Yesterday, while chatting with a black female friend of mine she berated the scarcity of good men saying they were either taken, gay or too promiscuous to trust.

I was quite shocked to hear for the first time that homosexuality is supposedly prolific among black men. This was verified by a young black male friend of mine who was there at the time.

I had long thought that homosexuality among black men was serious cultural taboo and put gay men at risk of being beaten and women subjected to ‘corrective rape’.

I was assured this was a thing of the past and these days people are free to choose – and many black men are now choosing to be gay.

Comments?

I got a most interesting response from a friend of mine which I share below:

Well, let’s address the first glaring point: no one CHOOSES to be gay – the only choice is whether you come out or stay in the closet. Whether hormonal, genetic, conditioned on some level or a combination of those, being gay is something that’s part of who you are, involuntary and innate.

Secondly, the statement that ‘homosexuality is prolific among black men’ is a misreading of the situation. Yes, there are more visible black gay men but that’s because there’s a higher percentage of the gay population that chooses to come out than before. The percentage, I would say, always remains more or less constant in all communities (around 10%) but now more of that percentage is coming out and being visible, hence the false perception that “more men are ‘becoming’ gay”.

Thirdly, homosexuality is generally a taboo topic in black communities (though not uniquely so) but it’s not a uniform picture. There are gradations and variations on attitudes depending on class, geography, age, etc. Most visibly out gay men would be at risk of harassment, victimisation and assault in many townships but you also find islands/enclaves of acceptance, or at least ambiguity, in some townships.

For example, I’ve heard stories of township taverns where straight men specifically go to pick up effeminate gay men for sex. The reasoning is seemingly that: 1) this particular subset of gay men are “woman” enough in appearance and presentation to be fucked but more submissive and pliant in sex than more strong-willed, assertive ‘modern’ township girls and 2) there’s no risk of pregnancy with anal sex. (Naturally my next question was, ‘Well, why don’t they just have anal sex with girls?’ and the answer lies in point 1. Many black girls don’t like taking it from behind and would refuse to do so.)

Even historically, black culture (like most cultures in fact) has evolved and adapted mechanisms for limited accommodation of homosexuality. Basically a blind eye was turned to it (though not all the time) before initiation into adulthood because it was seen as “kids fooling/playing around”. Particularly during puberty, it could be accepted as ‘sexual experimentation.

When teenage herdboys would take cattle herds to graze for days or weeks on end away from home, mutual masturbation and, more commonly, thigh sex (though sometimes anal) was not unheard of, although obviously not all herdboys did it.

But ultimately, the cultural imperative was to get married and have children. There was no concern with, or even conception of, homosexuality as an innate sexual orientation. People only cared that you did what was expected of you as an adult member of society. If you wanted to live a secret double life and continue a same-sex love affair from your teenagehood after you got married, no one cared much as long you didn’t get caught. Interestingly, the penalty for adult homosexual relations in most tribal law codes was SMALLER than the penalty for heterosexual adultery. They understood that proportionally speaking, it was relatively harmless – there was certainly no risk of illegitimate children being borne out of a gay affair!

Warwick, tell your friend to count herself lucky. In the bad old days, she’d have been at higher risk of falling in love with and marrying some closeted queen who would never be physically or sexually attracted to her and be more likely to be thinking about her brother than her whenever they had sex. There’ve always been promiscous men and gay men; at least these days it’s almost as easy to identify the second group as the first so that women don’t waste their time barking up the wrong tree.