Yes, it was at the root of my mother’s concern and to some degree her motherly pin pricking occasional discounting and homophobia.
Pills, Cash and Freedom
I came out at 18 after a tumultuous relationship with a high school best friend skidded from best friends to romantic partners to his being unsure. I, wisely, sent him to our high school counselor who was very progressively doing LGBT counseling and groups. She told me that I shouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t gay. That sent me into a dramatic tailspin that included the worse suicide attempt ever. I was making a lot of money at a sales associate at A&S Department store, like sometimes $1000 a week. Banks pursued me and gave me checking, savings, credit cards and a credit line.
I went and bought every over the counter sleep aid I could, crushed them into orange juice, left my wallet and keys at home and wandered into the park to have a very Olivia deHavilland end.
BUT
I had never taken even cold medicine, or had a serious alcoholic drink or done drugs. So about a half an hour into this meshuggas, I started to feel the pills. I freasked out!!!!! And actually took myself to the hospital a few blocks away.
Yes, I got the pleasure of getting my stomach pumped.
The doctor explains to my mother after I blubber out the whole sordid tale that I’m not suicidal, I’m just not getting enough support for my sexuality. But now that I’m out……….
Prescient Family Counselor
Ironically, about a 5 years earlier when my parents had a divorce that involved not just the police but a SWAT team and a multi-state fleeing, car accident and gas station robbery—-when it all calmed down we went to family counseling with a sensational counselor. I’ll throw in here that one of my mothers’ deepest insights and wisdoms, from her having majored in psychology in college, was a healthy respect and willingness to deal with problems with capable mental health and family technicians/psychologists.
This one, after counseling us, teaching us meditation and communication techniques, told my mother several insights about me. One of them was that I would be a prodigious writer. The second was not to be surprised if I wasn’t entirely straight in spite of dating girls, having had girlfriends, etc..
Racism, Misandry, Bias, Homophobia on the World Menu, Kyle. Stick With Trim
My mother, when I was 18, frantic at my 18 year old suicide blunder/attempt finds my journal, reads it, gets the full story and understands my turmoil. I come home from the hospital and my mother was at 6s and 7s. She finally explains to me that being Black is trial enough in the world, in the USA. That being a Black male is going to put me in more exponential danger throughout my lifetime.
Being BLACK, MALE and GAY. Oh, that’s the trifecta of painting a target on my back and having, essentially a fucked up—-to more difficult—- life.
She recommended I “not do it, stop it”.
I looked at her and my other family members and went in my bedroom to pack. I was unwilling to compromise my identity for anyone and was completely comfortable, thanks to my work and money, to cut the wholesale lot—-family, boyfriend, even high school—-off.
Realizing that I was not raised to be someone to bend (years later my mother said she and my father had built me to be too strong/tough—-that she should’ve built better trapdoors into my psyche to control me. Yeah, I grew up with Emma Frost.) my family tries to rally support to “tolerate me”.
Divergence: I Am Sovereign Unto Myself
Now, this is where I diverge from “Gay World”. I say diverge because I’ve spent well over a decade teaching LGBTSGL workshops so I’ve spent literally tens of thousands of hours listening to, questioning, hearing the experiences of LGBTSGL folk, including men of color.
My willingness to strike out on my own is incredibly unique.
I have always had several mantras in my head, since I was a child.
“I am sovereign unto myself.”
I’ve always known, felt, thought since I can remember thinking.
I do not yield, capitulate, kowtow, kneel for anyone. Ever. It’s not being emotionally stubborn or obstinate. It’s having a line where my Identity, my Self, is not up for control by others. I have been in situations where I was being physically tortured, threatened, beaten, even in jail—-where all “hope” was lost and my choice was to simply surrender.
If I do so in such a situation, say Yes. Know that I’m lying. I’m thinking No. Just kill me. lol
Making Dem Gay Boy Moves
So now I’m 18 and I leave high school exactly 3 months before graduation because due to doing a year in New Jersey, all my credits won’t transfer—-so I would be allowed to walk graduation but have to return for the Fall semester.
