“Jerrod” was originally published on Witness as a paid subscription on June 19, 2024. It’s now free as a gift to loyal subscribers. Happy holidays!
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, a Black male character named 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 points 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, divine, or careful as love.
When you add Blackness to the queerness, the bleak and severe judgment of this gaze is magnified exponentially.
By virtue of actually living at the intersection of Blackness and queerness, I’m keenly aware of how heterosexism, like all bigotry, is bullshit. And to demonstrate what I know, I centered Isaiah and Samuel, two young Black men enslaved on a plantation in Vicksburg, Mississippi (a plantation that the enslaved call “Empty”) in The Prophets.
Isaiah and Samuel are soulmates who fall in love the moment they lay eyes on one another as children (one of the lies heterosexists like to assert is that queerness has no infancy and no childhood). Both Isaiah and Samuel are as whole as can be given the circumstances and, yet, also complete each other. They feel and express their love under the threat of having it tarnished, banished, or broken at any given moment—as is still the case for Black queer men in many places around the globe, including in the so-called leader of the free world, the United States of America.
The Prophets also tells a parallel love story that takes place farther in the past, on the African continent, just prior to European invasion, where Isaiah and Samuel’s spiritual forebears, Kosii and Elewa, two young men from the same village, are also bound by their intense and predestined love for one another.
What I was attempting to establish was this concealed truth: Homosexuality is as ordinary to human existence as breathing.
Why did I believe it was necessary to broach this subject? Well, because within too many Black communities, there’s a peculiar mentality that posits that no Black person was ever queer in any way—not lesbian, not gay, not bisexual, not transgender, and so on—until European invaders came first to conquer and then enslave the people of Black nations. According to the precepts of this mythological thinking, it was the trauma of conquest and enslavement, not to mention the unsavory passions of the Europeans themselves, that knocked Black people from our “natural” path of cisgender heterosexuality and sullied us such that we gave in to “debased feelings.”
Plainly, queerness in Black people is said to be caused by the ferocious and frequent rapes carried out by white conquerors, slave owners, overseers, and others. These rapes, they say, made some Black women despise being with men so much (or enjoy being with women so much) that they turned toward other women, and made some Black men enjoy being with other men so much (or detest being with women so much) they turned away from women. This is what we mean by a term we still use to this day: “turned out.”
I don’t dispute that the sexual horrors committed against us and our Ancestors changed us in ways we can scarcely imagine. As James Baldwin once said:
“I doubt that Americans will ever be able to face the fact that the word ‘homosexual’ is not a noun. The root of this word, as Americans use it — or, as this word uses Americans — simply involves a terror of any human touch, since any human touch can change you.”
But anti-queer individuals have to make up their fucking-minds about whether rape turns us from straight to queer or from queer to straight. There are, after all, documented situations where men rape women and girls suspected of being lesbian, where women rape men and boys suspected of being gay, in order to make them heterosexual “again.” Human sexuality is a complex experience, yes; but what I know to be false is the idea that queerness can only come about through some traumatic experience and that it can be “corrected.” And I know it’s false because real history (not the stories we tell ourselves to boost our egos) illustrates quite clearly that queerness has been around for as long as (or maybe even longer than) people have been around.
In a multitude of places on the before-time African continent, what we now call queerness (and transness) was considered a regular part of human existence—so much so, that most African peoples didn’t even give it a distinct name because they didn’t see it as abominable, separate, or in need of distinction from any other sexual phenomena. It was only when European and other outside entities invaded these African scapes—and began their colonial campaigns of terror and mayhem, bringing with them their oppressive and treasure-hunting gods and religions—that anti-queerness (and anti-transness) was introduced. Europe and other nations invented these schemes in an effort to make cisgender heterosexuality compulsory so that they could maintain a steady production of workers and soldiers for their Crown’s (or their State’s) exploits, with the heaviest tax and toll of that manufacture placed on the shoulders of the human beings they would convert from village families to nuclear ones.
If Europe and likeminded dominions could scare the world into believing that their all-powerful gods would punish us eternally and horrifically if we ever engage in same-sex or sex-altering activities, then they could ensure their own positions at the top of the food chain simply by the sheer number of cannon-fodder/military/labor bodies forced procreation would permit.
And blast it: Their plan works! (See: the anti-abortion movement.)
This worldview seems to be quite seductive. I have been learning that when a conquered people are seeking, in some measure, remedy; when we’re looking to raise ourselves up, even if just a little bit, from the dejected conditions we’re pushed into, one of the ways in which we do so is through a tactic we learned from our oppressors: We find another group to step on. In the case of some Black communities (particularly those where the conquerors’ religions are embraced as our own), the queer and trans people of those same communities serve that purpose.
