Atlanta creator Donald Glover welcomed a baby boy with his girlfriend Michelle around the same time that the video of George Floyd went viral in May. He revealed the arrival of his new bundle of join in an exclusive interview with the I May Destroy You actress Michaela Coel for GQ.
“Yeah, it was nuts,” Glover said. “I was in the hospital bed. My son had just been born, like, an hour before and I was watching the George Floyd video. It was such a weird moment. It was such an intense, weird moment, because I’m watching that video and it’s like eight minutes long, so you’re sitting there and I had just had this amazing, joyful, expanding moment, plus my dad had passed away recently, so [my son] was named after my father… I don’t even know what, really, the word is to describe it. It was just expanding: the empathy and compassion and the terror and the joy of it.”
The couple now has three sons together. Glover also talked about sex identity and racism in his GQ interview. The actor, who also goes by music pseudo Childish Gambino, once thought he might be gay during his college years.
“Most of my college years were me being like, ‘I don’t know what I like,'” he said. “I had friends who asked, ‘Are you gay?’ And I’d be like, ‘I sort of feel like I am because I love this community.’ You know? But maybe I’m not? And I always was trying to figure out ‘Am I weird for not wanting to label it?’ Yet, also, I never felt completely safe in just one place.”
He also talked about his experience with racism when one of his close friends used a derogatory slur to label black people.
“One time I was really close with this guy – a white guy,” he continued. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, this guy’s my friend.’ And then one day we went to the mall and some black kids ragged on his shorts. He turned to me and said, ‘There are black people and then there are n—-s.’ My brain, my heart… It was really intense, so I go home and I tell my dad.”
At the careful guided instruction of his father, Glover would stop talking to the friend.
“I was in high school, so I didn’t really have the emotional tools to really be like, ‘Oh, I understand,’ because I had no experience. We just never talked again. It was a hard lesson, to understand that separation between myself and my friend. And all credit to my father for helping me see that for myself.”
