Ronnie Wyche has never been to a Pride parade, but he has been to a protest. He does have two good excuses on why he’s skipped Pride.

“Number one, I don’t like parades. I also work in the service industry, so during most Pride events, I'm always at work.” Wyche told Creative Loafing Tampa. But the 33-year-old poet and bar manager also put in a lot of work before he could get to the point of talking about Pride.

Like most people, Wyche knew who he was attracted to at a young age—about five years old, to be exact. Unlike most people, those feelings were also a premonition.

“I remember just genuinely and naturally, without any influence, knowing that I was gay. But I also remember understanding, already, that there were people in the world who would not accept that,” Wyche explained. “That,” was the fact that he was not just gay, but Black.

Today, Wyche has learned to accept all of himself. And contrary to what media at large tends to portray, he, like other gay and Black men, is not a monolith. That complexity is undeniable, but all the new hashtags about being queer and Black unsurprisingly fail to capture most of that nuance.

“It’s a touchy subject, and you don't want to police how people represent their sexuality,” Wyche explained, “but mine doesn't define my personality—it doesn't define what I like outside of sex, outside of who I'm sleeping with.”

Still, for a five-year-old who 100% cared about how he was perceived by the world (and at times still does), all that emotion, paired with the color of his skin, weighed heavy on his shoulders.

“When you're taught at a young age—through religion, society and the media—that being Black is bad and being gay is bad, you internalize those things,” Wyche said.

So Wyche came to believe he wasn’t good enough. He grew jealous of young people, both Black and gay, who could move through the world overtly proud of who they were. 

“They came out at a young age and didn't hide,” Wyche said. “I didn't understand why I didn't have that same strength inside of me.”

He eventually curated a group of confidants who knew he dated guys, but Wyche was nowhere near the point where he felt OK telling his family. So he compensated by becoming an overachiever and perfectionist. Wyche overworked himself, got a degree and presented his life as perfect.

“I suppressed my problems by being the best employee, being homecoming prince, and being likeable,” he said.

The facade went on for more than a decade before Wyche broke his knee and ended up on bed rest for six months. That setback two years ago put him on crutches, but slowing down also put Wyche on a path to addressing the ugliness in the world which distorted his self-image. He did the shadow work and became his harshest critic; he stopped playing the victim and learned how to journal. Less than a year ago, Wyche told his mom. He’s more proud of that moment than anything else in his gradual coming out process.

From a young age, Wyche had always treated others the way he wanted to be treated: with empathy and kindness. But until that moment when he told his mom hus truth, Wyche wasn’t being kind to himself.

“Not to get too broad, but that is a greater problem with the society that we've created. Everything's too fast, the world at large does not slow down,” Wyche said. Those drawn out days, weeks and months with a bum knee also wrung more poetry out of him. Wyche sometimes calls the poems random ramblings, but the prose is a conversation with himself. Lately, those words, posted to social media, have been a conduit to dialogue with others.

On workdays, Wyche takes a 15-minute Uber from his home in Brandon to The Bricks in Ybor City; 90% of the time he draws a driver who wants to talk about current events. The person behind the wheel is usually more defensive than understanding. Wyche is vehemently against sound bites, especially ones that divide, but last Thursday, he got stuck in a car with a white driver who kept saying “all lives matter” in a discussion about protests and the movement against centuries of American racial violence. 

“I was frustrated and trying to understand why, when we say, ‘Black lives matter,’ they have to say ‘all lives matter,’” Wyche said. So he sat in the back and started a poem. The 17 lines positioned Wyche as the devil's advocate trying to figure out the driver’s position. The civil rights violations endured by Black Americans, Mexican immigrants, women and prisoners all clamoring for equality all came rushing to his mind. He wondered why the person behind the wheel just couldn’t understand.

“I don't think it comes from a place of pure hate for some of them. I think it comes from a place of being the victim in trying to not see that this country has inequalities in all ways,” Wyche told CL.

The quest to understand and converse is what led Wyche—who hates parades—to go to a protest. On the night of the Fowler riots, Wyche came home from a 12-hour shift, turned on his TV and saw Tampa on fire. He realized he was living in a revolution, but he also heard conflicting reports about protesters attacking cops and vice versa. So he went to Curtis Hixon Park the next weekend to see for himself. Wyche confirmed his new gut feeling that he was now battling for something greater than himself.

“We're fighting now for our children, for the next generation to not have to grow up like I grew up—to not live in a world where you are hated for something so simple as sexuality or the color of your skin,” Wyche said. But he also realized that being on the street is not how he’s being called to help.

“I express myself in this revolution through dialogue, and art, and conversation, and going to talk to people who are different than me,” Wyche explained. His role is to help others, and himself, find empathy and accept one other.

But the concept of healing—the like idea of being a gay, Black man in America—is not monolithic. As the scenes unfolding in streets show us, finding solutions is going to take more nuance and pain than the country can probably handle right now.

Wyche admitted that until this movement happened, he was still struggling to figure out how he fit into this world.

“How do I find my own identity in a world where so many people are telling me, 'If you're Black, you're this. If you're gay, you're this,’” he wondered. But then he brought it back to the healing process.

“Healing is such a journey,” he said. Over the last two years, Wyche has been tilling his soul trying to undo a lot of damage.

“I’m trying to get back to that little six-year-old boy who loved himself for his Blackness and his gayness before the world poisoned him with hate and homophobia,” he said. “We all need to get back to that state of innocence and acceptance.”

That, like the work we have to do to heal the country, will be a tough task. But there’s no excuse to not try.

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