I came out–to myself.
I’m gay.
Just mouthing it to myself was enough. I belonged to something. I was connected to something, even if I did not fully understand what it all meant. It just was what it was. No amount of maneuvering or hiding or “becoming” was going to change who I was inside.
I am a gay, Black man.
The whisper of it mimicked the times I would write a story and read the words back, lost in the melody of its flow. That little whisper made me rock back and forth, closed eyes in meditation. I was writing a new chapter. The words, for the first time, sounded sweet.
I–am–gay.
I should have stopped at the whisper.
If I had known then what I know now, the whisper would have been the end of my coming out. The whisper was enough. There was no mandate to shout or be loud and to assign pride to a declaration that had not yet been fully absorbed. The whisper made space for me to accept myself and gave me space to grow into a new understanding of how to move through the world. Coming out to others became an act of penance.
The act of genuflecting before everyone I knew put me back in bondage. My value hinged on other people’s reactions. Coming out, as we know and celebrate it, privileges folks whose love we believe to be conditional. Our wholeness hangs in the balance of their reception. There is a reading of coming out that celebrates the bravery of declaring who we are to the whole world.
F–k the world.
The world tortures us, the world dangles conditional love, the world mocks—often seeing us as an unfortunate variant. Then, there we go on bended knees, praying that we are still loved or, at a bare minimum, tolerated by people we aren’t even sure love us.
Tolerance is crazy.
But in 1994, steeped in talk shows and TV movie version of coming out, I did what others had done before me and began my obligatory coming-out tour. Each tour stop mad me hate the pronouncement and myself a little bit more. The whisper made me feel free. The nervous, staccato mumbling to family and friends about my sexual desires felt demoralizing.
Over and over again I confessed, mostly over long distance calls. That I was spending money I did not have to tell people who I preferred to sleep with was added insult. None of it felt good. It just felt like an obligatory rite. The call itself was awkward, blindsiding folks I could not see, as they calibrated upon hearing my confession. I was glad not to see anyone’s eyes as I laid myself bare.
Eyes tell truths.
As brazen–or maybe numb–as I had become about coming out, I hadn’t been ready for the whole truth of it. The reactions you see, not spoken platitudes over the phone, carry a different weight. Being free at home was the goal though, and for that, I needed to tell the two brothas sleeping in the bedrooms next to mine. Calling them long distance was not an option.
Their eyes were unavoidable.
“Hit this,” Pete said, holding a bong in my direction, as we sat in our living room.
Tron was already faded, and I was just sitting there, as I normally did, not partaking. Us sitting in our house watching TV and talking shit was one of my favorite things to do. We were all doing LA in different ways. Tron seemed to have found a groove. Pete was a social butterfly and had amassed a clique that was always down to party. I was obsessed with “making it,” diving headfirst into the business. We did our respective things and then leaned on each other for support. Usually that support was just a chance to unwind and laugh at the dumb shit that was happening at our day jobs.
“I’m good,” I said and turned back to the TV, rejecting the bong.
Pete wasn’t having it. “Nah, bro, hit it,” he demanded, as he giggled.
My father, being a drunk and doing whatever else he was doing, had mostly kept me from smoking. It always felt like a slippery slope. I thought I would end up like him if it all got too good to me. It was late sophomore year before I had a drink at Hampton. Tawana and Kim, two of my “big sisters,” handed me a concoction at a house party just before they graduated. I attempted to beg off.
“Nope,” Tawana said. “You gotta have at least one drink before we are outta here.”
I took the cup, and surprisingly it wasn’t as harsh as I’d expected. It tasted like Kool-Aid. That turned out to be a bad thing, because it made it way too easy to drink. A lesson was learned the next morning. Then, a couple years later, after a Student Leadership workshop at Hampton University, I blazed up with a couple friends, never letting on that I had not actually smoked before. I don’t count the roaches that I pulled out of the ashtray and tried to light up when I was a kid, pretending to be like my father.
There was no inclination for me to take the bong from Pete’s hands. But looking at them, totally and completely relaxed with themselves and with me, convinced me to take it when he asked the second time. He told me what to do, and I inhaled, deeply. Too deeply.
The choking felt like imminent death.
They weren’t helping me, even though I was, in my mind, clearly dying. The little floaties you get in your eyes after a bad fall or a violent sneeze had taken over my vision. My eyes filled with tears. Tron’s eyes were filled with tears too, as he was rolling around on the floor laughing. Pete stayed with me, cracking up, but with his hand on my shoulder.
“Not so much,” he got out between laughing.
He pointed it in my direction after my coughing subsided.
“One more time.”
Fuck it.
I took another, and another…
After having complained about not feeling anything for about twenty minutes, suddenly, my head was floating. My arms and legs, though, were heavy. It felt as if I was underwater.
Sounds were muffled, and I was in slow motion.
“Do I sound normal?” I asked repeatedly.
They kept saying yes, but to me, my voice was distorted.
“Am I talking slow?” I asked, in a panic.
They were gone. Whatever I was saying didn’t matter, because they were fucked up, too. All I could hear was laughter; loud, cackling laughter. It was pissing me off, because I clearly needed hospitalization.
This is why I don’t do drugs.
“Call an ambulance,” I begged them, the words still sounding as if I was six feet deep in a pool of water, gurgling. In tears, they told me to relax, that I was okay and to just breathe. I was mad as shit. We needed an ambulance, but I could not get up from the floor to reach the phone in the kitchen. Instead of calling 911 like my mind was telling me to do, I fell out on the floor and laughed. We all laughed until it hurt.
And then, as my body and mind started to come back to me, I looked at them and said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”
Now tired, and ready to get in bed, they both looked at me with half open eyes, confused by sudden seriousness. Pete was next to me on the floor and Tron was sitting on the secondhand chair that I had lifted outside of the building’s trash room.
“I’m gay.”
Silence.
In that silence, my mind went to a million places. I wished my legs were working so I could pop up and run to my room. They weren’t, plus their silence bolted me to the floor, paralyzed with fear. Waiting was the only option.
“That’s it?” Tron asked, nonplussed.
I nodded.
He shrugged and smirked. “Congratulations?”
Pete toppled over. “Congratulations!?!”
“We good,” Tron said as he stood and dapped me up.
Pete looked at me and simply said, “I don’t give a fuck.”
Their eyes held the truth. They matched the sweetness of their response. I was overcome, and high. The combination was dizzying. Pete reached out his hand, and I gripped it as he pulled me up to my unsteady feet. He smiled, dapped me up, and we staggered off to our rooms.
It was smooth until it wasn’t. I was different, an alien.
Excerpted from THE DOUBLE DUTCH FUSS: A Memoir by Phill Branch. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted © 2026 by Phill Branch.