The Blueprint

My parents gave me their blueprint for manhood. Their instruction started early in my life and continues today. Here's a sample:

1. A man takes care of his responsibilities, all of them. That means kids, houses, debts and any other responsibility you assume as a man.

2. A man never hits a woman. Ever. I caught the worst ass-whipping of my life for putting my hands on a girl in middle school. Same year, I fought a dude, and didn't even get touched.

3. A man cares for his family, he supports his family, but he must be The Man in his family. That's my dad's legacy there.

4. A man takes his direction from God, but follows no other man blindly.

Those are just four of the dozens of Man Laws my parents drilled into my brain over the course of my life. My brother and I grew up in a household where the primary goal was turning us into productive, independent men. Every activity was geared to that end, and we both knew that at age 18 the job had to be completed and we had to be ready to strike out on our own.

Later in life, when I talked to friends and associates who grew up in different households I realized that many people did not get that same instruction from their parents. Whether it was because they grew up in a single-parent household where manhood was a nebulous and rarely discussed concept, or their parents just thought that kids should be allowed to be kids, lots of cats I met along my journey had never really developed a coda for being a man. They were flailing about while depending on their friends and life experiences to give them a blueprint.

I thought about manhood and my definition of a man recently when I came across an article in the LA Times discussing gay life at Morehouse College in Atlanta. For those of you out of the HBCU loop, Morehouse is one of the most prestigious black universities in the country and counts Martin Luther King Jr. and numerous other luminaries among its alumni.

The article discusses exactly how much of a struggle it is for gay men to integrate into an all-male campus that has been known for decades as one of the best places for a black boy to become a man. While Morehouse has always had a significant gay population, it has also been known as a bastion of conservative black manhood; the type of manhood that makes no allowances for men who love other men.

I thought that raised some good questions.

My parents were anti-homosexuality. I grew up in a conservative black home and attended conservative black churches for the most part. There were gay people in those churches, everybody knew about them, but they weren't allowed to openly champion their homosexuality. Their presence was only tolerated if they didn't discuss exactly how they felt about people of the same sex.

That's the way things worked.

In my household, being a man did not include liking other men. In fact, men who were gay were viewed as an inferior type of man: punks, sissies and faggots. The same sort of sentiments were prevalent at my predominantly black schools and when I hung out with all my friends. You couldn't be a real man and be gay.

I didn't begin questioning this concept until pretty late in life, probably towards the second half of college. See, college opened my eyes about a lot of things, particularly that being gay didn't make you a bad person and being straight didn't make you normal. I'm not saying I was a champion of homosexual rights, but I think I began to move past the idea that gay people were weird and embrace the idea that they were fully and completely human. While I still think being being gay is a sin, I began to understand that didn't give me the right to treat them as anything less than my equal.

In college, it rapidly became clear to me that being gay had no impact, positive or negative, on an individual's ability to be a good human being. Homosexuality does not jibe with my religious beliefs, but using a personal belief system to justify vile behavior towards others is a coward's ploy. My parents didn't raise me to be a coward.

It seems that a lot of folks at Morehouse are having to have the same internal discussions because gay men there are demanding equitable treatment from their peers and the university's administration. I imagine it's very difficult for some of the people who've grown up in households similar to mine to deal with challenges to their traditional definitions of manhood.

But, I can't even comprehend how difficult it is for gay men on that campus. I remember at Howard University that the cats suspected of being gay were generally avoided in the dorm, and often formed smaller cliques among themselves for protection and companionship. This sort of isolation must be worse on an all-male campus due to how easily men fall into despicable behaviors when surrounded only by other men.

It seems like a heavy burden to bear to believe that your sexual orientation is blight on the university you attend. I cannot imagine the strain that inflicts on college students struggling to determine their identity as adults. I have nothing but sympathy for these men, and I salute those of them who are willing to endure the slings and arrows of their peers to make the journey easier for those who come behind them.

There are many different routes to manhood, it's time to acknowledge them all.