Weird philosophies have been put forth, by people who claim to love Black people, asserting that Blackness/Africanness and queerness/transness are not merely incompatible, but also contradictory. It’s literally and figuratively beat into our heads from a very young age that the worst thing that a Black man or boy can be is queer or trans or feminine—all of which are ways to say that it’s detestable for us to be women, which is to say that it’s detestable for us to be “weak.”
Queerness, transness, femininity, and womanhood are associated with weakness as a byproduct of patriarchy, which insists that masculinity is superior to femininity in every way that matters, particularly physically. Therefore, women and any feminine people (as well as disabled people, especially) are hopeless, helpless, thoughtless; in need of correction, instruction, and, in the case of non-disabled-cisgender-heterosexual-appearing women, “protection” (but for queer/trans/disabled people and others: eradication). Weakness, in this worldview, is considered a vile thing because of how easily the weak can be preyed upon. Patriarchy compels men to believe that we aren’t allowed to be weak because we have to do the work of empire-building: fighting, killing, and protecting ourselves and others from…ourselves. The predatory behavior itself is, apparently, desirable even though it, not weakness, is the problem. And striving to eliminate the predation is, seemingly, out of the question.
As a result, there’s tremendous social coercion employed to get Black queer men to hide our desires from public view and even, in some cases, from ourselves. If we don’t, we’re punished in ways up to and including death. To avoid this fate, we pretend to be what our communities want us to be: “thugs” or whatever the masculine ideal of the moment is; each fallacious act damaging us and somebody else, fueling the intense self-loathing that the world is happy to admit it ignited. Inevitably, the external hatreds become internal and then are projected outward again, creating an endless circle of blame.
One of the saddest things about a colonized people is that in our misguided attempts to be more like our colonizers, we create enemies out of our own selves. Here, we do so by refusing to provide quarter and sanctuary to those who don’t fit neatly into the crab-barrel that white supremacy has fabricated Blackness to be. So, we show contempt toward the nerd and the freak, the valley girl and the geek, the awkward and the homely, the punk and the rocker, the struggling and the uneducated, the docile and the disabled, the queer and the trans—all while bleaching, blonding, blue-contacting, and burgeoisieing ourselves into oblivion. It makes no sense, yet it makes all the sense in the world:
“What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.”
― James Baldwin, A Dialogue
It's tragic what people do to us. But I don’t believe it’s victim-blaming to say that we bear at least a tiny bit of responsibility here, too; particularly now that we know that even in a relentlessly hierarchical and oppressive system like ours, victimhood can sometimes be, regrettably, weaponized: shaped into its own cudgel and used to justify retaliatory dehumanization. Deeper interrogations are necessary—not to gaslight victims, but to note the distinction between them and those who believe it savvy to use victimization (or identity) as a Trojan horse to camouflage their own abusiveness.
Declining to do the work because we think we’re innocent and that accountability is only for other people, some of us permit our internalized anti-Blackness to broadly paint all Black people as inherently anti-queer, as being more anti-queer than any other people on Earth. We take our individual and limited experiences with homophobia within our groups and project them onto the entire Black populace. This becomes our justification, one of them, for deeming other Black men contemptible, unworthy of our sex and love, beneath our consideration for relationship-building, out of the question in terms of commitment and euphoria; and why we believe we’ll find friendlier terrain outside of Blackness.
There’s no acknowledgment of the irony of this belief given that Europe and the majority-white United States are the progenitors, suppliers, and global distributors of anti-queerness. Check it: All laws—every single one—that limit and destroy the rights of queer and trans people are European/American in origin and incentive. And please recall that it was South Africa, a majority Black nation newly returned to Black rule, that became the first country in history to recognize the humanity and rights of queer people in its national constitution. It was this understanding that I tried to convey in The Prophets.
In all fairness, one’s non-Black lover might be a reprieve to some degree. But are their parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins likely to be the ones engineering our destruction? Think of Samuel Alito and Martha-Ann Bomgardner-Alito and how they seem quite anxious to snatch LGBTQ+ flags down to the ground and plant their tyrannical own. What is one’s non-Black lover’s role in these confrontations? Do they stand firm against their blood relations? Do they have split loyalties? Are they neutral? Or do they simply expect their Black lover to “understand”?
