My first interaction with sexual harm was during “nap time” in my kindergarten class. Generally, child-on-child sexual assault isn’t widely discussed, but despite that, it’s just as harmful. This era, however, was somewhat consumed by my overarching abuse that occurred from around the ages of 7-14, perpetuated by who I label as my two childhood abusers. I have had other short- and long-term sexual abusers/assaulters, but they more added to the reality that was generated by those two instead of creating it.

All of my sexual abusers were boys, men, or boys who turned into men. They were all Black (which is important to the story), and they were all intimate to me. Black women played critical supporting roles in reifying the harm that I endured and the silence that I was forced into. I believe this is just as pertinent because of how patriarchy, sexual violence, and sexual oppression are wrapped in the sweet scents and soft hugs of our Black mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunties, church ladies, and friends. My abuse would not have been able to last as long as it did, or even begin at all, if we didn’t live in a culture of misogynoir, silence, sexual shame and pathology in little Black girls, and systematic sexual oppression of Black womenfolk at large. There is no woman in my family that I know who has not lived a childhood harrowingly similar to mine.

I say all that to say, a big accusation that queer folks get who have suffered sexual abuse in their childhood is that their brain chemistry was warped, their sexuality was deviated, and they harbor a deep, intrinsic resentment against men and therefore subconsciously transformed their sexual desire away from men (it’s important to note that this accusation seldom comes to those who were sexually abused by women, because of patriarchy and misogyny, people don’t even believe that can happen). One way or the other, I have not only been accused of the same, but I’ve even questioned myself: am I only bisexual because of the conjunction between compulsory heterosexuality and my fear of men?

First of all, to get it out of the way, no. But secondly, I would also like to say I believe I’m concluding that Black eroticism simply does not have the capacity to hold all that I have to give it. Black eroticism has transformed my life, my politic, and my relationship to sex and sexuality, but we also have to pay attention to and understand where the limitations of theories and practices lie. The closer I get to where I’m going, the harder it is for Black eroticism to move uphill, and that’s okay. But I bring that up because I don’t know how much space there is left in Black eroticism to carry my man-centeredness and my deconstruction of it. I don’t know if my exploration into the degenitalization of sex as an engagement with Afropessimism, anti-Blackness, sexual excess, and deviance can all fit inside the confines of the pleasure that Black eroticism concerns itself with, and that’s okay. Theories and practices are made to stretch; they are capacious, but they can also split and then become meaningless, and just because I don’t think Black eroticism is going where I’m going doesn’t mean that I don’t want it to go at all. I’d like it to stay intact.

But back to the main. Bisexuality always makes its way into mainstream discourse, usually in the hands of bisexual women defending their attraction to men against the perceived ire of lesbians. I’m not saying biphobia doesn’t exist; it absolutely does, but truly, I’m not interested in that argument right now. I’m more interested in the concept of the compulsorily heterosexual or the “actually straight” bisexual woman who’s simply tired of men that, from some outside perspectives, I would be implicated in. I would say at the polar extremes of my sexual experience in terms of consensuality, men exist at the pole of clear assault, women exist at the pole of clear informed consent, and men present themselves again in the grey middle. But I’ve only had sex with a woman once, and while it was lovely, I did not get the revelation of being compulsorily heterosexual or compulsorily attracted to cis men (cis men specifically, because of defaulting a desire for men to a desire for dick). I got the revelation or the reaffirmation that I am nothing if not a bisexual Black being that enjoys the exploration of Black pleasure, not the physically sexual participation in it, especially with the centralizing of genitalia. I was looking for the realization that men just didn’t do it for me, and that’s why I didn’t enjoy sex; that this apathy wasn’t innate to me, that I wouldn’t have to interact with my sexual trauma again.

But I would like us to look at this plea for pleasure in lesbian sex as another reiteration of man-centeredness because why was I thinking about the absence of a man in the presence of a woman? In leading up to the sex, in my previous desires for perceived “lesbian sex”, in my shame of only having “straight sex” thus far, men, and my need for something to either redeem them or myself was always highlighted. In my life, I’ve run to men and boys for confirmation of worth. And in my investment in Black radical feminisms and Black eroticism, where my worth lies has completely changed. But where I believe Black eroticism stops is where I cannot find ecstasy in sex with women either. I never untied my worth with sexual ability; it just became a conflation of political validity in my ability to experience physical sexual pleasure with another Black body, specifically a femme one. And with my politic being based in what I can feel with who, it also must engage what I cannot feel. Making gender, sexuality, and desire unbendable truths where men are who I’m tragically bound to, and women are who I will never be worthy of.

But none of this can be talked about without applying Blackness. The presence of intraracial sexual violence is crucial to how I now experience desire and man-centeredness because without my Blackness, my sexuality would be a disrespecting of my humanity, instead of a reaffirmation of its nonexistence. Centralized in my childhood abuse and assaults was the impending and irreparable damage that the dick would come and exact upon me. It’s important that these dicks were Black, just as it’s important that I loved the people that harmed me and would position myself close to them to gain their “love” and attention in return for what became my purpose, because it became a question of how I was harming myself/how our shared Blackness was creating a fear and fetishization of Black flesh and Black genitalia. Years and years of this created an obsession with what not just a Black dick, but Black penetration (ie, fingers, a dildo, etc.) could do to me, which was carried on for years to come. That’s why the genitalization of sex cannot be separated from anti-Blackness and the Black as the nonhuman, the monster, and the sexual predator. Not only that, but the belief that devious and dubious penetration was not something that I could avoid, that it was inevitable, and therefore this terrifyingly sexual recurring daydream of being raped by any man that I laid eyes on became commonplace and terrorized how I viewed, and still view, men that I come in contact with. It has expanded past just Black men, but it still was bred from a place of anti-Blackness and pain. It’s hard to understand yourself as a perpetrator of anti-Blackness by yourself unto yourself, but from there I was able to understand my bisexuality as wrongfully put on trial, and instead scrutinize my man-centeredness and my need for men to do unto me as the afterlife of my sexual abuse, not just by individual Black boys and men, but by the overarching oppressive reality of anti-Black sexual violence because no one has fucked me worse than white domination.

I think the last thing that I’d like to touch on is my feelings towards men now. It’s the farthest thing from easy to contend with man-centeredness and a real erotic love for Black men and Black masculinity (which of course exists outside of cisgender men, and I love it there as well, but I do also love it in Black men cis and otherwise). A tall darkskinned nigga who’s politically/personally invested in similar streams of the Black radical tradition as I am will always be my type. I love seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting, and ultimately desiring Black men. I believe that it would be more man-centered to purposefully dismiss and repress what is true to me to somehow “prove” that men mean nothing to me or that I’ve de-centered them, because in that reality, they’d always be on my mind so that I could avoid them. I want to get to a place of real radical love for Black men. A love that is not void of critique, disappointment, anger, critical change, and physical removal when necessary. I don’t want to constantly be preoccupied with men, whether that be with how they can hurt me or how I can reject them. I want to be free of manhood as an oppressive, dominating, and overwhelming construction. This work of degenitalization, Black sexual excess, and revolutionary uselessness that I’m coming into, I believe, is holding what I have now.

This isn’t a goodbye to Black eroticism, bisexuality, or even man-centeredness, but I am surely further uphill.

But then I saw a video by a Black gay man who was in opposition to her piece, and I agreed with his critique of her using gay identity to explain her desire, but his critique also read as dismissive of a Black woman attempting to express her contentions with how women are allowed to desire. So I finally decided to read the piece myself, and it was good. I was surprised by the contents, because my assumptions were turned on their head. I did indeed assume it was about desire, but I assumed she was mapping gayness onto herself because she was “tired” of womanhood not allowing her to be deviant, and she understood gayness as inherently deviant. That her internalized homophobia was leading her to understand gay sexual/erotic desire to be animalistic, and that’s the sexual consumption she wanted excused for herself. That was not what it was at all, but I do think there are a few terms we’re missing that could’ve avoided the confrontation altogether.

In her piece, Janice explored the “perverse” desire that women, and I will specifically input Black women, are not allowed to express. In media, white women are desired, loved on, chased after, fawned over, but they oftentimes are not given the depiction of reciprocity. They must stay pure, soft, hesitant, and patiently waiting for sex and desire to be done to them. However, Black women have always been portrayed as sexually deviant, monstrous, predatory, “overly going”, and insatiable. Because of this, Black women have been forced into constricting and restraining their wants and sexual fantasies so they can escape a stereotype that was never predicated on their participation in it. We’re manipulated into thinking that abstaining will change the mind of the Misogynoirist, but it will not. We will always be the hypersexual nonhuman, whether we fuck unapologetically or not. But because of this fear of the Black “whore” caricature, the “Jezebel”, a lot of Black women have ventured into writing Black love stories that depict Black women as “soft”. As desirable to men, to be chased, to be loved on, to be fawned over. This is not freeing to me. Trying to replicate white “femininity” in our ideas of romance, love, sex, and want will not dispel the societal hypersexuality of Black women; it only reifies purity culture and our own sexual repression. I believe this adds to the milieu that Janice complains about where women cannot want.

She goes on to muse about how it has become “embarrassing” to desire men in our mainstream culture, and it has. As a bisexual Black being, the most common thing I hear is that “you’re lucky because you have another option”. My love of (Black) women isn’t treated as independent of my love of (Black) men; it’s treated as a plan B when men inevitably disappoint me. Queerness is still treated as anomalous, even in the “liberal” mind, where once society fails you, you can move on to a lower stratosphere. The heterosexual’s plight is having to stay “dutiful” to the purity of human romantic pairing. That they (in this case, women) must suffer through disappointment and dissatisfaction to continue their duty to the state, the nuclear family, the human. They don’t get the choice to be a failure, but I do. There are a million issues in this thinking, of course, but I’m focusing on the idea that any one gender is a second option, my desire for someone can be ignored and dismissed, or that because I love women, I don’t have to love men. This is not true. Loving men romantically and erotically will always be a part of my experience, whether it is “embarrassing” in this moment or not. And so in this way, I heavily feel Janice in her work.

She talks about a perversion of want, a visceral, “feral, primal appetite that has nothing to do with what it means and everything to do with what it feels like” that she feels towards men. The way that she experiences erotic feeling when she sees the way men move, act, be, feel. That her want goes far past what Black women are allowed to feel if they are to stay pure, respectable, and in a never-ending race against the label of hypersexuality. This is where she deploys gayness, and how gay men are allowed to express their lust for other men in ways that women are not because the Woman, the Feminist, the Misandrist, is supposed to refuse not just the receiving of desire from men, but to suppress their own desire as if it’s not there at all. As if the inherent want of men, a sexuality towards men, is anti-feminist or counterrevolutionary. She does briefly mention that gayness and gay desire are not void of contention in society, but I do think it’s important to also recognize and acknowledge that not all gay desire is liberatory and lustful. I employ lust as a freeing thing, a good thing, an erotic thing, and a thing that is not extended to gay folks through homonormativity and queer respectability. Mainstream gayness cannot be separated from the same white supremacy, rape, and purity culture that the rest of society lives within. Not all gay folks, not all gay men, are proudly announcing their desire for men with no restraints because we still must adhere to sex as oppressive. To patriarchy. To male-centeredness. I think that was very apparent in the video I saw of the Black gay man who, from my perspective, was very invested in purity and “purifying” gay desire to be appealing to respectability, which is directly connected to whiteness. I believe what Janice is looking for isn’t just the desire of the “gay man”, but a queering of desire.

Black radical/queer feminisms that are invested in the erotic and eroticizing interpersonal relations and liberation at large will explain much better than I can how heteronormativity, sex, and monogamy are meant for mental capture and disembodiment. For the colonial/white supremacist project of the nuclear family, pleasure, consent, and eroticism are not needed, or even tolerated. Domination has no room for real ecstasy. For real pleasure to be possible, there has to be a queering of that pleasure. Queering is a disrespecting, a dismissing, a dismantling of neocoloniality that requires unpleasurable, coercive, disembodied, reproductive sex to continue on white supremacist ideals through the birth of new “citizens”. Queering is coming back to yourself and what is true to your body, your want, your sexual experience. Queering is an exploration of the erotic that is innate to you, that is disinterested in what sex has to look like, what desire has to feel like, what pleasure has to sound like. Not every gay person has queered their desire, and not everyone who has queered their desire is gay. Black queer feminists have done this work for decades, but it is and always has been extended to the straight Black women who long to experience men liberatorily without fear of the “whore”, “ho”, or “easy” moniker. It is possible, and it’s been done.

“i like men the way gay men like men” resonated with me, and I believe it was a perfect example of how and why Black radical feminist thinking and practicing must be deployed in our everyday lives and our real communities outside of the academy. We need Black queer feminism; we need a Black queering of sex. No one, including gay men, is “allowed” to desire men freely in a patriarchal, white supremacist society where men represent and exact danger. If we do not liberate ourselves from that, none of us can really and fully lust.

And I am exhausted, because I am already overstimulated all of the time.

We are in the morning after a meltdown.

Across social media, we hear “I want to have non-verbal time with my friends,” or “once someone says something off to me, I go non-verbal because they lose access to me”. Closer, but not quite.

In my experience, going non-verbal is not just not talking or not feeling like talking at the time, or being anti-social. Going non-verbal is not a punishment to other people for offending you, disrespecting you, or upsetting you. It can occur after those things, but it isn’t a choice. When I go non-verbal, my words sink past my throat and sit heavy on my chest. I cannot reach down and grab them because when I do, they simply travel further to the pits of my stomach. And this doesn’t happen in times when talking is an option; these are in times when I need to advocate for myself, explain my emotions, voice how I was harmed, express my anger; it happens when words are necessary. It is not a punishment for the people I need to talk to; it feels like chains upon myself.

And my mom came to sit with me as she waited for me to speak, but every time she would get up to take her own break, because she was frustrated, thinking I wanted space, or even a shift to get a tissue, the whole cycle of trying to speak again would be restarted. Whenever my environment changes in the smallest regard in those moments, it spikes my overstimulation and plummets my focus on calming down enough to voice my needs. Every time my mom would leave, I cried. And it wasn’t to manipulate her, it wasn’t because I’m childish (even though the guilt of that belief creeps in quite often), it was because my brain was so emotionally swelled that anything and everything externally that changed felt like a cosmic shift.

Then, I was finally able to speak. I apologized and expressed what had hurt my feelings. I wasn’t able to say all, or even most, of what I wanted to say, and it took me two times for me to say it for my mom to be able to hear me, but I did it. I had to coach myself through it, praise myself after it, even though I didn’t get it all out, because that was the only way I could say anything at all. I went on to talk about a potential future opportunity, and my mom’s reaction was positive-neutral and cautionary. Nothing was wrong with her response, but in conjunction with my mental state at the time, it tipped over the threshold of my overstimulation.

Everything became intolerable. My clothes were too close, the fish tank was too loud, the lights were too bright; I was melting down. And a meltdown and a panic attack present themselves differently. I also have an anxiety disorder, and panic attacks are similar, but I feel more of an urge to escape the situation. I need to leave the room, the people I’m around, the conversation I’m in. But with a meltdown, I cannot escape my skin. My hands flail, I’m wailing, I’m falling out of my chair, smushing my ears shut, squeezing my eyes closed, anything to stop the world. There’s a reason that meltdowns haven’t been inducted into mainstream social media vernacular like going “nonverbal”, and it’s because there’s nothing palatable about them. There’s nothing to twist, misinterpret, or redefine about them; there’s nothing “cute” about something that if you weren’t looking close enough, or didn’t care enough to discern, you’d assume was an adult having a tantrum. My mom sat there with me, held me (once I wasn’t actively running from physical touch), and patiently waited until I came back to myself.

I came to y’all with this story for two reasons: one, neurodivergence isn’t “aesthetic”. Being neurodivergent isn’t “quirky,” “weird,” or “alt.” It’s hard. It’s not some misfortune upon me, but it is difficult for me and for the people around me once I get comfortable enough to lean on them for support. Not only is it generally hard, but it’s exponentially harder for a Black, queer, gender variant person born into a world that oppresses me as a woman who’s trying to look for a way to get properly and nondiscriminatorily diagnosed. It is hard.

And two, I cannot turn off my neurodivergence during sex. I cannot stop getting overstimulated by touch and sound just because it’s supposed to be labeled as “arousing” in the new context. I cannot constantly be overstimulated during sex and somehow be able to voice my wants, needs, and desires in the midst of that, just because it’s supposed to be “sexy” now. That’s not how neurodivergence works, but this is who sex forgets.

This, however, is not to say that neurodivergent people do not or cannot have sex. We do all of the time. But not only is the language we use to denote sex and pleasure perpetuating rape culture and misogyny (crack, blow her back out, be put through a mattress, etc.), it’s also very ableist. Nothing about “being put through a mattress” sounds pleasurable to me; it sounds overwhelming. You can play with overstimulation, you can play with emotional thresholds, but the consensual, discussed, and purposeful interaction with limits that exist in Black BDSM are incredibly pathologized in mainstream sex culture because of rape culture. You aren’t supposed to actually verbally and intentionally engage with things like neurodivergence, physical disability, and trauma because the point of “sex” as a mode of oppression is to bypass consent. “Sex” is a means to an end, and that end is eugenics, patriarchy, and the neocolonial nuclear family project. That’s why Black sex is always seen as deviant. Black gay sex. Black disabled sex. Our pleasure is seen as antithetical to what sex is supposed to be used for: producing white children with white ideals.

