Why are Black queer men still deeply invested in casual sex and hooking up?

Black queer sex may be more accessible, but it doesn't absolve us of hang-ups and preferences resulting in internal conflicts similar to other groups. It can be easier to go for what we desire in sexual situations involving two men, knowing how we are sexually wired. As a Black queer person, I've easily cultivated a consensual and fulfilling sex life. I started dating men at age eighteen and came out of my glass closet a year later.

I fear the years without the right to marry or love publicly and safely have indirectly caused some Black queer men to be blind to the value of commitment. How we navigated sex before the dawn of the internet, in dimly lit public spaces, backrooms, and parks, has permeated queer culture, often at the expense of our physical safety and freedom. This reality, compounded with the HIV epidemic and the loss of thousands of lives, has changed how we view sex. The degrees of compartmentalization we navigate still haunt us to this day.

Passionate, sweaty, even reckless—the unbridled spontaneity of sex can be one of the things that makes it so damned fun. Now imagine that every sudden urge required a lengthy pause while you search for a bulky, hard-to-wear sexual aid that just might fall off mid-stroke.

It’s a mood killer, to say the least.

Yet for countless men and women whose sex lives revolve around so-called strap ons - artificial penises that attach to the body using a strappy harness - it’s a uniquely bitter pill they’ve learned to swallow.

Glenise Kinard-Moore aims to do something about it, turning a cocktail-napkin idea into a potential sex game-changer for LGBTQ+ people and the disabled alike.