As we walked to the corner store sex shop in the Flatbush Avenue junction, we’d already deliberated that our tallest friend would manage the purchase. He had, of course, bought the first tape that we watched over and over again. Our other friend, with the glasses, looked even younger than the rest of us and it would’ve been breaking some kind of law to sell him the tape, we knew. So, in our boxy sneakers and shifty glances, we huddled off to the right like we were going in a candy store and left it to Rock to bring the collected money to the counter. This was 1996, I wanna say, and the tapes weren’t labeled nor would we have stayed in that seedy store long enough to browse. These were the kind of New York adults who fomented a dangerous contraband tradition of selling to anyone with the money to buy their ill-gotten goods.

We arrived at Rock’s house before his parents and sister and while his brother was in practice. There was a small window we had to review the tape of unknown runtime, blank white label box, and banned sound. We’d need to close his door, sit there mouths agape and ears alert to the front door downstairs. I was practicing my giggle and the jokes I’d make about what looked gross to offset the silence that enveloped us when something became both nasty and intriguing. Three young Black boys, slurping up a screen full of men going inside women, live action style with sweat and hair. At that point, we were thirsty consumers so the VHS tapes were edits of many gonzo hardcore movies spliced together so that the original order was lost. Sex wasn’t a story, we learned, just an act. Two body parts thrumming in a roughly syncopated beat. No matter how many jokes I rehearsed, the silence beat us every time.

I find this ritual unimaginable now. In college at the turn of the century, it was even more surreal and cramped. My friends then had access to an older brother’s apartment that served as a kind of flop house. His brother had been minted Eldest Boy and enjoyed privileges like free rent from his parents for being in college. That midtown Atlanta boys’ club was a strange refuge and screening ground for his unreal pornography collection. “Booty Talk” represented the best of West Coast Productions slime and we’d wait, again like we were captives to thirst, for the Friday haul his brother inevitably wrangled on his way back from the strip club. At the time, those studios were putting out an insane number of titles, none scripted or lampooning like the White adult film industry that was their close parallel. Dick and pussy. Floppy organs and straight rods and bulbous breasts and tattoos and blunts and severely choppy edits characterized these raunch-a-thon reels.

They were also a communal affair. It was not my apartment so I got no quiet time with my friend’s brother’s stash. That was an etiquette we wouldn’t dare violate. Again, we sat like a gallery, his older friends and us, the freshmen, viewing like we were in a Times Square theater trying not to get arrested. No one spoke except for a few shaky puns or the click of a soda can opening to address the pervasive thirst. Were we meant to watch these flicks with Our Boys, none of us daring to touch and fully clothed? I don’t know, but that’s how we did it. Oddly, we had been among each other when the idea of ganging up on a girl was in play or when someone hired a stripper and brought her back for the entertainment of two or three of us (like on my 20th birthday when we ran a train on a girl and I was too dizzy of 8 Smirnoff Ices to get my pants from around my ankles).

This was a bizarre time when, through porn, I adopted the wrong belief, that sexual performance was about impressing other men and discarding women. I did not understand that Black men’s sexual conquests had taken on a homoerotic meaning in the bonding customs we’d been subject to. That had been in my lyrics, my lockers, my lies and my loneliness. I did not understand that I would become addicted to porn, the mechanism of proving manhood through a hard-cocking display, the opportunity to bond with other men the only way I knew how—by proving we could fuck anything but each other. That was the calculus of love among friends I had at the time and I didn’t resent them their ignorance just like they let me have my sensitivities. It’s only after I committed one sexual taboo, during the train, that I knew we were all in an obstinate cycle of denying ourselves pleasure so we could inhabit better masks.