A Ballad For Silas

A Pride Month reflection for a soul who helped guide me here.

Photo by Bernd Dittrich.

what i hope for you

is freedom

for what is a body
but the first poem
we learn by heart,
a quiet, stubborn rebellion
beneath skin, beneath
moonlit bones

here, you
named yourself again,
in language
older than prayer.

touched earth
with a truth
that bloomed fearless
from your chest

***

I don’t believe I’ve ever truly understood homophobia. Not in the sense of what it is or how it manifests. Those things I can firmly grasp in the historical and academic ways one understands the machinery of white supremacy, capitalism, or patriarchy. No. What I mean is, I have never understood homophobia spiritually. Never felt in my marrow the aversion some people cling to as identity. As weapon.

It always confounded me, even in boyhood, and for this confusion I remain profoundly grateful. As it meant I never set out deliberately to perpetuate such hate.

This admission is not intended as a badge of moral superiority from my position as a cisgender heterosexual man; I carry far too many flaws for such arrogance. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the gentle, persistent work done upon me early in life, the quiet shaping of a counter-narrative against the rabid tide of homophobia, transphobia, and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry that infects our world.

A shaping that was largely thanks to my mother. A complicated woman whom I sometimes wished different in countless ways—but never in her fierce and unwavering allyship to the LGBTQ+ community. An allyship that wasn’t mere performance or distant support, but something communal, visceral, a lived experience shared openly in front of my childhood eyes.

Her friendships, celebrations, sorrows, and daily interactions taught me early on that there was no distinction between what was considered normal and the humanity thriving within these friendships. The worlds my mother inhabited and invited me into blurred boundaries others sought to rigidly define, reminding me from the beginning that love is always simpler, always clearer than anything else.

For all the people my mother brought me around, though, there was one who from an early age sticks with me. His name was Silas.

Silas was my mother’s coworker, and quickly became one of her closest friends. He was tall, handsome, a Black man who always appeared impeccable. As if dressing well were a reflex rather than a choice. I remember how distinctly he carried himself, how different his presence felt from the other men who orbited my childhood—the uncles, neighbors, or even the stiff caricatures of masculinity that flickered across our television. Silas’ manner was flamboyant in a way that, lacking vocabulary then, reminded me of some women I knew. Carefree and expressive. But it lived at an intersection of a particular defiance, a controlled strength, as though he always wished someone would dare try him.

What remains clearest about Silas, however, beyond any trait of appearance or temperament, was his extraordinary kindness—a gentleness uncommon among the men I observed around me. Silas was never afraid to express tenderness or offer praise, a behavior which seemed elusive or perhaps forbidden to most other men I knew. They, I later understood, had been conditioned otherwise, restrained by norms or tradition into withholding affection, trapped in the perpetual guardedness required by conventional masculinity. But Silas was unafraid, his warmth flowing effortlessly, generously.

When I was about six years old, my world revolved largely around color pencils, paper, and plastic toys I methodically dismantled to build anew into whimsical inventions. Silas took special notice of these creations. Each time he arrived at our apartment—whether dropping in casually or preparing to head out into the night with my mother—he paused to admire whatever fantastical gadget or scribbled drawing I eagerly presented to him. His praise was sincere, delivered with an enthusiasm that felt rare and precious, and I grew increasingly eager to impress him, as though earning his approval validated the very act of creation itself.

My mother and Silas were young then, a fact I only fully appreciated after passing through my own twenties. My mother, barely out of girlhood herself at eighteen when she had me, would have been no more than twenty-five. Youth animated everything they did. Life was a vivid sequence of parties, laughter, and movement, a spirited escape from the mundane responsibilities lurking at the edges of adulthood. To me, they seemed fearless in their pursuit of joy, dancing and laughing through rooms crowded with friends and possibility, never appearing weighted down by the gravity of circumstances they had not yet encountered—or perhaps were simply choosing to ignore.

My mother and Silas went out often, their lives punctuated by celebrations, but Halloween was when they elevated their fun. Each year, after she had paraded me through the neighborhood collecting candy from doorways I barely knew, my mother and her friends would gather at our apartment, preparing to set out once I had been safely settled in a sugary haze. They dressed in costumes that rarely stood apart in my memory—vaguely spooky, perhaps provocative to adult eyes, but interchangeable from year to year. Except for one Halloween, when I was about nine or ten, a night imprinted indelibly upon my understanding of the world.

