The world does not hand you softness when you are born Black and queer.
It does not give you instructions on how to carry love without apology.
It does not teach you how to exist in a body they never planned for.

So you learn in the quiet.
In the spaces between being seen and being erased.
You learn from the ones who never flinched when they said your name.
And you learn from the ones who did.

Some lessons come in whispers.
Some in wounds.
Some in the silence left behind.

Either way, you survive.
Either way, you keep moving.

I. The Burden of Blood

I was born heavy.
Not from the weight of my own body, but from the weight of those who came before me.

I carry my father’s name.
A name given, a name inherited, a name that does not just belong to me.

I carry my mother’s prayers.
Tucked into my skin, whispered into my breath, sewn into the seams of my childhood.

And I carry the things that cannot be named, only felt.

My father’s hand. A quiet, steady weight on the top of my head.
A slow rub, just once. Never rushed, never forced.
A gesture so small the world might have missed it—
but I never did.

My mother’s eyes. Watching me like she already knew what the world would try to do to me.
Like she saw every battle before I had to fight it.
Like she knew one day, I would have to learn how to carry a silence she could never break for me.

They never called it inheritance.
But that’s what it was.

Not wealth.
Not land.
Not a legacy wrapped in comfort.

But the knowing.

The knowing that the world would never look at me and see “enough.”
That I would have to fight to be seen as equal.
That I would have to survive things they would never see.

And maybe that was the hardest part.

The way they tried to prepare me for battle,
never knowing that one day, I would be fighting wars they never imagined.

II. America – The Weight That Is Forced Onto the Body

Before I was a boy, before I was a body, before I was anything—
I was Black.
And that alone was enough.

Before I kissed a boy, before I even understood what I was—
I was already something to be whispered about, something to be warned against.
I was already a lesson.

Before I could choose what my body would mean,
it was already a battlefield.

Because in America, my body has never belonged only to me.

It has belonged to history.
To law.
To men who passed their hands over my head and said,
“You have a bright future if you stay on the right path.”
As if the road had already been chosen for me.

It has belonged to desire.
To the ones who wanted me in secret,
but denied me in daylight.
The ones who whispered in my ear in the dark,
then walked past me in silence when the sun came up.

It has belonged to punishment.
To a country that decided long before I was born
that Black bodies are evidence.
That queer bodies are a crime.

And maybe that’s the inheritance.
Not just the blood,
Not just the history,
Not just the lineage written into my skin.

But the knowing.

The knowing that I have always been watched, measured, feared, desired.
The knowing that my existence is a thing to be debated, legislated, erased.
The knowing that somewhere, right now, someone is trying to decide if I have the right to live freely.

The knowing that no matter how much I survive,
there will always be someone who wants to see me gone.

III. Self-Reclamation – Taking Back What Was Always Mine

But I am still here.

I carry my father’s name.
I carry my mother’s prayers.
I carry my ancestors’ unfinished business.

And I will not be erased.

I will not be rewritten.
I will not let them turn my life into a footnote, a tragedy, a cautionary tale.

I was born with the weight of history on my back.
But I was also born with the strength to carry it.

This body—mine.
This name—mine.
This breath—mine.
This survival—mine.

I am not my suffering.
I am not my silence.
I am not a lesson for the next one.

I am a reckoning.

And when they look back, when history asks who I was—let them say I carried it all, and I did not fall.

Strike One: Blackness

Before I ever spoke my first word, the world had already written my obituary.

Strike one.

I came into this world wrapped in melanin, heavy with history.
They weighed me at birth, but they did not measure the weight of my inheritance—
The chains still wrapped around my name, the echoes of cotton fields buried in my blood.

Before I could crawl, I had already been warned:
This skin is both armor and target.
Black boy, be careful.
Black boy, be silent.
Black boy, don’t give them a reason.

But Blackness has never been just about existing.
It has always been about proving.

Proving I was worthy.
Proving I was capable.
Proving I was more than whatever assumption walked in the room before I did.

My parents never had the luxury of ignorance.
They raised me knowing that life itself would demand more from me
—more effort, more resilience, more proof that I was equal.
That I was better.

I remember the first time I felt it for myself.
The weight of being measured. Judged.
Not as an individual, but as a representation of something bigger than me.

A school competition.
An award that should have been mine.
I had done the work, but when they handed out the trophy,
they gave it to the white boy who stood beside me.

And I remember the look on my father’s face.
Not anger.
Not surprise.
Just knowing.

As if he had already prepared me for this moment long before it arrived.

“You have to be twice as good to get half as much.”

I carried that lesson with me, tucked inside my ribs.
It became a silent mantra.
A quiet, unshakable truth.

That Blackness is both burden and fuel.
That I would always have to prove myself worthy of what others received without question.
That I could never afford to be average.

Strike Two: Queerness

Desire bloomed in me before I had words for it.
Before I knew the language of longing, I knew shame.
Before I knew how to love, I knew how to hide.

Home was safety.
Home was Blackness wrapped around me like armor.
But queerness?
Queerness was something I had to figure out alone.

Outside, I immersed myself in a world that my family didn’t know.
Or maybe they did, but we never had the conversation.

I was my own tour guide.
Navigating streets I had no map for, meeting people who showed me pieces of myself
before I had even learned to recognize them.

I learned everything through experience.
Through nights in spaces where the music was loud enough to drown out the fear.
Through conversations with strangers who understood me better than the people I had known my whole life.
Through hands that held mine in dark corners, through lips that spoke my name like a promise.

Queerness, for me, wasn’t about rejection.
It was about compartmentalization.

