When did it get real gay, Markeyth?

Nik talks to Markeyth Powell, a dancer friend from college who is boldly stepping into his identity. They dive into his Buddhist-Christian, faith-filled upbringing and the power of “being a loud, proud, out, gay Black man."

Transcript

 Nik: Warning, this is an adult podcast for adults. If you're not an adult or you don't want to hear adult content, go somewhere else. 

Markeyth: There was a lot of intimidation for me to be myself. Walking around as this black gay man. It was easy to be a freak. It's harder once that freak moment is over, when you're alone with yourself, being pleased with what you've done or how you've gotten there. Those kind of feelings intimidated me from making some choices, trying some things out, sharing myself with a lot of people sometimes.

And now in this 42nd year, it's like: I've arrived, I've arrived to myself. I've arrived to myself.

Nik: Hey, what up queens? This is All The Greatest Gays, where I talk to my gay friends about being gay. I'm Nik Schriner, your token straight guy, and today I'm talking to my buddy from college, Markeyth Powell. 

He's an amazing dancer, a super funny, sweet, bright light, and we get to hear all about what it was like for him growing up in the church with a Buddhist grandpa, a single mom, and remember the days of chat rooms?

Yeah, we go there too. Here he is: Markeyth. 

Markeyth: Let's go all the way back. My name is Markeyth. I'm Mark and Keith, hyphenated. I'm named after mama's two best gay friends, Mark and Keith, was the plan.

Nik: Oh my gosh! 

Markeyth: My mom is only 19 years and 9 months older than me, and even before I understood that, it played into our dynamic.

She made a space where I could talk to her about anything. I'd hear her talk to anyone about anything. My grandmother, her mom, is this devout Christian woman who comes from the past, but she was born again. So born again means I know who I used to be, but I'm not that person anymore and I don't want those things around me.

So I had these two power dynamics. This one socially completely righteous person. This one person who just saw the world as a place that you played in. Mom enjoyed life. Grandma was about staying sanctimonious so that when she dies, she can go to heaven. Um, and so both of those seemed, you know, like a place that you should find a, a happy medium in.

Nik: And then you've got Markeith in the middle. 

Markeyth: Got Markeith in the middle. And then I got my grandfather, who is a practicing Buddhist. On Saturday morning, Grandpa would take me down to the park, and we would join this group of these, all these little Asian people, and Grandpa's this six foot tall, coal, black man. And we would practice Tai Chi, and then we would listen to this speaker, and then we would go to S& S Salt, and we would have fish and chips, and ginger beer, and we would talk about what we just did, and maybe play on the little Pac Man machine, and then I'd go home and we'd do some yard work.

And then on Sunday morning, I'd get up and go to a Christian church with Grandma and hear some of the best music and see people falling all over the place and flailing and everyone's dressed really nicely. Grandma would pack like five or six kids in the back seat of a ginormous Lincoln Town car and take us down, barreling down the road to this church because, you know, it could be a great experience with all these classes and just things to do there to keep the young people occupied and off of the streets.

But seeing that dynamic in comparison to Mama's dynamic with the two gay boys and her other queer friends… 

Nik: So where was dad in this? 

Markeyth: My dad is Alex James Powell. My father's wife at the time was my mother's oldest sister's best friend. Out comes me! 

Nik: Uh, secret, this is a secret baby. 

Markeyth: Yes! So I always had a relationship with my dad.

You know, he went back and forth between Louisiana, he had a home in Sacramento. 

Nik: Was it a big deal for her to have a baby out of out of wedlock and that, because they never got married. 

Markeyth: I'm sure it just ticked all her boxes, cuz she got to piss my grandmother off. She would have stayed home until she got married and she never intended on really actually, you know, having a traditional married life. She liked Mark and Keith, and she liked her dynamic with them and what they had together.

Nik: She was like, great, I'm pregnant, I've got my own baby. I'm gonna name him after my two homies, who are gonna be helping me. 

Markeyth: I really honestly remember being in my crib and meeting all these people and there was just always someone holding me. There was a huge community around me. 

Nik: So did she talk to you about Like, where you came from, and about Mark and Keith, who your uncles were? Walk me through you getting to know inside who it is that you really are. 

Markeyth: It just happened. It was just part of my every day. I was nowhere near kindergarten at this time. And I remember this boy named Michael. And this girl that I'm still Facebook friends named Charlotte. And Charlotte was my girlfriend and Michael was my boyfriend.

And my mom was totally okay with this, just so long as we didn't kiss. 

