Immediately after Easter, my wife and I took some days away by cruising with our adult son Taran, and his delightful girlfriend Minlee. After two delicious days in Manhattan (the Oyster Bar in the bowels of Grand Central Station is highly recommended), we "set sail" out of Bayonne, New Jersey for a nine day cruise to Haiti, St. Maarten, San Juan and Bermuda. One middle of the night, while channel surfing on rough seas, I happened across a featurette about a cruise ship vacation identical to the experience I was having and yet completely different. This film documented a gay family cruise excursion hosted by Rosie O'Donnell and her partner and children. It was nothing more (or less) than a group of families with their kids – strangers to one another – on holiday who happened to be gay and lesbian.

To narrow the focus, just a few couples were interviewed and tracked as a lens for everyone's experience and what was immediately compelling was how mundane it all was, except for one factor – how relieved everyone was not to have to be defensive about who they are. It was a story about creating a space in which people can be ordinary.

And the kids did what kids do – played and laughed and ran around and were free and that freedom was infectious as it always is for parents who have forgotten how to play.

But when they pulled into a Caribbean port of call (I don't recall which one) and exited the ship to visit a foreign land, they found themselves greeted by "aliens from another planet" (my thoughts then and now): born again fundamentalist Christians bearing placards and banners quoting scripture and promising eternal damnation. Some of the younger kids looked terrified and I marveled at why any parent would expose their kids to all of this. And I was moved to tears as the camera followed a woman and her partner with a child-in-arms past this gauntlet of vile hate with heads held high, greeting the islanders with smiles and waves. When asked by the filmmaker, she simply said "It's important that our daughter see this, for this is a part of the real world too and she needs to know that these people do not speak for all Christians."

I turned the set off at this point – assuming that their vacation and ours would end well -and wondered about the very different memories my family and those families might have of a holiday.

But unable to sleep, I thought about issues of identity.

I grew up in the near south in the 1950's. I lived in a segregated neighborhood (although I didn't know of any integrated ones) among people who were referred to as "colored." The neighborhood (I didn't have the language "inner city") school and the church I attended were colored as well. Early on, however, I learned that not all colors in "colored" were equal. St. James Church, in those days, had a "brown bag test" for inclusion – if you were darker than a brown paper bag, you were not encouraged to join or to aspire to leadership. In those days, my godmother, Clothilde, was a hairdresser. I'd visit her in her basement beauty shop where on Saturdays she would spend long hours "cooking hair." She also sold beauty products, including the skin bleachers advertised in Jet and Ebony magazines that promised a "brighter" you. None of this seemed more than it was: daily life.

But by the 1960's, things shifted dramatically. With the advent of the modern civil rights movement, colored people became Negroes now and with the goal of integration (especially after the Brown decision in 1954), we looked at our homes, our schools and our churches and indeed they were no longer (to quote Genesis) "very good."

I was one of three Negro children who integrated Franklin Delano Roosevelt School #18 in Baltimore when in the 5th grade and there discovered a veritable cornucopia of teaching materials and resources. I also discovered a wealth of shaming by unwelcoming administrators, teachers, parents and kids. At 9 years of age, it's hard not to internalize that shame. By the 1970's, things changed again and we were no longer Negroes but now "Black." The world had shifted on its axis for now the darker you were, the better and straightening hair was considered a form of cultural genocide.

By the 80's, we were no longer Black but now African-Americans. Dashikis were required wear for those with a pan-African consciousness and black slang became Ebonics, a distinct language some wanted taught in institutions of higher learning.

And by the 1990s, some in the larger culture began to, multiculturally; speak of "people of color" (which sounded like we were "colored people" again to me).

This journey in identity awareness had three sides to it.

Firstly, trying to figure out who we were. As the mixed race progeny of African slaves and white slave owners, what are we? How should we self define ourselves? Indeed, the very right to self define as a people apart from the definitions of the dominate culture, is the basic requirement of human agency.

Secondly, the larger issue has been the quest to be accepted, to fit in. Michael Jackson's question in song: "Am I black or white?", so tragically reflected in his compulsive body modifications; is but the embarrassing extreme of a people who tried for decades to become a part of the broad definition of "white" (which had expanded in former generations to include formerly excluded peoples like the Italians, Irish, Germans and others). Bill Cosby's admonitions to a young generation to use "proper English" reflect my parents and his generation's commitment to seek assimilation by minimizing distinctiveness. But the cost was far too high and the rewards too elusive. Randall Robinson in his latest book Quitting America argues that whites will never accept Blacks as fully human and has left America with his wife and kids to live in St. Kitts, her native home.

And thirdly, the human desire to transcend the continuum of acceptance/assimilation on one end and segregation/separation on the other (the Black Nation, the Queer nation) and to be just oneself is perhaps our deepest yearning. To not have to think about race or sexual identity the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. To not have oneself defined by an accident of birth (Fats Waller's plaintive blues cry "what did I do to be so black and blue?"). To be seen as an individual and not as a member of a group is ever the goal for Americans in this uniquely individualistic culture.

And in my nocturnal reflections, I recalled the quiet words of the self defined "moderate" in this discussion who says "I just don't want it (race, sexuality) thrown in my face." And so I found myself thinking of my mom. My mother, who was lighter than I am, used to pass for white in segregated 1930's Baltimore. Her girlfriends would implore her to slip into the Hutzler or Hecht department store and buy them a stylish hat or handbag they, being darker, could not purchase for themselves. My mom said that there was a perverse pleasure in putting something over on the ignorant salesgirls from East Baltimore but she said she always felt soiled afterwards. In handing the bag to her girlfriends, there was that awkward moment when her subversive act also drove a wedge of pain, humiliation and shame between her and her friends. And so, in time, when they would ask her to "pass" for them; she would decline. They could not imagine the pain that comes from privilege bought with denial of self. And so to those who cry "I just don't want it in my face," we respectfully reply: "It's not your face we chose to be concerned about. It's our own face in our own mirrors." In Genesis, it says "let us make man∗ in our image, after our likeness" (1:26). To be made in the image and likeness of God means that all people – whatever their identity – reflect the identity of God. In fact, if we would see the face of God, that face is incomplete if any of the human family is excluded from the portrait.

The question is what kind of world do we choose to inhabit, what sort of future will we seek to create? A world in which some people are defined as "other" and thus outside the economy of God or do we choose to make a world in which all people and identities are welcome at the table without having to deny, hide or obscure who they are; a world in which we each can be ordinary children of God.