Somewhere along the line, perhaps as a response to Black/white interracial relationships being declared immoral, illegal, transgressive, and taboo (and only because Black people are considered inferior to white people and all other people), a Black person falling in love with or having sex with someone who isn’t Black became, first, an act of rebellion, then an assertion of humanity, then a path to upward mobility, then a source of self-esteem, then a way to make “pretty babies” (who have a better chance at success than the Blacker generations before them), and eventually “progressive”—progress as in white people thinking that they can prove that they don’t have a racist bone(r) in their bodies if they can date/sleep-with/marry/have a child with a Black person. To the lazy mind, it has become shorthand and a shortcut for depicting “diversity” in media: A gay interracial couple figuratively (and perhaps literally) kills two, maybe even three, birds with one marketing stone.
Returning to Baldwin, I recall that he once said:
“Love is where you find it.”
That’s such a beautiful sentiment that I instinctively want it to be true. There’s nothing worth celebrating more than love, real love, from wherever it comes, given how precious and rare it is. Theoretically, and all things being equal, there should be nothing wrong with one consenting human being loving other consenting human beings, irrespective of racial identities. But all things are most decidedly not equal (and they are not equal in very specific and intentional ways); and neither love nor sex have proven themselves adequate armaments against the thriving inequities that antipathy and rape have long since established. As
writes in his poem, “beyond love in june”:“love is love is fine, but beyond the slogans, beyond the profit margins, are we the space where safety blooms…?”
It's evident in the way that societies behave that for Black queer love/sex (though, not Black queer love/sex exclusively) to have any social value, validity, viability, or visibility, it’s necessary for at least one person in the relationship to be non-Black. It’s as though such an arrangement is a vetting process conveying to non-Black people that the Negro(es) in question has/have passed “inspection,” a modern equivalent to having their scalps, gums, genitals, and assholes checked on the auction block prior to sale. It’s like their “quality,” no different than merchandise, has to be confirmed. It seems that it must be known if they are “the safe ones” who are politically aligned with ruling-class conclusions.
The incentives for Black men to not be attracted to other Black men, to not love other Black men, to actively decline the very ideas are incredibly powerful. The world has a voracious appetite for and vested interest in Black pathology and self-destruction. It’s highly averse to Black-on-Black love and Black self-love, which are the same thing.
There’s a nauseating pride that certain kinds of Black queer men—the ones who refuse to be romantically involved with other Black queer men—feel when they reject Blackness (and to be clear, the critique here is specific to the peculiar Black queer men, who, with gumption, reject Blackness) in favor of non-Blackness. They seem to feel more…I don’t know…sophisticated? Civilized? Acceptable? Respectable? Intelligent? They seem to think that by having a non-Black partner, they have either won the trophy or are the trophy; and for them, the objectification isn’t offensive.
By embracing the white supremacist notion that Blackness is a receptacle for inherent inferiority, incoherence, barbarism, and embarrassment, Black queer men who aren’t attracted to other Black men also aren’t wise enough to feel the shame that should come along with advertising their renunciation of their own people. (To be fair, their own people lack the same shame for the same reason). They, in fact, see it as a badge of honor, a signal to non-Black people that they are somehow “special” and “not like them other niggers.”
The benefits of this supplication, this appeal for table-crumb proximity is considered invaluable and a way to access all of the rooms, all of the conversations, and all of the accolades “ordinary” Negroes are denied. For these Black queer men, it’s as though they Darwin-charted their evolution and think of themselves as having gone from on-all-fours sissies to finally upright homo-Homo Sapiens. Or, in capitalist terms, they see being with non-Black people as causing their own stock/value to rise.
Because they think they are no longer considered apes by virtue of having aristocratic confirmation, they’re fine with being The Black Buck (now called The Big Black Cock or BBC—not to be confused with the news organization—or maybe, in some sense, it can be confused with it). The status has monetary, coital, and psychological facets; never truly sensual, intellectual, or emotional ones, though. And the fact that this is dehumanizing doesn’t seem to matter if materialism is employed as comfort and/or distraction.
Some of these Black queer men don’t appreciate being assessed in this manner (however true it might be) and have ready-made excuses to explain why they cannot be attracted to other Black men.
They say that a few Black people hurt them in the past, so now all Black people are suspect. They say other Black men remind them too much of their male family members and therefore become unattractive via an incest aversion. They say Black men are aesthetically grotesque. They say that the spaces they dwell in—usually primarily white institutions and situations—simply don’t have any Black candidates or at least none “on their level” (whatever that nebulous phrase is supposed to mean; it generally has to do with money and prestige, I imagine; something we learned from our royal overlords. Tellingly, this standard is thrown out of the window when the candidate is non-Black, though. Because non-Blackness, or un-Blackness, is its own form of currency, its own commodity). They say that’s it’s too predictable and limiting. They say it’s simply a “preference” and don’t believe that it’s necessary to analyze how just about every social apparatus in existence (especially film and television) is specifically designed to initiate and nurture anti-Black tendencies as well as predilections for non-Blackness.