Nik: But Charlotte and Michael, you guys were all official. 

Markeyth: Yeah. 

Nik: And were Charlotte and Michael okay with that? Did they know about each other? 

Markeyth: Yeah, but I'm sure they're thinking like this little four year old, like, what is he talking about?

Nik: But, but you identify now as gay, not bisexual, right? 

Markeyth: I identify as gay when it comes down to like seeking a relationship. at this point in my life, that's kind of my zone. The responsibility of being bisexual means you gotta date everybody. And I just , I'm gonna go like the road of least resistance at this point.

Nik: So when did you have your first gay relationship? Like, you know, real gay related? Real. When did it get real gay, Markeyth? 

Markeyth: It got, when did it get really, really gay? It got really, really gay in college. 

Throughout high school, I had a couple girlfriends, but I had a really busy schedule. I had been an actor.

Around 11, 12 years old, my career, so to speak, took off. And I had a ton of choirs and dance groups and auditions and pageants, and I was doing something all the time. Community service work, auditioning for this. There are about three or four standing shows at my church. Um, I was really involved in those programs.

Nik: I'm just imagining, like, little Markeyth in a suit with, like, a 1980s cell phone and, like, a book and assistant, like, a tiny little assistant. 

Markeyth: Ask anyone. I kept a fanny pack with a tiny little date book in there and a little, or maybe, like, a little electronic phone book, and I kept my dates and I did my thing. So me and my mom would be like two ships passing in the night. She'd be like, I miss you. We would have to have like lunch dates. Sometimes she would come pick me up from school and take me on a lunch date so she could figure out what I was doing, because I hadn't seen her in like days. 

Nik: Oh my gosh. What an incredible independent young man.

Markeyth: There's a ton of pictures of me in little tiny suits. 

Nik: I knew it. I could, I could psychically see that. That's hilarious. 

Markeyth: By college, things kind of slow down. 

I'm away from my town. I had actually went to Norfolk State in Norfolk, Virginia. I had like my first dose of gay. I mean like the guys were really, really aggressive.

It was a different crowd. 

Nik: So you went from Sacramento. 

Markeyth: Yeah. So I'm in Norfolk, Virginia. I'm still trying to do choir things. I'm focusing on my grades and, and I'll have downtime. I'm sitting in the cafeteria or I'm waiting for something, and a guy would just come sit next to me and talk to me. It took me a little while to realize that they're just not being friendly.

I think it's just a pickup, you know? That's when I actually, I guess, started to really notice how I'm presenting myself, how I'm coming across. Cause I didn't think of myself as like a super masculine man or super effeminate man. I just was me, you know. 

Nik: You were always just being who you were. 

Markeyth: So a series of situations and I end up in Chico for the very first time.

So I'm in the dorms in Chico. 

I'm in one of the private dorms. This is the dawn pretty much of fiber optic internet. So now you can chat fast. You can send pictures. I'm on a site checking my email, and then it gives me a link to this chat room and I'm like, “Oh, wow.” Chat rooms are still a new thing. So I'm inside the chat room and it's, and it's not really interesting and I'm scrolling down the different lists of options and then I see one.

Nik: What are you looking for in this chat room? How did you get invited to this chat room? What's, what's the point of this chat room? 

Markeyth: This is Yahoo groups. Yahoo, I don't even think Yahoo groups is around anymore. So this is brand new, and you can drop photos in there, you know, and there's people's pictures in there and it's starting to get more and more scantily clad, and they're mostly women, and it's just not really moving me.

Finally, I see a link to one that says. Gay black chat. 

Nik: You're like, how did you know? 

Markeyth: Who's watching me? I get into there, and it was just like my head exploded. I couldn't believe some of the shit people were saying to each other, and it was just so right there in your face. So I guess from my responses ,I get a private link.

So now I'm not in the general room. I'm in like this private with this one other guy. His name is Tupac the Lover, and we're chatting back and forth. Then we're like, oh, well, we'll never get a chance to meet. And then he says he's in Concord, California. And I'm like, oh, I'm in Chico, California. That's not too far.

And so I arranged to go meet this random stranger. And I did. 

Nik: Oh my fucking god. 

Markeyth: I drive to Concord. We chatted for a few months. Then we talked on the phone. 

Nik: Oh good. 

Markeyth: And I get his address and everything. I have to print these directions out because there is no GPS. 

Nik: Yeah, MapQuest it. 

Markeyth: I MapQuest it out.

