Queer Studies For the Straight Black Male

A college class that made me a better person

I grew up in a tough neighborhood in Houston, and even by the standards of a poor inner city neighborhood, I had a particularly tough and poor childhood. And from that, I somehow found myself a college student a lot of years after the point when people stopped referring to you as a college kid.

During my first couple of years, I’d taken three literature classes with Professor Choudhuri, a short smiling Indian American woman with a challenging, but genuinely engaging style of teaching. Before the Spring semester of my senior year, I looked for her in the class catalogue as I was preparing to register for my classes. Professor Choudhuri didn’t have any African American Literature or Russian Literature classes, my top choices, that worked with my schedule, but she was teaching a class called “Queer Studies,” that would focus on the work of LGBTQ writers.

Honestly, I would not have taken the class except I so enjoyed Professor Choudhuri that I probably would have taken any class she was teaching.

The class ended up being comprised of mostly women and about an even split between LGBTQ students and straight women, with about four straight men, as far as I was able to tell through the conversations we had as the semester went on. The other three straight men were pretty open about only having signed up for the class to get their last required English or literature.

I sat down next to a short girl called Charli, with very short hair, baggy shorts and polo shirt and a neck tattoo of a rose that wrapped its leaves and thorns around and around, and bloomed just bellow her right earlobe. That’s where I sat the first day; that’s where I sat the last day.

The very first thing we read was a book called “Zami,” by the African American writer, Audre Lorde. Lorde didn’t call the book a novel or an autobiography; she’d called it a biomythography, a term meaning the work contained both real life elements and some parts of fiction or myth.

Lorde was African American and gay. In Zami, the protagonist, like Audre Lorde herself, had grown up in Harlem and the book is the story of a life of discovery and the sometimes agonizing growing pains of becoming one’s self. Audre Lorde’s writing was big and strong, and often almost brutally poetic.

“My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when that word-combination of woman and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white American common tongue,” Audre Lorde

On the day we turned in our papers for Zami, a tall skinny girl came into the class holding the book, but not the way you hold a book, and not the way you hold a baby. She clutched it in both hands, her fingers pressed into the flesh of it.

When we started to discuss the story and the plight of its protagonist, her eyes were wet. They were wet and teary the whole time.

“You just don’t know,” she said, holding the book to her heart. “This is me, up and down, backwards and forwards. This is me!” She shook her head slowly from side to side.

Professor Choudhuri smiled into her.

The girl told the whole class about how she’d spent years sleeping with different men, hoping the new one would make her feel what people said you were supposed to feel when you were with a man. She said she hadn’t wanted to disappoint her religious parents or embarrass them. So she’d spent most of her life suffering, trying to live their dreams.

She said, “I’d been so sad for so long.”

There were echoes of her story all over the class. One guy said he’d attempted suicide, and Charli walked over and wrapped her arms around him. She told him she used to think about it all the time. When she came back to her seat, I reached over and squeezed her shoulder. I didn’t look right at her and we didn’t speak, but I just wanted to offer something of my heart to her.

We read other great books like “Fun Home,” a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel that tells the story of a young girl who comes out as a college student and shortly thereafter discovers that her father was gay.

“Blue Boy,” by Rakesh Satyal, was the story of a little Indian boy growing up in Cincinnati in the early nineties. His parents and their friends are conservative Indian immigrants and expect him to ruffle no feathers and paint within the lines, but Kiran is weird and flamboyant and likes to dress in his mothers clothes sometimes.

Every day my classmates shared so much of themselves. Sometimes I felt like I was intruding. But we all became close that semester. Even if I almost never got a chance to talk personally to a particular classmate, I felt a friendship with them. It seemed like every time the class met I was reaching my fingers beneath my glasses to wipe away tears.

I hadn’t had many gay friends, and the men in the neighborhood used to say that gay black men made straight black men look bad. There was never any violence against any of the gay guys in our neighborhood, but I would’ve avoided a friendship, afraid of what people might think.

I had three cousins who were gay, and I still loved them, but they were my family. I had no choice in the matter. There hadn’t been time to avoid loving them.

I’d often get to the class early since my first class ended a half hour before it began, and if there were a few other students there early, we’d talk like family. I wanted to know if they were alright, how had their other classes been going.

In my creative writing class, I wrote a short story about a transgender woman who winds up being a much better mother than the alcoholic father she used to be. I didn’t tell any of my Queer Studies classmates; I didn’t want them to think I was writing about them. But I did feel a great responsibility to make sure this character wasn’t robbed of her humanity.

In the end, I got an A in the class. The last day we came by and dropped our final papers off to a smiling Professor Choudhuri, who had something encouraging and sweet to whisper to each of us. I hugged each of the students who came with their papers when I was there.

I felt something had washed over me. I knew that I didn’t hate gay people, and I knew that the fact I’d grown to care about these people and the journey life would take them on didn’t make me any less straight. They were all decent people and like me, they’d been through a lot.

Human beings often just go along with what they were taught, having never questioned those beliefs, it’s the easy way out. But when I stopped in this class and asked myself if what I’d been taught about gay people was what I believed in my own heart, the answer was no. These people had been nothing but kind and wonderful and honest in a way I hoped I would be capable of one day.

Except for Victor, a Filipino guy and brilliant writer who was also in all of my creative writing classes, I haven’t seen most of those guys in the seven years since I graduated. But I think of them from time to time, especially when I spot one of the books from that class still on my shelf. I don’t know where they are now, what they’ve done since Queer Studies, but I wish them luck.

Suggested reading from this author!