But when we think of Black sex as more than the nonhuman, deviant, and grotesque activity that white supremacy says it is, Black sex and Black ecstasy can be revolutionary. But it cannot be revolutionary on its own. Reenacting white cisheteropatriarchy does not only happen if you have sex with a white person; you can also perpetuate that same harm with another Black person if you are not externally committed to Black revolution. Radical Black sex starts with your dreams and desires for Black trans women, Black sex workers, Black incarcerated folks, Black elders, Black folks outside of the West. You bring your politic with you everywhere, and that includes into your sex life. In the same way that I cannot strip myself of neurodiversity like panties during sex, I cannot take off my Black feminism either. I cannot separate my partner using me as a means to individual pleasure, from masculinist pro-Black movements using the labor of Black womenfolk for their own false idea of liberation through capitalism and patriarchy. I cannot separate a partner dismissing my overstimulation and discomfort from how we tend to set aside our Black neurodivergent and disabled folks from our movement work. The point is to center and prioritize these people. We cannot wait for the “right time” to include and consider the queer, disabled, neurodivergent, fat, poor, imprisoned, sex-working, non-college-educated Black folks until the rest of us know what we’re doing. We begin to create a hierarchy of worthiness of who can be free (I was actually just called out for this in my “No Nigga Deserves a Blowjob” piece). We decide some of our people need “too much” from us to be free, and therefore, they have to sacrifice themselves for those who have less marginalization. But we are tethered to the most marginalized of us. If the Black sex workers aren’t free, then we cannot have sex liberation at all. If the Black disabled folks aren’t free, then we will never have freedom from the medical industrial complex. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that we can somehow escape this reality of oppression by leaving half of us to die within it. It will not work.

I say this all of the time, but I believe in Black sex liberation so much because it is one of the most accessible ways to understand our subjugation. It can get hard to understand or explain the prison industrial complex, neocolonialism, imperialism, Afropessimism, etc. (it’s critical to understand these things, and they are explainable obviously, but they are very dense); but sex, pleasure, ecstasy, and how we do not get those things are much easier to comprehend. You may not get right away how the white-man-made atrocity and genocide in the DRC and Sudan directly affect you, but if I start with why you haven’t been able to be inside your body during sex despite “consent”, we’ll probably get somewhere pretty quickly.

I want us to invest in finding ways to pleasure each other in the same way I want us to invest in finding ways to free each other without stipulations of who, what, when, where, and how. In the same way that I need us to intentionally touch, speak, hold, and engage with each other sensually in a manner that holds space for overstimulation, physical pain, confusion, indecision, and exhaustion, I need us to intentionally create space in our work and in our movements for those of us who live the most outside of reality. It’s not about making sex unpleasurable or making freedom unreasonable; it’s about making those things whole.

The cover is a slightly humorous note of mine from the other day on Instagram, as a call to engage in more sensory-friendly ways to feel pleasure. Why can’t we get our pussies blown on more? Why can’t we have our nipples and boobs gently rubbed instead of intensely sucked? Why can’t we softly rock back and forth on someone’s lap instead of “getting our backs blown out”? Why does pleasure have to come at the cost of my comfort? Why does freedom have to come at the cost of my life? We know that the revolution will be violent and sacrificial and deathly and hard. But it only costs my life if it leaves me out. If it leaves me to die at the hands of white supremacy instead of with the strength of my people. There is honor in giving your life in the fight for liberation, and there is beauty in experiencing pleasure even when it doesn’t look like “sex”.

I want to reiterate that I’m okay with being “a lot”. Being “a lot” is why I want so much for my people. It’s why I want so much for myself. It’s hard, it’s lonely, it’s scary, it’s tiring, but I’m okay with searching. I’m loving this journey of searching and finding the folks who understand where I’m coming from and where I’m going. It’s a lot, but I’m a lot, and we’re a lot, and we deserve a new world.

P.S. If you have the privilege to, I say try to do or engage in something pleasurable that meets all of your physical and emotional needs today. It doesn’t have to be inherently sexual, just do something that aligns with how you feel good, not just what “feeling good” is supposed to look like. Mwah.

Let me start by saying, I’m no “sexy, Soulaan, Black American princess”. I’m sexy and Black, but chile that’s about it. My father is Ghanian, my mother is West Indian, and I was raised in a small, poor town in Pennsylvania without much outside interaction for the first 8 years of my life. I’m neurodivergent, kind of awkward, and notoriously only recognize 1 in 7 pop culture references people casually throw around. For all intents and purposes, I didn’t sound “Black” growing up. I was constantly reminded of my lack of a Blaccent, my lack of Black American folk knowledge, my lack of Blackness. And I felt so targeted and embarrassed and isolated. I felt wronged.

Until I realized that those were children, and I brought half of it onto myself.

I think that the “I was bullied for not acting Black” and the “the darkskinned girls bullied me for being lightskinned” declarations come from a common place. Whenever I hear the lightskin folks dem (specifically the womenfolk) complain about the darker-skinned girls bullying them for being lighter, for having looser curls, for “looking less Black”, I hear two things: one, these darkskinned Black girls were taught to internalize anti-Blackness, colorism, and a sense of ugliness that they then projected on the lightskinned girls to feel better about not being accepted anywhere else. If they have to be persecuted for being dark, then the next best thing is to make darkness an in-group. And two, those lightskinned girls probably acted like they were better than the same girls they accused of treating them as inferior. I’m not saying they deserved to be ostracized or picked on; I’m saying that colorism is deeply embedded in our community. In the ways we call looser hair “good hair”, how we’re told not to do all that playing in the sun, how our men gravitate towards lightness, how lightskinned Black folks are generally “picked”. We’re taught that lightness is something to aspire to, and that trickles down into how light kids subconsciously act around their darker peers. Subtle looks, distancing themselves, offhand comments that they parrot from their parents. They might not remember that part because lightness as rightness is normalized, but dark folks perpetuating harm against lighter folks is seen as unacceptable and novel.

Now take those same conclusions and apply them to the kids who were bullied for “not acting Black”, like me. I was told I sounded white, I acted white, my hair wasn’t done right, etc. Now, before I go on and say what I’m about to say, the three things that come out of my mouth the most are “dick”, “pussy”, and “please stop with the damn diaspora wars”. Keep that in mind. But it’s critical to know where the diaspora wars come from and how they manifest if we’re going to end them. Unity and coalition breed resistance and revolution, and that’s the biggest fear of the White Man. The diaspora wars are very divisive and efficient in weaponizing what we don’t know and planting what white supremacy wants us to think we know. All that to say, in my household, explicitly or not, there was anti-Black American sentiment. Little comments of ghettoness, danger, judgment, and disappointment permeated the ways my father talked about Black American folk. Despite his “pro-Blackness”, I now realize the holes in my father’s politic when it came to the people that colonialism wanted African folks to believe were sullying their roots. And with that, I took that rhetoric with me to school, and subconsciously walked with the belief that I was smarter, more respectable, and ultimately better than the Black kids who’d “act out”.

I don’t say all that to say that some people aren’t really ostracized for not adhering to the monolithic picture of Blackness that we’re sold, but there is a particular attitude that usually accompanies these folks, especially after a while of being isolated and ridiculed. This feeling of injustice and superiority begins to develop, and the need for any old thing to be included in Blackness is demanded. The real component of “acting Black” isn’t having a certain drawl, or using the right slang, or knowing every line of Friday; “acting Black” is being of the people. Loving the people and not feeling superior to the people because you have a couple of extra dollars, you don’t wear Nike Tech, you don’t say “nigga”, or you know how shuck and jive for white folks a little better than the rest of us. You can be alt, neurodivergent, weird, non-American, queer, and whatever else lies outside of “mainstream Blackness” and still be just as Black as long as you know it.

So next time you feel inclined to defend yourself or see someone else complaining about “not sounding Black” and being checked for it, think about what’s behind that, and if it’s a critique of dehumanization or a point of white-appealing pride.

I’m gonna try to make this quick.

Between the second-to-last time and the last time I gave a nigga head, I said that I’d never give a nigga head again. That might seem contradictory, but it was because the last time was what really solidified my choice, while before then, it was just in theory that I felt something was intrinsically wrong. The last time, I told my sex partner I do not like giving blowjobs, that I will not be doing that for him, and we agreed. But in the “heat of the moment,” he neglected my boundary of using a condom, and asked me for head. I could’ve said no, sure, but I was coming out of a relationship where I was sexually assaulted and coerced, I was naive, and I didn’t know how to—or that I could—advocate for myself in sexual situations. I stopped in the middle of it and shut down, which led to me being taken home earlier than planned, and that was the last time I saw him.

That interaction taught me something crucial: even the niggas that believe in “sexual liberation for women”, even the ones that “prioritize” women’s pleasure, even the queer ones, put a time limit and a situational restriction on when their partner deserves pleasure, and when it’s their turn. The times before then, when we had sex, there was no penetration, and it was the first time I squirted with a partner (I soon realized that squirting and cumming are very different things, and I in fact did not cum), and I had a lovely time. I still battled with feelings of shame, fear, and trauma, but the act itself was enjoyable. My pleasure was centered, my pleasure was prioritized, my “no” was respected, my “yes” was praised. But I realized that last time, whether he meant to/consciously planned it or not, I was being prepped and primed to be set aside. We were getting my needs “out of the way”, so that his could be centered. If that weren’t the case, then he wouldn’t have “forgotten” that I said I would not have penetrative sex without a condom. He wouldn’t have asked me to do something for him that I explicitly said I was uncomfortable doing. It was my own Marissa-Ramses situation (you know? from Love is Blind? Never mind, sorry).

When I say that no nigga deserves a blowjob, a Nigga is a very specific person. A Nigga in this iteration is a person socialized as a (Black, because I wasn’t gonna be giving a white man anything no way) man, queer or not, “feminist” or not, “radical” or not, who at the end of the day holds the patriarchal ideal that womxnfolk’s sexual obligation is to serve. Not just pleasure, but specifically to be dominated. They might placate you first or intimidate you right away, but it always comes back to domination with these types of men.

There’s a specific amount of care that has to be embodied if you want someone to give you head that these niggas do not know how to—or want to—possess. The act of physically silencing someone, potentially choking them, pulling their head into your groin, overwhelming their senses in multiple ways; blowjobs can turn into face-fucking, can turn into objectification in a split second in the hands of someone who already leaned into the belief that they have a patriarchal ownership of pleasure instead of an intimate connection to it. Putting your own pleasure in the hands of someone else to fulfill, expecting someone else to do something for you that you are unwilling to do yourself, or you feel isn’t your “job” to do, perpetuates subservience.

And I reflect on Savior’s incredible article “Let’s Talk About Genital Preferences” at least once a week, and twice on an existential week (and those are becoming much more frequent in these times). How do I perpetuate transphobia in how I uncontestedly allow my trauma to manifest? What did the dick itself do to me? Why do I feel like pussies are safer? How is assuming that vulvas are inherently less aggressive still perpetuating the same patriarchy that has militarized the penis? And I keep these questions with me. It’s not the dick that I’m scared of, it’s not even men that I’m resistant to, it’s white supremacist patriarchy that I refuse. Penises do not belong to men, and neither does patriarchy. The practice of sexual domination is rampant throughout the gender spectrum because systems of oppression are made to indoctrinate and evolve. They are insidious and invisible. They are passed down through the ways we talk about eating pussy as foreplay instead of sex, sex as an act instead of an experience, pleasure as checkpoints instead of the entire journey.

No nigga deserves a blowjob because no Nigga is detached from how white supremacy, patriarchy, and queerphobia say that Black folks socialized as women should yield to their dick. You could eat my pussy ‘till the sun comes up, but if you forget you’re a “feminist” when it comes time for me to give you head, like there’s supposed to be a specific time, like pleasure is transactional, like I need to be superficially satiated so that we can get back to the point, then it means nothing to me.

I have all the love for the Black women across the diaspora who are teaching how to suck dick right, how to make him sing, how to get nasty with it, because I do think that there is a form of sexual liberation in educating on how to pleasure your partner to those who have been systemically stripped of sexual education, sexual autonomy, and sexual beingness. But I just think it’s important to remember that sucking dick has to be a personal desire, not an outward obligation, because with how these niggas be acting, no nigga deserves a muthafucking thing.

As I stated in my piece about my time in the Black Queer Everything Institute in DC, I’m going to start my ethnographic project on Black queer sexual fantasy and desire as a mode of liberation. Since then, I’ve been reflecting on my own fantasies and what exists in my mind as so pleasurable that it makes me feel free.

I consider myself quite a feminine thing, and I’ve come to realize that I’m incredibly attracted to a masculinity that worships my femininity, not undermines it. I only find freedom in Blackness, and therefore I only find pure pleasure in Blackness. And then the further down I get in my pleasure fantasies, the closer I get to what I see as orgasmic liberation, Black womanhood lies at the center. Black womanhood that isn’t confined by fictitious promises of safety through cisheteronormativity, white supremacist femininity, or docility.

Because even inside of Black womanhood, the crux of the revolution, there are some falsehoods and facades. Rich Black women. Straight Black women. Cis Black women. Black women who try to trade in this oppressive form of sexual purity for social respectability. But there are the Black women and the Black folk socialized as women who have already accepted that Black women will always be “hos” in an anti-Black and misogynoiristic world, and have realized that there is nothing—besides liberation—that can change that. Therefore, they refuse the ruse of respectability, of purity, or modesty, and proudly exist as hos.

(As I’ve said before,) Zalika Ibaorimi’s “ho ontology” really changed how I think about freedom and who freedom needs to serve. If the hos aren’t free, then we aren’t free. I consider myself one of those hos. If I’m not free, then you aren’t free. But then I began to think: since I’m not free, who else isn’t either?

I believe the epitome of liberation through expression exists within the Stud. You see, Black womanhood already exists outside of human womanhood, purposefully so. Black womanhood is an oxymoron in a lot of ways. Womanhood is a human signifier, and Blackness is the antithesis of humanity. But that doesn’t mean that materially, Black womanhood isn’t real. Black womenfolk throughout history, both through and after slavery, and colonialism/neocolonialism, have been self-identifying and redefining what it means to be a woman. Sure, womanhood was created by white supremacy to give manhood something to dominate and protect against Blackness, but Black people have been rewriting and recreating for ourselves forever. So Black womanhood isn’t womanhood; it’s beyond it. And every day, it’s being expanded and recrafted to be more freeing.

In white supremacy’s womanhood, femininity and masculinity cannot exist together. Femininity is supposed to be an inferior and protected identity, while masculinity is meant to be the superior and militarized identity. They were intentionally split because with unity comes freedom. But studs have completely transformed that. The womenfolk who are masculine-of-center are reclaiming the masculinity that they’re told is “unnatural” to them, and utilizing it to complement, not dominate, the femininity of their partners and the other Black womenfolk around them. Of course, some try to appeal to patriarchal superiority by perpetuating the same violence as white men do, just like some Black men try to emulate, but at the core of stud identity, there is freedom.

“But there has to be more”, I thought. There is no end to freedom, there is no end to pleasure, so what goes deeper? Who else has had to self-define their femininity and womanhood because society has refused them? Black trans women are facing a very particular genocide inside of Blackness that is largely being ignored by, well, everyone. The white supremacist movement has the most obvious reasons to hate Black trans women, but down the hierarchy, they are still denied life. The white gay movement ignores anything that shines a light on its white privilege. The Black masculinist movement refuses anything that challenges its appeal to power through patriarchy. The Black feminist movement (at large, things change the more radical we get, of course) ignores anything that complicates its “respectable femininity”. And the Black queer movement excludes anything that strays too far away from the gender binary and how whiteness would have us understand queerness. Everywhere you go, there’s an invisible yet incredibly material sign of “No Black Trans Women Allowed”. They want them dead, they want them hiding, they want them impoverished.

Or, they want them to pass.

I’m in the midst of reading “Protect the Dolls Means Defend the Bricks Too: A Call-In to My Fellow Trans Sisters” by Nsámbu Za Suékama, and it got me thinking about even amongst the most marginalized of us, who gets access to the scraps? “Passing” within the trans community, especially in the Black trans community, where being “clocked” as trans is even more dangerous, has created such a rift between us. Even within gender-nonconforming identities, if you look too much like your “birth identity”, you aren’t doing your due diligence. You don’t “pass” as queer, and there is a white respectability to be acquired even in that. Somehow, we’ve still come back around to “you’re only a woman if you look like it”, even within the spaces that should theoretically be the most adverse to these labels and qualifications of womanhood. For that same reason, studs are treated like men, or even infantilized as little boys or confused little girls who just are “tired” of being women. That’s something that specifically the white trans man community misses; the “confused little girl” buff is not specific to just them. Queer Black girls have had that thrown at them forever. “You’ll come to like men”, “you’ll realize another woman is too much drama”, “you’ll grow out of those little boy clothes”. Gender is a performance, and gender is an obligation. Both studs and trans women disrespect that performance, and disassociate themselves from the obligation of femininity, especially Black trans women who don’t set “passing” as their ultimate goal.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met or heard of a trans stud. It’s very rare in the first place to see trans women who aren’t hyper-feminine, or who don’t try to appeal to patriarchal men’s standards of beauty and attractiveness (this is largely for safety, because being “visibly trans”, specifically as a Black person is extremely dangerous). But then, for a Black trans woman who isn’t “abandoning” their masculinity and instead is incorporating it into the heart of their true identity, I’m sure I’ve never seen. What would it mean for the world, the Black world, the free world, to foster trans stud identity? What would have to change? Everything (as I’ve already alluded to). White supremacy would have to be killed. White supremacy is what needed gender so that the human could be man, and the nonhuman could be Black. Womanhood would have to be released from whiteness/humanity, or more accurately, womanhood would have to be no more. It might seem contradictory as a trans stud is a woman, but a trans stud is a Black, transgender, masculine-of-center woman, which isn’t a “woman” at all. Womanhood as it was created, for whom it was created, must also be dismantled.

