Jussie Smollett is telling the truth. Or telling a truth. Or telling us something truer than the truth.

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried.

O’Brien wrote about war, the unfathomable experience of war. He believed that the facts, the truth, were insufficient to depict his experience, to get his message across, to transmit the horrors of being a soldier in Vietnam.

If that is unfathomable, how can we who are not possibly fathom the lifelong, manifold experience of being a Black, gay man in the United States? Continue reading “The Truth and Jussie Smollett” →