Love and Identity (or Just Love)

BY darrell spearman

Several different concepts of love exist within this vast colorful world. There is love as feeling—an internal experience conjured by a connection between people. There is love as attachment. There is love as compassion, love as temptation, love as judgment, love as guidance, and many other conceptual loves floating around. Some of these conceptualizations of love are simply false, contradicting, and even self-destructive, while some are warm and soothing for the heart and the mind. Throughout the past two years, I have done lots of research on love, challenging the concepts of love I have been taught to practice. This research includes reading from artists who have done their own research, for big portions of their lives, of what righteous love is, and how far it can take a person. Reading, interpreting and practicing the works of bell hooks, Julia Cameron, and Tarell Alvin McCraney, I have come to understand and dissect what love means to me, and how to know the differences between conceptual love and righteous love. As we journey through my research, please remember that there is always more than one way to think about anything. We are going to explore love as an action word, as a look into ourselves; love as a conduit to our awareness of the power of authenticity that lives within, which allows receptivity, and sharing our gifts with the world. Love is an action word, and it is a crucial building block for identity. 

In All About Love: New Revisions, bell hooks talks about love as an action word. When I read this book for the first time, it was late August of 2020, just after people were allowed to spend longer hours outdoors in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I began biking again around Central Park in NYC, bringing this book with me, stopping for reading sessions on open spaces of grass, while the citibike I rented laid on the ground, lifeless. I read it in the sun sitting outside of coffee shops, and even in bed curled up with my cat, Artemis. Reading it felt like a massive awakening. hooks spoke about what it means to love, and openly shared ways that concepts of love showed up in her childhood as masked mistreatment, and her process of unlearning those concepts of love she’d been taught, by weaving out behaviors that are not at all synonymous with love. In fact, she actively separates love and abuse so we can analyze the differences, as she pairs the word love with justice. In her book, childhood is a major theme and starting point for her research on love. hooks emphasizes the pathways from childhood to adolescence, where love gets lost and distorted. In a 1999 interview on All About Love: New Revisions, she says: “Our personal attitudes about love are tied to our culture’s politics; to what our nation tells us is important.” Hearing her speak about ways we conceptualize love and reading her writing about justice for children, I began to examine my upbringing, separating from resentment, as an observer rather than the person carrying the sentiments of my experiences. 

I remember having a conversation with my mother when I was about nine years old. I told her that I felt as if my uncles and other family members did not love me. In turn, she said to me: “They are your family. They do love you, they just have a funny way of showing it.” At that age, I had questions and something inside of me wanted to challenge that idea, but I did not have the words nor the courage to do so. Also, I knew that this was her perspective and what she told herself about their connection to her as well. I don’t remember saying much else afterward. I shut the door on myself and the fact that something about it felt so wrong. It is important to state that I am a gay black man. When I was a little boy, I was the most effeminate person, even more than the girls, in my family. My cousins and I were all in the same age bracket, only some of us two-four years apart, and so we did everything together. My cousin, Ikell and I were both quite effeminate and we gravitated toward interests that were mainly reserved for girls. We were often surrounded by three uncles who were very masculine, especially two of them, who we are going to call M and L. I remember feeling very free in just the presence of my cousins, because we all knew each other so well, and the girls did not question our behavior—not to our faces, at least. Since my uncles I refer to are their fathers, I am certain they absorbed their homophobia as children just as we did, but on the other side of the spectrum. We were ourselves, and there was no one to steal that. We were each other’s first friends. The first artworks I had ever felt connected to were films and tv shows like The Cheetah Girls, Hannah Montana, That’s So Raven, and High School Musical. All of these films and shows had musical elements, which means that I would soon love to perform and force my cousins to learn choreography from these works and explore my passions. I loved to play dress-up games on Stardoll.com, Myscene.com, Polly pocket, and anything fabulous and creative. However, this was not okay with my uncles. I often felt like a disappointment to them from such a young age, and as Ikell and I began to grow in size, their hazing began and grew larger than we could bear. We were verbally humiliated and shamed in front of our entire family, often, and no one would defend us. Our authentic movements and mannerisms were criticized and picked apart, and eventually, I did not know who to be when they were around. I felt like a frozen entity in their presence. Even today, talking to M feels like a spell that keeps me stiff as a brick, and my words as quiet as a gentle breeze. I am still working on this. If someone intervened, we had already been shut down. So, when I told my mother that I felt as if they did not love me, I was correct, and I still do not believe they did. After all, I believe that love is an action word. I remember M saying: “We had to go through it, so they have to as well,” referring to the hazing. Maybe our uncles wanted to love us, but did not feel strong enough to break through their own resentments in order to love us, and uplift us. Maybe they just could not fathom the idea of us receiving the proper support we needed as creative little boys, since they did not receive it. “If we are being abused in any way, we are not loved,” said bell hooks in her interview. It was not until I made friends who were inspired by my identity and actively supported me, that I felt safe to be myself. I am still cutting through the mold. One good example of love for me is when I am on my yoga mat experiencing a Power Vinyasa flow and I can feel my muscles working, my entire body activated. That feels like love. 

