Dear Jasmine,
It occurred to me today, for many reasons, that last time I was in Europe, I wrote you a message. I needed to write you another today.
This trip has been mind-alteringly different than any trip I have previously embarked on. I don't know why, but I'm starting to feel the benefits of having lived in New York for almost ten years. Paris is endlessly beautiful, romantic, and cool. But it still seems small. I’m not afraid of people anymore.
Loïc's studio apartment is in the 2nd district in the heart of it all. Just a five minute walk from the Louvre. I have two previous trips to Paris to compare this one, and it's been strange to revisit old haunts and remember how big I used to feel and how endless life seemed. One thing has changed for me, and that is for certain, my life is no longer going to happen one day. It is happening.
I haven't heard much American pop music here, and most people don’t speak English well enough for me to communicate, which is refreshing for a few days but then has gotten old. There are certain corporate cross-overs here: Pret a Manger and Le Pan Quotidien (duh). But Paris is so old it surpasses nostalgia. I can't remember anything about castles and statues, so I walk among them like as if I stumbled onto an endless film set.
The people are beautiful, as you would expect….as there are certain ones that just blow you away….but New York is better. Clothes do fit people better in Paris, and they seem more comfortable in their skin. There is a Brooklyn-like post hipster upsurging for sure. Sandwich boards outside coffee shops are written in English, as if that's really cool. There seems to be more heart in it and less posing…I feel the old architecture everywhere really gives the people a texture you can’t get in America. Joseph says Paris wishes it were Brooklyn. I said Brooklyn is just a dream so then Paris is a dream about a dream.
Liberty is written into their DNA and they have more evolved conversations about politics. The children aren't annoying and the old people aren't out of touch. Everybody seems to be on a spectrum of living in time, and not segregated by age into child, teenager, adult, old person. In the parks, the children play the way we used to play: unsupervised. And the twenty somethings drink their beers and laugh as the children play games nearby and the old people reminisce or do cute hobbies like paint. It really is…perfect in that way.
The show at the Pompidou went fine. We were a part of a series called School of Death, the tag line of which was, "You are already enrolled."
Loïc has been an angel. I am falling in love with him.
Today I spent the day with his gay uncle and some distant cousins. They had two little boys who had never been to Paris so we did tourist things which was nice but tiring because they spoke no English all day.
When they went to The Eiffel Tower, I asked Loïc if we could turn back and go to the Musée du Quai Branly. We had passed earlier and I saw they had a giant exhibit on race relations in America called The Color Line and I wanted to see how it was curated. It ended up being enlightening to see an outside perspective on our story. It was more objective and removed, almost like how we might discuss Japanese treatment of Chinese during WWII or something; naturally self-identifying with the oppressed population rather than the oppressors.
It was littered with excerpts from old newspapers. There were issues of The Crisis throughout. Art pieces and history lessons. I felt like a fish, temporarily extracted from its tank, given permission to see how its own system of fish in the tank have functioned over the past few centuries (though France obviously is not without its own fucked up relationship with Africa and Imperialism).
When confronted with physical oppression, it is impossible to not think about the body. And when I think about my relationship to race and America, it is impossible to not think of my best friend. As I walked through the exhibit, I thought about the first time I intimately touched a black body; which didn’t happen, because of my growing up in Livonia, Michigan until I attended University of Detroit High School and rehearsals for FAME the musical began. I missed our first rehearsal, and when I got to the second rehearsal, I was paired with you, Miss Jasmine, because we were both tiny. It was during this time that I split my brain into two parts, the part that was self-consciously aware that I was touching a black girl for the first time, and the part that knew that I was responsible for not believing that it was a big deal. That your skin was skin just like mine.
I don’t know if you remember this, but the first time we attempted the lift, the one where you are facing me, and you jump up and I hold you by your thighs, Renee was specifically watching us try to perform it (because we were learning to catch up with the others) and you jumped up and I full out accidentally hand palmed your ass cheeks, instead of your thighs like I was supposed to. And you were overtly uncomfortable and I was overtly confused because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do, but it wasn’t. I went home, a fourteen-year-old white boy and simmered in embarrassment whenever I thought about that….our first meeting.
