I am always very careful about the things I say when I’m around teenagers because if they misunderstand tone, bias, or context, then a whole lotta people will have a lot of xplainin’ to do. So I approached with a with a bit of hesitancy my reading of “How do you tell?” from Who’s Your Daddy? at a local high school on May 8, 2009. On the surface, “How do you tell?” and “First Love” from Who's Your Daddy? are stories about identity and fit in with the literature textbook themes of "Conformity and Rebellion." But “How do you tell?” is different from "First Love," in many ways.
“How do you tell?” exists on both literal and metaphorical levels. On a literal level, the story expresses difference, but there are several clues within the text that suggest that it could also be read as the attempt of a young man to understand with his sexual identity and to "come out" to his parents.
Of course, once we had deconstructed the story, I had to answer the question, “Are you gay?” which had the follow-up, “What made you want to write this story?” I didn’t have the time to go into the prejudices that male, Jamaican writers must confront, but I talked about the issues of difference that I’ve had to face in my personal and professional life—always being a kind of exotic whether I was playing football or in graduate school and being the only black person in the room when Absalom, Absalom was being dissected. I also talked about the devastation that I had witnessed because of AIDS during the early years when no one knew how the disease was spread and many of my friends were dying.
Teenagers have a hard enough time just dealing with growing up and when sexual identity is thrown in the mix, then I can only imagine the grief that they must face daily. I hope these stories will help with the discussion of this issue that has split families and torn communities apart.
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