I was at a retreat in Miami, Florida a few years ago. It was a writer’s workshop wherein mostly Black writers were getting a week with some dedicated professionals to unravel our gifts and decide whether or not we were still “emerging.” That meant a lot for me to get into the workshop because I’d been twice rejected and it seemed at least important for me to surpass certain milestones in my forties so this avocation wouldn’t feel so silly to pursue. Anyway, it was very validating by several measures but it also broke me down in ways I couldn’t have expected. For one, I met one of my dear writer friends and he was my teacher. He could be a peer to me, in another sense, because he grew up under the influence of hip-hop, has many of the same heroes, and lays out the best of his work inside self-deprecating humor. He loved to hoop and we had run a few games on the university campus.

Once when we were leaving a game he said to me, concerning my writing and my life, that I was in a unique position because I could write about an area that others hadn’t. I asked him what he meant.

“Black men don’t write about sex,” he intoned.

I still wasn’t sure what he meant.

“Well, it’s not like there’s no Black male erotic writers, but that’s mostly women when you break it down. And, saying this about myself, a lot of times when men mention sex and they’re first-person writers, it’s under the guise of humor. Or it’s very typical and about the act.”

I started to question his definition of “men” and “sex” but I was also being obtuse. I knew what he meant and he was right.

The publishing industry is prone to some of the same stereotypes as all American and commercial art forms: it trafficks useful tropes about Blackness that keep our sexual and human side on the margins in favor of comforting the middle class white woman reader. If a Black male author were to become explosively popular as a fiction or nonfiction writer, I imagine he’d have to be a sex worker. His name would be Trey or Big T and he would tell tales of suburban cuckolding and his role as a bull for couples who played his submissives behind closed doors. The actual emotional value would be in the validation of white readers who either live that life or fantasize about it and the author would simply cede himself to that crowd.

The joke would be on the publishing industry when they found out it was an Asian woman or some AI who wrote it.

I’m interested in writing about sex because of a Melissa Febos title that’s in my reading list right now. The craft memoir “Bodywork” is about writing into sex and the attendant traumas, catharses, and overall advantages of sensory work when peeling back the layers of an artist self.

I love writing about myself, like most awful, indulgent memoir people. I hesitate to write about sex, both because of the aforementioned sexist and racist rigidity for my demographic, but also because I would have to reveal, even to my lovers, how I truly feel during the act.

That’s the ultimate value of sex writing, which should be distinguished from erotica. I would write erotica if I wanted to chase the fantasies of success and, again, appease a reader who was looking for the expression of their desires on the page. That’s not what would feed me or fuel me spiritually though. I’ll tell you about the first time I realized I had to write about sex, the mechanics of it, sure, but mainly how the feelings that come up during our most intense experiences are a map for what makes art essential in the description of the great human project.

I was in Costa Rica, this was 2021. My live-in partner and I had decided we would join a retreat where I’d eventually meet one of my treasured friends in life. She was hosting a couples’ Tantra excursion where, as typical as that sounds, I found the most atypical group awaiting me. We walked up the steps to a canopy where each person was masked and being rapid-tested for Covid. This was a crazy time, I’m realizing, because we had to test before the flight to even embark to Costa Rica, which meant that any positive test here meant you basically caught it on the plane or in the airport. Also: very possible. As we waited our turn, I started taking in the sights. Everyone was Black there and most of the other retreat-goers were women. They cut a certain figure: curvy, mid-30s or later, and decidedly single or within a modest pair of women. There was laughter and there were head rolls. There were neck snaps and lean-backs as each woman greeted others they clearly knew from stateside.

There was also my friend, the retreat leader, shuffling around to every station within this jungle center for yoga and some level of escape. She had tasks and was delegating them to various worker bees in her orbit. She wore a flowy tank top and short shorts. Her close-cropped hair and perfect jawline gave her an androgynous bent to her long eyelashes and huge brown pupils, both inquisitive and officious. This was her actual tribe, a group of professional women who wanted nothing more than to access some pleasure without the lingering white or male gaze of their past.