Silas arrived at our door in a costume I can no longer describe precisely, but it was something unmistakably feminine. A fairy’s gown perhaps, or a dress of shimmering fabric that seemed both magical and inappropriate, at least according to the limited vocabulary and imagination I possessed then. Whatever it was, I recall laughing. “You can’t wear that,” I said, feeling certain of some universal rule I had absorbed without questioning. The idea of Silas suddenly appearing in a costume intended for a woman unsettled something inside me, something I had not yet been forced to examine.

Silas was neither angry nor embarrassed, but calmly defiant. He told me simply, “People can wear whatever they want.” I objected, relying on a logic as thin as glass. “But that’s for girls,” I insisted, already sensing the fragility of my argument.

”Why?” Silas asked, gentle but unyielding. “Because,” I replied, a child’s universal fallback, a placeholder in the absence of true understanding. “Because what?” he pressed, leaving me without words.

My mother, who always trusted my ability to reckon with the world plainly, overheard our conversation and quietly pulled me aside. Silas drifted towards other friends, all laughter and anticipation for the evening ahead, while my mother spoke clearly and directly, as was her habit.

“Silas is gay,” she explained. The word was familiar only in its cruel schoolyard use, spat out carelessly by other boys whenever someone stepped beyond some invisible line. It made no sense connected to Silas, whose kindness was unwavering. My mother went on patiently, explaining that gay meant Silas liked men rather than women, that it was a normal part of the human experience, that love was larger and simpler than what many people believed.

I remember feeling confused, yet strangely unmoved. My confusion was intellectual rather than emotional—he liked boys, I liked girls; Silas was kind, Silas was like an uncle. “Okay,” I might have said, shrugging, already bored by the simplicity of the revelation.

My mother looked at me for a second as if she was surprised, then hugged me tightly, as though I had offered some profound wisdom rather than merely the unclouded logic of a child. She and Silas left soon after, off into the glittering darkness of the night, while I remained home, quietly sorting through candy my grandmother meticulously checked. Ten times, at least, for hidden razors, poison, or whatever the nightly news promised lay lurking beneath the sweet surface.

Later that night, when the quiet had settled like dust over the apartment, I was jolted awake by shouts and scuffling feet, my grandmother’s voice sharp with alarm, “What happened, what happened?!” My mother’s answer was urgent, precise, clipped with a strain I had never heard before, “Get some washcloths and ice, Band-Aids…whatever’s in the bathroom!” The voices belonged also to two women, friends of my mother whose names I can no longer remember. They spoke rapidly, anxiously, “Sit down, Silas! Sit down—you’re bleeding! Sit down!”

Bleeding. At that word, sleep abandoned me completely. I shot upright, a knot tightening in my stomach, panic spilling me out of bed and into the living room, pajamas clinging to my small, helpless body. Silas stood at the center of the room, illuminated harshly by the ceiling light, his costume torn, shredded in places, glitter and fabric twisted grotesquely as if mauled by wild animals. One of his eyes was swollen shut, his mouth leaked blood down his chin, patches of crimson bloomed across his arm and chest.

“Silas, are you okay?!” My voice tore through the confusion, high-pitched and frightened, freezing everyone in place for an instant before my mother snapped into focus again.

“Get him out of here,” she commanded, her eyes wide, desperate.

My grandmother seized me swiftly, urgently whispering, “You shouldn’t see this.”

But I resisted, pressing back, frantic, “Is he okay? Is Silas okay?”

Her hasty reassurance did not quiet me. Nonetheless, she deposited me firmly back into bed, closing the door, containing something I was too young to witness. But I slipped immediately to the door again, ear pressed against the thin barrier, heart pounding in my chest, straining to understand the muffled chaos outside.

Silas was shouting now, his voice sharp with anguish, defiance boiling beneath pain. “I don’t wanna sit down! I wanna go back outside! Let me the fuck out! I got something for them niggas! I’ll show them who’s a faggot!”

The word landed harshly, alien in its bitterness, a jagged stone hurled into a world I had believed safe, familiar.

“I’m a faggot, right? I got something for them!”

His voice was raw, edged in a violence I did not recognize. I heard feet shuffling, urgent whispers, bodies holding him back from something terrible, something inevitable. Until eventually, his shouting softened to sobs. Deep, wounded sobs that seeped through the door, heavier than any sound I had ever heard.

