Welcome to DBQ. This publication, now entering it’s10th year was established to not only document the culture, experience, and work of LGBTQ+ people of color, but to affirm, celebrate and to garner visibility for community.
All tagged SEX
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
On being naked.
It’s liberating. I’ve waited a long time to get naked in front of the camera, spent the better part of my life afraid of being naked. Sheltered behind closed church doors, inundated with conservative ideology —ashamed of my bare brown skin to be exposed, I never featured my body growing up, I hid it. I’ve experienced enough judgement and shade from the holy to ever let someone catch me with my pants down.
What began as my saved and sanctified mother putting her hands over my eyes lids every time nudity appeared on the movie or television screen or her confiscating my Playboy magazines hidden carefully under my mattress, ended up creating a negative, shameful, and unaffirming connotation about nudity, sexuality, and sex. The religious dogma stirred into my psyche most of my life caused me to hate myself, my body, and sexual urges and fantasies.
BITTER BITCH - IT'S YOUR SECRETS THAT MAKE YOU SICK
Before he walked out of my life, he said his only hope for me was that I become so great and powerful, such a success, that all the things he had done to break my heart, all the betrayals, lies, humiliations, all the pain he had caused would then mean nothing to me.
I write because I know I am not alone. If my heart is stuck, there are tens of thousands stuck also. It then becomes my mission to navigate through these experiences, the community at my heels, with bated breath along for the ride.
No one wants to be bitter, which is why most of us run from the idea and any slight accusation. We claim betterment in hopes to hide the down spiraling effect that takes place when someone you trusted enough to place your all on the line snatches the air from your lungs in an instant. When the knife that we never thought we would feel punctures our skin, into our flesh, tearing away at the wholeness we once knew, we many times are reduced to futures influenced by pain.
Something within me was mesmerized by something within him, and despite all my caution I understood him immensely. Whatever I found in him was special to me, Nirvana at best, and at best was often enough for nothing else to matter after him. We were on the run together on an adventure, and as long as we had each other there existed a fire, a love that would make us invincible against the world. For boys like us, there is not much we long for more than love and acceptance.
