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Infinite Love & the Sacred Whore with Dr. Herukhuti
1.7k Plays3 years ago
Follow Dr. Herukhuti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/drherukhuti
Follow Dr. Herukhuti on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_herukhuti/
Buy "Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men": https://www.amazon.com/Recognize-Editors-Robyn-Sharif-Williams/dp/0965388174
Bodeme in Harlem: An African Diasporic Autoethnography: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233134389_Bodeme_in_Harlem_An_African_Diasporic_Autoethnography
Center for Culture, Sexuality and Spirituality: https://sacredsexualities.org/
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Two Bi Guys is produced and edited by Rob Cohen
Created by Rob Cohen and Alex Boyd
Logo art by Kaitlin Weinman
Music by Ross Mintzer
We are supported by The Gotham
This week I had the privilege of speaking with another bi-con, H. Sharif Williams, also known as Dr. Herukhuti -- he is an artist, sexologist, social entrepreneur, educator, and activist whose work operates at the intersection of race, culture, sexuality and spirituality. (FYI: there was an audio issue when he begins speaking, but we fixed it after a couple minutes!)
We chatted about the book he edited with Robyn Ochs, "Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men"; his "bodeme" identity and how & when he chooses to use labels like "bisexual"; intersectionality and marginalization within minority communities; how love is commodified under capitalism and how he recognized himself as polyamorous as a result; the holiness of sex and what it means to be a "sacred whore"; American cheese as a metaphor for being racialized as "white" in America; Dr. Herukhuti's artwork and mission behind it; his documentary "No Homo No Hetero"; and much more.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Zencastr Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everyone, I'm Rob, and this is Two Bye Guys, and in case you didn't know by now, our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor of the show. I should know, podcasting remotely can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be. Zencaster's all-in-one web-based solution makes the process quick and painless, the way it should be. I chose Zencaster before they approached me, so that's how you know this is completely authentic. I did a ton of research, I looked into a lot of options,
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Speaker
But it turned out Zencaster had recorded everything, downloaded everything, done a backup, and everything was fine. Nothing was lost. Same thing with the Court Vox interview last episode. We had some internet issues. We were out of sync a little. There was a delay. It was kind of weird. But then once I did the automatic Zencaster post-production, everything was perfect.
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Introduction to Dr. H. Sharif Williams
00:02:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to two bye guys. I'm so excited for today's episode. We have a true, another true bicon guest, somebody that I've been aware of ever since I just started realizing I was bisexual. It started coming out and I'm very excited to have him on the podcast today.
00:02:24
Speaker
Today we have H. Sharif Williams on the show, also known as Dr. Harukuti. He's an artist, sexologist, social entrepreneur, educator, and activist whose work operates at the intersection of race, culture, sexuality, and spirituality. I'm very interested in that intersection. He is the founder of the Center for Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality,
00:02:48
Speaker
the CEO of Culture, Sex, and Spirit, governor of the Association of Black Sexologists and Clinicians, executive producer of the documentary No Homo, No Hetero, and editor of Recognize the Voices of Bisexual Men, which is how I first became aware of his work,
00:03:05
Speaker
and I want to ask him about, as well as sexuality, religion, and the sacred, bisexual, pansexual, and polysexual perspectives. His work has been published in various academic and popular publications, including the Journal of Bisexuality, the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships,
00:03:22
Speaker
African Voices, Huffington Post, LGBT HealthLink, Bi Magazine, Black Genders and Sexualities, among many others. Herukuti has a master's in education and is a doctor of philosophy with a PhD in human and organizational systems. He is currently a faculty member in the undergraduate programs of Goddard College and the graduate program in applied theater at City University of New York.
00:03:49
Speaker
plus a lot of other things that we'll get into. That was the short version. So welcome to Two Bye Guys, Dr. Herakuti. Thank you for inviting me for having me.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's really a pleasure to meet you because we'll talk about the book later, but the book was one of maybe the first two or three books about this stuff that I read and it was the first one that was like many different perspectives on a similar theme and it really helped me to just see how
00:04:21
Speaker
widespread the experience and diverse the experiences, but all kind of united by this core belief that I had been ashamed of for so long. Anyway, I
Exploration of Bodeme and Identity
00:04:32
Speaker
could gush about it forever, but it was really such a helpful book for me to hear from so many voices and to recognize that in myself. Okay, I'll stop fanboying. Let's get to you.
00:04:46
Speaker
I always like to start by asking people, what pronouns do you use and how do you identify? And then that's the doorway to the conversation. So we'll start there. Sure, sure. So in terms of pronouns, I respond to any and all pronouns. I am a Bodeme in the traditions of the Dacra people of Ghana and Burkina Faso.
00:05:12
Speaker
Bodeme are people who, in the West, we would consider to be sexually fluid and gender fluid, or outside of the gender binary and the homo-hetero binary. And I came to recognize myself as a Bodeme through working with Dr. Maladoma Somay, who was a teacher of mine. He recently actually
00:05:42
Speaker
transition to the world of the ancestors in December of 2021. And Maladoma is someone who introduced to the West this concept of gatekeeper, which in the DAGRA community is called vodame. So I respond to all pronouns. And in terms of my sexuality, my sexuality,
00:06:10
Speaker
is very much tied to my spirituality.
