K’eguro Macharia ruminates on how sex is siloed from life, and how we are as much our fantasies as we are our realities.

 

 

Can James Baldwin fuck?
—Rinaldo Walcott, “Everybody Loves Jimmy Now”

It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. . . I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.
—Essex Hemphill, “Loyalty”

 

i.

Initially, I had wanted to write something else. I am working through some stuff on Kenya’s Penal Code. Some of the ways it was adapted from India’s Penal Code—written in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny—and how Kenya’s 1930 Code responds to African freedom practices while being grounded in the long history of antiblack laws that subtend modernity.

That writing is coming. It is simply taking time. Trying to think with and against the law is not my favourite thing.

Call this a throat clearing.

 

ii.

Initially, I had wanted to write something else, and then I read Rinaldo Walcott’s delicious article, “Everybody Loves Jimmy Now,” which tracks the conditions under which James Baldwin has become one of our favourite radicals, his sexuality acknowledged, but his sex life considered irrelevant to his life, aesthetics, ethics, and politics.

We want Baldwin, but we want his beautiful prose without his sex.

Do we even know if he topped, bottomed, liked tit play, preferred watersports, called his lovers daddy, asked to be spanked, asked to spank, used light restraints on his fuckbuddies while he gave them mindblowing blowjobs, or maybe didn’t like oral sex at all, or maybe never engaged in anal sex, or maybe simply adored frotting, or thought mutual masturbation was the most sensual activity, or only had sex in public bathrooms, or only had sex on public beaches, or spent hours kneeling at gloryholes, or preferred his partners to wear leather or rubber, or whether his sex life was better in France or Turkey, or whether he went to Turkey because he had been told the sex would transform him, or whether every time he smoked—he smoked a lot—he was thinking about blowjobs.

(I am unable to find a question mark.)

 

iii.

What might it mean to be a fully desexed gay icon?

How is this now the condition under which gay men—let me use gay, please; it does something that queer does not, and something that queer exceeds—become visible and celebrated or, at least, tolerated.

Is the rise of the fabulous the erasure of the erotic?¹

 

iv.

“We are more than the sex we have,” the gay people say, insisting, “love is love.”

Yes, girl.

But the law against you at the moment is about what you do. Not about who you love.

A teacher for my mandatory religion class—I went to a catholic university—said being gay and celibate was perfectly acceptable. Love from a distance. Love in proximity. But do not touch.

 

v.

Calling sex love simply confuses stuff.

 

vi.

Why it is that the stories gay men tell about how they have sex are not considered important to their life stories?

How is sex siloed from life?²

It is not that gay men do not talk about sex. They do. We do. It is how it shows up in the narratives we craft, when we craft them as life stories.

So, this is also about genre.

 

vii.

Genre is leavened with theory.

A too-early encounter with Michel Foucault left its mark. I continue to distrust confession as a way to incarnate a self and transform a public. I still think confession is coercive and, often, generated under conditions that are saturated with unfriendly power relations. One is forced to confess by the police, by the church, by mental health institutions, by hostile family members, by hostile workmates, hostile strangers.

One’s confession is forced from one, as hostile forces arrest one. One is folded into story—story is a convenient term for genre. But that story, as Fanon teaches, precedes and subtends one, impeding any creative impulses one might have. You fold into the story that is legible as story.

 

viii.

Many years ago, I was chatting with Karen Martin, a co-editor of two volumes on queer African fiction alongside Makhosazana Xaba. And we both remarked how the non-fiction story of African queerness had very quickly become rather generic.

“I didn’t know.”

“I only felt strange.”

“And then one day.”

“It was hard.”

“I lost friends and family.”

“It’s still hard.”

“I am living in my truth, and it’s worth it.”

There are slight variations, but the conventions had been set, and it seemed that every personal essay we encountered followed similar contours.

I do not mean to discount the familiar ways homophobia and transphobia show up—the endless appeals to tradition, culture, religion, decency, morality, class. Those, too, assume a familiar generic shape.

Still, there was a sameness to how the stories were narrated.³ It seemed if you had read a few, then you had read most of them.

Again, I do not mean to discount the immense power that comes with narrating one’s life to oneself and to others. I only mean to say that such narratives so often follow generic contours.

We learn what is legible and then shape ourselves to be legible.

 

ix.

I am returning to sex, I promise.

 

x.

And so Karen and Makhosazana solicited fiction, a space where imaginations could play, unfettered from the generic conventions of the coming out story.

(Even when someone claims they know they have always been gay and so were never in a closet, they still narrate a coming out story, a “how and when did you know” and “how and when was it affirmed or confirmed.”)

 

xi.

I have been reading heterosexual sex since I was 11 or so. I read it in Jean Auel’s books, in Jackie Collins’s books, in Johanna Lindsey’s books, in the many Mills & Boon and Harlequins I devoured. I read the metaphors for desire—fire, ice, smoke, fireworks. I read the metaphors for orgasms—volcanos, tsunamis, fireworks (again), crashing waves, hurricanes, storms, typhoons, all very watery things. I read the euphemisms of “manhood” and “secret place” and the non-euphemisms of cock and cunt.

