Reflecting on the Challenges of Telling Femme, Black, Queer Stories

On Sundays, my mother dropped off my younger brother and me at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and we’d spend the afternoon exploring the exhibits. It was the late 1980s. I was ten, my brother was seven, and dozens of other Black kids our ages were also left largely unsupervised in the museum for hours on end. I made instant, temporary friends with whoever was around, playing hide-and-seek in the rock cave or freeze tag up and down the wide spiral staircase. It was fun to be part of a pack.

Then the pack turned on me. I remember exactly where. I was walking past the Giant Water Clock, a 26.5-foot tall Rube Goldberg contraption that relayed the time of day by filling sixty thin glass disks for the minutes and twelve large bulbs for the hours with dark blue water. A bunch of kids were hanging out nearby, and a girl—maybe eleven or twelve—asked me loudly, “Why you walkin’ like that?”

Her voice was accusatory with a hint of disgust. The edge at the end of her question signaled to everyone within earshot that she was about to go in—I was gonna get clowned. I froze. The loose gathering of children, once engaged in more than a dozen separate conversations, found a common focus and turned into a crowd.

I tried to think of a quick response that would put my inquisitor on the defensive. What came to mind was the truth: I walked funny because I was born pigeon-toed and refused to wear my corrective shoes as a toddler. So I walked on my toes without my heels touching the ground. When I stood still, I often looked like a ballerina on pointe.

I was no stranger to the merciless teasing of childhood; she wasn’t the first to call me out on how I walked. But those insults were purely observational—like wisecracks about ashy skin or chapped lips—and didn’t suggest anything deeper about me as a person. But at the Children’s Museum, it was about more than my stride.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like a girl. Why you switchin’ like a girl?”

I didn’t have an answer. Even if I did, no one would have heard it over the roar of laughter crashing in from every direction. For years, I blamed myself because I believed it was my responsibility to mask my “girly” mannerisms. My failure to do so invited ridicule. This, I thought, was a natural law like gravity.

What I needed to know was how effeminate Black men could move through society without shame, without concealment, and without accepting a fate of victimhood. But I couldn’t find examples in my everyday life or even reflected back at me on movie and television screens.

*

When I was fourteen years old, after years of denial, I privately accepted that I was gay, but many people had figured that out long before I did. This wasn’t a case of clever detective work. I unintentionally sent out signals about my sexuality by behaving in a manner commonly considered effeminate.

I rolled my eyes and pursed my lips to show annoyance or disapproval. If I was talking and got excited, my wrists became loose hinges that let my hands flap and twirl freely. My style of dress could accurately be classified as fastidious. I favored silk and rayon shirts in bold colors. In the checkout line at the grocery store, I pressured my mother to buy me Soap Opera Digest whenever actors from Another World or The Bold and the Beautiful were on the covers. I didn’t join the other boys in their locker-room talk about sports, cars, and girls. My trajectory was unignorable: This boy is turning into a sissy.

In high school, I felt I had to course correct, especially when affirming one’s masculinity became an obsession among the boys my age. It made no difference that all of us were juveniles and most of us were virgins. We created a blood sport out of spouting macho brags and striking each other down with crude jokes. The message was always the same: I’m a man, and you’re a faggot.

Hardly anyone back then hesitated to use a homophobic slur, including me. That was one of the twisted aspects of these heterosexual competitions: They forced queer kids to play on a toxic field of self-hate. I insulted other boys for their suppossedly gay behavior to avoid being called out for my own.

Whenever I was asked to offer an opinion about television shows and movies, I was especially wary. I remember watching In Living Color during my freshman year with friends from my high school football team. We were five boys eating pizza in front of the glow of a boxy, big-screen TV when the latest installment of the recurring sketch, “Men on Films,” began to play. As the fictitious film critics Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather lisped, shrieked, and snapped their way through their punch lines, I forced myself to laugh harder than anyone. My friends mocked those flamboyant queers, and I matched their disgust. I couldn’t afford to remain quiet, and I certainly couldn’t ask what was funny about these cartoonish stereotypes to begin with.