I remember feeling, as a friendship grew between us, that I didn’t know why you liked me. I thought you were so cool, and it took me most of my twenties to truly examine this pedestal. But, I did feel a permission by you to be who I actually was inside. You made me feel good about being me. Something I desperately needed.
I remember the first time I saw you wear a longer weave. It was at your graduation at that weird stadium in Plymouth, and you were wearing that white dress all the girls had to wear. I remember telling you how beautiful you were. I think there is a picture, like a real one taken with a disposable camera (remember those?), of us from that day somewhere. I was surprised by this apparent sudden beauty, and unaware that my eyes, conditioned by unexamined structural racism, were reacting to your straighter, longer, more caucasian-like hair.
Experiences outside of our friendship, mostly involving music at the churches in Detroit, and some of the friendships I was forming at U of D began to reveal a peculiar truth to me: black people were more accepting of my effeminate brilliance. I say effeminate brilliance for a reason; I think of lot of my brilliance is directly related to my femininity. I remember Mr. Thorne, the choir director at Sacred Heart, taking special strides to tell me I was special, and that I was exempt from all of the close-mindedness my family was steadily inheriting. I remember Earl, a member of my choir at St. Aloysius bringing me gifts of African oils to anoint my hair with. I would always politely accept them, but never actually use them. I remember the “Sister Act” moments in these churches: old Henrietta with her cane and her trashy camo sweat suits learning, with my help, that she could belt like fucking Aretha Franklin. I wish you could have seen me at these churches sometimes. When I made music with white people at white church, I was treated politely and respectfully. At black church, I was lifted up. I was cherished. I was loved. And not in a careful way, but in a let-me-wrap-my-arms-around-you-though-I-do-not-know-you-and-tell-you-how-you-are-saving-me kind of way.
When I befriended your brother and sister, I felt the same way. I didn’t know why you guys loved me so much, but I felt loved. Love that I didn’t feel in my family. Not that my family doesn’t love me…but they don’t know how to love me the way I want to be loved. You and your siblings did. I remember when you told me that Brook had been talking about best friends, and you said to her you didn’t know who your best friend was, and she said, “Matthew’s your best friend.” And I felt very proud of that.
I knew, acutely, that you and your siblings were different than the black people at the churches I worked at. But I didn’t ever feel comfortable thinking these thoughts consciously, or bringing them up to you.
My mom used to talk about how beautiful you were all the time. She had an air of pride in her voice. Pride that she could see beauty in a black woman, while maybe her mother could not. (Maybe similar to the pride your mother might embody when she speaks of me kindly, even though I’m gay.) But she also, disproportionately loved you more than any of my friends. I think she felt that you had the ability to watch over me. That your gaze was enough to keep me safer and sturdier.
As our friendship relocated itself over time to New York City, we had become mini-versions of our eventual selves. The problems of racism came more and more to the forefront of America’s collective conscious, and I would often reach out to you for help navigating or comprehending Reality. As time went on, it would become more and more clear: I don’t fully understand what you go through and I never will. I remember one time walking in Crown Heights and starting to cry while you were explaining (it was after a period of many conversations of me not getting it) the fact that race was something you didn’t get to take a break from. These tears, baptizing me in white fragility while you stared on strong, stoic, and tired. I was frustrated because I wanted to be the best for you…I wanted to make you feel better, and I couldn’t. There was a line between us and that line was indeed dictated by the color of our skin and the races we inherited.
I remember being jealous of Chris when you met him at Conde Nast. Jealous because there was a gay man now in your life who had in common with you the one thing I never could. Did this make me want to be black? No. Did it make me want you to be white? No.
