A Valentine to a Certain Kind of Black Male Sexuality

Jamie Foxx had a medical emergency, and I sincerely hoped he would survive.

I hoped that this comedy special would reveal something serious about Black men’s bodies.

I’ve been a Black boy for 36 years , and among the most fearful, excitatory, and sublime aspects of such an experience has been what people make, or try not to make, of my penis.

Just 20 minutes into Foxx 's Netflix special, the D emerges.

Frida Ghitis: Sometimes I fear that we are using the gesture of holding space to lazily exclude ourselves from the problem of sex, the way that men often do with questions of gender, either saying nothing or performing absolute deferral.

Ghitis grew up in a house full of sex workers before the internet, and so the scary vacillation between prudishness and terror I found elsewhere, from the POV of folks who were most certainly fucking—if not any and everyone, then certainly people whom they were not “supposed” to fuck.

A woman in the audience raised her hand and described this as her favorite part of the novel.

“It’s like something vague coming into focus,” she said. “You’ve got experience—unless you’re a virgin, of course—but you”ve also got something like innocence. At least when it comes to this new person, you figure them out, encounter by encounter. You experiment, and they’ll help you to know what's right, what works.