The second I discovered that Jamie Foxx had experienced a medical emergency, I sincerely hoped he would survive, beyond which I hoped that his survival would lead to another comedy special. And I hoped that this comedy special would reveal—through that beautiful juxtaposition of intense hurt and humor—something serious about Black men’s bodies, something serious before those untimely, or overdue (depending on who’s being asked), deaths around the ripe age of 67. You know the tropes: won’t go to the hospital, fighting, hard livin’, etc.
This is what I hoped, more than halfway to the tomb myself, even if those who love me rampantly deny that basic fact. What I knew, however, was that we would get dick jokes. Knew we would get dick jokes because I’ve been a Black boy for 36 years, and among the most fearful, excitatory, and sublime aspects of such an experience has been what people make, or try not to make, of my penis. Knew after more than a decade as a medic in an all-male unit, and after years inspecting testes for ticks and lice as a nurses’ aid, washing and providing nonsexual but always necessary scrutiny of other people’s cocks, that the Black phallus and all its attendant fantasies would pop up, either always imperiled or throbbing and in mint condition for her pleasure.
Just 20 minutes into Foxx’s Netflix special, the D emerges. Fifty-seven-year-old Foxx, rocking a thick leather fit with the sheen of a short-haired, light-skinned puppy, looks good. This man’s post-stroke hairline invokes such a specific kind of Black male envy that it deserves its own essay. But the D? It ain’t doing so great. The nurse wants to bathe Foxx, and he’s like, Absofuckinglutely not.
With a left foot forward and a hand on his crotch, he’s like, “No, you not finna see this pickle…. There’s shit goes along with this pickle. I’m Black.” He pauses for effect. “I’m Jamie Foxx. It’s a whole lot of shit goin’ on here with this pickle.” It’s a Black male comedian classic just a nudge away from your average locker room chatter, a discourse that could get interesting but too often, in life and performance, reverts to bravado, to a narcissism extended by hardcore heterosexual porn’s most prominent event: competitive thrusting, before things really get on down to business.
To anyone who understands racism, and the fact that it has always been sexual, some of this business is obvious. Hundreds of years of mass rape and forced reproduction do not proceed without attendant cultural industries and mythological developments, without the deformation of normative sex and gender categories brought to mainstream consciousness by scholars like Hortense Spillers—without a series of psychic breaks, which have helped reinforce the idea of “Black women as persons who carry, fuck, never tire, and remain impoverished,” as Simone White writes, and the notion of Black men who are all member—both a walking threat and a big Black cock promise. Wesley Morris approached this problem back in 2016 from the visual sphere—suggesting that against a renaissance of sex positivity, the culture is simply not ready to deal with Black male sexuality:
“A Black penis, even the idea of one, is still too disturbingly bound up in how America sees—or refuses to see—itself. I enjoyed HBO’s summer crime thriller, The Night Of, but it offered some odd food for thought: The most lovingly photographed Black penis I’ve ever seen on TV belonged to a corpse in the show’s morgue. Meanwhile, the series’ most sexual Black character was a rapist inmate.” Jamie Foxx is just like us.
I’ve tried to articulate what a loss this is for everyone, through the precise angle of my own vasectomy. As someone interested in sex both physically and intellectually, I tend to question subjects like myself—Black, male, writing, sleeping mostly with women—about our sex. It interests me; it should be of interest to us. Why we rarely write seriously about our attempts to provide and procure pleasure: the anxieties, the bliss, the insecurities, the frustration and fear and curiosity at the nexus of love and sex. Why this discourse falls instead to the twin duplicities of bodily conquest and bed death. I think we think that investments in amplifying pleasure subsequently preclude care, and not just care for our lovers, but for our friends and sisters and mothers too—that we will horrify and torture the women we care about lest we say a single serious thing about sex. Sometimes I fear that we are using the gesture of holding space to lazily exclude ourselves from the problem of sex, the way that men often do with questions of gender, either saying nothing or performing absolute deferral.
