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Black gay men don’t date. We hunt. And we hunt without much, if any, human contact. The hunt usually begins in cyberspace, on one of a gazillion black gay chat lines, the main one being “Adam for Adam.” That’s where a horny inarticulate brotha who wouldn’t otherwise be even a remote consideration for a slob session can re-create his banal image into something with far more commercial thug appeal.
And, trust me, it’s all lies.
How many black men in this town do you know fitting this description: “6-feet-1, medium to dark complexion/hung/muscular build/straight-acting/top, drug/disease free. Looking for a bottom, or the same.”
The same what? Same fool to buy into that dated script?
Hell, the way I see it, if you were “all that” you wouldn’t be on some chat line. You’d have a girlfriend or be married and driving around in your darkly tinted SUV at 2:30 a.m. cruising the ho’ stroll and preying on leftover crack meat — black male hustlers on crack — discarded and ostracized by white gay bar patrons. Just like the rest of the would-be crotch predators.
The current trend for Cincinnati’s black gay scene, as it is in so many other cities, is down low and low down, or a combination thereof.
I refuse to give into the laziness that technology puts a click away. Because of my frustration I appear distant or aloof. I am, however, put off with all the labels, prerequisites and dress code ethics we’re supposed to adhere to just to get our holla on.
Besides, I define my own sexual self within the parameters of my own black male experience here in Cincinnati’s America. Excuse the hell outta me for wanting to meet a brotha on my own terms in a well-lit place for face-to-face conversation in the comfort of our own brown skin.
Many black gay men are suffering, trying in vain to fit into identities tailor-made for them by someone else — the closeted black gay man who does not (cannot?) identify himself as such but who still lusts to participate in the physicality of “man love” decomposing into schizophrenic behavior. He’s trying desperately to feed two addictions, with no sound affliction toward either.
His addiction to live life in his beloved communal dysfunction comforts him. So does fear. It’s the fear of being a fag.
Being a fag represents a fundamental transgression of his neatly defined and fixed boundaries of what validates his masculinity. It’s inherited from the straight black culture’s addiction to the static roles of black men as brutish and at times violent predators.
This paradigm has given birth to the “Thug” and his equally toxic baby brother, the “Homo Thug.” This makes trying to find a connection from the neck up an all-consuming task.
On any given Friday night, catch me grocery shopping at Simon’s on Fifth and Walnut. You’d never know it was a gay bar. Everyone’s cloned in his best drag as a Rap icon, dead or alive.
Skewed black gay male identity isn’t new. All the fragmented identities and disjointed access we have to one another might well be generational. These younger cats have the kind of hunger that starves their integrity and feeds off their disparity, all the while fanning the flames of possible extinction.
Back when Sylvester made me feel mighty real, before whatn’ no mountain high enough, before computer cruising and cell phone text-messaging, I found my way, as if being beckoned under a spell, to a dive called Central Café, on the other west end of Fifth Street. Even as strangers our validation of each other was through our eye contact or a smile.
We didn’t have all the weighted pretense that exists today. It was enough to be in the mix. Yeah, we still had our camps of butch, fems, tops and bottoms and the beloved “trade” and what’s today tagged as the down-low brother.
But there was a sense of ease, a level of being unafraid to breathe realness into the air and infinite possibilities into the night. Now nights are reserved for ceremonies of exorcisms to excoriate thy gay self from the blackness of flesh.
Then came AIDS.
AIDS changed all that fuzzy slipper complacency, crashed the party and sent everyone home sobered by the reality that what we did in the dark could put us in the ground. The reality of a pending death has a way of forcing you to redefine yourself and your basic principles of pleasure.
There but for the grace of God go I.
Fortunately, I was saved that gay melodrama because I possessed the relentless clarity of who I was and how I fit into the even bigger zigzag framework of family, community and self. My rage against those forces of society at work to keep me in turmoil with myself, and other black gay men, functioned as a dubious distinction. It’s granted me X-ray vision to see through the bullshit to the truth, allowing me the worthiness of happiness.
Having survived two decades of the AIDS epidemic, living HIV negative and being filed away in the “Butch Daddy” file (gay terminology for an older masculine top) has taught me how not to compromise myself. And to love unconditionally and in spite of myself and of the flesh; to love in the spirit.
I’ve lost many good black men — not just to the virus but also to apathy, fear and self-loathing. Not to mention the labels.
Labels that have noting to do with identifying ourselves as Love. ©
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2005.