Dear Linc,
Black people never get abducted by aliens.
Every UFO buff knows about the case of Betty and Barney Hill; so does every weird sixth grader. I had read about their story in those hardcover picture books that Time Life used to sell via an 800 number advertised on commercials that were only ever shown late at night or in the daytime when no one was home. I never ordered the books over the phone, but the public library at Andrews Air Force Base apparently did, because that was where I got my Time Life book about UFOs. Also, I got a picture book about what Earth would look like when in a couple of billion years or so the sun would begin its natural course of death. Don’t ask me why this morbid shit intrigued me at that age. Don’t ask me why such a small library even had books like that.
I am glad, though that the base library is still around, and is still active enough to warrant its own Facebook page. The whole base itself keeps getting threatened with closure because of budget cuts. I’ve heard that the reason its neck keeps getting saved is because all the presidents land there when they are flying back into Washington. I’d be very sad if Andrews closed, just like I’d be sad if the U.S. stopped making pennies. My sentimental attachments are not very practical.
One of the theories used to debunk the Hill case was that their abduction was really a hallucination caused by the stress of being an interracial couple in an era when such a relationship, especially a marriage, was the terrible sin of the moment. To this day Barney Hill is really the only black guy I know of that has been abducted by aliens; everyone else seems to be some white person pushed to the fringe of society for a myriad of repeating themes like emotional instability or job loss. Maybe if you’re a colored person working at some cushy highrise job, you don’t want to rock the boat by letting on that you went right home last night and then woke up this morning in the forest.
In case it wasn’t obvious, Linc: yes, I’m still reading Communion. It’s actually a decently-written book, but as far as memoir goes, the truth is out there. (I was going to write “the truth is anyone’s guess,” but The X-Files left behind a good legacy.) That book was originally published way back in the 80s and I still remember originally being scared of the alien pictured on the cover. I’ve looked up the book on Wikipedia and used Google to see if anything new has been written about it; all I’ve found is that Whitley Strieber has continued a decent writing career (which he had before he published Communion, a fact that has been used against him). Unsurprisingly, if you type only the word “communion” into Google, you get a lot of Catholic search results — which is just as well, since the church seems to believe in aliens these days. Poor Galileo.
The re-booted X-Files should have an interracial couple for the lead. There hasn’t actually been talk about re-booting The X-Files; in fact, it’s admirable that David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and Chris Carter have been on the record very recently as wanting to go ahead with a third movie. But if that doesn’t work out, I would be all for them going the Star Trek route. I haven’t met too many other X-Files fans who acknowledge that the show did a good job of exploring Scully’s background as a Catholic — most fans would rather talk about aliens, or shipping Mulder and Scully (apparently my blog now commands such an audience that you and I, Linc, are in fact being shipped; I don’t know what to make of this) — but that exploration was one of my favorite things about Scully and the show altogether. On any other show, it might have come across as corny but The X-Files made faith, particularly the Catholic faith, so relevant, so classy. If they were able to do so well with Catholicism, then they should explore belief from the perspective of a colored person. The stories would be epic: how can you explain the unexplainable when you are trying to deal with very real issues such as ethnicity, heritage, skin color? Here, even though I generally mean “colored” to be any non-white person, I would want the reboot to have a black person in either the Mulder or Scully role, but my partiality is for the woman half. I’m thinking she could be played by Kent Masters King. Look her up, Linc, and be totally unsurprised that she used to be on General Hospital.
There was once a major recurring character on The X-Files who was a black guy, an informant for Mulder. But he was an informant who “just happened” to be black. There were no bold stories about his unique position and I sometimes speculate that his internal voice sounded like Samuel Jackson and that he was privately thinking, This alien shit is not what I had in mind when I joined the FBI. (Sadly, there was not even much of a chance to explore his background, since he was — if I recall correctly — killed off.)
Anyway, black people have been on my mind lately. That sounds stupid. What I mean is that I have been thinking back a lot to where I was raised in Maryland, in a county that at one time was regarded as the most affluent African American county in the whole country. Nearly all of my closest friends growing up were black. Until I got to college, I had lusted for two white guys, one Indian (south Asian), and the rest were all black; I never considered an Asian guy until college. The fact that I have spent so much of my twenties being attracted to white guys is a mystery. I don’t quite know at what point their unique physical features became appealing to me: how their skin gets red in the sun, and the shortness of their unwavy hair that you can play around with during lovemaking — sorry, I’m thinking of Adae again.
The security detail that guarded E.L. James at our store this week was breathtakingly fuckable. They had the whitest white people names and the cliche “tall and strapping” could be easily applied to them, as well as easy casting in porn. They looked just like the kind of guys I see on the Corbin Fisher and Sean Cody websites. (Don’t judge.) If they ever see this never-to-be-sent, I hope that they are not too insulted, especially by the revelation that one of the things grounding me during that hectic event was the daydream of being alone in a hotel room with them.
Despite this, Linc, I am on the verge of posting yet another online dating ad — and this time, I think that I’m going to list black guys as my preference. This all sounds like I’m making a big deal about color and, well, it kind of is. You and the E.L. James security guards of the world are delicious to look at but I have come to realize that at the end of the day I want to go home with a guy who does in fact remind me of home. My online dating ads have never listed a preference before, but the truth is that I have gone out with all white guys; as a gay Filipino brought up in a black town, it has been an interesting issue to juggle. In my search for a husband, should color matter? If I answered the question in terms of home, then it does. Do I know what I want, and who I want? Not always, and not until I meet him.
Joe
