The Downtown Y - By Diepiriye S. Kuku-Siemons

I cannot remember exactly how old I was, or even which incident happened first. The memories, however, are quite vivid, as are the faces of the men. Their faces and certainly their bodies flash through my mind from time to time, not haunting me, but bringing me some sort of erotic pleasure like the captive innocently licking the breast of the captor. It’s as if I wanted it, and certainly needed for it to happen. I needed to turn myself over to someone in order to feel free, to experience the freedom that others flaunted but continued to elude me.

‘Showin’ off ya’ ass ‘cause ya’ thinkin’ it’s a trend, girlfriend, let me break it down for you again’¹

      On the first day of swim class, Greg, the instructor, made us all jump into the shallow end to get a sense of everyone’s abilities. Only a hand full of parents waited around the pool during the class, and I can still remember the gleam on my mother’s face when Greg, who years later I would bump into in the gay club, promoted me from minnow to shark after just a few minutes of splashing around in the pool. When I hit the water, I immediately began to twist and twirl underwater like the dolphins I had seen on TV, and often imagined myself to be- I was a dolphin in a previous life, I’m sure of it. I love water and was a natural at swimming for which years of being chased and shoved into the deep end during games of pool-tag with my elder cousins served as useful training for water sports. Between the local high schools with indoor pools that opened to the public during the summer, city parks with well-maintained outdoor public pools, and the pools at the chain of apartment complexes where my cousin Zambia lived throughout her childhood. Swimming had always been my favorite sort and I easily out performed other kids who would otherwise spend their time teasing me, saying that I acted like a girl. Swimming was gender neutral and relatively non-competitive, so it is the only sport that interested me as a kid.
    Greg said that I was the best swimmer in the class, and despite his audacious praises, which again segregated me from the other kids, I was just glad to have the time in the deep end.
    My swim class lasted for just an hour, but they were among the happiest hours spent anywhere in my life at that time. The memories of this era still warm me inside, and place me in a state of natural wonder and contemplation about my existence as if reading my own narrative in a book, experiencing the scenes over and over like an obsessive observer, or my grandmother reading Octavia Butler for the first time- just can’t put the book down.

I'm depending, depending, depending on you/I'm deep-ending, I'm at the deep end/I don't know, I don't know what to do²

    I sometimes teased my mother for wading around in the shallow water, too scared to dive into the deep end. On the first day of class, their instructor announced that the adults would slowly work their way towards the deep end, emphasizing that no one would be pressured to go in. Many of the adults seemed timid around the pool, but my mother just took it in stride, the water giving her a level of mobility she lacked on land, making her more agile than those scardy cats. Showing off in the kids’ class had given my mother proper impetus and just enough courage to finally attend a swim course after years of empty consideration of the subject. This is also how my mother was able to travel alone to visit me years later in Africa, Europe and India. With only one and a half legs, my mother stood higher and trekked further than anyone else she knew.
    The adult class began shortly after the youth class ended. I would always stick around to help my mother into the lift attached to the edge that would lower her into the pool, and placed her prostheses on one of the benches nearby. My mother was not the only fat person in the class, nor was everyone else able-bodied; coupled with a sliding fee structure, it seemed that the Y encouraged those of a variety of capabilities to take part in physical activities- in that way I felt that they realistically promoted diversity and acceptance.
    Fat floats, I quietly said to myself, so my mother had a huge advantage, which I knew would keep her safe. To this day, I still cannot float. As a result I have become quite apt at wading in deep water, which proved useful for the Boy Scout Swim patch that I earned by doing so for over ten minutes in a murky lake during summer camp when we were being tested for our ability to curtail a series of water emergencies. Once my mother was safely off the lift and in the pool I headed for the showers since we weren’t even allowed to play in the deep end during the adult class, and we were apparently the only parent-child duo to take both classes, so I had no waiting peers, and the locker rooms were virtually free. I would stay under the steamy shower for a long time. I was curious about the men who filtered in and out. Not having my father around, I suppose, fed an acute interest in knowing the (adult) male body, for I imagined that I would not be a short, hairless bubble-butt boy forever. I remember wondering when I’d grow pubic hair or if any hair would ever cover my chest. Who would teach me to shave, and how big would ‘it’ grow? When I was ten my cousin Damian, just two years my senior, told me that ‘pubes’ started growing exactly at age twelve and that exactly four years later the penis would hit a growth spur and grow exponentially. Although I wanted to believe him, I had the feeling that he only had half the story.

All men say that I'm as sweet as honey/I’m 34, 38, and 22 at the tummy³

    The men in the communal shower room knew that I was watching and I am surprised that no one made a single attempt to curb the inevitable. In retrospect, I see this as my first time out cruising, which was as natural to me as splashing around in water like a dolphin. I watched them, waiting, fishing for something to happen. Who knows what I expected to come of my curiosity, which is rarely innocent, but I certainly needed for something to happen, to connect somehow with someone, anyone at that point, who could help me understand what was going on inside as well as out. After those who had genuinely come to shower had cleared out, the business of choosing would start. I had two takers: The first was chubby and white with a great deal of hair on his legs, chest and back. The next was lean and Black, and wore a Jheri curl. The experiences were spread over some unknowable amount of time- days, or even months, so blurred are the experiences in my memory. Both men had a drive that I recognized yet may never understand, but a lust, nonetheless, that I still struggle to accept in me. Even now, nearing my sweet sixteen of being out to myself, I still need to be reminded sometimes that it’s not just me.

