It was a voice, piercing and wailing, that seduced my eyes to the television screen. A song, “Someone Like You,” was the falsetto truth that made magic…became my introduction to a new self. Seeing Sylvester, I believed that I wasn’t as alone as I’d believed for much of my life.  After all, this was BET, and it was daytime. It wasn’t Donahue and the pathologizing, if sympathetic, demonization of the transgendered. And while my basketball games and bboy aspirations were not reflected in his song and dance, I believed that there was a profound kinship with this brotha/sistah who dared to live boldly and unapologetically, black and gay, at a time when I couldn’t even whisper my secrets to God. Sylvester was a goddess, a warrior, a griot, a storyteller… and my life would be changed for it seeing him that day. Sylvester was the gospel.

In 1986, knew little about Sylvester– an ambitious high school country-boy in Arkansas without access to the club scenes that had long celebrated the fancy dancing his voice projected– I did sense that Sylvester was two spirit.  I knew it watching the video, being both captivated and terrified at once– seduced by this gender bending neither/nor that was representative of the world I dreamed about without the rigid dictates for a masculinity I had ambivalently mastered. In my dreams, it was okay to be a man and love a man.  It was perfectly okay to love myself for loving as I was made to. So I was terrified about watching Sylvester because I wasn’t terrified at all. I identified with this non-normative presence who sang and danced with Debbie Allen as his unbothered co-star.  It made me believe that a world was possible where freedom, love, and expression were truly inalienable– even for colored boys moved to dance under disco balls to house music– their sweat and tears refracting a prism beyond their prison. Sylvester was rainbow. His music the gospel for angels fallen and falling.

The late 80s were hopeful and painful at once.  Having resolved that there might be a way to fast, purge, rebuke, kill the homosexual demon within, I developed an anxious relationship to music by Sylvester. It was joyous in the ways I imagined my heaven would be. It was sweat, bodies, and perversity in the way I was taught hell would be.  It was NYC Paradise Garage exaltation while I sat on Front Porches contemplating suicide. At my high school, someone I believed was a friend suggested that God hated fags, gave fags AIDS, and since years of fighting not to be a fag grew a futile aspiration, why wait for hell when in one? In my heaven, Sylvester sang for me and somebody danced and prayed the blues away. In my heaven somebody told me that I was always already all right… and I eventually grew to have faith in this reality.

Sylvester died on December 16, 1988 from AIDS related complications. My identificatory bond with this truth-teller was perhaps a foreshadowing. When you believe, as Sylvester did, that God loves you anyway– when you dare to bow to any false God suggesting otherwise, it’s quite a cross to bear. The fight is long, hard, and often lonely. Many of your black gay brothas believe you are too “out”, too truthful, too brave. They will, however, sleep with you.  They will even sometimes fall in love with you, if unable to stay. The nights grow lonely. The comfort of men posturing as angels overwhelms sense of futurity and safety. When you want safety now, when there’s been so little of it in your life, why wait for heaven? But there’s a price we pay for being bruised and broken.  Ten years after Sylvester died, after many a dancefloor shuffle to “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”, “Do Ya Wanna Funk”, “Dance”, or remixes of “You Are My Friend”, I’d accepted my fate as one infected with AIDS. It may sound twisted, but with AIDS came purpose, courage, and a commitment to no longer shaming myself for being myself– as imperfectly perfect as God created me. I, not unlike Sylvester, am a messenger now.  Today I celebrate 10 years of living beyond declarations of my death, even as I mourn the loss of a man experiencing his last days, 20 years ago.  Today my losses are acute, sharp, and incalculable, but there is a song; and there will be other songs. In these songs is a hope I hold as close to my heart as the beat itself.  And the beat goes on…

HIV moved me to come out of the shadows of hypermasculine secrecy to accept myself more fully– to share this heaven I imagined instead of shaming it.  The late 80’s and early 90’s represented the deaths of many of my warriors, mentors, and saints:  Melvin Dixon, Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs, Assotto Saint, Essex Hemphill among them. There’s a heaven on earth, and I’ll die testifying about it.  It involves beautiful black people, not dying shamefully, in the ways we do in Sub-Saharan Africa or inner cities in America, but black people, alongside our allies, lauding so many of our fallen heroes as griots and shaman who hold something powerful in their truth. “The meek shall inherit the earth.”  Today, in my humility, with a great deal more hopefulness given medical advances with HIV, I have to continue to hold no shame about telling my story and the stories of the men who’ve come before me.  I’m all the more committed to my truth– even as living this way has cost me family members, relationships, and opportunities I would secure if a “good boy” willing to just shut up and be normal like everyone else. I continue to tell my truth, even as there are men and women afraid to touch me for their ignorance and fear of contagion. The heaven I speak and dream of is not a normal place– it is embellished with the music, dance, and freedom people experience when dancing to Sylvester even today. To be sure, I am no Sylvester… I am just a man moved by his truth– the delicate resilience of his life in full color– to be more fully myself. Change is not the rhythm of the status quo. Change is a pitch, sharp and shameless, unapologetically joyful about its journeying to heaven.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.