How We Fight For Our Lives
From a very young age, Saeed was aware of his sexuality and “thought about being gay all the time” (8). Yet this felt like a dangerous realization to him since the only representation Saeed could find of other black gay men were all men who died from AIDS: “All the books I found about being gay were also about AIDS. Gay men dying of AIDS like it was a logical sequence of events, a mathematical formula, or a life cycle…it was certain” (9). By the time Saeed is in high school, he realizes that his existence can be quantified as a compound formula in which his safety is exponentially at risk: “Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is a death wish” (44).
The story reaches a climax when Saeed goes home with Daniel, a white man he met at a college party. In the midst of intimacy, Daniel violently begins to beat Saeed. But instead of feeling what would have been rightful hatred toward Daniel, Saeed is shockingly sympathetic. He says, “When I looked up at Daniel, I didn’t see a gay basher; I saw a man who thought he was fighting for his life” (134). Saeed views Daniel’s need to hurt him as systemic rather than personal, indicative of Daniel’s internalization of societal homophobia and racism: “It wasn’t like he was beating me, exactly. He was beating the desire I had brought out in him, shoving it back down to where it usually hid” (133-134).
Throughout the memoir, Saeed is often fetishized by white men, becoming an object upon which others project: “From a distance, maybe my body transformed, as the bodies of young black men are wont to do when stared at by white people in this country” (54). He finds himself in a loveless, toxic sexual relationship with a white man that Saeed nicknames the Botanist. Saeed learns that “it’s possible for two men to become addicted to the damage they do to each other…he’d lash out and scream racist slurs, which sent me into a vicious loop, my worst fears about myself echoing back to me in a white man’s voice. It wasn’t enough to hate myself; I wanted to hear it” (116). Instead of avoiding the Botanist and his racist slurs, Saeed is constantly drawn back to him like a moth to a flame. Some of Saeed’s behavior may be viewed as self-destructive, but this is not without cause. The memoir strongly suggests that this is a product of the societal system that taught Saeed to dislike himself—a product of growing up black and gay in America. In a direct address to the place that causes him such pain, Saeed shamelessly states, “America, I did the best I could with what I was given” (129) since “if America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself” (130).
How We Fight for Our Lives is an unflinching portrait of Saeed’s journey of fighting to become himself in a society that condemns the very space that his identity occupies. The memoir is compassionate and honest, providing insightful reflections on family relationships, blackness, gayness, and the societal systems that we all live within.
