I don’t really date Black men anymore. They’re just too complicated.” (T-Bone, Black American from Minnesota.)
“All Black men want to do is bend you over, buss, and hit the bricks. Ain’t nobody got time for dat.” (Dee, Black Dominican currently residing in Florida.)
Once You Go Black, You Never...?
The above quotes are from two gay Black men I know who at one point in their lives messed around with Black men exclusively. But as time went on, they both decided that this endeavor had become unsustainable. T-Bone is from Minnesota and is a young and handsome man who grew up in a middle-class environment among other stable Black families. So, when it was time for him to start dating, he was naturally drawn to other Black men. He turned to the dating apps and created a profile that expressed that he was mainly looking for Black men. With his toffee-coated skin and youthful good looks front and center, he had no problem meeting eligible men of the dark cocoa variety. But as time passed, he began to get frustrated with his aborted attempts to establish meaningful relationships with the ones he’d met. Ants can lift things that are 50 times their weight over their heads and have an incredibly efficient...
“I could not get anything going with these Black men. They always seemed to be having some problem or crisis that overshadowed everything. Some were really unreliable and distant. Others were just sketchy, always coming with a story or excuse. Whenever I tried to get close to them on a sentimental level, they’d pull back, like they were scared shitless by intimacy. They were always too self-conscious to drop the macho facade and just be themselves, be vulnerable,” T-Bone expressed to me one night while smoking copious amounts of weed in his small apartment. He added that several of his gay Black friends feel the same way and have also shied away from cruising Black guys because, in many instances, they felt like they didn’t want to get sucked into the family and financial dramas they always seemed to be embroiled in. “It just got to be too much work filtering out the few stable ones from the ones that were, honestly, kinda kookoo bananas. So, I modified my dating profiles and invited men of all backgrounds into my life and found it to be a welcome change.”
***
My Dominican friend Dee was blunter in his synopsis of why he no longer messes with Black men. He is a chestnut-skinned, Latin shawty with green eyes who was a huge hit with the Black guys in his native New York City back in the 80s and 90s. He did what many mature men in their late fifties do and moved to Florida a few years ago. He says that he has seen firsthand how the dating scene has changed and is not giddy about it. “Back in the day, I used to meet up with dudes and we’d spend the whole night talking, kissing. I’m Latino so you know I love to kiss! And even if we didn’t know each other, I felt that all that foreplay and messing around helped us established a level of intimacy, you know. And when it came to fucking, it was mutual. I mean, niggaz back then used to kiss and eat ass.” He mentioned that even though he received a lot of grief from other New York Latino friends for dating exclusively Black men, he never wavered in his love for the darker hues. “Yeah, Dominicans pass that mentality down from generation to generation that you date and marry a white man and can only have a Black man as your secret side piece. I was the only one of my friends who felt no shame in proclaiming my undying love for some good Black dick. While they went to white clubs or [Latin establishments] La Escuelita or Factoria, I was up in [Black clubs] like Body and Soul or Octagon looking for my Black bruthaz. My friends all dogged me out for that, but it was all good because I loved me some Black men and that meant more for me,” he said with a hearty laugh. “And not only sexually. To this day, all of my long-term relationships have been with Black, non-Latino men.”
But as the years passed, he began to see changes in his interactions with Black men.
“All these niggas wanna do nowadays is bend you over, spit, stick and split.” He complains that what they are seeing on the apps has had a negative effect on how Black men see themselves in the sexual realm. Black men are taking on the role as the perennial sex machine: the aggressive and faceless disseminators of dick and seed who will fuck you and then while you’re in the loo, they slip out the door without so much as a parting toodle-oo. “I think that’s what a lot of white young headz want from a Black dude. They are all these insatiable bottoms who can take dick long and hard for hours because they’re on meth or them blues, so the few Black tops out there think that all bottoms want the same thing.” Due to this changing situation, Dee made the decision some years back to avoid encounters with Black men altogether because more and more of them seemed unwilling to reciprocate sexually. “I would love to have a Black boyfriend, but if he’s not willing to please me as much as he demands that I please him, it ain’t gonna happen.”
***
Black and Forth Our Love Goes
T-Bone has not out-and-out stated on his profiles that he is restricting his interactions with Black men, but has slowly but surely stopped responding to solicitations from them. “Up until recently, I had never dated a white man, even though I didn’t have any problems with them, per se. I was just more drawn to Black men when I first started dating. Now, it’s kind of the opposite. There is something kinda laid back and easy about white guys. I know it’s not PC to say, but white men just don’t bring all the drama because they seem to be better adjusted and more comfortable with their sexuality and situations.” T-Bone has not ruled out dating Black men in the future, but for the moment, he is exploring other possibilities, including Asian and Latin men.
