 So this is a piece I wrote for a launching of a journal called Foglifter. So it's going to be in there. And if the time works out, it'll also be in the book of conversations. A measure in growth. The day with the baby blue jacket is how I label it in my memory. My family was out shopping in Williamsburg, Virginia. And I had on a baby blue Tommy Hill figure peri jacket with a copper zipper. I was a heavy kid. There was a lot of walking involved that day. And I was getting hot. And my adolescent armpits were used to embarrassing me. To this day, I hate carrying jackets in my hands. If I'm not wearing a jacket, then I hate carrying it. Jackets are meant to be worn. It always seems so awkward to carry a jacket in my hands. And it still does. Hands should only be filled with purpose. And a jacket's purpose is not to warm or fill your hands, right? The purpose of your hands is not to hold items that can be worn on other parts of the body. Don't ask me a question on the internet. Jackets are made for wearing. And this narrative is beginning with the jacket that I had on that day because it was baby blue. And I was getting hot. And like I said, I hate carrying jackets. So I let it fall from my shoulders down my arms. And it rested within the crooks of my bent elbows, much like a fine lady does with a long scarf of many colors, much like the shawls worn by Odom May Brown or Matisha Adams. I was comfortable. But the fashion created a discourse around my body and around my body as if it did not have a conscious. As if my ears weren't passages into my body. The body that was hearing, a discourse in which I was the subject, the subject that sparked rage in my father. The wind blows blue the Sunday away. Don't you remember that day when the screen door slammed over and over? The wind blew blue that day. No one fastened the hook so that flimsy door tried to fly with one wing. Tried it did. Screens show no pain, but the pains in the windows rattled. And the rattle is what I remember the most. Take off your jacket or hold it in your hands. Why? I'm hot, and if I hold it, I might lose it. I was always setting things down and walking away from them as a child. I picked up the flute in first grade, put it down after a month of lessons. My father raised about having to cancel lessons and the cost of renting the instrument. I do not understand why he was so dismayed. He said the flute was a punk instrument, and not punk as in colonialist rock, bred in the minds of Holden Caulfields, punk bred in the minds of Ralph Ellison's invisible narrator. I picked up baseball in the eighth grade, still heavy, not the best runner, but I hit every ball. That fat faggot is terrible, was the last thing I heard at the end of the first practice. I never went back. The coach begged me back two days later, said I could have been a hitter. I don't think your team wants me around. My dad begged me to go back to, showed up at school during my seventh period, pulled me out, and begged me to commit to a team for the first time in my life. But I couldn't use the line that I used with the coach and my dad. I couldn't use the line with the same implying discernment for why I wasn't welcome. I couldn't use the same gesture I used in making sure I locked eyes with the coach so he knew my implications. I couldn't use the same emphasis on the words team and wants me around. My timbre was once again concealing the truth from my dad. The coach understood because, like I said, I hit every ball. My dad, on the other hand, just thought I was giving up. Then pulled the jacket up on your shoulders. My father was adamant in getting visibly frustrated in the middle of the outlet store, and strangers were beginning to stare. Baby, give me your jacket, my mom chimed in. No, he can carry it. He can wear it, right? But I'm comfortable this way. It looks feminine, but I'm comfortable this way. You look like a sissy, and I ain't raising no bitch. Raising no bitch is an old-time Negro spiritual that a still song. It was given to us when they took the skirts from our warriors and replaced them with pants. Raising no bitch, I ain't raising no bitch. By everything taken from me, I ain't raising no bitch. He don't have to kiss that breeder woman on the lips, but heaven knows I ain't raising no bitch. My mother ended up carrying the jacket. My father did not speak to me for the rest of the day, and that is when it happened. The moment when the sounds from the mouth of my parent, my guardian, removed me from the safe space amongst my family and placed me in the crowded hallway of my middle school and on a day when my best friend had stayed home sick. See, I was never allowed a closet door. I had a beaded curtain. I was made to feel ashamed for it. I was the first assumed homosexual in my class. I was called faggot before I knew the definition of the word. I was told that I talk like a girl, that I walk like a girl, and that I did things that girls did. Needless to say, all of my friends were girls. And my father asked me often which one was my girlfriend up until the day when he got frustrated with the silence that was my closet door and forced me to speak. I kept the name calling and bullying to myself. I kept the sticks and stones to myself because I thought mentioning them would be a revelation to my parents. If my peers were enforcing something that my parents were already trying so hard to ignore, then it would only validate their unspoken thoughts. In many ways, I grew up alone because I kept the everyday harassment of my chosen behaviors to myself. Does every queer child grow up feeling like their parents belong more to their heterosexual siblings than them? I was never spoken to about the birds and the bees. I don't know the metaphor or what each sign represents nor will I Google it. I assumed what the signifier stood for over time and why I wasn't spoken to about sex between men and women. It would have been a dis-ease for my father. He would have only lashed out in anger. That was the only language we used with each other for a long time. Like that spring