00:06:13
Speaker
And so, Bodeme also identifies and represents that aspect of me as well in terms of my sexuality. Interesting. I have not heard that word. That's interesting. Yeah, what's also really, really powerful is that Taylor and Francis recently made Free to the Public an article that I wrote about my experiences working with melodoma and understanding the concept of Bodeme.
00:06:43
Speaker
So now that article is free and available to the public. So all you have to do is do a search for bodeme in Harlem, spelled B-O-D-E-M-E. And you can read more about the concept of bodeme, as well as how I came to learn what it means to be a bodeme, both for me and in the world.
00:07:10
Speaker
Cool. I found a lot of stuff to read this week preparing for this interview, but that was not one of the things I found. So I'm going to have to read that later and we'll post it in the show notes. So we fixed a little audio issue. Hopefully your audio will sound better now and we'll continue.
00:07:26
Speaker
That's really interesting about Bodeme. I'll have to read that article and learn more. Do you prefer to use that label now as opposed to bisexual or queer? Did that shift for you? Or does it mean something similar? What do you prefer to talk about with people? No, I use Bodeme as an authentic and accurate representation of my experience and my reality.
00:07:53
Speaker
And because it comes from an African and African centered framework and as a person of African descent who is deeply committed to living in my truth in a way that is that is
00:08:09
Speaker
culturally relevant and responsive to my culture as a person of African descent. So I use that
Polyamory and Spiritual Beliefs
00:08:17
Speaker
term. But I'm also someone who lives in the West. And so I choose to use
00:08:26
Speaker
words and concepts that are more familiar to folks in the West. So I will use the term bisexual as a shorthand to place myself in those kinds of conversations in the United States and as well as a political choice because bisexuals face prejudice, discrimination,
00:08:53
Speaker
and oppression, marginalization from within the, quote unquote, LGBT space as well as from cisgender and heterosexual folks. So using that term bisexual politically, I think is important for that purpose as well.
00:09:19
Speaker
Cool, very interesting. Okay, I have more questions about that, but I'm curious also to get into like, when did you realize you were bisexual? And like, what was your development like there? And when did you start coming out? And what was that like? Yeah, so I knew what I liked and what gave me pleasure long before I knew how people use language to define that.
00:09:47
Speaker
So I was having sex when I was in first grade with my best friend who was a cisgender boy and with a
00:10:05
Speaker
a daughter of a friend of my mother's who would come over after school and wait for her mother to get home from work. And she and I developed a sexual relationship and she was a cisgender girl. So I knew what my body felt was pleasurable and what my desires told me that I wanted and liked.
00:10:35
Speaker
way before I came to understand that people called that bisexual or people had these kinds of labels. And as I began to get acquainted with how society viewed same-sex desire, I internalized
00:10:56
Speaker
the stigma associated with same-sex desire. And so for a number of years in my childhood, I policed and silenced my same-sex desires up until maybe high school when I then had a boyfriend again.
00:11:19
Speaker
And but I was still conflicted. Well, I was conflicted. I wasn't conflicted when I was a kid. But in high school, I was conflicted about my same sex desire because of all of the internalized prejudice and stigma that that I had done prior to. And so from then through college, I was in a process of
00:11:45
Speaker
being okay with the same-sex experiences I had had prior to that, but not really acting on my same-sex desire in the moment at that time. It wasn't until I entered a relationship with a girlfriend and told her that I had had this past
00:12:12
Speaker
sexual experience in my life. And I did that with girlfriends often. If I was serious about them, I told them, oh yeah, I had had experience with males before. And she was the first girlfriend I had to say, so what does that mean for you now? And I told her I didn't know what it meant for me.
00:12:38
Speaker
because I didn't allow myself the space to explore those feelings and desires. And so she said, well, I think you should. I think you should find out. And that led us to opening up our relationship and me exploring that aspect of myself.
00:12:55
Speaker
So in my early 20s, I was opening up to more of myself and then later came to understand this word called bisexual and to apply it to my experiences.
00:13:15
Speaker
that's a nice relationship you had, especially at a pretty young age. That's kind of special that someone would say that. Yeah. Yeah. And we were together for 10 years.
00:13:27
Speaker
And we co-raised two children together that she had from a previous relationship. And it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. It was definitely challenging. And it required both of us to do a lot of work.
00:13:47
Speaker
on ourselves, to deal with our own insecurities, to deal with fears of abandonment, to deal with jealousy, and also to deal with self-acceptance and self-determination. So it was something that I definitely value and appreciate.
00:14:09
Speaker
And at the same time, it was worth. Yeah. Yeah. And so was that like kind of the first time you had had an open, like explicitly open relationship and did it work for you? Do you still do that or did you prefer monogamy or something else?
