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Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race
This powerful book couldn’t come at a more timely juncture. With our deep misunderstanding of racial identity, the murder of transgender women increasing at an alarming rate, and the battle of faith and sexual orientation at churches across the country, we are in a cultural war of ideologies. Overwhelming prejudices have constricted our basic capacity for compassion and understanding.
Live Through This is a collection of intimate essays about one man’s journey to self-acceptance when his faith, sexuality, and race battled with societal norms. These insightful writings will plant seeds of consideration and inspire readers to stretch beyond stereotypes. By reading stories about the demographics that live on the fringe of traditions, we gain a deeper awareness of our cultural climate and how we can improve it, starting with ourselves.
Live Through This is a collection of intimate essays about one man’s journey to self-acceptance when his faith, sexuality, and race battled with societal norms. These insightful writings will plant seeds of consideration and inspire readers to stretch beyond stereotypes. By reading stories about the demographics that live on the fringe of traditions, we gain a deeper awareness of our cultural climate and how we can improve it, starting with ourselves.
260 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 23, 2017
14 people are currently reading
262 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 18, 2019
I wouldn’t have picked up this book had my publicist not scheduled a media interview with him (which is now on hold), but his story is fascinating. I especially loved reading his insights on being mixed-race and on living in WA state.
January 9, 2018
This book is insightful, touching, and real. So real. Clay Cane spared nothing, giving details of his growth, his friendships, his parents, and culture as it shifts around him.
I was so afraid, upon reading the first two pages of this book, that it would be another tragic story about a black gay man who was shunned by his parents and his community (after having seen his documentary, I wasn’t sure what this book would be yet- I only knew I wanted to read it). And then it delightfully isn’t. I was crying five pages in, my heart breaking because of the fierce love his mother has for him, and although I won’t know that love from a parent and it was definitely a rare occurrence, he addresses that- he explains how he was glad that the first time someone called him a faggot, his mother told them to get the fuck out. That is powerful, especially coming from the mother of a black child.
All of these stories- ESPECIALLY ABOUT BALLS, POP CULTURE, AND POVERTY- resonated inside me. Clay Cane perfectly captures the intersections of queerness, race, classism, religion, and everything else. And in doing such, he speaks things that I have been unable to articulate for so long, being only 17 and obviously lacking his black man’s perspective.
I just really, honestly, truly loved this book. I know it just came out, but I can’t wait for him to write more. This is a person who understands our time, and the delicate overlap of communities that so many people tiptoe around. He has been shown as visionary in his other work, having tense and incredible interviews and tackling one of the hardest topics of all (Black religion and gayness) in his documentary, but this book is phenomenal and truly showcases his brilliance. GO BUY THIS BOOK. GO LOOK UP CLAY CANE.
I was so afraid, upon reading the first two pages of this book, that it would be another tragic story about a black gay man who was shunned by his parents and his community (after having seen his documentary, I wasn’t sure what this book would be yet- I only knew I wanted to read it). And then it delightfully isn’t. I was crying five pages in, my heart breaking because of the fierce love his mother has for him, and although I won’t know that love from a parent and it was definitely a rare occurrence, he addresses that- he explains how he was glad that the first time someone called him a faggot, his mother told them to get the fuck out. That is powerful, especially coming from the mother of a black child.
All of these stories- ESPECIALLY ABOUT BALLS, POP CULTURE, AND POVERTY- resonated inside me. Clay Cane perfectly captures the intersections of queerness, race, classism, religion, and everything else. And in doing such, he speaks things that I have been unable to articulate for so long, being only 17 and obviously lacking his black man’s perspective.
I just really, honestly, truly loved this book. I know it just came out, but I can’t wait for him to write more. This is a person who understands our time, and the delicate overlap of communities that so many people tiptoe around. He has been shown as visionary in his other work, having tense and incredible interviews and tackling one of the hardest topics of all (Black religion and gayness) in his documentary, but this book is phenomenal and truly showcases his brilliance. GO BUY THIS BOOK. GO LOOK UP CLAY CANE.
June 1, 2017
(Review incomplete due to Goodreads' space limitation.)
As a dyed-in-the-cool non-collectivist, I tend to avoid so-called identity politics, but I am appreciative of individual identities and love it when someone is “something else,” an oddball, a hearer of a different drum, an underdog who overcomes. Ralph Ellison wrote that “the individual is a minority,” and, likewise, Ayn Rand called the individual “the smallest minority on earth,” and that’s what I look for among the masses: unique personalities, glowing talents, opinionated bees in bonnets, folks who tell their “I am!” stories before the stories become “she/he was.”
Consider journalist/author Clay Cane, a candid individual who demands candidness and a truth-teller who sniffs out truth, no matter how fragrant or funky. As John Coltrane said, “to play truths, you’ve got to live as much truth as you possibly can,” something Clay seems to espouse, since he also pursues truth-living as much as telling. His style of living and telling is presented with excellence in his new memoir-like essay collection, Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race (published by Cleis Press).
