Ground-ed

BELASCO

Grindr could be really fun. It's like a giant high school cafeteria where the mean gays mix with the geeks and the jocks in a never ending game of cat and mouse. It can also be grating. In it, you can find the no fats/fems/asians/blacks/bigotry of the day "preference", and also the downright fetishization of a whole race just for the purpose of fucking.

Vice published an article about the idea that some men reduce black men as a giant dick. Nothing more and nothing less. A commodity, the Mandingo fantasy, created by white men for white men and obviously, without the cooperation of the object of said fetishization. Black men see themselves being robbed of any agency in what concerns them as sexual beings.

In a climate such as the one we live today in America, with a bigoted, racist, sexist, bloviating orange man-child in the White House, this conversation becomes more pointed. The objectification of the black male also works to make the hyper-sexualized notion of every black man as a stud more palatable. Nevertheless, when a black man is perceived as devoid of anything else by his sexual prowess, he becomes somehow less human: he's a brute beast good for only one thing: fucking. There's nothing more and nothing less to him than his cock and once said cock is used, there's little use to the man attached to it.

So when you find out that men on Grindr aim to get fucked by a black man, they are not only expressing a preference, they are actively reducing said man to nothing more than a dick. This, of course, is the other side of the coin of sexual racism, in which men openly state they will not fuck a black man or a man of color, for that matter. And then queer black men find themselves at a crossroads: should they just take what they can with the men who just want them for their dicks or get peeved by the myriad profiles that actively exclude them from sexual interaction?

I'm sure there is a middle ground, a middle ground where queer black men and men of color are seen as just a man. The fact that they are black or MOC is just the icing on the cake. No expectations, no preconceptions. But I'm an optimist. Hey, otherwise I would be just cursing at any passerby who looked my way and howling at the moon on Monday nights.

xoxo