00:14:29
Speaker
I'm polyamorous. So I have practiced monogamy throughout my life. And I would say in the last maybe 20 years or so, I have come to recognize that I am polyamorous by nature. And again, when I said that my sexuality and spirituality are interconnected,
00:14:52
Speaker
The the polyamory is a part of that that I believe that love is is something that in our society is commodified through cat is like we have a capitalist approach to love and intimacy and so monogamy represents a private ownership relationship with love a private ownership and private property and
00:15:20
Speaker
approach to relationship and intimacy. And as a
Spirituality and Activism
00:15:25
Speaker
communalist, I believe that it is ethical for me to share love, intimacy with others, and to do so in a communal, cooperative way. We talk nowadays about solidarity economies and mutual aid systems.
00:15:49
Speaker
over the last, again, 20 years, I've been invested in taking that approach to relationality, to how we form relationships with people, how we share love, how we share intimacy, how we share the erotic. So yeah, that's a different part of my sexuality and spirituality. And it's also related to myself as a healer.
00:16:17
Speaker
and sacred whore, that I use my gifts, as Audre Lorde said, I use my sexual gifts in service of my vision of a more just, equitable, and liberated world.
00:16:34
Speaker
I love that. Did you say sacred whore? I did say sacred whore, yes. I have multiple other things to respond to, but can you just explain what you mean by that too? Yeah, so what sacred whore, and I didn't coin that term, but for me, what I mean by sacred whore is that as a comedic priest, a priest that was initiated into the traditions of ancient Egypt,
00:17:02
Speaker
As a comedic priest, I'm connected with the practice of being in conversation with and relationship to the various aspects of divinity. One such aspect of divinity in comedic spirituality is head hero. Head hero is considered, I'll do a shorthand explanation, but it is the goddess of love and pleasure and abundance.
00:17:28
Speaker
And so as a keeper of the shrine of Hederu, I provide people in the community with access to Hederu's gifts and Hederu's wisdom in themselves.
00:17:45
Speaker
through my engagement with thems as a body worker and healer, as a somatic practitioner, as a sex educator, and as somebody who provides access to the erotic and sensuality and even sexual pleasure as a healing modality.
00:18:09
Speaker
as well as a form of knowing and coming to know oneself and the universe.
00:18:17
Speaker
So that's where your name comes from, Haru Kuti. So Haru Kuti is the name. My namesake is another divine principle in Kometic spirituality. And had Haru and Haru Kuti have had a relationship in the stories and mythologies of Kometic spirituality. So there is some connection there. But you honed in on that.
00:18:46
Speaker
part of both names, Heru, and Heru literally means the face of God. So Herukuti means the face of God at sunrise and sunset. Heteru means the house that holds the face of God. So there are some, like if you're sitting in the house that holds the face of God,
00:19:10
Speaker
That means that you have allowed that sunrise and sunset, that horizon to come in and enter that house and enter you and warm you and enliven you.
00:19:23
Speaker
and heal you. I love that. It's fascinating and it's like I really couldn't agree more that our sexuality is a really sacred and fundamental thing and yet we're taught so often the opposite and we're taught that it's the shameful thing or this private thing and so what you're saying makes perfect sense to me and yet is also kind of this radical idea. It's actually an ancient idea. It's something that
00:19:50
Speaker
People in the global south, indigenous people, African people, and people in Asia had, and also people in Europe before Christianity, held as a reality.
00:20:05
Speaker
But because of the rise of and the dominance of Catholicism and the rise of settler colonialism and imperialism around the world, people were driven away from those concepts and those ways of being. And there are a number of us who are trying to reclaim that heritage and that legacy.
00:20:39
Speaker
I identify as poly also, even though I couldn't even see that as an option for so long. And yeah, we're taught this monogamy, this thing, but it seems so natural polyamory to me.
00:20:54
Speaker
brief story, like my younger sister is adopted. I'm a biological child of my parents. My sister's adopted. And when we adopted her, I didn't really, I wasn't really into the idea as a little nine year old. And my parents explained to me that, like, you know, we don't have this much love. Now we're going to split it like we have this much love for you and then it's going to grow and your love is going to grow to expand to this new
00:21:21
Speaker
family member. And so I learned at that age that love is this thing that grows. It's not a finite thing. And I think that that conversation is why I'm Polly today, because that made sense to me at the time and still does. What an anti-capitalist approach that your parents took to you to explain. What they were basically doing was they were disrupting the scarcity model
00:21:50
Speaker
that you were holding. That leads us into a supply and demand competitive fight for an assumed scarce resource. And your parents said, no, that's not the case. Love is actually infinite and expansive and generative.
00:22:12
Speaker
powerful. It's really quite a special thing, love, and really a wholly sacred thing that is infinite in that way. I might steal that sacred whore as a new identity label for myself. Okay, so then I'm curious, so you kind of had this relationship with this woman who opened things up and you had these experiences. How did you kind of go from that to
00:22:39
Speaker
the activist work you did and your career and your art. How did you decide to integrate all that into your work and how did you get started with that work? Yeah, so activism is kind of like a family business for my mother's side of my family. My maternal grandparents met in the American Labor Party.