evening during my sophomore year in college when he called me and blatantly asked me, what do you sleep with? The silence was broken, but I remained silent on the phone for some time until he asked me the second question, do you sleep with men? I am a man that has never heard the story of the birds and the bees, so I can only tell you the problems that arise when queer adolescents aren't warned about the hooked beaks belonging to birds of prey, or which bees have stingers, or why even the mention of bees when most stings come from yellow jackets. Does the birds and the bees discussion mention loving yourself first? In Fredericksburg, Virginia, during the oddies, the only option of meeting another queer person seemed to be online. I didn't meet it, I didn't mind it at first because I wasn't all too open with my sexuality at 16 anyway. My learner's permit had evolved into a provisional license and the hand-me-down first car of the household was all mine, and it was read like my desires at the time because the only thing I wanted to do with my newfound fresh-faced freedom was to be naked and to be naked with another man. I was once very ashamed to say that this guy and me did not talk for very long before deciding to meet and have sex. Obviously, I'm not anymore. I was 16. I smoked three black and miles back to back when I was 16 too because I thought it was the cool and appropriate thing to do. I threw it for 23 minutes straight. I remember because it was exactly 10 p.m. when I first leaned over to Hurl and when I looked back up from the pavement, the clock in my car had read 10-23. I had to be home by 11. My two girlfriends were both hiding in the darkness with boys and I was their ride. I was alone. I started taking diet pills when I was 16 too, stealing them from the local Walmart, one of the local Walmart's, at first because my friends and I were getting addicted to speed and then with more incentive when I noticed they curd my appetite and allowed me to drop from 210 pounds to 150 in one summer or two and a half months. We talked online for a week and arranged for me to pick him up after football practice during the August pre-season. Go to his empty house and have sex. I should have known when I saw the Dixie Outfitters shirt, Confederate flags crossed, his Southern pride expressed to turn around. However, the South is strange. Somewhere this flag and true ignorance awaiting a life-changing lesson from a person of color and some, like I was, are completely ignorant of the language that has spoken in households of those that adorn themselves with that flag. He was clearly looking for a lesson from a black male and he played football so I was sure his associations with black males were pretty high as fucked up as that sounds. I did not know what I was to him nor did I care at the time. I was not thinking with my brain there was a buff football player sitting in my passenger seat. I can still smell him at times. But I could not tell you his name, something I made myself forget. There were many names that I should have forgotten and yet I catch them in my contacts when I upgrade my phone and when I have to download my old contacts all over again. Sometimes it takes until I've had that perfect day and I'm riding on the AC Transit home and I'm feeling overly confident in my day's work to finally assemble the strength to delete those numbers to names that once made me hate the body tangled to my own. His was the first name I forced myself to delete and I never looked back. We held hands in my car, he explored my person as I drove deeper into the wilds of Spotsiavania County. The Orange County border was visible from his house, a place that was infamous for his treatments of black residents, for his black residents. Hell, Spotsiavania was no better but it was a few miles closer to home, a few miles closer to what was familiar and known to my 16 year old self. We made out in the car before going into his house. We went straight to his room and closed the door. I left with plans of seeing him again. I drove home listening to the parachutes album. Back in Coldplay was good. When I counted up my demons, saw that there was one for every day with the good ones on my shoulder, I drove the other ones away. Justing from that moment and our romanticism that I thought was more than lust, I was just, I was always looking for my Heathcliff, my tea cake. I was 16, I was alone. AOL instant messenger greetings when ignored for days. Strangely enough, his girlfriend or someone claiming to be his girlfriend messaged me saying that I was just his nigger experience. She said that, she said that she did not agree with him. The conversation ended with an I'm sorry. I told myself the apology was genuine until I was able to consider the whole situation a lesson learned. A lesson I learned alone. I have written this down to fly away. My father and I did not talk to one another for four years. He got tired of me being the black sheep of the family and ways beyond his regards to my sexuality. I took college for granted for four years before I got it together. Then I was spoiled. And I was spoiled. And I was spoiled from the money of a man who had to pay his way through college, law school and the man that put indoor plumbing into the house in which he was raised. His parents' residents in the 70s. I was wasting another person's hard work and I needed to learn what work was and I had to do that alone. My dad initiated dialogue after Michael Sam revealed to the world of college and pro football that he was a homosexual. With that revelation, my dad heard the language being used surrounding Michael Sam in the barbershop among his congregation and his friends and it finally clicked. I still do not know what aspect of my life he came to understand but he came to understand something just like I understand now that there is no finish line for growth. My dad was never given a manual on how to raise a gay kid just like I was never given a manual on how to deal with the father who was raised in a society that rejects gay men. Thank you.