I Was Never Meant to Be Legible

The silence in a Black home is never just silence. It is a weight. It is a wall built brick by brick, sermon by sermon, until the child who doesn’t fit the mold — the one who is gay, the one who is “different” — realizes they are living in a house that was never designed to hold them.

We are raised on a specific brand of survival. We are told the world is already coming for us, so we must be perfect, we must be strong, and above all, we must be legible. We must look like the version of Blackness that the church and the culture can stomach. We must be the kind of son or daughter who can be introduced without a footnote.

When you are LGBTQ+, you become an immediate threat to that legibility. You are the variable that doesn’t resolve. You are the crack in the foundation they are terrified will bring the whole house down. And so they would rather seal you behind the wall than admit the wall was never load-bearing — that it was only ever there to keep the neighbors from seeing in.

Legible. Sit with the word, because they never said it out loud — they only enforced it. To be legible is to be readable at a glance, the kind of person a stranger can file correctly without asking a single question. In a Black family, legibility is a survival strategy before it is anything else. Be twice as good. Be impossible to misread. Give the world no excuse…