In fiction, there was play and surprise. Virgins could have powerful orgasms. Imagine that!⁴

When I was younger, I told a neighbour that I wanted to read romance books that featured how men approached love and desire. At the time, I did not know that I wanted to read gay imaginations doing gayish things, the same way I had read straight imaginations doing straightish things.

 

xii.

It wasn’t fiction, though.

It was Essex Hemphill.

I wanted to give you
my sweet man pussy (“Heavy Breathing”)

Curiosity Bookshop, complete with back room, movie booths, garish red lights, gusts of heavy breathing, and the popping noise of greased dicks pumping in and out of tight holes. The creaking floorboards were aging with semen and sighs. Every now and then you’d hear a man hiss, “Work that pussy, bitch,” as clusters of panting men gathered to watch an ass being fucked. (“Without Comment”)

Essex was crafting a language to narrate sex and to narrate why that sex mattered. Especially for Black gay men:

We are communities engaged in a fragile coexistence if we are anything at all. Our most significant coalitions have been created in the realm of sex. What is most clear for Black gay men is this: we have to do for ourselves now, and for one another now, what no one has ever done for us. We have to be there for one another and trust less the adhesions of kisses and semen to bind us. Our only sure guarantee of survival is that which we construct from our own self-determination. (“Does Your Mama Know about Me?”)

But he also knew the “adhesions of kisses and semen”—what a gloriously Whitmanian phrase!—were important. He had read his Audre Lorde. He knew about the power of the erotic to build worlds and bridges, to lessen the threat of difference and hold out possibilities to imagine freedom. Pleasure was not the enemy, not the thing to hide away to focus on the “serious work” of politics.

 

xiii.

What would it mean to insist with Essex,

Now we think
as we fuck
this nut
might kill us. (“Now We Think”)

What forms might fucking lead us toward? What might we do with those forms that honours the “ass-splitting truth” of our erotic imaginations and practices? And how might we insist that our thinking and doing is indebted to and stems from the “ass-splitting truth” or our erotic imaginations and practices?⁵

 

xiv.

I do not mean confession. I mean imagination. The two might meet.

Like Rinaldo does in his article, I can only point to the example of Samuel Delany, to what he does in The Mad Man and Hogg and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, how he imagines and creates and populates worlds of lives lived through, with, and alongside sexual fantasy and sexual practice.

Delany is, of course, a singular genius.

But, maybe we can learn from him. The affordances of form. The uses of fantasy. The possibilities of the erotic.

 

xv.

I do not mean that gay Kenyans are not talking about sex. TikTok is full of threats and promises and seductions.

But I find much of it unimaginative.

How many times can you say you want to fuck someone? (Or, as the Kiswahili has it, “kudinya.”) I am bored by how generically the sex is imagined.

What might be written—I am, above all, a person of the word—that builds and explores erotic possibilities as world-building, world-sustaining possibilities.

Or simply really fucking great sex.

 

xvi.

Perhaps I mean to say something quite simple: we are as much our fantasies as we are our realities.

And it might be that genres in which those fantasies gain quiddity are as important as the straightforward narratives we offer about ourselves.

It might be that in poetry or fantasy or romance or any other genres other than memoir and biography, we might tell the “ass-splitting” truths about the power of the erotic. It might be that without the burden of telling the truths of ourselves, we might offer other truths about living in erotic relation.

 

xvii.

Essex Hemphill’s important question about who we have loved has now been outsourced to legal recognition by the state. Gay marriage is the answer.

While I support gay people’s desires to create relations that make life more possible—even as I detest the systems that tether benefits like health insurance to marital status—I want the erotic not to be devalued as a source of pleasure and renewal and friendship and experiment.

 

 

K'eguro Macharia is a writer from Nairobi, Kenya, and the author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (NYU Press, 2019).

“now we think: as we fuck” first appeared in K'eguro Macharia’s Substack Imagining Freedom, 30 September 2024. It has been shared here, alongside a new Chinese translation by Jaren Ng, with the kind permission of the author.

Banner image: James Baldwin during a visit to the Netherlands, 1965. Public domain.

 

 

Notes

^{1. I return to a question I’ve pursued before.}

^{2. I am telling on myself here. I wrote a short something for a Kenyan publication and said nothing about sex. In part, I am trying to understand why I made that choice. I am not entirely sure that a gay Kenyan version of the Victorian porn classic My Secret Life is what I want. But I do not know. Perhaps we should try it and see.}

^{3. This sameness reminds me of how church women follow a generic format to narrate themselves: my name is x and I was in darkness until I found Jesus and since that day we walk together. English lacks the flavour of how these narratives sound in Kikuyu.}

^{4. I note that the most exciting sexual act that happened across all these books was oral sex. I would have to wait until much later to learn the varieties of ways bodies can do erotic things, some genital, many not.}

^{5. If you’ve read Frottage, these questions will sound familiar. I am, in fact, repeating myself.}