"My Murdered Cousin Had a Name"
Friday, for me, was a bit surreal. As America was celebrating the victory of marriage equality at the Supreme Court, it was also mourning black people in South Carolina murdered by a white supremacist.
All the while I thought about a cousin of mine who was murdered years ago. We grew up in the same segregated Louisiana hamlet of about a thousand people. Everyone said that he was gay (only they used pejoratives in place of that word) because of the way he carried himself and the fact that he didn’t date women or marry one.
However, he never addressed his sexuality in my presence. It was not a thing that in that time and place one proclaimed. Small, rural communities like ours maintained their own, unwritten Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell protocols. He simply lived by his own terms.
And yet, my cousin’s difference became more evident to me when he started to stop by the small upholstery shop down the street where one of my brothers was an apprentice and where I sometimes visited.
As I wrote in my memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/opinion/charles-blow-my-murdered-cousin-had-a-name.html
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