Queering Desire

A short read of Janice's "i like men the way gay men like men".

I had purposefully avoided reading an article in the Memento Vivere publication on here called “i like men the way gay men like men” for quite some time because I was very skeptical of the title. A straight woman borrowing a sexuality that is foreign to her to explain what I assumed was innocuous sexual want. I had just had a conversation about why so many straight women enjoy BL/yaoi/gay media that is purposefully made for and by straight women because they can vicariously experience unabashed desire through the “bottom” without having to parse through contradictions of unsafety, coercion, force, and purity that often accompany the ways in which women are depicted in romantic and sexual media.

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.