And at the heart of the identity, a trans stud is a woman who exists for women, Black women. Masculinity in the hands of a woman is transformed. It begins to do the exact opposite of what it was weaponized to do. It cares for women instead of fighting against men in this eternal pissing contest. Women are no longer objects or subjects of possession; they are partners in pleasure and desire. Trans studs are the nightmare of the White Man because they defy every system of shame, respectability, fear, and unfreedom that was built on top of Blackness. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t met or seen a trans stud; they aren’t some mythical, fantastical being that “just might” be the key to our freedom, they’re the realest thing there is, and until the very idea of trans stud identity is free, then neither are we.

I want to have impossible sex. I want to have sex that doesn’t include penetration of any kind: not someone’s dick scraping against the inside of my body until it threatens my womb, or someone’s fingers twisting and pulling at me to call forth something I don’t want to answer with, or someone’s tongue coming to whisper something I do not want to hear.

I don’t want these things, not because they don’t have the potential to feel good, feel explosive, feel treacherously arousing, but because they do not make me feel erotic.

I was never a “virgin”, not even when I was born. I was born into a world that places hypersexualization, danger, and nonhumanity on Black subjects before we know we’re Black, before we know we’re damned, before we know we’re dead. My first encounter with sexual misuse was before I started kindergarten. I did not have the privilege of innocence. I have nothing to lose but shame.

No matter how I try or hope, my abuse, assault, and rape are embedded in how I experience sex. This is not a carceral judgment, a devastating punishment; it is simply the reality I live in. I live in a reality that has raped my ancestors, terrorized my people, and stolen from me. I do not come to sex looking for only pleasure; I come looking for freedom.

I want to have impossible sex. I want to be pulled into a lover’s lap, we sink further into a bed that I own, that I rest in, that I write in, dream in, that I find safety in. I do not want my sex to exist in places I do not know. I want their hands on my hips, squeezing my flesh, their lips near my neck or my shoulder or my heart, and I’m talking.

My sex exists in words. In stories. In the thoughts I need to express, the ideas I need to explain, the frustrations I need to expel. My sex only exists with a lover who understands me. A lover who loves their Blackness in a world that’s built on top of it. A lover who mobilizes their queerness against projects that use heteronormativity as a vehicle for colonialism. A lover who doesn’t see exclusivity as inherent commitment. A lover who doesn’t need me to be a woman, a human, a “sexual” being to love me and offer me pleasure. I want a lover who erotically worships the thing that I am.

My sex is performed through kisses and “yes”s. When my partner has their head nestled between my thighs, they leave love along my rippled and stretched skin, and when I read to them the new things I’ve written, or when I recite an excerpt from the book that’s held above my head, they “hm” and “damn” and “that’s a word” along with me. Jennifer C. Nash and adrienne maree brown and M. Jacqui Alexander are always having sex with us. Them and god, because my lover(s) will be the ones I praise.

I do not want to be overstimulated during sex, I do not want to struggle to find words, I do not want to be drunk with pleasure; that is not what makes me feel erotic. The overwhelming, all-encompassing (even when it’s slow and “attentive”) sex scares me, and that is not erotic. I know that fear is combatted with courage, but I am not courageous; I am exhausted. I am tired of having to parse through 13 years of on-and-off sexual misconduct and violence. This “healing work” would not be for myself; I feel just fine when I am not being thrust inside of or sucked on or asked, “What do you want?” “What makes you feel good?” “What do you want next?” Because I know what I want. I know what makes me feel good. I know what’s next for me. I want orgasmic liberation for Black folks across the diaspora. The possibility of Black queer folk feeling the ultimate pleasure of freedom is what makes me feel good. I am looking towards a violent revolution inspired by the Haitians and the deliciously sinister and sly rootworkers as the next thing. I do not need to be dicked down the right way, or eaten out until my eyes roll back, or someone to serenade the pussy just right to heal me. My work is healing me just the same.

I want sex that doesn’t ask of me nakedness, or sexy words, or an orgasm, or tired limbs, or wrestling thoughts of when I wasn’t asked at all and was told and forced instead. I don’t want sex that demands labels from me, makes me choose between asexuality or allosexuality, or makes me decide if my fear only lies with cisgender men. I don’t want sex that calls me a hypocritical Black erotic, or bisexual, or sex enthusiast, or fantasizer.

I want to have impossible sex. Sex that’s called anything but by everyone else. “That’s cuddling.” “You’ve only kissed or made out.” “You’re only reading to your partner.” The things that make me feel like my erotic self without having to find the pleasure within it, it’s just there.

And that’s not to say I’ll never have sex the “recognizable” way again, or that a partner/lover could never build enough safety with me for the opportunity to explore to present itself, but that is not what I’m working towards. I’m not looking for my mind to be changed, my body to be wooed, my pussy to be flooded. I don’t want mind-blowing sex; I like my mind to stay intact. I like to feel in control, I know where that need comes from, and I am okay with it. I like not to struggle with articulating myself more than I already do as a neurodivergent person. I like to feel warm and soft with slow strokes and pets on my back and the reassurance of a listening ear. I like exploring what my people find sexually pleasurable and arousing without having to use it as a roadmap or playbook for what I should try next. I like just being me.

And will I find a partner, two partners, three partners who understand this and want this and enjoy this impossible sex too? I don’t know. But I miss intimacy; I’m not quite sure I ever had it. Truly experienced sensual touch without expectation, touch that was treated as the point instead of as a gateway to whatever else they, or that I convinced myself that I, wanted. I want sex that starts and ends with “Would you like me to read your draft?”, with “Can you help me plan my next movement space?”, with “I love you.” That is what I’ll be searching for and healing for and working towards.

I want to have impossible sex.

I recently watched the third season of the show Euphoria, directed by Sam Levinson (the white devil). I watched it not because of interest, but because I watched the first two seasons when I was a young teen, and I wanted to see how I understood it now as a radical adult (and for the purpose of writing a paper on it). After watching it and being horrifically disgusted, I distanced myself from thoughts of it altogether, and the paper fell to the wayside, but a spiral of conversation somehow brought it back up, and I came right back to being appalled. So let me bring this to you right quick, and not leave this conversation up to the “leftist” white folks.

Euphoria isn’t a standalone issue; it’s just a microcosm of how unsafe and anti-child our culture is. I didn’t have a safe childhood. I was exposed to toxic sex culture before I started first grade, and that painted the rest of my developmental years. But even with that, I had options. I had an outside to play in, I had kid-appropriate shows to watch, I had games to play, I had books to read. Those things didn’t “save” me, but they anchored me to some kind of childhood wonder. I struggled with the concept of innocence, but I had something that I could safely say was for me, for kids. But the kids of today (and by today, I mean starting back at the beginning of the pandemic) don’t have that privilege. Our society, specifically in America, is too unsafe to send your child out in the world without a phone to reach you, and the internet, no matter how much we try to make it, is not “child-friendly”. No parental controls, no YouTube Kids, no website blocks, will stop children from accessing things on the internet that they have no business being exposed to. And the fact of the matter is, these kids are smarter than us. They were raised on the internet, and they know how to manipulate it much better than we know how to protect them from it. Our cities are becoming exponentially unwalkable and unplayable. You can’t go anywhere unless you can drive, you can’t do anything unless you have money, and children have little to no access to those things. So what else is there to do besides be on their phone? That is where unsafe content festers: boredom.

I remember when I watched Euphoria for the first time, it was just because I could. I wasn’t particularly interested in the premise; I was just bored and saw discourse about it circulating on Twitter and Instagram. The whimsical colors, the psychedelic music, and the salaciousness of it all allured me. It felt “adult”, like I was secretly enjoying something and “understanding” something that only grown-ups would get, but the truth was, I was the exact target audience. The truth is, Euphoria may be branded as for “mature audiences”, but the people it thrives off of are children who cannot tell “mature” from “deviant”.

The third and last season of Euphoria was absolutely disgusting. Every single part of it read like it was made by a pedophile (*COUGH COUGH*) for other pedophiles to enjoy and for kids to giggle and gasp at. There was no complex theme, no lesson, nothing to introspect on that would justify the show being for adult minds; it’s really very simple. All it is is rape, drugs, white supremacy, and violence. When people on threads theorized that one of the strippers had a camera in her neck brace, I knew that wasn’t going to happen because it would’ve made too much sense. Sam Levinson isn’t smart, isn’t a visionary, isn’t “deep”; he’s a pedophilic, disgusting, depraved, white supremacist who used Sydney Sweeney’s equally white supremacist ass to actualize all of his distorted fantasies.

Actually, let’s talk about Sydney’s character for a second. Cassie is a caricature of the “defiled white girl” that all white men are afraid of their daughters becoming, and also fetishize other people’s daughters for being. It’s the same reason that white men are so obsessed with Black men and the Black penis; they are simultaneously “protecting” their white women from the BBC while having this homoerotic desire to be cucked. To be dominated by the superhuman masculinity and hypersexuality of the Black man. No one thinks about Black dick more than white men, period. And in a very similar way, they are consumed by the thought of a white woman sex worker because that is the job of a Black or Brown woman, not their precious princess. White fantasy always has to be “devious”, so while they create laws against sex work and the like, they crave the “defiling” of the little (big on little!) white girl with huge titties and tiny brain that doesn’t know any better than to throw herself at them unless she’s stopped. Unless these men “hold back”. Unless all sexuality is reigned in. These people are wicked. Cassie put on a diaper for her OnlyFans. What else could that be? It wasn’t a commentary on the hardcore porn industry; it was a commentary on what Sam Levinson wanted to see on screen. Fae shit herself. SHIT. HERSELF. You really think that had anything to do with the plot? Don’t make me say it again (these people are fucking wicked).

That was not an actual depiction of sex work, nor were the strippers in Alamo’s club. These events and episodes had nothing to do with showing the reality of sex work and the connection with trafficking and drugs; it was all for the element of scandal. There’s nothing about Jules getting wrapped in Saran wrap or Cassie as a giant pressing her boobs into the glass of an entire office building, or Rue and Fae deepthroating balls of fent that should appeal to a grown adult. There’s nothing to decipher about this show; there’s nothing about it. It’s only for the sexually deviant, the white supremacist, and the undeveloped.

Euphoria appeals to children so much because it feels like a secret. It’s gross, there’s so much going on, it’s labeled as “adult”, so they feel grown. They think they’ve matured because they “get” it, but they “get” it because the whole thing is placed right in front of them. It’s not complex sexuality, it’s not nuanced use of drugs, it’s simple (I’m going to keep saying this). Sam is simple. You don’t need to do much to hook a child. They start internalizing this salacious, deviant, over-the-top, outrageous piece of shit as what sex is, what drug use is, what adult life is, and what they should aspire to. I used to think that it was ridiculous when adults would say that kids will start wanting to do the things that they see on TV, because I was convinced I was too “individual” for that. But I wasn’t making my own choices; if anything, Euphoria just convinced me even more that my childhood sexual abuse was normal, that’s how serious this is (I’m getting so hot). That my teenagehood would be empty if I weren’t engaged in illegality and immorality, that I was “boring”. Mind you, everything else besides drugs and “consensual” sex (because the sex in that show was far from consensual, even when it was), but I still believed that I wasn’t getting the full experience. I wasn’t trying to be “fast”; I was being convinced that I was slow.

And that’s why children are undeniably an oppressed class, especially (specifically) poor Black and Brown kids. We are adultified immediately. We don’t get to be children, not just because of our white supremacist society, but because people see children as inconvenient. In a capitalist, anti-intellectual society, there isn’t time for kids. There isn’t time to really see what your kids are consuming. There isn’t time to really teach your kids about sex and drugs before other kids or fuck ass shows can get to it first. Children aren’t considered in the walkability of cities, the cost of living, the prison industrial complex, in deportation, in rape culture, or sometimes in our own movement work. We continue to say that “the children are our future”, but it’s like we’re only considering the children that are to come in this “new world” and not the ones that are being raised and neglected in the same one that we are fighting against now. Yes, the children are always ours, but what are we doing for them? We’re letting them keep going to school to learn that slavery actually gave their ancestors some “useful skills” and that the only way out of the hood is through the entertainment industry? That entrepreneurship and Streamer University will fix it? And I scrutinize myself as well. I want to be an adult sex literacy educator, but how do we educate the children? How do we make sure they don’t turn into adults with an unhealthy relationship with sex and the self? The way that our children are treated as if they have no autonomy is unacceptable. How are you supposed to survive as both Black and an unconsidered child in this world? We can’t just “own” the children; we need to hold the children. Protect them. Fight for them. Let them whisper to us so we can shout for them.

Euphoria is a horrendous disaster that acts as if it’s supposed to be for adults when really it’s for kids to learn how white supremacists want the world to carry on. Malcolm already told us not to be fools and allow the enemy to teach our children, and that’s the exact point of that show. I’m so over it, y’all. We’ll be getting back to regular programming soon, I just needed to get this off my chest.

P.S. Watch Dying for Sex! That show is actually for adults, and it’s a spectacular piece of art. It’s a perfect example of sex, trauma, and depth that caters to the adult brain to really introspect. A child would find that boring as fuck, and that’s exactly what I like to see.

If I tried to cover the entire experience, I would be writing a dissertation, so instead I’m going to frame this paper around the project that I will be diving into as my fulfillment of the year-long portion of the fellowship. My mentor will be Dr. Marlon Bailey, the Black gay sex king, and I couldn’t be happier or more excited. I really didn’t figure out what I wanted my project to be until the day that we were presenting our ideas for it, so I went in with no notes, no articulation, just purely vibes and the preface that I wanted to eat ass (no seriously, one of the fellows included my verbatim quote from one of our conversations in his mini appreciation speech for me and I unironically almost cried with love).

For context, the two most potent lessons from my time with BQE were that not everything needs to be let go of, and that you are what you do, not what you say. The second one may seem simple and obvious, but I was taught it in the simplest and most beautiful way, and it changed me all the more. I unconsciously packed and prepared almost all blue. My jewelry, my clothes, my nails; somehow, everything that I had about me was blue. And that might seem innocuous, but it’s important to note that for the longest time, I’ve said that my favorite color is pink. My bedsheets, my favorite attire, my glasses (the ones that I used to wear; the ones I wear now are noticeably majority blue), everything was pink. I loved the cuteness and softness of pink and felt in some strange way that I had a duty to the color to prove that gendering colors was ridiculous, and I didn’t have to run away from pink for my genderqueerness to be recognized. And, I’m not sure when things changed, but they did. I’ve found myself so drawn to shades of blue, to the water, to the earth, to an erotic flow of thingness (we talked about the connection between Afropessimistic nonexistence, critique, and the fear of being a thing during the fellowship; a longer conversation will be in order at some point). I didn’t even realize that this was occurring until multiple fellows pointed out how much blue I wore and how good it looked on me. Whenever you meet new people and mean to bond quickly on a surface level, “What’s your favorite color?” comes up. And I was prompted to think it through for once instead of blurting out pink. What do my actions say my favorite color is? Who do my actions say that I am? I almost missed this revelation, but the environment I was in made space to question, dissect, and interrogate everything through a Black, queer, and erotic lens, and now my favorite color is blue.

Dr. Ashon Crawley taught us a lot about Black queerness in the church and visual art. One of the days, he presented to us some of his works where he visually represented praise breaks and worship through clapping paint onto a canvas or beating pigmented powder into paper with his feet. I nearly cried during this, and I surely was rendered speechless. The last thing I was expecting from this institute was for it to deconstruct my internalized hatred or fear of religion. In (white) queer spaces specifically, there’s a tendency to demonize religion and belief. That it’s traumatizing, stifling, degrading, and the antithesis to queer affirmation. And with no hesitation, I say that a lot of times, that’s exactly what it is. Being raised Christian by conservative immigrant parents played a very integral part in ruining my childhood. I have a very vivid memory of being forced to fall on my face and pray and beg for forgiveness for my sexual abuse at the time. Nearly everything that I was subliminally taught about Christianity centered on fear, shame, and inferiority (because you can say “Jesus loves you” all you want, but if you exemplify the carcerality of hell to your child for years, there’s nothing you can say to override that). And that’s stuck with me. I’ve very recently and very slowly begun to understand that the white queer tendency to discard all aspects of religion does come back to liberalism and anti-Blackness (I have a paper coming on that, watch out), but that resentment towards Christianity and “faith” has not dissipated. But then one of the fellows told me about how they have intertwined their queerness, Christianity, Blackness, and identity as Southern all into this conglomerate of trueness. How they cannot discount the praise, the worship, the guidance, the healing, the joy, the strength, the freedom that Black people, and specifically Black women, have found through faith in their God (there’s a book called White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus by Jacquelyn Grant that I’ve known about for a while that I still mean to read). They studied the creation and inner workings of Christianity specifically during their undergraduate career, and still came out believing. That was a transformative conversation for me. It didn’t convince me to invest back into Christianity or religion at all, but it asked me, “Why do you feel that you need to let everything go to be free?” “What are you unwilling to let go of?” “What does have to be left behind vs. what have you been told you must leave behind?” And those questions have carried me to my project.

The Desire We Refuse to Set Down

I’m not sure if that will really be the title of this project, and that was an incredibly long intro, but we’re getting to a point. During the institute, we talked about sex a lot (hence the conversation of ass eating being fostered). We talked about some more “TMI” things like how we want to be turned over, our best times having sex, our favorite kinks, who likes to get spit on, etc, but most of our conversations leaned more sexually radical, inquisitive, and erotic in the ways that I love most. We discussed when you should teach your children sexual education and masturbation practices, how we’ve found ourselves in an erotophobic society, and what it means to be sexually free as Black queer folx. It was such a romantic experience to hear and see people look to me for erotic musings as if I know what I’m talking about (which I do, actually. It’s really amazing to see the fruits of your passion and research). Not only that, but something that I’ve resented is how hypersexual and ignorant conversations around sex and sexual liberation tend to get with people my age, especially cisgender men. There were two cis men in my cohort, and they meaningfully contributed to our conversation as well as honestly and humbly listened to the knowledge that I had to give. It was healing to say the least.

