In 2012, when Frank Ocean told me (yes, me, specifically) to “imagine being thrown off of a cliff” in the Tumblr note he published before dropping the transformative Channel Orange, the same Tumblr note in which he admitted publicly for the first time that he had been in love with another man, I cried, and then I did, too. I admitted for the first time publicly – or at least for the first time to my parents – that I was queer in a three-page email.
The fall from that cliff was glorious for many beautiful moments – until I smashed head-first into the ground. Until my mother wrote back, three days after receiving my email, to tell me that all three pages were unacceptable and this was not what she raised me to be and – Kṛṣṇa help her! – my body, now lying mangled on the jagged rocks at the bottom of this hill I wanted to die on, was enveloped in sin.
My queerness was just my demonic schooling brainwashing me, she insisted, and so she could no longer support my education financially in the meager ways she had been (which, my bank account being meager, too – as this sort of thing tends to be hereditary – was enough to mean I had to consider dropping out).
When I say mine was a huge, tight-knit, Black Hindu family, this doesn’t really explain what was at stake in being disowned by my mother. There aren’t words to properly sum up in a short essay what it means that she raised her 10 children (and helped raise many of her nine stepchildren, through my father) the way she did: homeschooling us with intention and care, giving us something to believe in and tying that thing together with real, indisputable love, all the while daring to thrive in the face of poverty and abuse.
There aren’t words to articulate how quickly and efficiently and tenderly my family came together three months ago, when the cancer attacking the womb which had carried all ten of us over the span of 40 years was diagnosed untreatable, just to return that love to and support for our mother and each other.
It’s difficult to explain what it meant to see my siblings line up to call the two pages of my mother’s reply to my email in 2012 unacceptable, telling her that the bigotry contained within it was not how she raised us to be.
What I mean is: my family has always loved deep and hard and with a blazing fire, specifically because of all the beautiful things our mother taught us about how you care for kin.
I tried to deny this truth for a while in order to explain away, after my mother’s attempt at disowning me, why I kept everyone in my family at arms’ length for years. But what I mean to express was that this family, like everyone else’s, fucks up deep and hard and on blazing fire too. That seeing their support for me couldn’t make up for the fact that I almost lost my mother before cancer was ever even in the picture.
Sometimes, we mean well, and then we still hurt people. Hurt, oftentimes, is inevitable, and we are stuck with the predicament of who will feel the pain and why. And so much of who we choose to let feel certain pains is determined by the ideas we hold around “family”.
My sister Priya – I changed her name to protect her privacy – is a police officer in Chicago, an eyebrow-raising occupation for the sibling of an avowed police and prison abolitionist. I don’t mention it often, but we’ve struggled immensely trying and failing not to hurt each other over the years. I’ve struggled immensely trying to hold what I know – that she means well, that she would never intentionally hurt anyone, least of all Black people – in tension with what I know just as deeply: this system of policing will always hurt us.
Before George Floyd, there was Tamir and Rekia and Korryn and hundreds others who were proof of this, when all they should have ever had to be was alive.
When George Floyd was murdered and the global uprisings against police occurred, I supported them while my sister Priya feared for her safety as enraged Black people destroyed the streets she patrolled.
I would post my concern about the thousands of demonstrators whose lives were being torn apart by her department’s violent response, leaving her to believe I didn’t care about her, in the midst of a pandemic that is most brutally ravaging Black communities.
In the midst of this, both of us had to watch our mother strain to keep a straight face as more and more excruciating pain shoots through the nerves – so tiny they should never have been able to hold so much hurt. It was everything at once: Black death is a stellar collision in that way, and in the way that it can wipe out entire solar systems at the same time.
My queer community
My family has always been my first universe, but my queerness taught me that it needn’t be the only. When my mother rejected me for who I was, my queerness showed that there were other people who might mother and support me in the ways that I required, and I found them in community centers and ballrooms and clubs and activist organizations set up to protect the too many of us who lose our galaxies on the regular because of anti-Blackness and homophobia.
