to do with being strong?
is one of many questions that annoyed me.
Also,
What does being a man have to do with this supposed inherent ability to be able to fix things? To be a maven of sports?
I knew these things, but I just didn’t understand them. They didn’t follow. I couldn’t make any correlation between them. In a lot of cases, I just wasn’t strong at all. I knew I didn’t have a keen sense of how to fix things at least maybe if I wasn’t reading the instructions to fix them, obviously, and I have never been enthused about sports. I honestly accepted believing the notion that I was horrible at every sport, even before trying some of them so I avoided them. I remember back around post high school, I was asked by some folks to be on a team to play night football with them, and the first thing that habitually came into my head was something along the lines of,
Why do they want me playing with them? I suck at sports. I’m not a team player. I’m not trying to deal with being blamed for not knowing what I’m doing, because I seriously wouldn’t know what I’m doing. Why do they insist on thinking I know I’ll be a good teammate?
I went anyway to play with them anyway, though, it was out of peer pressure. Of course I had surface-level knowledge about Basketball, Football, Soccer, Lacrosse, Tennis, but the only reason I’ve known about sports is because it is a fundamental requirement embedded in our American school curriculum. Most of the time I had been engaged in conversation about athleticism, sports, or whatever, is when a covertly racist white man, would want to have small talk with me about the Lakers or something. So I often felt guilt for not knowing what to say about what they were talking about. I’d just pretend to know about sports, not so much because I was interested, but to get him to stop talking to me about sports, to stop talking to me in general.
I never said I wasn’t strong, or I didn’t care about sports out loud, or to other people though. Just thinking of the demonization I would face, admitting that I am not driven by extrospection, pure bravado, strength or callousness or, that I am not a man? It’s scary. Under this exterior was quirkiness, anxiety-riddenness, unmerciful self-skepticism, living off a slew of pessimistically assumptive conclusions that came from my self-loathing; I was just one of those “unconventionally” weird Black boys; I guess when it came to interacting with other Black men, there was something in my subconscious mind that made me feel obligated to abandon whatever true feelings I had. It was something confining, limiting, toxic that came to this Black male homosocial bonding.
I knew that learning to further practice embracing my emotions was a start toward further accepting that side of me that has been systematically demonized in this cisheteropatriarchal society: the feminine side of me. By femininity, I mean I was learning to accept that, not so much as a man, but as a Black being, I’ve cried, a lot. I sometimes used art and music as catharsis to purge myself of my feelings by crying because life at times, has been too much. I know I am sensitive. I believe this is only in part of because the several times I’ve gotten help in therapy.
More and more, I slowly recognized that it often bothered me when my parents, friends, people in general, assumed that because of my stature, being a man had to do with being strong, forceful, being the patriarch of the household, the conventional bread-winner, or what have you. But often in my mind, I refuted, that just because one is a man, does not mean they are strong.
Just because one is a man, does not mean they are inherently independent. Just because a man is not following gender stereotypes, does not make him less of a man. Just because a man has mental illness, or is physically disabled, does not make him inferior. Just because a Black man shows Platonic affection to another Black man, or has sex with another Black man, does not make him effeminate, or weak, or immoral, or not deserving of love. And even if they weren’t men, it wouldn’t make them less than, period.
And so, I revisit a few weeks ago in June where I kind of started exploring my maleness a bit. I didn’t have any make up of my own so I used one of my mother’s lipsticks, just to try it on. It was pitch black red and I felt it was showing a side of me I had yet to understand. Generally, I felt it looked nice on me. I didn’t feel a sudden change or transformation, or a feeling of being less “masculine.” I was still this me, but most of that me was just unsure how to be a me.
I wore this lipstick and immersed myself in this self for the remainder of that evening. I figured since my mother was coming home soon, I kind of hinted that she would voice worry about why I had lipstick on, but mind you, my mother was a devout Christian. I had a feeling she wouldn’t be intolerant of me too much, yet I kind of hinted that she wouldn’t have approved of me wearing lipstick anyway.
