How my gay 'brother' helped me to be a better man
(continued)
A mutual friend of ours called me with the news in New Jersey, where I was working as a reporter. I sat at my desk and bawled.
When my editor asked what was wrong, I told him, "my brother, Bernhart" was dead. He patted my shoulder, sent me home and told me to take off all the time I needed. Later, it took some explaining before my sympathetic editor, a white man, finally understood that Bernhart wasn't my biological brother. He wasn't kin, but Bernhart will always be family to me.
I've got a family of my own now, and a black son to raise. Like his peers, he's exploring the treacherous turf of race and sex that all young black men must travel. He's 13, and one day soon, I'll talk to him of Bernhart; I have to, because there's no way he's going to grow up a homophobe like his dad was.
My son will know there are gay men and women in his family, in his neighborhood, in his school and in his church. He'll learn that he must respect them, and he'll never hear his parents make anti-gay remarks, or watch them sit by silently when others do.
I'll tell him that real black men don't insult each other, or pummel each other with fists or baseball bats, for any reason.
Instead of burdening him with the same misguided perceptions of masculinity we've passed down through generations, I'll tell my son about judging the true measure of a man by his words and deeds.
The incident in DeKalb County and at Morehouse reminded me of a quote attributed to Eve Zibart, a fiercely talented writer who also worked at the Post around the same time.
"Prejudice," she once wrote in a story "rarely survives experience."
After you get to know people in their full human dimensions, Zibart believed that it's almost impossible to keep on hating them.
You can't learn the best qualities of black manhood by fathering and abandoning a brood of babies, or attending marches, listening to role-models-for-rent, or aping the brutish machismo in rap videos.
The only way to do that, I think, is to reject the insular, intolerant attitudes about color and class and sexuality that separate us from one another.
Instead of hiding behind homophobia, we have to confront these issues honestly, without fear of scorn or physical abuse. We're grown-ups now, and the old self-hating ways we learned when white society treated us as children are no longer acceptable.
My lunchtime discussions with Bernhart never got that deep; I'm sure he was just hungry and I was too busy watching the women who were watching him. Still, our relationship taught me lessons about black manhood I'll share with my son -- so that he too will know my friend Bernhart.

Lyle V. Harris is a member of the Journal-Constitution editorial board.