Looking for a boy’s family

In 1981, I was a student of Art History at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and tried hard to support myself in various jobs. Columbia was an all-boy school at that time. Old oak table and a million cigarettes. (You can smoke in class.) Until I got there, I didn’t know much about this university—not even an all-boy college. For me, this is a new world. Until then, I lived in a girl’s family all my life. There is now a boy family.

I didn’t live on campus. I live in Brooklyn with my aunt, uncle and an admiring elder cousin. Around that time, our master’s degree was inspired by her sister and eldest daughter and was planning to move from Brooklyn where I grew up to Atlanta. A new beginning. She was just over fifty at that time. She made it clear that if I were to be with my aunt’s family, I had to follow certain rules. I have to pay the rent for twenty dollars a week. “No one lives for free,” our mom said.

At first, my aunt opposed the task: I was just a subject. But our master’s degree is firm. That’s it, or I’ll live in Georgia with her and my brother. There are several reasons why my mother put down her feet. One is dad. As long as she knows him, he will have no rent with his mother. My mother is very smart and respects her. Our mom said, “Mrs. Williams can throw some peas in the pot and feed the entire army.” Mrs. Williams has a husband and two other children – two girls – but for her, dad is always the first.

Our mom didn’t want me to be some kind of version of father, a man who could love women less and get more from them because of that, rather than having anything to do with her. She really has something to do with everything. She grew up in a society (a West Indian society) and that didn’t pay a great premium to the women’s bodies, and any intimacy there was a joke. People make fun of you for expressing your desire, or, if you are a man, interact with only one woman or show feelings for your child.

In his life, Dad had two women to raise him. Williams and my mother-but our mother had only one huge love: the others. She believes in the community and wants us all to belong to it, even Daddy, even though he lives in his mother’s home and was born into a kind family that laughs at her.

We come from the world she comes from, our mom may have a depreciating corpse, but she fights for her rights and keeps her own footsteps. And, when she let it go, the world is different. After she put down her feet, I went to school to work. I paid my aunt’s rent every week. In my room at home, I have a table, a bunch of books and a typewriter. I’m trying to write. I plan to write.

Life in Colombia is strange. All of these boys. I can smell them. Many of them are inside, careless about their scent. They raised their arms and the kingdom came, and the air was different. Gay people are not easy to recall. For example, that would be impolite and has proven to be impolite, for example, in 1981 the queer body was produced. Our gay boys have only been evacuated from Stonewall for about a decade and have been blackmailed or jailed for twenty years for “tenders”, so our bones are cautious and crazy. Sometimes we commit a great amount of love or anger privately, and the only public intrusion we allow is to throw glittering hard words into the air, hoping that they won’t bounce back and succumb to us.

I’ve never seen so many rich people or rich people before. First, my hair surprised me. Our mom has made her and us live as hairdressers for years. Her clients are all black women. Their hair has a lot of words and worries. Colombian boys’ hair is so shiny and nourishing. They have good teeth and healthy bodies and strong nipples, exhibited on sunny days, sitting on campus steps, they take off their shirts without a single person, at least in straight shirts, looking hammed. They grew up playing tennis or pumpkin in Connecticut, Rhode Island or further north. In the summer, they went to the cloak. Their families know each other, which is the source of pride among them, not painful jokes or alienated resentment.

Manhattan has always been my father. He once took me and my brother to foreign movies and then ate foreign food. He was very unconcerned about the gaze of the whites, who wanted to know what we were doing in the tea room on the Upper East Side. We ate Blints in Germantown and caught liv ullmann in “Immigration”. Then Dad took us home to Crown Heights and for a while it felt like Sweden.

In Colombia, I don’t have to pretend I’m anywhere else. I Once was Other places. All of this – the magnificent buildings, a wave of stone steps, are like a stage. But what to become? Dad gave me Manhattan, and now I’ll go without him. In my New York, he had no active role in New York, and maybe that was the act of becoming me in itself.

Everything is weird or else I want to be. I’m not saying it’s as queer as a camp (a loyal support for artificiality), but like I think, interested in all of it. In this new, strange place, I feel more free to keep talking about what excites me, like before I was with my big sisters as a kid, they ended all of these things- because what I became, some kind of chaos?

In my family, I never answered the question of what faggot is because I can’t trust anyone with any answer. No one grew up in East New York, or in Crown Heights in the 1870s and 1870s, they would believe they were gay.

