The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project Archives

Behind the Scenes: The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project

Black History Month is often focused on prolific members of the Black community throughout history who contributed to the world in the name of betterment, and while they are incredibly important to our community, we often overlook those who are still alive and continuing to make a difference. We know that much of the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation has largely been led by Black members of the community who often don’t get enough credit for their contributions. This year, the Autostraddle team decided to focus our Black History Month coverage on the Black elders who are still here and still doing the work.

We connected with Black elders through a partnership with SAGE, the world’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of LGBTQ+ older people. Founded in 1978 and headquartered in New York City, SAGE is a national organization that offers supportive services and consumer resources to LGBTQ+ older people and their caregivers. Autostraddle was honored to talk with five Black LGBTQ+ elders, and we’ll be publishing these interviews throughout the month of February. We welcome our readers to celebrate these members of the Black LGBTQ+ community with us, while they’re still here to be celebrated.

a collaged background of paper and fabric and squggles. text reads: Behind the Scenes: The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project

These interviews have been incredible, and the project itself has been something we’ve been really proud to be able to publish. This is your support at work! Carmen, Vanessa and I discussed how best to handle the usual “Editor’s Notes” for this project. We opted to ask each of the writers who participated in the interview project to reflect on their experiences, and so, here are those reflections. Thank you so much for being members and being here to celebrate the Black elders who are here and doing the work.

xoxo,

Nico

Sa’iyda

As soon as Vanessa, our Community Editor, posted about the opportunity to interview Black elders through SAGE, I knew I had to take part in it! I love interviewing people, and getting to talk to an older Black queer person felt like a special treat.

I don’t have any queer Black elders in my life, and I didn’t realize how much I was missing that until I got off the phone with Ray Gibson, who I did my first interview with. Let me tell you, Ray is a HOOT. We talked for well over an hour, and I could have talked to him all day because it was so much fun. We laughed and laughed, and I realized that even though he’s old enough to be my dad, we could have a connection. He felt like the long-lost uncle I’ve always wanted (even though he’s not rich). It just felt so unbelievably validating to have that conversation with him. Like me, he has very little filter, and we could be honest with each other in a way that you don’t often get to be during interviews. The transcription of our interview was over 80 pages long, so there was so much that got left behind.

Doing my second interview with Barbara Abrams felt like a warm hug. She is one of the kindest women I’ve gotten to interview, and it was so comforting to speak with her. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t also a lot of fun! We shared some great laughs as she told me stories, and there was a commonality I felt with her because she lives in New York City, which is where I’m from. She also doesn’t have much of a filter, but in a very different way than Ray. She’s warm and comforting, but she takes no bs from anybody.

I developed such a closeness with both Ray and Barbara. Ray and I email each other now, which is so much fun, and I think I’m going to help edit his book when he’s ready. And I told Barbara next time that I’m in NYC, we’re going to have lunch together. This was truly a life changing experience for me, and I’m very grateful.

Dani Janae

I have relationships with people in their 80s so I was so excited for this project! I love the focus on Black queer elders during this month. Interviewing DonnaSue was so easy, I asked one question and she just started talking, hitting all of the notes I had. Our stories are different but touch in some places and I found that so special! I plan to actually keep in touch with her and that feels so exciting too.

I really got to work in all of the talking points we hit into the final doc which is why it’s so long lol. I wanted readers to see her in full light and be as enchanted by her as I was. It’s so important to see and hear our elders, to listen to them not only with the motive of learning, but just to see them as full complicated human beings.

DonnaSue was so wonderful and funny. Sometimes her jokes would catch me off guard because we’d have just been talking about something heavy. But I was totally wrapped up in her story and her language, it was a real ride.

I grew up with Black women in my immediate orbit but none quite like DonnaSue. Forming relationships with Black queer women is so important to me now, no matter their age, I just want to be surrounded by them. So this was a really wonderful opportunity that I’m so grateful for.

shea

This project was truly a dream come true for me. As a baby gay growing up outside of DC, I knew older LGBTQ+ folks existed but I didn’t know any personally. I can remember roaming the streets of DuPont Circle as a teenager, quietly ducking into Lambda Rising, and imagining what it might be to be like the folks with rainbows and graying hair who seemed so sure of themselves. Other than the fierce drag queens in the bars and clubs I went to on the weekends, I don’t remember seeing any Black LGBTQ+ elders when I was younger. To be able to interview not one but TWO elders filled my heart with so much hope and joy. Both of my parents are dead and I don’t really talk to extended family (ain’t homophobia a bitch?), so being able to connect with Don and Malcolm felt like a homecoming I’ve been desperately longing for. Both Don and Malcolm have such warm and affirming energy and their stories – their stories are full of so much love, passion, and hope.

I work in education as a Black trans person so my feeds and inboxes are often full of tragedy and despair regarding legislation and violence. These conversations were a breath of fresh air and a reminder of a past/future that is beautifully complex and defiantly bright. After our conversation, I sent Don a follow-up email telling him how much I appreciated our chat. He responded in typical “Don” fashion with a reminder that has made me feel less alone in this world. I’ll leave you with part of his note. May it warm your heart today: “…Whenever you feel alone in the world, you can call me up 24/7. I have my father’s boisterous laugh, broad shoulders right for crying on, and my mother’s arms known for giving world-class hugs. Human beings are social beings, so we all need each other to survive. This is especially true for those of us in the LGBTQ+ community…You and I are family.”

“I Don’t Want To Be Forgotten”

a black and white photo of Barbara Abrams, a Black woman and elder, is the center focal point of this collage. Beautiful collaged items including newsprint, colors, squiggles, and lines surround her. She's wearing a sweatshirt that says Brooklyn on the front.

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

Barbara Abrams works towards the betterment of LGBTQIA elders in New York City. Talking to her was like a warm hug. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Sa’iyda: Hi Barbara, thanks for your time today.

Barbara: Thank you so much for considering me for this call.

Sa’iyda: I’d love to know a little bit more about you, as a person. Maybe tell me a little bit about your childhood, your upbringing, and how it led you to the work you do and the person that you are now.

Barbara: My fantasies were television movies, like Annie Oakley. I always liked and was admired by women that fought back. They didn’t let a man push them around. In other stories on TV, the women were always catering to the man, no matter what he said. In reality, my mother was being beaten by men. I just felt like, that is my mother and I am going to save the day. Because I am not going to let this man, who doesn’t even smell right in my world, in my head, come to you. You let him come to you, you let him come in our house. But he’s not kind to you. And you said to me that if I ever get married one day, make sure I look at the man’s shoes. And they should be shiny, and they never should have holes in their socks. But every man she brought home, that’s how he looked.

Sa’iyda: Interesting.

Barbara: I said, “My God. I think she’s trying to save me, but she’s also afraid that I’ll make the wrong choice because she knows her choices are what they are. And she sees me, I’m her firstborn and I’m coming to save you.” I would come at those men with anything that I could find, that I knew would cause some bodily damage. And then that’s when I was just not afraid and saying, “You’re not going to continue to hit my mother the way you were doing. And I saw it, it’s not going to happen.” So I would hurt them. Well, I’d find things and I’d hide my weapons, my arsenal, I’d just hide it. And whenever that kind of situation occurred, I’d come out and the next thing my mother knows is I’m in the room and I’m wailing on someone.

That’s the way that happened, time and time again. And then after seeing that, Annie Oakley wasn’t really making it for me. I tried sitting with Gunsmoke, Miss Kitty was all right, but she wasn’t really doing it for me really. And then along came somebody named Mary Tyler Moore, and she lived in something called an apartment, in this place called New York. And I said, “I like the way this woman seems positive about herself, she knows what she wants and she lives alone. So living alone must be really nice.” So I decided… I was fresh out of high school and my mother and the neighbor next door wanted me somehow to marry the boy next door, which was the neighbor’s son.

I said, “Mommy, you want me to marry this boy next door?” I said, “I will kick his ass.” I cursed and that was a no-no. But that’s what I said. And she said, “You are going to marry that boy. He won’t beat you.” I said, “What? Mommy, who beats who around here?” So she just said, “Get in that house now and put on your good clothes.” Because we were obviously going to some kind of courthouse, because I don’t remember any of this. I was 18 or 19, fresh out of high school. And we did this. And then right after that, was Vietnam.

Sa’iyda: Oh wow, okay.

Barbara: I mean, he went right away, like the next day. In that day and age they drafted you by your first and last name, and his name was Abrams. So is mine. I kept the name. So he was off to the war and he would come back home on anything that was moving back to Florida. And to check on me, he would hide between houses across the street and all of that, to see if anybody was coming by. I couldn’t take the jealousy stuff. I had a dog, he used to kick the dog. I told him, “If you ever do that again… it just won’t be pretty. I don’t want to fight, but I will protect what I love. You know I don’t love you. You know that. You know this was your parent and my parent. This was their idea, it wasn’t mine.”

It just never got right for him. He couldn’t keep a job because he would tell his boss — my uncle told me this and then I eventually got it from him — that his wife was sickly and he had to leave the job because she had to go to the hospital.

Then I found out that he was doing this and I said, “I want to have a discussion with you, but you are not allowed to talk.” And he looked at me and he was getting ready to say something. I said, “If you say one word, you will never see me again and you’ll always wonder why.” So he didn’t say anything and I said, “I am going to leave you. I’m not going to tell you when, but I’m going to leave you. So I thought you should know that. It’s not like somebody abducted me or anything like that. There’s nothing here for me.” And he said, “But I don’t do anything.” I said, “It’s not you, it’s just that I don’t like you and I don’t love you.”

I was very straight up, I always have been. He looked at me like it wasn’t real and he went to work. And when he went to work, driving the car that we had, as soon as I saw the car turn the corner, I pulled my yellow steamer trunk from under the bed. I had purchased the trunk first and then I purchased five articles of new clothing. My mother always said to me, “Always know what you’re doing…” She was a good advisor, but she didn’t live the advice that she gave me. But she was a good advisor. She said, “Always be prepared to live your life for whatever you want.” I didn’t say, “Well, I didn’t want this.” I just said, “Thank you, Mommy.” I bought five articles of clothing, little by little, and put them in the trunk that was under the bed. And I washed my underwear that I had, that I owned, every night. Underwear and socks every day. So that everything was always clean, whenever that day or that moment came.

Sa’iyda: That you needed to go.

Barbara: Yeah. That’s how I live to this very day. If I’m going to do something, I never do it immediately, I think about it first. And then when I feel like I’m certain, no matter what, then I make that decision and I don’t need people to talk to me about anything. Because I’m sure about my life. I’m only talking about my life, doesn’t involve anyone else but me. So I like for people to not try to give me advice. I know who I am. I left, and about six months later, I saw a lawyer here in New York, and had the lawyer send him notifications that I’m asking for a divorce. And my mother gave me his phone number and I told him, “You need to sign those papers because I’m paying for the divorce and you don’t have to pay out of pocket anything.” Then that was that. Because there was never going to be anything different, never ever. And he said, “But I don’t want this, [I don’t want] anybody to think I did anything.” I said, “Listen, I’m telling you what you need to do and that’s it. I’m not going to talk to you long. I know you heard me, sign the papers.” He signed it and he sent them back, and I got a divorce. I still have the papers.

Sa’iyda: Wow.

Barbara: I’m just so excited about that. That’s years and years ago. He’s since died and they tried to get me to take his benefits from his death, as his wife. I said, “I am not your brother’s wife. And I never was. I don’t want things to be more complicated for your young mind. Just accept the fact that I was never his wife. Okay? I know he wanted me to be, but I’m not.” That was the end of it. When I came here [to New York], I asked my mother one day, abruptly to her, “Would you take me to the train station?” She said, “Yes, baby. When?” I said, “Now.” And she said, “Okay.” She didn’t ask me any questions because she knows how I live.