Historically, cishet White folx as well as cishet folk within the Black Church, historically utilized Christianity as a political power, justifying rhetoric established in patriarchal, homophobic/misiac, transphobic/misiac, and white supremacist ideology. Additionally, Haitian culture, our culture, is also rooted in some of the same bigoted rhetoric.
Keeping in mind that my mother had long been influenced and conditioned to have these patriarchal and homophobic/misiac beliefs, the pastors she had been going to, speaking, and listening to every Sunday, and the insistent moralizing she’s woefully rationalized as Him being the only way to “help us”, obviously made it clearer to me that her Christian faith was almost in a way ubiquitous, as though the God she so heavily moralized about, was in the entirety of her dialogue. I think it was the only thing that held her together, but she was often intrusive with her faith. From mentioning God as the go-to-answer as an all-powerful solution, episodically listening to notable Christian pastors such as T.D. Jakes and Joel Osteen orate grandiloquent speeches, to her ritualistically listening to mainstream White Christian country, folk, and pop music all throughout the day to help reinforce her faith.
Yet, she has construed my growing progressive views as me forcing her to adjust to my views. I felt that if her beliefs were this strong, then I didn’t really have to further deduce how she felt about me playing with my maleness.
My mother raised me as a Catholic, and I was baptized, but I was a loose-leaning Catholic. I didn’t understand, voice, or hold any strong religious views, not excluding the problematic views one would expect me to proclaim considering my conditioning of white supremacist-influenced Catholicism: monogamy as the so-called “default” and moral relationship position, sex only to be performed when one is certain they will be getting married, polygamy as “immoral,” and [this] God: a dogmatic, binaristic, monolithic being who was European, white, able-bodied, cishet, and male. Later in my life, did I begin investigating all of these indoctrinated ideologies I was taught and ventured through atheistic thought, Buddhism eventually leaning between agnosticism and Existentialist philosophy to find something to believe in. For the most part, I believed there could be some spiritual forces that existed, but none which I felt dictated who I was predetermined to be, who I was supposedly supposed to be, or that this God had been “watching” me, predatorily scrutinizing the skeleton of my morals in every one of my choices.
The moment she saw me, the me with lipstick on, she looked as though she were frustrated — disillusioned. I had ambivalent feelings towards her looking at me as if my face were reprehensible. Though I felt it was hate, it appeared as though it were fear, or at least a dubious-influenced hatred that drove her fears. . .like,
Why would my only, precious, [Black/Haitian] son. . . do this?
I felt like the frustration in her eyes were like fidgeting hands that wanted to rip off the decor from my lips. I thought on why she was upset. I muttered to ask why she was so opposed to me wearing lipstick. Her answers were toned in disorientation and hesitation. I felt her answers were just place-holding another. While she had been struggling to understand me, I don’t believe she was willing to. Though we were born during different periods in time, she was a Haitian-born Haitian and I was an American-born Haitian, we had contrasting beliefs.
You can wear that makeup just as long as it’s not in my house,
She angrily exclaimed.
She must have thought that my choice pertained to my sexuality, that I was abruptly coming out to her, and even if I had, obviously my choice in wearing lipstick made no such gesture, yet I felt a hint of an impending occurrence. I was a bit fearful. I felt as though she was going to kick me out of her house if not that night, but inevitably in the days to come. My choice to wear lipstick was a choice independent of her feeling discomforted. For her to project this anger onto me, while claiming in the same breath, that she claimed to have a gay friend, only meant that it obviously hadn’t absolved her of her bigotry. And for the fact that she didn’t want me to wear it in the house, showed me that she didn’t want a person starting to look into themselves to figure things out. She wanted what she believed to be an extension of herself, to perform the role of stereotypical [Haitian] masculinity and manness.
For a long time, I didn’t know what that meant, but at least now I know it’s nothing fixed.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Hudson Valley, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.