The first time I read a Tarell Alvin McCraney play, I stumbled into Drama Bookshop on West 39th street in New York. I found a play titled Choir Boy, which is a brilliant encapsulation of the ripple effects of missing love within the black male experience, when Pharus, a gay black singer, is verbally and physically abused by the other boys at Charles R. Drew Prep. It was very clear that some of the other boys were suppressing their own sexuality and struggling with identity. After reading more plays written by McCraney, such as American Trade, The Brother’s Size, and In The Red and Brown Water, I found out that he wrote the film Moonlight. I watched the film for the first time in the early Spring of 2022. Up until seeing it, I had never felt represented correctly in any work, ever. As bell hooks did a beautiful job dissecting our concepts of love and what we do to love as a society, McCraney does a spectacular job at emphasizing the importance of love by showing, visually, how its absence interferes with one’s identity. In Moonlight, I followed the coming of age story of Chiron, aka “Little,” a black boy growing up in Miami, who has absolutely no one to mirror his identity back to him, therefore under the impression that he is not real. He suppresses his sexuality, interests and feelings because he is only ever told how to be or what to feel. Raised by a single mother who is far too tired, too stressed, and relying on substance to keep her up and running, she does not have the mental capacity to give him the support that he needs, and the boys at school seem to feel terribly uncomfortable with his identity, which forces him inward, internalizing all of his encounters with the people in his environment, really under the impression that there is something wrong with him. 

“Darrell, are you gay?” This question, when I was in elementary and middle school, used to rattle me intensely. The reason it did is because I was taught that it was wrong, and so I felt so inferior when someone questioned the truth of my identity. I clung fiercely to this idea that I was like the other boys. No one would ever be convinced because we had all known each other since we were babies. I went to the same school from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, and all of my classmates knew me before I had been forced to hide my identity. There were no mirrors, which meant if I did tell them the truth, I would be the brave one, the “first.” That was way too much pressure for someone as timid and anxious as I was who avoided confrontation at any cost; even if I had to suppress and suffer in silence. There are two times in the film we get a correct glimpse at Chiron’s identity: one scene where we see him dancing in a studio at school, lost in his own world, creative and bold. After that one scene, we never see him dance again. I found this scene so crucial to the encapsulation of trapped identities due to an absence of love, and misplaced abuse, as it seems to put a cap on flamboyance. In this scene, the element of mirrors were included, since they were in a dance studio. This was the one time Chiron’s identity was mirrored back to him–through his own reflection. A second scene that gave us a glimpse of his identity was the beach scene with Chiron and his classmate, Kevin, who was also secretly gay. The two of them kissed and embraced each other on the beach, although this connection was not safe to explore until decades later, in the end of the film. Although Kevin was the closest thing to a mirror Chiron had, Kevin did not have enough mirrors to believe in his own identity, meaning that this mirroring was inconsistent and weak. 

Mirroring is an action I find synonymous with love in the most profoundly supportive ways. When I began studying the works of Julia Cameron, the well-known author of The Artist’s Way, it was around the very same time I read the works of bell hooks. The Artist’s Way is a twelve week program, in book form, as a guide to one’s creative heart. This completely changed my ideas of love, and it encouraged me to pay attention to the ways I viewed myself and the way I viewed the world. She asked me to write about who I was as a child, with a similar approach as bell hooks, encouraging readers to find ways to recognize how influenced we have become. Acknowledging who I was as a child led to me recognizing where mending needed to occur, and Julia Cameron gave me tools to do so—tools that I still use today, re-experiencing the program each year. I am currently experiencing, for a second time, an extension of The Artist’s Way: a book by Cameron titled Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity. Her works are usually sectioned by weeks instead of chapters, as the intention of these books is to help with creative recoveries. In “Week 2: Discovering a Sense of Perspective,” Cameron wrote about Identity, and introduces the concept of mirrors. She says: “When we are surrounded by people who either cannot see us or cannot acknowledge what they see, our image blurs. We begin to feel a certain self-doubt and a certain stubborn inner knowing that we may then dismiss as crazy. Part of us knows we’re more than they see, part of us fears we’re less than we hope. This inner friction is painful.” Her statements in this particular essay reminds me of the story of Chiron in Moonlight, and my own story. The only mirror during my childhood was my older cousin Ikell, but as we were both shamed, and then ashamed of our identities, he did not have the capacity to be a supportive mirror. There were moments, though, where we both forgot about their shame and really enjoyed what we loved to do together, and I will always be grateful for that—those weightless, shameless moments where we would choreograph dances, write songs, sing, play dress-up in our aunt Tamara’s attic closet, and come up with our own designs. This would occur whenever those who refused to acknowledge the magic we possessed were not around. 

Creative mirrors, or believing mirrors are people who are willing to reflect your greatness back to you. That way, when we walk into the world, and shame is shot in our direction, we still have enough belief in our lives to know that there is nothing strange about our identities, that we are just witnessing perspectives, and that we exist. In this same section, Cameron says: “These mirrors are held by people large enough and expansive enough spiritually to not be threatened by the size and grandeur of another artist shaking out his sizable wings.” I mentioned making friends who I allowed to experience my identity as I am in the process of unraveling, and their mirroring and support has helped me carry myself everywhere I’ve gone since the start of the pandemic. There is no way a person can thrive without their powers reflected back to them, as it would be difficult to even know what we possess, or that we are even real. As artists, this kind of love is crucial, and it is so important that we have it as young children. If we do not, we can be revived, yes, and it is a hard process, but believing mirrors make it bearable, memorable, and a bit more festive. Believing mirrors are the best reminders.

As a child, I always interpreted love as attachment. Being surrounded by people everyday, specifically relatives, meant that we loved them. However, I could not believe that, and it was only a matter of time until I gained knowledge and support to actively challenge that narrative. If there were people I was surrounded by as a child who helped me bury my identity, how could I say that they loved me? Their internal feelings of me, I cannot claim or assume, but their actions, I can name and place specifically, because love is an action word. Many of us have experienced abusive relationships, or have been in some, and the attachment and comfort within the bondage is what is so often considered love. Love is not attachment. Love is not bondage, shared trauma, likeliness, shared interests, fun moments, or the familiar. Love is in what is done, what is created, and how we encourage each other; how we are willing to be believing mirrors for one another.