I’m dropped off at the train station, it comes into Penn Station. I see Macy’s when I come up to the street. I know [Mary Tyler Moore] lives around here somewhere. Just because in the movies of course, she threw her hat up—

Sa’iyda: Hat up in the air, right. Yes.

Barbara: So I said, “She lives around here somewhere. But that’s okay, I’ll see her eventually.” My first apartment was 110th Street at Central Park West. It was July of ’69. And that was the junkie era, where people were just bowing down, falling, almost to the street but never really landing. That junkie bow, that’s the name for it on the street. And I went into this building and I immediately asked the super of a building, “Do you have an apartment?” It was like $50 a month or $25 a month at that time. And you were brought up to this little small place and no windows or view or anything, but it didn’t matter. And the super said to me, “Ma’am, close your door young lady.” I said, “Get out of my apartment. You don’t tell me what to do.” Of course when he left and some crazy looking man passed, I might do it… I’m from Florida, we don’t lock anything.

Sa’iyda: You got to lock those doors in New York.

Barbara: I had to learn quick, but I had to learn my way. I saw the evidence that I needed to close that damn door. There was this crazy little man, who looked in at me, and I’m like, “This is my home. You don’t look at my home.” I closed the door, and when I did, I went to pull up the blind to look out the window — all I saw was a cement wall. Like in I Love Lucy or something. So I went out to just kind of figure it all out. Where am I? I sat on the bench at Central Park West and watched yellow taxis go by. I had never seen that many cars.

Sa’iyda: Coming from Florida, that had to be a huge culture shock.

Barbara: It was. But I was enjoying it. That’s the thrill I wanted. “Oh, look at all of these cars. Look at all these taxis. Wow, this is amazing.” And eventually, I found out what the Village was. I knew nothing, I’m just curious to find out about my life. What am I doing? I went to the Village and I used to sit on the street because this was the hippie era.

Sa’iyda: East Village or West Village?

Barbara: It was the West Village between West Village and Sixth Avenue. That side. Sit right there on the street and everybody with their bandanas around their heads, and punky, crazy looking clothes. Because I’m from Florida, everything’s got to be dressed right. I had to get me some jeans and look like everybody else. And start singing folk songs and all of that. So after that era, I went into the super dance era — it was David Mancuso, white guy from Yonkers, that came up with this idea of spinning music all at the same time in his apartment called The Loft. And all of the musical people, Diana Ross, all of these people used to be dancing right next to you. But it wasn’t about fan loving, it was about just dancing.

Sa’iyda: And having a good time.

Barbara: And having a good time. I’ve never been a drug person ever. I drank, I never, ever ordered beverages, I’ve never smoked cigarettes, I’ve never smoked anything. But I was around all of my friends that did smoke and I was the roller. I was the person that used an album cover and a card from a deck of cards, and faced off this big batch of… it looked like weed from a bush. And you rolled it up, crack it up, and used the card until the pieces that you were going to roll up in this tobacco was ready for whoever was going to smoke it to smoke it. I was always in a cloud — like the president [Clinton] said… somebody said he never inhales. But I was in it, so I had to be high to some degree.

Sa’iyda: You were around it, so there’s no way you weren’t.

Barbara: Well, around it because that’s who all of my friends were. Everybody smoked and did some kind of quaalude or something. And I just had fun all the time. Just danced day and night, until I got older. Then you just slow it down and then you go to parties. A friend at the time used to give parties by the World Trade on Sundays. You go there from three o’clock in the afternoon until 11pm that night.

And you just danced. You danced the whole time. Dance was like heaven to me. And then you grow some more, you mature more. I still worked, the job that I had at that time was at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I had a responsible position — I’m proud of myself for doing all this. I didn’t have a college degree. I earned one, my job paid for it in full.

As long as I had an A performance, they paid for it. So I’m just proud of myself because everything I ever did, in terms of living your life and taking care of yourself appropriately and being financially able to sustain your life and your choices, I did that for myself.

Sa’iyda: So when did you figure out or have inklings, or fully understand, that you were gay?

Barbara: Just before I left Florida, the woman I call my best friend, lived down the street. Her sister was gay. She used to come back and forth home, whenever she felt like it. And it’s the way she dressed and the way she walked down the street. People would pull back the curtain, my mother and her sisters, anybody else that was an adult. I’m not allowed to look at what they’re looking at, because I’m a child.

But I saw her and I was impressed with how she carried herself. Because she knew, had to know everybody was peeking. It’s Florida, it’s a neighborhood. You know that’s what people do.

She wouldn’t care. She’d just give a walk, she’d give a performance for the eyes. And she’d just do her walk thing. And I just thought it was so classy and just so elegant. I just said, “I like that.” And one day I’m sitting on the steps, you can call them stoops or you can call them steps, of my home, and she passed by. Because I had moved from my mother’s house, I had my own house. And I’m sitting there, playing with my puppy and she said, “Hi.” And I said, “Hi.” And she said, “Can I come over?” I said, “Of course.” And she came over and she sat on the steps with me. And she just said, “So how long have you been living here?” I said, “Not that long. I always lived with my mother down the street.” We were just doing fly-by-night talk. All of a sudden, she kissed me.

Sa’iyda: Oh!

Barbara: Yes. She just abruptly kissed me. I don’t know, maybe she saw something I didn’t even know yet. And I said, “I think you better go home.” And she said, “Okay.” Her mother had built on the side of their home, an apartment for her just to live her own private life. So I went inside because my mother always preached to me… My mother’s very spiritual, very holy and all of that. And I was just the opposite.

So I went in the house, my home, and I sat on the bed and I looked in the mirror, and I waited for an hour. What I was waiting for was for a fang to fall out of my mouth and I’d become monstrous looking, and not recognize myself as a demon. If you did things like that woman, you become monstrous by God. Gave me one more reason to think God ain’t right. So after waiting an hour, I felt that was sufficient.

I didn’t see any distortions of myself. So I went to this woman’s house and I said, “It’s Barbara.” She opened the door and I did to her what she was doing to me. I don’t know where that came from, but I knew it just felt comfortable and it felt right. And then I said, “Okay, I got to go.” And then the next thing I knew, I was trying it out on another friend, who was married to this guy.

We were talking and we were in her bedroom window. Leaning in the window, both of us, looking at children playing. And it was in the afternoon, late, and she turned… We were very close in body, in this window. And she turned and she looked at me, and I looked at her and we had eye contact. And neither one of us was removing ourselves from that eye contact. So I took the lead because I felt like I’d kissed my best friend’s sister—

Sa’iyda: You already kind of felt comfortable at that point.

Barbara: I felt very comfortable at that moment. I kissed her and she liked it. She told me, she said, “I like the way that felt.” I said, “Oh, you did? You want to do it again?” She said, “I’m scared.” I said, “Well, let me know when you’re not scared.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll leave.” And when I saw her again, she told me she was afraid I’d come back to Florida. She told me she was afraid that she wanted to see me. We had an intimate encounter. And she said she was in love. I’m like, “Oh. You can’t. You can’t be in love. I don’t even know about this part yet. But that can’t be right.” So I said, “Think about it and we’ll talk the next time I come.”

Sa’iyda: You’re exposing them to something they had no idea about.

Barbara: So now I’m back in New York again and I had met two different guys on two different occasions. This one guy, and he looked like a bodybuilder, but when it came time to want to be intimate with me, because he did all the poses and all of that, I’m like, “Oh my God. Look at this guy. There’s no way I could be with him. I just can’t do it.” I could never feel anything toward a man. I could like him as a person, that looked nice and handsome, but I could never… You can’t touch me. So I just accepted the fact that I truly was gay. I had to be gay. That was my acceptance of myself. I made an announcement in my own head that I was a gay woman.

Sa’iyda: And did you have the language and understanding of what that meant, at that time?

Barbara: I knew that it meant I like women. I like the same sex as myself, because that’s the way I explained it to my mother. I had her come to New York, to know where I lived, and to see where I lived, so that she’d know that I was fine. And there was no trouble or reason for her to worry about me taking care of myself. She said, “I want you to have a grandbaby for me. I want a grandbaby.” I said, “Well Mommy, you have to talk to Lamar…” That’s my brother. “About that. Maybe he can have you some grandbabies because I like women.” She says, “Lord, have mercy Jesus. Barbara Jean.”

So I’m just looking at her and I said, “Mommy, what do you think?” She said, “You just can’t go around having sex.” I said, “Do you think that’s what gay is?” And she said, “Isn’t that what it is?” I said, “No, it isn’t. I haven’t even had sex yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. I don’t know what it is. How you really get into it. I don’t know any of that. I just know I like women and I will not be having any children because I will not have an encounter with a man.” And she said, “Lord, have mercy Jesus.”

She just didn’t know how to accept that, but she knew that I made her life comfortable. That’s what she knew for sure. So she just decided to go smoke her cigarette.

Sa’iyda: You put her outside. I love it. So, how did you become an activist and how did you do the work where you speak about your experience?

Barbara: Because I’ve been to many centers where socially, people gather as LGBTQ people, like GRIOT Circle. Once I retired, I knew the woman that started the place called GRIOT Circle, Regina Shavers is her name. She’s deceased. But I felt like I needed to give back by giving my body and time, and energy, and my knowledge about just life in general as a principal status, by being there. I had the time. I didn’t have anything that I had to do, I could be there every day. And because of the type of person that I am, if I’m going to give you my time, I’m going to give you my time a hundred percent. And the people there, where I was a volunteer, saw that. And the next thing I knew, I was having responsibilities. I’m like, “Wait a minute. I shouldn’t be having keys to the office. I shouldn’t be taking money to deposit in the bank. I shouldn’t be having this responsibility. These are employees who have responsibility.” They liked the way I function.

And all those things mattered. If something had to be cleaned, it was cleaned properly. If something was broken, it was fixed properly. Things just had to be right, they could not be shabby. In the beginning, we started with one room, in the YWCA here in Brooklyn. And then we went from there to a big functioning building, to the fifth floor. And that’s where I was spending all of my time, there. So little by little, when people would come in to socially benefit from this senior place, they’d come in with knowledge from anywhere, varying places. And that was also helpful. So whenever I’m anywhere, I talk about the conditions of things that I know, living from this position of how I live my life.

Sa’iyda: Right. And how did you get involved with SAGE?

Barbara: I saw them someplace. I think I was probably working, again, volunteering with GRIOT Circle and SAGE came into place. And then it became a partnership. So therefore, I joined SAGE. And then if something else was around, promoting themselves as LGBTQ+, I joined that too. I join everything. And this way, I’m over here for a minute, I’m over there for a minute, but I’m consistently doing the same thing. I don’t want to be forgotten.

Sa’iyda: Why is it important to you, not only to do these things but to, as you say, not be forgotten?

Barbara: Enough of us don’t promote ourselves because we’re still hung up behind the wall. We hung up behind that curtain. Young people are not, older people still hide.

Sa’iyda: Why do you think that is?

Barbara: Because of society. They don’t want to be judged in a stereotypical way, the way my neighbor asked me, “Are you gay?” And saying, “I didn’t know. I didn’t see you that way.” We deal with politics every day. So you don’t need people that are just like you, in the same manner, to make life rough. We don’t need that. So just be respectful.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. Well, we have been talking for just about an hour, so I am going to let you go on with the rest of your day.

Barbara: It feels like it’s been 10 minutes.

Sa’iyda: I know. I just looked at the time, I was like, “Oh my goodness. We have been talking for almost an hour.” But this has been absolutely lovely and enlightening, and I appreciate your time so very much.

Barbara: Well, it’s been terrific talking to you. Thank you very, very much.

“I Needed To Create Something To Save Myself… That’s What I’ve Done”

a black and white photo of Malcolm Reid, a smiling Black gay man and elder, is the center focal point of this collage. Beautiful collaged items including newsprint, colors, squiggles, and lines surround Malcolm.