But back to the lessons I learned. For one, I had to come back to the truth that I don’t actually like sex. This is something else that we talked through, and I realized that being a Black erotic and loving sex doesn’t mean I have to like having it. It’s not that I’ve hated all the sex I’ve had, but there are simply so many other ways that I’d rather express my attraction and desire for intimacy to someone. It’s not just what you say, or what you feel you must say, that makes you who you are. Sex is my work, my life, and my passion, not my particular mode of enjoyment. And I’m so okay with that. Before, I wasn’t; I felt hypocritical and broken, but this institute changed that for me. I don’t feel the need to identify as asexual or really dissect this in relation to my sexual trauma; I’m okay with just being for now.

Two, I aim to live in my sexual fantasy. I have thought so much about sexual fantasy and imagination during this past week. What is the interconnection between us not collectively being able to sexually fantasize and not being able to see ourselves in a free reality? What are the correlations between disregarding what we secretly sexually desire and dismissing our “unrealistic” dreams for an Afrofuture? Imagination unregulated by the confines of a white supremacist world is the portal to liberatory success. If you can’t dream it, you can’t do it. That’s why one of the most integral tenets of oppression is a very intentional and soul-breaking limit on what we can imagine. The perma-waft of “it is what it is” that is blown over everything about Black enslavement and unfreedom is purposeful. It’s an enslavement of the mind; you just have to believe that there’s no road to freedom, and that’s all that’s needed for it to be true. This same phenomenon can be found in how a lot of us, specifically Black folx socialized as women, are taught about sex. You will eventually have to settle. It’s going to have to hurt sometimes; you’re not going to always want it, you’re going to have to do some things you don’t want to do to properly satisfy your partner. It just is what it is. But I don’t want to live in the world of “it is what it is”, I want to live in the fantasy where it’s never anything that I don’t want it to be. I want to live in my mind (we also talked about mad studies, and it’s deeply interesting to me. How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind is making a fast track to the top of my TBR list); live in a world that’s not governed by what is possible or sensible or proper. Everything Black and free is perfectly reasonable to me because my truest sexual fantasy is freedom.

In realizing that the physical act of sex doesn’t do it for me, I’ve been thinking about what does arouse me. What I do fantasize about. It goes much deeper than who I find attractive; it’s about what activates my body to do. What do my fantasies drive me towards? I’m turned on by Black fatness in motion. By Black women with deep voices who use that voice to command and demand. By Black men who cry when they’re overwhelmed with desire or passion. By old Black folx that masturbate in the daytime. I’m aroused by expressions of erotic freedom that defy all conceptions of respectability, cleanliness, decorum, or restraint. I fantasize about the nasty, overwhelming, loud, orgasmic thing which is the Black liberation we are crafting. That’s what I’m not willing to let go.

And so finally, what I want to do for my project is collect the stories and the deepest sexual fantasies and desires of queer Black folx. I want to hear about the things my people feel they don’t deserve, that they feel they can never have access to, that don’t even exist yet; I want to know how my people want to be touched, tasted, praised, seen. I want to know if they want to be fucked or made love to. I want to know how they will feel free. After collecting these accounts of fantasy, I want to make them fantastical. I’m a becoming storyteller, I love storytelling, and I firmly believe that people understand their lives far better when it’s told back to them through the lens of whimsy. Folktales, myths, past-truths; these are timeless ways of teaching and expressing our lived experiences. I want these stories to act as a roadmap to liberation through understanding what our people most want. Their desires have been pathologized in the same way that running away from a master or resisting colonization was. Our desire for freedom has always been painted as antithetical to sense, and that’s what I want to capture through sexual want and visual art (specifically nude pictures): freedom won’t make no sense, it’s just what we know.

I’m overjoyed that I get to think of and work towards something like this just as much as I’m overwhelmed by this undertaking. With both of those truths, I cannot wait to embark on this journey of the erotic and never, ever let this go.

(P.S. I don’t ever even want to see a Cutwater again, I need all of my water whole, thank ya!)

All of my pieces end up on my Instagram right after I publish them because I love my work, I love writing, and I want the people that I know and regularly talk to to know what I’m up to creatively. But this piece will be different. Maybe it’ll appear on my story at some point, but in no larger capacity than that because I am ashamed. I’m ashamed of myself as a bisexual, as a radical Black fem that loves men, as an erotic who’s only had sex with cis men, as a woman who has found themselves pressed over hearing from a man right now. So I haven’t been on Instagram at all today so that I could take time to rest and reflect, and that’s what I’m intimately here to talk about today.

I have identified as bisexual since middle school. I very briefly entertained the idea of using a microlabel, both with my gender and sexuality, but I quickly realized that those wouldn’t work for me and that I felt more liberated in broad terms and identities where I didn’t have to shove all of me into a very small, hyperspecific box. So I’ve loved “bisexual” for about 6 years now. But more recently, for about half that time or even less, I’ve delved into the Black radical tradition. I’ve talked about my sister as an inspiration to me multiple times now, and how my intersections of Black and the child of immigrants have propelled me towards an urgent desire for liberation work. I started with the basics of anti-racism and patriarchy, but soon I went on a journey of exponential radicalism, until I arrived at radical Black erotic feminism (and I’m obviously still going; there is no end to radicalization). I have been transformed by the things I’ve read, the people I’ve learned about and from, the things I’ve written and created and dreamed. (I have a long way to go, mind you, but) In all the time that has passed since my childhood and my official diagnosis of depression, I have never felt more hopeful. Not necessarily hopeful for my social position or our reality, but hopeful that I can keep struggling. With no exaggeration, radical Black erotic feminism has saved my life.

But being in these spaces has presented me with a shame that I didn’t foresee, but one that I have been butting heads with in small doses for a while, and now, it’s come to me in full force in a very short amount of time. Being in radical Black feminist spaces, a main priority is the deconstruction of patriarchy and the decentering of men. More than that, being a queer fem in these spaces, you’ll also find the decentering of heterosexuality and dismantling romantic reliance on men. You’re surrounded by these prolific, intelligent, lesbian and queer women who have no desire to engage romantically, sexually, or otherwise intimately with men, or if they do, they don’t. Really, that’s it. And in the face of that graceful interfem dependence, I feel I fall incredibly short.

I have spent most, if not all, of my life being disappointed by men. I don’t have a relationship that I desire to continue with my father. My long-term childhood sexual abusers were two boys who became men. My next two sexual assaulters were men. Every sexual harasser I’ve come across has been a man. This isn’t to say that I haven’t suffered any intimate harm perpetuated by a woman, because that would be a lie, but my main experiences with pain have been from men. Even my consensual sexual or romantic encounters with men have ended in frustration, fatigue, and disillusionment. But unfortunately or not, I have not yet been disillusioned enough to say that I will not invest in a relationship or positive intimate sentiment towards men again. This is what’s bringing me shame.

The title of this piece is obviously slightly facetious (and also a call back to a piece of work I’ve been meaning to read). Every Black woman who has found love in their life isn’t straight. Every Black radical woman isn’t a lesbian. But what I mean to convey is how stuck I feel in this space. I feel that if I were to continue desiring love from men, it would have to be because I feel I have no other choice, and if I were to reach the peak of my radicalism, I would have to stop loving men altogether. But neither of these is true, or at least I know the former isn’t. I love women, Black women, and femfolk. I’m not someone who doesn’t see themselves as capable of having a relationship with a woman, but I find myself acting like it a lot of the time. After every disappointment with a man, I find myself analyzing it only to elevate my standards for men instead of just rationalizing that men are not the solution to my loneliness and desire for intimacy at all. I refuse to be one of those insufferable bisexual women who say, “I’m basically a lesbian, I hate men so much,” because I am not, and I will not bastardize lesbian identity by flattening it to just hating men. Lesbianism has nothing to do with hating men; it has to do with loving women, and for this I am once again ashamed.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly is tethering me to men after all of this, and these are some of the potential conclusions that I’ve come up with:

• I’m actually just straight, and I’ve simply spent too much time in queer spaces. I know that this isn’t true in the same way that I know I’m not actually just a woman who wants to be different. I felt so strange in my gender identity for a long while when I identified as nonbinary, and even now as gender-neutral, because it doesn’t present like the gender nonconformity of white queers who are most represented in queer spaces. But once I realized that Black womanhood is a part of me and doesn’t have to be discarded to be genderqueer, I’ve felt more stable (I still feel unsure sometimes, but I’m learning that that’s okay and it doesn’t make me a fake, it makes me a person). Similarly, I tried toying with imagining my life without Black women in it in a romantic capacity, and all I saw was misery. Additionally, I didn’t start identifying with queerness when I started engaging with it on a political level. I’ve been desiring girls since 3rd grade, and later on, I found the language for it. My first crush was on a girl (a white girl, but that’s just because that’s all I was around). The things I feel for Black women cannot be completely explained through community and admiration. It’s erotic, it’s sexual, it’s romantic, it’s insatiable, it’s exponential. It might be muted, but it is undoubtedly there.

• I’m romantically attracted to women, but not sexually. This one has lingered on my mind, and while I haven’t come to a concrete conclusion, I’m leaning more towards this also being false. I’m definitely more intellectually stimulated, emotionally cared for, and romantically interested in women than men, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find them sexually alluring as well. With all the transparency in the world, I’m most attracted to Black, slightly androgynous, non-skinny fems when it comes to women. I know how my body feels when I am presented with Black women in a sexual capacity. However, I do know that I am much quicker sexually attracted to men. If I’m going to be attracted to a man off of something, it’ll be his looks first. Not specifically how conventionally attractive he is, but how he presents. This has continuously happened quicker with men than women in my mind, and more often than not, I’m left with these introductory feelings for a man.

• I am chronically male-centered. This is probably the most accurate. Being groomed for 10 years of your developmental years doesn’t just leave you with a heap of sexual trauma, but it also makes you believe that you need the attention and touch of a man to live. It doesn’t matter if it hurts, if it’s coercive, if it’s unconsensual; it’s all you can get, and you better take it gratefully. It’s not just being harmed by men, it’s being neglected by the women around you that leads to the continuation of your suffering. It’s not that you find safety in men, it’s that you find stability in them. They’ll always desire you, they’ll always want (read: prey on) you, they’ll always be lurking around despite your personality or comfortability because it was never about that; it was always about your body. I’ve been silently taught that my body is really all that is of value about me. And because the women that I’ve surrounded myself with aren’t the sexually deviant queers, but instead the radically liberated ones that value intellect and morality over everything else, I can’t pull the “body” out of my arsenal to make them interested in me. And while I know that there’s much more to me than my physicality, I have a terrible inferiority complex when it comes to my intellect, and it’ll take time to dismantle what I was taught about myself. This leaves me with the belief that women can’t be interested in me, and so all of my efforts might as well go towards men, no matter how exhausting it is.

Because life is lonely. Yes, I’m in the midst of building a radical community around me; an intimate, erotic, queer, liberatory one. But I still desire personal romantic love. I’m polyamorous because I desire many loves and to give this intimate love to many people. And the last thing that I would want is to have a legion of men as the people that I’m in romantic relationships with, but despite that, I still harbor a proclivity towards them. I find that my attraction towards women comes slower. It doesn’t feel as urgent, as pressing, as fluttery, as “exciting”. It more simmers under the surface of my skin. I don’t rush to my phone to see if she texted me, or scour my brain for ways to get their attention; it just feels like “oh, yeah, I like her. Anyways, what’s for lunch?” It just feels like a fact of life. Sometimes it feels more pressing than other times, but mostly, it exists in the back of my brain. But when I catch feelings for a man, it overruns everything. My pictures, my thoughts, my insecurities, my attention; everything goes towards that man. I feel empty when I don’t hear from him. My heart threatens to beat through my ribcage when we do converse. I feel like my life is halted between communication, and it’s exhausting. I hate how I feel about myself, and just in general, when I like a man. It feels so all-consuming and overwhelming. I’ve never had less fun than when there’s a man I want to romantically engage with, and I never feel calmer than when there’s a woman I want. For a while, I was incredibly interested in a woman who was in a long-term monogamous relationship with her partner, and I felt not an ounce of jealousy or contention (or maybe like half an ounce, but it wasn’t really bothersome at all). I just loved enjoying her presence, her intelligence, her beauty, her humor, her personhood. I loved having her in my life and being able to interact with her whenever I could. It didn’t disrupt my life, it didn’t disturb my peace, it just was.

And yet, I am ashamed. I’m ashamed because I know whenever I think of a relationship and what I want in a relationship, a man is the first thing that comes to mind. I’m ashamed that no matter how much I’m told to divest from men romantically, I just can’t seem to. And it’s not even because I think I shouldn’t, as I used to in the past; I believe that I should, I just haven’t been able to. I wish that I didn’t desire men. I wish I didn’t want men to desire me. It’s not that I wish I were lesbian or that I want to “transition” into a lesbian; I just wish that my bisexuality didn’t feel like someone who’s attracted to men, who also happens to be attracted to women. I’m ashamed to be this way in Black radical queer feminist spaces. I’m ashamed to feel this way in the presence of Black women who have found power and love with other Black women or who feel secure in their queerness and their relationships with men. I feel like a disappointment to my queer radical foremothers. I feel like a hypocrite when I talk about radical queerness and Black woman centered eroticism and everything that I feel is integral to my personhood. The word of the day is ashamed.

I got off of Instagram today because I realized the pattern already of me feeling lonely and sad and insecure within myself because a man wasn’t interacting with me often enough to feel okay. I feel like more than anything else, it’s my desire for men that is stopping me from being radically great. Yeah, sometimes I watch my tongue because of white friends I don’t want to offend too much, or Black friends I don’t want to make introspect to the point of not wanting to talk to me, but where I close my mouth the most is with men. I fear putting my accessibility and desirability in jeopardy, lest I never get it back and I never get love again. Because we’re taught as women and femfolk that the love and intimacy from another woman isn’t enough to sustain and fulfill us. We’re told that the love and attention from a man is a necessity to complete us (it’s important to also not generalize and romanticize all lesbian/fem relationships because I know there’s a lot of toxicity to be found there as well, so I’ll leave that here). I’m tired of it, but most of all, I’m embarrassed that I’ve lived like this for so long and even into my life as a radical.

I feel like men are holding me back, and I don’t want to feel that way. As I said, I don’t ever want to delude myself into believing that I’m just a temporarily indoctrinated lesbian, I know that I’m attracted to men, and I don’t think that has to be a bad thing. I’ve seen my queerfolk do it right and not allow their attraction to men to interfere with their politic and morality and sense of self and queerness. But I have to figure out why my attraction to women simmers while my attraction to men overwhelms. I have to figure out why my first thoughts of a relationship involve a man. I have to figure out why I continue to allow men to disappoint me. But until I figure this out, I will be ashamed.

There’s a little cold spot in your back pocket where the creased index card used to be. You unfold it carefully, it’s already old and worn; the creases are softer than the rest of the paper. You told her you could just give her your phone number, but she said you wouldn’t remember the same. That there was too much in your phone, and a little gathering that would take place months away would get lost behind the next tragedy to come. So, she slipped you an index card with words written neatly in the lines and told you to keep it in a pocket. Not in a purse, not in a wallet, but a pocket so that you’d always know when it was gone.

The house with the music. August 12th. 9 pm.

There’s nothing else on it, no address, no dress code, no instructions. You sink back down into your bed; there’s a groove at the very edge where you always sink to think. Your phone screen illuminates with a tap and the time: 8:47. You don’t know where to start looking, but she didn’t give you the note as a suggestion; you know that. Her nails were long, sharp, nearly curled like claws. They scraped at your forearm as she pressed the paper into your hand. The lines in her palm were pushed into yours with not a request but an order. The paper was a summons.

You lock your door at 9:09. Your big sister has your spare key, but you leave yours underneath the doormat anyway. Your neighbor sees you fixing back the black half circle, shaped like the moon. She leans back in her rocking chair that’s always covered in red leaves, even though no trees are peering down into her porch. She turns away, pretending not to notice. You know when you get home there’ll be a mason jar of sorrel and dried apricots on your little dining room table, and the doormat will be just off to the left, but you let her pretend.

You walk all the way down your street, so far down you forget which way is up. Maybe you left from this way. The note warms your pocket.

There’s a house at the end of your street. It wasn’t always a house; it used to be a haunted shack for the kids to dare each other to dip in and out of. Before that, it was where Grandma Sherell went to pray each morning from 6 to 9 until God got tired of the prayers and wanted to talk to her face-to-face. She wasn’t your grandma; she was the neighborhood’s. Your mother always said she kept the devil off the streets for as long as she was alive. The devil never came back even after that, and the music pouring from the house had to be the reason why, you think.

You can’t say what kind of music it is; it’s all of it. It’s jazz out the windows, blues behind the door, gospel coming from the cracks in the porch floorboards. The closer you come, the softer it is, the clearer it is. You could hear it from way out front by the stairs leading to the aged wooden slabs, but now with your ear pressed right up on the front door, you almost don’t catch it. But a hum still bleeds through. Like a heartbeat it goes; it’s low, it’s full, it’s joyous, it’s multitudinous.

