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Ocean’s of Love Letter: Is one black man loving another man the revolutionary act of the 21st Century?
“In 2012, some folks find it more provocative that a black man has loved another man than if he had done violence against one.” ~Dr. Herukhuti
In To Be Young Gifted and Black, Lorraine Hansberry proclaimed, “For some time now—I think since I was a child—I have been possessed of the desire to put down the stuff of my life…. And, I am quite certain, there is only one internal quarrel: how much of the truth to tell? How much, how much, how much! It is brutal in sober uncompromising moments, to reflect on the comedy of concern we all enact when it comes to our precious images!
Telling the truth of one’s life can be a complicated and dangerous endeavor, especially when you are young, gifted, black and queer (in this context I use queer to mean having experienced something other than normative Eros). It may mean that you destroy the hopes, dreams and expectations constructed for you to fulfill—only to have new ones built in their place. This is why the concept of coming out is so limiting as a way to explain what happens when someone puts “down the stuff of [their] life.”
Social media booked, tumbled and tweeted itself into a frenzy last week in response to, R&B and sometime Hip Hop artist, Frank Ocean’s Tumblr posting … In the post of a December 27th 2011 journal entry, written while on a plane ride from his birthplace of NOLA to L.A., Ocean eloquently explores his experience of love toward/with/for an undisclosed man. Travel gives us time to reflect on the things we’ve done, should have done, and wanted to do. The solitude of certain forms of travel, like the anonymity of an airplane with its recycled air and pressurized environment, can bring us closer to the immediacy of our needs—needs like love, unconditional and reciprocated. Media sources have alleged that the self-disclosure was precipitated by a music reviewer noting instances in Ocean’s forthcoming debut studio album in which the singer/songwriter uses male pronouns in expressing love and Eros toward someone.
… . Ocean is at the early stages of what seems to be a promising career in the music industry, an industry that in recent years has been transformed by changes in technology distribution and access—changes that have given artists and consumers more opportunities to own, control and share music. So what does it mean for Ocean to have both fluidly written homosexual and heterosexual desire into his album and shared with the social media world his experience of a love of a man—his first love and a love that was “malignant” and “hopeless” and yet he gratefully credited with changing his life? CONTINUE
Dr. Herukhuti is founder of The Center for Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, author of the book Conjuring Black Funk: Notes on Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, co-editor of Sexuality, Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual, Panexual and Polysexual Perspectives, high priest of the Shrine of Sekhmet and Heruhet (Brooklyn, NY), and faculty member at Goddard College (Plainfield, VT) and Fielding Graduate University (Santa Barbara, CA).](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6zm64xu7C1rrhahro1_500.jpg)
“In 2012, some folks find it more provocative that a black man has loved another man than if he had done violence against one.” ~Dr. Herukhuti
In To Be Young Gifted and Black, Lorraine Hansberry proclaimed, “For some time now—I think since I was a child—I have been possessed of the desire to put down the stuff of my life…. And, I am quite certain, there is only one internal quarrel: how much of the truth to tell? How much, how much, how much! It is brutal in sober uncompromising moments, to reflect on the comedy of concern we all enact when it comes to our precious images!
Telling the truth of one’s life can be a complicated and dangerous endeavor, especially when you are young, gifted, black and queer (in this context I use queer to mean having experienced something other than normative Eros). It may mean that you destroy the hopes, dreams and expectations constructed for you to fulfill—only to have new ones built in their place. This is why the concept of coming out is so limiting as a way to explain what happens when someone puts “down the stuff of [their] life.”
Social media booked, tumbled and tweeted itself into a frenzy last week in response to, R&B and sometime Hip Hop artist, Frank Ocean’s Tumblr posting … In the post of a December 27th 2011 journal entry, written while on a plane ride from his birthplace of NOLA to L.A., Ocean eloquently explores his experience of love toward/with/for an undisclosed man. Travel gives us time to reflect on the things we’ve done, should have done, and wanted to do. The solitude of certain forms of travel, like the anonymity of an airplane with its recycled air and pressurized environment, can bring us closer to the immediacy of our needs—needs like love, unconditional and reciprocated. Media sources have alleged that the self-disclosure was precipitated by a music reviewer noting instances in Ocean’s forthcoming debut studio album in which the singer/songwriter uses male pronouns in expressing love and Eros toward someone.
… . Ocean is at the early stages of what seems to be a promising career in the music industry, an industry that in recent years has been transformed by changes in technology distribution and access—changes that have given artists and consumers more opportunities to own, control and share music. So what does it mean for Ocean to have both fluidly written homosexual and heterosexual desire into his album and shared with the social media world his experience of a love of a man—his first love and a love that was “malignant” and “hopeless” and yet he gratefully credited with changing his life? CONTINUE
Dr. Herukhuti is founder of The Center for Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, author of the book Conjuring Black Funk: Notes on Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, co-editor of Sexuality, Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual, Panexual and Polysexual Perspectives, high priest of the Shrine of Sekhmet and Heruhet (Brooklyn, NY), and faculty member at Goddard College (Plainfield, VT) and Fielding Graduate University (Santa Barbara, CA).
It's A Sin? Frank Ocean & Prejudice Against Male Bisexuality
Male bisexuality, (about which I know a lot, thank you very much) is subjected to no end of prejudice, and one of our last taboos …
The prejudice about bisexual males is they’re rapacious horndogs, so driven by lust that they can’t help but drive to dive face first into any sexual organ they can find. It’s hard to know how to respond to that particular attack. Perhaps it’s envy of the fact that gay sex is always a lot more accessible than straight, ergo if one seeks, he shall certainly find. Perhaps it’s insecurity, that base male instinct that finds other males a threat as ‘poacher’ of the partner, directed onto the self… the bisexual male might not only fancy your bird, but your mate, or you too. Secondly it is, of course, allied to homophobia, the male terror of their own sexual desire being reflected back at them.