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

I can count the times I’ve been to Atlanta on one hand — once on a family vacation and another time, almost twenty years later, for work. Both times, I found myself wondering what it would be like to exist in a space so rich with Blackness, charm, and melanated queer community — what possibilities exist in a richness that defiantly merges past, present, and future? Last month, I got some answers and the results are shared in the beautiful transcript below.

I spent an hour in conversation with Black Atlanta’s gay uncle, Malcolm Reid — a passionate advocate and community organizer who’s spending “retirement” creating affirming spaces and programs for HIV-positive elders. Despite calling Atlanta home for the past four decades, I immediately hear New York in Malcolm’s voice when he talks of the wonderful relationship he had with his mother and his upbringing. “Atlanta is home,” he asserts though. In our conversation, we cover a lot — growing up Black, boy, and not-yet-gay in New York City, coming out, falling in love with Atlanta and his husband of 26 years, aging with HIV, and the importance of community for Black LGBTQ+ elders all over.

At 65, Malcolm Reid’s journey of finding self, home, and fighting like hell is one that reminds us that there is nothing more beautiful than building the life we deserve with the ones we love.

shea: Let’s start at the beginning – where are you from? What was growing up like?

Malcolm: So, I’m 65 years old. I was born in 1957 at St John’s Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. For the first four and a half years of my life, I lived in Brooklyn. And then my mother and father separated. So we moved to the Bronx and moved into Castle Hill Projects. In Brooklyn, we were living in Brevoort projects. Then we moved to the Bronx to Castle Hill Projects. I will say that back then the projects were the “lower middle class,” and “mid-middle class” housing for people. My mom always said that people that lived in the projects back in those days all had good jobs. They all wore uniforms to work. They were either nurses, cops, people that worked for the city or the post office, or whoever.

My mom was a nurse and it was just her. Growing up, we struggled but my mom always made sure that whatever she had to do, we (my sister and myself) were going to go to Catholic school and we were going to get the best education we possibly could. So with the help of her mother, they made sure that we had the best upbringing as kids as we possibly could. Then later on, she met a man and had my two other little sisters. So then we were a family of four with a single mom living in the projects. And I mean, we knew that we didn’t have everything, but we didn’t know that we were poor. You know what I mean?

My sister and I attended a Catholic high school, but my two younger sisters were the first kids in the family to go to the public school system. Mom was really cognizant of the fact that I was the only boy in the house and she didn’t want me in public schools. Even back then, she didn’t want me in public schools. So she made sure that we both graduated from Catholic high schools.

That was my upbringing. I was very much a typical boy – playing basketball and football, going to the community center, and all that New York stuff. I was hanging out in the street and doing all of that, getting in trouble, and all of that good stuff.

shea: You mentioned your grandparents helping take care of you. Can you talk a little bit more about the relationship with your grandparents and the intergenerational care network that helped raise you?

Malcolm: Oh yeah, I’d be happy to. Actually, I just want to take a minute to tell my grandfather’s story because it is the story of Black America. My grandfather was a twin, his name was Herman, and his brother’s name was Thurman. I never met Thurman — Thurman died. I can’t remember how old he was when he died, but he died long before I was born. But one day, my grandfather and his brother left Wilson, North Carolina, and they walked to Richmond, Virginia, got on a freight train, and ended up in New York City.

I always tell people, had the train ended up in Chicago, that’s where we would’ve been born. If the train ended up in Los Angeles, that’s where we would’ve been from because when they got on the train, they didn’t know where it was going. They just knew that they had to get out of the south. So, he got to New York and met my grandmother, and my grandfather and grandmother were together for 67 years before my grandfather passed.

When my mother and father broke up, my grandparents knew my mom was going to need help and they made sure that she was able to move from Brooklyn to the Bronx so that we could all be close together. They lived in the projects as well. Even though he wasn’t in the house with us, my grandfather was pretty much the man in my life. My father was around. He would come around and give my mother his little $30 a week or a month or whatever it was, but my grandfather was the person who taught me how to drive. My grandfather was the person who just made sure that I knew that it was about being a man — taking care of your family, taking care of your sisters, and doing all of that, because like I said, I was the only boy.

Now, I will interject and say that when I was eight years old, my father came by to give my mother some money. I think I was acting up, and my mother was always like, “I’m going to tell your father when he comes.” So she went and told him I’d been acting up and he came over and he did what parents did back in those days — he spanked my butt and then told me that I was the man of the house now. I was eight and I was the man of the house.

At my mom’s funeral, my sister reminded me of what happened next. She said, “yeah, and a couple of weeks later when you were walking around puffing your chest out, talking about you were the man of the house, mom grabbed you and pulled you to the side and said, ‘You are not my husband!’ Because I was bossing my sisters around and telling them what they should be doing. I was a bit of a terror back then!

My grandparents lived in the building directly across the street from my grade school. Their windows faced the school and my grandmother was always in the window watching what was going on. In New York, back in those days, the schools had a schoolyard, but they would also close the street so that the kids could play out in the street. If we were out in the street or in the schoolyard, my grandmother could always see. And whenever there was anything going on, she was on the phone calling my mother, “Malivene, you need to come up here after you get off of work!”

So yeah, it did take a village. Our friends’ parents and grandparents were always in the window looking out and seeing what was going on in the street. That’s how I grew up.

shea: That idea of a village just seems so different from mainstream culture today. A lot of kids aren’t outside, you don’t really talk to your neighbor. It’s so different from even the times when I grew up. Back then, it seemed like we knew everyone on the block and just living community.

Malcolm: And not only that but, Ms. Jones could come up to my mother and say, “Hey, I saw Malcolm on the basketball court doing so and so,” and my mother wouldn’t even ask any questions. She’d come home and spank my ass, because Ms. Jones had no reason to lie on me, right? Imagine telling parents today, “hey, I saw your child doing this or that.” They’d just look at you and say, “mind your own business.”

shea: Yeah. I remember growing up that if I was at my grandmother’s house or at church and one of the other old ladies saw me being mischievous, they would spank and then before I could get home, they would call and my grandma would get on me too!

Malcolm: Exactly.

shea: It was a community effort, definitely. But yeah, times are definitely changing.

Malcolm: Indeed.

shea: I want to just talk more about your relationship with your father and your grandfather, especially being a gay Black man. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Were you out to them? What were your relationships like?

Malcolm: No, I did not come out until I was 28 years old. I moved from New York to Atlanta when I was 23. And I moved to Atlanta so that I could be gay. There was such a stigma back then. My father’s favorite word was faggot. As I was becoming a teenager, he tried to be a part of my life, but he really wanted to be my buddy. He wanted to hang out. He wanted to teach me how to do all the “manly” things — how to go out to the club, how to drink, how to smoke cigarettes, how to do all of that stuff. Just feeling that stigma of growing up in the projects and the barbershop and just on the basketball court, playing basketball in school, and laughing at sissies and all of that stuff — I knew that I could not be gay in New York, so I hid it.

I started driving a cab in New York when I was 18 and those were my first sexual encounters. I would meet guys down in the Village and have little anonymous sexual hookups, but I was still very, very scared and very, very intimidated.

When I moved to Atlanta, I started to explore. My first ever relationship was here in Atlanta. After I got comfortable with him, I said, “Okay, it’s about time that I tell my folks.”

shea: And you were 28 then?

Malcolm: Yes and by that time, my older sister had moved down here as well. For me, that was kind of stressful too, because like I said, I moved to Atlanta to be gay, and now here she comes, right? I’m like, “why you got to come down here?” But she came down, and so she told me she was going to go to take the train back to New York to visit. So I wrote a letter to my mother telling her that I was gay. I also put in the letter that if she decided that she wanted to disown me, I would understand.

I wrote that in there because over those five years, between the age of 23 and 28, becoming involved in the gay community here, I knew plenty of people, especially from the south, whose parents had disowned them. Some of my best friends were people that didn’t have any place to go. They lived in shelters or whatever. So I made sure that I said that. The letter was cathartic for me because I knew that once I wrote that letter, I was free. Once I handed it to my sister, I was free. I told her, I said, “I’m going to give you this letter. Do not read it. Give it to mom when you get there.”

That was the first night that I went to a gay club in Atlanta. I went to a club called Foster’s, which then became Loretta’s. I had a great time that night. I mean, I just partied and I got home at God knows what time in the morning. Then, I spent the next day just pacing the room, waiting for the phone call.

About three o’clock in the afternoon, my mom calls me and she’s being quintessential New York mom, she’s talking about everything else but [the letter]. She’s like, “Your father’s had a flat tire. Your father decided to come to help me pick up your sister. I don’t know why he decided to be bothered, but he did. And of course, your father and his old raggedy cars, he had a flat tire,” and da, da, da. And I’m sitting on the phone thinking, Jesus Christ.

So finally she says, “So your sister gave me your letter and I read it. I have a question.”

I said, “What’s that, ma?”

She said, “Don’t you know your mother loves you?”

And I said, “Yeah, mom, I know.”

And she said, “So what’s this nonsense about me disowning you?”

I said, “Well, mom, I had to put that in the letter because I know so many people who that has happened to.”

She said, “Well, I’m not them. So don’t even!” Basically, so don’t go there with me. And then the next question she asked was, “Do you have somebody special in your life?”

And I said, “Yeah, I do right now.” She said, “Well, that’s good.”

Then we went on with the rest of the family conversation. Eventually, she asked, “Do you want me to tell your father?” I said, “I really don’t care. If you want to tell him, fine, you can.” She said, “What about your sisters?” I said, “Well, Kim and Nicole,” who were still living in New York at the time, I said, “Yeah, you can tell them.” I said, “I’ll tell Karen [the sister who moved down to Atlanta] when she gets back here.” So she said, “Okay.” That was our agreement, and that’s where we left it.

Over the years, my mom was a godsend to me because she was a nurse. In 1997, when I found out I was living with HIV, I was able to talk to her about things. A lot of my friends didn’t have that resource. She was able to tell me a lot of information. My mom is one of the reasons why I never got on AZT. My mom was like, “No, that’s killing people. Don’t do that.” She said, “They talk about it’s prolonging life, but it’s not giving anybody quality of life.” She said, “So don’t do that.”

And as my mother got up in age, I was able to move both her and her husband down here to Atlanta in 2012 and she lived down here until she died in 2020.

shea: Wow what a journey. So it sounds kind of like Atlanta is kind of home for y’all — or do you still consider New York home?

Malcolm: Oh no. I mean, sports — I’m still a Yankee fan, a Knicks fan, and a Giants fan. I will carry that with me always, so I’m a New Yorker at heart, but Atlanta is home. My whole family’s here now. All my sisters are down here. I’ve got friends and a solid community here. Atlanta is home.

shea: How did you choose Atlanta? I feel like a lot of people view New York City or San Francisco or LA as the places you want to go when you’re coming out. If you’re not in one of those places, you want to get there. So what drew you to Atlanta? How did you get there?

Malcolm: Like I said, I was driving a cab and my cousin — well, he’s not really my cousin – we grew up together as cousins. One day, he wrote me a letter. He was at Clark. It was Clark College back then before it became Clark Atlanta University. He was telling me how wonderful Atlanta was and how Black Atlanta was. Not knowing that I was gay, he was, “Man, do they got some fine honeys down here, man. You need to come down here.”

He eventually invited me to come down in September of 1980. I came down for a couple of days. I was supposed to come down for like a weekend and hang out. I ended up staying for three weeks, and really, really fell in love with the city. I still didn’t explore my gay side, but still was enamored with the Blackness that was here. It was like, not only were there Black people here, but Black people were here doing well. I also was drawn to the history. I’ve always been a political junkie. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was always about the Black Panthers, the Civil Rights Movement, and all of that stuff. So just seeing where Martin Luther King, Jr. had been and where all of this history happened was just amazing to me.

So when I went back to New York, I decided to drive my cab until the wheels fell off, make as much money as I could, and move back down to Atlanta. And that’s what I did. I moved down to Atlanta on December 18th, 1980. Before moving there, I did have this long list of cities that I was going to live in. I was going to explore the country. I was going to move to San Diego and I was going to live in San Francisco. I was going to go to all of these places. I parked my butt in Atlanta and never moved.

shea: I mean, Atlanta’s a great place to be though.

