Crossroads

A Coming Out Story

A few weeks ago I went to a rally in Crown Heights with my dear friend and roommate Zach. There were tensions brewing in the community between Jews and Blacks, tensions borne of housing disputes and mutual angst and a Black man who was pushed out of his wheelchair by a Hassidic Jewish man.

I’ll be writing more about this in greater detail in an upcoming book, but to skip ahead, Zach and I went to keep the peace.

We’d heard about the Crown Heights Riots in the 90s and we wanted to demonstrate that you could stand for justice without demonizing any of the communities in conflict. We’ve been living together for 7 years now as a Black-Jewish unit and we know that such things are possible.

We’re even starting a non-profit called Sanctuary: Healing Home for the Black and Jewish Diaspora in Brooklyn to help support the community. This is just what we do.

So we went to the rally and he held a sign that said ‘I stand with the Black community,’ and I held a sign that said ‘I stand with the Jewish community.’

I micro-dosed beforehand because I knew how I could be emotionally triggered by folks yelling all kinds of insults at each other, or even at me.

Which is exactly what happened.

One Black woman saw my sign and accused me of being anti-black.

And as the breath from her lungs transformed into the foul rhetoric that left her mouth, the sound of her words landed deep under the cavity of my chest, down into my gut and into my nervous system, triggering a deep teenage wound I forgot I possessed.

Suddenly, tears welled up in my eyes and I remembered the few Black kids in school who alienated me and accused me of acting white just because I loved to read.

Suddenly I was angry and although the psilocybin I’d taken hours before helped quickly alchemize that anger into sorrow, into arguing with her on a purely intellectual basis, into doing my damndest not to curse her out, the truth is that I really wanted to.

The truth is that I wanted to tell her to fuck off, to never talk to me like that ever again, that she didn’t know who the fuck I was, and that if she ever crossed me again, there would be hell to pay.

And the part of me that wanted to do this, it must be said, isn’t evil. Dark, yes, but not evil.

She understands that purity is the laughing stock of modernity and that clean, nice, white-washed sterility is but one of many infinite realms we get to travel as human beings — and sometimes that realm is an incarceration; sometimes it is not the mark of enlightenment. Sometimes it does the work of a straitjacket, and sometimes it has slowly choked the life out of me for the sake of a false innocence.

I did not say what I wanted to say to the woman that day at the crossroads in Crown Heights but something else sprouted in me nonetheless. The woman’s words, foul as they were, planted something new in me which was the awareness, the absolute conviction, that I would never let anyone tell me who I was ever again.

And that night I went to a club called House of Yes and I danced all the blue fire raging inside of me that day and I caught a woman watching me in the midst of my revelry. The assemblage of the day’s earlier events combined with her look and her aura was an initiation. I made sure to get her number.

And later that night, I came out as bisexual.

In reality, I’ve been bi all my life. I was a tomboy who played sports and loved comic books and preferred hot wheels over barbies. The trend was crystal clear. But I grew up in an extremely homophobic environment. Even as I write this I’m aware that somehow this piece may find its way to my parents. But the anger and the rage that sprouted in me at the crossroads in Crown Heights laid waste to the fear I’ve had of their disapproval.

So in a way I’m thankful to the woman who called me out and I’m indebted to the field of anger and rage she invoked in me. Anger and rage are also kinds of love; and I was taught that perfect love casts out fear.

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