In the West Indian community, our mom met a stranger. He never said he was gay, but he conveyed it through his picky love for women and the fact that he lives in Manhattan. He loved my mother – I thought they were far away cousins ​​- when he came to visit, I heard family, neighbors, etc., calling him “Auntie”. To them, he is not just a queen. He is every queen they have known, despised, disgusted and amused, spit secretly, fired and ridiculed. Because that’s how bias works: you’re one thing that represents all the bad things in others. Isn’t this how elders describe racism? But homosexuality is not the color of the skin. It is a state of being, a consciousness that makes your race or anything else your life gives you. My ability as an aunt to love people who think I am a pariah or some kind of evil novelty, tell me that it is made of something different, but what?

It happens the way love happens – although the least you want everything. I spent about a semester in Colombia when I was in trouble with a small group of people, most of whom were studying art history like me. The most interesting of these is from Orange County, California, the son of a single mother who works as a nurse at Disneyland. His skin was pale, rinsed easily, curly dark hair and beautiful hands – dad’s hands, but gestured, like that of a female. He is an excellent reader of philosophy, which makes me want to read more seriously and widely.

Roland Barthes A few years ago, prosperity emerged on the academic planet in Colombia, and his love for that group of people. My smart friend read him and imitated his motto style, which is a new way to become an “author”. But, to me, Butters’ writing is like the best embroidery sewn in the air: only the author can see it. What does all this actually mean when it comes to “other”?

I think one of the reasons why those queens like Butters is that he is very elusive about being queer without fully understanding that structuralism is a discipline. So are they. Despite Stonewall and other political progress, my new friends barely left the closet (some never left). They grew up in parts of the United States in 1981, and were still ideologically in 1956.

Me and my blonde friend. I have a close language relationship. Toni Morrison “Sula“I lend him, and he’s interested in hearing how my father and his mother spoiled him, like Milkman Dead in Morrison”Solomon’s Song. ”

We pass books back and forth, and walk back and forth, and the words in them make the ground stronger. I kept trying with Butters because I loved my friends and found something I knew in emotional language.Roland Barthes Roland Barthes” and”Lover’s words.In fact, in the previous book, it was really just a photo that introduced my boundaries. Black and white photo shows a young Bart in his mother’s arms.The need for love” – Expressing a world: This is me, all of us, and all of us. What souls do not want to be carried, held, and surpass the age of the carrier?

In “Love Words,” I was attracted by Butters’ explanation of “Crying of Love”: “I want to understand myself, let myself understand, let myself know, be known, be hugged; I want someone to take me with him.” Indeed, I want my nerdy friend to take me into his mind, discover stories with me, elevate me with his mind, and join my community disco. There is a select crowd in that imagined disco, which is largely strange. The hall is small, and honestly, it’s a home. In the disco hall of my community, DJ plays Chaka Khan, prince,,,,, Philip Glass’s “Einstein is on the beach,” Jane Olivor Dionne Warwick Ask us to convey a “message to Michael” BoyOf course, singing “Station to Station” and the record describes “The Descent makes me shivering”, Elton, who sang Elton, sang a lot. Of course, all of these songs are certainly a song, a song of hope, they are such a powerful room, just like God is on our stage, on our cool high stage, and your weird thing is that you can all be around you. It makes you feel panic because it is not a panic for love?

My book friend has a boyfriend. Let’s call him Les. He grew up with his white single mother, a social worker, in a large group of buildings on the Lower East Side. Rice didn’t know his father, he was black. He is the only person of color among the gay boys in Colombia, and I feel obliged to love him given my sense of cultural loneliness and our mom’s loyalty to spiritual wandering. For a long time, I thought I did it because I thought it should be.

We don’t have sex with each other. First, our connection and anxiety are familial, not romantic. Rice is interested in the classroom not to eliminate his race, but a way to quit himself from the background. In Colombia, he didn’t want to be his origin story. He all reached the myth. He surpassed the white boy in the white boy. He embraced capitalism in an exaggerated way the lack of philanthropy: there is only one class space, and that class is skilled and cruel around the world, and more so. This is in the era of Lacoste shirts, twill and LL bean bags and boots. Somehow, Les’s Laxter shirt collar stands tighter and stiffer than anyone else.