On the Other Side of Freedom

by DeRay Mckesson

  I now realize that I saw brotherhood and I saw lust, but I never saw romance between men in real life or on TV before I was an adult. I never saw people my age talking about desire beyond the binary, never experienced pleasure without sneaking. It was not seeing myself in the world that taught me the timidity that it would take until adulthood to break; it was the absence that I felt in this larger world that taught me that quiet would keep me alive, keep me loved, and keep me sane. But I did not know then the cost of the quiet. I did not know that the quiet is a thief, that it steals the potential for joy, for power, for freedom. And like most thieves, it works so that you don’t realize you’ve been robbed until what you once had is already gone. Or perhaps it steals away the possibility of things that you deserved, wanted, expected.

  In its best form, art can be a mirror and a window, helping us to better see ourselves and to imagine new possibilities. But what happens when the mirror returns a reflection that doesn’t look like the you that you know yourself to be? Or when the window seemingly isn’t meant to be opened in the first place?

  When I think about the quiet, I think about the places where we’ve been told that we’re not supposed to make a lot of noise, the places where we’ve been told that the only way to achieve, progress, succeed, is to work in silence. And for so many of us, the world is that place.

  I think about the quiet instead of “the closet” because I’ve never hidden any part of myself from myself or from others, and the closet seems to imply some form of hiding. And when I think about being in the closet, I think of being there alone. But there are many people raised in the quiet, still in the quiet, stuck in the quiet, together. And they don’t always know that they’re not alone, even if it feels like they are. I was never hiding, as the image of the closet implies. But I grew up quieter about the parts of myself that I didn’t think anyone would love, the parts that I had never seen loved in others, the parts that might put me in danger if they were seen and heard as publicly as every other part of me. Quieter, that is; not silent.

  When I think about the quiet, the image of a library comes to mind—the place where supposedly you can’t learn if there’s noise, a place of exploration that says don’t speak. But there are always people whispering and passing notes in the library, always people finding ways to have a voice despite the rules, always people coming out of the quiet. The silence is enforced not just by the obvious presence of the rules but also by the collective self-policing that we learn from those around us. That is, until someone starts to speak, emboldening others to do the same. And then you realize that there’s a way to talk, to be, that allows you to say what you need to say, that adds and does not subtract from the space and people around you, that even helps the people who didn’t know to ask for help too.

  I did not lose my voice in the quiet, but some do. I was young when I learned how to use silence as a weapon, as a tool, as a blanket, as a handkerchief, as a friend. I realized that trauma and pain could outrun me and that fear is often a bully.

  When the silence came to suffocate me, I stood still.

  I remember the first time like it was yesterday. I remember being on the floor, about to go to sleep. It was nighttime. My sister was sleeping on the couch, but there wasn’t enough couch for both of us. Being the boy, I got the floor, which I didn’t necessarily mind. We had just installed new carpet at our house, and I loved napping on the floor there. But we were at my father’s girlfriend’s house on this night.

  I remember telling my father that I didn’t want to have to sleep on the floor with his girlfriend’s nephew. I didn’t have the language to explain it then; I didn’t have the words to express my hesitation when I was seven, on that night, on the floor, in her house. But I remember saying that I didn’t want to have to sleep on the floor with him. In the end, I was told to go to sleep.

  This was the first night that he made me touch him. It wasn’t the last night. It happened in many houses, in many places, over a span of a few years. I’ve largely moved those memories to different places, places harder to access, harder to recall, places beyond my easy grasp. It became too much to remember them every day because I still had to be in those places, even if he wasn’t there. And I didn’t want to think of him every time I walked into my bedroom, or any of the other rooms in our house. Because in some sense, it felt like he was always there. Well, until I decided to move those memories to a place I wouldn’t reach anymore.

  One night, while I was at my grandmother’s house, I went downstairs to the kitchen and I called my father. I had to be quiet because the staircase at her house creaks, and my uncle lives in the basement right off the kitchen. He answered. I just felt like I couldn’t hold it in any longer. It was eating away at me to not tell someone, anyone. I cried and told him that X made me touch him. I was eleven. He told me that he’d come in the morning, we’d talk about it, and that he’d help fix this. That I should go back to sleep and that we’d keep this between us for now.

  He came in the morning. We talked about it. And two weeks later, I started therapy. As an adult, I can say that I am happy that X remained alive after my father found out. There was no need to have my pain cause more pain.

  I remember my first therapy session. The therapist just didn’t get it. I remember it like it was yesterday. I felt like I was talking to someone who didn’t understand and simply couldn’t help me process what had happened so that I could move on and grow. Instead she wanted me to keep explaining and describing everything. I’d spent years not speaking about it, I’d replayed scenarios in my head, and I’d thought about a life where it didn’t haunt me. I needed tools beyond recollection. After my second session, I told my father that I didn’t need to go to therapy anymore and that I’d be okay.