00:23:02
Speaker
My maternal grandfather was a tenants rights organizer and activist. My mother was a member of the Black Panther Party and also a union organizer with 1199. So I was birthed into a family.
00:23:22
Speaker
that believe that we should be in service and that any injustice required us to work in solidarity and in cooperation with others, in collaboration with others, to address
00:23:41
Speaker
that injustice. And so as I grew in my own understanding of myself and my sexuality, I saw what biphobia was. I saw what monosexism was. I saw the ways in which bisexuality and bisexuals were marginalized in LGBT spaces.
00:24:05
Speaker
And I already knew that in cisgender and heterosexual spaces, bisexuality along with homosexuality and being trans was marginalized and stigmatized. So the activists in me was already, okay, this is an injustice. We need to address this. And so I started to work to unpack why that was and how I could personally contribute to it.
00:24:35
Speaker
So I'm a writer, I'm an artist. So I started linking up with other writers, other artists, other scholars, the first being Lorraine Hutchins. And we co-edited that special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality that you referenced.
00:24:57
Speaker
that dealt with bisexuality and spirituality. Then later I found out that Robin Oaks had a call for contributions to a book project that would deal with bisexual men. And so I reached out to Robin and said,
00:25:19
Speaker
Do you have any men who are working on this with you? And Robin said, no. And I think that would be great. And so we started to talk and develop a relationship. And out of that relationship came the decision to collaborate and co-edit, recognize.
00:25:38
Speaker
the book that was so instrumental in your own coming to embrace your full self. So I started to do things like that. I connected with activists that were organizing public policy briefings at the White House. So I went the first year as experts
00:26:04
Speaker
a content expert and then later became a co-organizer of one of the White House briefings on bisexual public policy. We co-authored a set of policy recommendations at the federal level that was later published by the Movement Advancement Project.
00:26:27
Speaker
So it was just about, in the Black community, we say, get in where you fit in. And I think that that so speaks to sexual fluidity as well. And so, yeah, I got in where I fit in. And so that's how I became an activist dealing with bisexual policy issues and bisexual visibility and liberation.
00:26:53
Speaker
Cool, awesome.
Bisexual Visibility and Intersectionality
00:26:54
Speaker
I have more questions about some of the activism, but since you mentioned the book, I want to ask a little bit about the book. And the book was like, really, I think something that helped me so much as I was coming out was not just reading a study or the Kinsey stuff, but hearing many different experiences from different people. So this book did that for me and also going to, by request, meetings in New York City.
00:27:22
Speaker
Both of those things I had this experience of like, oh, this thing I thought was crazy in my head. Actually, many different people of many different backgrounds think the same thing. So it must not be as crazy as I think.
00:27:37
Speaker
And you write in the book at the very beginning this thing of like, you know something in yourself, but if you don't see it in the world, you can't recognize it. And really that word, recognize, we have to see ourselves in the world to figure out who we are and what is going on.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, there's an African concept called imbutu, which is a Bantu word from southern Africa that loosely translates into I am because we are.
00:28:13
Speaker
I am because we are. And so it speaks to that truth, the reality that you're speaking of, that my coming to know myself is so interdependent and interwoven with my relationship with the world and my ability to have the world speak back to me in ways that allow me to recognize myself.
00:28:42
Speaker
and to recognize my position in the world and to then come to know who and what I am. And so the book recognized was so important to us as we were developing it.
00:28:57
Speaker
to have those multiple perspectives. Because we recognize that bisexuality is an umbrella for a lot of different journeys that are all walking similar paths under that umbrella. And we can have some similar experiences, but there's also such diversity and complexity
00:29:24
Speaker
that we needed to have an intergenerational approach so that there are people in their teens and their people in their 70s writing about their experiences. We want to have a global perspective. So although there are mostly works from people in the United States,
00:29:51
Speaker
We have people represented, bisexual men represented all over the world in various parts of the world. We have cisgender bisexual men and transgender bisexual men. So we wanted to really underscore that
00:30:10
Speaker
Just because you meet one bisexual man doesn't mean you understand fully what being a bisexual man is.
00:30:23
Speaker
there is a a universe of bisexual masculinities and and so you're you're able to then find where you are located in that universe and connect up and recognize that
00:30:41
Speaker
Oh, okay, yeah, if I can recognize myself, I can recognize you, and you can recognize yourself, you can recognize me, and we can build that interlocking system of recognition and empowerment.
00:30:56
Speaker
Right, exactly. It's beautiful, and I think the book kind of showed me at the time I was just coming out, like all the possibilities for me. Like to me, even at that time, the word bye was a very narrow definition in my head, and this kind of expanded it. Oh, I could be like this person, I could be like that person, I could be a little bit of all of it.