You nearly tumble into her when the door is pulled back from you. She stands in front of you with her nipples turned down to the earth and the corners of her lips curled up to the moon. The air around her is indigo, and it breathes out lavender smoke. You can’t move your eyes from her, and she doesn’t make you. Her skin matches whatever it’s against: the hickory floor, the nighttime hue, your own shade.

She tells you not to just stand there; she says that the devil waits for you to stall.

You enter the house behind her, sweat rolls between her shoulder blades and down her back roll like dew on a Black calla lily. The air is thick and inviting, her body is lovely and distracting, so much so that you nearly let the other bodies on the floor, on the couch, on the counters go unnoticed. The music reminds you. The hum that pulled you to the door lifts from the mouths of those present. Moans, cries, giggles; they synchronize. You freeze in the middle of the living room with the golden colored rug pressed underneath your shoes, and everyone looks up. She turns back and takes up your hand. Your eyes finally find her face and her head that’s bare, opposite of the locs that kissed her chest when you had seen her a few months before.

She leans into you, her breast rests on your arm. She tells you she shaves her head once every five years for this day. She says so her prayers can be closer to God, and then she protects those words until time comes around again. She grabs the others’ attention with a raise of her hands. No matter if their fingers and hands and feet and limbs and bodies were otherwise preoccupied, everyone sits up and stretches their arms towards hers.

She tells them that she invited you. She invited you to watch them pray. To watch them worship. To watch them keep the devil at bay.

She takes your hands in hers; her fingers are absent of the marigold nails that decorated them before; they’re bare, her fingernails are low and clean, her skin is soft and slick. She leads you down to the floor, in the middle of the people. She takes your sandals from your feet and lays them down underneath the kitchen table. Then she comes back to you with a small notebook and a pen filled with red ink. So much ink, it already begins to bleed out into the cap. She tells you to write down everything you see, everything you hear, you feel, you smell, you taste. She says this has to be remembered.

And then she holds your face firm in her hands and guides your forehead to her full lips that linger there while you suck in her sweet scent of coconut and the sun.

And that’s the first thing you write down.

* * * * * * *

Fire on my head,
there's no cool air around me.
Late August gon come around, 
and there's no cool air to ground me. 

She said the devil likes the ground,
it's where he gets to have his way.
But we're here to push our voices to the sky 
and keep that old devil at bay. 

Every voice was there to lift itself, 
guide itself,
and sing. 
I couldn't breathe that air outside no more, 
because in there we were making spring. 

Every moan that was sung, 
every body that was fucked, 
every kiss that was placed, 
every clit that was sucked, 
all the skin that was loved, 
all the people who were praised, 
all the joy that was shared, 
all the hands that were raised; 

There were calendula leaves in there, that I know.
Oceans came out on the floor; it made our skin glow. 
Fresh roses and sweat bloomed between our legs, 
"Come back down to where I can reach you," that old devil begs.

But we didn't touch the ground that night, 
our souls were far too high. 
Yeah, the devil may be 
big
and bright
and strong
and "right",
but a star can always die. 

'Cus ain't nothing bigger than my god, 
and my god is next to me. 
She has her fingers in this, soaking wet, 
She says 
"this how we get free." 

On the Sexual Autonomy of Black Women

Niggas are scared of vibrators for the same reason that they’re scared of lesbians, let’s start there. And to clarify, all men who both suffer from and are bolstered under patriarchy—which is all men—are instilled with sexual aggression and toxicity. But I’m not here to talk about all men. I’m talking about Niggas. My Niggas. Black Niggas. Black men are taught two things about their sexuality: that it’s all-consuming and that it’s deviant. Black sexuality is branded as inherently deviant under white supremacy, which is why you’ll see white young women specifically trying to prove their independence or jumpstart their defiance by having sex with Black men. “Black lives matter because I like Black cock”; y’all remember that? Even in their social advocacy, social “defiance”, it’s marked by their sexual/deviant enjoyment of Black flesh. But we’re getting off topic.

When Black men are told that their sexuality is despicable and yet all they are, their sexuality becomes intertwined with their sense of self. With their value. With their purpose. So, when Black women, the sexual “objects” that they have the most access to, have no need for the Black man’s dick, it feels like they have no need for the Black man at all. Anything else that sexually fulfills a Black woman is an intimate threat to the Black man underneath this concept (this is why sexual repression and racial oppression are inseparable, by the way. The sexual is the emotional and the emotional becomes the physical; it’s how we stay enslaved). This is why you hear (or at least I hear; I need to stop talking to men, because peace and love and pan-africanism, they be pissing me the fuck off) Black men speak with so much seemingly unearned ire towards lesbian Black women. It’s a swirl of the homonormative belief that queerness is only reserved for the white, and the perceived betrayal of a Black woman not submitting to a Black man’s dick, which might as well be his heart (this is obviously not true, but it is real in our white supremacist reality). It’s also important to note how this also plays into the indoctrination of the heterosexual nuclear family that has been force-fed to us since time.

And so, that’s how we get to the root of the “hatred” of the vibrator in Black men. It’s a fear of irrelevance. It sounds stupid to be jealous of a toy, but when that toy, that inanimate thing, is taking the place of what you see as your “role”, it becomes a little more rational. It’s like the twisted version of how artists see AI. Except AI art only brings worsening climate change, while vibrators bring orgasms and restful sleep. Something that a lot of Black men, and men in general, aren’t taught as a part of their “role”. Mutual pleasure has no place in deviant sexuality. In patriarchal sexual aggression. In a “rape as neutral and pain as inevitable” society (I said that!).

And so I Bought A Vibrator

I didn’t buy a vibrator just to write this piece, but I knew that I was going to write this piece while I was selecting my new, cute, lollipop pink vibrator. It’s more than just monetarily investing in my own pleasure; it’s divesting from the colonial concept of time (yeah, I know that’s not where you thought I was going with this). All forms of oppression are connected, right, and so is the miseducation of people underneath that oppression. So the same way that we’re taught about time is how we’re taught about sexual viability. We’re told that time is fleeting, it’s a finite resource, it’s linear, it’s non-repeating, it’s self-contained, it’s immovable, it’s pre-determined. These parameters also apply to the miseducation of sex. We’re taught that it’s to be chased, shamefully so. That it’s incredibly scarce (they’re creating a scarcity complex, remember that), that it’s heterosexual, heteronormative, a strict act that cannot be redefined or repurposed. Sex and time are so interconnected because we’re told that there is a time when you can get sex and a time when you cannot. There is a time when you should start having sex and a time when you should stop. There is a time when you should think about sex and a time when you should not. But what if we could rewrite time?

A long while ago, I read a poem called “Ode to My Vibrator” by Anjeneé Cannon, a Black lesbian poet. At the time, I was just entering into Black eroticism, and I thought it was a little bit ridiculous. I didn’t understand the significance of self-pleasure and what it could mean to sex yourself. But these days, I’m seeing a bit clearer. The vibrator acts as an extension of the self and a tool of defiance. Defying the “when” of sex. When pleasure is possible. When pleasure is available. When pleasure is tolerated. It genuinely breaks my heart to hear how many Black women say that masturbation is disgusting, self-indulgent, perverted (or cheating?? Like, come on now). That you must wait to feel good, usually for a man to make you feel good, or to use you to make him feel good. There’s always a time restriction on the woman’s orgasm. Even in “Did you cum yet?” Well no! And I definitely won’t if you keep asking, damn. Or the “You came too fast.” It might not seem serious, these touches of frustration in our ideas of pleasure and ecstasy windows, but it perpetuates the colonial idea that time is solid and impenetrable and preset. That there are rules to time, to sex, to pleasure, to life. With the vibrator, this idea of time is suspended. You didn’t cum too fast or too late because it’s only relative to itself and your experiences. You get to define sex by your own standards and performances, not what someone else is expecting of you. You’re sitting in sweat and sighs and moans and cries. It’s a space outside of time.

This is a thing that scares men; Black men, yes, but all men in general. Self-fulfillment will always be a threat to those who feel they can only be fulfilled through what they can do to others, not for others or for themselves. And changing that will take a lot of re-education, but for now, go get a good vibrator and watch niggas be mad.

We live in a reality governed by white supremacy and all of its constituents. A patriarchal, imperialist, colonial, homophobic, bioessentialist, xenophobic, capitalist, anti-erotic reality is the one that we exist in. We exist within a world that we (as Black and oppressed people) did not create. Our contributions have become caveats to the canon that was made. The “excellent” are exceptions, footnotes, and will soon be forgotten amongst pages of the paragraphical text that is white domination. This is the reality that we live in.

I bring this up first because some of the response to Gabrielle’s essay has been “sure, but this is the reality of things.” The reality of our institutions, and the academy on a whole, is that they will always be somewhat complicit in the forces that oppress their students (specifically in relation to HBCUs) because of…things. Money, access to resources, publicity. Whatever it may be that is stepping on the tail, snatching out the legs, of our schools, to do right, do radical, by their students, will not let up. Ever. It is immortal, it is irreversible, it is immovable.

And I am a pessimist. This world is ending. We are dying. Our destruction is imminent, and our reality is collapsing. I am sure of this. But unlike the people who are trying to combat my sister’s critiques of Spelman College with the argument of “it is what it is”, I believe that it is, but it will not always be. Living inside the belief that reality is linear, non-stopping, non-changing, and pre-determined is the most important part of domination. That creation exists on a line. That it cannot be changed, it can only be witnessed. It is deifying whiteness/the colonizer. They created, we witness, they destroy, we end. The End.

The Beginning

Realities and worlds start and begin every day. A baby born is a new world. Parents dying is a reality ended. When our life cannot go back to the way it was, or we refuse to allow it to do so, we are creating an entirely new reality. And when whole peoples’ movement (physical, spiritual, etc.) is changed, that reality ends, and another one has to take its place. We don’t collectively recognize things like the genocide of the people Indigenous to this land as an ended reality. Chattel Slavery as an ended reality. The Palestinian genocide, the genocides and man-made crises in Sudan and the DRC, these are ends to realities. You cannot go back to the existence you had before war or tyranny or fascism or destruction. We do not recognize this because if we did, then we would also have to recognize the re-invention and recreation that has come and will come after these atrocities. It delegitimatizes the colonizer as Creator, the hand of god. We would then have to recognize those who are recreating every single minute and inventing a new reality. Time starts again.

These are personal or communal realities. It doesn’t invalidate them, but it is important to understand that our own intimate worlds exist within the overarching “canon” that has consistently been controlled and dictated by the ruling class for generations. As long as those who have seized power continue to keep it, the reality that we look to, the one that just “is what it is”, will be the one that we are overwhelmingly affected by and suffer from. Investing in your own world, your own creation, is considered “insane” and irrational, but that is what the Black radical tradition is based off of. It’s extending your imagination past what you are told to understand as real or what can be realized. It’s learning How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (a book by La Marr Jurelle Bruce).

And what we’re looking to do as Black radicals, and even more specifically as Black radical feminists, is collectively imagining and implementing a new liberated world for once the one we are in now corrodes. It’s not enough to think of it, we have to start actively transitioning away from the canon and into our new writing of life. It’s not enough to be dissatisfied with how things are, we have to be prepared to construct how things will be. This is how new beginnings are created.

The Black Erotic Imagination

A while ago, I talked about the connection between sexual fantasizing and liberated world-making on my Instagram. How the incapability to fantasize about your sexual desires and pleasures that go past the cisheteronormative is indicative of why you are stuck imagining a changed world only as far as the limits of “reality” can go. A society without prisons is not imaginable in this reality. A society without money is not imaginable in this reality. Liberation in general is not feasible within our world as it currently exists.

Think of it this way: you’re continuously being underwhelmed and dissatisfied with the sex that you’re having. You’ve tried switching positions, you’ve tried switching partners. But every change, every tweak and rearrangement that you undergo ends in the same disappointment, or even if it results in an extra pinch of pleasure, it still lacks ecstasy. No matter what you do, what you imagine, your mind still can only comprehend sex as a sufficient foreplay-penetration-mellow aftercare sequencing event. Sexual ecstasy does not exist (especially for Black women and fems) within the sex reality that is governed by patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, and violence/rape culture. However, that doesn’t doom you to having unfulfilling sex for the rest of your life; you must now change what it means to have sex. To illicit ecstasy, what must happen? What must exist? What must end? People may not categorize your pleasure experience as sex anymore (a lot of people don’t even recognize lesbian sex as sex because most of it lacks penetration), but what is the use of being recognizable if the necessity is to be sad?

Maybe, in your new sex reality, penetration doesn’t exist. Maybe it doesn’t exist between only two people. Maybe it only exists over the phone. Maybe it only exists with yourself. Whatever it is, it was only created because you realized that the sex reality you were in wasn’t made with you or for you, it was created around you. You were forced to exist within it, but it’s really your sexual repression that this world is reliant on, not your sexual wholeness. You realized how to imagine sexual wholeness, that it wasn’t going to be found inside of intentionally constricting and oppressive definitions and practices. Even at the farthest edges of what sex is said to be, it is still intrinsically connected to control, power, and domination.

An Interlude

I want to remind y’all why I’m a Black erotic and why sex liberation for Black people is so important. Black eroticism is all about Black pleasure, and Black pleasure is Black freedom. Because the thing is, all of the systems of oppression that we suffer under aren’t just theoretical like our oppressors or the ignorant would have us believe. They are perpetrated against our flesh. Our bodies are central in our subjugation. Our bodies are what are cut, hung, hit, dragged, choked, and killed. Our bodies are what are over-exhausted, overexploited, overrun. More than just our bodies, it’s our bodyminds (a concept defined to me by adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism: the politics of feeling good) that are being held captive. And there’s no more concise iteration of bodymind oppression that sexual violence and repression. It starts early; in the ways that we’re taught about sex. Sex is male- and phallocentric. Sex is a sub-dom activity (with no indictment on the BDSM community because they use this relationship as a performance of control rather than succumbing to it. Similar to how Marlon M. Bailey researched the performance of gender in ball culture in his book Butch Queens Up in Pumps, performance is a form of reclamation, rewriting, and ultimately, world-making). Sex is solely for procreation. You’re “fast” if you get it too early; you’re “slow” if you don’t get it by now; you’re “ran through” if you get it too much; you’re irrelevant if you don’t get it enough or don’t want it at all.

And then after this foundation of sex education imbedded with rape as neutral and pain as inevitable, we’re pushed into a world that perpetuates it. A world of body-counts, the Epstein files, the memeification of Diddy and R. Kelly, “being put through a mattress” (we just talked about this), and “Rape Academy” (we’re not talking about this; don’t look it up either, save the little peace of mind you have left). Sexual trauma and assault are results of what we are taught sex is. In our world, rape and sexual assault are sex, because sex isn’t predicated on pleasure, it’s contingent on control.

This is all an assault on the bodymind, and when you think of sexual repression as the most intimate form of bodymind oppression, you realize how everything else that subjugates us is modeled after our sexual abjection. That’s why without liberation from things like capitalism, white domination, and patriarchy, there can be no sexual liberation (which invalidates the white feminist iterations of sexual freedom), and there can be no liberation from anti-Blackness without an investment in sex ecstasy (which invalidates the masculinist and erotically-negligent Black movements). That’s why I believe in centralizing sexual liberation in our Black radical struggles; not because it’s our “most important” oppression, but because it’s so recognizable. You might not understand how the prison industrial complex affects your material life, but you’ll sure as hell have to understand something if you’re told the reason you got raped was because your titties were out.

How to World-make

Back to creation. I brought all that up to explain how crucial I think a Black erotic politic is in imagining a new world for us. You wouldn’t say “it is what it is” when a child relays their sexually traumatic experience to you, you’d say that something must be done. But no matter what you do, if you continue to do it and dream it inside of the confines of this reality (ie. calling the police, pushing them towards child protective services, etc.), there will always be room for it to happen again. Because the violence that exists in our world is man-made. It cannot be resolved by the same systems that allow it to happen. A new system, a new reality must be created that is reliant on something else. Reliant on the freedom and pleasure of all the living things that it houses. A world that functions communally.

To world-make we have to world-end. That includes ending the ways in which we allow our institutions, our leaders, and ourselves to be complicit with oppression. If we don’t, we’re going to “it is what it is” ourselves to death. If our ancestors resigned to “it is what it is” during slavery, that reality would still exist. I’m not saying it’s easy to divest from the only world you’ve known. If it was, we wouldn’t be here. That’s why it’s so much simpler to see Black celebrities, Black billionaires, Black politicians, Black schools, Black excellence as the pinnacle of success and liberation. That’s all we can get in this reality. Because like Gabrielle said to me during a conversation about her paper, “for there to be the Black excellent, the rest of us have to be un-excellent.” Black exceptionalism requires Black inferiority to be the rule.

It wasn’t about inciting controversy just for the sake of it by critiquing Spelman College; it was about imagining a world where “LBCUs” (liberated Black colleges and universities) don’t have to be complicit in coloniality and empire to survive because survival in a white supremacist world won’t be the goal. “It’s better to speak remembering that we were never meant to survive”, remember? Audre Lorde didn’t say that for nothing, she said it to open the way for us to create without fear. Wanting to live is natural, but this isn’t living. Putting our faith in people that prioritize their class privilege over their race solidarity isn’t progress. Incarcerating those who perpetuate evil isn’t change. And cowering away from critiquing a school and the academy at large because they turn out the “Black excellent” isn’t solidarity, it’s complicity and conformity. Whether we want to believe it or not, Spelman College along with all of our institutions, exist in a destructive and intentionally miseducated reality, and that is what it is.

Making a new world is going to be the farthest thing from easy. Prior revolutions have done nothing if not shown us that death and birth are traumatic. But they are imperative. And revolutions happen because people dare to imagine a completely different world than the one that they’re suffering in. They’re reality changing events. They take radical education by those that know and dream: our Black radical, queer, erotic, and transnational feminists and workers. They take imagination, fantasy, “madness”, confrontation. Change is going to take change.