Ultimately, these poor souls are people who have decided that Blackness—as a human category, racial designation, political stance, zone of adoration, and community endeavor—can only be cheaply monolithic and a manifestation of abject failure. They have concluded that in order to succeed in any of those and other areas, they must abandon Blackness to whatever degree possible, skin color be damned, and focus entirely on individual triumph, like Europe would have us do—which requires throwing other Black people under the proverbial bus (see: Clarence Thomas and Condoleeza Rice).
It’s a mentally resilient and resolute Black queer man indeed who, after surviving a lifetime of anti-Black/anti-queer bombardment, can still find his way into the embrace of another Black man. I remember seeing a video online once—I wish I could find it again—where a young Black man, maybe no more than 18 or 19 years old, had already determined that his femininity made him unlovable to other Black men, who went out of their way to let him know it. So, he said his options were limited to being fetishized by somebody non-Black or being alone. He chose the former. And can you blame him? Living is hard enough, but to go through it without knowing a desired caress (no matter how swift the rock or hidden the hand)?
Loneliness can do that, you know. Have us accept pity as a replacement for sincerity; make us submit to the most pathological parts of ourselves in what we deem a “safe space,” where harm can be remixed into sexual pleasure and considered “revolutionary” because we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that the potential for hurt can be minimized, or neutralized altogether, by our mere desire for it to be. And perhaps that could be a possibility if the boundaries between our bedrooms and our boardrooms, our house and The Big House, weren’t so sketchy.
Imagine a world where we could be sure that our racist or sexist sexual feelings didn’t somehow inform our other interactions, sometimes in ways we weren’t even aware of. We shut down legitimate inquiry of these topics in part so that we’re denied the room to examine how, for example, a politician who has earnest erotic fantasies about trans women can draft, propose, and pass laws that define trans women as genetic outlaws worthy of elimination; how a cannibal can make a meal out of Black men to the laughter and arousal of spectators; or how a white person who gets their rocks off by giving Black boys and men drugs then watching them get high and/or overdose can donate to Black Lives Matter causes or be seen as the victim in those situations.
I understand the loneliness. But: Is the fealty necessary? Must even sex be a place where racism is a virtue? Where it receives French kisses, and arms and legs spread so wide they look as though they’re preparing to be quartered? It’s the triumph of white supremacy, I tell you; proof that anti-Blackness is so powerful that it seduces both the whipper and the whipped. It’s where no impulse, no matter how depraved, is denied entry. It’s sexy dehumanization for those who believe liberation’s true test lies in the right to degrade and the right to be degraded. I see it in these Black folk who cherish their objectifiers in ways they would never cherish other Black people. Missing are the warm embraces, the smiling into faces, and the public displays of affection that are welcomed when only one person involved in the pairing is Black. It’s surgical, too: excising all aspects of Blackness except those that make us alluring to non-Black people. Moving about in these cliques with an esteem that will never be reserved for Blackness.
Yes, it’s sickening. But it’s also sad.
Could this be why we have generations of high-profile and influential Black queer men whose declarations of independence begin firmly and most assuredly, in word and/or in deed, with this preamble: “Not into Black guys”? It’s a layered confession since it’s also a self-assessment. With one disgraceful sentence, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people are instantly removed from the love equation. And it’s as appalling as war because it is one, but on the inside. In one way or another: Frank Ocean? Tyler the Creator? Steve Lacy? Michael Sam? Derek Gordon? Jason Collins? Byron Perkins? Don Lemon? Karamo Brown? RuPaul? Billy Porter? Have mercy: Bayard Rustin? Sherman Hemsley? James Baldwin? The list is endless. The insidious nature of anti-Blackness marrying anti-queerness is that its conniving offspring will succeed in turning you against yourself and your tribe. Because it also turns your tribe against you.
Or maybe these men are just the exceptions that Hollywood spotlights in order to present the minority as the majority, to make love between Black men seem more disastrous than the feuds between us. Maybe that’s just where the director’s camera guides us. But if we step away from their lens and use our own intuition, then we might actually see Raymond and Sterling St. Jacques, Anthony Hemingway and Steven Norfleet, J. August Richards and Joshua Gbor, Charles M. Blow and Juel D. Lane. If we used our own hearts, maybe then the two Black men holding hands on a Brooklyn-bound A train would earn our awe rather than our disgust.