Let’s start with his name, which requires us to start at the end of the book. In the final chapter, “Killing My Father,” Clay reveals that his birth name was Tyrone Cane, Jr., after his father, a man who physically abused his mother and emotionally abused little Tyrone. Why the ire for his son? Because from an early age it was evident that the boy was born gay, “opposite of what [his father] defined as manhood.” A while after Tyrone Sr. abandoned his family and moved to Philadelphia, Tyrone Jr. went to live with his father and ended up developing introversion and fear from his father’s abusive conditioning, which included, horribly enough, snapping fingers each time he caught his son “acting like a girl.” “Studying masculinity was my survival technique,” Clay writes.
It’s no wonder that many years later Clay felt insulted by a particular answer an unnamed black actor gave in a 2004 interview, in response to a question about the actor’s hypothetical willingness to play a gay character:
“I think it’s important to make sure I present myself and my manhood as something that is everlasting…I think that’s important to young men to never have to see me in lipstick or to never have to see me doing something that emasculates me.”
The actor believed that such abstinence worked to “preserve the black man,” which, of course, excludes someone like Clay, who is a black man. The implication is obvious. Eventually the video had to be removed from the host website due to many negative public reactions, and the main advice given to Clay was to eat shit, since “celebrities have money and power” and can end the careers of folks like him if they present ethical challenges.
As for the culmination of life with his father in Philadelphia, a truth-liver can’t sustain a lived lie, so by the time Tyrone Sr. found his copy of B-Boy Blues by James Hardy and yelled that he’d “have no faggot living in my house,” all hope of compromise, let alone full acceptance, died. In profound repudiation of his father, Tyrone changed his name to Clay (which, ironically and every bit as symbolically, is the surname Muhammad Ali replaced in the mid-1960s), claiming his own identity and breaking genealogical shackles to continue freely on a positive, hopeful path.
Such damaging bigotry is something that Clay has had to battle again and again in his life since then, but, thanks to his mother, he inherited the spiritual fortitude needed for such endurance early on. I relate to this particularly since my mother raised me and my brothers by herself from an early age. Like Clay, I remember government cheese and the nauseous task of having to buy groceries with food stamps back in pre-EBT days. (His home hosted countless roaches, mine had several rats.)
In “The First Time I Was Called a Faggot” Clay reveals that his mother condoned his “feminine” nature and interests, even his crossdressing as a seven-year-old. Her tenderness for and tough defense of her son were salvational at a crucial time in his development. When her tentative boyfriend cruelly said, “Your son is gonna be a faggot!” at the sight of the boy dressed in girly clothes, Clay’s mother’s reaction “would either damage or affirm me for life,” as he puts it. “My little soul was in her hands.” Of course, she kicked the creep out at once and, as Clay rejoices, “that one moment of affirmation armored me for life.”
Clay’s spiritual weaponry also is owed to “His Royal Badness,” “the Purple One”: the artist eternally known as Prince. Lucky to have an adoring Prince fan for a mother, he was given the opportunity to admire and identify with an artist “who was gender nonconforming before the term existed.” Prince’s importance in their household was so important, his picture was hung up among images of MLK and Jesus, “but it was clear who reigned supreme.”
By the time the episode chronicled in “Asking For It” came around, Clay had accepted his nature a gay black man but was vulnerable to forces that were perhaps more degrading than his father’s nastiness. Temporarily caught in a demeaning, rather sleazy relationship with a drug-dealing skunk, let’s just say Clay reached a low point in which he “begged for someone to save [him] from the gutter.” Contrasting the time when his mother’s hands held his “little soul,” Clay recalls a situation of extreme distress and exposure: “My soul was up for grabs. There was no magic in my sexuality. I found my tribe, but I still existed in identities that were not valued.”
Much of Live Through This addresses the fundamental struggle to come to terms with one’s sexuality – and to flourish constructively according to whatever is discovered about oneself. For Clay, racial conflict compounded sexual conflict. Before he could truly realize and leverage his innate talents, Clay had to navigate existential turbulence without sinking into despair or, worse, self-hatred. As far as sexuality goes, he had to challenge the heteronormativity that still reinforced a monolithic indifference to – if not aggressive erasure of – folks of his stripe. As Christian philosopher Brennan Manning writes in The Ragamuffin Gospel, “the more fully we accept ourselves, the more successfully we begin to grow. Love is a far better stimulus than threat or pressure.” As the earlier Clay quote says, one tends to crave societal valuation.
For one to be valued in society, she or he must be seen. (We’ll let hermits and really rural folks chill in their simpler circles.) Complacent or deliberate blindness to certain kinds of people has a dehumanizing effect. Often, fringe-society folks, folks familiar with being ignored, shunned or entirely discounted, also can be guilty of such blindness, perhaps due to being preoccupied with their own social exile or painful quests for recognition and dignity. This is something Clay realized about himself during his wilder days on Thirteen Street (“Freak Street”), the strip in Philadelphia, back in the mid-1990s. And this realization blessed him with a long-lasting, creative influence from an unlikely source.
