In the Name of Love

I was sitting on my bed when he told me—it was just an innocent conversation, very casual—

and the subject of chat lines came up. I had never been on one—my mom would regale me with

tales of massive party lines in Chicago—but he had been on one, and his friends made it almost a

fad in itself. The key was not to get on the gay chat line, but the straight one, with guys who were

looking for a good time with the opposite sex. They would disguise their voices, feminize them,

and sometimes I can imagine to the point of camping themselves out of their own pretended

gender, looking to see if the hetero-maxims of their prey actually stood up to their ideals.

Inevitably, that iron rod of gender roles flapped like lifeless rubber in a cold breeze: flacid.

What happened to stick out in my friend's mind was what happened to a friend of his: X.

The chat was hot, live like neon electricity, and X was wildly tripping the light fantastic to

several different beds with "straight" guys. Then came the fateful call, where everything seemed

normal and unordinary. I drastically exaggerate: everything was as smoothe as velvet and velour

jogging suits. X goes to guy's house (X is a woman, right?); apparently X is not a woman,

nothing close; guy beats him severely, because of his generous nature; a pistol happens to be

lying around, guy grabs it, and as they say, "X is history," or so my friend said. I could easily

read the subtext of, "He got what was coming to him." People should not carelessly maraud

around chat lines assuming identities of beautiful femmes, only to be shot down later. I think that

was my friend's moral message.

Personally, in my humbling experiences with my friend, it seems the black community is

filled with unprecedented homophobia, not excluding himself. He would unabashedly talk about

"sissies." This is the home grown euphemism for effeminate, gay, black men: sissy. Unlike the

more offensive "pansy," sissy lends itself to much deeper interpretation: one who acts effeminate
and is therefore worthy of derision and cultural exile. In fact, my friend was so vehemently

against such a lifestyle he would frequently embrace it himself, just to prove his point.

There was never really any further elaboration on the state of the assailant in that crime,

if I can call it that. Perhaps it was a moral lesson for everyone else to follow, sent down by God

as example to humanity. I find it difficult to imagine what joys were left to X's family, should he

have any. I have never had a friend of any kind who just died, or was murdered. The entire

reason behind it, the schema to the murderer's dialectic, was nothing but hatred. I am not

preparing an analysis of hatred, however. The problem is presenting hatred to the world, and

calling it hatred. The problem is looking at this thing, and not seeing something floating down

from space, or traveling between dimensions to rape and pillage us on this plane of existence.

This is something as natural and mundane as going to work, or filing taxes: just another variation

of our daily experience: hatred.

My dad has clearly expressed a disdain for the black population of Memphis, so have

some of my friends; I have my own qualms. The difference of culture does not offend me, but

the destructive nature of it does. Any culture can be destructive to its own adherents, such as the

culture of bigoted white southerners. I will not be touching on that, however. I would like to

explore black culture briefly, instead.

Back at the height of the marketing campaigns of the eighties and early nineties, there

was a push to start cloaking all of the brands within a funky fresh cellophane of the new "Hip

Hop." Such companies as Adidas, et al., were among the first to jump on the black stereotyped

bandwagon in a getaway to monetary freedom at the expense of an impressionable minority.

Soon there were more to follow, leading into the identity politics of the nineties; however, the

first to be snared in the corporate maze were these hip hopsters, zealously flinging themselves at

a cultural ideal which they had initially created, but now sold to the corporate megaliths.
 In retrospect, society allowed for such degeneration of culture, as it did for my own. The

subcultural gamut I run through (gay, male, white, middle-class, etc.) comes with its own

demons. Regardless of selling the essence of any of these, they have all ready been sold and

traded before (we grow up sold). I am not here to soap box anti-corporatism, yet I would like to

explore it as a cultural phenomenon and accomplice to the beneficent deeds visited on X.

As a homosexual male in the midsouth, I can say that there are tensions which I have

failed to experience, but that still find me through friends, etc. I have never been personally

victimized or demonized for who I am, and I consider myself lucky. X did experience such

things, he also paid dearly for them. I would say that it inevitably was a cultural

misunderstanding that lead to the extermination of X. Even within the umbrella culture of

"black," there are grave tensions between those who identify as homosexual, and those who do

not. Within these bubbles of subculture there is adequate room for conflict. Take into account the

schisms between various gangs of the same umbrella culture, but of differing subculture. There is

also such a schism when it comes to homosexual black men, and heterosexual black men.

I have heterosexual male friends, and we usually get along. I have not encountered a

heterosexual male that was violent toward me. What I have observed culturally, is that my

community finds itself on the back burner of the public eye: a somewhat taboo subject for the

major populus. It is not surprising that I read such horror stories like that of Scotty Weaver in

Mississippi, or someone before him being burned alive in gasoline and discarded tires. What

surprises me most is that I have such good heterosexual male friends, and almost no gay ones. If

there is hatred here, I do not know it. What I do know, is that there can exist a peace between us:

it is possible to live agreeably with each other.

My remorse comes in knowing that X may never realize this. X will forever hang like

smog over a dense city, reminding the citizens of the excrement they dump into the air (the
excrement we fill our lives with through sensationalist media, and propogandist expose). The

chatter of a thousand voices gossipping on that proverbial party line, the voices of choice singles

hooking up and spreading out the wealth of venerial disease and emotional distrust, vapors out

into the clear air, with no one listening but the assailant as he withdraws his weapon and sighs.

I have lost touch with my friend (probably for the better). I still wonder where he will go,

if he will ever end up on the wrong end of a gun one day. I would like to think I could change

that, that I could offer some kind of assistance to my community and his. We are not that

different in so many ways, yet there are lines enough that we can draw a distinction between us.

When we let those lines become too entrenched is when we can no longer see anything else but

our own image. Thus people put guns in their hands, bullets in others.