Demonizing the DL

I'm in a very unique position because of my profession to have men confess their desires to me. Married men, playboys, thugs, scholars, nerds, even ministers, every type of man has opened up to me and told me that they have the desire to experience sexual arousal with another man. These are men that would never ever ever tell the women in their lives that they have those desires. They go out of their way to tell the women in their lives that they hate fags, that they would never want to be with another man. They can't even accept within themselves that they have bisexual desires, they fight them, they try to deny them, and they most assuredly don't tell their partners that they have them.

Even in my own personal life, I meet and date men that swear up and down that they are straight and then in the process of opening up, in the act of sharing fantasies and becoming intimate with me, they "confess" that they are curious about sex with other men. Once the comfort level is established, they can confess to me their desires to share intimacy with other men but they have this innate fear that I'm going to see them as being less than a man. Once they realize that I am not going to look down on them for their desires, when they see that I'm aroused by the idea, they then confess fantasies and desires that they've wanted to share with someone for a long time. The floodgates open up and they confess all sorts of emotional and sexual feelings to me at that point.

Society, and its rigid and dysfunctional definitions of what manhood is, is responsible for the perpetuation of the whole DL phenomenon. If a brotha came to a sista and said, "I have this desire to be penetrated by you, to experience role reversal and I like my ass stimulated," the neck rolling would commence immediately and she couldn't wait to get on the phone with all her friends and tell them that he was a fag. Being interested in a woman penetrating you does not mean that you are interested in a man penetrating you. Even if a man is interested in another man penetrating him, or even what it would be like to have the full sexual experience with a man does not mean he is going start wearing a purse and talking with a lisp. Manhood has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to suck a dick or even kissing another man. (It takes an act of heaven and earth to get a "straight" man to say that he wants to kiss another man. It is usually when he's aroused and he's let down his guard enough to know that I really am comfortable with the idea of him being with another man that he will say that he wants to feel loved and protected by another man sometimes and that he wants to kiss.) Manhood should be defined by the ability to be truthful, respectful, and emotionally mature. Physical pleasure, and the source from which one receives it, has nothing to do with being a man. The longer this society continues to have these debilitating beliefs about manhood, the more "DL" men you are going to have.

I recently had the experience of being in a living situation with a man that had desires to be with other men but his primary romantic interests were with women. He would spend great efforts telling them how he wasn't homophobic but how much he didn't like gay men getting in his space, how he didn't like gay men looking at him, he would tell women how to spot a DL man and counsel them on when they suspected a man who was. In bed with me, he would tell me how he wanted to suck a dick and get pounded by another man. His fascination was with a very dark skinned man with a big dick. That seemed to represent the embodiment of a real man to him in bed. In life, he would go out and be with a transsexual, taking on this thug persona that he normally didn't have in his every day dealings. It seems each role was tied to a definition of manhood. To women, he was the all around man, being sensitive and this shoulder to cry on yet still a manly man. With me, he wanted to be a bitch; he wanted to be fucked by this embodiment of what he thought a real man was. To the transsexual, he became the real man, the thug and the nigga.

It seems to me, if we lived in a society that allowed men to be feeling, complex, emotional human beings, we wouldn't have this dichotomy that creates the "DL" man.

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