Tupac the Lover, you know. Handsome, dark skinned, tall guy, um, older guy, and we talk for a little while, we smoke some weed. This is my first time smoking. And then we drink a little wine, and there's my virginity, right then and there. Like a pro. 

This is the night of my 21st birthday, um, and he's like, “what are you waiting for?”

Nik: You went to celebrate your 21st birthday. 

Markeyth: My friends throw a birthday party for me and I go to their birthday party and then they all take me out to the club and I buy everybody a drink and then I say that I'm going to the bathroom and then I get into my car and I drive to Cocker, California.

Nik: Did you guys continue to see each other or was it?

Markeyth: We saw each other for a while, but I realized kind of early on that it wasn't. A relationship. This was just gonna be like a hookup type thing, which was fine with me, you know, I really wanted to explore that more so than being in a relationship. I think I'd had, like, my fill of relationships at that time, but physical contact with people was something that I just didn't let anybody get close to me like that.

Nik: Were, were you afraid of having sex with another guy? 

Markeyth: I was afraid of the responsibility of keeping up somebody else's attention. I am a busy person. I involve myself in a lot. And I saw what that did with my relationship with my family, with my mom, you know. I mean, that's probably one of the closest people to me at that time. And months could go by and I wouldn't see this woman. And it was just because I had really productive things to do. So how would, how would that work with the relationship? I would have to neglect something, or you would have to neglect something for us to have time together. I got these things that I want to do right now.

And it's just not fair to me to cut out hours of my day just so that we could spend time together so that you can know that I'm yours in your mind. That just wasn't gonna work for me. Still doesn't really feel like it works, works for me. 

Nik: So have you ever found someone that you wanted to actually give time to and make time to?

Markeyth: Yeah, so I did that. I did that with my most previous former lover. We spent 13 years together trying to make that work. In retrospect, the only thing that really worked about that was that we lived together. Had we not shared a domicile, I would have never saw that man. I really wouldn't have. His schedule was busy, my schedule was busy.

And then when we forced time with each other, the phones are going off, so now we gotta turn the phone off. It just always felt like I wasn't as present as I was to be if I was going to be in a love relationship with someone.

Nik:  So you were able to end that because it didn't quite check every single box?

Markeyth: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and I, and I still applaud him for that. Cause one day he's like, this relationship is not working. And I'm like, Ooh, I can't say that it's working out for me either. You know? I mean, we're making it work, but if we're being honest about what it should feel like, I don't think now is, is the time.

My biggest gripe with humanity is how present we're not when we are supposed to be present. We're always thinking about the past or always planning for the future, and it fucks up where you're at right now. Um, but to be here with you right now means I gotta shut everything else off. 

Nik:  What is your life like now when you get out of here?

Markeyth: I feel like my brain has melded or maybe I found a technique or something that has allowed me to, with time, feel like I'm not missing out if I'm not planning for tomorrow or regretting yesterday. 

Nik:  The idea of not feeling like you're missing out, I feel like that is the ultimate gift to give someone, to give yourself.

Markeyth: Yeah, that's the way that I would calm my younger self or anyone who I would give advice about time and waiting is: getting comfortable in that waiting. Learning how to feel like you're not missing out while you're waiting and putting some actual meaning into all the good that you're doing for yourself.

You're doing so much positivity for yourself by staying here right now, wherever you're at, whenever you're doing something, isolating all the other noise. 

Nik:  Did you have a Buddhist grandfather? 

Markeyth: I had a Buddhist grandfather. He really, he really shaped me in a way that it's just wild. So right before we went into quarantine, this is March of 2020.

I got accepted into a Vipassana meditation retreat. The idea of going to this ten days of no communication, no talking, no eye contact, just meditating for twelve hours a day just seemed like I was setting myself up. Either I was going to win or I was going to lose. 

Nik: You’re going to go through whatever it was.

Markeyth: I was prepared for how difficult it was going to be. That's all I could prepare myself. This is going to be the hardest thing I ever did. Oh my god, this is going to be the hardest thing I ever did. 

But, it wasn't. I still don't have words for that. Being in there and realizing, ultimately that, my takeaway was that I had been neglecting myself by not being as present as I could be in any moment.

Nik: But just go, go, go on to the next thing. 

Markeyth: And then forgiving, and then forgiving myself in that same moment for not being able to do it before that moment. It's like, Oh, I'm going to be able to go someplace, realize that this isn't really what I want, and this isn't really where I'm going, but I'm happy to be here, and then just navigating life in that space was something I had been introduced to by my Buddhist grandfather at four years old in the park, you know. But it took me time to, to fix it for, for my life, for my body shape, for my experiences, and for where life is going to take me. 

