While last week was the week of Pharrell's "New Masculinity" *eyeroll,* this week is all about Tank's views on gay sex. It's great that we're having conversations that used to be off-limits. Most especially, it's great that we're collectively attempting to engage healthy conversations about black men's sexuality. I know that we've got some growing to do to get "there," but along the journey we've got to stop contradicting ourselves.
Last week people celebrated Pharrell for doing what black queer men have been doing since ... forever—being divergent and softer in his fashion choices. This week Tank took us a step further into the sexuality void and, shirtless body be DAMN, tried like Moses to lead black people into open-mindedness regarding black men's right to sexplore. Needless to say, the people ain't having it. It appears folks like their straights untainted and their queers extra-legibly and identifiably queer—it's a "NO DECEPTICON" zone where blackness is concerned.
The problem in all this is the glaring contradiction in the fact that apparently people want black men to be free, while at the same time wanting them to be bound. They don't know what freedom looks like. Freedom, if we go by this series of events, is purely external. So no, you don't have to wear Timberlands and fitted baseball caps anymore; we've taken that off the list of black male requirements. But don't you dare even think about sexploration in order to figure out if maybe there are other pleasure possibilities you might be interested in. I have a sneaky suspicion it has much to do with insecurities and notions of sexual "competition," but don't have the time here to unpack that.
The major point I'd like to make here is that the more we do to clarify black masculinity, the more we seem to muck it all up. Further, we do all the mucking blindly, not realizing that we're asking for two different things that are actually one in the same. Pharrell's external embrace of the divine feminine within tells us nothing about the remnants of toxic masculinity that may well be lurking on the inside. Tank's articulation of open thought does more to undo the toxicity everyone has long been complaining about. Yet Tank's kind of radical progressivism is rejected because it apparently goes too far.
The moral of the story is that there is a very problematic investment in aesthetics that does nothing to transform the much deeper seat of masculinist trauma from which the toxicity emerges. Yes, I'm calling it trauma because the insistence on particular performances of masculinity that meets us at birth are in and of themselves a form of violence, an assault on the vast possibilities black men are disallowed because they are interdicted at the door. It's traumatic in ways that many men are not even aware constitute trauma. To be cut off from oneself before ever even being able to construct individual selfhood is disabling. It is akin to cutting off a man's legs at birth and giving him prosthetics, fake apparatuses, before he has ever even realized his own natural capacity to walk or run. He learns to walk on artifice, and to run on falsehood. He will also eventually outgrow his prosthetics and be limited in that same set of abilities because the original apparatuses are so juvenile and unnecessary they can never serve him in his maturity.
Frederick Douglass said, "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." In this moment, I think we're finding out precisely that.
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