Eventually, Clay found value in his expertise as a journalist and interviewer. Though he earned mere pennies in comparison to the celebrities he met and wrote about, he had a wealth of insightful persuasiveness which helped him rise from obscure amateurism. He reveals in “How Sex Workers Taught Me to Hustle” that much credit for this accomplishment belongs to the transgender sex workers from Thirteenth Street, particularly an outspoken transwoman named Adina.
Clay and his peers burgeoned with assertive celebration of their non-traditional sexuality, and they rolled with righteous defiance. “We were street urchins who terrified the white gay community and black heterosexuals,” Clay writes in perhaps the coolest two lines in Live Through This. “We didn’t believe in same-sex marriage; we were anti-marriage.” Despite this flouting of convention, street-stompin’ Clay unwittingly acted hypocritically toward transfolk when he’d regularly hurry by Adina and her bullshit-detecting cohorts because he “feared being associated with them.” Finally, unable to ignore Adina because she blocked his path, his blindness lifted:
It occurred to me that I had often walked by her like she was garbage on the corner, the same way heterosexuals leered at my friends and me if they accidentally wandered down Thirteenth Street after midnight…[F]rom that moment on, I made it a point to see Adina.
As the two got to know each other, Clay learned that Adina possessed an enviable ability to read people quickly and accurately, the very skill he eventually honed to further his career. Sadly, Adina’s priceless impartation didn’t earn success for herself. Clay ran into her years later and saw that “the spark was gone,” that she’d surrendered to a society hostile to her kind. Such is the tragic danger of rowing against the current, of being purposely unseen by others.
In many places on Earth there’s a problem of being seen, of Big Brother-like eyes peeled to detect convention-threatening deviance. Such was the case for a Jamaican boyfriend of Clay’s, Carson, who is visited in an affecting essay called “I Will Remember You.” Vacationing in Jamaica to meet Carson in person for the first time, Clay learned that Jamaican society is dangerously anti-gay, so anti-gay that Carson married a woman in order to appear normal – to literally survive. To Clay’s credit, besides its pitiful illustration of the pretense needed to avoid punishment, Carson’s marital status seems to have also bothered Clay on a basic fidelitous level. Though the situation doomed their relationship, he learned that “all forms of oppression – sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism – have a link.” And, because of this link, one cannot champion the rights a la carte. Specifically, as Clay puts it, “you cannot advocate for an end to racism but still be a proponent of homophobia.”
Speaking of racism, Clay’s being the son of a black man and a white woman factors deeply in both the person he has become and the conflicts he has experienced. Exponential progress in civil rights hasn’t erased a bloody, atrocious past, nor has it established a utopian replacement. Perhaps the legacy of the history-long sin of slavery is best countered by Clay’s concept of “intersectionality,” which involves not only “a cathartic journey of progression and reinvention, flourishing along the spectrum of lightness and darkness,” but also regression, pain and failure, resulting in hardier heads and hearts strong enough to march on. I’m reminded of something John Coltrane said in an interview: “You have to have trial and tribulation, or what are you going to learn?” Clay echoes this idea in his own style:
We carry the past and present. The scars of our past are a piece of our intricate imperfections. These experiences not only form who we are; they shape our fears and burdens. That’s the other part of intersections – they’re not solely the identities, they’re the fights we may never win, which are unavoidable in the journey.
I was thrilled to learn of Clay’s love for Jean Toomer’s extraordinary prose/poetry masterpiece, Cane, which served as his “daily handbook, grappling with the concepts of intersectionality decades before the term existed.” Beyond the title coincidentally corresponding to Clay’s surname, the book deals with a subject Toomer both obsessed over and wished to eschew until his dying day: race and how it relates to black and white folks. Born of “mixed race” parents, both of whom were touched directly by American slavery, Toomer found himself teetering on a fine line between black and white, passing as either, depending on the circumstance or how he chose to declare himself. (In today’s parlance one might say that he was race-fluid.) While he sometimes identified as “Negro,” he also identified as “white,” eventually expressing desire for transcendence beyond both racial labels, amalgamation of a new race: “American.” Cane portrays the consequential effects of racial hangups on its characters, tending to, in an almost Faulknerian way, present the American black/white dichotomy as a corrosive, confusing, even maddening thing.
For instance, in “Becky” the so-called “one-drop rule” (a eugenicist phenomenon which became a legal determination via Virginia’s Racial Purity Act and was peculiar to the U.S., as far as I know) is alluded to right away in the opening line: “Becky was a white woman who had two Negro sons.” The line’s implication was indirectly addressed 60-some years later in Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet”: "Black man, black woman, black baby/White man, white woman, white baby/White man, black woman, black baby/Black man, white woman, black baby." Becky’s sons grow up under a burdensome question mark: “White or colored? No one knew, least of all themselves.” Though the one-drop rule insists that any degree of “Negro” ancestry unquestionably makes one black, ambiguity intensifies the boys’ status as Other, alienating them from both races. “‘Godam the white folks; godam the niggers,’ they shout as they left town.” Also, in “Bona and Paul,” people whisper about Paul, whose race isn’t immediately evident: “What is he, a Spaniard, an Indian, and Italian, a Mexican, a Hindu, or a Japanese?”
