a moment of clarity.

words.

"...One night, when I was 24 and living in San Francisco, I met a handsome white guy visiting from Germany. We stood near a window in a crowded bar and talked about an art show he’d just seen. Eventually I brought him to my apartment, where, after removing some of his clothes, he eagerly started to undo my pants. But then he stood there for a moment and gave my crotch a long, perplexed look, like Geraldo Rivera did when, after months of buildup, he opened what turned out to be Al Capone’s empty vault. He replaced his clothes and, before exiting, explained himself: “That’s not what I expected.”

I knew what he meant. He was expecting a “Guinness Book of World Records” penis. He wasn’t the only one — just the last to do it with such efficiently rendered disappointment. That hurt, but I remember being amused that, for him, all our attraction came down to was what someone had told him my dick should look like. I remember standing there, half-dressed in my living room, and actually saying out loud, “Why does he know that?”

But everybody knows. Anytime a pair of pants is prematurely rezipped or the line goes dead in a sex app’s chat window, I always know: He was expecting a banana, a cucumber, an eggplant, something that belongs to either a farm animal or NASA. He was expecting the mythical Big Black Dick (which, online, people just call “B.B.D.”). That presumption is something you tend to prepare for with interracial sex — that your dick could either render the rest of you disposable or put your humanity on a pedestal, out of reach. That it could make you a Mapplethorpe..."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Last Taboo: Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal With Black Male Sexuality