And when praising Menace II Society and Larenz Tate’s performance in the film, I hid my crush on Tate. Same went for my crushes on John Leguizamo in Carlito’s Way and Darius McCrary in Family Matters and Andrew Keegan in Party of Five. My infatuations came with PG-13 fantasies and a guilty knowledge I could barely contain. The mention of their names sent a burning spike through my chest.

Then there were the characters that made my skin crawl: shrill, mincing, effeminate Black men who were little more than laughingstocks. Lamar Latrell in the Revenge of the Nerds movies; Hollywood Montrose in Mannequin; and Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather, reviewing movies with two snaps up during their recurring skits on In Living Color. I couldn’t deny that some of their mannerisms lived in me, and I resented it. If they were clowns worthy of ridicule, so was I.

Without a doubt in my mind, staying in the closet was essential to my well-being. I’d seen what happened to the femme Black boys a few years older than me. They were ostracized and bullied. They didn’t conform and caught hell for it. I scrubbed and cleaved the effeminate parts of who I naturally was from the persona I shared with the wider heterosexual world. I reigned in my hands when I spoke. I mimicked the posture of straight guys. I grew careful with my eyes, mindful of where I placed my gaze and for how long.

I grew careful with my eyes, mindful of where I placed my gaze and for how long.

*

One summer, I returned from Georgetown University and spent the off months cutting grass in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. My coworkers were older men weathered by hard labor, hard drinks, and hard times. They considered me one of their own because when on the clock, I cursed, joked, complained, and worked my ass off just like them. Never mind that I spent my free time hooking up with guys my own age that I met on Gay.com. Throughout college and my entire twenties, I grew into a sexually active gay man more adept in the performance of butchness.

Code-switching as a gay man among straights was familiar to me; I’d been code-switching as a Black man among white people for my entire work life. In both instances, the goal was to make the dominant population comfortable with my existence, at the very least, and with my advancement, at best.

For example, in my midtwenties, I worked as a temp assistant for a Hollywood studio, and casual biases were at play. Being too Black, too gay, or too effeminate could cost me money, and I’m acutely all three. So I started using my first name, Charles, because I wasn’t getting selected for assignments when I was listed as Rasheed. At lunch, I pretended that I loved The Office instead of my favorite TV comedy at the time, Everybody Hates Chris. If I shared stories about what I did over the weekend, I changed the settings. Instead of admitting that I met friends for drinks at the Abbey, the most widely known gay bar in Los Angeles then and now, I’d claim that I was somewhere the straights adored like Urth Caffé.

I look back on how I presented myself—the energy it took, the double consciousness it demanded, the lies of omission and commission—and I wish I had been more honest and brave. But I believe I wouldn’t have gained the approval and favors necessary to make it as a temp or to build a career as a screenwriter if I hadn’t presented myself as nonthreatening, amiable, and traditionally masculine. I needed agents, studio executives, and other writers to choose me. That’s one of the toughest hurdles to being Black, gay, and femme that I’ve faced—most people simply can’t imagine they have much in common with me, something so alien to them.

In my thirties, with an increased sense of security in my personal and work lives, I started to inch back toward my effeminate side. After years of writing failed novels and abandoned screenplays, I got hired as a television drama writer where most of my job included discussing story lines, many of which were drawn from personal experiences. As a naive staff writer, I was excited to divulge anything in my mind for the sake of the show. I believed I’d been hired to bring every aspect of myself to the writers’ table. So I was eager—a few upper-level producers felt I was too eager—to suggest ideas from the moment I entered the writers’ room. I recall the first time I pitched something in the writers’ room based on a date I’d had with my then boyfriend (now husband). The story beat got on the board, and I marveled at how my gay life had just become material for the show.

My whole queer self could bring new perspectives to the table. My ideas were used in dribs and drabs, and even when the more universal events of my life were applied to straight characters, I earned credit for providing useful ideas. I didn’t even mind pouring my creativity and emotional insights into heterosexual parts because I figured I’d get plenty of chances to do the same for queer characters.

I was wrong. Queer roles did not abound in my career, and neither did other queer writers. I have been the only openly LGBTQ+ writer on seven of nine drama series.

Over the course of more than a decade, I got married and adopted two children, and I am currently the co-showrunner of the TV series Bel-Air. None of my coworkers have ever mentioned my pigeon-toed walk or any of my other effeminate traits. I like to believe that they’re untainted by even a whiff of homophobia. Yet I suspect that my freedom to walk our stages as an obviously effeminate gay Black man has something to do with me being “the boss.”