I could exist in both spaces—
I could move between the world of home, family, structure, and history
and the world of freedom, discovery, and self-exploration.

And for a long time, I thought that was enough.

But some truths don’t like to be contained.
Some identities are too big to live in separate rooms.
Some parts of yourself will demand to be reconciled.

And eventually, I would have to ask myself:
Was I hiding because I was afraid?
Or was I splitting myself in two because I thought it was the only way to survive?

Strike Three: ***+

I wasn’t even supposed to get tested that day.

I was doing a favor.
Something small.
Something forgettable.

Dropping off empty *** medication bottles for a friend.

I didn’t think twice about it.
Didn’t flinch when I walked through those clinic doors.
Didn’t feel fear, or suspicion, or the weight of a single **** thing.

And then—
Why not?

I was already there.
Already standing in a place where people came to check, to know, to confirm their worst fears.
But not me.
I was just passing through.

Not because I felt sick.
Not because I thought he was cheating.
Not because I had any reason to believe my body had already been rewritten.

Just because.

Because I was young.
Because I was naïve.
Because I had never learned to see myself as someone who could be touched like this.

So I sat in that chair.
Let them draw the blood.
Watched the crimson thread coil into the vial like it meant nothing.

I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t careful.
I just existed, unbothered, wrapped in the safety of my own innocence.
And it’s wild—insane, really—to think about now.

How casual I was about it.
How I thought this was just another box to check, another errand to run.
How I walked out of that clinic and never looked back, fully expecting a clean bill of health.

The Diagnosis

The walls of the clinic felt closer than before.

Like they had shifted inward, like they had grown teeth since the last time I was here.

The counselor looked at me—not with pity, not with fear, just a quiet knowing.

Positive.

The word sat between us like a heavy thing.
Like lead on my tongue.
Like something I needed to spit out, but couldn’t.

And that’s when it hit.
Everything was about to change.

The Confrontation

I went to his place.

A tiny space off San Jacinto, a door that led to nothing.

Inside, it looked like no one lived there.
But I felt the opposite.

And there he was.
Standing above me.
Waiting.

I didn’t ask him to sit down. I didn’t soften my voice.
I just said it.

“I tested positive.”

He blinked. Breathed in. Breathed out.
Then, so casually, so easily—like he was telling me the time, he said:

“I was going to tell you.”

And then I left.

The Silence After

For over ten years, I carried that thought like a second diagnosis.
A sickness buried deep, gnawing at my insides.

I deserved this.

I let the world convince me that a moment of trust was a crime.
That my body was a consequence.
That my worth had an expiration date.

I was 21 when I tested positive.
I am 35 now.

And I am still undoing the damage.
Still pulling myself out of that dark place.
Still reclaiming my body, my breath, my right to exist without shame.

Because it was never my fault.

And it was never his to take.

Does My Blackness, My Queerness, My Status Offend You?

Then sit with it. Let it sear into your skin like the heat of a Southern sun, like the sweat that dripped from backs that built this nation, backs that bent under weight they never asked to bear.

I know what you see when you look at me.
You see the broadness of my nose, the thickness of my lips, the fullness of my thighs, and you want to consume me.
Not love me.
Not hold me.
Not claim me.
Just take me—under the cover of night, between the sheets of your shame, in a room where no one can witness the truth of your hunger.

Because isn’t that how you like us?
Hidden.
Indulged in secret, denied in public.
Turned into a craving that you pretend not to have when the sun comes up.

So I let you enter me, and for a moment, you are nothing but breath and heat and the rawness of need. For a moment, you call my name like it is the only one you have ever known. But in the morning, when reality settles like dust in the corners of the room, when you pull on your jeans and tuck away your shame, I am nothing more than an inconvenience, a memory you need to wash away.

You go home. You wake up beside her. You pour your coffee, kiss your children, shake hands with the world, and tell yourself that last night was nothing. That I was nothing. That what happened in the dark does not exist in the light.

And yet, I linger.

I linger in the way you look at men like me in public.
I linger in the way you bite your tongue when someone calls me a slur.
I linger in the way you vote, in the way you pray, in the way you clutch your righteousness like a shield, hoping no one ever finds the cracks.

You took a risk, didn’t you? That’s what you tell yourself.
You let your body betray your beliefs, and now, in the harsh light of morning, you must repent.

Because I am undetectable, yet you still see me as a danger.
Because I cannot pass it to you, yet you still pass me off as your sin.
Because I am not the one who is *****, yet you are the one who scrubs your skin raw when you leave me.

The irony is poetic.

But let’s not pretend this is new.
No, this shame has lineage. This shame has roots deep in American soil.
This shame is generational, passed down like heirlooms wrapped in guilt and denial.

It is the overseer sneaking out back to the cabin.
It is the master entering uninvited.
It is the preacher gripping his Bible with one hand and reaching for flesh with the other.
It is the lawmaker decrying sin by day and indulging in it by night.

And still—still—you wake up every morning pretending your world is righteous, pretending you have built something holy, something clean.

You ask why I make it about race, about queerness, about history.
But tell me—who wrote this script?
Who made Blackness a thing to be bought, sold, discarded?
Who turned queerness into a whisper, into a crime, into something that exists only in the corners of your hypocrisy?

This is not my shame to carry.
This is your inheritance.
And it is heavy, isn’t it?

So tell me—does my Blackness, my Queerness, my Status offend you?

Good. Let it.

Because I will not shrink.
I will not be your secret.
I will not let you rewrite me into something small enough to be swallowed.

I am the morning.
I am the reckoning.
And I will never again be yours to deny.