Nik: Well, it's funny, we can't really give ourselves what we need to hear until we're ready to hear it.

Markeyth: Right. And you're screaming at yourself the entire time. And that's why the waiting process is so, so beautiful. It's just a space that we can't understand how grateful we should be to get an opportunity to just sit somewhere in somebody's backyard and smoke some weed until the next day comes. Yeah, thank God for that.

That's life. That's the moment. That's the moment because everything else is going to be so much more fleeting, and if you've never practiced being in the moment, that one time, that one little fleeting space that you get, you're not going to get to enjoy it either. 

Nik: That's so nice to hear. I feel like I got a taste of that coming back to when we first met.

And our dance teacher connected us, cause I needed to learn the steps and we met out on the lawn, and you showed me the dance steps and I was just, my eyes got about this big and I'm like, who is this man? Holy cow, this frequency he's holding. And you were so sweet because I was the worst. I was the worst African dance white guy that's ever been.

I'm sure there's been a lot of bad African dance white guys. But I think I take the cake of the worst. You're like, Oh my gosh, you're so fast. You're learning these. I took me forever to really do it. 

Markeyth: You, you picked it up. I know the dance that you're talking about. And I could do the dance on my right side, but I couldn't do it on my left side, and you were doing it both and you were ready to go to the next step.

And I was like, wait a minute, hold on. 

Nik: Oh my gosh. Well, fast forward to us in some big hippie tent doing the dance. And I was just like your little shadow, just trying to keep up with you, man. You make it look so easy and so cool. You have a thing about you that is intoxicating. There's part of you, I think it must come back to your ability to zero in on whatever it is that you're doing.

It just goes to show to me the power of presence, the power of winning in the now by being completely focused on it and taking that with you into whatever it is that you're doing. 

Markeyth: Being in the present meant that my mom was passing or my grandmother just recently passed, and I had to be in that moment.

I could avoid those emotions, but then what does that mean? You know, you're still neglecting that moment. That's one of the hardest times of being present. I could only imagine for people who don't spend that kind of time in their emotions. Ever, have never spent that kind of time in emotions. 

Nik: And here you are, you lose two of the most important people to you.

I'm so sorry again. Thank you. And you're just there, you're in it. 

Markeyth: Hmm. It doesn't make it any easier, right? But it is where I realize my superhuman strength. Probably my previous experience of having to deal with emotions. Let's back up a little bit. Little gay black boy. I'm running around Sacramento, and I have people who have seen me dance.

They see me do things and they love me. Oh, everybody's mom loves me. But, it's the late 80s, it's the early 90s. 

Nik: So you weren't out. 

Markeyth: I was as out as I could be, you know. For me at that time, okay, let's take that, take it back a little bit further. Why I didn't have any kind of negative experience about my sexuality at my church at that time was my pastor, his name was Jesse E. Copeland. And this is a towering old, old black man, you know. He's seen the world really change. I remember this conversation that he had with my grandmother about this musician that was playing at the church, and people were suspecting his sexuality. My grandmother is the mother of the church, so he goes, “Mother, how do you know that he's gay?”

And my grandmother says, “I just know.” My pastor says, “Well, have you ever been in the bed with him?” And she goes, No. He says, “Well, then that's not, that's not your business. That's not your business. What he does in that time is not your business. We're here for one moment. We're not going to ever get in the bed when we're here at this church.”

Shit. I mean, I was a child, but I remember that just ringing in my head that my responsibility to people is the moment. My responsibility to you is the moment, you know? And if in that moment you don't want me, then shit, bye. And, and when I walk away from that moment, I'm done with that moment. How you thought about me, what you think about me, what you're gonna say about me, it's not my business. I can't control it. 

Um, but in that moment, if I gave you the best that I have in that moment, then I've done everything that I'm, that I'm supposed to do. And I practiced that from that moment forward. Whenever anyone had a word about me, or said something about me, or he's gay, or are you gay, or someone asked my friend to ask me if I was gay, I would tell them, ask. Tell them that they can talk to me, tell them to come ask me.

Nik: I think there's something so fearful about it, like, even when we were friends and had this great camaraderie around what we were doing, in my head, I'm like, “Oh, Markeyth is probably gay and that's cool with me. But I feel like to be able to ask that or being like clear about it, it's super frightening.