00:31:25
Speaker
There are a lot of great essays in it. Two of them are yours, which I want to ask you or just mention at least because I reread them and there's a couple really powerful, beautiful things in them. You wrote one essay about going to a free clinic to get tested for HIV and other STDs. And you talk about going in there and seeing people in the waiting room
00:31:50
Speaker
And everyone, you kind of know what everyone's there for, but nobody talks about it. Everyone was silent, and you write that you didn't want to break up the anonymity by asking where to go or who to check in with. And then you wrote something that I read it, and I was like, yeah, that makes so much sense, but I can understand how the you in that moment is kind of blocked from seeing it or acting on it. You wrote,
00:32:20
Speaker
You didn't want to break up the anonymity or talk to anyone. To do so would be to confront the humanity of our lives. We have desires, emotions, feelings for other human beings. We have sex with these human beings we desire, love, feel for. And we have fears and concerns about our health as a result of those loves and desires. It just couldn't be more straightforward, fundamentally true, and totally
00:32:46
Speaker
good, like good, positive things. We have these loves and desires. And then, yeah, we need to talk to doctors about it because of the practical realities. And yet, in this instance, and in so much of life, where we keep that in, and we silence ourselves because there's so much shame. So, I don't know, can you talk about that? Or do you want to tell the rest of the story?
00:33:09
Speaker
Well, in writing that piece, what I wanted to do was both humanize
00:33:20
Speaker
and particularize. So in the humanizing is to recognize that bisexual men are no different than any other human being in terms of the needs for food, clothing, shelter, security, connection, community, those kinds of things.
00:33:44
Speaker
We seek those things out and we engage those things differently than somebody who's not a bisexual man, but we still have those needs and those desires. And so we are just as deserving in that humanity of being appreciated and valued as anyone else.
00:34:14
Speaker
And then there's the particular part of it. And that speaks to what intersectionality talks about, that black feminist framework called intersectionality, that the social identities that we carry because of our membership in certain social groups, so bisexuals, working class people or poor people or black folks, what have you.
00:34:42
Speaker
that the interlocking social identities we carry in a society that is oppressive makes our journey to meet our needs more or less difficult. That we have advantages or disadvantages imposed upon us by the society
00:35:09
Speaker
that particularize our experience of love and care and desire and food and clothing and shelter. So that's what I was trying to do in that moment. And as an artist and as a writer, one of the things that I tend to do is as I'm living life, I'm always observing.
00:35:34
Speaker
So I get to then reflect on what it means in this moment. So yeah, I'm going into a testing center and I'm dealing with my own stuff around, okay, have I been exposed to something? Did I contract them? All of that other kind of thing, the shame, the guilt, the this, the that, the curiosity, the fear, all that. But I'm also an artist.
00:36:02
Speaker
and writer who's watching myself in that moment. And so I could be in that space and be like, whoa, I don't know where the heck I'm supposed to go now that I'm in this room. All of these people are here, but
00:36:18
Speaker
You know, nobody's really looking at each other. Everyone's silent. And, okay, I'm not gonna break this up, but I need to figure out how I'm gonna navigate the situation. And then the artist in me, the artist writer in me is like, ooh, okay, what were y'all all doing in that moment? What did that mean?
00:36:37
Speaker
And how can I represent that for others in my work in ways that bring those questions and those reflections to them about their own experiences?
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah,
Black Lotus Project and Racial Identity
00:36:52
Speaker
I identify with that as a writer and artist. I'm experiencing life and also always thinking about how to represent those experiences. I also want to ask, it's kind of related and it's also on the Black History Month right now, but when this podcast comes out and so I want to ask about that experience. I'm like,
00:37:13
Speaker
you wrote about Frank Ocean coming out. Well, I don't know if he actually used the word bi, but he talked about his experiences with men and women, and he was kind of specific about the language he used, right? You wrote about that. But you also wrote, he said, I feel like a free man. And you wrote about how that's different than saying I am free, and how that there's this painful truth for Black men about
00:37:39
Speaker
a dominating culture that expends incredible amounts of time, money and energy, controlling and policing our bodies and the way we decide to use them. So I'm curious, can you explain why that was important to you? Why I feel like a free man was such an interesting choice of how to phrase that?
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah, well, again, you know, artist-writer, so language is important to me and does things to me. And so when I, you know, I'll do a close reading, so then I'll say, oh, okay.
00:38:15
Speaker
That's meaningful, that feel rather than am. And it's tied historically. So the sanitation workers strike in Memphis and in Chicago using the placard, I am a man.
00:38:33
Speaker
These were black working class workers holding these placards in their protests. I am a man. Well, if you think about if you if you are already recognized as a man in society, you don't actually need to hold a placard.
00:38:50
Speaker
It's because you are not recognized as a man, as a full human being, that you have to then, or you're choosing to represent that. Black lives matter. The reason why people say black lives matter is because black lives don't matter in the society. If they did, you wouldn't need to say it.
00:39:11
Speaker
And so being a Black bisexual man in a society of settler colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, in a society that only believes your value is tied to the profit that you can make for others, the benefit that you can make for others, what then does it mean
00:39:42
Speaker
to be free. What then does it mean to be self-determined? What then does it mean to claim something for yourself? That's a very, very powerful, powerful act to claim something for yourself. And whether that means claiming the desires and the loves that you have,
00:40:10
Speaker
whether it means claiming your capacity to be in relationship with people regardless of their gender, whether it means to claim the experience of pleasure that doesn't conform to the box that the society has put you in. That's a really, really powerful act.
