Cosmos

CW: Mentions of Childhood Sexual Assault, Pedophilia and Loss

I was 15 the first time I kissed a girl full on with tongue. It was like we exploded into each other. All starry orange burst, hope, lust, nacho cheese sunflower seed breath and fear. Our tongues moved like our hands wanted to but I think we both knew if we touched with anything else we would get stuck like starfish on peoples’ faces. And someone would walk in to our hands cementing on each other and our mothers would be called and everyone would talk and we would be asked if something had “happened” to us to make us touch each other like that. We would be separated like they do in interrogation rooms, we would be whupped, we would save ourselves, we would choose the less active response. We would say, “She made me do it.”

They would say, “Where’d you see that done? Someone has been touching you, hunh? Is that why you’re like this? This can’t be you. Not my daughter.”

I think the girl I kissed knew this but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she wasn’t afraid at all. I was.

I used to go behind our shed with other family members my age. We’d look at each others’ bodies. We were curious. Sometimes we used flashlights to see inside. We experimented, humped, asked why that thing poked out like that or why hair grows here and not there? How does it feel? We never really talked about why we did this in secret. We just knew we had to.

When I was 7, I was molested by my babysitter. Her name was Roxane. I told my mom and the community rallied around me/ us. We didn’t call the police. That was not our way. I stopped going to her house, everyone in the neighborhood knew what she’d done and she lost her babysitting gig because of it. We also found out that she had been sexually assaulted by a family member. Roxane was 17.

When I was 18, I got a tattoo dedicated to my deceased uncle on my right shoulder. It said, “Rest In Peace Timothy” and had prayer hands below the writing. Tim was killed by a drunk driver while crossing the street when he was 6. The driver ran a red light that afternoon and Tim died a few hours later. While at my grandmother’s funeral service two years ago, his older brother told a story about how he’d seen Tim’s intestines spill out on the street while the emergency responders tried to push them back in.

When I was 8, our house burned to the ground. I drive by the area often. I don’t know how I feel about it. The house was rebuilt and painted in the same colors. Maybe Roxane still lives down the street. Maybe there’s leftover cells from my uncle’s dying body on that street. Maybe there’s still blood on the steps from when my forehead was sliced open. Maybe I am still that little girl seeing and smelling fire everywhere and wanting to put it out while simultaneously wanting everything to burn.

Two months after getting the tattoo, I cut my hair off. My mom was taking a bath when I showed it to her. She looked me in the eye and said, “Are you gay now? It’s cute, don’t get me wrong. But all that hair you cut off, you have that big tattoo and you’re skinny. If you didn’t look so cute, I would think you were gay.”

The first club I went to was The Crib in San Francisco on Harrison Street. I was 19. It was dirty and beautiful and irritating and very gay. One Black guy came up to me while I was dancing alone and said, “That’s my man. And he doesn’t want that” (pointing to my body). I wasn’t interested in either person, but I remember thinking folks probably came up to them all the time trying to be a third. Especially straight women. I wished them well and kept it movin’. (We can talk about the way gay men nonconsensually touch Black femmes/ nonmens bodies in spaces and vice versa but this is not that conversation.)

I’m not straight and never considered coming out. I didn’t think I owed it to anyone to do so. Being queer is something that feels so close to me, so connected to who I am internally. But for the longest time I didn’t engage with women because I worried that my trauma made me this way. Not because I had a judgment about what other gay and queer folks did but because I had experienced complicated things with my own assault and they would come out whenever I wasn’t in control. I want so very much to be in control all of the time. And, it’s killing me.

My grandma was an alcoholic. When my mom was a kid, my grandma’s friends would watch her periodically. One group of caretakers were two Black women who happened to be a couple. One day, my mom spent the night at their house and they all slept in the same bed. They only had one. We grew up religious, and at that time, my grandma was Seventh Day Adventist (she was kicked out of the church for having a baby out of wedlock). My grandma didn’t like that they shared a bed and never let my mom stay with them again.

The story began to shift as time went by and it would be shared every now and again. (Sometimes the story of my sexual assault would be hinted to as well.) Conversations about what women were not supposed to do with each other, how demented and unfulfilling it was when they tried and how they needed to “just get a man” or “stop acting like a man” were constant. Though the couple hadn’t touched my mom outside of brushing her hair and helping her into her pajamas, the gist was that they had done something wrong. It was spoken as if the couple were pedophiles, as if they had deliberately enticed my mom, a six year old child, into their bed. The reality was that they were poor, were doing their friend a favor and saw no harm in sharing a bed with a child they were taking care of.

I believe in Black children and always always want them to be protected. They deserve that. And we must be honest about when things are not about protection and more about fear, exaggeration, violence and phobias.

On January 1st, 2016, while sharing a meal of macaroni and cheese, baked chicken, mashed potatoes, greens and corn, I asked my mom, cousin and grandma what they thought about queerness. Though I grew up with two gay uncles renting out our basement (before the fire), I noticed the separateness of their space and ours. The underlying points of not being seen physically touching one another, the loudness of quick kisses, the reminders to not do “that” here. “Casual”, violent and unrelenting homophobia still colors our interactions and perceptions.

Some families and communities are tolerant of gay/ queer folks because they have a previous investment, relationship and/or history. This investment happens before they came “out”. So family/ community is then able to choose into not seeing/ un-seeing certain things. They can relate to the person that someone was “before” without truly interacting with who they are “now”. The queer/ gay person is then confronted with their former self, that is also often and always homophobic because that is the only way to “survive” in a homophobic and queerantogonistic family, to kill the parts of ourselves that we want most distance (and also closeness to and) from.

The second time I kissed the same girl, I saw Roxane’s face and screamed. I ran out of her room and didn’t come back for another year. She put my things in a bag and brought them to me at school the next day. I hated her for it. I got over it eventually and we’d kiss whenever no one was around. I liked the jumping into her, the loop of falling into and continuing. I only know this beautiful loop now, this revisiting, this honor because I choose to honor this part of myself.

When “queer” and “pedophile” become violent synonyms thrown out at family gatherings, across dominoes games, between the things said and unsaid, when they are wielded after as lifestyle judgements and reminders, methods of control, moments to display hurt, of re-telling untruths, we are not building a process that holds all of us at the center. We are not building languages that build our capacity to name our experiences. We are not protecting our babies. We are not building consent spaces. We are regurgitating storylines that make us all into monsters. We are uplifting spaces where we cannot name our harms fully.

Everytime I touch another queer person, I time travel. Sometimes the time travel is fun, sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes we touch cotton and blood and my tongue splits open. Sometimes we try to reach the stars and fail. Intimacy is a tough thing. All your shit comes up, all those blocks, all the things you don’t want to say out loud. They show up on the body. Our wants, our needs, our questions. They curve our spines, make us inhale and exhale, make us sigh in release and sometimes impatient. We cry, get sad, get angry, try not to feel.

A thing can be a thing and another thing can be a thing and they can both be things without being things together.

Even now, I reflect on my childhood sexual assault. Did it happen like that? Was there some underlying homophobia or perception I had that influenced my experience? Did Roxane really do all of that? Or is it that I was taught women/ girls do not touch each other “like that”?

A big thank you to my mom for believing me. To the folks who have time travelled. A quick notice to the questions dancing in between. And to my grandma “Bubbie”, for listening and reminding me that we do not always have to have the answers.

I miss you everyday.