It wasn’t until sometime later, after I finally decided to bring up the incident to some friends, that I realized just how many gay men of color I knew who had similar encounters with white men. That’s the insidious thing about categorizing people by their race the erasure of everything that makes them who they are and the inhuman feeling they’re left with. It was a thing ― a Mandingo fantasy without a name or any desires of its own. I wasn’t certain of much at that point but I was sure that whoever that guy back there was having sex with, it was not me. Of course I’ve always been familiar with racial fetishes, in the abstract, which I stand against on the principle that racial identity is not a sexual “type” but the experience of being actively, vocally fetishized during sex now put real emotion behind a belief I always had. But whatever had just happened, it happened without my consent and it wasn’t sitting right with me. I certainly wasn’t raped and the word “violated” seemed a bit too strong for the situation as well. It was like something had been taken from me and I wasn’t quite sure what. Afterward, as I did what I jokingly refer to as my “walk of shame,” I realized that for the first time, I actually felt shame.
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