Track 19: The B Word

There are some words Black men learn to swallow, along with our tears, our curiosity, and the parts of ourselves that never quite fit the version of manhood we were taught would keep us safe.

We learn this early. Don’t cry. Suck it up. Be tough. Be a man. Nobody is really asking how we feel. The lesson is simple. Feelings and desires are not essential for survival. Control is. Endurance is. Performance is.

By the time we are grown, we are fluent in the performance art of toxic masculinity. We learn how to blend in and code switch for safety. Survival becomes the goal. What we are rarely taught is how to be fully ourselves without consequence.

So when attraction enters the conversation, it is already loaded. Even admitting you are attracted to the same gender feels like crossing a line. Something to swallow quietly. Something to manage. You are expected to pick a side and stay there. Make it simple. Make it legible. Make it comfortable for everyone else.

Now imagine being attracted to more than one gender.

That is where the B word shows up.

Not as something you are allowed to explore, but as something you are expected to outgrow, deny, or explain away. For Black men, bisexuality rarely gets to just exist. It is treated like confusion. Like a stop on the way to somewhere else. Like a truth that needs to hurry up and resolve itself.

And for many Black men, that truth becomes another word we learn to swallow or suppress until one day we find a space where we are finally safe enough to be.

Spring of 2008 is really where my coming out story starts, even though I did not know that is what it was at the time.

I broke up with my girlfriend because I was trying to find myself. But if I am being honest, I was trying to fill a void that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with my father. It felt like he chose women, liquor, and my light skinned siblings over me, and I carried that feeling longer than I realized. I was looking for validation wherever it would sit still long enough.

Up until then, my curiosity mostly lived in private. Fantasies. Secrecy. Jacking off to teachers, classmates, and those doctored celebrity faces pasted onto porn star bodies I genuinely thought were real at the time. I laugh now, but back then that was the only place curiosity did not come with consequences.

I did not stop being attracted to women. That was not the question I was trying to answer. I was not even trying to figure out if men could make me feel good. I was just hungry. For attention. For affirmation. For something that made me feel chosen.

That hunger led me into rooms with men older than me. More experienced. More crafty. More sneaky. I did not have the language yet for power dynamics. I just knew I felt seen.

One of those rooms changed everything.

I ended up with someone who had HIV and did not know it.

Growing up, condoms were always about not getting a girl pregnant. That was the lesson. AIDS, when it came up at all, felt like a scare tactic that never really landed. It did not feel close. It did not feel like something I needed to protect myself from.

I would not find out I was HIV positive until the fall of 2008, after I had been raped and was trying to pretend I was fine.

That diagnosis stacked on top of trauma I had not even begun to process. My brain went straight into survival mode. It was not a death sentence, but it was not a walk in the park either. And right after that came the thought that changed everything. No man is going to want me. And if I decide I want women, what woman is going to want a bisexual man who likes men and is positive?

That felt like too much truth for anybody.

So I did what I had been trained to do. I swallowed parts of myself. I stopped saying I was bi. I suppressed my attraction to women. I accepted whatever showed up in relationships because I did not think I deserved better. Desire stopped being something I explored and turned into something I managed.

That is when the B word stopped being something I could say out loud and became something I buried.

Years later, after telling myself I just thought women were pretty, I finally had to admit I had been lying to myself a little. I used to blame it on one early experience. That one girl I went down on, and the taste lingered on my top lip long enough to have me thinking about Ursula the Sea Witch. That memory did a number on me, and I let it trick me into believing I did not want women at all.

Turns out fear is loud when it goes unchecked.

Eventually, I found a space where I was open. No pun intended. A space where curiosity did not feel dangerous and exploration did not feel rushed. My first real experience did not look how people usually imagine. I connected with a trans man who had not had bottom surgery, and it unlocked something in me immediately. The ease. The familiarity. Nothing like what scared me all those years ago.

From there, I leaned in. I enjoyed being with other trans men. I loved it. But what surprised me most was not the experience. It was what it unearthed. I had buried my sexual attraction to women so deeply that I convinced myself it did not exist anymore.

Now I joke and say I am bi curious, not because I am confused, but because I honestly do not know how I would even link with a woman at this point. A Black Woman at that. Black Women who have been some of my heroes. Black Women who taught me strength and softness. And also Black Women I have watched help curate and perpetuate the same toxic masculinity we all inherited.

I still hear the echoes. What Black Woman is going to want me. Married to a man. Still Poz. Even now, when I am undetectable. Even knowing most people are statistically more of a sexual risk to me than I am to them.

Then there is the type of women I am attracted to, which complicates it even more. I like women who are dominant. Women who can carry the world if they need to, but still enjoy letting me take control. Growing up, I had crushes on the obvious ones. Halle. Kelly. Megan. But I also had a thing for the pretty tomboy types. Laila Ali. Sanaa Lathan. Women with a little edge.

That evolved into an attraction to women with masculine energy. Bisexual studs. And yet, I do not often come across that energy in Black spaces in a way that feels open to someone like me.

And there it is again. The swallowing. The hesitation. The wondering if some desires are still too complicated to name.

Black men have no problem finding women who are into women sexy, especially when they can benefit from it. As long as it entertains them. As long as it does not challenge their position or force them to confront their own insecurity. But when a man is into men and women, the energy shifts. Black Women see a threat. Black Gay Men see confusion. Suddenly he is suspicious. Suddenly he is someone you feel like you have to keep an eye on, because in your mind he is really just gay and has not admitted it yet.

And maybe that fear is not about us at all. Maybe it is about how uncomfortable we get when Black men refuse to be simple, silent, or small enough to manage.

Some of us are not confused. We are just finally telling the truth out loud.