It is February, 2026 and public perception of reality has never seemed more disjointed. It is my contention that there is no such thing as “reality” and even if there is, there is no value in it. The only thing that has value, the only thing that truly matters is our perception of what reality is. So how did this disjointed perception get created? That answer lies in the varied life experiences of every single one of us. On top of our unique life experiences, add the infinite spectrum of priorities in each of our daily lives as well as the goals we hope to achieve and witness, not only in our personal lives but in the world around us, it’s no wonder that it’s hard to agree on what reality is.
These life experiences are shaped by variables, some as basic as the time period and the location where you were born and raised. These differences can be as broad as what country you were born in and as specific as the neighborhood and even family dynamics. Being born in the mid-1950’s and raised in the south, the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia to be a bit more precise, only moving once as a child 3-1/2 miles from one house to the other, and attending only two schools from first through eleventh grades, my exposure to different cultural aspects were limited. The elementary school I attended was 100% white and the high school I attended, one of the largest and newest schools in the state at the time, had a single black family.
On the topic of family, that was one of the most important aspects of my youth. I spent extended time at each set of grandparents during the summer, one in the heartland of south central Georgia, the other in a rural setting north of Atlanta. The extended family gathered for holidays and both families had an annual reunion attended by a hundred or more kin. My father was the oldest child in his family and my mom was the oldest in her’s and I was the oldest grandchild on both sides of the family. One thing that was instilled in me from an early age was that I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. This coming from one set of grandparents living in a house that had electricity and a bathroom installed well after the house was built. The bathroom was a toilet and a sink. If you wanted to take a bath, the shower was in the hall surrounded by curtains. My other grandparent’s house had electricity and running water, that running water was the cold water from the well that fed the kitchen sink via an electric pump. The bathroom was an outhouse back behind the house against the barn (to help reduce drafts from the wind). Baths were taken in the middle of the kitchen, standing in a large round washtub with warm water heated on the stove. If you had to pee during the night, there was a pee can on the back porch you could use as long as you took it up and emptied it in the outhouse in the morning.
My grandparents to the south, lived on a farm and my grandfather farmed the land in both their county and the county next door, growing crops such as peanuts and cotton along with the pecan grove on their property. I remember my grandmother taking me to the zoo about 30 miles away. It was something we did every summer when I visited. I loved seeing the “wild animals” and getting a crushed ice cone with syrup. Several years in, when I was probably 5 or 6, I noticed something. Outside of the cages holding the animals, there were iron railings to keep the children from getting too close. Standing there taking in the sights (and smells) of these beasts just a few feet away, I turned to my sides to see the other children, but there were none there. I know I had seen children all through the park and wondered why they weren’t interested in the animals. I turned and looked behind me and there they were, 20 feet or so back, behind a barrier made up of some crude poles with rusted iron chains strung between them. When I asked my grandmother what was going on, the answer was a simple “You can watch from here but THOSE children have to stand back there. It was that same trip that I noticed I was the only one drinking out of the sparkling clean porcelain sink while the OTHER kids were lined up to drink out of what was basically a faucet on a pole.
Conversations about black folks in the community often went along the lines of “Negro Jim and Negra Jill did so and so.” There was talk about the negros doing this or the negros doing that. When I got a little older, around 10 or so, my grandmother hired a black maid to help out around the house during the summer. Our family ate three meals every day, at the dining room table. Shug (pronounced just like the first syllable of sugar) would prepare the meals, serve the meals, clean up after the meal, then sit alone at the kitchen table to eat her meal. One afternoon I feigned disinterest in having lunch that day. The rest of the family ate while I played outside. After they were done and the dishes cleared, I came back in the house and shared a sandwich with Shug at the kitchen table. My grandmother came in and scolded me, “We don’t do THAT in THIS house!” It was a lesson that she made sure I understood.
My other grandparents and extended family weren’t that nice when it came to black people and they were amongst them every day. They casually used “the N word” as if they were calling a red headed boy Rusty. In their book, a black person had every opportunity to advance as a white person but they were just too lazy. I could be mistaken but I don’t remember any interaction within that family with any black person.
Within my own family, I remember when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed. I was 12 years old. My dad left no doubt that he was glad, that MLK was nothing more than an agitator and a troublemaker. I keenly remembered hearing those sentiments this past year when I read reactions when Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. Again, highlighting that perception is more meaningful than reality.
I share my backstory as a basis of where I was mentally and emotionally as I went off to college. Though I had attended Georgia Tech my senior year of high school, I was still immersed within ‘what I already knew.’ I went to college at what is now Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. At the time, it was General Motors Institute, the only privately owned accredited 4 year college in the country. I was being fast-tracked for management at the General Motors Doraville assembly plant.
Flint, Michigan could have been a different planet. Yes, I had traveled the country with my family on vacations, but always from the confine of our travel trailer. Now, I was immersed in, what my families called, “Yankee.” It was obvious that I was just as alien to them as they were to me. I came from family, treasured togetherness, hugged my neighbor, ate fresh food, often right from the garden. They didn’t like eye contact, threatened to punch you if you tried to give a hug, and thought peanuts grew on trees. Above all else, I was just another person in that school trying to make a name for myself, no different from the girl sitting behind me or the black person sitting on either side. We were all truly equal. It was the first time that I had to acknowledge how strong the prejudice was in the South. I also realized that Southern Hospitality is actually a thing and the north was mostly devoid of that. To my fellow northern classmates, the civil rights movement was something on the TV news, similar to watching the action from the Vietnam War. It wasn’t anything they could really identify with.
