Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

by Sherronda J. Brown

In 1984, James Baldwin told The Village Voice, I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to their sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There’s an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society.9

Black queer activists have always had to be invested in dismantling white supremacy as the source of both anti-Blackness and queer antagonism. Meanwhile, white queer activists have been invested in upholding white supremacy, because they continue to benefit from a system that affords power to whiteness and white people, even when they are also queer. What is true of whiteness in every space, even in “progressive” and “inclusive” spaces, is that it will always work to create some form of exclusivity as a means to reassert white superiority.

What becomes unavoidable if they acknowledge that they may have been sexually violated because compulsory sexuality convinced them they weren’t “allowed” to say no? What things might have to be said out loud instead of whispered softly or swallowed whole if they begin to excavate their sexual histories and find that they may have committed violations themselves by disregarding someone else’s boundaries because compulsory sexuality assured them that their actions were acceptable and even expected?

All of our lives we have experienced ourselves as queer, as not belonging, as the essence of queer … queer not as being about who you’re having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live. —bell hooks