Knowing Clay’s parental situation, I expected embracement of the looser “mixed race” terminology by him, in the spirit of his intersectionality and the quest “to be the person and find the person who transcends the categories,” but instead I found a rather hostile interpretation. In “Tragic Mulatto” Clay asserts “the reality of my blackness” and presents the “mixed” sensibility as a method of escape from blackness by “the tragic mulatto.” Thus, he deconstructs actor Taye Diggs’ Mixed Me, a book for children of black and white parents in which the omission of the white half of their heritage is discouraged. “You’re seen as black,” Clay’s father once told him, intending to prepare his son for what he would surely face in society. “You’re a black man in America.”
Clay also cites Halle Berry’s defense of the one-drop rule, and her personal choice to present and express herself and her progeny as black. Now, for a long time, since I’m allergic to most collectivism, I’ve rejected the one-drop rule (what I half-jokingly call "white genes can't jump") to invalidate the blood-pollution notions of odious racists. I also nod at Public Enemy’s Chuck D who, in his interview in Spin magazine back in 1990, said:
The whole concept is that there is no such thing as black and white. The world is full of different complexions. The difference between black and white is set up by people who want to remain in power. This black and white thing is a belief structure, not a physical reality.
However, though I diverge from Clay’s vehement opposition to “mixed” alternatives, his reasoning widened my perspective on the subject, and it seems in tune with some of the related opinions of Cornel West (my favorite living philosopher after Slavoj Zizek). Something else Chuck D told Spin seems to support some of Clay’s well-taken points: “At the moment, we got to hold onto our blackness out of self-defense."...
...Lyrics from a Sunday school song I learned as a child come to mind: “Jesus loves the little children,/all the children of the world/Red, brown, yellow, black and white,/they are precious in his sight.” Such an inclusive, “We Are the World”-sweet sentiment, right? Well, mostly rightly so, Clay sees a need for a cleansing rain to fall on that parade. How can one even begin to consider sympathy – let alone affiliation – with any organization that bolts its figurative doors against her or his entry? To quote Brennan Manning again, “something is radically wrong when the local church rejects a person accepted by Jesus: when a harsh judgmental and unforgiving sentence is passed on homosexuals…” What really changed evangelist/sociologist Tony Campolo’s mind on church acceptance of homosexuals and gay marriage boiled down to one question he asked himself: “Can I deny homosexual couples what I am personally experiencing in the way of blessings and joy in a relationship?
An essay called “Holler If You Hear Me,” taken from the title of a documentary Clay directed for BET.com, Holler If You Hear Me: Black and Gay in the Church, focuses on the wall between many Christian congregations (black ones in particular) and non-traditional sexualities. He cautions against the potentially fatal consequences of “spiritual violence,” contrasting its deadly danger with his thankfulness for the lifesaving providence of his gayness. Though Clay doesn’t claim atheism, he rejects Christianity, citing American-treasure James Baldwin’s sense of incomplete freedom during his upbringing in Christian culture and repeating Hubert Harrison’s famous repudiation of “a lily-white God and a Jim Crow Jesus.”
Another charismatic writer who addresses spiritual violence is lesbian Christian pastor Elizabeth Edman, author of Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity. She claims that “all queer people face spiritual violence,” but self-defense must not involve hiding in the closet. Because, as well as having to be seen to be valued, one also must be heard. “When you are who you are and what you are about, it matters to tell people about it,” writes Edman. She also perceives – and, indeed, participates in – Christianity through different eyes. For her, if one treats “‘queer’ as something that has at its center an impulse to disrupt any and all efforts to reduce into simplistic dualisms our experiences of life, of God,” then “the binary-busting aspect of Christianity” can be instrumental in queering spiritual and social relations among people...
...“In this book I present harsh realities,” he writes, and he warns readers up front that his language “might be shocking” because “in reality, life is shocking, and this book is about life.” Live Through This also is about love. Consider this passage from “The Savage Hunt” chapter:
…the desire for partnership transcends every identity. I’ve seen the strongest people stripped to raw bones over a broken heart. If you work hard enough, you can progress in your education or career, but no matter how much self-proclaimed ‘work’ you accomplish, the struggle for ‘the one’ is never simple…Your heart is on the auction block, begging to be chosen.