Fuck you, High School. No, thank you. I control my destiny.
What are the alternatives?
And they explained to me that one of the teachers who I knew in my periphery ran something called a GED Program. I go to his office, he sends me from Brooklyn to another school in lower Manhattan to be tested. I get a perfect score—-on what I now professionally know to be the TABE and Pre-GED test.
The teacher pulls me aside and offers me a deal after talking to me: they will sign me up for the GED test in a couple of months, I’ll get a registration postcard, go, take the test, and return to them with the results. It would be a waste of time for me to come there 4 days a week, especially since I’m working (possibly making more than him) already.
I work, I take the GED, scoring 3 points shy of a perfect score—-which I didn’t realize for years until I actually taught GED classes myself and saw the whole scoring system! lol
Nods to my sexuality at home include my mother giving me several books given to her by gay male friends in Alcoholics Anonymous. The older men try to talk to me but they’re like….40+. Ewwwwwwwwwwww.
Porn, Strippers, Stripping And That NYC Night Life
I put a Chippendales calendar on my bedroom wall. I am rebel, hear me roar!
I buy about 100+ gay porn mags—-for the stories, no, really. Then I see an interview with Joan Rivers about the vapidness of porn and how non-fiction is so exciting because you can learn about other lives. I actually dumped all 100 magazines into the incinerator and go to Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue and 8th Street and start buying not just every gay book but I also start at A assuming that while I’m working full time to some point I’ll get to college so I’ll need to know this stuff.
I also start going out to night clubs. I even cage danced for awhile.
My family is somewhere between befuddled and shocked by my gradual transformation into an adult who while still introverted, is charting his own way.
Upstate University Where I Teach THEM A Thing Or Two
I still didn’t drink (I didn’t until I was 25, taught by a professor, mentor, whom I TAed for, Carlene Hatcher Polite), I’ve still never done drugs but I’m young and cuter than I know so there is lots of safe sexual experimentation. No love. But between my books explaining everything and the wild night life, I answer not only all my question but 245 of yours too.
I get to university upstate, I do my years there then move back to NYC. At college I was out because I arrived Out. I arrived Samantha from Sex & The City Out. But I’m 21 and they’re all—-younger—-testing waters, tentative—- so I mainly date men 10+ years older than me off campus as I have my own apartment by sophomore year.
But friends corral me to do Sex & Sexuality workshops with a trans friend. I do a dozen. Then I start writing for the newspaper and magazine and chapbooks and submitting work all over the world that gets published. Then I start writing not simply erotica but very sexually open/open sexuality writing. I become very, very, very popular in the whole city and start doing readings, paid readings!, and events and such.
Uh…….Family Homophobias, Kyle? Focus!
I layer in all of this because I think it’s important to understand that my coming out story is rather unique in the sense that it wasn’t dependent upon what my family thought of me. This also affected the relationships I had in colleges because I was in many ways—-30 years old at 21—-I’d lived years of being out and comfortable and directly being myself. Then I did a lot of public work, where not hundreds, but thousands of people knew me, my face, were in workshop audiences, readership. I wouldn’t call it “famous” but I was popular/known.
I offer the last bit because I have a sense of myself, internally and I also have a sense of when people/an audience is talking to KYLE. It feels like people are talking to a hologram slightly to the left of my shoulder.
Honestly I have pat answers, clever quips and anecdotes and a force field to about 99% of the stuff that comes at me because I learned to reinforce my sense of self internally in those 5–10 years from coming out, going to colleges and coming back to NYC.
Thanksgiving and Family Homophobia
Eventually the winding road of my professional interests leads me to working for an LGBT organization as a Youth Coordinator and Men’s Group Facilitator. The holidays are coming up and I’m thinking that perhaps it would be nice to maybe deepen and strengthen a romantic relationship by taking him to Thanksgiving with my family—-my mother has remarried and moved from living between NYC and Pennsylvania to Charlotte, NC. I bring this up as maybe I’m allowing distance to be a wall between my relationships. Throughout the years my mother has visited, met and talked to boyfriends, consoled me about break ups but I’m getting towards serious considerations. And my stepfather’s daughter is married with a child and planning on being there for the holidays. Big family time, I’m thinking.