Comedian Sampson McCormick, educator/activist Dr. David J. Johns, and writer Darian Aaron have started their own revolutions to document, for the historical record, what’s purposely being obscured. These can sometimes be uphill battles. I remember when Darian dropped his book, When Love Takes Over: A Celebration of SGL Couples of Color, a white gay man trolled him obsessively. He had the nerve to be angry that Darian published a book celebrating love between Black men. He belittled it in every way he knew how. He behaved as though the notion of Black men loving each other was a personal attack against him and affront to his genteel sensibilities; as though the very idea threatened his steady and unencumbered access to Black flesh. He enlisted Black men to join in on his tirade. And can you believe that some did?
That’s one of the things that white supremacy enjoys most: Black people tearing each other up and tearing each other down for its unobstructed viewing pleasure. This has become both pastime and profitable; Andy Cohen, 50 Cent, Mona Scott-Young, or battle rappers can attest to this. Under white supremacist auspices, quarrels between Black people that, perhaps, have legitimacy become, instead, entertainment (and they cannot be both) and, simultaneously, demonstrations of a pathology that’s made to seem exclusive to Blackness.
Because boredom is one of the main features of white supremacy, any Black person willing to set aside their dignity to perform mutilation—of the self or of other Black people, which is an antidote for white ennui, and has been at least since Ancient Rome—will be handsomely rewarded. In this way, Black people (but not only Black people) continue to lose the battle: In the most visible spaces, we remain unmotivated to love each other; or, at least, love each other enough.
So, it must be understood: I’m not tearing other Black people up or down here. That isn’t what this is. In particular, I’m not going to try to tear the subject of this essay up or down. I can write critically about us without serving us up on a menu for a flesh-hungry public.
All of these things—especially the danger of misinterpretation and the risk of these words being exploited as ammunition—were heavy on my mind when I sat down to watch the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show on Max.
I first encountered Jerrod when he had a television show called The Carmichael Show. My husband watched it first, enjoyed it, then recommended it to me. I later watched it with him and enjoyed it as well. I recommended it to my mother, who also enjoyed it.
Impressed by Jerrod’s remarkable talent, I began to search for his other art. I came across a stand-up special and a short documentary. What was interesting about the short documentary was this tiny interaction between him and his mother, Ms. Cynthia, in which he tells her that he once slept with someone of the same sex. Her reaction was stoic and I sensed there was something else going on between Jerrod and his family that hadn’t yet been annunciated.
Some years passed and I was eager to see more from Jerrod. I was excited to learn that he would be releasing another comedy special, this one called Rothaniel, which we discovered is his middle name (I love Southern Black boy things; and we both have roots in Dillon, South Carolina!). In this special, Jerrod also reveals that he’s gay. It’s a riveting watch because Jerrod shares his private self in a way that is so thoughtful and penetrating, drawing us in through his gifted storytelling, inserting humor just where it’s needed to save us from falling too far into the depths of sorrow.
I think Jerrod might be one of the greatest stand-up comedians of his time because his work is not just funny, it’s also frighteningly intelligent and uncomfortably honest. He’s a social reflection in some of the best and some of the most inescapable ways. Unlike other “comedians,” he doesn’t pick easy targets. He seems to be aware that when he takes jabs at others, he’s also taking jabs at himself. And that tempers and elevates what he does.
When he won an Emmy for Rothaniel, I was immediately happy and instantly suspicious. These institutions tend to give Black people awards when we—in some way, shape, or form—confirm or conform to stereotypes held in the white imagination (Think, for example, of the kinds of characters Halle Berry, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Mo’Nique, Denzel Washington, and others had to portray to in order to win Academy Awards; and think of the characters/performances that are overlooked). Enamored by their recognition, we often begin to dial up whatever it was that led them to bestow us with their accolades, leading us straight into the ridiculous. This can be hard to resist because of the resources and acceptance these things can sometimes offer. I felt bad because I wondered what was it that I missed in my original appraisal of Rothaniel, but then realized what it was and why I missed it.
Nevertheless, I was ten-toes-down when I learned that Jerrod would be releasing a documentary series exploring the facets of his life. The early promotions told us that it would be a no-holds-barred examination of his world. I watched eagerly. He gave me exactly what I wanted. And what I feared.
What struck me immediately was that almost every Black person in the series is presented as homophobic or quasi-homophobic—except for Jerrod’s best friends: Tyler the Creator, who comes across as both callous and unserious, and disappears after the first episode; and Jess, who’s shown to be a sloppy, greedy, intrusive moocher who waited too long to follow her dreams and toward whom Jerrod is feeling a growing resentment. All the white people, however, are portrayed as wise, patient, kind, noble, accepting, civilizing, and perfect even in their imperfections. In other words, at its base, this show exposes itself to be no different than 99.9% of the other media that springs out of the warped Western ethos. I imagine that, going forward, Jerrod will be extremely popular with a particular kind of white person and less so with a particular kind of Black person—partly because of the gay stuff, of course; but also because of this racial framing, which is so ingrained in the Western consciousness that people won’t even realize that’s why they like/dislike him.