Malcolm: Oh yeah. Looking back on my life, I was definitely supposed to be here.

shea: That’s beautiful. Can you tell me more about your life in Atlanta and how it’s changed over the past few decades?

Malcolm: As I mentioned, I started dating a man when I was 28. I started to feel secure. The only thing about that relationship was that he was a little closeted too. He had his friends, but they didn’t go out much. They had house parties and everything else, but they kind of stayed to themselves. I wanted to explore more, so I moved on and met somebody else that had more friends, was doing more things, and was more out in the community. And so over the years, I’ve just continued to be a part of this community. Right now, if I walk into a bar with someone, they’ll say, “Dang — do you know everybody?” and I go, “Yeah, I’ve kind of been here for a long time.”

But the best thing about Atlanta is what happened in ’97 — I met the man who is now my husband. We’ve been together for 25 years. Now we’re both 65 and elder and we just have a lot of friends who feel like family.

shea: Ohhhhh! Tell me about your husband and all of the lovey-dovey things! Where did you meet?!

Malcolm: We met in the club, girl. You don’t meet a good man in the club! Well, I did. I had always been in long-term relationships. I was dating a guy for a while who was super jealous all of the time. I broke up with him, met this other guy, and he just was abusive — not in a physical way but abusive like he was trying to find himself, and quite frankly (excuse my French, there’s no other way to say this) he was fucking everybody in Atlanta. But, I was in love and so devastated.

So my friends told me, “You need to stop these long relationships. You just need to date, go out, and have dinner with guys.” So I did that. I dated a couple of people. I met one guy. He was really, really nice. We dated for a while but then it got time for us to have sex and it was horrible. So I got mad at all my friends. I was like, “Don’t ever give me advice again. I’m sick of y’all.”

After that, I called one of my friends on a Thanksgiving night and said, “I’m going to the club tonight. I’m going to have me a cocktail, and I’m going to be cute, and I’m going back to my old ways.” And he was like, “Okay if that’s what you want to do, let’s go.” So we went to Loretta’s to dance and I saw the guy that I had been dating. So I went upstairs to the bar and I was sitting at the bar all by myself — this big ole bar. They had just constructed this new bar at Loretta’s and it was huge. I looked across the bar and the bartender was on the other side of the bar talking to this group of people. When I looked at the group of people he was talking to, I saw this guy and was like, “Damn, he is gorgeous.” And he started looking at me!

The guy started walking around the bar toward me. Our eyes were on each other the entire time. He walked and walked and walked, and then was going to try to walk by me! And I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait — no, HELL NO!” So he’s like, “What?” And I was like, “You’ve been looking at me from way over there, I’ve been looking at you, and you just going to walk by and not say anything?” So he came over and we started talking. He bought me a drink and we started drinking. The next thing I knew, I was going down to the dance floor and I told my friend, Reggie, “Come get your coat out of my car because I’m leaving.” He was like, “You leaving? Where are you going?”

I said, “I met this dude.”

Reggie said, “You just went upstairs.”

I said, “Yeah, and I am leaving.”

We went to his place and we have been together ever since.

After we moved in together, we had a little barbecue at my house and he invited his whole family over. That night he said, “Baby, my family loves you.” I said, “That’s good. I’m glad.” He said, “No, you don’t understand. They ain’t never really seen me date anybody,” because he hadn’t really brought anybody around his family.

He said, “My nephew and my niece grabbed me and pulled me in the corner and they said, ‘Yo, Unc, don’t fuck this up. We like him.” And our families are still tight.

Working in the field I do, talking to gay men all the time, listening to the troubles that they have dating and relationships, and everything else — I realize that I’m blessed, but what I won’t do is give relationship advice. I tell people all the time, “Y’all’s problem is you keep trying to model your relationships after somebody else’s models, but you have to figure out your own path. What works for us may not work for you.” But ours does work.

shea: Amen! So do y’all have any kids of your own?

Malcolm: No, no. We have nieces and nephews. And then we literally have the Atlanta Black gay male community as nephews. I mean, if I walk into the bar, I hear “Hey, Unc!” all of the time. That’s who I am. As a matter of fact, my real nephew called me one day and said, “Uncle Kevin . . . Me and Ian are your only nephews, right?”

“Yeah!” I said.

“So how come everybody on Facebook calls you Unc?” he asked.

I said, “That’s just a term I’ve been deemed in the community.” I had to explain it to him.

shea: Yes for community! Tell me more about your work in the community and your journey living with HIV advocacy.

Malcolm: I work at an organization called THRIVE SS. And THRIVE stands for Transforming HIV Resentments into Victories Everlasting (the SS stands for Support Services). I retired from AT&T at the end of 2019. Prior to that, in 2017, I had started a program for Black gay men my age (over the age of 50) living with HIV, called the Silver Lining Project and that was under the THRIVE umbrella. So when I left AT&T, I became the program manager for the Silver Lining Project. Then in 2019, I became the Director of Programs for all of THRIVE and that’s the role I hold today. I just love being able to serve the community. I don’t get out in the street and do much outreach anymore. We’ve got more staff for that now, but I like putting together programs, making sure that the programs are working, and making sure the staff has what they need. I also do a lot of political advocacy. I’m the Federal Policy Chair for the US PLHIV Caucus. I also serve on a couple of community advisory boards and other coalitions. I try to keep my hand in policy work too because I think that that’s important.

I can’t complain. Life has been good. As a person diagnosed with HIV in the late nineties, I’m fortunate that I was diagnosed after ARTs. But let’s go back to my mom telling me about AZT. So in 1991, I read a story in Ebony Magazine about a Black man who had the “new gay plague” or whatever they were calling it at the time. I think they might have called it AIDS, but there was also HTLV-III and some other terms being used. One of the things that they said about him was that the lymph nodes on his neck were swollen. When I read that, it kind of scared me because the lymph nodes on my neck were swollen at that time. So I remember going to the phone and calling my mother. There’s a famous corner in Atlanta. There was a Krispy Kreme donut shop on the corner of Ponce de Leon and Argonne. Everybody knows that Krispy Kreme shop. It was a block away from my apartment and it had a payphone nearby. I walked to that payphone, called my mother, and told her about the article. I just started crying and said, “My lymph nodes are swollen.” She told me to calm down and said, “First of all, your lymph nodes could be swollen for a whole lot of other reasons, so let’s not jump to any conclusions. I want you to go to the doctor and they probably want to biopsy it. Let them biopsy it, let them tell you what it is.”

So I went to the doctor. The report came back a few weeks later — mostly medical jargon, but basically it was consistent with HTLV-III.

When I told my mom, she asked how I felt and I said, “Fine.” That’s when she said, “They’re going to want to put you on AZT — don’t let them do that. Just make sure you take your vitamins and make sure you eat well. It’s going to be okay. They’ll find something else.” So that’s what I did and I didn’t really think about it anymore after that. I mean I knew I had this thing, but I was feeling good and I just made sure that I kept up with my health. That was important to me.

shea: Talk to me a bit more about your policy work and organizing.

Malcolm: I’m the chair of the Policy and Action Committee for the US People Living with HIV Caucus, I am on the HIV Aging Policy and Action Coalition, and I’m on several community advisory boards for the metro Atlanta area. And you know about AIDSWatch, right?

shea: Yes, but tell me more!

Malcolm: Okay. So AIDSWatch happens every year. This year it’ll be in March. The last three years really were virtual, but this year we will be in person again — I’m looking forward to that. During AIDSWatch, we go to DC. The purpose of the convening is to make sure that we are building a community of advocates and that people know what the issues are, and what we’re advocating for — funding for the Minority AIDS Initiative, funding for the Ending the Epidemic Plan, and more, like funding to help reduce stigma, to stop policies that stigmatize gay and queer people, like in Florida for example.

I like being out at the forefront of the work and also behind the scenes, just trying to make our voices heard, my voice heard. I started the Silver Lining Project when I was working for AT&T and living with HIV. At AT&T, I had great insurance. My husband was a makeup artist with Estée Lauder, he had great insurance. We were fine. We were doing it, clubbing on the weekends, having a good time, and not thinking about anything. Then I started talking to people and they would talk about how they have to re-certify for ADAP every six months. And I was like, “What do you mean you got to re-certify for ADAP every six months? Your HIV is not going away every six months? What is happening here?” And they were like, “No, you got to re-certify to ensure your income hasn’t changed.”

I realized how that process was holding people back from life. People didn’t want to get promoted because if they got promoted, they would make more money and then lose their benefits. Other people were living on disability and then they wouldn’t come off of disability even though the medication was working and they were no longer “disabled,” because if you started working then you might reach the income level where you could “afford” your medication [without benefits]. I was like, “That’s crazy.” So I said, “Okay, let me see what I can do.”

I tell people this all the time, when you put something on your heart and the universe sees that it’s all good, the universe will send you the people or the tools that you need to make it happen.

A little bit later, I went on a Same Gender Loving Cruise and I met two friends of mine, Craig Washington and Jerome Hughes. Craig was already involved in the community and he was asked to hold a talkback at the end of the cruise about our experiences. The next thing I know, I found myself up on stage disclosing my status. When I did that, Jerome came to me and said, “Hey, I have this group that you might be interested in.” I said, “Okay, invite me.” The way he came up to me though, I was like, “Dude, is this Amway? Because you sound like Amway.” [chuckles]

So in October 2015, I went to the group — it was just all these guys in Atlanta living with HIV — some of them who I had seen on a regular basis. Half the room, I knew, because we’ve all been out in the clubs and everything else. I was like, “Holy crap. All these guys are living with HIV.” That group eventually blossomed into THRIVE. They were incorporated in December 2015. The group was founded by three Black gay men living with HIV — Daniel Driffin, Larry Walker, and Dwain Bridges. It was designed for us and by us. It’s been going strong for seven years. We are a membership-based nonprofit and we have probably the largest member organization of Black gay men living with HIV in the country.

Eventually, I started looking around, but I didn’t see anything for people my age. I would go to meetings and everything else, but everything was about young people. I was like, “This is kind of messed up and I don’t see anything for my age.” And then somebody said, “Well, there is an organization for older LGBTQ people called SAGE.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, let me go check them out.” But SAGE down here ain’t SAGE in New York [chuckles]. SAGE down here was very, very white and very, very old. It wasn’t working for me.

One day, I’m at a meeting and Larry, the THRIVE Executive Director said, “Well what have you experienced?” I responded, “Listen, I don’t see anything out there for guys my age.” He looked at me and said, “Well start it.” I looked over my shoulder, looked at him, and I was like, “Who me? Start what? I don’t know nothing about this. I work in corporate America. I don’t know nothing about no nonprofit stuff. I don’t know anything about this.”

But again, God sends you the people, the universe sends you the people. I met two guys — Claude Bowen and Nathan Townsend. The three of us sat down and we wrote a grant for the Silver Lining Project to get it funded. And it got funded, and it got funded massively. It was like a $400,000 grant for three years!

shea: Whoa!

Malcolm: And so with that money, THRIVE was able to get a building that we’re still in today and then start to gather other funds. We put together a program called Silver Skills, where we teach the members of the group about HIV and aging. What is HIV doing to your body? You may be on your retrovirals, you may feel better, but what is medical science saying about this? Why are you feeling the way you do? PTSD and trauma, dealing with growing up Black, growing up gay, growing up living with HIV, what are all those traumas? What things are you going through? Loss and depression? Many of us have lost friends and connections. Finally, the program ends with talking about stigma — what it’s about and how to overcome it.