  In hindsight, it wasn’t that I didn’t need therapy, but rather that so much time had passed between the violations and me discussing them that I had already processed much of my emotions. I needed space to wrestle with how to keep living, and this therapist wasn’t equipped to provide that. We don’t give young people enough credit for being able to make sense of the world around them, to take things in and let things out, to be shaped and to shape the world around them. I needed something beyond the skill set of that therapist then. We did not have other options, though—we’d kept the abuse a secret from everyone but TeRay, and we didn’t want to risk exposure by searching for a new therapist. And so with nowhere else to turn, I went inward.

  It was in running from the memories of the pain that I entered the quiet for the first time. I learned how to use silence then, as a seven-, eight-, nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old. I learned how to smile and respond when an aunt or uncle would ask me during one of those national weeks about sexual assault if anyone had ever touched me. I learned that I could do and say just enough to get the adults around me to create their own narratives from the bits and pieces I would provide, all the while masking my shame and guilt. I learned how to hide while looking like I was fully present, how to become small in ways that only I knew while ensuring that others would read my behavior as introversion. I learned how to withhold information from the people closest to me, how to appear calm and composed when inside I was burning.

  I’d made the commitment soon after therapy that I would not kill myself, ever. I think that it was more practical than anything. We were raised by my great-grandmother and father then. And while my great-grandmother was loving to me, she was hard on my sister in the way that old women raised in a different generation had unreasonable expectations for little black girls. She didn’t like that TeRay whistled, or liked wearing pants, or that she played softball. To Nanny, TeRay was never being enough of a lady, even when we were quite young. I barely liked to leave the two of them alone together in the house, and I couldn’t imagine leaving the world with them permanently together. I didn’t know if my sister would survive her.

  I remember the day that I chose not to kill myself, because it was the
same day that I decided not to nap in closets anymore—something that I used to do so that my family would think that I’d run away and disappeared forever. When that phase ended, I told myself that I would sit in the pain from there on out. I would let it wash over me, let it surround me, envelop me, let it get as close as it wanted to. And that I would look it in the face. I had run from all those memories of him touching me. I was tired of running.

  When the silence came to suffocate me, I stood still. I stood still to show the silence that it would not push me any longer—that it would not win, not this time. But I had run long enough that I learned its tricks, and though I wanted to forget them, I don’t think you ever unlearn the tools that kept you alive in the moments when life isn’t what you wanted.

  I didn’t realize that I was in the quiet until college, when I saw people my age who weren’t there, who were living loudly. I hadn’t seen people showing up in the fullness of who they were until then, not truly. As a kid I mostly saw the constraints, the limitations that poverty created, and sometimes glimpses of joy beyond survival broke through. But seeing other people escape its grasp I realized that I too could get out of the quiet. It was not enough to stand up to the silence that tried to suffocate me; I had to learn how to move past it, to let it pass me by, to take those steps and leave it in my shadow.

  I learned quickly that this world wanted me to apologize for my desire, for the way my voice did not sound like the men I saw on TV, for the butterflies I got in the presence of men I dated, the men I loved. But we are to apologize for our mistakes and who I am is no mistake. I refuse to apologize for the timbre of my voice, the sway of my gait, the gender of my love. I did not always have the strength to refuse, but the lessons came slowly like the waves on a beach, slowly but surely, and then all at once. It was in the safety of my first kiss that I learned that men’s bodies could do more than break me. It was in the gentle power of the last man I loved that I learned that the words of men could find parts of me to build, parts of me to love that I had not always seen as worthwhile or valuable. It was in holding hands, watching TV, and making meals with the small set of men who have ever professed their love—a love that I embraced, believed, and gave back—that I understood the beauty in the mundane parts of love, in the simple quiet, in the hellos and good-byes, and kisses on foreheads instead of lips, in the Post-it notes and voice mails. I had to learn all of these things in real life, because I never saw them in the imagined worlds of TV or movies or cartoons. It was work to learn a love that made me less an object of desire and more a partner in a shared space.

  I am a man too, I reminded myself. But my masculinity did not grow in gyms, or on fields, or in the bedrooms of women. I had to learn that men are many things beyond those that we see in the media. There was a period when I didn’t like looking into mirrors in public. There was always one mirror at the house that I would tell people was my favorite mirror, the only mirror that I trusted. But the person I saw in those mirrors in public reminded me of how displaced I often felt, and it was too much of a burden to be displaced in public. I could manage displacement at home. But now mirrors don’t bother me. I had to learn that gay black men can be gay and black and men at the same time. I realize that there are people still learning this today.

