Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir by Hari Ziyad

Author:Hari Ziyad [Ziyad, Hari]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781542091329
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2021-02-28T22:00:00+00:00

Most of the family showed up to the homegoing. I had seen our cousins only a few times since moving to New York nine years earlier, and at Aunt Cheryl’s funeral, I told them the same thing I said at Mother Bhūmi’s, the last time I saw them: “We have got to do a better job of keeping in touch!” But ever since losing you, the deaths of other family members have been the only things that have managed to bring everybody back together.

After the ceremony, most of the family headed to our cousin Kadeem’s house around the corner from the church.

“I know you don’t want any,” Kadeem said after he brought out a case of beer and began to roll a blunt. “You’re Kṛṣṇanandini’s kids.” Your God doesn’t let you grieve like us.

Kadeem doesn’t really know me well, and I guess he also didn’t know you were gone yet. So I told him. I asked for a drink.

“Damn, what happened?!” he replied with a nervous laugh as he poured me a whiskey cranberry. I wanted to tell him how you were suffocated by limiting ideas about what boys like you should do, and sometimes that drives me to drink too much. Instead, I just laughed along with him. Then he asked me how I liked the girls in New York.

“They’re cool,” I said, before making up an excuse to escape the conversation, grateful for the Jameson.

Later that night, our cousin Richard grabbed my shoulder. I am closer to him, and he knows about my queerness.

“Step outside with me, Hari, man,” Richard said, running his hands awkwardly through his locs. I gulped down the last of my drink and headed to the patio, unsure what to expect. I carried my empty cup as if it weren’t empty at all, indistinctly aware of a strange hope that I might look down and see it had magically refilled itself.

“I been meaning to ask you,” Richard said through a graceless chuckle. “What made you like boys?”

I wanted to tell him, “I didn’t have a choice.” That you had been attracted to boys for as long as I could remember. It’s the same thing I told my parents in the letter I sent them in college explaining that I was queer. I assured them that nothing they could have done would have changed that fact. Lady Gaga proclaimed “Born This Way” was the answer to all my concerns around my sexuality, and I wanted so hard to believe this message, like so many of my gay NYU peers had in their deification of her, because that would make navigating this so much easier.

If you were born with your gayness, then the fact that everyone seemed to pick up on it just to pick it apart made sense. That it felt like your performance of gender was targeted every single day—that the only whupping I remember you receiving from Daddy was after you jokingly danced on a male friend, that it seemed like our parents

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