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strange
that she touch me like that.”
    “Well it sure as hell sounded strange. Just wait
until I get there, I’m going to give her a piece of my—”
    “Baby, no need. She drunk. She not know what she was doing.”
    “She knew exactly what she was doing.”
    “She do this before?”
    “Well…no.”
    “It be strange for her, I am sure.”
    “I’m glad you were able to handle it.”
    “I am not so sure, baby, that I handle it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I panicked. If she be a man, I hit her. But no. I felt
helpless and dirty, like she feel a right to touch me, to violate me, like I be
nothing. I never felt like nothing before. But it…it make me feel like nothing. She make me feel like nothing.”
    “Étie…”
    “Is what people think of what we have so no importa ,
so no special, that they can violate it any way they want? Is two men loving
each other so no importa that it need no respect? I up all night
thinking about this, thinking people think you and me like poor people, like
slave people, like invisible people, people no importa .”
    “We are muy importa , Étie. Our love es muy importa .”
    * * * * *
    I boarded my connecting flight to Santa Domingo sobered by
black coffee, Excedrin and Étie’s haunting words ringing in my head. People
think you and me like poor people, like slave people, like invisible people,
people no importa .
    I knew and he knew, Étie and I, that we were indeed bonded
by our self-respect, and no disrespect of our self-respect, our self-love, our
united love would go unchallenged, un-dealt-with, unanswered.
    Still, the paper-cut battles that lay ahead, the fight
against the subtle tyranny of the heterosexual majority, and the trudging
through the maze of that pejorative ignorance and polite dispassion, wearied
me.
    Rare black butterflies are we, our exoticness admired under
glass, on the carnival stage, for the love we share. Our love is a love that
speaks its name in tongues too foreign to be understood by those well-meaning,
condescending heterosexist admirers, yet with a lilt that intrigues them enough
to indulge in things they wouldn’t dare try within the civilized civility of
their pristine opposite-sex existences. The very thought of a man lusting after
his brother’s wife is a universal abhorrence. Fucking your gay brother’s
partner? No problem.
    My mother, a lifelong housewife, was asked by a new
acquaintance, “What kind of work do you do?” She answered proudly and without
hesitation, “Honey, that’s what I have a husband for.”
    Imagine that scenario between two men. The immediate
assessment is that one is a user and the other a fool.
    That smooth flight over blue Caribbean water was what I
needed as I pondered these things with a bitterness that needed to be tempered.
    Upfront bigots are easily manageable. But well-meaning
friends and family—set and self-sanctioned society—prick lethally, slowly,
memorably, with an unconscious disdain innocently disguised as genuine love;
the height of condescension that begged for an understanding of its own.
    All of this made me realize how much I missed my daddy and
the emotional protection of his unconditional love. I was simply one of his
beloved children, all loved and cherished equally for our united spirit and our
individual differences. We were all equally special in his heart.
    But my relationship with my father also made me think about
Étie’s relationship with his. For one so full of love to be brutalized and
rejected by a father so full of hate is my baby’s unimaginable reality. And now
a part of him is armored with hate. Oh how I so want to love away that hate.
    But how can I, in the face of gingered disrespect for who I
am and what I am? Isn’t subtle hate the worst kind of hate?
    To be gay is to be tolerated. And I am sick to fucking death
of being fucking tolerated by friends, family, foes and social foreigners!
    I thought about a lot of things on that ninety-minute flight
from Florida to