My mother, having found Jesus and become a Pastor (I could say something vicious about her using her high end psychological manipulative capabilities for easier targets, when she convinced people of her spiritual powers to heal, being her guide. But we’ll give the scoreboard the veracity of truth on that one.) but I haven’t really tested the Jesus Waters with this level of deep engagement.
She says that my visiting as a couple probably isn’t a good idea.
Excuse me?
(Now I’ve been out for well over 15 years by this time.)
I’m thinking we’re going to have some Bibble laden discussion about reservations and how though the house is big and I’ve jokingly assured her that the last thing I want to do with a boyfriend is get freaky with my parents/family 10 feet away.
She deflects and says that my stepfather wouldn’t be comfortable.
It’s such a deft deflection and attack that I—-me!—-Kyle!—-am speechless for a minute.
(Now picture this. I’m in a huge office, it’s a Saturday having this discussion in the back office area, awaiting a 70+ year old teacher who I’m to have a lunch meeting with. The front door is all the way down the other side of the floor so he comes in. He gets closer. and closer. He later said he stopped in his tracks and politely went and sat in the outer area.)
I was cursing my mother the natural fuck out.
How dare you?!!!
How dare you think you have the right to in anyway minimize me, my Identity, my relationships for—-and I go into all kinds of detail about my stepfather—-10 days out of jail for selling crack to an undercover cop when he met her at an AA meeting; having not worked for SEVEN years as my mother had the exorbitant resources to support them in a glamorous life—-until all the money was gone; they had both lived in sin—-married to others that took years of untangling; the hypocrisy of the whole religiosity bullshit and “power to heal”; and I accept her bullshit men choices, yes, including my own father, and have never banned her from my home—-even when she was contemplating divorce from this, in a long line of, boobs.
I went the natural fuck off.
I explained to her that she and my whole family (quite a few had moved South) were on a Time Out, King Baby was putting her in the corner. I was cutting them off. Don't’ call me, don’t write me—-I was taking a 9 month break—-the gestation period of birth—-away from them. It was time for THEM to get clear and right about themselves in all of their messy dysfunction to not even the slightest sleights towards me or I’d see them next at funerals, if I bothered to attend. And I hung up the phone.
Dr. Lawson, he’s dead now, came into my office with his cane and fedora, a dapper dandy, and chuckled, he wouldn’t want to get on my bad side if that’s the hurtling I would put onto my mother.
My deeper ire was that her knowing I was the Youth Coordinator of an LGBT program, I had often discussed with her my work, my curriculum and the how I had to be both a mentor and role model. In my capacity as that Out position, I could not abide by any form of bias in my own life.
Space on My Back
There is none.
For none of you.
I once bit a dog back after it bit me. It never bit me again.
You must, with a steely resolve, smash your bullies as hard as you can, whether it’s verbally or physically.
You must draw your line.
Your line is your life, your soul, because those closest to you will try and cut you.
Years after the verbal holiday onslaught, it was terminal-dying time and I was in Charlotte trying to staunch the emotional and financial insanity that my family was wrecking around my mothers’ impending death.
They tried it. A coupe of times. My mother asked “When was i going to meet a nice girl?”
I asked: “As a glutton to get to 250lbs, a five way bypass, out of control diabetes, no teeth, bald, with a leg amputated, should you really be checking other people’s lives? I have put my life on hold for months to be here for you, motherfucking check yourself, check your mouth, check your mind, check your ideas about me. You’re dying. Don’t go out a fool.”
My stepfather came for me a couple of times to “slipping ooopsies”—-calling men faggots and such around me.