His childhood poverty, his experiences on the streets, his manumission from paternal abuse, exposure to the “warrior marks” of sufferers he met, the heartbreak of the dating scene (“the savage hunt,” according to Clay’s past best friend, Nikki), his found and lost friends and boyfriends, his survival in an HIV-/AIDS-haunted community, his struggle to maintain personal/professional integrity as an interviewer, and his activism against sexual and racial injustice – all of this swirls in a heart that needs to receive and radiate love. “Life is shocking,” but so is love when it appears and persists in spite of “harsh realities,” hate, social blindness, judgmental surveillance and even atrocity. This is why Clay claims his book is inspired by a basic question: “Can I live through this?” More important, what I always ask is, robbing Roberta Flack, “Where is the love?” Really, this book could very well have been called Love Through This.
As a dyed-in-the-cool non-collectivist, I tend to avoid so-called identity politics, but I am appreciative of individual identities and love it when someone is “something else,” an oddball, a hearer of a different drum, an underdog who overcomes. Ralph Ellison wrote that “the individual is a minority,” and, likewise, Ayn Rand called the individual “the smallest minority on earth,” and that’s what I look for among the masses: unique personalities, glowing talents, opinionated bees in bonnets, folks who tell their “I am!” stories before the stories become “she/he was.”
Consider journalist/author Clay Cane, a candid individual who demands candidness and a truth-teller who sniffs out truth, no matter how fragrant or funky. As John Coltrane said, “to play truths, you’ve got to live as much truth as you possibly can,” something Clay seems to espouse, since he also pursues truth-living as much as telling. His style of living and telling is presented with excellence in his new memoir-like essay collection, Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race (published by Cleis Press).
Let’s start with his name, which requires us to start at the end of the book. In the final chapter, “Killing My Father,” Clay reveals that his birth name was Tyrone Cane, Jr., after his father, a man who physically abused his mother and emotionally abused little Tyrone. Why the ire for his son? Because from an early age it was evident that the boy was born gay, “opposite of what [his father] defined as manhood.” A while after Tyrone Sr. abandoned his family and moved to Philadelphia, Tyrone Jr. went to live with his father and ended up developing introversion and fear from his father’s abusive conditioning, which included, horribly enough, snapping fingers each time he caught his son “acting like a girl.” “Studying masculinity was my survival technique,” Clay writes.
It’s no wonder that many years later Clay felt insulted by a particular answer an unnamed black actor gave in a 2004 interview, in response to a question about the actor’s hypothetical willingness to play a gay character:
“I think it’s important to make sure I present myself and my manhood as something that is everlasting…I think that’s important to young men to never have to see me in lipstick or to never have to see me doing something that emasculates me.”
The actor believed that such abstinence worked to “preserve the black man,” which, of course, excludes someone like Clay, who is a black man. The implication is obvious. Eventually the video had to be removed from the host website due to many negative public reactions, and the main advice given to Clay was to eat shit, since “celebrities have money and power” and can end the careers of folks like him if they present ethical challenges.
As for the culmination of life with his father in Philadelphia, a truth-liver can’t sustain a lived lie, so by the time Tyrone Sr. found his copy of B-Boy Blues by James Hardy and yelled that he’d “have no faggot living in my house,” all hope of compromise, let alone full acceptance, died. In profound repudiation of his father, Tyrone changed his name to Clay (which, ironically and every bit as symbolically, is the surname Muhammad Ali replaced in the mid-1960s), claiming his own identity and breaking genealogical shackles to continue freely on a positive, hopeful path.
Such damaging bigotry is something that Clay has had to battle again and again in his life since then, but, thanks to his mother, he inherited the spiritual fortitude needed for such endurance early on. I relate to this particularly since my mother raised me and my brothers by herself from an early age. Like Clay, I remember government cheese and the nauseous task of having to buy groceries with food stamps back in pre-EBT days. (His home hosted countless roaches, mine had several rats.)
In “The First Time I Was Called a Faggot” Clay reveals that his mother condoned his “feminine” nature and interests, even his crossdressing as a seven-year-old. Her tenderness for and tough defense of her son were salvational at a crucial time in his development. When her tentative boyfriend cruelly said, “Your son is gonna be a faggot!” at the sight of the boy dressed in girly clothes, Clay’s mother’s reaction “would either damage or affirm me for life,” as he puts it. “My little soul was in her hands.” Of course, she kicked the creep out at once and, as Clay rejoices, “that one moment of affirmation armored me for life.”
Clay’s spiritual weaponry also is owed to “His Royal Badness,” “the Purple One”: the artist eternally known as Prince. Lucky to have an adoring Prince fan for a mother, he was given the opportunity to admire and identify with an artist “who was gender nonconforming before the term existed.” Prince’s importance in their household was so important, his picture was hung up among images of MLK and Jesus, “but it was clear who reigned supreme.”
By the time the episode chronicled in “Asking For It” came around, Clay had accepted his nature a gay black man but was vulnerable to forces that were perhaps more degrading than his father’s nastiness. Temporarily caught in a demeaning, rather sleazy relationship with a drug-dealing skunk, let’s just say Clay reached a low point in which he “begged for someone to save [him] from the gutter.” Contrasting the time when his mother’s hands held his “little soul,” Clay recalls a situation of extreme distress and exposure: “My soul was up for grabs. There was no magic in my sexuality. I found my tribe, but I still existed in identities that were not valued.”