  I am a man who loves men, living in a body that so much of the world has been taught to hate. But I have found communities of men like me, ready, able, and willing to live as boldly as possible; ready to claim voice, and space, and power, because they know that their lives deserve it. I spent so much of my time fighting for justice in a macro sense that I didn’t realize that I had not yet understood justice personally—that I too should be able to live in the fullness of who I am every day without threat and with the ability to prosper. I had to challenge people around me who demanded otherwise from me. It was this challenge that led me to tweet, “If your love requires that I hide parts of who I am, then you don’t love me. Love is never a request for silence.” I realized that so many people who had ostensibly been good to me in my life had been asking me to be silent about parts of me, especially me being gay. And that’s not love.

  I like to think that having to navigate so much complexity, constantly fumbling around in uncertain spaces, is what helped me in those early days of protest. I remember standing at the intersection across from MoKaBe’s, the coffeehouse that became a meeting spot for activists when we were in St. Louis City. Hours later, a group of us would be inside as the police took aim at all the open doors and windows and fired tear gas at us. But before taking refuge in the coffeehouse, we’d been assembled out front. The police had split our large group into four separate groups, and I’d been separated from the people I’d come with. I recognized the protesters around me—the result of many nights in the streets together—even if I didn’t know their names. And then I watched with mild surprise as someone in front of me yelled to the police, “You fucking faggots!” And as he turned around to rejoin the group of protesters, another guy looked at him and said, “Man, that offended me.” And the guy who’d yelled the words apologized, said he didn’t mean to be offensive, and then they both dissolved into the crowd.

  This all happened in a few moments and amid the chaos in the middle of the street. I’ll never forget it. It was in Shaw, a neighborhood of St. Louis, in the early months of the protests, after the killing of VonDerrit Myers. And it felt like something was changing about the way that we were starting to build community, and certainly the ways in which we were starting to think about identity. I’d become accustomed to homophobia and hadn’t any reason to believe that it was ebbing—until the protests began. Suddenly, we were having these public conversations about things that we’d only discussed privately, if at all. So to see a stranger confront another stranger about his homophobia as we were working to build a community together stood out. And now I realize that it was only just the beginning.

  I knew even then that we were building something magical. We were, all of us, building something that would be bigger than our opposition to the police, bigger than our calls for accountability or our sprints to outrun tear gas and rubber bullets. I realized in that moment that in the process of challenging a system that was killing us, we were learning to stand up to the silence that also tried to kill us, and that it was perhaps this that would be the lasting success of the protests at the personal level for each of us.

  The narrative of the civil rights movement is often centered around the narratives of men. In those early days, it seemed as if men were determined to exert their own sense of primacy to this movement. Sexism and misogyny were rampant: men told women that it was too dangerous for them to be outside, men ensured that they led the marches and actions, and men talked over women at the meetings. But those attempts at silencing the women were met with their own sort of resistance. Women led marches and planned actions. Their voices explained and unpacked what was unfolding. Black women were the first people I organized with in St. Louis: Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, Alexis Templeton, Kayla Reed. And other women like Elizabeth Vega, Pastor Traci Blackmon, and Pastor Renita Lamkin were pivotal influencers and leaders. Black women have long been an incredible force in the work. We know there would not have been a civil rights movement without the work of black women or queer folks, though they were not recognized in their time. And likewise, this movement would not exist without the work of black women and queer folk, who, unlike before, are not being glossed over. They refuse to be content to work in the quiet.

  But we weren’t having conversations about identity then. Some of that was practical—the police were so wild that all of our collective energy was focused on withstanding them. It became clear, though, because we were forming friendships so quickly and in the midst of chaos, that we’d need to have these conversations in a hurry. So we started talking. Constructing a new lexicon together was both important and necessary, because the only way we’d learn to build a welcoming community was by learning how t
o talk to one another, especially about who we were.

  When we finally had the space to publicly engage with topics concerning identity—topics like queerness, masculinity, feminism—the conversations were hard. In life outside the classroom, or outside the school, I have observed so few opportunities to engage with identity. Though they be messy, these are yet necessary conversations to have. One’s identity doesn’t just live within them alone, but exists, rightly or wrongly, in relation to others. When we experience things together, it is important that we process them together too, and that we consider both the community we inherited and the community we want to create.

  Many of the relationships built in those days of protest are versions of trauma bonding—we met and became close with each other in the midst of shared pain, because of shared pain, or in attempting to avoid pain, together. We met each other as we fought, not the other way around.

  Relationships built in and around trauma require that we are even more attentive to explicitly processing the future that we want to build and the barriers that have kept that world from existing; otherwise we can find ourselves re-creating or re-producing conflict in order to have a foundation on which to bond. Friendship and love cannot thrive when trapped in trauma. I’ve found that we were fighting for a larger freedom without acknowledging the need for an ethic of freedom and liberation in our interpersonal relationships.

  See, the thing about the quiet is that it doesn’t only affect the people stuck in it. It creates a world in which those not in the quiet—generally those in power—believe that they’re the only people, that they are the sum total of humanity. The quiet creates a world in which people can say and do things that hurt those they work with, live with, and seemingly love, without them thinking about it. It is how narratives that do damage continue to travel, to hold power, to move.