Finally after 6 months of his bullshit, I pointed out that while a GED at 45 was an admirable accomplishment in his life, it wasn’t a accomplishment. He had amounted to nothing and all of his wannabe business/entrepreneurial bullshit were the soupy meanderings of a formerly drug addled brain. That he wasn’t my biological father nor had he been a father to his own daughters. Abandoning one to foster care when her mother died of AIDs, coincidentally in my cousins’ apartment building—-who then called my mother for help/resources and they realized it was his daughter—-my mother was willing to launch in with lawyers and adopt her—-he said no and let her go into the mires of foster care. I told my mother then, 10 years before she died, that he told her in that moment who he was. He was a financial idiot/mess and has since gone bankrupt and is in deserved poverty.
Don’t ever fucking come for me.
Race, Sexuality and Sex & Gender
Race & Sexuality, Un
It is difficult. It is more complicated. I’m constantly, when not recognized by others, tasked with coming out to the judgments and banal and puerile questions and biases of people, most pointedly Black people. I have a lesbian cousin—-the one who lived in the building of the divine coincidence of my stepfather’s daughter——but she’s fractured. By that I mean she’s been on Welfare for 30+ years and mentally ill so she hasn’t held professional, political or volunteer positions as I have that have pointedly been about LGBTSGL issues, teaching, support systems, legalities, etc.. Her lesbianism is therefore subjectively personal and not as open to exploration with far reaching issues in the body politic.
A lot of my family, when I stayed in Charlotte, was on the edge or wanting to discuss Sexuality, mine, another distant cousin’s sexuality—-he cut off my cousins/his parents too. I can’t blame him.
His mother asked me to reach out to him when I got back to NYC. I did. He didn’t reply. I just hope I recognize him before you know…I accidentally fuck him or something. lol
My family is riddled with alcoholics, drug addicts, fools, con artists, pedophiles and convicts. And a few good folk.
But that is true of families of color—-it is like the tsunami of system racism and bias crashes into families. And at the same time the lack of body Agency that slavery brought—-sexual exploitation, also created a puritanically sexual conservatism and narrow perspective among Black and Latino folk. Black bodies were then further oppressed by having the press of the Black Church as the only social haven so in order to be protected you had to subsume your identity to it.
I often teach/ask in workshops what it means to Black and Latino men to sit in pews and have religious leaders yell at you as abominations. Is the other succor worth the rancor you must swallow at the tip of the pulpit? (All puns and imagery intended.)
While we didn’t grow up particularly religious, my mother and stepfather deeply immersed themselves in religion as a compensator to losing so much money and still wanting sway over large numbers of people.
In most of my workshops with a heavy minority audience, I spend a lot of time explaining basic shit, validating sexuality. Lots of Black LGBT folk think White people have somehow Super Cock imposed homosexuality into generations of Blacks and Latinos. Or that one is choosing some sort of sinful deviance. Or that being sexually abused as children “turned” them.
It’s a mess from about 50% of Black and Latino folk.
I had a roommate accuse me of being a homosexual. I was 30. And had railed several delicious young men throughout the years in my bedroom…it never occurred to me that her uber religiosity had judgment connected. Probably because like my family members, included my mother, I had cash, resources to share.
Two of my older cousins tried to get me to come over to their house because they had “questions”.
I demurred. I bill $150 an hour when consulting. I don’t do private audience “sexuality talks” where people wait to pick at my psyche. Yes, I diverge that hard. I’ll suggest a website, a book, even a movie. But I am not yours for dissection.
Yes, I have been reduced, treated reductively by Black people, coworkers, friends even (no longer) because of my perceived sexuality.
Black & Latino LGBT folk have lied about me, been hateful, maligned me (often online) because I’m Out, reasonably happy and yes, comfortably Out. Freedom in my Outness and my professional work has given me something that I don't sit around or stew on, like some of my clients and friends do, in a paranoid depression about my sexuality.
The trade off is what the trade is. I accept reality.
The Church of the Poisoned Mind.
Race & Sexuality, Deux
“But, Kyle, what about the White folk?”
More than 50% are “okay” whether straight or LGBT but there’s still race and the fact that I’m a big Black man—-who will curse you the natural fuck out in front of your grandmother and the Queen of England if you come for me. Most are cool, not because I’m such a wonderful paragon but because they didn’t get hit as hard with the tsunami of systemic racism in their families so they already accept or tolerate me as the Other, so my groin Otherness, is just another odd component of the Black Transformer.
