write, black boy, write

What makes a successful writer, let alone, a successful black gay writer?

I always wrote, that is, whether it was a poem or tragic short story where everyone always died, my imagination has always been a part of me, consuming then trying to escape me. I’ve always read --even if it seemed somewhat illegal to do, growing up a precocious black child in an oppressive ghetto where if cousins caught me reading they would take my books and throw them in trees or on the tops of ghetto shacks (their only argument that I was trying to be white whatever the hell that meant); but I still stole the adventures of Willa Wonka, Animal Farm, Lord of the Rings and To kill a mockingbird which was all required reading in my middle school’s gifted and talented program. When I got to high school I started venturing away from the required reading of Faulkner, Hemmingway and Shakespeare. I started reading more forbidden novels like Iceberg Slim, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin. Baldwin was the first author I read that had a gay theme.

When I finally gave in to the horrifying fact that I was a writer, storyteller, not a want to be author looking for love, fame or money, but that writing for me was soul-work which would mean a lifetime of big highs and big lows, I wanted to cry.

I could’ve gone to law school or gotten my MBA and worked at some consulting firm, bought a house in the hills with a European imported car in the driveway. Instead, my life was quitting jobs because I feel inspired, bill collectors, family members thinking I’m conning them with my so call writing career because I haven’t published a successful novel or shown any proof of my worth as a human being. It’s a myth that some people become writers because they don’t want to work, live in their heads. It’s true, I never fancied a job. I hate jobs. I hate the idea of pretending to like something that has nothing to do with my overall life just so that I can eat or have money for the strippers and liquor. Anyways, I digress.

Truth, writing is a difficult career, if you’re lucky to get work. I met so many people who say i like to write a book, and i'm like, you probably have better luck at completing a 26.6 mile marathon. Like any type of art, only a few people actually get to make a living that is pay their rent, eat, and have enough money for health insurance and maybe a nice exotic vacation. Writing is not a glamorous job, not like in the movies where the good looking guy sits at the typewriter with a cigarette in his right hand and cocktail in his left, ready to tell the world about his soul and pain. Writing is very, very lonely, almost schizophrenic because some of us become obsessed with the voices in our heads. And there is no guarantee of publication, success, that you can quit that job you hate, that your old lover will come back and make amends, that daddy or mommy will apologize for not giving you enough love as a child. When I decided that I will be a writer, that it was closet form of happiness I could consume in this lifetime that didn’t come in pill form, liquor or sex, I knew it wouldn’t be easy but also didn’t think it would be so fucking hard. One of my three degrees from my state college happened to be in English, but I only took one creative writing class. I only knew one writer, who published a short story or two back in the eighties but ten years of his book being rejected he gave up on the craft all together. I had no support system and to make happiness more challenging, I was irresponsibly black and tragically gay. In my case, if I really wrote what I knew, I go broke and starve to death.

I was going to have to redefine success. I was going to have to come up with a plan. I only knew two successful fiction writers that were black and gay: E. Lynn Harris and James Earl Hardy. Of course, because they were successful, many books stealing the same formula would follow. I had no desire to mimic; besides I didn’t know any successful people who just happened to be black and gay. I had no material. So I’m left to ponder, what will happiness look like for me?