We did that curriculum for three years. We met on a weekly basis or every two weeks with what we call Oba’s Roundtables, “oba” being the West African term meaning king or leader. We did Oba’s Roundtables on a regular basis, and then just had events and parties. One of the things that we pride ourselves at THRIVE and Silver Lining about is when you walk into this building, we don’t want you to be holding your head down and going, “Uh-no, I got HIV.” It’s about self-love. We want to have a good time. So we give great parties, we have great events. We’ve been doing that for seven years and the model is really, really successful.

Working with THRIVE and the Silver Living program, I also got asked to engage in other opportunities. I’m just known now for being able to support. I’ve turned into a policy wonk. People will say, “Okay, well if you need to know something about HIV law or whatever, criminalization, whatever, go, Malcolm has all of this stuff.” And just having the time of my life serving the people, and serving myself. And serving myself, right? Someone said, “I needed to create something to save myself.” That’s what I’ve done.

shea: Sounds like you’re staying booked and busy!

Malcolm: My husband says, “So you do realize you retired, right?” [chuckles]

Ronald Johnson, the Chair of the US PLHIV Caucus, and I joke all the time.

I’ll call and say “Hey Ronald, how’s retirement?” Ronald’s in his seventies and he’s “retired,” too. He’ll say, “Oh, it’s wonderful. I’m not doing anything.”

shea: Ah. Just sitting around. Just sitting around, relaxing — changing policy and all.

Malcolm: Yeah, we just chilling. One time, I said, “I think I’ll take up golf.”

shea: Ha! Before I let you go, I did hear you talk about just the lack of spaces and resources for gay Black men who are aging. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the lack that you see and the needs that you see. I do think in our society, so much of the funding and resources are geared toward young people, whether it’s youth or young adults. So I just wanted to know more about what you see and what you see the needs are, as more and more queer and gay people are aging.

Malcolm: Really it’s a social aspect. I remember being young and in the bar and pointing to an older guy going, “If I am in the bar at that age, please shoot me.” Now, I realize how blessed I am that nobody took me up on that because I’ll be dancing at the club tomorrow, having a good time, but I realized that having that social outlet is important. People see me and say, “No way you’re 65!” People begin to assume certain things when they age. You have to act a certain way. You can’t go out. You can’t do certain things. And that in itself makes you old. It doesn’t help you age, it makes you old.

So when we started working on Silver Lining, one of the things we said was we wanted to get people out of the house, because there’s somebody that’s saying, “Well, I can’t go to a bar anymore because I’m too old,” or, “I can’t go here because I’m too old.” And loneliness and isolation will kill you a whole lot faster than HIV will. So that’s part of our premise and goal — to make sure that people are living their full lives, enjoying themselves. It’s not just about going to a bar or a club. If that’s not you, that’s not you. But as long as you’re not sitting home going, “Oh, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.” I mean, get out. Go to a museum, take a class, do something to make sure that you’re keeping your mind active, your spirit active.

A lot of us don’t have kids and you don’t have children to come over and talk to you. So we want to make sure that we’re getting the people out there and we’re doing the things.

SAGE does a wonderful job because SAGE first seized on the notion that we weren’t supposed to be here this long. Especially If you’re living with HIV — nobody thought that they were going to get to be 65 or 70 years old. We were all supposed to be gone. But we’re here and now as we are getting older, we’re starting to see more and more of this. We’re starting to see more and more groups for older guys, because people realize, “Oh shoot, we’re still here and we got to do this.” It’s just a matter of making sure that people are living their lives to the fullest and they’re doing everything that they can possibly do to make sure that they are happy, healthy, and thriving. That’s what we need most.

shea: Yes! Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, you’re a busy person, to chat with me and share your story with me. I appreciate it.

Malcolm: Not a problem at all. I love telling these stories because, for me, it’s about letting people know there’s life after an HIV diagnosis. There’s life after 50. There’s life after 65. Get out there and continue to live your life. Don’t slow down. People ask me all the time, “When are you going to just slow down,” and everything else. I said, “I guess the day that they carry me out of here.”

Ain’t nobody trying to slow down! Life is fun. Keep doing it.

“Mother Has Lived, What Can I Say?”

a black and white image of DonnaSue, a Black butch elder, is at the center of this collage. the artist has layered newsprint, paper, and lines over the photo to create a gorgeous playful picture of DonnaSue

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

I don’t talk about it enough, but I feel very strongly about intergenerational queer relationships. I have queer friends and community members in their fifties and sixties and older, and I cherish those relationships so deeply. It’s invaluable to have a friend who has been through what you’ve been through and more, and can impart some wisdom and hope.

So, when the idea of interviewing an LGBTQ elder was presented to us, I was really excited and jumped at the chance. This excitement grew tenfold when I first emailed DonnaSue to schedule our interview. Just from our brief exchange, I could tell she was serious, vibrant, and whip-smart. When we both logged into the video chat, my nerves were eased as I was greeted by her face.

DonnaSue Johnson describes herself as a “big, black, beautiful, Bohemian, bougie, Buddhist butch.” She was born in 1956 in South Jersey, to policeman Donald Johnson and mother Sue, hence DonnaSue.

“I had a great childhood. I truly, truly did. I was born the same day my grandfather died, my maternal grandfather, who was a physician and a civil rights activist,” she says. “He went to Lincoln University with Thurgood Marshall and Langston Hughes.”

DonnaSue’s life is full of historical tidbits like this. Her father’s father was a Buffalo soldier and a reverend. Her family has a rich history, and her own life is just as interesting. She shares with me that her family was very academically focused, and that academic excellence was embraced in the home.

DonnaSue recounts one story in which her brother ran home from a day of school crying and asked “Mommy, didn’t we [Black people] do anything?” and after that moment the family bought the Black History Encyclopedia and began to learn Black history together. DonnaSue says that she is still to this day learning Black history, and we briefly talk about American civil rights activist and lawyer Pauli Murray.

DonnaSue excelled in school, and eventually made her way to college, attending the HBCU Virginia State College, now University. She says that this was a way to get the Black experience, having grown up in a predominantly white area of New Jersey.

“I majored in special education. My mom was a special ed teacher. My grandmother was an early childhood educator. I think I mentioned my grandfather. My paternal grandfather was the physician for the black community in Burlington County,” says DonnaSue. “But he also was the first president of the NAACP for Burlington County in New Jersey. I was in a marching band. I played basketball, softball, tennis. I pledged Delta.”

After graduating, DonnaSue says she was a part of Black organizations like Jack and Jill, and also was a debutante, she jokes:

“Mom tried her best to get this butch out!”

After getting her degree in teaching, DonnaSue says that career path didn’t work out for her, so she decided to enlist in the Air Force. She went into officer training school to become an officer instead of the other routes into the Air Force at the time: ROTC, academy, or 90-day programs. Her schooling took place in San Antonio, Texas.

DonnaSue and I don’t talk a lot about this time in her life.

“It’s hard to talk about this part of my life because I am a one-hundred percent disabled vet. I suffered from military sexual trauma and PTSD, and major depressive disorder, but I didn’t even know what was going on,” she says. “I didn’t recognize it until decades later. I just kept on pushing pushing pushing.”

Throughout my talk with DonnaSue, even in the moments where we are talking about something serious or heavy, she always finds a way to bring gravitas and a lightness to the topic. She always has a joke or a saying that eases the tenser parts of our talk. I learn that after the Air Force, she went into social work for 40 years.

She says her favorite gig was “emergency psychiatric crisis intervention” in an emergency room setting. There, she would determine the level of care for each person on an individual basis. Back when she started, the levels varied from, to use her words, “I give you a card and say, ‘bye, call as you need’” to “the most restrictive which would be taking away your civil rights and forcing you into treatment on a commitment status because you’re a danger to self and others.”

“We were working to assist folks in having an opportunity to live and get better with whatever they were dealing with,” she says.

I can tell what this job meant to DonnaSue just from talking to her. At times, she’s on the verge of tears remembering working with families or individuals.

Now, DonnaSue works with SAGE, the oldest and largest advocacy organization aimed toward the care of LGBTQ elders. SAGE is based in New York, where DonnaSue lives now, but also has nationwide programs.

Having worked for SAGE for more than eight years now, DonnaSue says the pandemic definitely shifted how they administered care to the elders they serve. SAGE shifted to a hybrid level of care to make sure elders had their basic needs met as well as their social needs.

At SAGE DonnaSue leads many groups, one of which is called America’s Burning, where in 2020 they covered the three P’s: Politics, Pandemic, and Protest.

“We had a community of LGBTQ seniors, mostly Black lesbians, who were these women who are so intelligent and bright. They were on top of their games in terms of wanting to know about what was going on,” she says.

The group covered topics like the Tulsa massacre and many other massacres that happened to Black Americans, and most recently covered Pauli Murray’s work.

DonnaSue says she was out during her time in the military, before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a policy. She says it was like a “witch hunt.” Stationed at Travis Air Force Base between Sacramento and San Francisco, DonnaSue recounts her first gay day parade with Sister Boom Boom and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

She says in those days, during the AIDS crisis, she was doing a lot of dating despite messaging that “lesbians don’t get AIDS,” a phrase that makes her roll her eyes.

“I’ve read ‘And The Band Played On,’ read the pages, and I’m like, ‘oh my god, I was there. I was there.’ As much drinking, drugging, fucking, and sucking that I was doing in my twenties, imagine if I was a man? I might not be here.”

In the time we had together, we didn’t get into all the juicy tidbits about DonnaSue’s dating life that I wanted to, but she tells me she’s single now after having a long-term partnership end, and regales me with the story of the 10-year polyamorous relationship she had with a married couple.

The couple had three children that called her “Aunt Donna,” and they still keep in touch to this day despite the relationship ending. She still remembers birthdays and big days for the family.

“Mother has lived, what can I say, Dani?” she laughs.

We talk much more about DonnaSue’s social worker, and she tells me about getting her Masters at Fordham University, and becoming a workaholic who didn’t have time to really process the trauma she experienced in the military.

She was a part of the first ACT team in Jersey. ACT stood for Assertive Community Treatment, and there was also PACT (Program of Assertive Community Treatment) where she saw clients who had dual diagnoses, like those that struggled with mental health and substance abuse disorders. She says it wasn’t uncommon to hear:

“Excuse me, can I please continue getting high because that helps the voices?”

“Basically, my modus operandi was ‘Do you want a cup of coffee and a piece of pie,’” she says, and you get the sense that DonnaSue deeply cared for every person she encountered during her 40 years in social work. Even though she must have seen hundreds of people, it feels like she knew them all and brought them all the highest form of care she could.

“I’ve worked with a lot of seriously and persistently mentally ill people who are also co-occuring disordered, which means they were mentally ill and chemically addicted,” she explains. “I love the job. Most recently, I was working for an adult day healthcare center for adults that had HIV and AIDS, mental illness, and chemical addiction. That was a magnificent job. You see a lot of death because folks, for whatever reason, they weren’t adherent, they weren’t compliant with their medications. Some are still with us thank goodness.”

We also talk about Buddhism, and how it has served as a place to find peace in difficulty for DonnaSue. She says that she learned that most obstacles are brilliantly disguised blessings. And that when you look at it this way, a firework goes off in your head, and that’s when you can look for solutions, options, strategies, and answers.

“I’m here to say, ‘Be you, be yourself, Celebrate whatever you want to do. It’s important.’ When I say everything happens for the best, my grandmother taught me that way before I became a Buddhist. As I got older, I said. ‘What about death? What’s good about death?’ and I figured two things out. Number one, it teaches us how precious life is. As we move forward in life and all the different decisions we have to make, always remember, life is precious. You’re going to make it.”

“The other thing is, if anyone tells you you got plenty of time, they are not a reliable source of information. It’s a bald-faced lie when someone says you have plenty of time. Look at how you were on your game today making sure we connected. This time is precious.”

At 66, DonnaSue says she is working on a project for TEDx and a 501(c)(3). She’s also working on a presentation for Yale University. She’s got irons in the fire and wants other lesbian elders to know that it isn’t too late for them, that you’re never too old to get things started for yourself.