Much of Live Through This addresses the fundamental struggle to come to terms with one’s sexuality – and to flourish constructively according to whatever is discovered about oneself. For Clay, racial conflict compounded sexual conflict. Before he could truly realize and leverage his innate talents, Clay had to navigate existential turbulence without sinking into despair or, worse, self-hatred. As far as sexuality goes, he had to challenge the heteronormativity that still reinforced a monolithic indifference to – if not aggressive erasure of – folks of his stripe. As Christian philosopher Brennan Manning writes in The Ragamuffin Gospel, “the more fully we accept ourselves, the more successfully we begin to grow. Love is a far better stimulus than threat or pressure.” As the earlier Clay quote says, one tends to crave societal valuation.
For one to be valued in society, she or he must be seen. (We’ll let hermits and really rural folks chill in their simpler circles.) Complacent or deliberate blindness to certain kinds of people has a dehumanizing effect. Often, fringe-society folks, folks familiar with being ignored, shunned or entirely discounted, also can be guilty of such blindness, perhaps due to being preoccupied with their own social exile or painful quests for recognition and dignity. This is something Clay realized about himself during his wilder days on Thirteen Street (“Freak Street”), the strip in Philadelphia, back in the mid-1990s. And this realization blessed him with a long-lasting, creative influence from an unlikely source.
Eventually, Clay found value in his expertise as a journalist and interviewer. Though he earned mere pennies in comparison to the celebrities he met and wrote about, he had a wealth of insightful persuasiveness which helped him rise from obscure amateurism. He reveals in “How Sex Workers Taught Me to Hustle” that much credit for this accomplishment belongs to the transgender sex workers from Thirteenth Street, particularly an outspoken transwoman named Adina.
Clay and his peers burgeoned with assertive celebration of their non-traditional sexuality, and they rolled with righteous defiance. “We were street urchins who terrified the white gay community and black heterosexuals,” Clay writes in perhaps the coolest two lines in Live Through This. “We didn’t believe in same-sex marriage; we were anti-marriage.” Despite this flouting of convention, street-stompin’ Clay unwittingly acted hypocritically toward transfolk when he’d regularly hurry by Adina and her bullshit-detecting cohorts because he “feared being associated with them.” Finally, unable to ignore Adina because she blocked his path, his blindness lifted:
It occurred to me that I had often walked by her like she was garbage on the corner, the same way heterosexuals leered at my friends and me if they accidentally wandered down Thirteenth Street after midnight…[F]rom that moment on, I made it a point to see Adina.
As the two got to know each other, Clay learned that Adina possessed an enviable ability to read people quickly and accurately, the very skill he eventually honed to further his career. Sadly, Adina’s priceless impartation didn’t earn success for herself. Clay ran into her years later and saw that “the spark was gone,” that she’d surrendered to a society hostile to her kind. Such is the tragic danger of rowing against the current, of being purposely unseen by others.
In many places on Earth there’s a problem of being seen, of Big Brother-like eyes peeled to detect convention-threatening deviance. Such was the case for a Jamaican boyfriend of Clay’s, Carson, who is visited in an affecting essay called “I Will Remember You.” Vacationing in Jamaica to meet Carson in person for the first time, Clay learned that Jamaican society is dangerously anti-gay, so anti-gay that Carson married a woman in order to appear normal – to literally survive. To Clay’s credit, besides its pitiful illustration of the pretense needed to avoid punishment, Carson’s marital status seems to have also bothered Clay on a basic fidelitous level. Though the situation doomed their relationship, he learned that “all forms of oppression – sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism – have a link.” And, because of this link, one cannot champion the rights a la carte. Specifically, as Clay puts it, “you cannot advocate for an end to racism but still be a proponent of homophobia.”
Speaking of racism, Clay’s being the son of a black man and a white woman factors deeply in both the person he has become and the conflicts he has experienced. Exponential progress in civil rights hasn’t erased a bloody, atrocious past, nor has it established a utopian replacement. Perhaps the legacy of the history-long sin of slavery is best countered by Clay’s concept of “intersectionality,” which involves not only “a cathartic journey of progression and reinvention, flourishing along the spectrum of lightness and darkness,” but also regression, pain and failure, resulting in hardier heads and hearts strong enough to march on. I’m reminded of something John Coltrane said in an interview: “You have to have trial and tribulation, or what are you going to learn?” Clay echoes this idea in his own style:
We carry the past and present. The scars of our past are a piece of our intricate imperfections. These experiences not only form who we are; they shape our fears and burdens. That’s the other part of intersections – they’re not solely the identities, they’re the fights we may never win, which are unavoidable in the journey.
