A Valentine to a Certain Kind of Black Male Sexuality

The second I discovered that Jamie Foxx had experienced a medical emergency, I sincerely hoped he would survive, beyond which I hoped that his survival would lead to another comedy special. And I hoped that this comedy special would reveal—through that beautiful juxtaposition of intense hurt and humor—something serious about Black men’s bodies, something serious before those untimely, or overdue (depending on who’s being asked), deaths around the ripe age of 67. You know the tropes: won’t go to the hospital, fighting, hard livin’, etc.

This is what I hoped, more than halfway to the tomb myself, even if those who love me rampantly deny that basic fact. What I knew, however, was that we would get dick jokes. Knew we would get dick jokes because I’ve been a Black boy for 36 years, and among the most fearful, excitatory, and sublime aspects of such an experience has been what people make, or try not to make, of my penis. Knew after more than a decade as a medic in an all-male unit, and after years inspecting testes for ticks and lice as a nurses’ aid, washing and providing nonsexual but always necessary scrutiny of other people’s cocks, that the Black phallus and all its attendant fantasies would pop up, either always imperiled or throbbing and in mint condition for her pleasure.

Just 20 minutes into Foxx’s Netflix special, the D emerges. Fifty-seven-year-old Foxx, rocking a thick leather fit with the sheen of a short-haired, light-skinned puppy, looks good. This man’s post-stroke hairline invokes such a specific kind of Black male envy that it deserves its own essay. But the D? It ain’t doing so great. The nurse wants to bathe Foxx, and he’s like, Absofuckinglutely not.

With a left foot forward and a hand on his crotch, he’s like, “No, you not finna see this pickle…. There’s shit goes along with this pickle. I’m Black.” He pauses for effect. “I’m Jamie Foxx. It’s a whole lot of shit goin’ on here with this pickle.” It’s a Black male comedian classic just a nudge away from your average locker room chatter, a discourse that could get interesting but too often, in life and performance, reverts to bravado, to a narcissism extended by hardcore heterosexual porn’s most prominent event: competitive thrusting, before things really get on down to business.

To anyone who understands racism, and the fact that it has always been sexual, some of this business is obvious. Hundreds of years of mass rape and forced reproduction do not proceed without attendant cultural industries and mythological developments, without the deformation of normative sex and gender categories brought to mainstream consciousness by scholars like Hortense Spillers—without a series of psychic breaks, which have helped reinforce the idea of “Black women as persons who carry, fuck, never tire, and remain impoverished,” as Simone White writes, and the notion of Black men who are all member—both a walking threat and a big Black cock promise. Wesley Morris approached this problem back in 2016 from the visual sphere—suggesting that against a renaissance of sex positivity, the culture is simply not ready to deal with Black male sexuality:

“A Black penis, even the idea of one, is still too disturbingly bound up in how America sees—or refuses to see—itself. I enjoyed HBO’s summer crime thriller, The Night Of, but it offered some odd food for thought: The most lovingly photographed Black penis I’ve ever seen on TV belonged to a corpse in the show’s morgue. Meanwhile, the series’ most sexual Black character was a rapist inmate.” Jamie Foxx is just like us.

I’ve tried to articulate what a loss this is for everyone, through the precise angle of my own vasectomy. As someone interested in sex both physically and intellectually, I tend to question subjects like myself—Black, male, writing, sleeping mostly with women—about our sex. It interests me; it should be of interest to us. Why we rarely write seriously about our attempts to provide and procure pleasure: the anxieties, the bliss, the insecurities, the frustration and fear and curiosity at the nexus of love and sex. Why this discourse falls instead to the twin duplicities of bodily conquest and bed death. I think we think that investments in amplifying pleasure subsequently preclude care, and not just care for our lovers, but for our friends and sisters and mothers too—that we will horrify and torture the women we care about lest we say a single serious thing about sex. Sometimes I fear that we are using the gesture of holding space to lazily exclude ourselves from the problem of sex, the way that men often do with questions of gender, either saying nothing or performing absolute deferral.

But I grew up in a house full of sex workers before the internet, then worked in health care most of my adult life, and so the scary vacillation between prudishness and terror I found elsewhere, from the POV of folks who were most certainly fucking—if not any and everyone, then certainly people whom they were not “supposed” to fuck—was jarring. In other words, the most horrendous reveals of sexual wrongdoing were a Tuesday for my mom and them, who also knew what others had done to me, and even my grandmother never lost her investment in sex, telling everyone about how good she got her pussy eaten in painstaking detail. No one used terms like “sexual assault” or “sex positivity”; thus we often spoke through the nittiest of the grittiest details without recourse to abstraction or fades to black. This also meant that, no matter what happened within and outside of the house, there was nothing ambiguous about right and wrong, what felt good and what did not. And lying about this, or amalgamating representation with reality, was not to be respected.

I kind of imagined literature would be that way before I got in the game, but it was not; the most damning lack coming from what we might call the male angle of heterosexual relations. I should also probably admit here that I’m disinvested, inasmuch as I’m allowed to be, in those centralizing tenets of marriage and cohabitation, whose hegemonic force also underlies everything we are supposed to say or do.

To be against rapists is the rather easy, base-level discourse within which I don’t have patience for idle chatter. But who, I might ask, should take up the mantle of countering Fat Joe’s and DJ Khaled’s anti-pussy-eating propaganda? I mean, we have Lil Wayne’s “almost drowned in her pussy, so I swam to her butt” for great fantasy, but what might we offer, specifically in the bedroom, more than hard dick and soft tongue? Does your girl like a set of slow kisses upon the labia, or love the soft closure of your upper lip and tongue just above her clit? Where, oh where, is our philosophy of sex?

The Walter Mosley interview for The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction offers a rejoinder I’ve come to love. When asked whether he feels pressure to write about Black heroes, given a lack of them in popular discourse, he responds:

“That’s like saying, When you’re having sex with your girlfriend, do you feel a responsibility to make her feel happy? I guess you would say yes, but it’s not really about that. I’m writing about people I love. Your grandmother is sick, you’re going to take care of her. Somebody says, Do you feel a responsibility to go take care of her? It’s my grandmother, she’s sick, man, what the fuck? I got to go there.”

The hero as an idea annoys me, but I agree with Mosley here. And when I speak to women I love, who love or just plain lust after many men, they tend to agree: Who is teaching y’all anything? I think if art and literature provide any kind of education, it is a subtle one, wrapped messily beneath this century’s faux political discourse, always advocating for innocence or absolution.

In one of my favorite moments of Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations (the title of which could also mean sex > Dickens), the protagonist, David, lying in bed with his lover, another staffer on the presidential campaign of an Obama-like figure, asks this very question.

“I have been waiting all my life—was waiting long before I met Regina, I’ve come to realize, and am still waiting now, long after—for the emergence of a criticism of sex. Something that, say, porn won’t satisfy. The data set on porn and its various effects is by now large enough, I think it’s fair to say, to conclude that it has basically zero beneficial—or, more to the point I have always fumbled to make, pedagogical or interpretive—effects on the development of sexual performance or creativity or integrity over time…”

David turns to Regina and goes on to lament our lack of seriousness when evaluating our relationships to sex, positing something that feels akin to what I’ve argued above: that any middle space or inquiry, which is where most sexual activity happens, is out of the question even as we dedicate grandiose time and energy to sex itself. Vinson read this section of Great Expectations on a panel with Kaveh Akbar and me, and a woman in the audience raised her hand and described this as her favorite part of the novel, after which she asked if Vinson could read Regina’s response:

“No!” she said. “That’s exactly what’s good about sex. It’s like…”

She hesitated for a moment, tilting her head just a tick.

“It’s like something vague coming into focus,” she said. “You start out with someone, and it’s not like you can bring the moves or, like techniques you’ve already learned into this new situation. Not all of them at least. You’ve got experience—unless you’re a virgin, of course—but you’ve also got something like innocence. Naïveté. At least when it comes to this new person. And you figure them out, encounter by encounter. You experiment, and—if they’re good—they’ll help you to know what’s right, what works. And at the same time they’re trying too.”

What I love about this exchange is that it doesn’t end, nor should it, and it exemplifies a really simple way that art can help arm us with the necessary tools for continuation. Even though I’ve talked about this section of Great Expectations with many people, the real treat would have been going on then and there, would have been Kaveh and myself and other audience members joining in, unafraid to experiment with thought. A real treat would be turning to your lover and reimagining and practicing and fighting for how you, and I, and they, might like to be touched today.