When I wrote my novel, The Prophets, I was writing, in part, to put out into the world a story I wanted to read. During my literary journey, I had never encountered a work that centered a romance between two Black male characters in a time period prior to the Harlem Renaissance. I had seen sexual assault depicted readily: In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Jacobs describes an enslaved Black man chained to a bed and repeatedly violated by a white male slaveowner. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the Black male character Paul D. is sexually assaulted by a white male overseer.
So, I definitely saw brutality.
But I never saw love.
I never saw love because it’s often the case that from heterosexual point of view, queerness is an existential aberration; a corruption borne of defective genes and/or poor breeding and/or improper touch. In the sights of this heterosexist gaze, queer people are capable of, at best, debauchery. But we don’t have the requisite “higher functionality” to demonstrate or embody something as intricate and divine as love.
When you add Blackness to the queerness, the bleak and severe judgment of this gaze is magnified exponentially…
