A Moment of Reflection for Colorado Springs
I recently did a book event in Washington DC. During the Q&A, someone asked me how my family and friends felt about me writing a book about my life. I was frank and said that I don’t engage with my family much about my writing or most of my life; a reaction to the traumas of coming out as a teenager, a coping mechanism. A way to protect myself.
I also said that my memoir was in reaction to learning the sinister things that men in my family had done. Men like my father.
“I wanted to write a book about what it means for me as a queer black man to humanize these men, not romanticize them or wholly villainize them. To see something in them that they probably wouldn’t see in me. Humanizing someone or something that has the capacity to destroy us. That to me is a very queer logic.”
But in light of the recent Colorado Springs shooting at Club Q, I ask - what are queer people to do when the world aims to destroy us? Do we simply humanize the whole world? Is this queerness or complicity?
Maybe these are impossible questions to ask but they are on my mind. Destruction. Complicity. Denial. Resilience. Love.
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that they feel important.
This post is a moment of reflection for all of those affected by the recent shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs.