A Pride Story: Choosing to Live My Black Fat Queer Life
As a child, queering my life gave me choices. The main choice? Life over death.
I’m thankful for my queerness.
Sometimes, I sit and reflect on how I made it to this place in life. I have two degrees, a job with a significant salary, and I’m blessed to have access to communities that value and protect my Black fat queer body. I think I’ve figured out how I was able to achieve these things with no possibility models and a childhood I barely escaped.
Can you imagine being six years old believing that you were going to hell, that your life was damned?
I was born in Eunice, Louisiana. Area code 337, population 10,000. Imagine three towns of Mayberry lined up horizontally, a four-square-mile sprinkling of department stores, hometown restaurants, a library, and a courthouse. Eunice is a railroad town. Most of the tracks, though, are invisible: Lines that separate “Whites only” areas from those for everyone else. The places where we shop, and the houses where we worship, are divided. It’s hot, humid, and sticky all the time — like that pivotal summer day in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, both in temperature and temperament. Mosquitoes have made Eunice their home…
