My Black Pride Is None of Your Business
I don’t need color-coded validation from white guys on Grindr.
I recently wrote an essay for Queerty titled “Hold the ‘Chocolate’! Racially coded hookup talk is so unsexy,” knowing it probably would be a more love-it-or-despise-it read than usual.
I was expecting pushback two weeks after collecting virtual high fives for an op-ed in which I extolled the joys of being gay and 49 years old. As it turned out, though, the blacklash — erm, backlash — was far more aggressive than I had anticipated.
I’ve been writing about race and sexuality long enough to know that browsing through the comments on anything I write about either (and especially, both) can be hazardous to my mental health. But after the positive response to my feelgood forty-nine-and-loving-it piece, I decided to take a peek at what people were saying about me just two weeks later.
It wasn’t pretty.
Among the things I learned from the comments I read, many of which appear to have been deleted by a merciful moderator:
1. Many black men incorporate words like “black,” “chocolate,” and “dark” into their Grindr profile names, so who am I to get annoyed when gay white men use those terms to describe and define me?
2. Some black guys like it when white men call them “Chocolate,” “Black stallion,” etc., so I should, too.
3. “Black don’t crack” is a phrase and a concept presumably invented by blacks and often recited by them, so I’m not allowed to hate it when gay white men (and it’s always gay white men) use it when I tell them my age.
4. As I’ve never had a black long-term boyfriend, I have forfeited my right to write about race. White privilege is a figment of my imagination anyway — or maybe it only applies to heterosexuals.
5. Although I spent four and a half years living in Buenos Aires, exclusively dating and sleeping with Latino men, and although I have been with a number of black men, as well as Asian men (from Thailand, Philippines, India, Israel, Turkey, and elsewhere) and indigenous men, I am interested only in “white.”
6. I have spent all of 2018 so far in the Balkans because I want to be the only…
