I don’t know if Mr. Randall Kenan meant to awaken me the way he did; startle me into self-awareness. I don’t know if he came from a family described in the book as proud and matrilineal. I don’t know if he meant for this book to be one that Black queer men of a certain age regard as “a first testament” to our lives in a wanning pandemic, a will to live, a recounting.

I don’t know.

After his death in August of 2020, I sorted through my old email accounts to find our correspondences. He spoke to me like I was a nephew, he wished me well and hoped I would find peace. “Oh, take a vacation,” one email laments. I don’t know if he was saying it for me or him.

I only met him once, for tea, black for him and green for me, in a too-early cafe in midtown Manhattan. Our teatime was awkward, he allowed it to be, so that neither of us felt the tremendous pressure to be extraordinary as we often had to be in other spaces. As Cousin Ann recounts in Visitation, “But don’t you know it yet, Horace? You the Chosen Nigger.” But here, he knew, I needed, maybe we needed, to be ourselves, nothing more. He allowed deep pauses of nothing, for genuine questions to arise. He set the portrait I would come to replicate in my own work, the painting of two awkward men from the Southern United States who queerness had chosen and who, because it was the Blackest, truest thing to do, had chosen it back. We could love all the things that did not add up. We could love the quiet and the questions. We could embrace curiosity with a capital C.

“Curiosity” in this novel, Mr. Kenan assigns to Rev. James “Jimmy” Greene, the dutiful widowed pastor cousin/uncle to Horace. I don’t have to explain a cousin/uncle, right? Maybe I do. Your father’s cousin is your cousin, yes? But said cousin is your mother’s age; so, you give the respect you would of an uncle or aunt to that cousin. Right? Because . . . Because you do.