*

I could try to convince you that I’m beyond the issues that once shaped me. I’ve succeeded, and society is evolving in fits and starts. More men in popular media are wearing makeup, fingernail polish, and skirts. Many people are familiar with terms like gender nonconforming. Billy Porter won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his role in Pose, and he freely expresses his queer identity on red carpets at every turn. But the bright spots that we celebrate are outliers; the freedom on display at the Met Gala isn’t exactly safe to exercise elsewhere.

Only 35 percent of Black LGBTQ students believe that they can “definitely be themselves in school,” according to the latest Black & African-American LGBTQ Youth Report from the Human Rights Campaign. The same report finds an even bleaker picture at home, where the proportion of Black gay youth who feel they can be their authentic selves plummets to 19 percent. I could be wrong, but when I imagine the gay Black boys who long to be their “authentic selves,” I don’t picture the ones who naturally fit the heteronormative mold. I see Black boys who are suppressing the femme in them, or the ones who suffer punishment when they let their femme traits show.

On several TV shows, I proposed introducing effeminate queer characters into the core cast but instead settled bitterly for a same-sex couple holding hands in the background. I wrote scenes where characters casually revealed that they are queer, and I watched helplessly as those scenes were cut in postproduction.

The biggest roadblock isn’t unspoken bigotry among the people producing a TV series; it’s a tendency to avoid the wrath of vocal bigots in the audience. Spotlighting queer chracters on a show can open the floodgates to a barrage of ludicrous but fiery social media complaints about the show being enslaved to “woke politics,” “the gay agenda,” or “grooming.” Oftentimes, top producers and creative execs don’t want to carry the responsibility or face the backlash that comes with effeminate queer representation—or queer representation writ large. That’s why so many shows and movies have latched onto the trope of gay characters whose most ingenious trait is that you can’t tell they’re homosexual.

Once, while working on a show with a hypermasculine queer male character in the core cast, I pointed out in the writers’ room that the charcter was only ever depicted as a strict top during sexual encounters. He penetrated his sex partners but was never himself penetrated. He received blow jobs but never gave them.

I long to create Black men who are bold, expressive, and irrepressible in their homosexuality.

I was the only gay writer on the show, and for the episode that I was cowriting with my writing partner, T. J. Brady, I proposed a scene where our gay character was fellating another man. There were objections from a few of the straight writers in the room. What were we saying about our gay character if he was seen on his knees pleasuring another man? Would the actor be comfortable performing such a scene? Would we alienate our audience? One writer asked, “Don’t we want to protect our hero?” That last question stunned me. I’d somehow forgotten just how pervasive and insidious the bias against the “unmanly” side of homosexual acts can be. Here was the line: A hero could be gay, but not a sissy—not femme.

Ultimately, the blow job stayed in the picture. Yet my pride is limited. Across my career, I’ve lost far more efforts than I’ve won when trying to introduce or shape gay characters on television shows. The ideas I’ve pitched don’t seem that radical to me. I’m just trying to present something other than the butch white homosexual. I’m trying to represent me—to create the representation I never got as a kid who was made fun of for his walk, his switch, his femmeness.

I am having some success on Bel-Air, where the character Ashley Banks is exploring her sexual identity within the LGBTQ+ community. We’ve taken a lot of criticism for depicting this story line, but I hope it helps affirm young Black queer women in our audience.

I, however, haven’t yet been able to write on-screen a mirror image of myself as a young man. It’s a goal I’m still chasing, an opportunity that has eluded me. I long to create Black men who are bold, expressive, and irrepressible in their homosexuality. Effeminate, Black, homosexual men who aren’t relegated to playing the best friends, sassy coworkers, bitchy antagonists, or—perhaps worst of all—a lineless background character left pantomiming for the amusement of the straights. I want more leads like Pray Tell in Pose. I want more protagonists like Usher in A Strange Loop. I want more examples than I can count on one hand. I’m committed to doing what I can to wave the Black-femme-boy flag, but representation on this front requires broad allyship. There is untapped wealth in the experience of effeminate Black gays. We deserve to be heroes.

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