F the N-Word

Following months of civil protest, a mass shooting at a black church that shook the nation to its core and got our president to sing Amazing Grace on international broadcast television, and after years of civil rights and countless discussions on diversity and social justice, I finally started to feel as though things were looking up. A slew of white police officers were receiving just convictions after countless months of radio silence or downright acquittals from the Justice Department.

On a more personal note, I’d been accepted to the grad school of my choice and moved to a new city: NYC, in fact, the city that never sleeps and is hailed as history’s biggest gay mecca. What better set of circumstances to kick off studying 20th-century queer American literature? Shock.

It was the evening of Christmas Day. I had done well in my first semester of graduate school and was celebrating with some new but close friends, and I felt really happy and present in my body for the first time in awhile — it felt great. On my way home later that night, I decided I’d try and continue the party mood by inviting a guy over I had been talking to on Grindr for about a month. (Let’s call him X). It was going really well, and we really liked each other, so we decided to meet. But out of nowhere, someone I hadn’t initiated any form of communication with before messaged me. I thought I was having a lucky strike, talking to two guys at the same time. But I was wrong.

The stranger called me a nigger. And then he told me to kill myself. At first, the incongruence of the situation with how I was feeling previously left me no choice but to laugh out loud.

I didn’t really comprehend my feelings, nor could I process properly what I had just experienced. Was it still Christmas?

I realized I needed to meet X immediately, because it wasn’t just about me anymore. I needed to feel him by my side and look at him to help me understand what happened, where I went wrong, for we were both gay black men in a city that will swallow anyone whole if they so much as relax their vigilance for an instant. But the surprises just kept coming. He got to my place, and he had tears in his eyes. I didn’t understand why, because I thought he’d be happy to see me. I was certainly happy to see him, my excitement concealing my grief. He walked in and showed me a picture on his phone. Three words felt like three deep cuts loosening from their false sutures against an insultingly lively orange screen: “Nigger. Kill yourself.”

We stayed in bed together for five consecutive days talking, laughing, crying, and holding each other through what felt like a nightmare. Disembodied, I felt like I was awake in someone else’s dream world, trapped in a series of actions and words that I produced without knowing why I was doing them at all. When I was becoming more politically aware of my racial identity, I discovered Toni Morrison’s novels and her public interviews. In an early interview with Charlie Rose, Morrison asks a series of questions I ended up asking a stranger in my bed. What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Still smart? Do you still like yourself?

I still don’t believe it, but that’s because it actually happened to me.

Though disturbing, author Betrearon Tezera insisted elements of this article, including the imagery — a screenshot of the actual Grindr message from the piece — remain uncensored to communicate the shock experienced daily by queer/trans folk of color via racism on LGBTQ+ social/dating/hook-up apps. We obliged.