Never had I heard a man cry—at least not like that. Silas’ sobs were not the silent, hidden sort that men are taught to swallow back. They burst forth, raw and uncontained, filling the small spaces of our apartment until they pressed against my chest, aching, demanding something of me I was too small, too uncertain, to give. It was heartbreaking in the truest sense, a breaking that cut deeper than scraped knees or childish losses, deeper than anything I’d known before. Perhaps it was my first real heartbreak—a fracture that reshaped the way my heart would beat from that moment onward.

I lay awake later that night, bewildered. Powerless.

In the morning, I asked my mother directly what had happened. She paused, careful with her words, the exhaustion written clearly on her face. “Remember how I told you Silas is gay?”

“Yes,” I answered softly, uncertain.

“Well, some people don’t like gay people,” she began, measuring each word carefully. “And sometimes those people do bad things. Last night, some men hurt Silas because he’s gay.”

I stared at her, confused. “But why?”

She shook her head, tiredness deepening the shadows beneath her eyes. “I don’t know,” she confessed softly, a kind of resignation settling between us. “Sometimes people just aren’t good.”

For hours afterward, her explanation haunted me, simple words stretching toward something complicated and brutal I could not yet understand. The senselessness of it unsettled me deeply—that someone could be so kind, so tender toward me, yet punished so mercilessly simply for being himself. The confusion turned steadily to anger, and then, slowly, to something hotter, clearer: rage.

It wasn’t right. Even then, without words to name what was unfolding inside me, I understood that something cruel and senseless had happened. Silas’ pain—bruised, bleeding, wrapped in glitter and shredded fabric—was inflicted because of something bewilderingly simple. Something that felt as natural and uncomplicated as breathing, yet, for reasons beyond my comprehension, provoked rage and violence from others.

That night never left me. Silas’ tears echoed when I stood in schoolyards, fists clenched at my sides, waiting to swing at any careless mouth that spat the word “gay” as an insult. They echoed in dim bars years later, when slurs were tossed around casually, forcing me to dare strangers to either step outside or swallow their hate whole. Silas’ tears flowed through me as ink, guiding me as I wrote characters and stories, hoping my words could carve out gentler worlds.

Silas’ pain shaped me. It nurtured a strength in me, taught me the fierce urgency of tenderness, of speaking clearly and loudly for those silenced by fists or cruelty or despair. Yet, somewhere along the line, Silas drifted from our lives. Halloween nights faded into ordinary Octobers; parties became quieter, older. Silas gradually receded into memory, becoming an impression rather than a presence. I don’t know why or when it happened, only that one day, he was no longer there.

Silas had sculpted something essential in me, though I hardly noticed until one day, having lunch with my mother, his name surfaced again after years submerged in silence.

Between bites, my mother’s voice cracked. Silas had died by suicide not long ago, she told me, her eyes shimmering with grief. The news settled over us quietly at first, a soft sorrow that would later bloom into something much sharper, more defined. The true weight of his passing only came days later, when someone asked why I had chose to make one of the main characters in my recent novel gay. The question arrived simply, innocently, but it held the power of revelation.

For the first time, I thought beyond the polished answers I’d rehearsed—the ones about allyship, representation, and the necessity of visibility. Instead, I saw Silas again clearly in my memory: his laughter, his impeccable dress, the way he paused to admire a child’s wild drawings as if they were masterpieces. And suddenly, I was crying, overcome by a grief that had patiently waited years to be fully known.

Silas, who had knowingly or unknowingly guided me, shaping my compass toward empathy and courage, had been somewhere carrying such profound pain that living became unbearable. I don’t know precisely why he left, but I knew well enough the violence and sorrow the world reserves for men like him. My heart broke all over again, shattering quietly as I sat, considering anew the gravity of what he had faced.

I write this now as a prayer, an apology, a whispered promise into the spaces Silas left behind: I’m so sorry for the cruelty of this world, Silas. Sorry for whatever grief burdened you beyond endurance. You deserved softness, gentleness, a world vast enough to hold all your beauty. But I promise to carry forward your tenderness, your defiance. I promise to build something better, kinder. A place where our queer, trans, and non-binary children might flourish in their fullness, never having to suffer as you did.

Thank you, Silas, for teaching me how to be human.

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In Retrospect is an attempt to make sense of culture, the peculiarities of joy, and the curious ways life unfolds in a moment of seemingly constant fracture. If you find something here that matters, something worth returning to, you might consider become a paid subscriber or perhaps buying my latest novel, This Thing of Ours.