Feeling The Spirit in The Dark
Perhaps the first suggestion to the presence of a haunting is the trace of something out of place, unsettled, or unsaid.
Although I can’t say that I’ve ever definitively believed in spirits, other-worldly spiritual forces are a deep part of my family’s lived experience. Spiritual faith has been a life-saving, revelatory vigour for some; an older male relative of mine had an epiphany one morning while walking through the woods that awoke within him a new vision for life: to educate those around him about the all-delivering power of the Lord’s love. As for me—a closeted gay Black boy growing up in Southern California—I felt an internal conflict with notions of the spiritual, particularly the Christian worldview embedded so deeply within my family’s history. The burgeoning question of my sexual identity was mired in a fear of social retribution, owing to an unspoken expectation that I would fit the mould of the man that God had destined me to be.
Many queer Black people have experienced this conflict, and the crushingly limited rendering of Black masculinity in the North American imagination is a ghostly
