A Life Spent Searching For Love From My Father

Who teaches us to grow into men who love themselves, and other men?

“Your honor, this is a case of young love gone horribly wrong.”

Those were the words that leaped from the lips of my Legal Aid Society public defender. They penetrated straight into the flesh of my 25-year-old body like splintering shotgun shells meeting an intended target. I sat in a courtroom, much like the courtroom my father had sat in years ago with my mother, not even old enough to vote, holding me tight to her chest as though she meant to shield me from the pain that was to come.

My father and I had one thing in common: We both lost our freedom by becoming property of the state at very young ages. He was 17 and I was 25 when we had to humble ourselves before a judge who would decide our almost predictable outcomes. I became just another of the 11 Black men to be sentenced to incarceration that day.

Growing up, I had all the things most would think represented a normal healthy American upbringing. I shared birthday parties with my cousins and classmates at the local Chuck E. Cheese or Burger King playpen. I had Nintendo Duck Hunt nights and the Home Alone Talkboy tape recorder — I even had the matching Dallas Cowboys bedding and curtains set. I performed in winter and spring concerts where I had the occasional solo; the dream of becoming the next Sammy Davis, Jr. or Usher danced in my mind. My young single mother gave me all that she could and then some, yet I found myself always searching for more.

I had arrived, but no matter what stage I performed or what accolade I received, I continued to seek the love and praises of all the wrong men.

I wish I could say that after that cold lonely October morning in court, I learned all the things I needed to know to grow up to be a man and take responsibility for my life, but it wasn’t true. At 25 years old, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, make a budget, or even how to buy new underwear and socks every three months without a scolding reminder from my mother. I knew at that point that even though I was young and smart and talented, I still wasn’t enough of those things to know what kind of love I deserved — from my father, from other men, from myself.

I was only eight years old the second time my father went to prison. I relied heavily on television and books for men to guide me as I grew up. Steve Urkel from Family Matters and Heathcliff from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights taught me so many lessons. Much like Heathcliff, I felt that being fatherless had hardened me. I, too, craved love and acceptance from everyone around me. Steve Urkel had my same hopeless disposition and unrequited love problem. But since he was a genius, he created a machine that turned him into a man who received the love he craved, even if it only lasted a night at a time. Unfortunately, there weren’t any Family Matters episodes to watch that would prepare me for what was ahead.

On weekends, I would wake up to the smell of bacon frying and the sound of my mother’s high-pitched voice belting from the kitchen where she would have a sing-off with Celine Dion — or “Salon Don,” as she used to call the singer — playing on the radio. My mother usually worked all week at the bank, where she became a branch manager, and nights at the grocery store. Still, she managed to take care of our home.

Her strength and ability to persevere was the greatest of all the gifts that my mother gave me. She didn’t have the energy for religion. Instead, she would give me a few dollars for the offering basket, make me a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, and send me to church with a forehead kiss. I still remember running up the stairs to tell her what I’d learned about faith and how excited I was to get saved. Looking back, it’s funny how excited I was to be saved from hell before realizing the hell I would soon be living in was one of my own making.

Back then, I got in the habit of wandering into the church down the street from my house, usually on Wednesday nights when the mass choir rehearsed. Every time I walked through those double doors into that sanctuary, I had a visceral feeling of belonging. Everything became illuminated through the iridescent stained-glass windows. The light turned the deep purple into beams of bright plum, and the dark cherry red into the most majestic royal ruby tone. It looked like heaven, and it looked like hope; those colors told the story of what I felt inside. I loved how the light made the figures in the window come alive. Soon, I found myself in the pews every Saturday for vacation bible study and every Sunday for service.

I loved everything about the church. I especially loved the deacon who took me into the bathroom on the day of my baptism to help me change into my all-white linens. He was tall with muscles, beautiful dark almond eyes that looked like mine, and a perfectly manicured mustache above his upper lip. It wasn’t until his face was beside mine while he kneeled to help me out of my pants that our lips met. I was 13. This man — a father figure, someone who held power in the church — took advantage of my naivete.

I had never been kissed by another man before, not even my father. Not good night, not goodbye, not ever. I only received affection after some of the scariest moments of my childhood. Like the day I got lost at the state fair. After crying for hours, waiting in a security office waiting for him to come get me, I got, “It’s okay, sonny boy.” Likewise the look of embarrassment he gave me when we got pulled over during a road trip down south in his brand-new Saab. The cops arrested him and took me to the state troopers station, where I had to sit and wait 10 hours for my mother to pick me up. Throughout all these instances, I cannot recall a single time my father held my hand, hugged me, kissed me, or told me that he loved me.

The older I got, the more I searched for these things from other men — men who were much older than me, who seemed to know what I liked even before I knew what I liked. I sought out seedy secretive situations that made me feel what I felt in that church basement the day I got baptized. My choices in relationships drove me further away from church and spirituality and directly into the drug and party scene. I surrounded myself with people who made me feel safe and wanted, men who felt just as lost and unloved as I felt. We tried to love each other from the bottom of a hopeless, empty well.

Somehow my dream when I was a little boy singing in talent shows turned into my day job when I got to sing behind some of the biggest celebrities everywhere from Madison Square Garden to the Hollywood Bowl. I had arrived, but no matter what stage I performed or what accolade I received, I continued to seek the love and praises of all the wrong men.

Travis was the first married man to break my heart; Leonard gave me my first sexually transmitted disease that went untreated for so long I nearly died; Manny introduced me to crystal meth, sex work, and was the first one to domestically abuse me. And then there was Omar — the reason I wore a ripped-up blood-stained shirt, and stood in front of a judge describing the love that had gone wrong.

Omar had stabbed me seven times with an envelope opener over drugs he thought I withheld from him so that I could use them with another man. In that relationship, we loved hard, and we fought harder. I believed it was love after we had been up for days getting high. The drugs wore off, the hunger set in, but there was no money for food. Omar went to the grocery store and stole eggs, bacon, and pancakes to eat; he knew that meal reminded me of my mother.

I didn’t blame any of these men for my pain or my problems. I blamed my father. He was the first man who hurt me and taught me that it was okay to let other men hurt me. It wasn’t until the judge presiding over my case mandated a year of therapy that I began to see my role for what it was.

All those years, I wanted to feel good. I thought I deserved to feel good all the time to make up for all the pain that I had endured. It was in that searching and fearless moral inventory — the fourth step of the 12-step recovery program — that I was able to see myself clearly.

The hardest part to accept was that I was no victim. My father’s lack of love wasn’t to blame for who I’d become. I learned that my self-seeking need to feel loved placed me in positions to be hurt. The more harm I brought upon myself, the more I hurt others.

I wanted to receive forgiveness for that. I wanted to be loved. But it meant that I had to forgive. Forgiving myself, and then forgiving my father, was the first radical act of self-love I have ever experienced. The ripple effects on Black gay boys with incarcerated fathers spread far and wide, and perpetuate a cycle of trauma. I take full responsibility for the choices I have made along the way that landed me in the situations I went through — but I wonder if it would have all been different if my dad had given me just one simple kiss.