In the opening episode, we learn that Jerrod harbors a secret love for Tyler. I’m not even going to front: I initially fell for this skit. I call it a skit because I now think, like Jay Theo above, that I was being trolled. I can no longer believe that two Black men who have demonstrated, in their own ways, how much they don’t like other Black men would ever really have any romantic feeling or romantic tension between them.
Tyler has already gone on the record about how his attractions are preserved wholly for white men (maybe for real or maybe to make his heterosexual Black male homies feel “safe” around him). And while Jerrod never explicitly said anything like that, the way he ran through hook-up-app white men on the series and how quickly he fell in love with a white guy named Mike in the very next episode makes it implicit. (Either that or he really does love-love Tyler and everything that happens afterward is a reaction to that rejection, which deepens the rabbit hole of my thesis.) Therefore, what I believe I watched in that first episode was performance art; three-dimensional, painstakingly awkward, and strategically cringeworthy clickbait specially marketed for TikTok and Twitter outrage/virality.
But at first? I was reeled in. Wide open. In my feelings. On some: “Twin! Where have you been?” Immediately thinking of ways to honor and soothe Jerrod’s hurt, even from the great distances between us. Empathy may not be the answer, but it is an answer: The first person I ever loved couldn’t and wouldn’t love me, either. And I spent year after wasted year making his every wish my command, hoping that maybe, by some small miracle, he would be moved by my sniveling devotion. I believe we now call this love-bombing. We talk a lot about how love-bombing presents nuisance and possibly threat to the person it’s directed toward—and for good reason. However, we rarely hear about how it’s sometimes used to their benefit, too. The fact of the matter is that the subject of my unrequited love was more interested in paint drying than he was in me. But: He loved the care with which I considered him, the worshipper-like way that I regarded him, the control I allowed him to have over me, and, most of all, the unrestricted access I gave him (and his girlfriend!) to my pockets.
Of course, I was a certified fool. And maybe I even wanted to be a fool because the reality was too enlightening. When I finally did get my shit together, my heart was shattered and my self-esteem was gutted. But I have no one but myself to blame for that. I was pretty inexperienced and didn’t understand that love isn’t a tap dance; it’s not a variety show nor is it a competition to be won. It’s either felt or it isn’t. And if you have to try to convince someone that they should love you, you might succeed in convincing them of something, but that something will not be love.
I found it interesting that Jerrod’s first therapist, a white woman chosen from a pool of white candidates, tells him that he’s treating his queer relationship like a heterosexual one. The dynamic is that he’s “the man” and his boyfriend Mike is “the woman.” As a result, Jerrod behaves as though he should be able to fuck anyone he wants while Mike is supposed to remain faithful, disrespected, monogamous, and serially heartbroken. At this point of revelation, every Black queer man I know thanked the gawds that Jerrod has shown very little interest in other Black men.
He’s following the cisheteropatriarchal model for relationship that he learned from his father (philanderer/provider) and mother (devoted/maternal). Here, I think about how awful a model for life cisheteropatriarchy is; how so much of it is commercial, a plantation project—which is to say a capitalist endeavor. It confirms for me that neither wealth nor sovereignty, neither vanity nor compulsion have anything to do with love.
Eventually, to avoid coming off as too much of a hypocrite, Jerrod allows Mike to sleep with other people, too. But it seems to be something that Mike agrees to under duress rather than enthusiastic consent. So, why would he agree to it? Could it actually be love?
It was very easy to feel sorry for Mike. We have all made moves that we thought were the right compromises or sacrifices to make in the name of loving somebody, even when it didn’t sit right in our spirits. But despite being positioned as the hapless victim of some Mandingo-incarnate’s sex-fueled bacchanal, Mike sort of comes across, to me, as elitist, entitled, petulant, pompous—and way too cunning to endure these flagrant incivilities, to let Jerrod have these wild indulgences without assessing how lucrative the investment might be in the end.
The role of “long-suffering, but dutiful” can be excruciating and yet fructifying. Prenups don’t really hold up like that; fuck what you heard. And repeatedly, it never dawns on rich folks (or potentially rich folks), especially Black male ones, just how deliberately targeted they are by come-ups convincingly posing as steadfast lovers (or maybe they’re well-aware and have something insidious in store, or believe that they deserve the betrayal?). Remember how quick-fast-and-in-a-hurry Michael Sam’s fiancé bounced once it became clear that Michael wasn’t going to be making those big NFL coins (allegedly)?
