I just noticed that some of the recycled Republican garbage online today seems to be that favorite old chestnut, “If the Democrats are allowed to take power they will turn the whole country into Detroit.”
Detroit: It’s a city where they have never been and never seen, but it has been a metaphor for racist organizing among certain Republicans ever since 1980, when Ronald Reagan called Detroit the poster child for Democratic failure.
Let me tell you about the Detroit I know.
All I can say is fondly do I hope, fervently do I pray, that we may all one day be like the people of Detroit. My life, or whoever I have been as an adult was assembled like an automobile in Detroit; everything in my life is before Detroit, and after Detroit. So let me tell you something about that Detroit, but first let me go back to the miserable chapter that was my life before Detroit.
I knew I was gay when I was fourteen. That’s even a few years before Stonewall when I was fourteen. If you did find anything in a book at the library about it, all the book said was that I was a monster. From the time I was fourteen until the time I was nineteen every single day was asking myself the question, is it suicide today, or do I wait until tomorrow. I sat in a dark corner of my parents basement after school making myself bleed.
By the early 1970s it turned out I wasn’t alone after all. Thousands and thousands of young gay people were pouring into the big cities. They were coming as refugees. They were rejected by their parents, their friends, their communities, their churches. Pariahs in the land. All of us. They created these prettified gay ghettos. Oz, somewhere over the rainbow where we could be who we are and finally breath free. I was one of them.
But I had this job that sent me to go work in Detroit, the blackest city in America. It was the ultimate culture shock, so I left my apartment in Oz and I landed in black metropolis without a parachute. Detroit, however, being somewhat unlike any other black city was a place so black that one crazy white boy running around the place by himself is no threat to anybody. I had free passage in the place.
Then there was one of those summer Saturday afternoons in Detroit where I somehow wound up just hanging out on the street with a group of twenty-something working class men my own age, at the time. African American men just out during the day on the east side of Detroit. The east side being the blackest ghetto in the blackest city in America. Somebody said something about gay people he saw on TV. He said something bad. I spoke up. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to take it anymore. And there we were confronting each other on a street on the east side of Detroit; all of us suddenly all absorbing new information.
What they did then was start signifying. Signifying is a black term that means something like a game of playful putdowns. They called me a punk, punk meaning faggot in Detroit vernacular. They called me a punk the way they call themselves the N-word. As a term of affection. They were trying to bond with me. I’m gay. What the fuck do I know about bonding. But there it was, a bunch of straight black men trying to bond with me.
Black people don’t reject their gay children like white people do, and they didn’t reject me. It was all ‘we don’t know anything about this gay shit with you, but we like you.’ So I fell in love with Detroit, and all that terrible pain from when I was a teenager, it all went away and it got better. I found a home in black Detroit, where for the first time in my life there were people who treated me like a human being.
Most people like me went looking for Oz. I found Detroit.
Eventually I had to leave Detroit. My job went away like jobs tend to do in Detroit. I cried when I had to leave. Every time I have ever gone back I feel just a little homesick. But I packed up Detroit and took it with me. My worldview comes from Detroit. Still.
I wish the Democrats really could turn us all into people from Detroit. I wish none of us ever had to scream out, “I can’t breath.” But for now all I have to say is this:
I’M FROM DETROIT AND I’M PROUD!