My English teacher interrupted the beginning of class just as we were taking our seats and digging out our books. In a few minutes, she said, the school’s theater department would be performing an abbreviated version of a play called The Laramie Project. It would be an all-school assembly and take up most of our class time. Smirks and pleased whispers at that last detail. The teacher raised her voice, reminding us to be mature and thoughtful, but she didn’t explain why the reminder was needed.
I knew, though. Hearing my teacher say “Laramie” was like watching a grenade bounce across the floor of our classroom. I tried to read my classmates’ faces without changing the bored expression on my own. I did my best to mirror the easy shoulder shrugs and grinning relief I saw around me as we streamed out into the hallway.
The Laramie Project was a series of monologues based on interviews in the weeks after the murder of Matthew Shepard. He was a gay twenty-one-year-old man who’d been brutally killed by two strangers he’d met one night in Laramie, Wyoming. I remembered the moment I’d heard about it, watching the news at home with Mom, only a few months after we had sat on the same couch and watched reports about James Byrd Jr.’s murder. A photograph of Matthew—skinny, blond, smiling—was displayed while the details of the case were discussed. I remember thinking he looked sweet, hopelessly gentle. The kind of kid I’d hang around with after school, but only when people I knew weren’t around. Realizing that this was who I’d been for Cody made me wince.
Watching the news, I’d thought I could feel my mother turning to look at me, so I’d gotten up and walked out of the living room as if I were bored. She didn’t say anything about it that night. “Gay” was still an unspoken word in the house, an increasingly eloquent, encompassing silence.
By the time Matthew Shepard’s life and death made it to the classrooms of my high school in 2002, my feelings about him and James Byrd Jr. had started to swirl and converge. I was walking through a dusty, fluorescent-lit hallway—halfway to the assembly hall, trying with every filament of my body to look cool—when the two truths finally collided:
Being black can get you killed.
Being gay can get you killed.
Being a black gay boy is a death wish.
And one day, if you’re lucky, your life and death will become some artist’s new “project.”
AS THE HOUSE lights dimmed, I sighed, relieved to be invisible again. Sitting in the dark just before the stage lit up, I heard or thought I heard a senior in the row ahead of me say something about a “dead gay boy.” He turned to his friend, maybe to deliver a punch line, or maybe not. Their backs were to me, so I couldn’t tell what they thought about this dead gay boy.
Within just a few minutes, some of the girls on my row were sobbing. A few held one another’s hands. The monologues were heart-shattering.
I envied the girls who felt comfortable enough to cry, how easily they breathed. All the boys near me looked indifferent. I would think, later, that maybe some of them were only pretending to be indifferent. Maybe some could only sit comfortably, whisper ironically, laugh audibly, with total effort. For me, it took all I had to sit still and silent. I wanted to be on that stage, speaking the words I still didn’t feel safe enough to say on my own.
One of the last monologues the students performed was in the voice of Matthew Shepard’s father. He was speaking to the two convicted murderers during their sentencing hearing. Dennis Shepard, an oil industry safety engineer, offered them a stern mercy. Instead of the death penalty, he asked for a life sentence—as Matthew would’ve wanted, he said. He prayed for the killers—or perhaps cursed them—to think about Shepard every day for the rest of their lives.
The girl sitting right in front of me let her head drop to her chest as if felled. She shook her head back and forth, crying softly. It repulsed me then, her freedom. The actor onstage continued his monologue. As best I could, I pushed the words away while keeping my eyes on him. The spotlight made his tear-filled eyes glimmer and I sat there in the dark, trying to ignore a second girl now sobbing right next to me. I tuned out the words he spoke for fear that if I let myself pay attention I would start crying too. I would start sobbing and not be able to stop, not until long after the houselights came up.
But then the houselights did come up. And I slipped on the forcefully carefree posture of the other boys around me. The existential shrug of young men afraid to admit that they’ve been touched by art, and that they want to be touched in that way again.
