A few weeks ago, a white heterosexual friend of mine asked me,”What does it mean to be a black gay man in American culture?

I found his question quite serendipitous, as Moonlight had just won the Oscar the night before – a film about black gay men, written and directed by black gay men – and that I was on the cusp of launching a new project called, “Black Gay Well-being,”  that I hoped would shed some Light on the very issue.

My life has taught me to recognize the signs and synchronicities – no matter how they come, no matter who they come from – so I gave him my perspective…

What’s it like to be a black gay man in American culture?either you go insane, and develop addictions and other toxic coping behaviors, or you become so fractured by society that you stop looking to society for validation, or any affirming messages for that matter, and learn to become your own moral source directly connected to, and guided by, some sort of higher power.

You just get to a point where you’re so broken by culture and realize that NOTHING in culture supports your true Self, but you know your truth and how it feels, and make an internal commitment to live from there now, instead.

There are not a high percentage of black gay men that get to that place, that place of truly knowing their truth, honoring it, and loving themselves enough to truly live it in the middle of a culture that says they shouldn’t and a culture that’s proven highly volatile to their willingness at times to do so, but the ones that do are the healthy and truly happy ones.

We don’t see them much, but they exist.

We exist.

And our very presence is a healer to those that see us, if only for a minute, because we plant in the consciousness that it’s possible. That healing is possible, and that living your true, black, gay life is possible, and worth it.

Basically, being a black gay man in American culture means you’re a healer. Once you get fractured enough, you heal yourself.  Then, your very existence heals.

Everyone who watches. Everyone who listens to your life lived in its own truth, in wide-open spaces, with joy and self-love as the fuel.  They get their healing.

But only after you’ve been courageous enough to get yours, in a culture that says (and often demands) that you shouldn’t.”

Thats what it means to me.

❤, Jerome