Some of the things that take place in the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show have made national headlines. There has been a lot of fury around how Jerrod was on television talking about how he’s into race play; about how he was sitting up there sucking some random non-Black stranger’s toes for the world to see. But those weren’t even the most outrageous acts in the show in my estimation. Much like the supposed Tyler crush, they seemed more like stunts and shows than anything authentic (though, like I’ve said before, nothing performed for a camera can be for real). As a result, I yawned because I’m old enough to remember how Grace Jones already came for throats like this in the 70s. And visual homosexuality is only edgy to homophobes.
But there were other instances, relatively smaller and much quieter, that not only made me gag, but that I actually found vulgar, giving me secondhand embarrassment for all involved.
In the first of these, Jerrod purposely missed his childhood friend’s wedding—in which he was the best man—just so that he could go have a sandwich or something trivial like that. The pure coldness was chilling and caught me off-guard. It was as though he was rubbing his palms together deviously, like a supervillain anxious to ruin the superhero’s plans. Then, afterwards, there’s a segment where Jerrod says that he’s a bad friend, contacts friends whom he has let down, and allows them to berate him over a series of phone calls. I felt bad for both Jerrod and his friends, and realized that while these scenes may operate as catharsis, they would ultimately prove to be meaningless since we’re never permitted to see a changed Jerrod, only a manipulative one.
Throughout this series, I was reminded of The Twilight Zone episode called “It’s a Good Life,” where a little white boy with god-like powers bends the wills of all of the white adults in his life because they’re afraid to upset him and face his wrath. That’s why when Jerrod tells his father, Mr. Joe, that the only way he feels courageous enough to confront him—about his serial infidelity, his secret second family, etc.—is on camera, that confession feels disingenuous to me. Given what I saw, and the escalating ways in which he was provoking his father (showing his father near-nude photos of Mike and the like) before the crescendo, what seems truer is that Jerrod wanted to use the power he has over his family—which is, plainly, economic—to publicly humiliate them before getting them to bend the knee. (As an aside: It’s wild how some of these homophobes be cool with receiving them homosexual dollars, though. That’s just as funny as when Jerrod tells this joke about how every atheist he’s ever fucked always calls on God during sex.)
I believe this dynamic is confirmed in the final episode when Jerrod says something to the effect of him vacillating between wanting to protect his mother and wanting to destroy her. That looms large as a scene of Jerrod’s family—finally able to “tolerate” (and there’s nothing worse than being tolerated) him and Mike—plays as the credits roll. It’s supposed to read as a happy ending, a reconciliation of some sort. But outside of his nieces’ boundless energy and delight, I only perceive spite; resignment if I’m being generous. Jerrod seems to have “won” in the same way anybody with money wins: People do as you ask because you have money and they want some/all of it, not because they respect you (though, maybe having a lot of money makes this irrelevant). What this tells me is that Jerrod doesn’t necessarily need witnesses, but he definitely requires an audience.
For me, the most heartbreaking and vicious scene in the entire series is when Jerrod allows Ms. Cynthia to pray over him in order to, in her estimation, remove the demonic spirit of homosexuality from him. It’s the only moment in the series that Ms. Cynthia looks as though she’s genuinely happy. She is, in fact, ecstatic; giddy, even. Now when she tells Jerrod that she loves him, it seems like she really means it this time, and only because she believes White Jesus is going to abracadabra Jerrod from queer to straight.
So, when he says this about his parents: “I’m smarter than them,” and it’s delivered like, “I’m better than them,” I know why. The statement said so much to me about Jerrod and his family, more than I think he wanted to reveal. But when you present your life as a circus, everybody in it becomes a clown—including you. Beyond merely displaying Jerrod’s egocentrism and classism, that utterance showed me that he’s been fashioned, by the rejection of other Black people, into a sort of ruthlessness; primed to imbibe anti-Blackness straight from the patriarch and matriarch’s golden chalices such that he might now see himself as separate from and above other Black people.
And the truth is that no other outcome was really possible for him. His own mother told him dead to his face that her White Jesus was more important to her than he could ever be; and she let everybody know that nothing can change her mind about that—not the pastor telling her that she was misinterpreting scripture; not the Black queer woman therapist asking her to open her heart.
And since the apple never falls far from the tree, Jerrod showed her—and us—what it looks like when his White Jesus is more important to him, too.
Shit: At least his actually exists.