I would like to end this by saying that I’m not ignorant; I won’t pretend that writing articles and essays, with sound critique and thought or otherwise, is going to immediately create a new reality. We have much more to do than talk about it, but writing is how we make the blueprint, how we add to it. My erotic foremothers, both living and passed on like Audre Lorde, L.H. Stallings, adrienne maree brown, and Jennifer C. Nash wrote and are writing the blueprint for liberation fantasizing and radical world-making. people like my sister are doing the same, they’re revealing how and why the institutions of this world don’t work, why they must end, and what we can build after. That’s the opposite of ignorance; it’s how we get free.

Two, I’m going to be doing a lot of generalizing. A lot. I don’t have the desire to overuse “some”, “most”, “not all”, “from what I’ve experienced”, or “sometimes”. If you’re going to take great offense from hearing about the contentions of a Black erotic feminist with Black men without them stressing that they’re obviously not talking about every single Black man that has lived, is living, and will live on this Earth, then you were going to find this piece offensive anyway.

And three, you niggas have been pissing me off. From the time that I really became interested and devoted to Black eroticism, I was committed to incorporating Black men into the framework and practice, and making sure that they felt safe and included in how I was defining and practicing eroticism. I was told by multiple Black women that I respect greatly that this wouldn’t work in the way that I was trying to push, but I didn’t listen. I wrote them off as close-minded and slightly misandrist. But they did tell me that I’d find out soon enough, and find out I did. I have been incredibly disappointed and embarrassed by the lack of understanding of the erotic that I’ve seen in Black men. I’m not saying erotically competent Black men don’t exist, but you’re gonna see what I do have to say.

We’re Both Oppressed, Damn

One thing that I’ve continuously noticed while interacting with Black men, radically engaged or otherwise, is that they resent feminism. They try to mask it underneath the very sound (and Black feminist, might I add) critique of white/capitalistic feminism that has notoriously undermined the struggle of Black and Brown women and people, and has pedestalized the hatred of men instead of the actual deconstruction of patriarchy because of its integral connection with white supremacy and capitalism, the same systems that allow white women to hold oppressive power.

They pretend that their refusal to interact with Black feminism is solely because of the potential corruption it has endured from white feminism and, therefore, the hate of Black men. But really, it has very little to do with that. If that were really the issue, then these men would find their way over to radical Black feminisms and workers because they would understand that Black feminism isn’t just a sect of feminism or the opposite of white feminism, it’s a distinct framework made by Black women to struggle against systems of oppression from the lens and particular social position of Black womanhood (which includes all Black people socialized as women, not just cisgendered women). Where their skepticism really lies is with the fact that they aren’t being centered. Black men are not immune to internalized patriarchy just because they suffer under white supremacy. White supremacy is divisive, and it uses patriarchy to separate the Black struggle movement. Many Black men believe that feminism is what is dividing us, when really it’s the other way around. They’ve been neglected and socially abused for so long that they turn their ire onto Black women; so when Black radical feminists refuse to adhere to that, they label them as separatist, misandrist, and anti-Black/Black men. Because to them, Blackness is inherently masculine. That is white supremacist and misogynoiristic rhetoric, but Black men don’t want to hear that. It’s the one thing that white people have told them that marginally works out in their favor, and our collective internalized racism and desire for whiteness/power inclines us to listen to the oppressor over those who are equally or more oppressed than us.

I was almost going to name this piece “My Professor’s Ex-Wife Was a Black Feminist”; I don’t know that for sure, but I have a feeling for a few reasons. One, he remarried to a white woman, and a lot of times, Black men drift over to white women because of Black women’s intolerance of their misogynoir and anti-radicalism. It’s not that white women are better in any sense of the word, but it’s because they have no expectations whatsoever except for you to have a big dick and allow them to fetishize and emotionally exploit you for their fantasies (I’m generalizing, obviously, and don’t mean to say that all white women who are in relationships with Black men don’t intimately care about them, but white supremacy is pervasive). Two, he loved to call me everything but a Black feminist, because three, he had something against Black feminism. He likened me to Pan-africanists, Black nationalists, and every other framework inside of the Black radical tradition besides the one that I verbally aligned myself with. And it’s important to note that I loved this professor (too much). He was brilliant, funny, kind, curious, and patient. He was everything you’d want in a Black studies professor, but he was committed to changing my mind about Black feminism. He sent me videos, articles, and books by Black male studies professors and thinkers. He sent me critiques on Black feminists like bell hooks by Black man activists. I believe that he saw potential in me to contribute to Black liberation, but he was keen on steering me away from what he must’ve seen as divisive, counterproductive, and irrelevant. That’s why I contemplated naming this piece after a personal story he told me, because I’ve seen Black men divorcing themselves from Black radical feminist activism. It’s always made to be one or the other in their eyes, even though Black feminism clearly embodies collective liberation within the Black community. But Black men don’t see that; it’s male-centered praxis or nothing.

Why do You Need to Have Sex to Have Sex?

You saw the cover of this piece. I had a lot of fun taking the pictures for it, putting it together, tweaking it, picking between one draft and the next. I love my body (most days, I actually took these pictures on the first day of my period, purposefully, because it’s the time when I get most critical of myself), and I believe and want to embody the practice of eroticizing the body as eroticizing Blackness and Black liberation. But, the point is, I created the cover picture because this is what distracts Black men. Not just my body in particular, but the Black woman’s body in general. Whenever I mention Black eroticism to Black men, the first thing that comes to mind is sex. Not a radical Black sex politic, but just having sex with Black women. Just watching “Ebony” porn. Just separating interracial, Black woman-white man relationships. Black eroticism gets disfigured into the purely physical act of fucking out internalized whiteness, and anything else that Black men see as undesirable, out of Black women. That includes Black feminism, any critique of masculinism, even queerness, when you have the misfortune of talking to the Black men who think queerness is a psy-op by the anti-Black man government.

And then somehow I’m wrong. When I try to explain that yes, Black eroticism is intertwined with good sex, but the immovable foundation of the practice is finding pleasure in liberating your people, especially queer Black women, then I’m limiting the framework. I’m excluding Black men. I’m being anti-sex. . . What? I’m not the most intelligent person in the world. I’m not the most educated on Black radical feminism, Black eroticism, Black anything, really, and my inferiority complex reminds me of that every day. But I promise you that I’m more knowledgeable about the work that I am planning on dedicating my entire life to than a Black man who didn’t know that “erotic” was anything other than a porn category. And I’m not calling Black men unintelligible in the slightest, I’m calling them misogynoiristic just like all other men who are affected by white supremacist and misogynist rhetoric (which is all of them). Because of the masculinization of Black radicalism, any Black womxn with authority on any aspect of it (I’m not talking about myself, I’m talking about my foremothers and my future self) is seen as intruding upon their territory. And a huge part of misogynoir is the hypersexualization of Black womxn. Not only that, but it’s also a part of rape culture. I think people, especially men, misunderstand rape culture to be just the normalization of rape and assault in our society. But it’s also the normalization of the thought processes behind deconsensualizing sex and intimacy. It’s normalizing calling women “bitches” and “hos” in a painfully literal way. It’s normalizing the concept of body counts, virginity, and “being put through a mattress” (no lie, I’ve said this before, but I want us to move away from this correlation of violence and sex in our speech). And it’s assuming that a Black womxn taking their time, effort, and good faith to explain something as intimate as Black eroticism is only doing so to promote apolitical Black sex and as a petition to get some dick.

Patriarchy has convinced men, including Black men, that they cannot even conceptualize the sensual and the intimate without it being vulgar, aggressive, and phallocentric. That’s all they’ve been taught about sex, so when I say that Black eroticism encompasses sex, they immediately situate their anti-erotic understanding of sex onto it. That’s why Black men must exorcise themselves of patriarchy before being able to embrace or even understand Black eroticism; however, a lot of them aren’t willing to do that because they’ve made their connection to patriarchy their perceived connection to power. The less social power you have, the harder it will be to convince you to let go of the little that you do possess. Because white supremacy and capitalism will have you believe that without social power, you are without humanity, and while we know the construct of humanity to be inherently colonial, we still clammer after it. And while I understand all of this, I’m tired of being misinterpreted. It’s not about explaining and learning, I’m always willing to do that; it’s about dismissing what I’m telling you because it doesn’t align with the sole liberation of Black men.

What I’m Telling You

As I said in the beginning, I was warned. The truth of the matter was that I deluded myself into thinking that I was just different, more open-hearted, more understanding, more humanistic than those cold-hearted Black feminists, when really I was just male-centered. I craved male validation, and I didn’t want Black men to think that I was inaccessible to them because I was a feminist. We are all indoctrinated with that patriarchal desire, and while some dismantle it quicker than others, it’s something that we all have to intentionally do. And, no lie, I did and said some fuck shit while figuring out that men and their comfortability are not and should not be the center of my work. It wasn’t easy contending with that part of myself, and also having to apologize to the Black womxn and people that I dismissed in the process. This isn’t to say that I’m completely liberated from male-centered thinking, but I’m much more aware of it now, and I refuse to excuse it anymore.

Again, I’m not saying that Black men can’t be erotic. I’m not saying that Black men can’t be feminists (even though my full thoughts on that will be saved for another time). I’m not even saying that Black men aren’t allowed to critique or question Black eroticism and Black feminism. But I am saying that I’m tired of having to say all of this shit. Men waste so much time trying to bring up every perceived contradiction, nuance, hypocrisy, plot hole, and inconsistency to combat Black women’s movements that they surpass the undeniable work that we have been doing. We’re forced to address every possible way that our work could be discriminatory towards Black men and how we’re combating that to the point where we come back around to being male-centered. Masculinist movements don’t concern themselves with how they’re actively working to include and uplift Black women, so they assume that we’re doing the same thing (just like white supremacists assume that pro-Black people hate white people. It’s the same thing). Black masculinist movements have purposefully neglected their sisters and siblings, so we take care of them instead. We don’t hate Black men, we love Black women, and that’s something that misogynoiristic-minded niggas cannot comprehend.

Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote a book called Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race about exactly what the title describes, however, that’s not where I’m going with this; I’m not going to stop talking to Black men about the erotic and about Black feminism, but I sure as hell won’t be arguing with them anymore or extending the benefit of the doubt. I know what a bad-faith conversation or question looks like, and next time I hear or see one, you’re not getting access to me, my body, my mind, or my care ever again.

But I love y’all.

I want us to get imaginative. We’re entering a different world so that we can understand the one we’re in. We’ll be living inside of the Black Vagina today.

The Black Vagina acts as the Black body. Not the individual Black body, but the communal one, searching for liberation. The Black body that is beautiful and delicate and capable of much creation and wonder. It can be aroused, it can be traumatized, it can be expanded and shrunken depending on the care, attention, and love that it is shown. The Black Vagina is the perfect visualization of Blackness as a whole because it sits in the most intimate spot of the most socially oppressed people: Black people socialized as women. If we’re going to reach complete liberation, we have to work from the oppression of the Black Vagina, upwards. If we start there, then all other oppressions will have to be dismantled along with it.

We’ll go from foreplay, to fingering, to the actual eating, to aftercare. Legs open and enjoy.

This is How You Bleed

We are living in an age of instant gratification. If things don’t happen immediately, if wars aren’t ended instantaneously, if genocides aren’t dispelled the moment we’re tired of advocating for them, we simply forget about it or at least try to push forward onto the next thing we feel we can resolve quicker. It’s understandable to a point; we chase pleasure. The pleasure of freedom is alluring, and the displeasure of oppression, pain, and onlooking at tragedy is overwhelming. We want climax now. We get a taste of it in different parts of our life, parts when we were able to indulge in small pleasures, and we want to feel that again and again, quicker and quicker. But there’s a problem to that.

Vaginas are delicate things. They aren’t meant to expand at a moment’s notice, you won’t reach climax just because you suddenly want to, and sex won’t feel good the second you decide to have it just because it’s something you desire. That’s why foreplay is so incredibly important. With arousal comes lubrication; a vagina will become open, wet, and easier to please. Some people become aroused quicker than others, some take more coaxing and time, it’s important to understand and learn the person, the body, the vagina that you’re trying to arouse and what they need to feel the most pleasure. Otherwise, rushing into something that isn’t ready to be entered, the only wetness you’ll feel is blood.

I’ve said this before at some point, but foreplay and storytelling are the same thing. Storytelling is how you arouse your people into revolution. You’re telling them how investing in Black radicalism will end with them in the most pleasure possible. How it will make them feel, what it will look like, what they can expect, what you want them to do, why you want them to do it, how proud of them you are for trying and how excited you are to continue with them. If you throw people into revolution, into war, they’re just going to die with the resentment of confusion. That’s the unaroused blood that will be spilled. Of course, during sex, vaginas can bleed anyways. Sometimes it becomes too rough, too deep, too quick, but that doesn’t mean it was bad. The revolution will not be peaceful. There cannot be peace without justice, and there cannot be freedom without death. The point of foreplay, of storytelling, isn’t to completely stop pain, it’s to incorporate it into understanding and pleasure. It’s to prepare for discomfort, and to assure that it won’t be ignored. That you’ll always be there to hold your people when they bleed, when they hurt, when they cry, when it’s too much, and when they’re ready to start again.

Inside the Black Body

Wash your hands, please. Hands carry an incredible amount of germs. The skin, underneath the fingernails, everywhere. We come in contact with a million things everyday that we touch and interact with. Doorknobs, pens, phones, computers, food, sheets, other people. Our hands are always touching, feeling, exploring, working, handling, and that means that everything we interact with leaves a trace of itself on our hands.

And with that, when you go to pleasure someone, to finger a vagina, you’ll be pushing all of those traces inside it as well. We’ve already talked about the delicate nature of the vagina and how it’s imperative that you treat it with care, consideration, and erotic intention. Shoving unwashed hands, penises, toys, or anything else (I don’t really know what else you need to be putting in there besides medical tools, but I’m not big into kink shaming) is how you cause infections, discomfort, and pain. You need to enter clean and conscious of how your body will affect theirs.

Again, we are viewing the Black Vagina as the Black body and the Black revolution. And just like the Black Vagina, Black liberation isn’t fragile, but it is delicate and it can be infected. Those infections come from internalized oppression. We know that white supremacy/colonialism is the disease, but colorism is an infection. Toxic Black masculinity is an infection. Fatphobia is an infection. Ableism, erotophobia, misandry, texturism, respectability politics, queerphobia, xenophobia, these are infections that will imprint themselves on the inside walls of the liberation movement if you don’t cleanse yourself of them first. Of course, these things can be weeded out and treated, but prevention and education are much more profitable and care focused then having to correct later. And yes, sometimes we are infected or are carrying something that we aren’t even aware of. That’s why we call it internalized. But that’s why it’s crucial to get regularly tested. The body itself, the Black Vagina, must also be tested for what might be lingering there from past negligence. Sometimes we get comfortable in our pain and internalization of oppression that we even forget that it’s there. Testing is listening to what you’ve ignored whether that be people, problems, or feelings that you’ve deemed unimportant or unworthy.

And then you are inside. You have aroused the body, it’s soft, it’s warm, it’s wet. But this still isn’t a time to rush (spoiler: there’s never a time to rush pleasure. There’s times of urgency, but never a careless quickness). Like we talked about with foreplay and why it’s so often overlooked, in the midst of sex, it also tends to be rushed because arousal is high and so is the desire for that gratification. But the best pleasure is gradual and mutual. It can be overwhelming and overstimulating sometimes, but that doesn’t make it bad, it just means that much attention and care must be applied to the experience.

Edging is very often only discussed when it comes to phalluses (I’m using the word phallus instead of penis because I love the word phallus). But the vagina can and should be edged too. Edging is used to amplify the orgasm experience. When you delay orgasm right before it manifests, when you finally do allow yourself to climax, it’s going to be an incredibly intensified and pleasurable moment. These are the stages of revolution. In movement work, the end goal is complete liberation for all Black and oppressed people, but that is going to take time. Much time. An overwhelming amount time, and that’ll take copious amounts of patience. It’s work to do something like that. It’s work, it’s skill, it’s care, it’s patience. You have to know when to pull out to postpone the orgasm, when to start again before the feeling completely dissipates, when to stop edging all together and coax out the climax. This is how organizing works. You have to know where to put your efforts, where to touch, when to pause and rest and recuperate, when to continue again, when the job is done, if the job will ever be done; because pleasure isn’t a destination, it’s an experience. Even after orgasming, there’s always more pleasure to be had. The erotic is an eternal spiral to enjoy.

Don’t Add Sugar, Liberation’s Already Sweet

You’re finally in between their legs. There’re a few things you should come to the vagina already knowing. One, vaginas don’t taste like sugar, spice, and everything nice unless you truly love the taste of not only the vagina itself, but also the taste of pleasure that isn’t directly your own. And two, eating someone out isn’t all about just spamming the clit. If anything, that can be counterproductive. The clit is the most sensitive and nerve-dense part of the vagina, and constantly agitating it can quickly become overstimulating and uncomfortable. The vulva is the outside of the vagina with the labia majora and minora, clit, urethra, and pubic mound/hair. These all need to be included in the ritual. Your tongue needs to be clean, it needs to be soft, it needs to be wet. It’s okay to be new at it, it’s okay to not be sure, but that’s why you ask. You explore, you listen to how the body moves and opens or closes depending on what you do. Dedication is important, but pushing past the physical limits of your jaw, your fingers, your hands, isn’t going to do much good in the end. Switch gears when you need to; when your mouth gets tired use your hands. When your hands get tired use your mouth. When both are tired use a toy, or just take a break, that’s okay too.