A FEW WEEKS later, I came home from debate practice to find Mom sitting in front of the computer. She was smoking a cigarette, staring at the front door as I walked through it. Mom rarely, if ever, smoked inside the apartment. And when she did, she would sit by an open window or go stand on the balcony. Even if I couldn’t yet feel her stare laying into the back of my neck as I closed the door behind me, the haze of smoke hanging in the air was proof enough that I’d stepped right into their trap.
Walking over to the desk, I stared at the dark stain her lipstick left on the cigarette, then at the computer screen itself; anything to avoid meeting her eyes. The “Older4Younger” chat room window was on the screen as well as the message she’d written to the last man I’d spoken with. I’d been visiting gay chat rooms for months by then, because I had questions—so many questions—and urges that I decided had gone unanswered long enough.
A few years before, Mom had recorded an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show about “sex education” and left it on the kitchen counter with a note telling me to watch it when I got home from school. It answered the questions I had mostly already figured out on my own, but that only made my other questions more inexplicable and urgent: What about boys who liked boys, what about boys who liked men? Who could we go to with our questions? What about our bodies? What were boys like Matthew Shepard and me supposed to do with ourselves before America had its way with us?
“Read it,” she said, standing up. “Before I press Send.”
Dear Pervert—
Your profile says that you are in your mid-30s. I’m informing you that you have been communicating ILLEGALLY with my son who is a MINOR. I am his mother. If you ever try to contact him again, I will report you to the police. You are sick. STAY AWAY FROM MY CHILD.
My face burned. “Mom, it’s not like that,” I said. Or at least tried to say.
She moved so quickly I almost lost my balance. Her face now hovered less than an inch from my own. I could smell the cigarette smoke curling between her lips. Standing nearly forehead to forehead, it was the first time I registered that I was taller than my mother. Some shade of this realization must have flashed across my face, because she locked eyes with me right then and took another step forward, knocking me back onto the computer desk. My butt mashed against the keyboard, adding a jumble of letters to her message.
“Hit Send,” she whispered.
I obeyed without a word, jumble and all. Then I slid out from between her and the desk, avoiding her gaze. Kingsley was sitting on the couch, staring at us both. He whined, ever the cocker spaniel, and the interruption seemed to call my mom back to herself. She lit another cigarette and went over to pet him. She had slipped into a new mood, a sudden key change. I waited until she started speaking before I dared move again.
“You’re growing up and you have… feelings. Everyone has them; everyone has questions. But, Saeed, this”—she pointed her cigarette at the screen—“this is dangerous. There are men out there who would…” She trailed off, looking at the dog, then at the living room window as she took another drag. I could almost see the effort whirling behind her eyes. The strain of having to push through the exhaustion of a long workday only to come home to the job that didn’t pay: raising me. “Did that man—did any of those men—ask to meet you?”
“No. Well, yes—but I knew better. I mean, my profile said I was eighteen.”
She stood up again. “Saeed!”
“I know, I know.”
“You think you know.”
She let out a puff of smoke, grabbed her ashtray, then started walking toward her bedroom as if to announce that she had persevered as far into this conversation with me as she could. Kingsley hopped off the couch and followed her. She waited for him to make his way into the bedroom then closed her door.
Only after I was back in my bedroom, behind my own closed door, did I realize how much I wished we had kept straining through that conversation together, how little I understood of what she had said. Did she mean that when she was growing up she had feelings and questions about other girls and that this was normal? Did she mean all men who were attracted to men were dangerous or only the kind of men I found in that chat room? And even if that were the case, I was in that chat room too. I hadn’t been tricked or seduced; I had sought those men out. Did that mean I was one of those dangerous men or on my way to becoming one of them?
The older I got, the more frequently my mother and I would push each other to the precipice of what we actually needed to say, only to back off just before either of us was forced to get more specific than vague allusions to “feelings” and “questions.” But this only meant that the unanswered questions became ever more loaded.