She used to tell me how embarrassed she was of them. I believe that my mother always resented my grandparents for being lesbians. I have lesbian grandparents, which I believe assisted in this stigma against homosexuality in my household. “I attended a small Baptist church and a somewhat small high school. So she comes out of the bedroom and looks at my mother and says, “Charlene, I’m gonna whip you over the head with this cane if you don’t just love your son the way he is.” 78 years old, walking with a cane, sleeping in our spare bedroom, and of course at 3 in the morning she hears shouting and she’s trying to figure out what’s going on, but she knows what’s going on. My grandmother was living with us at the time because she had a massive heart attack the year prior, so she was very sick. “We went back into the house and my mom and I were going at it, kind of going back and forth. And my mother was so open and accepting and loving, and that’s kind of what I expected from my grandmother because growing up, that’s all I knew and to finally be at a moment in my life where I’m comfortable with myself and to reveal that to someone and to be outright disowned obviously is somewhat traumatic. “My mother’s mother took it the worst and she actually openly disowned me to the family for a few months. She’s a very hard-going, Christian, Pentecostal lady, and that’s just so funny for a 5-year-old who doesn’t know anything that, he just knows he likes Adam, he loves Adam to death, and he tells his Grandmum who he tells anything in the world, and the only time she ever got mad at him was when he told her that he liked a boy. Do not say that.” I didn’t really question it or anything because I always just did what she said.
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Don’t ever–don’t ever say that.” And I was like, “Why? But he’s my boyfriend.
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I just remember one day going to church with my grandmother and we passed Adam’s house, and I was like, “Mum-Mum, Mum-Mum, Mum-Mum! My boyfriend lives there!” And she’s like, “What? No. I don’t know, he was this cute little white kid and we’d just color and played together and recess, it was just Adam, Adam, Adam. I just remember this one time, I was learning my sexuality I guess you could say that, but I remember this one kid in my Kindergarten class, this kid named Adam, I remember having a crush on him so hard, I don’t even–when you’re 5, you’re like whatever, I just remember being like, “Oh my God, Adam, I want to play with Adam.” Adam was a cutie, I remember him being on the chubby side. She passed away when I was like 16 but I have so many memories of her. I’m moving shortly, in about two months, and I ran across a picture of my great-great-grandmother. I’m Deshawn Timothy and I live in Philadelphia but I’m from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and I’ve been here for about nine years.