00:40:39
Speaker
And so part of my work, particularly over the last maybe seven years, has been to build space with black bisexual men and bisexual plus. So all of the
00:40:56
Speaker
All of the folks under that umbrella, we say the no labels folks, the pansexual, the polysexual, the sexually fluid folks, all of those folks to build space in which we can heal from the traumas.
00:41:20
Speaker
that we've experienced, the racial, sexual, and gender violence that we've experienced, to recognize each other, that Ubuntu concept, to be in brotherhood with each other, and to think about how we contribute to the Black liberation struggle, how we can contribute to Black community.
00:41:46
Speaker
to our families and neighborhoods in an authentic way, in a way that is indigenous and responsive to our cultural values, which are different than those in other communities. So for example, coming out, coming out isn't something that is an indigenous cultural
00:42:12
Speaker
practice to Black folks. We are more about inviting in. As people who had colonists and settlers and slavers come into our community and kidnap people and rape people and hold them hostage and force them into labor, it's really important to us about who we invite in.
00:42:38
Speaker
So we talk about inviting in, inviting people into one's truth, inviting people into one's full self. And not everyone deserves to be invited in.
00:42:50
Speaker
So you don't have to tell everybody your sexuality because not everyone is deserving of that and it can put you at risk. So those are the kinds of things that we've been working on and I've been involved in over the last several years in terms of black bi plus masculinities and manhood.
00:43:14
Speaker
Cool. That's awesome. So is that like, is you run the Black Lotus project with Jay Christopher, our first podcast guest ever? Is that correct?
00:43:24
Speaker
Yeah, so Jake Christopher, who actually now is Jake Christopher Dadafumi, he is one of the co-founders with me of the Black Lotus Project, which is a part of a larger initiative of the No Homo No Hetero initiative, which we co-founded with David J. Cork. Cool. And were you involved with Buy Request at some point too?
00:43:54
Speaker
In New York? I definitely attended a few meetings of my request, but I was not a regular attendee.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yeah, that was my regular. I guess I'm curious, like, I'm curious what kinds of conversations that can exist in Black Lotus Project. I mean, you kind of talked about it already, but it's like, to me, it's kind of like, I can understand how like that unique experience needs to be discussed. Whereas like, if I started a meeting of white bisexuals, we would probably just talk about being bisexual because the white privilege is often invisible to most people.
00:44:32
Speaker
really, the only containers I've found to talk to other white people about white supremacy and white privilege have been specifically for that. It took a class on defecting from supremacy. We really have to be targeted and directed to talk about it because it's so invisible, at least it was to me. And really,
00:44:56
Speaker
my male privilege, my white privilege, my straight privilege too were very invisible to me in many ways until I recognized my bisexuality. I understood that oppression and that shame and the structures that kept me from realizing that. And then when I started coming out, it helped me connect
00:45:16
Speaker
to these and understand these other forms of oppression. But I think, you know, I feel lucky I had that experience of coming out and realizing I was bi because it did connect me in that way. But, you know, many, many people with the privilege, it's invisible forever. So I'm just curious how those spaces, you know, how they were different in your experience.
00:45:40
Speaker
Well, I think the difference is, as you said, is the recognition of the pain, trauma, and violence of settler colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and cis-hero patriarchy on the South. So folks who are racialized as white experience significant levels of trauma and violence from that system.
00:46:08
Speaker
But they carry the intergenerational trauma of invisibilizing that violence, that many folks racialize as white. Their ancestors became white at the expense of their ethnic identity. So before they were white,
00:46:31
Speaker
You know, they were a part of a particular ethnic tradition. They were Italian. They were Greek. They were Irish. They were, you know, they had a particular ethnic identity. I oftentimes talk about this with folks racialized as white and comparing it using the metaphor of cheese. So if you think about American cheese, American cheese was designed to be,
00:46:58
Speaker
was designed to be homogenized, was designed to be non-imposing, non-threatening, acceptable to the greatest amount of people. You could use it far and wide. But if you compare the taste of American cheese to the ethnic cheeses,
00:47:22
Speaker
that have been produced around the world. You're talking about a Gouda, a goat cheese, a Gruyere, a mozzarella. It's different. There's a soul. There's a soul to that cheese that isn't in American cheese. And so folks whose ancestors became white
00:47:48
Speaker
In part, they had to lose their soul and their spirit to do that in order to become a part of the system of whiteness and receive the privileges of whiteness in the society.
00:48:07
Speaker
But that came at a significant cost. And so I encourage folks racialized as white to actually have those conversations with each other. So what would it mean if there was a decidedly race conscious
00:48:23
Speaker
bisexual group of folks racialized as white who began to unpack what it means to be bisexual at those intersections. And so that's what we do in Black Lotus Project is that we're unpacking what it means for us to live at these intersections given the structural violence that we face.
00:48:48
Speaker
right?