Dee professes that he has crossed Black men off his list, but this has not altered his preferences towards white men. “The only white thing I’ll put in my mouth is some Colgate. I have never liked white men and ain’t gonna start now at my age! I still need my man to have melanin, but I make sure now that they are Latino, or foreigners. I just can’t get down with these aggressive-ass Black Americans who don’t kiss and refuse to lick it before they stick it. No thank you very much,” he adds with a roll of his eyes.
T-Bone was a bit more reflective when talking about his decision to stop dating Black men. “I believe that there are still a lot of lingering psychological adjustment issues gay Black men have not dealt with. Many of us are still rejected by our communities, like I was when I came out. Everyone in my family except my grandmother completely disowned me and the so-called Black church supported their decision. So many of us have to deal with trauma like that. And Black men are never fully accepted by the mainstream gay community either. So many of us are in limbo and that manifests itself in negative ways. I also feel like many Black men rejected me because I can be effeminate, like they would not want to go out in public with me because we might run into one of their homies. Or maybe they were intimidated by my openness. All I know is that it just became increasingly more difficult to strike up a relationship with a Black guy who wasn’t angry or possessive or emotionally distant because of all this baggage they carry around. I just don’t have the energy for it.”
I ask them, “But aren’t these sentiments racist?”
T-Bone had his usual measured and reflective answer: “I don’t know if my viewpoints are racist or not. I think many of us have collective experiences, including traumatic ones, and they create these trends in our behaviors. It just so happens that many of the behaviors that don’t really mesh with my personality and expectations come out in gay Black men. There are probably scores of white and brown people who have these same behaviors, but I just haven’t come in contact with them as much. It’s complicated.”
Dee had his customary in-your-face response: “If it’s racist, so be it. I’m just not going to expose myself to that macho, selfish bullshit, not at my age. I mostly blame the internet and social media because Black men did used to kiss, eat ass and reciprocate way more before all this Twitter porn bullshit came along where dudes be begging for a nigga to ‘beat that shit up’ without any reciprocity. Maybe Black men have been negatively affected by all this more than the other races. All I know is that I don’t want to be part of it anymore. I’ll leave that to the white meth queens.”
***
Arizona Iced Me (with Lemon)
These were pretty enlightening conversations I had with T-Bone and Dee and it’s kind of concerning because of the ripple effect that these perceptions can have on the entire gay scene. As an old ass gay man who’s Black and a top, my options are already as scarce as a Christmas without Mariah, and now things are even more dire because the pool of young Black Sugar Boys is drying up for us. A few nights ago, I actually sucked it up and went out to a gay bar in Phoenix and every instance of Black men I saw there was of the fly-in-the-milk variety: three or four white guys with one Black dude in the group. Not at any point was there any interaction among the Black patrons as they seemed to have been absorbed by their environment. Not even a head-nod of an acknowledgement of each other’s presence. I ended up playing a few games of pool with two brothers (real biological brothers, not bruthaz) from Cyprus and chatted a little with a couple of white guys who were certainly a little drunk and tryna get some BBC all up in ‘em before sunrise. I eventually closed out my tab and called it a night without having interacted with any of the other Black guys there. As I drove home, I could not help but hark back to the comments that T-Bone and Dee had made. Did the other Black guys in the place look at me and think that I was after their precious white men and deemed me as competition? Did they not see me as a potential sexual partner because of how they’d been influenced by the mandingo portrayals of Black men on the porn sites? Or were they just the typical Black Arizonans who can’t be bothered with other Blacks?
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was definitely an implicit, latent feeling I got from those other Black patrons, like they were avoiding me and each other on purpose. Perhaps they felt like the more Black men there were up in the bar, the less special each individual Black guy would feel in the eyes of the white patrons they coveted. Maybe rejection is the knee-jerk reaction at seeing other Black men in the bar as it’s them who are responsible for the negative light cast upon us as a group. Or it could be like the situations expressed by Dee and T-Bone; they have sworn off Black men after a series of negative interactions with them. Again, I don’t know if this Black-on-Black racism among us fags is on the rise, but it certainly feels like things done changed since the days when we would at least acknowledge each other’s presence in a predominately white establishment.
***
What I need young Black men in America to know is that many of us Black Daddies still kiss, still cuddle, still eat it before we beat it. And if that bussy real good, we might even get you that PS-5 your biological dad won’t. Don’t believe all the hype you see on PornHub because you just might be missing out on something special chasing after them Chads and Brads. I’m just saying.
AN AFTERTHOUGHT
There are precious few gay Black male celebrities who live their lives freely and the vast majority of them have chosen to put non-Black partners on their arms. These celebrities include actor and singer Billy Porter, journalist Don Lemon, comedian Jerrod Carmichael, TV personality RuPaul and director Lee Daniels and Karamo Brown. (I have not taken the time to find out why Karamo is famous.)
(If I were to make a list of all the straight Black male celebrities who date or marry non-Black women, I’d need to purchase more storage space in my cloud.)
Billy Porter
Don Lemon
Jerrod Carmichael
Karamo Brown
Lee Daniels
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