Dear White Gays: Not All Black Guys Are Tops

I’m a bottom. I’m not verse, I’m not bottom-verse or verse-bottom. I’m a bottom. Every time I’ve been attracted to a guy my thinking has always been, “Damn! I want him to put his D in me!,” not the other way around. So that’s how I know. I’ve topped before and I just don’t like it.

I’m a bottom.

It always surprises me when I chat with a white guy in a bar or online and he automatically assumes I’m a top. I live in Toronto and was at a bar recently when this guy comes up to me and tells me how beautiful I am.

“Where’s you boyfriend?” he asked. Smooth. I tell him I don’t have one and the flirtation keeps coming. Five minutes later out comes the question: “So, are you a bottom or a top?” This is all pretty normal until he says he thinks I’m a top because black guys are always tops.

Oh?

He tells me he’s a bottom and I tell him I’m one, too, and the whole thing pretty much dies right there. We could have still sucked each others dicks, but whatever.

If there’s one thing all bottoms know it’s that tops can be pretty freaking scarce, so it’s always great to find one when you do. But it seems like there’s extra pressure to be a top if you’re black.

Black guys want to bottom, too.

But you wouldn’t know it if you saw most interracial gay porn. There, the black guy is nearly always the top. “You’d be breaking an unwritten rule in gay porn,” one producer said anonymously in an article on the Huffington Post. “Most of the white guys who watch interracial porn want the fantasy of submitting to a tough street thug.”

So this is the fantasy that’s thrust on me when white guys approach me to dominate their butts in the bedroom.

I don’t want to.

When you assume I’m a top because I’m black it hurts my feelings. Black tops exist and they are amazing. Big dicks of all colors are so much fun. But I want you to know that when you approach me at the bar or online and you assume I’m a top, or that I’m hung, or that I’m hung and a top, I feel dehumanized. It feels like you’re reducing me to a thing that can perform a service for you, not like a mutual bond, the way sex should be.

There’s a porn video I saw awhile ago where a white guy is sucking this black guy’s cock. It’s huge and the video is nice. But it never once showed the face of the guy getting sucked. It was complete fetishization of the black dick. Who needs to see his face? There’s a big black cock to suck.

When you’re a black gay guy bottoming is a political stance. It’s a small way of saying I don’t want to play the game of upholding dehumanizing stereotypes and images. I don’t want to confirm media and cultural stereotypes about black “virile” masculinity. I’m not going to be your mandingo.