I was thrilled to learn of Clay’s love for Jean Toomer’s extraordinary prose/poetry masterpiece, Cane, which served as his “daily handbook, grappling with the concepts of intersectionality decades before the term existed.” Beyond the title coincidentally corresponding to Clay’s surname, the book deals with a subject Toomer both obsessed over and wished to eschew until his dying day: race and how it relates to black and white folks. Born of “mixed race” parents, both of whom were touched directly by American slavery, Toomer found himself teetering on a fine line between black and white, passing as either, depending on the circumstance or how he chose to declare himself. (In today’s parlance one might say that he was race-fluid.) While he sometimes identified as “Negro,” he also identified as “white,” eventually expressing desire for transcendence beyond both racial labels, amalgamation of a new race: “American.” Cane portrays the consequential effects of racial hangups on its characters, tending to, in an almost Faulknerian way, present the American black/white dichotomy as a corrosive, confusing, even maddening thing.
For instance, in “Becky” the so-called “one-drop rule” (a eugenicist phenomenon which became a legal determination via Virginia’s Racial Purity Act and was peculiar to the U.S., as far as I know) is alluded to right away in the opening line: “Becky was a white woman who had two Negro sons.” The line’s implication was indirectly addressed 60-some years later in Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet”: "Black man, black woman, black baby/White man, white woman, white baby/White man, black woman, black baby/Black man, white woman, black baby." Becky’s sons grow up under a burdensome question mark: “White or colored? No one knew, least of all themselves.” Though the one-drop rule insists that any degree of “Negro” ancestry unquestionably makes one black, ambiguity intensifies the boys’ status as Other, alienating them from both races. “‘Godam the white folks; godam the niggers,’ they shout as they left town.” Also, in “Bona and Paul,” people whisper about Paul, whose race isn’t immediately evident: “What is he, a Spaniard, an Indian, and Italian, a Mexican, a Hindu, or a Japanese?”
Knowing Clay’s parental situation, I expected embracement of the looser “mixed race” terminology by him, in the spirit of his intersectionality and the quest “to be the person and find the person who transcends the categories,” but instead I found a rather hostile interpretation. In “Tragic Mulatto” Clay asserts “the reality of my blackness” and presents the “mixed” sensibility as a method of escape from blackness by “the tragic mulatto.” Thus, he deconstructs actor Taye Diggs’ Mixed Me, a book for children of black and white parents in which the omission of the white half of their heritage is discouraged. “You’re seen as black,” Clay’s father once told him, intending to prepare his son for what he would surely face in society. “You’re a black man in America.”
Clay also cites Halle Berry’s defense of the one-drop rule, and her personal choice to present and express herself and her progeny as black. Now, for a long time, since I’m allergic to most collectivism, I’ve rejected the one-drop rule (what I half-jokingly call "white genes can't jump") to invalidate the blood-pollution notions of odious racists. I also nod at Public Enemy’s Chuck D who, in his interview in Spin magazine back in 1990, said:
The whole concept is that there is no such thing as black and white. The world is full of different complexions. The difference between black and white is set up by people who want to remain in power. This black and white thing is a belief structure, not a physical reality.
However, though I diverge from Clay’s vehement opposition to “mixed” alternatives, his reasoning widened my perspective on the subject, and it seems in tune with some of the related opinions of Cornel West (my favorite living philosopher after Slavoj Zizek). Something else Chuck D told Spin seems to support some of Clay’s well-taken points: “At the moment, we got to hold onto our blackness out of self-defense."...
...Lyrics from a Sunday school song I learned as a child come to mind: “Jesus loves the little children,/all the children of the world/Red, brown, yellow, black and white,/they are precious in his sight.” Such an inclusive, “We Are the World”-sweet sentiment, right? Well, mostly rightly so, Clay sees a need for a cleansing rain to fall on that parade. How can one even begin to consider sympathy – let alone affiliation – with any organization that bolts its figurative doors against her or his entry? To quote Brennan Manning again, “something is radically wrong when the local church rejects a person accepted by Jesus: when a harsh judgmental and unforgiving sentence is passed on homosexuals…” What really changed evangelist/sociologist Tony Campolo’s mind on church acceptance of homosexuals and gay marriage boiled down to one question he asked himself: “Can I deny homosexual couples what I am personally experiencing in the way of blessings and joy in a relationship?
An essay called “Holler If You Hear Me,” taken from the title of a documentary Clay directed for BET.com, Holler If You Hear Me: Black and Gay in the Church, focuses on the wall between many Christian congregations (black ones in particular) and non-traditional sexualities. He cautions against the potentially fatal consequences of “spiritual violence,” contrasting its deadly danger with his thankfulness for the lifesaving providence of his gayness. Though Clay doesn’t claim atheism, he rejects Christianity, citing American-treasure James Baldwin’s sense of incomplete freedom during his upbringing in Christian culture and repeating Hubert Harrison’s famous repudiation of “a lily-white God and a Jim Crow Jesus.”
