Striving = Death: The Scourge of Familial Silence on Black Gay Men
Hyattsville Mayor Kevin Ward died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after his body was found in a park in McLean, Virginia on January 25th, 2022. I was saddened to hear this news, for while I didn’t know Mayor Ward personally, I know someone who did. While the details surrounding his death are still being investigated, I wonder how a successful politician, with a husband and family, arrived at the point of wanting to take his own life. It got me thinking about a couple of other Black same gender loving men in recent months who have experienced recent life spirals and exhibited suicidal thoughts and behavior.
The first is a 40-something year old medical professional who confided in me one morning that he was thinking of taking his own life and had been struggling with dual addictions to sex and alcohol for years. He had recently wrecked his car after being inebriated and passing out while driving, his fourth alcohol-induced car accident where he remarkably never injured himself or anyone else. He knew he needed help and we discussed his options for rehabilitation.
“I wanna live,” he kept telling me.
He has since been to an inpatient residential treatment facility and is currently continuing outpatient rehab and therapy.
The second is a 50-something year old ex of mine from decades ago who had previously worked in corporate America and is now an educator. His family had called me for help back in November of 2021, worried that he was suffering from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). They were right. He was admitted to a hospital with pneumonia, dehydration, and “failure to thrive,” and it was discovered he had a T cell count of 5 (normal is 450 to 1100) and was suffering from dementia. I learned his health had been deteriorating for a year or two, but he had pushed several family members away who had offered help. While he is now on HIV treatment and is improving slowly, he is still in a hospital awaiting long term rehabilitation placement as he is unable to walk or take care of himself on his own.
When talking to both of these brothers, I noticed some similarities. My friend and colleague in the medical field was raised in a conservative Christian household that endorsed judgmental beliefs on homosexuality and archaic notions of Black masculinity. He confided in me that growing up, he never felt that he could be his true self. My ex grew up in an Islamic family, who also ascribed to similarly antiquated notions of both same sex love and what Black manhood meant. During our conversations after his physical and cognitive states began to improve, he noted how he always felt imprisoned about both his sexuality and his HIV status.
These stories made me consider my own journey inviting family members into my sexuality as a 20-something year old medical student. I was raised Catholic by an incredibly old school Caribbean father and European mother. Dad was upset and disappointed with the discovery of my sexuality, exclaiming that I had ruined his aspirations regarding why he emigrated to the United States from Haiti. My mother was less damning but admitted later she prayed daily for years that I would change. After their initial shock, things turned to silence — Dad never talking about it at all, Mom attempting to discuss my romantic life a couple of times but looking so uncomfortable on each occasion that I just let her off the hook and told her she didn’t have to ask if it caused her that much angst. Things never improved with my father before his passing in 2020, but over time my mother and I have had much better conversations about my personal life, and I’m thankful for that. I’ve also personally grappled with addictions to work and gambling, as well as sexual compulsion at various times in my life — wondering if and how they may be related to these formative experiences.
A politician. A nurse. A corporate businessman and educator. A physician. One thing I’m asking myself — are we overcompensating ourselves to death?
For Black gay men, disclosure and inviting our families into our sexuality and our authentic selves doesn’t always lead to violence, rejection, or expulsion from our homes into the streets. Instead, it is often met with silence. Silence when it comes to asking about our personal lives. Silence when it comes to not asking us if the man we brought home is our “boyfriend,” only to ask another family member behind our backs. Silence in not checking in on us the same way we check in on them to see if we are OK. Silence reflecting a tendency to “tolerate” instead of embracing full acceptance and affirmation. Silence as apathy when choosing to endorse the adage “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Silence when witnessing the signs that we may be struggling with our mental health. Silence while witnessing us slowly kill ourselves with addictions ranging from work, drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, food, and many others. While not as overtly harmful as physical violence or getting kicked out of the house, lingering silence can have an equally devastating impact on the trajectory of our lives over time.
We allow the silence to fester because we don’t want to appear as if we are wanting to create familial conflict or drama. We understand that many family members view our sexuality as a far more unforgivable infraction than our siblings who commit crimes and get incarcerated, or become pregnant at fifteen. We accept these conditions as the norm. So, what is our recourse as Black same gender loving men when our biological families meet our authentic selves with deafening silence?
We achieve.
We get straight A’s in all our grade school, high school, college, and graduate school classes. We accumulate degrees and letters behind our names until it looks like an alphabet soup. We excel at sports that we don’t even like to prove our manhood. We are overly attentive and make sure we are available to assist family members whenever asked (or not asked). We serve in our places of worship in various leadership capacities to show how much we love church despite church not loving us. We get promotions at our jobs and rise to the highest rankings in our departments in the face of blatant racism mixed with sexual prejudice. We fill in for our heterosexual work colleagues when they choose to have children and erroneously believe that our childless lives contain far fewer obligations and responsibilities than theirs. We assist with the raising of young nieces and nephews whenever we can. We take care of our elders when they get older because our heterosexual siblings are often “too busy” to help the same caretakers that always gave them participation trophies simply for being straight.
We hope that these efforts serve as proof that we are socially redeemable beyond our sexuality — that they will somehow morph into an invisible, indestructible cloak to protect us from all the negativity and hatred that seeks to harm us. But it rarely does. It just smothers us while we are dying inside for our family’s full acceptance, which we may never get no matter how hard we try to demonstrate that we are worthy of their approval.