It was a Black queer man who helped guide me through the financial aid system at my school and rounded up enough money to continue paying for college that year; and it was queer lovers, friends, neighbors and strangers who showed me the first real, loving community outside of family in my adult life.
It was these people who allow the “of course” to erupt from my mouth so instinctively and volcanic when I am asked about adoption, barely having to consider in the face of all the Black queer kids who need homes and for whom I might be able to provide like I was provided for.
For a long while, I used this community to replace my blood family, and not all for the worse. My queer community showed me a healthier relationship to sex and sexuality and gender and consent. They taught me ways to resist state violence, to organize and to read the work of revolutionaries and to write my own part in a future revolutionary tale. They taught me that family is just as much who you choose as it is what your DNA decides, that love doesn’t have to stop at shores as fickle and mortal as oneself or one’s blood or even whom one knows.
I have to show care to communities that are bigger than myself and the people near me. I have to be willing to cast my love into waters beyond my own pool, even if light refracts differently under those surfaces.
Uncomfortable relationships
When you’re queer, there are some things straight people say to you that, simply because of who you are, mean something different to you than to them.
When my sister says “family”, as in, “How you talk about police knowing that I am an officer sometimes makes me feel like you don’t care that I’m family,” I see, in addition to her own beautiful visage, flashes of off-shore faces that she might not be able to see, simply because of where I swam when this family didn’t feel safe for me.
I see Aiyana and Sean and countless others who weren’t innocent enough to become hashtags, and, though their faces are not always as clear as hers, I want them to be safe too. Faces don’t have to be recognizable for me to love them; I want to care for the strangers in my community too.
When I hear “family”, I see Trayvon and his brother, now one of my best friends. I see myself with hogties digging deep into my wrist and breaking flesh like bread after thuggish police tossed me cheaply into a wagon, just for protesting my friend’s brother’s murder. And I know that we are tied together by something real and deep and blazingly on fire. A recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal found that the calcium in our bones and teeth likely came from exploding stars scattering the mineral across space in massive quantities, and when I smile wide I see their grin in mine. I call that “family” too.
And when I tell my sister, “I love you, I really do”, I mean that I have to be able to care for her within this context. That I want her to be the best version of herself that she can be as an important part of the vast sky, but I cannot operate as if she is the sky itself.
When I say, “I love you”, I am watching my mother move across my sister’s face, remembering how the truest love for her never meant I had to accept or forgive the harm she caused without her offering apologies; and there is so much thoroughly devastating harm that is done by police to Black people in this country. I am remembering how the apologies later came, when I refused to limit myself by the dictates of a concept of love and family that wouldn’t make space for me to live fully, even if my mother never quite said the word “sorry”, because real love finds a way.
The apologies come in her asking, “How is your husband? I really like that Timothy!” and in her reading my pieces about struggling to show her love and her struggling to absorb the words and her struggling to show love to me back when it’s difficult and uncomfortable and we don’t always agree.
My relationship with my sister who is a police officer is difficult and uncomfortable and we don’t always agree, but love isn’t about comfort and avoiding critique. Love is what pushes us to be better people.
My sister Priya and I will probably have to leave some things unresolved. There is nothing I desire more than to have the institution of policing dismantled, because I believe with every tiny nerve of my being that it is necessary for the healing my communities require. That is true regardless of who is part of that institution.
My sister and I may never agree on what “better” means, but I only hope we can both agree that desiring it for someone and acting on that desire is what love is. Soon, inshallah, I will be better at demonstrating that this is what my desire for her has always been, and better at fighting with the quest for love guiding me. Better at showing that love – as I discover it – to her, and maybe then this won’t have to be so hard.
I wish, more than anything, that this didn’t have to be so fucking hard. For my sister. My mother. For all the Black people who never should have had to figure out how to create a safe society in the rubble of the past five centuries of being ravaged by the state and its agents.
It was unloving to keep avoiding these conversations just because I didn’t know how to say what needed to be said. I know that my sister wants me to improve on this front, which means I know she loves me back. I promise to do better. Saying what needs to be said even without knowing how to say it is the thing queerness has always directed me toward, anyway.