In the summer of 2005, I found myself far from home and far outside the world I’d known. I was 16, living for a few weeks in Philadelphia, surrounded by writers, actors, and artists who weren’t afraid to be exactly who they were. I had been accepted into a prestigious screenwriting intensive at the University of the Arts—a dream opportunity for a Black girl from the Mississippi Delta who had always felt like her words had somewhere else to go.
And I loved it. I really did. I loved the city, the writing prompts, the long afternoons of story workshopping, the quiet validation of being in a room where everyone had a voice—and mine wasn’t out of place.
But what I didn’t have language for at the time—what I couldn’t yet name—was how afraid I was of the kind of freedom I saw in my classmates. And how unprepared I was to be in the room with it.
I remember the moment like a still frame in my memory. One of the boys in our group was asked how he knew a guy from a neighboring program. He responded with a casual shrug, “We used to date.” Just like that. No hesitation, no apology, no shame. I laughed—reflexively, nervously. Everyone else in the room just looked at me with soft amusement. “Oh Shayla,” someone said with a smile, “you’re growing.”
But I wasn’t ready for that kind of growth.
That same someone—a girl in our class—talked about helping her mom plan her father’s wedding to his new husband. And again, no one flinched. But I did. Over and over, I flinched. At the honesty. At the ease. At the permission they’d clearly been given—or taken—for themselves.
I told my mama I missed Hot Cheetos and Spades games. I told myself I missed the comfort of home. But the truth is, I was running. I wasn’t used to queerness being celebrated. I wasn’t used to people naming their identities out loud and expecting the world to bend toward their truth instead of hiding it.
Where I came from, difference wasn’t growth. It was danger.
I was raised in the Church of Christ, where women weren’t allowed to preach or lead or even speak in worship without a man as their covering. A place where silence was sacred. Where queerness wasn’t just disapproved of—it was deviant, dishonorable. Where loving someone of the same sex was seen as rebellion, as sickness, as sin.
And for a long time, that belief system shaped how I saw the world—and how I saw myself in it.
But doctrine wasn’t the only thing that made me shrink. There was also trauma.
My first sexual experience was a violation, carried out by a female cousin three years older than me when I was just four years old. For years, we never spoke of it. My family never named it. But its shadow shaped me.
In my adolescence, aunties and older women I was supposed to feel safe around—many of whom never named themselves as queer—sexualized my development. They commented on “my shape,” obsessed over what I could do with my “figure,” said things that made my stomach twist, even if I didn’t yet have the words for why.
So when I encountered openly lesbian women—particularly Black lesbian women—I didn’t see safety. I saw a distorted echo of harm. I held them at a distance because I feared that being near them might come with the same boundary-crossing I had never learned to qualify, let alone to protect myself from.
And the truth is, there weren’t many openly lesbian women around me at all—at least not then, and not in public. Looking back, even at that program in Philadelphia, I don’t remember a single girl who openly identified as gay. I suspect they were there. I suspect some of them may have been quietly exploring or protecting something tender between them. But in 2005, it didn’t feel safe to be a Black lesbian girl out loud—not in Mississippi, and maybe not even in Philly.
After I returned home from that program—despite the praise I received, despite my instructor pulling my mother aside to encourage my application, despite the path opening up right in front of me—I didn’t go back. I didn’t even apply.
No one in my life told me that discomfort could be a doorway. That culture shock could be growth. That I didn’t have to return to what was familiar just because it was all I’d known.
So I went back to Mississippi. I enrolled at the University of Southern Mississippi. I majored in English. I told myself I’d teach, maybe get a master’s in counseling. I built a life inside the boundaries I understood, even as my spirit reached for something bigger.
I shrank. And I kept shrinking.
But then something shifted. Slowly. Not in Philadelphia, but later—during college.
That was when I began to embrace Black gay male culture with a kind of admiration and ease I hadn’t afforded anyone else. Maybe it was their humor, their style, their intimacy with Black female culture. Or maybe it was that their femininity felt comforting to me. Less threatening. Less charged. Safer.
Unlike the Black boys I’d gone to school with who assaulted me on the playground, or the men who called out to me from cars and gas stations, or the male teachers and mentors who offered attention with a lingering stare or an ulterior motive—Black gay men didn’t try to dominate me sexually. They didn’t hover or corner. They weren’t like the principals, pastors, and love interests whose “kindness” always came with strings. They didn’t feel predatory.
And yet, even that comfort was shaped by patriarchy.
Gay or not, Black men—even feminine ones—could exist in a world where their identity wasn’t immediately silenced in the same way. Gay Black men could make space for themselves because culturally, their queerness still centered a masculine experience. They could “get a pass” because they weren’t seen as threatening tradition—they were seen as performing a version of it.
But Black lesbian women, especially masculine-presenting ones? They defied too much. They didn’t coddle men. They didn’t soften their edges for the church. They didn’t bend their desires to meet the demands of family, culture, or patriarchy. They embodied a kind of autonomy I didn’t yet understand—and couldn’t yet access.
And that scared me because I had never been allowed to be that free.
The older women who objectified me—who should have protected me but instead commented on my curves and hinted at what I’d do to boys one day—they weren’t “out,” but their behavior carried the same toxic masculine undertones as the men who pursued me. In a place like the Mississippi Delta, where lesbianism is dangerous, denied, or distorted, I don’t think they ever imagined that their desire could have a safe place. So it leaked out. All over me. A child.
So yes, my bias against lesbian women was shaped by church doctrine. But it was also shaped by trauma. By silence. By being sexualized long before I could say no. By watching masculine desire—whether from men or women—come toward me with no regard for consent.
That’s why it matters that the moment I decided not to pursue my screenwriting dream, it was immediately after a boy came out in front of me. That’s not incidental. That’s the moment that sealed it. Because suddenly the dream was no longer just about writing—it was about confronting everything I had been taught to fear. And I couldn’t do it. Not yet.
But I’m doing it now.
This Pride Month, I’m not writing as an outsider looking in. I’m writing from within the process of unlearning. I’m writing as someone who knows how easy it is to make internalized fear look like moral clarity. I’m writing as someone who has used doctrine to distance herself from the people who deserved her compassion. And I’m writing as someone who is finally circling back to the moment I turned away—and choosing to stay.
I’m still a heterosexual Black woman from Mississippi. That hasn’t changed. But what has changed is my willingness to ask myself why I was so afraid in the first place.
This month, I feel something I haven’t felt before during Pride: ease. I’m not fully healed, but I am unlearning. I’m making room. I’m realizing that the Black lesbian women I once held at arm’s length—especially those from my own home state—have always been part of the fabric of Black womanhood. And I can’t say I love Black women if I carve out exceptions.
So no, Pride Month is not about me. But it’s also very much about me.
It’s about the version of me that missed a chance to rise because fear told her she didn’t belong. It’s about the version of me that believed her calling had limits because queerness was something to survive, not something to learn from. And it’s about the version of me today, who is still tender, still growing, but finally reaching back to reclaim what once felt too far away.
If you were raised like I was—in the church, in silence, in systems that punished difference—I want to say this: it’s okay to unlearn. It’s OK to grieve what you missed. And it’s OK to begin again.
Maybe Pride Month isn’t about you either. But maybe it is.