I think that the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show lacks a protagonist and that might be what makes it brilliant because that’s what makes it true. Still, I’m left with the discomfort that comes with not wanting to stare at an accident but being unable to look away. I watched a genius who, because he sits at certain intersections, will only be regarded as such after he’s dead (or only for as long as other Black people remain his primary targets). My weeping is for him and for me because his pain reminds me of my own. There’s an unwanted familiarity in watching him wrestle with whether or not to break bread with his own family, who might all be Judases in disguise. This leaves him in a frenzied state of longing, compelling him to seek warm, if fixated, touch in the grip of many other elsewheres.
My sadness comes from knowing that healing on camera, in public, with all Black-man-eating eyes on you, is absolutely impossible. But I can’t make the mistake other spectators are making: What Jerrod is engaged in is not simply exhibitionism; it’s also self-flagellation. Unloved people are prone to punishing themselves because loving themselves is unimaginable. And perhaps what Tarell Alvin McCraney said is true:
“In the moonlight, Black boys look blue.”
Watching Jerrod, I’ve learned that this is true in the sunlight as well.
I love Jerrod. I love all the Jerrods. I love them because I have no other choice. Well, I do have other choices, but every single one of them leads to defeat. Whether these men reject me or not, acknowledge my full humanity or not, they’re still people who could have, should have, loved me but were denied the tools—and therefore, the capacity—at every measure. I love them because despite how they invite me to kiss their asses (and not in the good way), I can never lose sight of this: Once upon a time, they were just boys who really needed someone to hold their hands, but in order to be tricked into believing they were impenetrable, they were damned to fists instead.
The Jerrods also terrify me, though. They terrify me because they’re funhouse mirrors showing me what could become of me if I, too, allow my trauma to turn me into catastrophe; if I don’t at least try to heal; if forgiveness remains a foreign concept to me; if I surrender to all of the most wicked things this country of kidnappers has ever said or thought about me and my people.
You know something? This ain’t really about Jerrod, is it? This is about me. This is about you. This is about us. About how we measure and define ourselves—our wants, our pleasures, our lives themselves—by the perceived achievements and actual triumphs of white supremacists. We haven’t yet reached the stage in our development where we can understand that sometimes what looks like winning is actually losing. And it can be losing irretrievable things; things that can, perhaps, be faked, but cannot be wooed or soothed by silver—like integrity, souls, and love.
The scars we proudly leave on our queer and trans babies: This is what it looks like when we stubbornly refuse to break generational curses. And we refuse at our own peril.
So, go ahead then: Follow behind the robber barons if we want to. Give in to our most bitter, conservative impulses if we think that serves us. Bow to cruel gods of massive ugliness if we feel that brings us favor. Keep on treating our young as though they’re heirs rather than humans; possessions rather than blessings; woes rather than wonders; legacies rather than loves. Continue to let the plantation inside of us grow and tangle. I’ll tell you one thing: All that will do is ensure our doom.
For our children will enter into the world with the intimate knowledge of our weaknesses, dead-set on plotting against us, cavorting with our adversaries.
And keeping none of our secrets.
Recommending Listening
“billy ocean.” by B. Slade
“Free Xone” by Janet Jackson
“Dead Right Now” by Lil Nas X
“Two Boys on Bikes, Falling in Love” by Modern Love
“Jerrod” by Solange Knowles
Recommended Reading
“If you say being gay is not African, you don’t know your history” by Bisi Alimi
“There is no black 'Love, Simon' because gay men of color are portrayed as our pathologies” by Michael Arcenaux
“Why do you see so few black same-sex couples?” by Marcus Daniel
Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS by Marc Epprecht
“Jerrod Carmichael Has Done the Unthinkable” by Dave Holmes
“On being left for white men” by Myles E. Johnson
“A Kiki with Michael Sam” by Reecey Lucas
“Jerrod Carmichael Was Scared of Coming Out. He Still Is.” by David Marchese
Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain by Jason Okundaye
Recommended Viewing
“Luvs Me Not” by Cakes Da Killa
En Route: A Visual EP by Durand Bernarr
“I love us FR and want us to do better. You can’t want love but operate without it.” by @jstnfrtt (Justin)
“Kingston” by Mark Clennon
“Mi Readi” by Demaro
“Profiles on Black Gay Love” by Sampson McCormick
“Gonna Go” by serpentwithfeet
“Jerrod Carmichael Says He Wants a ‘half Japanese baby’” by The Talk
“Jerrod Carmichael Details How His Controversial Reality Show Impacted His Family” by The Tamron Hall show
“Black Gay Celebrities DO NOT REPRESENT the Black Gay Community!” by Jay Theo
“Superstar (Live From Wembley Stadium)” by Luther Vandross