DonnaSue also ends our talk with a little wisdom that I needed, and I hope if you need it too you can hear it.

“In our community, in the Black community, so many of us have had childhoods where we were taught by our guardians that what is said and done in the house, stays in the house. That’s what they learn and then they pass it on, it’s generational. But there’s no need to suffer anymore. There’s no need to suffer anymore. Talk therapy helps, sometimes medication is needed. Talk to somebody. It’s safe. Find somebody that works.”

We end our talk with plans to keep in touch with one another, and I’m so excited and grateful for the opportunity to get to know DonnaSue. Everything she said was something I needed to hear or made me laugh out loud on a day when I didn’t feel like laughing. It was a pleasure and an honor and I hope you love getting to know her a little more too!

“And I Said to God, Isn’t Being Black Enough? Do I Have To Be Gay Too?”

a black and white photo of Donald Bell, an older Black man with a beard and a large smile. Behind Don is a gorgeous collage filled with yellows, blacks, blues, and reds.

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

I am often the oldest person in the room. I have spent much of the last decade surrounded by LGBTQ+ youth – teaching them, reading with them, and researching them. Last summer, some of the teenagers I worked with labeled me a queer elder. I chuckled and gladly accepted it given my refutation of “the TikTok” and my love of “old folks music,” but I know I’m no elder yet. I save that title for legends like Donald Bell, a gay Black third-generation Chicagoan whose commitment to organizing and community spans more than five decades.

On a dreary Ohio afternoon in January, I dialed Mr. Bell’s number to chat. His hello was a bear hug that roared through the phone’s speaker like sunshine. “I’m sorry we’re not on zoom so I can see your beautiful face, but I’m sitting here looking at it on the website.” What a charmer. I smiled for more than an hour until we hung up. We talked about Chicago, growing up gay as a member of the Stonewall Generation, and what it means to bridge intergenerational differences as an aging member of our community. When we were done chatting, I was certain of three things regarding Donald Bell.
1. He is as brilliant as he is charming and honest.
2. He loves his city, his people, and his work.
3. He is [without a doubt] an absolute legend.

This is him in his own words, on his own terms, in a world that he is continuing to carve into something better for all of us. — shea wesley martin

On his activism

I have been an activist all of my life. I guess I was drawn into the civil rights movement in my youth. I was born right after World War II, and of course, I was intrigued by Black servicemen returning from the war, honoring and continuing to work towards the Double Victory Campaign. During the war, many Black servicemen vowed to fight against fascism around the world and then come home and fight segregation here. So that, along with Black parts of the labor movement, like A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters was all happening around me as I grew up. It was always there.

When I was six years old, Emmett Till’s body was returned to Chicago. As a child, I was not allowed to attend the services — no children were, but what I saw was how disturbed the grownups were. And this was traumatizing to me as a child, traumatizing to all of us because I mean, this was the first time I’d seen men cry in public, and the sense of urgency just reverberated through all of us. I first learned, at the tender age of six, the danger of being born into Black skin. Later on, when I was 13, The March on Washington for Jobs and Civil Rights occurred. I was too young to attend, but I did follow it all and when I started high school that year, I was part of a movement. We started what we called human relations clubs at several of the more progressive Chicago suburban high schools. So this [activism] has been a part of me for my entire life — from civil rights to all of the movements that came as a — the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement (as we called it at the time), the revival of the labor movement, and of course, the anti-war movement.

All of these things have been a part of me from my earliest youth and have carried on, not only with community activism, but with what I learned and was taught were the basic responsibilities of an American citizen. I have spent nearly 40 years as an election judge. I wasn’t interested in being a politician but I was interested in the American people getting off their butts and honoring the opportunities that they had. And that’s a huge lift. But it’s always been important to me that people get out there and they defend their civil rights by using them.

On lost histories and stories

I’m a third-generation Chicagoan. My family did not come here as part of the Great Migration; we came here long before that. My grandpa settled in Chicago just after the World’s Columbian Exposition in the 1890s. My maternal family was part of Pilgrim Baptist Church which is considered the home of gospel music. My father’s side of the family comes from another progressive Baptist church. We were steeped in that tradition. It’s very important to us, our identity, and our approaches to faith. For Black people, gospel music and gospel culture tie us to our American history because our people, African Americans, are resilient. And it has been the objective of white America from the very beginning to control us and then subsequently eliminate us. We have survived attacks on the Black body, Black identity, on the Black family dating back forever. There is no institution north, south, or anywhere else that cannot trace its legacy or “greatness” to our enslavement or the contributions of African American people. But again, that story is hidden and it impacts the way we think about ourselves but it also impacts the way that people think about us.

The first ever permanent settler of Chicago, the fastest-growing city in human history, was a Black man. We know history is whitewashed; it’s straight-washed. It’s (upper) class washed — all of those attributes of privilege are the prevailing ones that rule our histories, legacies, and our sense of belonging (or not belonging) for marginalized people.

Here in Chicago, one of the things that we’re proud of is the fact that despite New York, LA, and San Francisco being considered the “gay hubs,” we have a long and very significant history in the LGBT community. It’s here where the first homophile organization in the US was established, the Society for Human Rights. Most folks credit that to Henry Gerber who registered the organization with the State of Illinois as the secretary of the organization, but what is lost is that it was John T. Graves, an African American minister who was the president of that organization. So our LGBT library here, Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, bears the name of Gerber, but the legacy of Graves is lost. And that story — the erasure of our contributions — is repeated over and over and over again.

On Black Chicago, homosexuality, and community

Like most Chicagoans, I grew up in an immediate community of people who look just like me. Chicago historically has been and continues to be one of the most racially, ethnically, and class-stratified places on the globe. And so segregation is us in terms of history. Not all of that is necessarily bad because it also allows us to be a place of incredible rich cultural diversity. Chicago is American all the way down, from its very roots. And in its growth, it became the place that African Americans wanted to migrate to before the end of slavery and after slavery. The growth of what we call the Black Metropolis was so fast and is still going.

I currently live in Boystown, on the north side of the city, but it started on the south side in the Black community. In the 1890s, men, who were then called musical rather than gay, were welcome in the community and they could socialize. They could be in bars. They could find residences. As the (gay) community started to assemble, it started migrating north to where it is now. But that starting point and the connection to the community on the south side is lost in our histories. So many in the gay community don’t speak of the legacy and the advocacy that comes from the Black community.

These days, the Black community is characterized as the most homophobic of ethnic communities but that is not the truth of our history. The truth of our history is that gay, lesbian, and gender-expansive people were normal and recognized in the Black community. In 1938, an openly gay Black man and minister built the First Church of Deliverance. That congregation still survives, led by an openly gay man.

There used to be a cultural event that happened on the south side that included the entire Black community called Finnie’s Ball, a drag event that happened every year. Everybody went and everybody participated.

Even when my mother lost her mother, the person that she found comfort with was a trans woman who lived on the first floor of their tenement building and who was known as “Mama” in the neighborhood. “Mama” was there to comfort my mother and my grandfather didn’t have any aversion to it. He said, in the vernacular at the time, “well, you go and spend time with that sissy, I’m glad she’s there to help you.” These are stories and situations that are not portrayed in the modern community when people look at the Black community and the LGBT community. But our histories are totally entwined. And I’m sure that it’s the same in New York and LA and San Francisco and everywhere else, that the most marginalized communities are also the most welcoming for other marginalized communities.

On Chicago, the “LGBT oasis” of the Heartland

Well, Chicago was in fact the LGBT oasis of the Heartland, the middle of the country. People routinely migrated to Chicago from where you are [in Ohio]. For a long time, both when I was a student and working in my career in higher administration, Chicago and the Chicago metropolitan area served tons of students coming to universities. It is a huge place; it’s the engine of the heartland of our country. This is where our food and industrial development came from. So that oasis experience happened here too. This city was perceived as a safe ground. Of course, the political ramification of that is that Illinois is one of the few states in the union with full civil rights for LGBT people. It’s one of the few states where you can get married one day and the next day, you don’t have to fear getting fired from your job for being gay because we have full civil rights. We worked very hard at it.

The news never covers it all. The only thing that people hear about Chicago is about shootings so they’re not getting the truth about Chicago. While the LGBT community is reminded every day that there’s a “don’t say gay” law in Florida and there’s an “anti-CRT” law in Florida, what they’re not told is that three years ago in Illinois, we passed a mandate for teaching LGBT history in all of the public schools. As long as popular culture continues to treat us (and other places in the interior parts of the United States) as flyover country, our communities will never be aware of the progress that we are making.

In fact, I’m being seated tomorrow as one of the founding commissioners of the Illinois State Commission on LGBT Aging. This is a first-in-the-nation endeavor — a three-year commission to investigate the status and condition of LGBT elders throughout the state of Illinois to assess what services we are receiving, what needs we are having met, and what difficulties we are having in seeking housing and other services at this point.

In the news, we’re just in dire situations all the time. I think it is really easy right now to feel discouraged or saddened by the state of the world for LGBTQ folks, and Black folks, and there is often a narrative that is portrayed and passed on to our youth, especially that LGBTQ elders don’t exist, that we don’t grow old but we do — we’re here.

On schooling, growing up, and sexuality

Well, of course, not only was there no LGBT presence in schools; there was no LGBT presence in the world. I was born in 1949, in the middle of the 20th century. And when I was growing up, when I was maturing, I lived a heteronormative life, like many LGBT people of my age. I knew as a child that I was different but I didn’t know what that difference was. I couldn’t describe it, I couldn’t define it. And in adolescence, when I heard words like homosexual, I knew it wasn’t something anyone talked about. So I found a safe place to look into it and the safe place was usually the library. We had our nice little Andrew Carnegie Library downtown. I went to the library. They had uncensored sources of information, unlike our schools. The Webster’s dictionary sat open on a pedestal on top of the books in the reference room. Everything, of course, was print media at that time, so I also grabbed the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So I looked up the word “homosexuality” in both of those things to get an understanding of what it was. And I noticed that the pages in both the dictionary and the encyclopedia were smudged. A lot of people had been doing that but I had no idea who those people were or how to connect with them or to have anybody to have any conversation about this with. That was our experience.

As an adolescent, I dated. I had girls and women in my life that I loved. By the time I got to university, my high school sweetheart and I had been going together for so long that we were actually engaged to be married. It wasn’t until I was a sophomore in university that I had an experience that identified for me what that difference was. I was an orientation leader, so I went back to school early and I met my resident advisor. And when he opened the door, I had what I generally call “a Walt Disney moment,” where all of a sudden, there’s music floating through the air and there’s birds tweeting and butterflies and all of this stuff — I had fallen in love at first sight. I knew instantly what it was. I went back to my room and I had what we call a “come to Jesus” moment in my room by myself. I spent hours praying, crying, and just going crazy over this. And I said to God, isn’t being Black enough? Do I have to be gay too? In thinking through that, at that time, I formulated what would become a practice of my life — using one oppression to inform the other. I recognized that there had been no choice about being Black. There was no pre-birth line where you lined up at the table and they asked, “hey, you guys want to be Black? Come on over here and sign up!” That wasn’t an option. You were born Black and that was it. It was your challenge in life to come to a safe, emotional, and psychological space where you were okay with that. And even though society’s constantly telling you that you’re worthless, you have to free your mind from that, to value yourself, and to not be driven crazy by your own existence.

So I said, well, that must be true about this gay thing too. I decided that I was going to live my life in a headspace where I could value what I was and value all of the things that I was — this man in Black skin, this man who was attracted to other men — and I was going to be okay. I wasn’t sick, as they were saying in the DSM at the time. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t a mistake or offense to God, I wasn’t a criminal. I was just a person just trying to make it. And that’s how I’ve gone through my life. That’s how I’ve survived it.