In seeing the Black Vagina as the Black body, eating it out would be positioning yourself in the midst of revolution and liberation work. You’re in between legs that are keeping you in place (depending on the position, but you get the point), you’re in between theory and practice that keeps you focused. You have to be very mindful; sucking or biting the clit too hard is just as bad as not engaging it at all. It’s about balance and incorporation. Like we talked about, the vulva and vagina are a world. There’s no part that isn’t important, and the same goes for Black liberation. You can’t neglect Black queerness in favor of Black (misguided) masculinity. The liberation of Black trans women doesn’t negate or invalidate the liberation of Black cis women or vice versa. Black queer, trans, women, men, children, disabled, non-american, dark-skinned, fat, neurodivergent, and all the folks in-between; they all need to be aroused.

Think of douching as separation. Douching has been used to flush out the vagina from germs, smells, and infections, but it’s actually quite dangerous. The vagina is already self-cleaning, so douching isn’t necessary. It can eliminate bacteria that is needed in the vagina, and depending on what you use, it can actually cause infections. Douching is what things like Black excellence, Black elitism, Black nationalism (to an extent), and Black male-centrism all do to the Black liberation movement. They’re trying to eliminate what they view as tainting Blackness or making it bitter. Women, queer people, poor people, neurodivergent people; these experiences are made out to be irrelevant to freedom and a hinderance to Blackness. But the washing, the douching of Blackness is actually a white supremacist and colonial construction. Constricting freedom to wealth, skinniness, able-bodiedness, and cisheterosexuality is how white supremacy tries to convince us that we have to add sugar to something that’s already sweet. Blackness is already sweet. Communal liberation is already sweet. We don’t need imaginary pillars of success that were created by and for the oppressors, we already know how to arouse ourselves. We know how to love and appreciate ourselves, we already find ourselves erotic and pleasurable and desirable, we just have to go back and remember that.

You’ll learn to love the taste of a vagina once you realize it was never supposed to taste like peaches or smell like honey. Its enjoyment will come from how enjoyable you find the action to be. Black liberation will not be paved with streets of gold, and if you really love pussy, you won’t want it to be.

That Which Comes After

The road to liberation doesn’t really have an end. This isn’t to discourage, it’s just to acknowledge that freedom and time are circular. There being a strict beginning and end to things is actually very colonial to justify the erasure of things that predate the project and continue on within it to its annoyance and detriment. The point of liberating our people isn’t to reach a particular endpoint, it’s to bring greater and greater pleasure to them. Pleasure doesn’t have an end, it’s a continual experiment and exploration.

We all (should) know that aftercare is just as important as sex itself; it’s a part of sex. It’s checking in to make sure that everyone had a pleasurable time and that the transition from climax to resting isn’t too jarring. It’s guiding the body down, it’s regulating breathing, it’s cleaning up, it’s collecting yourself and each other. It’s talking about what you loved, what you want to try, what felt strange, what you want to do better, what you don’t want to do again.

There is no such thing as a means to an end. You cannot sacrifice people for the purpose of gaining communal liberation, it simply does not work. There will be sacrifices in the revolution, but it won’t be the inclusion of different Black experiences. If all Black and oppressed people aren’t equally considered and cared for and fought for, then it isn’t a revolution at all; it’s what we call white feminism and selective politics. Selective only to those that internalized white supremacy and oppression sees worthy. So with all that said, there must be consideration of what happens afterwards. Not necessarily after everything is “fixed” (which isn’t even a sound concept), but after every small fight, every win, every recuperation. What happens after we successfully get a political prisoner released? Where will they stay? Where will they work? Will they be complete sustained by the community? Do they want to stay in the area, or is there a way to get them closer to family and friends somewhere else? How do we hold people who perpetuate harm accountable without relying on the prison industrial complex? Are the excommunicated from their community? Are they physically punished? Is it solely up to the victim(s), or do all the people around them also have a say? What about child care? If we don’t want to give our kids up to the oppressive and dangerous foster care system or child protective services, where do we take care of them? How do we keep the children with us? How do we protect them from harm without subjecting them to the trauma of separation? The question of it all is how do we continue?

This is the point of aftercare, deciding what’s next, then that flows again into foreplay. Just like precolonial knowledge would have us know, everything, including eroticism is circular. You arouse, engage, eat, rest, discuss, and arouse again.

I want to remind us that Black eroticism is the undercurrent to movement work. I’m using the Black Vagina as the visual for Blackness because Blackness is incredibly intimate, beautiful, and in need of care, pleasure, and dedication. That’s what I have for us today, so I really hope you enjoyed it. Love y’all.

I will make this quick. One of my childhood abusers chose to go into the military and become a soldier and a direct compliant in U.S. imperialism. At first, he was stationed in Jordyn, but then was moved to Kuwait. I know that he was moved out of Kuwait before its bombing, but I have no idea where he is now. When I was first told this news, I was so concerned to the point where I almost started to cry. One, I was being forced to hear about him in a neutral-positive light. Two, I was forced to hear about U.S. imperialism in a neutral-positive light (yes, my family hates Trump and war, but they don’t hate the military). And three, I was forced to fear for his life. No matter how I try to spin it, my emotions have been manipulated and interconnected with my abusers to the point where I was convinced that I loved them. And while I have unlearned some of that, every now and then when the situation presents itself, I feel a distorted form of concern and closeness to them. So, mixed with the dread of war, I’m also facing the confused feelings around my abuser’s complicity in it and his mortality.

I have been kept updated on both of my abusers forever. When they’re depressed, what they’re going through, what they’re up to, their accomplishments. I believe this is for two reasons: one, my family means to “humanize” them to me, showing that they aren’t deserving of my hate or ire and that they’re going through as much turmoil as me. And then two, that they’re trying to (not so) subtly tell me that it’s time to move on. It was in my childhood, they’re allegedly not “bad people”, and they’re family.

I don’t want my abuser to die because he’s my abuser, I want him to die because he intentionally decided to be complicit in U.S. imperialism with no remorse or hesitance. For my entire life he’s been talking about either being in the police force or the military. His whole life our family has supported him in that, saying “how great of a soldier he’s going to be”, endorsing his desire to engage with a neocolonial project.

And when/if he dies soon, I’m going to be sad. I cannot just erase all the times in my childhood when I felt like he was the only person that loved me, even though I had to give a piece of myself to access that love. I got attention when I felt like my parents’ attention and love was misplaced or wore thin. I was sad, and violated, and hurt, and confused, and angry, but my abusers were almost all I knew of “affection”. But at the same time, despite my sadness, I won’t be immobilized or devastated. I wish death to the U.S. empire and all of it’s beneficiaries and allies. I don’t regularly hope that everyone in the military dies because there’s a little bit more nuance to that besides just saying they’re all evil, but for him, death just might be coming his way.

I say all this to remind us that imperialism, white supremacy, and oppression are never far from us. I think it’s always easier to “hate” those that we feel detached from and offer leniency or at least sheltered negligence to those that are in our camp. A gorgeous, intelligent woman with the name said on her Instagram that the need to immediately go no-contact with all of your family for one reason or the other is more often than not a show of the inability to handle discomfort. And yes, there’s always nuance to these types of things, but it also does hold true a lot of the time. We need to learn to dissent against the problems that are closest to us. I have no interest in cutting off my family (besides my abusers who I have been no-contact with for about four years) because I love my family. But as I grow, I refuse to allow my autonomy to be encroached on and dismissed. This is the attitude that we have to hold for those around us. For our patriarchal fathers, our dismissive mothers, our ableist grandmothers, our violent grandfathers, and our abusive cousins. We have to problematize how oppression has been internalized in our own community as well.

But I’m going to end this with saying that I’m going to outlive my abusers. If not physically, my radical politic absolutely will.

As you might’ve noticed, I’ve skipped my intro again. We are entering a war. It’s not that Black eroticism doesn’t have it’s place in the work and mindset that we need to proceed through this time, but this isn’t necessarily a time for joviality. Happiness, fun, hope (to an extent), silliness, etc. all have their place in revolutionary work, but that’s not what I’m focusing on today.

What I am focusing on is the corruption of leftist politics, and how this is both intentional and incredibly detrimental in the time that we are in.

I have a feeling that I’ve heard the term “girlification” or “girlified” at some point in life, but I don’t think I’ve heard it applied in this context. I’m using “girlification” to denote the washing of radical politics in “innocent” aesthetics that are often associated with white girlhood/young womanhood. Girlification disconnects oppressive actions from oppressive systems, and adds a convenient non-understanding of “how things got this bad” which triggers the desire to protect the physical and mental state of these white girls and women that are perceived as innocent and undeserving of the harm that they may now potentially face. There isn’t white supremacy and global anti-Blackness and imperialism and interconnected forms of oppression stemming from the delicate balance and mutual beneficiary between capitalism and anti-Black racism. It’s just Trump and Netanyahu and rising grocery prices and depleting water and a lot, a lot of death. It’s not that these white people don’t actually care about the issues that they claim to, but it’s the presence of the desire to protect white comfortability, and specifically the intermixing between patriarchy and white femininity that pushes for a radical end to oppression that encroaches on the innocence of white girlhood. Capitalistic white feminism is becoming not enough because capitalism, and america at large, are crumbling. The things that used to protect non-rich white people have been compromised, so to still continue the project of white supremacy and protection, white feminism must expand. That is where we’re getting this girlification.

However, there is another aspect to the girlification to leftist politics that needs to be covered. It’s not just how you view the events of the world and of the people, it’s also what you do/want to do about it. The girlification of radical resistance. Resistance becomes anything that allows white women to experience happiness in the face of global terror. Radical resistance becomes dressing cunt, it becomes eating whatever you want (notably nearly only applicable to non-fat white women), it becomes “hating” men, it becomes whatever can be done individually that brings about joy and protection for “white girl innocence”. Radical resistance is stripped of danger, because the girlification of leftist/radical politics is predicated on innocence and safety. That’s why this rewriting of radicalism rips out things like prison abolition, street justice, rioting, etc. because violent revolution and liberation isn’t befitting of the white young woman, and girlified radical politics are still compliant with the american legal system and the prison industrial complex.

I would also like to touch on how this girlification of radical resistance also encompasses pleasure as resistance. I’m clarifying now that pleasure is not innately resistant. I know that that might seem contradictory to the things that I say in relation to Black eroticism, but to explain, I mean that the simple act or experience of baseline pleasure is not an act of resistance. If you use your desire for pleasure to fuel your resistance, that is where the radicalism lies. A sex politic isn’t about just having sex, or even having sex exclusively with Black people in the case of Black eroticism and a Black sex politic, it’s about using the essence of sex and pleasure to inform how you engage with liberation work. It introduces exploration, communal/mutual pleasure, intimate workings, and sensuality into radical movement work. Pleasure isn’t resistance, it informs and underlines it. It’s just as important, but the dilution of resistance is intentional and insidious, and something that the coming revolution will not be able to afford.

I will not mince words; I don’t trust white women. I am not in community with white women, neither do I desire to be. I don’t want to build with white women. I don’t like white womanhood because of it’s direct connection to white oppressive femininity and it’s position within white supremacy, and I don’t feel one way or the other about white women individually. It’s called intentional indifference; I only hate or love a population that I’ve decided to have a position on, and a “plan” for. I love Black women and people in general because I plan for their liberation. I hate white supremacy and zionism because I plan for its destruction. But white people as just individual people outside of their collective social position, I have no plan for. They have to decide for themselves if they want to situate themselves within the revolution, and on a communal scale, white women have historically and notoriously decided that they will not. I’m not harping on white women because I think that white men are better, I’m harping on them because on the virtue of their womanhood, white women’s explicit and implicit dismissal of oppression that doesn’t affect them has been ignored in a way that white men cannot afford.

I’ve felt this ire towards how a lot, if not most of the white women I’ve seen talk about radicalism and leftist politics and oppressive events for quite a while now, and at first I thought that I was being too unfair or bitter or skeptical, but no. There’s always an underlying air of innocence and denial of compliance that surrounds the way that these girlified leftist white women speak and engage with politics.

I’ve never believed in the efficacy and innate radicalism of an intersectional feminism. I’ve always believed that we can organize and move separately in the same direction, and that’s enough. White, intersectional, and girlified radical/leftist politics are all becoming the same to me, and I want no part of it. Liberation is going to come at a cost and that cost will be all of our comfortabilities, innocence, privileges, and restrictions. I’m not going to stop talking about this, but for today, I’m done with words. I love y’all.

I’m terrified. I woke up to the news on my sister’s story about the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran, and then went to go find posts about it. Similar to the bombing of Venezuela, it’s being and, in retrospect, has been marketed as controlling the oppressive Islamic regime in Iran. To be honest, I’m not interested in trying to explain why U.S. intervention and imperialism is an inherently evil thing even with the presence of oppression and terror being enacted by the Islamic regime. I think we’re all cognizant enough to know that imperialism has never been, isn’t, and never will be the answer.

What I want to talk about is the fear that is surrounding our generation. I’m a Black erotic. That is literally what this entire Substack is about. But in times of bombing, war, fascism, white supremacy, and genocide, I have never felt like my passion is more useless and insignificant. I believe that a pleasure politic is what fuels me to want to do and engage with movement and liberation work, but the things that I love to do most, like talking about sex and sensual Blackness, feel like a colossal waste of time. I’m always aware that life can end at any moment, especially as a Black fem queer person living without the protection of money. But even with all of that, death doesn’t always feel particularly imminent. But recently, with every passing day, I feel like anything and everything I do is just filling in the short time I have before I’m killed. It’s not even like I feel like I’m doing anything, or I can do anything that extends my time, I’m just wasting time I don’t have. Like there’s a predetermined moment in time that is fast approaching where I die along with my people, and watching dumb shows, eating, sleeping, even writing this right now, is just taking water from an already half empty pot.

Audre Lorde already told us that “it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive”. We’re going to be killed anyway. As Black and socially oppressed people, our lives were never protected. Our minds could be satiated by the facade of a marginal safety that comes with being situated within North america, but really and truly, we’re meant to die too. This is a white supremacist world that we live in, and whoever doesn’t fit within that mold of oppressive power is immediately thrown into death and abjection.

And I do say all of this to sound pessimistic. I was planning on writing a think piece on hopelessness, and how hope isn’t necessary to move and I genuinely believe that. Because I have no hope. It’s not dramatic to say that I feel like I’m going to die soon. I hope I don’t, but I feel like my absence of suicidal desires is making things worse. I feel like my mind wouldn’t be in so much disarray if I already wanted to die, but I don’t. I want to live so much, and I want my people to live, and I want my family to live, and I want all of us to do it in peace and pleasure. But we can’t. Yes, we can say that we should’ve done more. We should’ve protested more. We should’ve dissented more. We should’ve rioted more. We should’ve boycotted more. We should’ve resisted more. Whatever it is, we didn’t. The issue is, we couldn’t. At least my generation, we’re just now adults and we’re inheriting war. Should I have been starting community gardens and safe houses when I was eight? Maybe.

I’m in love with so many things right now. I’m in love with like three different people while also being in love with my people in general. I’m in love with sex, with pleasure, with reading, with writing, with creating and seeing and touching and exploring. But I’m going to die soon. We’re going to die soon. We already have, my people keep dying. My Palestinian siblings are getting evaporated. My Sudanese siblings are bleeding out. My Congolese siblings are being starved to death. My Iranian siblings are being shot, raped, and bombed. The people in Rohingya, Jamaica, Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Tigray, Ghana, my people are dying and dead. And then of course, my people right here in the U.S. are dying too. We’ve been ignorant for too long in a way that people in places facing blatant western and Israeli imperialism have never been able to afford, but we’re undeniably dying too.

When I say that we’re all going to be killed soon, I don’t just mean that we’re all going to be shot or bombed or starved or drowned or burned. I do mean those things as well because they have been happening in the states, and whether you believe it or not, gruesome death is much closer to you than capitalistic protection will ever be, but I’m referring to more of an emotional/spiritual death. Fascism is killing our sense of self. You can’t dissent when you feel like this is just how life is. The government doesn’t care if you think what it’s doing is right, it just wants to make sure you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it.

I don’t really have a conclusion. If I could do more, I would. I can, actually, and I’m going to figure out where I fit into the “doing more” scene. But even more than that, I want to do more than just “doing more”. “Doing more” is white activism, and I don’t think I need to explain that for it to be understood (but maybe soon I will explain it more). I feel like I’m going to die soon, and I mean that in a million ways. But Audre Lorde and so many people before us have seen their own end of the world, and this current one might be the last, but it truly is “better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive”.

But lastly, I must say, even with this dread I feel more and more with every passing minute, I would much rather live in fear and hopelessness and sadness and anger that comes from staying informed and trying to fight, than to be ignorant and die from something that I refused to acknowledge. I love y’all.

But you know what, I’m tired of talking about white people. My substack is for me to muse about my life and my mind, but first and foremost, it is a Black erotic Substack. So, we’re getting back to our roots today, and I’m incredibly excited about it.

Yesterday, while I was out with my mom, there was this tall Black man with a sexy head of locs. I smiled at him and told him I loved his locs, and as he was walking past me, his face bloomed with a smile and I watched his eyes travel down my body. He looked back up at me and said “I like your whole look”. His voice was deep and smooth and laced with passing attraction. I told him thank you, and then the interaction was over.

I wasn’t wearing anything special, I’m not an especially gorgeous person, but I’ve had a number of interactions like this, and recently, I’ve been collecting my thoughts and feelings around this phenomenon so that I could talk about it and bring it to y’all. I want to talk about seduction today. Seduction and resistance. I’m not going to give a synopsis of this piece like I have all the rest, because it’s not going to be the longest thing in the world for once and because I want you to be fully immersed and explorative while reading. Now, enjoy.