No matter what we do, how accessible we make ourselves, or how accomplished we are in the workspace or world stage, many in our families will always see us as that “faggot,” the “gay one,” or the uncle with “a little sugar in his tank.” For many of our parents, we may simply represent the offspring who didn’t provide them with the grandchildren they desire. At family gatherings, while our siblings can speak openly about their opposite gender partners or spouses and are met with follow-up questions and interest, we are often met with awkward and uncomfortable quiet when we attempt to discuss our partners with the same nonchalance. We discover later that our personal lives are whispered about in private conversations, not openly discussed in our presence.
Instead of confronting this silence head-on, we strive to achieve and overachieve. We work ourselves to the bone and prioritize everyone in our family and workspaces ahead of ourselves in the desperate hope that our efforts will compensate for the perceived deficit of not being heterosexual. When the approval still doesn’t come, our mental health suffers and we turn to vices such as drinking, sex, drugs, work, food, alcohol, gambling, and other self-destructive coping mechanisms to numb our disappointment. Suicide isn’t always the acute overdose of drugs, slitting of wrists, jumping off a building, or a dramatic self-inflicted gunshot wound. Sometimes it announces itself in much more insidious forms that can be difficult to detect but arrive at the same destination over months, years, or even decades of self-neglect and sabotage.
The slogan “Silence = Death” was created in 1987 as a response to the United States government’s apathy around the HIV epidemic. It was a rallying cry for LGBTQ+ communities to embrace activism and advocacy in getting people in power to pay attention to the urgency of how it was killing so many of our best and brightest. Today the silence comes not only from our government, but from those who are supposed to love us unconditionally in our own households. Our own flesh and blood who would rather sit by idly and watch us self-destruct over their unspoken disapproval than to be there for us the way we are for them. It also comes from ourselves, as we suffer quietly in response to the realization that our families may never truly accept us for who we are.
The late Black gay poet Essex Hemphill spoke of this dynamic in his 1992 poem “Commitments”:
I will always be there.
When the silence is exhumed.
When the photographs are examined
I will be pictured smiling
among the siblings, parents,
nieces and nephews.
In the background of the photographs
the hazy smoke of barbecue,
a checkered red and white tablecloth
laden with blackened chicken,
glistening ribs, paper plates,
bottles of beer and pop.
In the photos
the smallest children
are held by their parents.
My arms are empty, or around
the shoulders of unsuspecting aunts
expecting to throw rice at me someday.
Or picture tinsel, candles,
ornamented, imitation trees,
or another table, this one
set for Thanksgiving,
a turkey steaming the lens.
My arms are empty
in those photos, too,
so empty they would break
around a lover.
I am always there
for critical emergencies,
graduations,
the middle of the night.
I am the invisible son.
In the family photos
nothing appears out of character.
I smile as I serve my duty.
My medical colleague told me that the day he felt suicidal, he called his siblings and mother after we spoke. His brother and sister were surprised at this turn of events. They were under the impression that his life was perfect despite witnessing his heavy drinking in person, since he was successful by traditional measures of steady work and financial attainment. During a heart-to-heart conversation with his mother, he kept apologizing to her for what he perceived as embarrassing himself and the family with his alcohol dependence issues.
“Don’t say you’re sorry,” she told him. “I’m sorry. We are the ones who pushed you to this by not fully embracing you for who you are. That’s our fault.”
Hearing him relay his mother’s words gave me hope. I wonder if other families may respond the same way if we chose to speak up over being suffocated by their silence.
I don’t know why Mayor Kevin Ward decided to take his own life if that is what he did. My hope is that it wasn’t because he never felt full and unconditional acceptance from his biological family. I don’t know if silence like the kind I’ve described is solely a Baby Boomer and Generation X thing, or if Millennials and Generation Z are struggling with the same dynamics despite growing up in more accepting times. What I do know is that both my friend and ex were choosing a protracted form of suicide that led them down roads where they could have been successful — and their families turned a blind eye until it was almost too late.
I also know that for Black same gender loving men, everything is not always as it appears. Behind every successful lawyer, educator, entertainer, social worker, stylist, contractor, real estate agent, accountant, or barber, behind every gym rat with a chiseled masculine physique — there is more than meets the eye. Beyond every Instagram post or TikTok video, there exists a suffering that may not be visible to the naked eye. Many of us who are open with our sexuality in public spaces may not have familial spaces that mirror the same level of comfort or freedom. We may be accomplishing all these amazing things in part to prove that we are worthy of our families’ love and acceptance — but at what cost?
David Malebranche, MD, MPH, is a board-certified internal medicine physician with expertise in sexual health and HIV/STI prevention and treatment. He is also a public health official, activist, and educator who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and has appeared in the YouTube series “Revolutionary Health” as part of The Counter Narrative Project and also on the #AskTheHIVDoc video series. Dr. Malebranche’s writings and research have been published in JAMA, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, and Lancet. He has also been featured on the “Greater than COVID” campaign with the Kaiser Family Foundation and has written several articles on HIV treatment education at thebody.com. In 2015, he penned a memoir entitled “Standing on His Shoulders,” a memoir about lessons learned from his relationship with his father, which is available on Amazon.