In the Heat

Abstract

In the United States, black men who seek to feel each other sexually and/ or emotionally encounter a number of historical and contemporary obstacles to doing so. From a historical context, as early as the beginnings of the European colonial project and the enslavement of African people, black male sexuality was managed and policed by the social structures of the day—social policy, law, and commerce (Bennett 297–325; Farajaje-Jones 327). These systems of management and policing served to organize black male sexuality in ways that maintained the good order of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. In the contemporary context, black male sexuality is managed and policed by contemporary social structures, for example, heterosexism, sexism, white supremacy, and capitalism. Contemporary systems of management and policing differ in certain ways from the historical. Now hip-hop hypermasculinity and hyperheterosexuality, a throwback to the Hollywood-produced black buck archetype of black manhood (Bogle 10); Obama-era politics of respectability, a throwback to the Duboisian talented tenth agenda; and HIV/AIDS prevention, as a sociological, psychological, epidemiological, and spiritual phenomenon that has come to be associated with behavior surveillance and modification, function to constrain the possibilities of feeling and being felt by another black man and marginalize the spaces for such feelings, emotional and physical, to transpire.

Black men loving black men is [a] revolutionary act.

—Joseph Beam

So to live in a Black male body and to desire other Black male bodies is to move about daily on a physical, psychological, and spiritual battleground.

—Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajaje (formerly Elias Farajaje-Jones)

These moments open our eyes to the walls that have been constructed to constrain our pleasures, desires, passions, and bodies … We can choose to draw power from these moments in service to our growth and liberation. We can choose to make [them] moments of erotic agitation in the struggle for our sensual empowerment. The choice is ours on a personal and a social level.

—Herukhuti