College was undeniably the first set of Life Lessons that challenged the foundation that guided me. I no longer saw the black person as being “less than”, in fact some of my strongest competition were black, both men and women. The next Life Lessons were started not too long after college – getting married and having children. Though I met my wife in the south, she was born in New York State and had only moved to Georgia in her teens. As my extended family was quick to remind her that she was the first Yankee in the family, she would roll her eyes at some of the “Johnson-isms” when we visited, and we would have a good laugh when we got home.
Until we had children. The “N word” was still freely brandished around my extended family’s homes. My wife made it quite clear to my parents that she would not tolerate that word being used when our children were present, the alternative being their grandchildren would no longer visit. She demonstrated that it was not only possible, but imperative to set boundaries with your family, even your own parents. She showed me the most sure way to get something was to ask for it, and she didn’t have to ask a second time.
Having children exposed me to another whole set of responsibilities I had never rightly considered before. It was much easier when I was single to consider the ramifications of my choices, the only one that was going to be primarily affected by those decisions was me. Marriage complicated those decisions by a factor of at least three. Now I had to consider how did those decisions affect me individually, my spouse individually, and the two of us collectively. Having two children within two years of each other compounded those decisions many fold. The payoff for that increased responsibility is I learned so many life lessons from my children. Our first born, a son, arrived in 1983, a fairly fresh millennial. His basis for happiness and life priorities have always been quite different from mine and while they don’t necessarily mesh with what I had planned for him, his laid back attitude and desire for minimalism over abundance is one that I often admire him for. Our second child, a daughter, came to us in 1985 and truly continues to be a blessing for me and, I’m sure, my wife. Being only 22 months younger than her brother, she was usually forced to tag along to watch her brother in his endeavors. I think she found motivation from that to attempt anything he did and worked to excel at them. While he was mostly quiet and reserved, she was loud and outgoing. Loud, not in a vocal sense, but everything else.
We moved to metropolitan Cincinnati in 1990. They developed independently from each other with their own set of friends and my wife and I noticed early on that there was something ‘different’ about her style and her choice of friends. At 17, she came out to us as gay. It was something she had struggled with, not knowing how we would react and likely fearing the worst. Our reply was a collective “Yeah, so?” I had only known one gay person in high school, the oldest brother of my best friend. I only saw him with his partner at my friend’s family home, which is where I spent a lot of time. They were fun to be around and their relationship had zero bearing on my life. But now that I had a gay child that was out, I noticed the inequities that the LGBTQ+ community faced every day and those were really not that much different than what I saw within the black community of my youth.
My wife and I returned to metro Atlanta with our daughter, who was starting her senior year in high school, in 2001. Our son stayed in Ohio to attend college there. Ultimately, our daughter found her perfect match and they were married in 2010. Together, with the aid of a sperm donor, they had our first grandchild in 2012. As you could imagine, our daughter and her spouse, now living in metropolitan Saint Louis, were both active in the LGBTQ+ community there. About three years later, our daughter simultaneously posted to Facebook and called us to discuss the post. She explained that even after coming out in 2001, something still didn’t “feel” right. Through her work within the community, she had discovered a term for what she was feeling. She informed us that she was nonbinary, a term to describe someone that didn’t identify as either a female or a male because she felt parts of both the masculine and the feminine. At the same time she advised us to use non gender specific pronouns (they, them and their’s) when we addressed them and talked about them. This was unknown territory for both my wife and me, be we still supported them in every way we could.
There was a bit of a mourning as we navigated losing our “daughter” to only refer to them as “our youngest child.” I personally struggled with the difference between sex, sexual orientation, and gender. I read as much as I could find on the internet. I had long phone conversations with our youngest child where I could ask questions. They were patient with me as I stumbled my way through this new reality.
Since their family group was in St. Louis and my wife and I were in Atlanta, the transition for us was often difficult. We had to be constantly reminded to use them instead of her and I tried my best to answer questions from my friends and family when the subject of what it means to be nonbinary came up. To my youngest child’s credit, they weren’t content with just changing their label. They continued therapy. They had chest reconstruction surgery to remove their breasts. They began hormone treatment. They performed outreach at MTUG – Metro[politan] Trans[exual] Umbrella Group, a support network for people of both sexes considering and healing from gender reassignment surgery. They went to work for Diversity Awareness Partnership and became a sought-after speaker and advocate to activate and support communities to advance equity and justice.
But still they struggled. On June 9th, 2018, my wife received a call from their spouse. Our youngest child had taken their life. Their funeral service was probably THE defining day of my life. This beacon of hope was gone at only 33 years of age. But people came to pay their respects and remember them. I was told the line to get into the funeral home stretched to as much as a 2 hour wait. The funeral was in St. Louis but they came, anyway – from Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, California, Washington, Germany and many more. Some folks had know them most of their life, others shared that they had only met them one time but felt drawn to come and pay their respects.
The one thing I heard over and over again was, “They always treated me like I was the only person in the room. I always got their undivided attention.” That, above all else, is what I have decided that the majority of us want, people want to feel like they are being heard. Our child’s voice had been silenced, their ears had been taken away, but my voice was still active and I became a much better listener. This became my new priority in my life’s journey.
One more observation before I bring this note to a close. My wife and I, along with our son, spent the one-year anniversary of our youngest child’s death in Acadia National Park. The year before, my son and I were on our way to Acadia when we got ‘the phone call’ from my wife while visiting in Washington DC. On our way home from the funeral, my wife and I spent several days visiting the monuments and museums in Washington DC, ourselves. The most gut-wrenching visit was to the Native American Museum. Four floors of documentation and reminders of how our forefathers had treated the indigenous people that were here centuries before being settled by the Europeans. The reminders were clear: first the native Americans, then the black people, were the people within the LGBTQ+ community going to be the next minority group to be targeted?