Another charismatic writer who addresses spiritual violence is lesbian Christian pastor Elizabeth Edman, author of Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity. She claims that “all queer people face spiritual violence,” but self-defense must not involve hiding in the closet. Because, as well as having to be seen to be valued, one also must be heard. “When you are who you are and what you are about, it matters to tell people about it,” writes Edman. She also perceives – and, indeed, participates in – Christianity through different eyes. For her, if one treats “‘queer’ as something that has at its center an impulse to disrupt any and all efforts to reduce into simplistic dualisms our experiences of life, of God,” then “the binary-busting aspect of Christianity” can be instrumental in queering spiritual and social relations among people...
...“In this book I present harsh realities,” he writes, and he warns readers up front that his language “might be shocking” because “in reality, life is shocking, and this book is about life.” Live Through This also is about love. Consider this passage from “The Savage Hunt” chapter:
…the desire for partnership transcends every identity. I’ve seen the strongest people stripped to raw bones over a broken heart. If you work hard enough, you can progress in your education or career, but no matter how much self-proclaimed ‘work’ you accomplish, the struggle for ‘the one’ is never simple…Your heart is on the auction block, begging to be chosen.
His childhood poverty, his experiences on the streets, his manumission from paternal abuse, exposure to the “warrior marks” of sufferers he met, the heartbreak of the dating scene (“the savage hunt,” according to Clay’s past best friend, Nikki), his found and lost friends and boyfriends, his survival in an HIV-/AIDS-haunted community, his struggle to maintain personal/professional integrity as an interviewer, and his activism against sexual and racial injustice – all of this swirls in a heart that needs to receive and radiate love. “Life is shocking,” but so is love when it appears and persists in spite of “harsh realities,” hate, social blindness, judgmental surveillance and even atrocity. This is why Clay claims his book is inspired by a basic question: “Can I live through this?” More important, what I always ask is, robbing Roberta Flack, “Where is the love?” Really, this book could very well have been called Love Through This.
September 19, 2020
Great set of essays that really start and end at the same place. Philly plays a pivotal part in his exploration and sex, gender, religion, and racial identity. I took a lot from them book but left wanting a bit more. I know Clay has spoken to some of these subjects in other works of his but would have loved him to explore the religious impact a bit more. With that said, I loved the essays and I had to remind myself that this is not a biography or a memoir. These are moments in his life interwoven to speak to some specific areas of his life that helped shape his identity. His imperfect identify that he embraces and realizes that the journey continues.
April 20, 2021
Whether you are LGBTQ or not, this story is relatable to many as Clay Cane matures from a boy to a man coming to understand who he is in school, at home, with his friends and relatives, and in the world. We learn how his life experiences helped mold him into the successful man he is today.
I saw him on TV as a guest commentator and heard about this new book. That day I ordered it and it has been entertaining, interesting and an enjoyable read.
I highly recommend this book.
I saw him on TV as a guest commentator and heard about this new book. That day I ordered it and it has been entertaining, interesting and an enjoyable read.
I highly recommend this book.
Read
January 7, 2023Ahhh forgot to log this book as well. I read it for a (college) english class, so that might warp my perception of the book. We jumped around a lot (i did not like), but eventually I just read it straight through.
I remember it being very very good, but I need to read it again to get a better objective perspective on the book as a whole.
As I remember it right now, I would give it a 4/5, maybe even a 5/5.
Ending was really good.
I remember it being very very good, but I need to read it again to get a better objective perspective on the book as a whole.
As I remember it right now, I would give it a 4/5, maybe even a 5/5.
Ending was really good.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 19, 2017
Decent collection of personal essays by Clay Cane on the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion. Many of the essays were personal, with Cane discussing a wide variety of topics such as coming out as a gay man, finding love, pop culture, hip hop, being the child of a white mother and a black father. Highly enjoyed this book!
September 28, 2017
Terrific read
Very enlightening and educational. Bright inquisitive child and introspective thoughtful young man. He seems like a class act. Get it.
Very enlightening and educational. Bright inquisitive child and introspective thoughtful young man. He seems like a class act. Get it.
May 8, 2018
3.5 Stars. I found this book to be good but not remarkable. Although I appreciated the insightful, in depth reflections Cane offered on his experiences and those of his communities, I struggled with the fact that he sometimes forsook emotional vulnerability for journalistic objectiveness. I also was disappointed to see how little religion was discussed, despite God being in the subtitle. If I could adjust the title of this book, I would remove the word God and replace it with class as class clearly had a much more significant impact on Cane than religion and his insights on classism were much more profound than his brief analysis of religion.
January 9, 2018
I devoured this book. This book is the epitome of literary soul food. Regardless of the social construct the reader dons there are jewels here for the mining. Walking through the technicolor tapestry of Clay's experiences calls into question many of the ideals of what exactly is human. I will definitely recommend to friends. I strongly recommend straight men to read or listen to this book and connect to manhood expressed passed sexuality. A five-star review for an experience enriching perspective.
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