We grew more and you went off to grad school, and we got some distance. Our friendship became a piece to be analyzed, by both of us really, as we became conscious of how peculiar our ease with one another over the years actually had been. You wrote about it in school. I wrote about it in journals. I remember sitting on some parking block in LA and consciously talking about how our relationship would evolve as we got older because…well, it had to. I would grow worried that maybe you thought, or that maybe the honest truth was that our friendship was simply a byproduct of a shared oppression and if we were both winners in this society....well we wouldn't be black or gay....and maybe we wouldn't be friends.
The experience of black skin as a novelty obviously faded away over time…I’m surrounded by skin of all shades all the time, unlike in Livonia. Sometimes I’ll think about it if a striking event returns it to me… A slip of an old woman's hand on the subway. Getting my haircut by Abdullah at the walk-up barbershop. A few weeks ago, I walked down Nostrand and outside that infamous book store a man was wearing a t-shirt that said “A White Man’s Heaven is a Black Man’s Hell.”
The difference used to be punctuated by a guilt for having felt the difference. Now, I simply notice myself noting the difference when the noting occurs, and I move on. My feelings about race do not matter. My acknowledgment to the ones I love about how my thought patterns and habits may or may not affect them does.
I remember you visiting me while I was bartending in Clinton Hill, and there was a DJ playing soul and funk music, and this black man with dreads took you by the hand and you guys danced, and I watched you from behind the bar. You never looked more alive in your life. He was obviously deeply immersed in an expressive culture in which the body was celebrated and he wore his blackness with pride, and you, in that moment, did too. From the outside, you had the appearance of being a flamingo, who spent way too much time with pigeons, and you finally met another flamingo. I hated thoughts like these though. While they came from a place of love, and wanting to understand you more, I couldn’t help but feel shame whenever I thought about it too much…because what right did I have to analyze anything regarding race?
I have always wanted to exemplify to you that I was capable of understanding, primarily because I didn’t ever want to lose you as a friend. I was afraid that the color line would become a color wall.
I’m not afraid of this anymore. I know you know I do my best, and I know that my best is all I can do, and that it’s not solely up to me to fix anything, but to simply love you and be as open and honest about where I feel I haven’t been helpful, whether its due to my personal defects or because of conditioning I am not yet capable of perceiving. And I do love you with every ounce of my being.
At the end of the exhibit, which took more than an hour to walk through, I saw this image:
It’s called Knowledge of the Past is the Key of the Future (St. Sebastien) by Robert H. Colescott.
I googled St. Sebastien. He was an early martyr of the Catholic Church (our favorite enterprise). He was shot with a bunch of arrows and didn’t die, and then spoke out against evil being done to disenfranchised people. So he had this notion of having freedom of speech even though he was supposed to be dead. He is also referenced by many gay artists. This is a quote from Thomas Mann’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech that also came up in reference: “Grace in suffering - that is the heroism symbolized by St. Sebastien.”
I thought about suffering as a negotiable, and how that's not how suffering works in reality.
We left the museum, and Loïc, who had been silent the entire hour, just said, “that was really an amazing exhibit.” And I squeezed his hand and agreed. We met back up with the family, and we took a boat down the Seine past all the famous sites. We had dinner, the young boys tried speaking English with me, and then we walked back to the apartment. When we turned onto Loïc’s street, a perfect full moon was hanging precisely over it, like an old children’s book illustration. You couldn't have drawn a better position for the moon if you tried, it was so picturesque.
All of the sudden, I heard music.
“remember. remember. remember.”
Was it? Yes! It was FAME. “I’m gonna live forever. I’m gonna learn how to fly.
I'm gonna make it to heaven....light up the sky like a flame.”
I laughed out loud. I started dancing. I hadn’t heard much American music at all, and for some reason, out of nowhere…on a day where you would not leave my mind, the song to which we learned our first dance thirteen years ago sounded from a tiny speaker in a shop on Rue Saint Saveur in Paris.
You will always be with me wherever I go.