I fell in love with a black gay man,
and I knew he was gay...
I didn’t know he was black.
You see, there are people who teach you how to think for yourself,
and there are people who teach you how to think like them.
That was my problem.
Those people taught me how to think like them,
so I went through high school thinking that white men were better than black men.
Every time a black guy approached me,
I made it clear from the beginning that I didn’t want anything beyond friendship.
And that’s how I met Reginald.
The first black man I fell in love with.
And I know I’m saying now that he is black,
but even so, I couldn’t see the blackness in him.
He was the white boy people talked so much about.
He was the dream boy of any living girl,
but he was locked in a black body that those same people didn’t understand.
The first time,
I saw a black man—
a man who wanted more than friendship with me,
but who wouldn’t.
In the end, we became friends—
and very good ones.
That issue of black men not being part of my heart went to hell
when I started getting to know Reginald better.
I started to love him.
For the love—
but above all, for how they had taught me to think—
I started to see him as a white man:
of high rank,
with a good family,
and a magnificent sense of humor.
But then, I found out that my beloved Reginald was gay.
Ironic, right?
The only black man I had ever fallen in love with—
and it turns out he is gay.
Still, I couldn’t keep myself away from him.
I started doing everything I could so that we were always together,
hoping that he would start to feel something for me...
He didn’t.
And I don’t blame him.
How was I able to notice his passion toward men
but not remember that he was a black man?
How couldn’t I notice that I fell in love with a black man?
Then I realized—
the same people who had put such an idea in my mind
were black people.
People who had decided to surrender to white people
and insisted on thinking like them.
But they decided that.
They inculcated that in me.
The day Reginald died at the hands of my brother,
I noticed his blackness again.
And no,
it wasn’t because I had lost the love I felt for him—
but because it was my brother who taught me to think like him...
who taught me to think like whites.
I lost the love of my life
because of my black brother’s decision
to think in the same way white people do.
Maybe I was the one who should have died
at the hands of Reginald’s sister,
because he saw me as a white man too
the night we,
thanks to a drunken stupor,
decided to be one—
consumed in mutual pleasure,
without taking into account the consequences.
How will I explain the death of his father
to my son who is coming?
Should I tell him his father died because he was a black man?
Or that his father died because I saw him as a white man?
Should I blame my parents
for teaching my brother to think like a white man?
Or should I blame myself for paying attention to him?
Now I don’t know who I fell in love with...
And I really think I never will.
