Darnell L Moore

from No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

I swallowed and digested my secret. The aftertaste of my week with him was so unforgettable I would stick a finger down my throat to bring it up years later. Billy was his name. He was in his early twenties and stood a few inches taller than me. His agile body was buried under an army fatigue jacket and baggy jeans. Hypnotic eyes lit Billy’s smooth, honey-colored face and tempting smile. His measured movements through the thorny paths of the public park in Center City, Philly, made him seem unafraid.

We briefly played the game. I turned around and looked in his direction as he walked away. We caught eyes as he glanced back. He nodded. My heart raced as we gave each other the look understood only by two young men searching for each other in the night. Our gaze was our contract.

There were no words spoken. No unease. Just unfulfilled longings and erotic attraction doing for us what our silences in the day had prevented. Dead brown leaves crunching under our feet was the only sound we made as we searched in the dark for a place to go. I was too scared to actually fuck a stranger outside. Trees aren’t mattresses. Police patrolling parks aren’t friends. And homosexuality wasn’t right. But because welcoming embraces were few, the hand of a stranger moving about my neck as I unzipped my pants was worth it.

We didn’t do much, but our too little was enough. Jerking off with an unexpected stranger outside amid quieted moans competing with the sounds of cars traveling in the distance, close enough to hear the breath of other men cruising the park, was a new experience for me. I was nineteen. I wasn’t yet gay.

Billy was just my third or fourth secret. Always in the dark of the night and always alone, I found touch and, sometimes, violence. Not that time, however. I searched and left the park with an answered prayer. It was a peculiar blessing, not unlike Terrence’s innocent kiss or Jason’s hugs that fueled my wet dreams every night. Those encounters were so memorable because they represented the fantastic, surreal power of fugitive freedom. Queerness is magic for those brave enough to make use of it, but it can feel poisonous for those who have yet to give in to its power. I sensed Billy’s magic. So, I traveled with Billy to his home in northwest Philly.

No overnight bag or change of clothes. No toothbrush or condoms. No clue how I would get home and no contact with friends for several days. No cares in the world, including for myself. No money. No sense of Billy’s last name. But we held each other every night. For that short time when we lost ourselves in our sweat, stale breath, and questions, there was no abandonment or fear of rejection. In Billy’s cluttered ten-by-twelve-foot room, our bodies intertwined. We shared secrets we would later forget. We giggled at horrible jokes. In his wisdom, Billy encouraged me to push through college. We held hands. Listened to music. Only the faint concerns of acquiring HIV after days of unprotected sex broke our harmony, but even the thought was not enough of a warning to convince me to leave or get condoms. How could I? The presence of arms and hands and tender lips and empathic hugs and loving thrusts and seeing eyes was too irresistible for me to fear death.

I had buried my fear of HIV years before when my Aunt Cookie told me, at the age of fifteen, that a second cousin I had never met was gay. She didn’t actually say the word. She made a hand motion others used when they wanted to communicate that someone they knew was a fag. And for the fag, wrists, like any dream of his desires for acceptable intimacy, seemed to always be broken. Aunt Cookie quickly added, “Your cousin’s name was Darnell, too. He died of AIDS.” Her semantics game worked. I would never again say “AIDS” and “gay” without interpreting them as synonyms. My fate was sealed. I was gay and, therefore, AIDS would be my fate, just like my dead, gay, HIV-positive cousin whom I had never met, who may have existed only in Aunt Cookie’s imagination.

But I kept my cousin alive in my dreams. I imagined that his skin was smooth and as brown as maple. His eyes were deep and dark. His hands were strong but smooth enough to be held by the hands of another man. His back was perfectly postured, strong enough to carry his lover from the sofa to the bedroom. He was the Black man I learned to openly shame and secretly admire. He was my aunt’s friend Keith, a hairstylist who sashayed through our neighborhood. He was LeRoy, my high school classmate who jumped double Dutch better than the girls. He was Dre, my high school friend who told me I was gay before I knew I was, who was hurt because I messed around with his boyfriend like I messed around with our mutual friend Ramik’s crush. Dre died before I knew what was wrong; he was buried with his secrets. This was the imaginative world Black men like us, who flirted with, fucked, and deeply loved other Black boys and men, tried our best to survive—despite the ways HIV decimated those around us in the 1990s.

Some of these men—sometimes beloved and sometimes scorned—were our fathers, uncles, neighbors, boyfriends, hookups, and play mothers. So many of us were and are living through the post-traumatic anxieties of those years. Public health research and community-based interventions then and now focus on the “who” and not the “why” when it comes to advocacy related to Black boys and men and HIV. During my late adolescence, never once did a doctor ask me, while administering an HIV test, if I experienced love or rejection, connection or estrangement. It didn’t matter that Billy, a beautiful man I met in a public park before we hooked up, was beautiful and kind. They wanted to know if I had sex with men. They didn’t ask why I decided against using a condom despite my awareness of HIV risks. It didn’t matter that I never had sex with Jason, a neighborhood friend who didn’t identify as “gay” or “bi” then or now, and yet shared care and intimacy with him. Some doctors didn’t even smile while interrogating me. Some never asked if I was okay because my feelings were not their concern. Humans feel, but subjects report.

Black boys and men are read as hypersexual: strong enough to deal with anything that comes our way, possessed of a brutish masculinity that prevents us from feeling, enabling us to terrorize others’ bodies. Our dicks are caricatured as weapons or photographed as objects of desire poking out from our clothes, the only part of our bodies that’s coveted. Our eyes as lacking tears. Our hands as tools for violence or pleasure, but little in between. Our lives as worthy of quick conclusions.

Whether my fate as a Black man in love with other men was God’s retribution or some form of nature correcting the unnatural, Aunt Cookie’s words haunted me like a divine foretelling. And as long as I would die from AIDS, fucking and being fucked raw by Billy in his strange row house in Philly would be of no consequence. I imagined death to be sweeter when the dying didn’t die alone, so I sought other bodies as company. If loneliness and rejection are the worst deaths, I had died many times before.

Pleasure and survival, touch and attraction, are not so easily pulled apart. I met up with Billy in a park, turned to his body, sought refuge in his arms and his bedroom, fucked, and disappeared for days with him because I located unspoken desires where they could not be found elsewhere. Not in sex education classes, living rooms, church sanctuaries, workplaces, or state institutions. And I was willing to deal with the consequences because I believed, because I had been told, that I would be infected and deadened anyway.

These actions tend to be the consequence of a twisted self-fulfilling prophecy we are socialized to believe. Too few are asking us the questions to get to the depths of Black queer boys’ traumas. What is it that you desire but have been denied? What is it that you need to feel safe? How do you actually feel about the person you had sex with? What is it about him you desire? What are the sources of your pain? Who hurt you? Who first told you that your sexual desires and attractions were wrong? Does it feel better when you use a condom? Do you feel more connected when you don’t use a condom at all? What is it about that particular connection that fulfills you?

To ask those questions would mean Black boys and men would have to be seen, first, as bleeding, crying, vulnerable, and sometimes resilient human persons. We are breakable. Black boys and men are still going to parks. They are searching for an embrace and sex with another man or woman, the butterflies that dance in the stomach when a crush says hello, relief from estrangement, pleasure, comfort, and so much else people across the spectrum of sexualities are in search of. Lovelessness is a consequence of living in a queer-hating society. It shapes relationships between Black men who love men, just as it shapes our relationship with the communities we exist in. 

Black same-sex love is revolutionary because we must first convince ourselves we are deserving of receiving and giving what has been denied us for so long.