I didn’t know how much I fit in. My partner was great at research so I trusted how much she had vetted the retreat and its head teacher. We grabbed itineraries after shaking our tests to show the negative hyphen on the white sticks. There was a daily nude yoga class I’d be excited to join. I won’t lie that the various shapes and honeyed colors of women and couples there were a feast for my attentive eyes. Each time I thought I’d found my thoughts again, another woman pranced by me and snatched my concentration into the bop of her hips or the slope of her shoulders. I love everything about the human body in tropical weather. The warmth brings the blood to the exact part of the skin that makes it look more alive than it ever has or will and allows the crowd to participate in joyful spectatorship.

Except this wasn’t regular looking or watching. In other spaces, and when I’d engaged my body as a tool or a weapon, my gaze focused on consumption. The long, hungry stare. The unjust taking of bodies by soaking them in. A woman at the grocery store. A couple entwined at the sex party. Morsels for my endless appetite to see without being corrected. With this group of Black women, I couldn’t snare them in my stare traps. Every time I prolonged my gaze, they would look me in the eyes, sometimes with equal curiosity. Not all of them returned the look; a few swiped off my gaze by turning a shoulder or laughing it away. The vast majority spoke to me, complimented me on my hair, my smile. They talked to my partner as if I wasn’t there, like, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. Is he spoken for?’ and then they would introduce themselves.

I wouldn’t call it a role reversal. I had attempted to stare but in turn became a witness. I also couldn’t see myself the same because I had been witnessed. As a Black man, I have stumbled into all kinds of behind-closed-doors acts: taboo kisses and sucks on my belly and blowjobs under cafe tables. I’ve loved, privately, the drooling videos of those I dated but wanted to see in their candid acts of passion, mouths breathless and wanting. I had consumed and I was certain I’d been consumed.

But I had never felt the immersive tide of being witnessed.

I had felt like lovers knew me — or, at least, wanted to know me — up until the point of pressing my vulnerable, hard parts into them. Then, their query ended. I was a surrogate, the exact sledgehammer I’d imitated before bludgeoning them with my desire. A tool and a weapon. Since this feeling was one of many firsts at the retreat, I felt dutiful about writing it, even though my own desire and my own witnessing hung shame on my shoulders.

My partner and I went to our bedroom, with an outdoor shower, canopy bed and a small living space where she would scatter her 82 facial care products. I smirked at her collection of small bags and joked that I only tolerated it because her skin was perfect like a Korean billboard model. I wonder if she felt objectified then or seen. We joined the opening ceremony. I’ll admit I remained skeptical of anything that felt “self-help,” or that would be priced for my middle-aged crowd. In the couples realm, so many products are built for you to shortcut doing the work yourself, whether it’s a diet that ships you all the meals, or a former sex worker who coaches you through “the last sexless year of your marriage…guaranteed.” But this was not the objective I learned about at the retreat. Instead, the teacher calmed the room chatter while she handed out a bunch of sharpened wooden stakes. Near her altar at the front of the room lay feathers, crystals, yarn and string, leather strips, and a variety of small, neon sex toys.

We knew we were in for something but hadn’t settled on what. She handed out small pieces of paper and said:

“I want you to write down your intention for your body during these next five days. Five days isn’t a lot of time and many of us waste time without even thinking what that took from us. This is not that kind of place. We have to create intentions or you’re gonna leave here all mixed up, crying, facing a comedown like no other talking ‘bout ‘I came the hardest I’ve ever come but now I’m not in Costa Rica no more and I don’t know how to get it back’ I won’t have answers for you either.”

That matter-of-fact delivery called out to me. She was not making us any promises but had shown us what we could do if we were careful with ourselves and intentional. I thumbed the pages of the schedule and saw that tonight there was something called “The Self-Pleasure Ritual” and it would be in the same humongous room that doubled as a yoga stage for the center. There were mats and long body pillows, blankets, and cushions. I could see in the braids and beads, in the eyes and hips and waists, in the puffed lips, that we all needed the effects of what would happen next. I just had to be willing to try it for myself.