My daddy left home when I was three/And he didn't leave much to ma and me/Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze/Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid/But the meanest thing that he ever did/Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."

Well, he must o' thought that is quite a joke/And it got a lot of laughs from a' lots of folk/It seems I had to fight my whole life through/Some gal would giggle and I'd get red/And some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head/I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named "Sue."

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean/My fist got hard and my wits got keen/I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame/But I made a vow to the moon and stars/That I'd search the honky-tonks and bars/And kill that man who gave me that awful name.⁴

    I ran into the chubby white guy only a few years later in the most unlikely circumstances. My little cousin was sitting for trial at the courthouse after he had committed one of a string of misdemeanors and felonies. He was the sort of kid that had a readily foreseeable future in the criminal justice system, one way or another. He was born addicted, and lacked any real guidance for most of his childhood, save for what his aunts and grandparents could piece together and provide. Even familial support was constantly undermined by his mother’s deeper lapses into drugs and the petty crimes surrounding the need to constantly get high. Even teachers noticed that he performed well in school if and when he applied himself. Apparently, the same had been said about his mother. She once told me that she should have been a lawyer- she, her father and I are all Libras and share a keen sense of fairness. Knowing her analytical skills and disdain for injustice, she would have given white America a run for their money. Perhaps his elder sister has become a teacher in order to atone for not being able to raise him when we were kids.
    My cousin was also fast learner, which is sad because he seemed to learn only (self) destruction. From his crib, he had witnessed his father hold a gun to his elder sister’s head and beat his mother to a pulp; we believe that she contracted Hepatitis C as a result of the blood transfusions she received during that hospital stay. My cousin told me that he despised his father and my only retort was to challenge him not to become the same sort of man. At that time, he would see his father often at their common hangout where my cousin would sell him crack before the man’s recent and uneventful death.
    The chubby white guy was a court appointed attorney for child offenders, and in urban America, someone of that sort would undoubtedly come across many vulnerable young Black boys. Though he recognized me, we both decided to simply look the other way.

Looking for some education/Made my way into the night/All that bullshit conversation/Baby can't you read the signs/...

Looking for some affirmation/Made my way into the sun/My friends got their ladies/They're all having babies/I just wanna have some fun...

I won't bore you with the detail baby/You gotta get there in your own sweet time/Let's just say that maybe/You could help to ease my mind/Baby, I ain't Mr. Right/But if you're looking for fastlove/If that's love in your eyes/It's more than enough/Had some bad luck/Some fastlove is all that I've got on my mind/Get yourself arrested for love/...

In the absence of security/I made my way into the night/Stupid Cupid keeps on calling me/But I see nothing in his eyes/I miss my baby⁵

    Greg was the director of the swim program when I returned to the Y years later for lifeguard training. This made him an oligarch of sorts, since most lifeguards in the city had to at some point go through him for training or certification. I loved the fact that a queer man headed such a physical sport, almost proving that we queers could be around, and not exploit, naked bodies. This proved that we were not innately perverse. I must have been filled with such questions at that age, refusing to in any way associate myself with anything gay. In that way, Greg was an early role model for me, and perhaps the only open gay man I had met I wondered if Greg were out at work.

Something's missing and I don't know why/I always feel the need to hide my feelings from you/Is it me or you that I'm afraid of/I tell myself I'll show you what I'm made of/Can't bring myself to let you go/Don't want to cause you any pain/But I love you just the same/And you'll always be my baby/In my heart I know we've come apart/And I don't know where to start/What can I do/I don't wanna feel blue /Bad girl drunk by six/Kissing someone else's lips/Smoked too many cigarettes a day/I'm not happy when I act this way⁶

    As I try to piece back together the fragmented parts of my past, I realize that those incidents at the Y wit the two men must have occurred well before the seventh grade when I landed at the Y seeking refuge when I ran away from home for a brief hours when I ran away from home. I recall feeling drawn towards the Y as I made that last trudge nearing downtown. It was as if I were being called upon to come to the downtown Y to represent myself, to bear witness and face my past. At least I had to confront the building in that state of defiance as if to own up to what I had done years earlier and was desperate to do again. I was desperate for that feeling, raring to escape from my self- imposed repression of who I felt myself to be.
    Naturally, I do not condone sex between men and boys, though I now look back with the fondness of hindsight. That which does not kill you makes you stronger, according to famed philosopher, Nietzsche, and I certainly feel wiser for this and similar mishaps in my early years of being out, well before I began to understand and eventually harness my own erotic power.

1 From “That Thing” by Lauryn Hill, 1999

2 From “Deep Ending” performed by Deee-Lite, 1992

3 From “Sweet Rhode Island Red,” performed by Ike and Tina Turner, 1968

4 A Boy Named Sue performed by Johnny Cash, 1969

5 From “Fastlove,” performed by George Michael 1998

6 Bad Girl performed by, Madonna, 1992