On creating community and building a legacy

Our people had to come out. I was growing up in a time of tremendous social upheaval in the United States. All of these liberation movements were happening and communities were coming into visibility. In the 70s, the gay community came into visibility, bars moved from back alleys to front streets. We lived together and our communities grew. Places that historically have been identified as gay spaces, whether we’re talking Chelsea in New York or DuPont Circle in Washington or The Castro in San Francisco, all of those places grew into existence after the Second World War and during my lifetime. But when I was a teenager, there were no pride flags, there were no national LGBT organizations. There was no space. So during my lifetime, those spaces emerged. That’s what we developed. That’s the legacy of my generation. And I am part of the first “out” aging generation of LGBT people. When I was young, I didn’t think about being 80 because I didn’t see anybody who was 80. We didn’t even think about it. But now I’m part of the first “out” generation of LGBT elders, or the “Stonewall Generation,” as some call us. We have a legacy to pass on to our youth.

First of all, we have to identify LGBT youngsters as ours, within the LGBT community, we have to form intergenerational relationships that are similar to the ones that exist, where people grow up in their communities of origin and their families of origin. Many of us are estranged from those families and those communities. So we have to make our own. And what has to happen is that young people have to recognize us as the people upon whose shoulders they stand, the people who went from the conditions in which I was born, to the conditions that exist now. And we have to recognize as the elders, that it’s the young people who are our legacy.

It’s the young people who will value what we’ve done. It’s the young people who will receive our work product as we move on in time. And hopefully, they will appreciate us as we have come to appreciate those who preceded us, who lived under incredibly worse times. So intergenerational relationships are essential at this time in the LGBT community because there will never be another generation like mine. There will never be another generation that comes from obscurity into public prominence.

We are now part of the American social and political fabric. We are out there and we can’t go away and we won’t go away. And some people are saying, oh my God, there just seems to be more of that homosexuality, there just seems to be more just gender stuff out there. And I don’t believe that there’s more. I just believe that we are now visible. And I believe that the question of gender identity and the questions of sexual orientation are questions that all humans have to deal with.

People will tell you who they are when they come into recognition of who they are. And society has just got to get ready for that.

On aging, the word “queer,” and the necessity of intergenerational connections

SAGE is our largest organization that advocates for those of us in the aging [LGBT] community and that’s important because in our society when we age, we grow into a new -ism. And believe me, as a person with all the -isms that I’ve grown up with, I was not pleased to encounter this new -ism around 65 as I entered the social safety network. Many folks become very paternalistic, telling aging people what we should do and how we should do it. As aging people, we appreciate the support and we appreciate the commitment of our younger allies, but they have to understand that we continue to be fully functioning people up to the levels of our capacities.

All of us who are aging are human beings who need social connections to exist, and this is a basic human need. And we know it, we know that we can deliver medically viable babies all the time but if those babies are not connected, if they’re not held, if they’re not touched, if they’re not talked to or sung to, no matter what we feed them, they will struggle. All humans need socialization. Many of us [aging LGBT people] have lost our siblings, we’ve lost our lifelong friends, we’ve lost our parents. Some of us have even lost our children and that’s a loss that we as human beings are just not wired for. That’s the worst loss of all. We end up with fewer and fewer social contacts. And we need connections. We hope that both our children of origin and our children of choice, the LGBT younger generations, will help fill that need. We need that connection and hopefully, they will benefit from it too. Could I talk about one thing that I really think is an important intergenerational thing to deal with?

That’s around the issues of language and identity — I specifically want to talk about the word queer.

I believe as an individual that every person has the right to his, her, or their identity. Each of us is who we say we are. If you say that you are queer, I’ve no problems with that at all. I get it. That’s your identity. In this age, many people identify as queer but what I want youngsters to understand is that queer can be a very triggering term for those of us who are older. I’ll use myself as an example.

I was born in 1949. At the time I was born — and in the time in which I grew up — homosexuality was universally illegal in all of the United States. It was also illegal in most countries in the world. So we were criminalized. Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder in the DSM. So we were pathologized. Homosexuality was thought of as inconsistent with the designs of the creator in most faiths and houses of worship. So we were demonized and the use of the word queer was a direct reflection of the oppression that we experienced. When I was in university, if you were identified as queer and that word got to the Dean of Men’s office, you could be dismissed from the university. This is before the Supreme Court made its ruling that public institutions had to guarantee students the right to due process. You could be kicked out of school. It would not only wreck your personal and your professional life but also cost you your student distinction and you could end up fighting in Vietnam. Newspapers published “queer lists” on Mondays, listing the names of men who’d been arrested and detained in local lockups from gay bars, from police raids. And so not only was your personal life ruined but you were also subjected to becoming a social outcast. If you were identified as queer and you were harmed bodily, whether you were gay bashed or you were killed, your queerness could be a legally recognized defense and get someone acquitted in courts of the law. So what I’m saying is that for many of us, that trauma is still there, and while I respect individual identity, what I push back against is using the word queer to describe our community. Again, this is my personal stance but I try to take the time to explain it so that there’s better intergenerational communication and understanding.

From my life experience, the word queer is as triggering as the word “nigga.” And I know we continue discussions about that within the African American community too. I just think that what we need to do is gently engage one another in conversation so that we can establish an understanding of where we stand on those things. I’m not denying anyone the right to identify as queer or as a nigga. I’m just gently requesting that we not assume that the terminology for our time is okay for a collective identification of the entire community. That’s my stand on that.

I don’t know if we necessarily have to have one catchall term because we represent expansive populations of people. And I know these are difficult times. So we just have to be able to civilly and compassionately talk to one another because we don’t want to foster the idea that we are different. We, in fact, want to encourage the idea that all of humanity is the same. But just to recognize that we’ve come to this place from different paths and to honor those paths because you can’t fully come to understand different individuals’ experiences without being open to honoring the past that they came along. If we could just have this conversation amongst the generations without anyone — whether elders or youngsters — feeling that the other is wrong, then we can make progress. We have to make room, we have to make space for each other.

On what comes next

Well, I’m excited about new formal areas of advocacy that I’m moving into this year. I just got a call from the Mayor’s office with an invitation to join the Mayor’s advisory committee here in Chicago. I am serving this year as an ambassador for PRIDEnet, based at Stanford University, where they house The Pride Study, a longitudinal study focused on the LGBT community across the country. I’m really proud to be working on that project, especially as a member of the aging community, because our experiences shouldn’t be lost.

“I Didn’t Know Trans Men Existed Until I Saw Chaz Bono on Dancing With the Stars”

a black and white photo of Ray Gibson, a Black trans man and elder, is the center focal point of this collage. Beautiful collaged items including newsprint, colors, squiggles, and lines surround Ray.

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

Our first interview subject is Ray Gibson, a Black trans man who is an Air Force veteran, a longtime LGBTQ+ activist and an all around good time. This interview was edited for clarity.

Sa’iyda: Thank you so much for doing this. I’m so excited to have a chat just about you and your life and things you’ve experienced. So I guess, tell me about your early life. Let’s start at the beginning.

Ray: Well, I’m a son of the baseball legend Bob Gibson. And that in and of itself set me on a course that is very unique in this country because I’m Black. And being a celebrity trust me, it was wild. It was very wild, very jet set. But that was my normal, so I didn’t know I was that different until I got older.

But when I got older, I definitely knew where my drive came from, where my winning attitude came from, where all of that came from, was my childhood. And I got to travel a lot; I’ve lived all over this country. I’ve traveled abroad by myself. So I had a lot of culture, a lot of strength from the 1960s. And basically I was just really fearless because my dad was the same way and I watched him like a hawk. And so everything about that life ended up a part of me.

Then I joined the service. My cousin told me just a year ago that I told her and another cousin of mine that I was going into the service for them to make me a better man. Now, I don’t remember saying that, but I have no doubt it came out of my mouth. Things like that came out of my mouth from time to time, and when I was aware of it coming out of my mouth, I was horrified because I didn’t understand where it came from. I’m like, “Where in the hell did that come from?” I told my mom when I was 13 that I wanted a sex change. And I’d never heard of such a thing. I didn’t know of anything like that at 13 years old in 1970.

I didn’t know anything about that world, but it came out of my mouth. But as soon as it came out of my mouth I was like, “Oh, shit. What did I just say?” It was the day my menstrual cycle started and I was beside myself because that was the final straw to the illusion that I had that I thought I was a boy.

Sa’iyda: Did you feel that you were a boy from a young age?

Ray: From six. I made up all these weird things. Like, okay, well, I was six. And then when I was eight, I was playing hide and go seek with these boys, and they exposed their penises to me in the bushes. And I thought, “Oh, what funny looking little worms.” But the first thing I thought was, “Where’s mine?”

And so from that age until about the sixth grade, I just blanked out. I didn’t know what to think, I was very confused. I thought I was a boy. I thought I was a girl. I didn’t know what was going on. And then we had sex education, and I made up that I was just latent and my penis would grow in puberty. It was just in my head. I mean, I just thought that’s what was going to happen. So when the opposite things happened, it freaked me out.

Sa’iyda: Right. You have your menstrual cycle, you begin to—

Ray: And the boobs.

Sa’iyda: Right, I was going to say that you begin to develop breasts.

Ray: The boobs started showing and all this stuff was like, “Oh my God, my dog gone body done defied me.” And I didn’t have nobody to talk to. I mean, these were just all things I was thinking, and I didn’t know how to talk about them. I didn’t know how to articulate nothing. I barely spoke as a child. And I was an athlete as well.

Sai: So that definitely had some sort of effect on your body as well.

Ray: The fact that I didn’t grow anymore is what had an effect on me. And them boys kept getting bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier, and I had to stop playing with them because they were starting to hurt me. But I played just about every sport, and I was on the track team. I was just a great athlete. I took after my dad. That stuff was in my blood, and I was just very serious about it. So I’d say what my background gave me was just this insane amount of ambition. I mean, I wasn’t going to be stopped by nothing. Even if I had to cheat, lie, steal, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to be stopped. I was going to win at all costs.

Sa’iyda: Let’s talk about what it was like growing up Black, even though you were the child of a celebrity, in the 60s and 70s.

Ray: It was a trip. I mean, there were things that we had to do. My mother used to like to take us to where my dad was training in the winter in Florida. We had to pee on the side of the road going cross country, because there was still white only bathrooms. And the gas stations wouldn’t let us use the bathroom at the gas station so we had to pee on the side of the car.

Now, as a child, I thought that was a little adventurous, and I asked my mother why. And of course, we were too young for her to really explain it to us, but it was annoying. I mean, who the hell wants to piss on the side of a car? The 60s was very tumultuous. And as a child observing that, I observed more of my mother’s reaction to what was going on than anything.

Sa’iyda: Were you and your mother close?

Ray: Well, yeah, because she raised us. My dad was gone nine to 10 months out of the year, every year for my entire childhood and my teenage years. He retired when I was 16 or 15, something like that.

But yeah, my mother’s reaction, and she got put in jail for sit-ins and stuff like that, which my father was like, “You can’t do that. You’re Bob Gibson’s wife. You can’t be getting arrested.” And she just looked at him like, “Mm-hmm whatever, Bob.” My mom was a fireball. And so when people or leaders were getting assassinated and stuff like that, she would just bawl her head off. Hell, she bawled her head off for Kennedy and just the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.

And she didn’t much care for Malcolm X, and I never asked her why. But I am more like Malcolm X than I am them other guys. So because of them and what my father was, my father had his way of dealing with it too in professional baseball. He got the entire league to integrate. Him, Bill White, and Curt Flood got together and got the entire Major League Baseball to integrate, and stopped putting the Black players over here and the white players over there. So that was his effort of the 1960s.

At the time, it was very important because the way they made the Black players live, it was disgusting. I mean, they put them in boarding homes and stuff. Or sent them over to some Black woman’s house who took care of them and had extra rooms in the house. And just the way they had to live versus these highfalutin hotels and stuff that the white players got to be in. And it wasn’t as effective. The teams weren’t as effective when the Black players had to deal with all that extra stress. So growing up in that, again, when you’re in that, it looks normal.