Sadly another common source of prejudice against bisexual men is the gay community. I’ve never been comfortable with any Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual societies and organisations thanks to the frequent hint of suspicion one encounters from gay men, that you’re just a gay man who has not yet been brave enough to come out. This assumption that the bi male is simply a closet case is an unfair a desire to polarise and define as the prejudice from the straight world of the bisexual as slut.
"A Perfectly Frank Admission" an essay by Travon Free
Christopher Francis Ocean, wherever you are … I’m starting to think we’re a lot alike. You see, It was only two short years ago that I myself passed through the threshold of bravery’s doorstep to free my soul of a parasitic burden, shouldered by this human being spinning in blackness, that had yet to be spoken to the world from a man who has built and is still building a life on saying so much. This man being myself of course.
The plight of the non-hetero American is still in many ways a heavy burden to carry and when you paint it Black or Brown, the amount of weight increases to a level that would cause Atlas himself to buckle at the knees. After I read Frank’s beautiful and poetic letter, for a brief moment, my world stood still. Immediately I recognized that space within myself. Anyone whose ever been in or wanted love should have. Because as a Black gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender person, there are very few examples of public success, acceptance or mainstream adoration, let alone in the hip hop community where “fag” is the end all be all of insults one can deliver …
Being a Black and bisexual stand up comic, actor and TV comedy writer with the successes I’ve had in a relatively adolescent career is in its own form a rarity. Seeing how I’ve yet to cross paths with anyone openly like myself. And even though the worlds myself and Frank live in are different, they share a lot of the same commonalities as well. Hollywood is Hollywood. Being the big deal that I knew this would be when I caught wind of what I considered rumor until proven otherwise, I took to twitter to see what everyone was saying. To both my surprise and delight, for every one “Frank Ocean is a faggot” or “I can’t listen to Frank Ocean anymore” tweet there were dozens of “His sexuality doesn’t matter to me, his talent does” and “Good for you Frank, I’ll always support good music no matter what” tweets.
Why does his sexuality matter if the music is good? Is he singing the song to you? No. Are you singing the song to him? Most likely not. I thought the beauty of music is the fact that the song could be about whoever or whatever we, the listener, wanted to be about? I sing Alicia Keys, Whitney Houston, and many other female artists I love and the fact that “ideally” they’re singing to another man never stopped me from changing the pronouns if I felt it necessary. And I’m almost certain that has always been the case for you. Have you stopped listening to Luther Vandross? Let’s not pretend we didn’t know what team Luther played for.
It’s no secret that Frank has a large Black fan base so most of these comments were from Black people. But the reason I was most proud was because for the first time in my life experience within the realm of Blackness, that talent, art, and pure humanness had transcended hate, homophobia, and indifference. Many can agree that sexuality shouldn’t matter in the toils of life any more than race should but unfortunately it still does. The bravery Frank put forth, baring his soul for all to see, while immersed in the worlds of the Jay-Zs and the Tyler the Creators, who have both lyrically at one point or another either used the word faggot or alluded to the idea that being gay made you inferior, is something to be marveled at.
To the thousands of people who have stood up and shouted cheers of praise and acceptance for Frank I applaud you. But the ones who chose to belittle such a valiant effort with homophobic slurs and promises of never playing Frank’s music again? It’s time for you to grow up. Because like your own, small minds get left behind. The quest for acceptance has raged on for years and the size of the hole that Frank has kicked in the seemingly insurmountable wall of hatred and homophobia within Hip Hop and music itself, has weakened it to the core. in the words of Bob Dylan, the times they are a changin’ my friends. Get on board or be left behind inhaling the exhaust fumes from the departing train of social progress. I don’t expect everyone to buy a ticket.
Thank God, the Universe, the Heavens, or whatever you believe in for Frank Ocean and people like him. Because although institutionalized hated and separatism can be battled fiercely from the outside, it’s most effectively destroyed from the inside out. I can only hope that my own efforts along with people like Frank, we will continue to open the doors of change and progress not just for Black, but all LGBT people.
We need more people to push boundaries and break molds. The greatest pioneers of social progress have never shied away from this notion. And in extending the dialogue necessary to create that path within our own communities no matter where they are, one day we will look back at all this hatred, homophobia, and nonsense of sensationalizing sexuality as nothing more than a drop of water in the Ocean of our lives.
Heteronormativity, hatred, racism, sexism and separation may still on some levels be king in America for now but progressive warriors like Martin Luther King Jr, Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X have proven to be historically sustainable Gods when it came to destroying these ancient relics of ideologies and in the end, what’s a king to a God?
by Travon Free Comedian. Actor. Writer. Revolutionary. Basketball player. And also a successful out African American bisexual man. From Compton California.
BiNet USA Applauds Frank Ocean's Coming Out
We want to salute rapper Frank Ocean and praise his courage to share his experiences of sexual fluidity. This past Fourth of July, (The perfect day to liberate oneself!) the 24-year-old musician outed himself open letter style on his Tumblr …
Rapper Tyler The Creator, who along with Ocean is part of the hip-hop collective Odd Future, voiced his support for Ocean in a (caution: strongly-worded) tweet…
In a post on Global Grind, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons wrote that he was “profoundly moved by the courage and honesty of Frank Ocean.” “Today is a big day for hip-hop,” Simmons wrote. “It is a day that will define who we really are. How compassionate will we be? How loving can we be?”
Bisexual Series 3/10 Frank Ocean
“I believe that marriage isn’t between a man and a woman but between love & love.”