There are though of course White LGBT folk who just love the BBC—-Big Black Cock niggers like me—-and offer me all kinds of diseases and perversions and low level acts of debasement.
The Church of the Poisoned Mind Redux.
Sex & Gender
How then am I treated as Man (who is brown) and what projections of masculinity or expectations are there upon me?
Conversely, because I am an only child, my parents worked hard to enforce ideas of not simply manhood but masculinity into me. My mother teaching me how to box and her and my biological father drilling chess and thinking and personal fortitude into me. But my eventual stepfather’s entry to my mothers’ life happened purposefully and usefully on all three of our parts as I chose to go to colleges in upstate NY versus PA or NYC, where we had a house an co-op.
By all three of us profiting—-I got my freedom—-it cost me directly my trust fund for colleges so I paid for it myself; my stepfather got complete and utter support by simply becoming a partner/companion to my mother and her utter slave, dependent upon her every whim; my mother got a slave without options in my stepfather who had no choice but to submit to her controls and her whims, something I think she realized she hadn’t had with my father or other husbands.
But I too profited, because I dodged the bullet that Black and Latino mothers project onto their LGBTSGL sons—-that we become their devoted, sexless/sexuality invisibility vassals. I did not fully realize and appreciate this until that terminal time in Charlotte and NYC when I experienced some of my stepfather’s vitriol and i realized it was because I was free. He’d spent nearly 20 years of his, tied to my mother, tied to her controls and now she was passive aggressively dying before him and leaving him holding the bag of a mortgage upside down house, medical bills, etc..
I was dismissive of his pettiness and foolishness as long as possible because I realized, he too was dead/dying, just still breathing, and that his life was pre-destined to have to keep peddling a broken financial bicycle that my mother had used the tires off of.
My Lived Life
In a form of twisted elegance, my mother was prescient in that race, sex and sexuality would dramatically shift my life, my future, but at the same time, it has also been my liberation. I wrote prodigiously beforehand and I’ve multiplied that output 1000 fold, you can just Google me—-books, articles, blogs, videos, TV shows—-thousands of items. That funnel and developed faculty was churning and producing yes, before I came out, several novels written in high school, but the confluence of writing, sexuality, teaching, workshops has exploded beyond even my own expectations and reckoning.
My family of course had some genuine fear for how the world would view and treat me, would this confluence draw harm to me, especially as a Black male and artist, amidst all of the projections of homophobia, bias, etc.. And there have been bruises along the way. But I will tell you an open secret: most of the attacks and crimes against me have come from LGBTSGL folk, men. Whether its been cruel supervisors at LGBT organizations or callous lovers, my liberation often rankles those who perhaps struggle back and forth with their closetedness, their Black and Latino families.
I once told a paramour about my courage in telling my family that I would not tolerate their mere tolerating of me, that it was either effort at acceptance or nothing at all. I thought it would example me as a man who has struggled against even his own roots to live his personal truth. Instead I came to understand that he was terrified at that strength, that ability to walk away, from perhaps even him one day—-which, yes, I did. To be weak, obsessive and controlled by a fear of rejection, what he feels in the closet, in not being out, was the polar opposite in me.
Ideology + L:iberation= Power is the theme of a book I’ve been working on dissecting this personal struggle and the intersectionality of race and sex.
I am sovereign unto myself.
It is very, very costly to me and yes, to others because I’m not longer available to the old paradigms of race, sexuality, sex, gender, control, oppression.
I know that my parents wished other, something else, “normal”, for me because of the challenges I have and will continue to face in a world of narrow mindedness. But they also feared me, a liberated me, because these new dimensions put me outside of their parameters of control. I watch so many clients, family, friends, ex-lovers so controlled by what others think of them.
I consider what you think but I do not bake it into my Identity and some revile me for that.
BUT
“God help you if you are a phoenix and you dare to rise up from the ash
a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy
while you are just flying past.”
— Ani DiFranco
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
#TheKylePhoenixShow
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