The Seduction of Storytelling

I want to expand on the experience that I brought up in my “foreword”. I was sexually abused in my childhood around from the years of four to 14. After that, I had two instances of assault in 2023 and 2025. I’ve said this quite often over time because it’s incredibly important to how I experience life, sex, sexuality, and eroticism today. It’s very important to note that in all of these experiences with sexual assault, my idea around desire and wanting was warped. I came to believe that sexual desire was only something that I was made to receive or to be forced on to me. That someone else’s, specifically a man’s lust and want for sex and my body was paramount, and the way that I felt about it was at the most a second thought. I was always the one to be asked, or more often told, and I was robbed of both autonomy and also independent want for a very long time.

But recently, I’ve been thinking about this. Sex and desire has been contentious to me, but only when sexual want was pushed onto me. In the small moments when I was able to express my want for others, again specifically to Black men, there was a twinkle of revelation in each interaction.

I enjoy being sexy. I enjoy being desired. I enjoy being listened to. There is this thing about the way that white supremacy and toxic masculinity operates against Black men that thins out the amount of passing compliments that they get. It’s a circular thing: Black men are told through white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy that they are to be hypersexual beings that are simultaneously entitled to sex with Black women and also too inferior to have meaningful sex and relationships. This is internalized, and Black men become emotionally repressed and sexually abrasive (similar to all other men who are affected and distorted by patriarchy, this sexual “danger” isn’t specific to Black men, but those are my men so I’m talking about them). Because of this, because of the assault and harassment that Black women and fems have been and are forced to face from these men, in turn it makes us hesitant to compliment or generally engage with our men for the fear of it turning into a sexually or physically or emotionally dangerous situation for us. Because of the aversion, Black men are then left largely de-eroticized. It’d be different if homophobia and toxic masculinity didn’t stop Black men from loving and complimenting and praising and eroticizing each other. Homophobia works different for Black women and fems (in the way that you just need to find a good man), so women are socially allowed to love on each other. Then, this all comes back to Black men feeling emotionally repressed, falling into toxically masculine thought spaces, and taking what they feel they have the right to because of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy, which doesn’t actually benefit them, it just appeals to their desire for power instead of liberation. Then Black women avoid them once again, and the cycle repeats and repeats and repeats.

But there can be a break in the cycle. Many breaks, but I’m focusing on one. When I take my time to compliment or talk to the passing Black man and I see his surprise, his confusion, his happiness, his want, it’s a rewriting of how desire works and travels. I’ve been sexualized by men and I’ve been wanted by and attracted men. It’s this want and attraction that I’m looking for and that I garner in these situations. It’s very easy to tell the difference. One pounces at you, the other is quietly in awe of you. It wants to hear more, it wants to know more. It’s intrigued and delighted. That’s what I want.

And for a while, I thought that I only enjoyed these interactions because of my trauma informed male-centeredness and desire for male validation, but I realized that it goes down much deeper than that. When I get to engage with other Black women and fems in a similar way, we are usually both in on the sensual nature of our conversation. Sensuality doesn’t have to denote sexual desire for each other, it’s an air of embodied listening, touching, feeling, tasting, and knowing that the person you are interacting with in that moment is capturing you and you them. But with Black men, it’s like I’m the only one in on this secret for now. It’s a weaving of desire, I’m telling you something that you didn’t know before. A Black woman knows that I want her, knows that I love them, understands the sensuality of our relationship, no matter how short or passing. But in an erotic (instead of strictly sexual) way, a Black man does not. It’s this desire to tell, to intrigue that I’m attracted to, not simply the baseline attraction that I get from talking to Black men.

Now, I say all this to say, these situations of expressing and telling about my like and desire and want and intrigue that a Black man had brought to me was because I see it as a microsituation or example of something much larger which is the overarching art of storytelling for the purpose of radical transformation. Arousal, intrigue, and curiosity are all one in the same. Toni Cade Bambara spoke about “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible”. What other way is there to make the revolution irresistible than to storytell about it? And what else is storytelling than arousing your audience? The erotic curiosity of what is going to be said next, what’s going to be done next, what you want from them, it’s a use of magic because the erotic is spiritual which is magical.

This mindset of and general purpose to erotic storytelling (which isn’t specifically telling stories about sex and desire, it’s about radically arousing people into listening to what must be said) is really what is at the heart of liberation work. What do you want your people to do and how do you want to get them to do it. It’s not forcing people into anything, it’s arousing people into their own freedom. It’s wanting sex and getting it (get it?).

I’ll talk to y’all next time.

So, I already started writing my next Substack piece about a week ago. It was (or is still going to be, I’ll finish it next probably) about hopelessness. But then last night, while talking to my sister about Black feminism and the nuances within the movement, the topic of “intersectional” and white-inclusive Black movements came up. The conversation arrived at the point of how a lot of white masc lesbians notoriously try to impersonate Black masculinity to affirm their sexuality and gender expression, and what exactly that means. I was too tired to explain my thoughts on that during our conversation, but it did inspire me to push this thought to the top of my Substack writing.

I’m not going to just be talking about the co-optation of Blackness in the white lesbian/overall queer community, I want to talk about the problem with white/intentionally ignorant-based “radical” politics. So, we’ll be going over the original reason why I’m making this piece, white lesbianism’s obsession with Black masculinity, “intersectional” feminism, white leftists, and my (amateur) conclusion on what we should do about this.

You’re Not a Stud, Love

Now, let’s get this out of the way. I believe that the phenomenon of superstuds is a product of homonormativity. I’m not talking about our typical stud, I’m talking about the Black women who are committed to adopting all aspects of toxic masculinity, both physically and emotionally, to mimic patriarchal Black men and patriarchal straight relationships. Homonormativity is a plea for power and privilege that queer people sometimes grasp at by presenting their queerness as “straight”, just including someone of a non-opposite gender. It’s trying to equate queerness and straightness by also demonizing gender equality, polyamory, genderqueerness, and anything that actually defines queerness as differentiated from the totality of heterosexuality in its oppressive form. So, in lesbian/queer relationships with superstuds, there’s a dominant presence of misogyny, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity because I believe it really is a subconscious petition for oppressive power, very similar to how Black men reach for patriarchy to rule over Black women because under white supremacy, they cannot rule over anyone else. It’s the same thing.

I brought that up for two reasons. One, I wanted to start with acknowledging that the Black lesbian/queer community is not perfect. We have our own issues with infiltrating oppressive systems and hierarchy. And then two, I also wanted to acknowledge that there is a particular misuse of masculinity amongst some Black queer women as well. But that isn’t the topic of today. We know that self-hatred, patriarchy, and white supremacy deeply and darkly affect our people, but that same inspection is very rarely extended to the foolishness going on in the white queer community, which is what we’re actually here to talk about.

There is a trend of white lesbian/queer women coming out as such and immediately indulging in Black masculinity to solidify their queerness (it’s actually not just white gay women, it’s also white “alternative” women. Let’s take Billie Eilish, for example. Way before she publicly came out as queer, she positioned herself as “different” than other white women and women in general by dressing and presenting very Black masculine. Her clothes, the way she spoke, the grills, everything. Black masculinity has been used as a way to set white women apart without actually commenting on how it’s seen as sexy and edgy on white women, but dangerous and ghetto on Black men). I’m not talking about the regular old mascs with the carabiners and plaid shirts; I don’t feel one way or the other about them. It’s specifically the white masc lesbians that feel the need to use a blaccent, streetwear, and a “desire” for Black women that I don’t enjoy or appreciate. And here’s why.

Like I had said, I was tired last night and couldn’t really string together exactly why I believe these white women are doing this and why exactly it’s an issue, and while I’m still exhausted, I’ve found a little bit more clarity on this. Blackness is seen as subversive. Struggle is seen as subversive. But not for the people facing it, instead it’s only seen as novelty for those that perpetuate it/are a part of the perpetuating group. For Black people, and in this case Black men, their masculinity is a threat. They’re too big, too Black, too disenfranchised to garner the same intrigue and appeal that white women are afforded when they imitate it. White women are seen as docile, harmless, submissive, and so because of that, I believe they take on this performance as a way to combat patriarchy and gender roles inside of their community. And that’s one thing, but the issue is that they never interrogate what that means for Black men. In using Black masculinity as a shield from the inferiority that comes with white femininity under white supremacist patriarchy, that is solidifying Black masculinity as the ultimate form of not strength, but as the thing that needs no protection or liberation. You’re saying that on white women, Black masculinity is a rebellion against patriarchy and heteronormativity, but on Black men, it’s too much. It’s the epitome of danger, and white women want to be seen as dangerous.

It’s also important to note that Black masculinity has been hypersexualized for centuries amongst white people (we’re talking about white women right now, but I swear to Jah that no one thinks about Black dick more than white men. They’re actually obsessed). The bodies, the demeanor, the position in labor, the perceived danger of Black men have always scared white women, and with the interconnection of pain and pleasure, it’s also aroused them. It’s the fear, the anticipation of pain that attracts white women to Black men, as well as the feeling of rebellion against patriarchy that attracts white women to those they see as the antithesis of routine and the status quo. Fuck what Black men are actually going through, it’s simply about their position of ire inside the minds of white women’s only oppressors: white men.

Where’s My Sectional Feminism?

This is very connected to the conversation that we just had about white masc lesbianism, because the same co-opting and dismissal of Blackness is happening inside of intersectional feminist movements.

Intersectional feminism has been lauded as one of the most radical types of feminism that there is because it’s allegedly inclusive of everyone’s lived experience and advocates for everyone’s liberation. But that’s not what’s been happening. Intersectional feminism, despite intersectionality being coined by a Black woman, has been taken over by white feminists (which actually makes perfect sense). The issue with intersectional feminism is that it isn’t equally belonging and inclusive of all women, fems, and gender-nonconforming people; it’s notoriously been used by white women to be perceived as all-inclusive of differing identities, but at the end of the day, it still revolves around whiteness. I’m not even saying that white intersectional feminists don’t actually care about more marginalized people than themselves, but the problem lies in the idea that the definition of everyone else starts with their noticeable refusal from whiteness (that’s also why I don’t like the terms POC or BIPOC. They’re dependent on being the opposite of whiteness. And you could say the same thing for Blackness, that I’m only Black because they’re white, and there absolutely is a conversation to be had around that, but POC specifically lumps all non-white people together just on the identity of not being white. Unlike Blackness, which has created its only limitless identification, the only thing that “POCs” have in common is that we’re not white and oppressed by whiteness. There’s no space for sovereign culture or identity inside of POC labeling).

But that isn’t my only contention with intersectional feminism; it’s also the access that white women are given to Black and Brown women, and how entitled they feel to the feelings, labor, suffering, and support of specifically Black women. How they feel exempt from whiteness because they’re now “in community” with Blackness. But in reality, all intersectional/white feminism is, is “we should care about them, because soon, the same thing will happen to us”. We see that happening in real time with the murder of two white people by ICE. So many white people, specifically white queer women around Renee Good’s murder, are outraged because the same systems that they’ve been ignoring when they only destroyed Black and Brown communities are now terrorizing them. And that’s why I cannot reasonably collaborate and organize with white women like this (or in general, I’m not gonna lie) because if you only realize that white supremacy doesn’t serve you when your people start dying from it, then the sexism and patriarchy that you say is the paramount issue cannot be as devastating as you make it seem. If you could live comfortably and ignorantly until now, what am I, a Black, queer, neurodivergent, poor, afab person, going to talk to you about?

I feel no need to include white women in my feminism. Not everything needs to be all-inclusive or intersectional to work. It’s a fear of exclusion, insignificance, and irrelevance that drives white women to interject themselves where they were not needed or wanted. It’s still white supremacy, feeling like you have to be considered in everyone’s work. These are the same white women who view Black radical feminisms just the same way that they view Black radical women: angry. But not only angry, but they view that as negative, and once again, dangerous. White women get to be angry and wild and outraged and fed-up with the systems that they see as their looming oppressors, and that’s seen as reasonable and subversive and radical and productive to change. But Black women’s anger is scary and uncomfortable and exclusionary. But my question is, what’s wrong with that? I have no desire to convince white people that I’m not angry or that I actually do like them, because that would be dishonest. I’m not just tired or hopeless or sad, I’m angry. I’m angry at them. I don’t like them. I don’t like whiteness at all. I don’t feel one way or the other about white people individually, but no matter how much they try to make themselves out to be (especially the “progressive” ones), white people and whiteness are not an individual identity, just like everyone else. You cannot be white by yourself; you are a part of an oppressive identity, and I don’t like that.

There is Indeed a War in Ba Sing Se

I know we’ve all heard “no war but the class war”. I cannot describe how tired I am of hearing that from the white leftists (and unfortunately from the white-minded Black and Brown leftists as well). As a poor person in America’s capitalistic society, I am not ignorant to the class war that is going on and has been going on since the theft of this country. But it would be just as ignorant to say that all other contentions of status are simple ploys by capitalism. Yes, all systems of oppression are interconnected, and yes, capitalism has played a very particular role in how racism, queerphobia, ableism, and everything else have manifested, so I’m not saying that the concept of there being no war but a class war doesn’t make any semblance of sense. It does, we know it does. But it’s not just about the actual logic of it that is upsetting me, because it that was the only issue, I wouldn’t actually have much of an issue (I do think that we can talk about the class war while also not diminishing any other war of oppression/difference we have going on, but I’m getting to that right now). The issue is that in the same way that white women have used their womanhood as a blockade against allegations of racism, white leftists are using their status as working-class to do that exact same thing. We don’t have to ignore the real struggle that Black and Brown people have been facing against white supremacy to also address how that would not be without the hands of capitalism pulling strings. But whiteness is an identity of fragility. It was not made to hold up under scrutiny, and the people who belong to that identity have internalized that fragility to such a point that no matter how radical they are, they still almost always trip into the pitfalls of offensive when it comes to critiquing how they subconsciously or not shield, defend, and excuse their whiteness in their movement work.

So Do We Hate White People or What?

No, we don’t, but not because I necessarily believe that hatred is unproductive. I used to, and I just deleted my whole paragraph on why it is, but I’ve just real time rethought that. In my mind, the only thing that is unproductive is indifference. I say all the time (and I literally just said it in this piece) that I don’t care one way or the other about white people individually, and that is true. I don’t feel in community with white people, white women, white queers, white leftists. That is purposeful stagnation. I have no plans, desires, or ideals around white people just as they are, so I feel no need to push my feelings for them in one direction or the next. But whiteness, on the other hand, I do hate. Whiteness is an identity of destruction, domination, and exploitation. Whiteness is corruption and theft. There is no redeeming factor to whiteness. And that, I do indeed despise.

If I love you, I want the best for you. I want you to flourish. I want you to be pleasured. I want you to be cared for, comforted, at peace, safe, valued. And because I want those things for you, I will do everything I can to make that happen. Love is a pushing force. But if I hate you, that’s not me just allowing negativity to sit in my heart with nowhere to go; I want the worst to happen to you. I am your enemy. I cannot wish any good to you. I want you destroyed. The reason why I believe people say that hatred is unproductive is because they’re hating wrong. If you just allow your hatred to be dormant and feed off of your own energy, then you aren’t hating enough. If I hate someone, I want the absolute worst; I want them destroyed, and that’s how I feel about whiteness. I’m not indifferent to whiteness, and the white people who are are an integral part of the problem. I hate whiteness so much that I want no trace of it left around in our world of liberation. Does that mean that I want all people socialized as white dead? Obviously not, but the systems that afford them privilege, I want to cease to exist. Now, you can definitely say that that’s counterproductive, which we might just agree on. I don’t ever want to spend so much of my time working out of hatred that I make that my politic, but we also cannot ignore the efficacy of hatred. If white people didn’t hate everyone else so much, then we wouldn’t be in the situation that we are in today. Donald Trump’s hatred is working. Netanyahu’s hatred is working (I also mentioned what’s going on in Iran here, but I actually want to talk about this at length later because just like everything else, it has a lot of nuance going on that needs to addressed. But just now that the people of Iran are also suffering). Hatred obviously gets things done. I believe that we must work out of an ethic of love to combat that, but demonizing people’s hatred (I’m specifically talking about those white people who love to comment on Black people’s declarations of distaste for white people, calling it “unproductive to the movement”, I cannot stand them) is policing people’s suffering and that needs to be made clear.

In all, I need us to leave Black women alone. I don’t mean in the form of “sitting back” or “resting” or this “not being our fight”, I don’t believe in any of that. I mean in the form of staying out of Black women’s business, of our practices, of our work, of our lives. You can work alongside Black women and people without interjecting yourself into our spaces. I don’t need to hear a white woman’s opinion on my lived experience, nor do I need to hear her sympathy for it. I don’t care. I’m not saying that there aren’t white people who have done good liberational work; that would be intentionally naive. I personally know radical white people that I enjoy and feel like are imperative to the movement (three to be exact), but those white people are also the ones that don’t implant themselves in Black spaces or act like they’re knowledgeable on something that they simply are not. Those white people mind their own damn business, and work on educating other white people instead of trying to convince Black and Brown people that they’re different than the other whites. We have closed practices for a reason, and they aren’t “cordoning off the movement”; they’re highlighting specific struggles and liberation ideas from those who know it best. That’s what communal liberation actually is, not a melted conglomerate of people all painted in white ignorance, it’s distinct ethics and movements all going in the same direction.

And that’s what we have for today, people. I’m not giving up on the poem at the end of substack pieces idea, it’s just that the poem I’m writing right now is long form, I’m pretty sure, so it’ll have to be saved for another time. But I hoped you enjoyed reading!