And it sounds very like 1980s, 1990s, where this kind of don't ask, don't tell. I love you no matter what. But I'm not going to say it, just like this wonderful old pastor did, like they may be, but it's not our business. It's like, well, what if it was our business? To accept you clearly. 

Markeyth: Right. If you're going to take it to the next level. And if you want to build that type of relationship with someone, then that's where that goes. But just knowing someone for the sake of being able to talk about them to other people is not I'm not gonna get anyone anywhere. Oh, that's my black gay friend. I love when I'm brought into a group, they’ve obviously already talked about me before I got there.

And now I get to have that awkward moment where I'm standing around all these other adults who pay bills, and they have kids, and they have lives, and I'm like the most interesting thing that they've seen. So now once we've gotten over that hump of who I may or may not have slept with. It's like, oh, this person has depth.

They have depth. Other things, we are interested in cars, we both like cars. Now we don't have to talk about some fucking, we can talk about a 67 Mustang, you know. 

Nik: What's really important, going back to, if it's okay, talking about losing your mom and your grandma. Like the humanity of something we all have to go through is loving and then going through loss.

Markeyth: It's so beautiful, my story with my, with my grandmother. Grandmother's problem with my sexuality probably initially stemmed with her being afraid of, you know, what that meant. You got murdered. You're gonna die. You're gonna get beat up. You're gonna get killed. Maybe this is something that you can pray out.

Maybe this is something we can pray away. Maybe if you don't ever act on it, especially in her generation, if you don't act on it and have kids, how gay really are you? But me and her had a lot of conversations. about me and, I'm like, “Grandma, you didn't know any gay people?” And she tells me this story about having a friend who used to dress as a woman.

And he got caught one day, and he had to fight this guy. I just remember her saying, he was sitting on a bar stool, the guy comes up behind him, pushes him off the stool. He gets up, or she gets up, and she punches the guy in the face, and then she just ran a little circle around him, and then punched him again, and then ran.

And Grandma goes, “I've never seen anybody run so fast in heels in my life.” 

Nik: Oh my god. 

Markeyth: Okay, so Grandma, you had a crossdresser friend. I was like, well, grandma, that was a cross dresser. He may not have been gay. He probably thought he was a woman, you know. Oh, well, what are you? No, I don't think I'm a woman, grandma. I just like men. 

Nik: You guys were good when she was gone? 

Markeyth: Oh, yeah. We, we stayed good throughout the entire process because even when she would revert back to things or saying stuff, I would always correct her in the moment. I liked what It did for her to have me in her life and for me to press her boundaries because she had the attention of the whole community.

So for her to have loving arms and understanding and vocabulary meant a lot more people were going to get what they needed from her. Her funeral was amazing. The amount of genders and sexualities and religions and ethnicities that came for my grandmother just showed that this was not a linear person.

She was multifaceted. And then I got to practice that. I think that the key to race relations, and just relations as a whole, is that people who look like us present this type of information and this type of vulnerability to the rest of the world so that we can see how weird it is to be this normal, and how normal it is to be this weird.

Nik: Mmm, how delicious is Markeyth, right? Give it up for him, Markeyth Powell. Yeah, it's nice to get to know my friend in a new way. Hope you enjoyed that.  

I love that he got to be straight with his grandma. Straight as in, like, straight up, like, this is me, grandma. And she's like, straight up, this is how I feel about that. These are my concerns, which are valid concerns. She’s just like, “I just don’t want you to be killed, baby.” Grandmas, am I right? I love that Markeyth and his grandma got to have that dialogue that lasted a lifetime. 

Anyways, if you would like to see a picture of Markeyth and his grandma, go to All the Greatest Gays on Instagram.

Also, I have to tell you about the last time I saw Markeith. It was after college, on the other side of the country. We were both working on the same TV show. We didn't know that. I was working as a stand in, and he was there for the day as a background actor, and all of a sudden, we spotted each other from across a literal football field. And we were working, so we couldn't just, like, run and hug each other.

 But what we could do was our silly little African dance. And, you know, we did. Right there in front of everybody, locked eyes like a couple of sweethearts. Da da da da da.And lord knows I still needed to follow his lead on that.

That's Markeyth, lightning in a bottle. Hope you enjoyed him. I'm Nik Schriner This is All the Greatest Gays, where we talk to my gay friends about being gay.  Keep coming back, and adios. 

Oh, one other thing, please like and subscribe. It helps other people hear this.