21 Quotes by Saeed Jones

Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is a death wish. And one day, if you’re lucky, your life and death will become some artist’s new “project.

Tears don’t always just fall; sometimes they rip through you, like storm-painted gusts instead of mere raindrops.

People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.” My grandmother and I, without knowing it, were faithfully following a script that had already been written for us. A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.

I buried myself in the bodies of other men so I could feel something other than the depression that was rolling in like a fog bank.

The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing.

Too much had happened for me to keep waking up surrounded by the lie of continuity.

The sons of single mothers inevitably encounter well-meaning family members who like to remind us of our role as “the man of the house.” The statement usually made me wince, the way it implicitly merged the roles of son, father, and husband; the way it erased the grown woman to whom the house actually belonged.

Some songs take women places men cannot follow.

Maybe, a decade older than I was, he knew what I would eventually learn: it’s possible for two men to become addicted to the damage they do to each other.