Because everybody was going through it. And I kept wishing I was older, and I could go to the places my mom was going because I wanted to complain about it too. I wanted to be a part of it too.

That was one of the most remarkable times in the history of this country. But at the time, it sucked. And they put us in a white neighborhood, all white neighborhood when my dad started making money. And he moved us out of the hood and that’s when all of the interesting shit began.

Sa’iyda: Oh, I’m sure.

Ray: All the racism. But again, when my dad was gone, my mom was kicking butt at home. I remember getting called a jigaboo or something by this little boy that was chasing me down a hill. And I turned around and busted his tooth out of his mouth. So I got sent to the principal’s office, and my mom got called. And she came to the school and she asked me first what happened, and I told her. And then she sat there and listened to the principal, and then she said, “You know what? Huh, I give my child full permission to kick anybody’s butt who calls them out by name.” All they could say was okay, because my mom was a fireball. She wasn’t playing when it came to her kids.

And I was only four foot nothing until I got to high school, but they were afraid of me because of the TV. The way the media portrayed Black people is scary and mean. So they automatically assumed that’s what I was. And after busting that kid’s tooth out, nobody ever called me that name or any names again.

So yeah, I went through the 60s and the 70s, and then I left home, things were a lot different by then, though.

Sa’iyda: Right. So let’s move to that. You went into the military?

Ray: After falling flat on my face trying to live. I got kicked out of the house because my dad did not like the idea that I was into women. And so I fell flat on my face. And after scrunching around, ended up with the wrong crowd, getting involved in drugs and alcohol, all that whole scene. I had a brief one-night stand with a celebrity, but we ended up friends. I was just a kid. In fact, she had no business messing around with me with her over that. She was in her 30s and I was 17. But she talked me into joining the service. She said, “You are too smart. You have an excellent mind. You’re just throwing it away in these streets, and these people will kill you out here. Stop messing around with these people in the streets. You have no business. Join the service.” And I said, “yeah, okay.” And a year later I did.

Sa’iyda: So you were 18, 19? And if I’m clocking this right, we’re now in the late 70s, early 80s. And what form of the military did you join?

Ray: The Air Force.

Sa’iyda: And what was that like?

Ray: Oh, God. Well, you know what, it gave me the training of my lifetime. I had an awesome career with it, but at the time, I couldn’t stand it because I was the wrong gender. And somehow in my head, I knew that. I knew it. I used to sit there and watch the guys.

And then I was the only Black person, the only Black person that showed up on my unit for about the first six months to a year. And the guys used to try to hit on me. So there was a lot of sexual harassment going on. And then there was racism too.

And I didn’t dare come out about being a lesbian. That’s what I thought I was. That’s the only thing I could relate to was my body, not my mentality. So that’s what I thought I was. And back then you could not, there was no, don’t ask, don’t tell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You got kicked out of the service if they found out. So I was in the closet.

Sa’iyda: So you were in the closet, you’re dealing with sexual harassment, you’re dealing with racism. And at the same time, you’re dealing with the understanding that the body that you are in is not quite right.

Ray: Not quite. Something was wrong. Something was off. And I kept thinking, why aren’t I being… Even in bootcamp, it was like, why aren’t I being trained with the men? I just had no… But see, again, I didn’t have nobody to tell this stuff too. So it was just tormenting me in my head. And then I would have to just keep it moving because there was nothing I thought I could do about it.

Sa’iyda: Right. And at the time, had you ever seen a trans person?

Ray: No.

Sa’iyda: Did you know anything about trans people?

Ray: Nope. I knew about transvestites, drag queens, and another word. But I bumped into one in a club one time, and I still didn’t know that was a transgender woman.

Sa’iyda: But you had never seen trans men?

Ray: No, I didn’t even know trans men existed until I saw Chaz Bono on Dancing With the Stars. There was this long stretch in between when I fought in the military and finding out about Chaz Bono that I just tried to bury that stuff because it was just annoying. Because there was nothing I thought I could do about it. I didn’t know what, I had no verbiage. I had no English for what was really going on with me. And when I saw Chaz Bono, I about pissed my pants. I really was like, “What the what?”

Sa’iyda: Right. Because growing up, you had known Chaz as Chastity.

Ray: That’s exactly what I said when I saw him on the TV was, “Wait a minute, wasn’t that Chasity? And what they doing with all that fucking hair on his face? And what’s the what?” I was all confusing the pronouns. At first. And then I had to hear every single time that if they interviewed that guy, I had to hear what they said. Because all of a sudden, everything that I ever thought about myself came rushing back to me. But I still fought it. I was scared. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what it would mean for my life. I had no idea how Chaz got to be Chaz. I was looking around seeing how transgender people were being treated, and I didn’t want to go through that bullshit all over again that I went through when people thought I was a lesbian. I got beat up. I got called names. I got all sorts of stuff happening, and I didn’t want to go through that. I thought, “Come out again as an elder, the middle aged?” I said, “No, I don’t want nothing to do with this.” So I tried to leave it alone, but it didn’t leave me alone.

Sa’iyda: So you tried to outrun it.

Ray: I could not outrun it. I could not. Because despite what I tried to do, I went home. I was in a deep depression at the time that had nothing to do with that, had to do with my life, losing track of my career, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

And so all I did was research. I moved to Atlanta. I was in Texas at the time, and I moved to Georgia and got a therapist. And told the therapist that I think that I’m like Chaz Bono. And she said, “Yippee.” She was excited.

She said, “Oh, I’ve got transgender clients.” And I looked at her like, “Lady, I just gave myself a death sentence, and you’re happy about it.” So she would try to get me to talk about it, and I refused to talk. I didn’t even know what my concern was. I just know I was mad that she wanted me to talk about it because I didn’t want to talk about it.

So I ran from it for four years. I ran, tried to run. And then when I’d leave her office, I’d go home and research transgender and what that was. Every day. Every day I was researching it.

I got a hold of this huge research guide so I could read all sorts of stuff in it. I can’t remember its name anymore. But I kept researching it. So despite my best effort to bury it, and, “Oh no, I’ll be a lesbian.” I told my therapist, “I’ll be a lesbian the rest of my life. I don’t care. I don’t want to be trans. I don’t want to have to come out to my family all over again. I don’t want any of that.” Because the first time was bad enough. Can you imagine what they’ll do about me saying, “I’m a man.” Oh, come on now. But it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I didn’t know people saw it. People saw it, I was the last one to know.

My relatives have told me they saw it when I was really young. I was really different. So I told the woman I was dating at the time. And then sometime between me telling her and the end of that year, I finally embraced it. Actually, I made an appointment. I told my PCP at the VA that I thought I was a man. I might be a man.

And she said, “Okay.” She set an appointment. She didn’t even ask me no questions. She saw it too. And she set me up an appointment with an endocrinology doctor. And I chickened out of the appointment. That was in 2014. And I got scared. I got scared of the side effects of testosterone on an elder. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And then the surgeries appalled me. I was like, “Oh, no. Surgery at my age? Oh, man.” So I was 58 years old.

Sa’iyda: But you weren’t that old.

Ray: Well, I was older than everybody else that was in that world. Although I wasn’t really connected to that world, I didn’t know anything about it until I started to transition. And then I dove head first. I don’t do anything half ass. I don’t do anything halfway. I dove right in. I mean, I’m living my best life because I finally found the missing link to me. I’ve always been an overachiever.

Sa’iyda: What was that like? When you finally stopped running.

Ray: It was euphoria. It was pure bliss for about a year. I was so happy. I was so beside myself, relieved. It’s like 1000 pounds lifted off of my shoulders. I felt like, wow, this was it. I said, “I’m amazed I did so well considering I have that fighting against me.” But I managed to keep putting it out of my consciousness every time some thought would come up about it. I would just, oh, keep it moving. Just don’t even. Yeah, okay. I heard that, but let’s go this way.

I didn’t have any choice because I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t know what had happened to me at birth. I didn’t know any of that. I just knew I just had to grin and bear it, because I didn’t know I could do anything about it. But once I found out that I could, wow. Now everything happened in stages, of course. I first started on HRT. Then came binders, packers. Oh my God. The first time I bought a packer. Oh my God. It was my missing penis that was supposed to grow.

I was so happy that I got kicked off of Facebook for posting myself in my briefs and my packer with my packer on. I didn’t have it exposed. I was taking pictures, snap, snap, snap. I couldn’t stop looking down. I was like, “Oh, oh, oh, oh. This was it. This was it.” Then I got a binder and I thought, “Okay, this is it. This was the way my chest was supposed to look like when I was 12.” But the first thing I knew I had to do, because I didn’t have civilian insurance, was to get top surgery. And it took me four or five years because I was on a fixed income, and the veterans don’t give us surgeries. They cover the HRT, but not gender confirmation surgery. So I finally did some things and ended up having some money to get my top surgery. And oh, wow.

I’ve got three birthdays a year. I’ve got my natal birthday, I got my manniversary, and my sobriety date. I’ll be 40 in May. 40 years clean and sober.

I’m writing a book about my life. It got real difficult when my dad passed away.

Sa’iyda: So how did your relationship change? I know he had kicked you out because you said you were lesbian.

Ray: He kind of freaked. Well, I was so much older. I was 58 when I told him. And he just was like, “Okay.” I suppose he talked to my brother and his new wife, his second wife. He must have talked to them about it, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. So I knew something was up. And I kept telling my brother, “Something’s up with Dad.” “Oh, he’s happy that you’re happy.” And I said, “That doesn’t mean he’s happy.” That’s code for, “I don’t want to talk about my feelings about this.”

My sister passed away and I had to go home. But I had to go home with hair on my face. And I present as male 24/7. There’s no distinction anymore. And [my dad] kept staring at me. I was like, “Is he staring at me because he’s curious? Is he staring at me because he’s mad? Or is he staring at me because he’s glad?”

I kept ignoring him because I have a habit of exciting the entire fricking room when I’m in a room. So everybody was talking to me at the same time, but he was just staring. And finally he said, “Ray.” I said, “What?” He said, “Do you ever shut up?” I said, “Yeah, when I go to sleep.” Everybody started laughing, started talking again.

He was mad that I changed my name. I legally changed everything. I changed my birth certificate too. And he was upset about that. I practically had to force him to at least say it so that we could begin to grapple with it. And on his deathbed, he called me a man. It was bittersweet — that’s what I’d been wanting my whole life from him, but it was too late to build any kind of relationship off of that.

He never knew what to do. He didn’t know what to do with me as a lesbian. He sure enough didn’t know what to do with me as a man. He was like, “How?” I just wanted him to say it, say something so we can talk about it. Say, “How now can you see yourself as a man? What’s up with that?” But funny thing about straight folk, well cis gender folks, even if they’re lesbian, even if they’re part of the LGB, is they don’t ask questions.

I told everybody in my family, “Look, you don’t have to accept what I am. But it sure would help if you understood a little bit about it, because y’all are coming from a funny place that I can see. And not knowing anything, even though you love me, is still awkward.”

Sa’iyda: Right, right. So how did you get involved with SAGE?

Ray: Long time ago, in the beginning of my transition, I was interviewed by one of the guys on the board. We talked to each other a couple of times a year. And he got involved in SAGE, and then he turned me onto them. I’m looking at them like I look at the whole rest of [the LGBTQ community]. Wondering, okay, when is my personality going to come out and they’re going to get turned off? So I’m just observing, and because I’m a veteran, it kind of takes me out of the whole healthcare side of it. So SAGE isn’t going to be able to touch that, and I can’t touch the civilian side.

I do this interview thing at least three times a year. And I also help the diversity training at the VA for incoming interns. I get to talk to them about being a Black trans man. And my doctors tell me that I turn their training into an experience and they never forget me.

Sa’iyda: I am sure you do because this has been a real experience.

Ray: Has it been fun?

Sa’iyda: It has, it has.

Ray: Well it’s been great. Thank you. Thank you for your time.

Sa’iyda: Oh, anytime truly.