Art, Revolution, and Decolonizing Sexology
00:48:49
Speaker
That's fascinating and it's actually kind of really clarifying for me too to put that into context because like I'm Jewish and my ancestors, my grandparents and great-grandparents are from Eastern Europe, Ukraine and I didn't even realize until pretty recently that that
00:49:06
Speaker
is an ethnicity. To me, it was a religion, but I'm a white person born in America. But the intergenerational trauma from that and from probably having to hide your identity and fit in, especially through World War II and the Holocaust, is like,
00:49:26
Speaker
that definitely affected my family. It definitely affected me in ways that were invisible. I had this very, you should fit within the lines of society. Don't take too many risks. Don't be out there. And all of that contributed to why I didn't come out as bi or didn't realize until
00:49:46
Speaker
later in life. The fact that Judaism was something that could intersect with my bisexuality was invisible to me until pretty recently, but it's very connected.
00:50:03
Speaker
And when we have more of those revelations, we build the foundation for solidarity. We build the foundation to be in alliance with each other in the dismantling of these systems of oppression that are doing such harm to all of us.
00:50:29
Speaker
I have like a million questions and we're never going to get to all of them today. I can tell, I can talk to you for like hours. Maybe you'll have to come back. I say that to everyone. But this leads me, I want to ask because like it leads me into your artwork and your vision as an artist because like
00:50:47
Speaker
I think I am a TV writer and I want to make movies and stuff. And for a long time, I think I was politically progressive, but didn't really have so much of a mission. And in the last few years, as I've come out, my mission has crystallized. And it's really become what you're saying is using my identity to connect with all oppressed, marginalized groups and really
00:51:13
Speaker
unite in solidarity to affect political change, right? So I'm curious, like you're a playwright, you're a poet, you're an artist, like do you have a kind of mission with your work overall or is it project by project or like and how does your identity affect your artwork? So as an artist, I am informed by
00:51:38
Speaker
the ideas of both Nina Simone and Toni Cade Bumbara. Nina Simone said, what else can an artist do but reflect the times? And that is the artist's duty, is to reflect the times.
00:51:59
Speaker
Tony Kate Bombara talked about the artist as a cultural worker who makes revolution irresistible. And so those two ideas inform me as an artist. I am reflecting the times and making revolution irresistible in my work, and that's whether I'm
00:52:28
Speaker
writing poetry, or producing documentary film, or writing and producing plays, or doing performance art. That's at the heart of my work. Some of my work deals
00:52:45
Speaker
with bisexuality. Some of it deals with sexuality more broadly. All of it deals with questions around racism and all of it deals with culture. The ways in which communities of people interacting with their environment, living in their world,
00:53:09
Speaker
develop practices and ways of being that help them to navigate life and to live as fully as they can. So that's what undergirds my practice as an artist.
00:53:25
Speaker
Awesome. And I mean, I could ask a million questions about this, but we don't have too much time. But can you tell us about No Homo, No Hetero, the documentary that you were producing, and where that is? Sure. So No Homo, No Hetero, the documentary, is something that I conceived of, I think, in like, what, 2016, maybe?
00:53:51
Speaker
And I met David J. Cork through J. Christopher D'Alfumi's previous group called Mankind, which was for black men who were sexually fluid. And David J. Cork is
00:54:12
Speaker
actor, director, producer. And so I reached out to Dave and said, hey, why don't we collaborate to do a documentary on what it means to be a black bisexual man? And David agreed. And so we started to go to work in terms of producing the documentary. And producing a feature film documentary.
00:54:39
Speaker
So know about the documentary world, like producing a feature film is huge, even a low budget one.
00:54:50
Speaker
And then to have a topic that is multiply marginalized has meant that we were challenged with funding issues, like people who said, oh, this is worthwhile. Like we go to the usual suspects for documentary film funding and it's like, oh, well, this is important. Why is this compelling?
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah. Do these people even exist? Do Black bisexual men even exist? So we've taken an approach of working as we get funding and fundraising to work. So where we're at now is we completed principal filming. We have some
00:55:44
Speaker
some ketchup filming to do or some additional filming to do to fill in some places. And we're in the process of creating a rough cut. So David actually just got funding from the New York State Council on the Arts to work on a rough cut that we can use to get additional funding for full post-production, the bells and whistles,
00:56:14
Speaker
the soundtrack and all those other kinds of things. Awesome. I look forward to seeing it. I hope it continues. And it is. It brings up this funding issue. It's kind of crazy, and I hope, I assume, it will change in the future. But in many areas, you see that
00:56:33
Speaker
of course we exist, of course Black bisexual men exist, bisexual people make up over half of the LGBT community in study after study, that's confirmed over and over, half. And yet the funding is something like 1% in the arts and health in all areas. It's kind of crazy.
00:56:58
Speaker
I want to ask about sexology and your sex education and body stuff because that's something that I'm still learning a lot about and want to learn more. So I read that at Goddard, you co-founded the World's First Sexuality Studies Program dedicated to promoting decolonizing sexuality and challenging the whiteness and Eurocentricity of the field.
00:57:24
Speaker
So it's not a field I am very familiar with. So I'm curious, how is that field dominated by whiteness, white supremacy, Eurocentricity? And what can we do to decolonize it briefly? I'm sure it's a complicated answer.
