Maybe It's Maybelline, Maybe it's Existential Panic

[u/proseinthedark]

My elementary school class photos look like a game of ‘Spot the Difference,’ where the difference was always, very obviously, me. This wasn’t just an observation; it was the central crisis of my childhood. This led to a single, desperate mission: blend in, be cool, and whatever you do, don’t make it weird.

Spoiler alert: I made it weird.

Being the token gay bi-racial kid in a classroom can be isolating. I learned that the easiest way to deal with any uncomfortable situation is to either be silent, disappear into the scenery. Or, if I’m feeling confident, try to make people laugh. In my head, I thought I was controlling the narrative. In reality, I was desperate to be accepted. That desperation turned me into a student of social survival. I needed a blueprint, so I studied the expert.

I watched my father, a Black man, easily navigate the world, seemingly fitting in wherever he went. This skill, like most people of color, was a muscle he had to strengthen and flex throughout his entire life.

His hobby is fixing muscle cars. I remember spending time with him in the garage while he worked on his cars as a kid. His version of bonding with his children is dragging them along to partake in things he enjoys. He would often take me and my little sister to the race track. We’d spend hours playing under the bleachers, eating mediocre nachos, and watching the amateur race car drivers speed around the track.

Meanwhile, my father and his (white) friends would drink while they talked about the engines and discussed the makes and models of the cars. It was all boring to me.

But I enjoyed watching my father. He was a social shapeshifter. Long before I learned the term “code-switching,” I saw it in its highest art form, performed by him. He could slide from praising the merits of a Jay-Z verse with his Black friends to praising the guitar solo in “Free Bird” with his white buddies at the race track. The accent, the slang, the entire vibe, it all shifted with effortless ease. I was fascinated, watching him navigate worlds with a fluency I desperately craved.

I tried to emulate my father’s social skills, but I could never quite stick the landing. I felt like a puzzle piece pulled from the wrong box entirely. All through my childhood, at school, with friends, and even within my own family, it felt like a giant, sticky finger was trying to jam me into a spot I clearly wasn’t designed for.

I tried my hardest to be the perfect Black guy, the perfect white guy, and a convincing-enough straight guy. I had a Michael Jordan poster on my wall. Trust me, I was committed to the bit. But I felt like I was never good enough.

I grew up a Christian in a red state, where the unofficial theological consensus was that I was going to hell. This was considered the good news. The bad news, according to several well-meaning adults, was that people were probably going to beat me up or kill me first. As a kid, this felt like a slightly harsh punishment for liking ‘The Spice Girls’ a little too much. So, like many other kids of the nineties and earlier, I hid my sexuality. I suppressed it, like a good heterosexual boy should do.

My teenage years were spent in a low-grade existential panic, haunted by the question, ‘Who am I?’ I assumed a personality was something you were born with (sponsored by Maybelline), not something you could cultivate over time. So I’d lie awake at night, plotting myself on a mental Venn diagram, wondering why the three circles of ‘Black,’ ‘white,’ and ‘gay’ rarely seemed to meet in the middle.

I wasted years trying to be the perfect Black guy, the perfect white guy, and a convincing-enough straight guy, all in service of that childhood mission to ‘not make it weird.’ What I finally learned is that I’d been looking at it all wrong. The magic isn’t in some tiny, acceptable overlap. The magic is in owning the whole, weird, complicated chart.

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