I have not the privilege of silence nor the luxury of puritanical ideology to cover my bare essential ass. In a culture that negates queer and trans bodies and their sexuality, expression, experience, and attraction --being a visible, black, gay man who is free, whole, and worthy makes it imperative for me to sound the siren in a jockstrap.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise?

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

--Maya Angelou

Interestingly enough, the meeting of our thighs is worth more than diamonds. Therefore every hateful thing someone can twist their mind to think or fix their lips to say about any queer or trans body is the evidence of the lies and poison we've been digesting since before we can remember. The audacity for most heterosexual and/or religious folks to think they have a monopoly on God. All this asserted control over that which no one has power over. All these lists of moral rules that get you into heaven written by humans who have never been and cannot create one to put anyone in. All of the black people following the Bible word for word as if God wrote the words with fingers and a pen. God isn't human. God is the stuff that brings humans to life.

However, most black people don't know God for themselves because their only knowledge of God is in the Bible. The same Bible that was pressed upon our African ancestors after they were dragged off the slave ships, kidnap from their homeland, spiritual tradition, and culture. The same Bible that tells slaves, our African ancestors, to obey their masters, that King James Version that condemns the eating of shellfish, pork, and rebukes a woman on her period. The same King James that allowed his mother to be beheaded so that he could eventually rule a historical three thrones. That King James who brought together forty-seven other scholars to translate the Bible into a self-titled version. Please understand the Bible doesn't own God. It has a simple licensing agreement, just like all the other religions, most of which predate Christianity. It is a book of human truths and experiences some in which God has highlighted. How could the Bible own God?... as if the sovereign divine loving energy that is God can be shoved into smallness and insecurity. 

God isn't in a committed relationship with religion; therefore, religion isn't a prerequisite to God. You don't need to follow anyone to get to the source or to make you worthy of God's love, because God is love. Anytime I experience the opposite of love, which is fear-- the inner spirit of hate, I know that there is a pitching-off of that which is God. You can't separate yourself from God, although many try to, which is to pitch off the good, the love that is inherent within us?

What I've come to know about God is that there is no gender, orientation, or expression that God is not. God is energy vibrating at the highest frequency known not to mankind. That energy is the host resident of our body. It's is the very grace that urges rivers of blood through our veins. God doesn't discriminate for everything that is, that has been, or that will be is made up of God. All matter is energy vibrating at some frequency, and it all originates with God, the source.

It is sometimes even difficult for me to call God him, for God isn't gender-specific.  The Presence is all genders and orientations. We many times experience God as we identify, for we are made in the likeness and image of God. 

There have been many times I've experienced God as Mother. And I can never forget the first time I came to this holy knowledge -- I was in the home and at the feet of Maya Angelou with my mentor Les Brown who was kneeling next to me with his head at her knee as she prayed a blessing over our lives. She uttered, "Father-Mother God, I come, I lay, I bow, I sit, I crumple here. I call the angels behind the stars and the giants of the land that you would bless and keep these two." 

This was the beginning of me understanding how wildly fluid God is.  

We've been force-fed so much fake news about ourselves and God. Many of us share 'hand me down' sentiments that God is an angry man in the sky who will burn you when you don't do what he says -- not even-- those are the viewpoints of purest, insecure folks waging war for power over our futures by claiming rights to the heart of God. Most of us have been drinking the punishment punch all of our lives digesting fear and degradation that gays are an abomination or that AIDS is his wrath on queer and trans people. If that's the case, what wrath are the lumps in our loving grandmother's breast? What wrath is diabetes or cancer of the brain? God's vengeance upon people for what? As if God needs to use pain and violence and as if he has a point to make. Please believe me when I say none of us were ever meant to survive, and the crossing over of death is perhaps nothing more than the experience of deep sleep that follows orgasms and cuddling in love. What else is the point of life, if not love? 

Imagine how liberated the architect of freedom would be. The great Source, Presence, and Loving Energy show up on this earth as our souls having a human experience. In that human experience, one can define themselves as they wish and express themselves as they please. The great adventure of God inside human form experiencing freedom; is our lives.

I can remember, as a young child, the feeling of fear every time I saw slight nudity in front of me, whether on a television screen, magazine pages, or out in the world. Momma taught my little brother Jon and I that nudity, lust, and sex were of the devil and that we must keep our hearts pure and close our eyes when we see such sin. This idea that became a belief for me informed my perspective about respectability, righteousness, and beauty until my grandmother Nano told me otherwise. I will never forget the day when Jon and I were watching a movie in a theatre with Nano.  A lovemaking scene with the slight showing of a woman's nude body appeared on the screen; instantly like clockwork, both Jon and I covered our eyes with the palms of our hands to hide our faces from the scene on the big screen. Nano, with her soft hands, touched our heads and whispered to us, "There is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.  Nudity and the body are beautiful. You don't have to hide your eyes". 

This would be the beginning of a shift in consciousness for me. Still, it would take decades for me to fully understand the profound toxicity that is fear and shame that encompassed my body, sexuality, and perspective. I now understand that my Momma's sincere hopes were to raise young men with pure intentions and golden hearts who treated people and their bodies with respect. I've come to understand that purity isn't a determinate for sex that God approves of; love is. The question is, did you both love it?

And I'd be remiss if I don't say this clearly. Sex symbols, sex workers, sex sirens, and porn stars are all leaders of the subject. They are the authority, the ones who are adventuring into places we are afraid to. Instead of standing in our sexual nature, we've shamed them because we don't have the courage to be them, and with that fear comes the stigma we create so we can say with disgust that we don't even want to be a porn star. I am about sick and tired of hearing and smelling the acid reflux of self-hatred rolling up in our own communities esophagus with words of degradation towards sexual figures all while most of us in privacy masturbates to them.

Queer people can absolutely be your stylist, decorator, makeup artist, hairdresser, creative director, or talent. Still, when it enters the realm of our sexuality, mainstream popular culture seems to deem our bodies as unworthy and unattractive.

If my sexiness offends you, the first and only question you should ask yourself is why? Whether it's because your body doesn't look like that or you don't believe people should show their bodies or you think there is an appropriate time for showing one's body. All of that is your projected mess, your own personal side effect of years of sipping the juice that informed you self-righteously with assertions of false power against your individual freedoms.

I write and do with intentions of inscribing history --to note the changing tide. I hear the silent screams of queer and trans people everywhere that utter the necessities for a renaissance of their own bodies. Our sexuality is battered in many thick, dense layers of shame. And I personally have no more fucks to give to stigma; that bitch has eaten most of us out of house and home, leaving us starving at life's feast. The journey anyone will fix their fingers to mark a disgrace --I will narrate as a litany of signs and wonders of queer brilliance. For we will never live free and affirmed in this world, hiding. Never, with our lips perpetuating the self-shaming, self-hating, judgmental narratives about our own black and brown gay and queer bodies every time we see them. When will we allow a celebration within our own selves every time we see bare skin?

We wrap our bodies in layers of fear, stowed away from the world as if the world isn't made up of the same body parts we're so afraid to show. Must we throw stones —whispering slurred unkind words? Who taught you to hate your orgasms and curves, wherever or however you found them? This is the only body you will ever have in this life. It's carried you in spite of your learned resentment of it, your unconscious neglect, and your inability to love it first and foremost. Your body deserves a sex party —for all the years, it's been wrapped up, armed for battle. If you think this holy rant has gone too far, baby, I've just got out the lube.