00:57:41
Speaker
So like many fields in the Western Academy, sexology focused only on the reality of people of European descent. And so the people who, that's how people were taught,
00:58:06
Speaker
So it made it more possible for people of European descent to feel like they had a place in the field, and so therefore they dominate the field. Although historically there have been some
00:58:22
Speaker
black indigenous and people of color who have made contributions to the field. It's been a field that's been dominated by people of European descent. And now in the last decade, there's a new generation of black indigenous and people of color, scholars and educators and healers in sexology who are committed to
00:58:48
Speaker
decolonizing the field and bringing racial equity to the field and stepping outside of the Eurocentric approach to understanding sexuality, love, relationality, and pleasure.
00:59:05
Speaker
So with publications like the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships and the creation of academic programs like the one that I co-founded at Goddard College, we are not only creating space,
00:59:25
Speaker
for the study and development of ways of knowing and arts and culture related to sex and sexuality that are from a black indigenous and people of color and global south perspective. But we're also creating space for black indigenous and people of color to find a place in the field for themselves and to know that, oh, this is something that they can study and they can do.
00:59:55
Speaker
cool. And this is, I guess this is kind of related, or maybe not, you could talk about both. But I also read your practitioner of tai chi chuan, chi kung, hatha yoga, and pranayama. I'm trying to get more, I'm very into yoga these days, but just like vinyasa. I'm trying to get into more meditation and other kinds of things. And you've taught embodied health practices for decades. I'm curious like how
01:00:22
Speaker
does wellness and these embodied health practices, how does it relate to your sexuality or your experience of sex? How are they intertwined, if at all? So, practicing and teaching in those areas aligns with my mission to help people own their bodies.
01:00:49
Speaker
to really own their bodies. I'm also a practitioner of Theater of the Oppressed. And we have this set of frameworks or exercises about helping people to listen to what they hear, to see what they're looking at.
01:01:12
Speaker
to feel what they touch. And that's about getting into your body. Settler colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and cis-hero patriarchy are all trying to get us outside of our bodies. We need to be outside of our bodies in order to endure
01:01:36
Speaker
the violence of these systems and in order for them to be more and more invisible. Once we are in our bodies fully, we become aware of the violence of these systems and they become intolerable to us. So teaching Tai Chi or yoga or pranayama meditation, qigong, is a way of helping people return to their bodies
01:02:06
Speaker
and then returning to their bodies, recognize that there is this matrix of systems operating that is doing violence to us and making that violence intolerable so that we act to dismantle those systems of oppression.
01:02:29
Speaker
I love that.
Embodied Health and Personal Reflection
01:02:30
Speaker
I feel like I just had a little aha moment you facilitated because I feel like for so long of my life, I was trying to control my body and fit my body in to what it should be or do this, feel this, feel that.
01:02:48
Speaker
And my coming out did kind of coincide with this interest in yoga and meditation and actually listening to what is going on inside there and feeling what's there instead of trying to control or push or fit some model. Yeah, you were coming home to your body. And that's what this is all about is helping people come home to their bodies.
01:03:12
Speaker
It's kind of amazing to me that all this stuff is so connected and it makes so much sense now, but it's such a fundamental thing of our bodies and our feelings. And as we talked about at the very beginning, sex and our desires are all these fundamental things that I didn't used to think were connected to politics or radical change. But it is, it's the starting place.
01:03:41
Speaker
I sometimes I ask, I mean, I have a million questions. Do you want to talk for three more hours? No. Maybe, maybe another time. But I sometimes I do ask is there anything on your mind that came up during this that you're thinking about that we didn't have a chance to talk about?
01:03:58
Speaker
No, I don't think that there is. I think it's always a process for me to be interviewed or to talk with folks publicly about my experience because I believe that as bisexual people, we actually have a right to our privacy. We have a right to holding things that nobody else knows.
01:04:28
Speaker
we actually have a right to that because everybody else has a right to that. And so I practice this revealing and this transparency as a service to other people out there who have similar experiences so that they can recognize themselves in my reflection.
01:04:54
Speaker
And that's, again, that's an act of love and an act of service. But I think it's really, really important to affirm that each of us has a right to our privacy and our secrecy.
01:05:09
Speaker
Well, I thank you for sharing as much of your story with us as you did. And yeah, it's like, it is. It's this beautiful thing of we need to share this with more people because it's hidden. It's still relatively hidden. It's getting a lot better lately, but there's still a lot of work to do.
01:05:27
Speaker
Well, thank you for inviting me to be in conversation with this community that you've created with the podcast. And I really, really thank you for your work and your service to buy folks into community. Thank you.
Conclusion and Gratitude
01:05:44
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. And thank you very much. It was really nice to finally meet you and lovely to chat. Peace and love.
01:05:57
Speaker
Two Bye Guys is edited and produced by me, Rob Cohen, and it was created by me and Alex Boyd. Our music is by Ross Mincer, our logo art is by Caitlin Weinman, and we are supported by The Gotham, formerly IFP. Thanks for listening to Two Bye Guys.