We Are Fixer-Uppers

Who's working on themselves? And who isn't?

DetoxPod 194 contains a chat with HIV activist Rodney “Daddy Rod” McCoy (listen here). I believe this is the first time I’ve had the partner of another DTP guest on the show (Rodney is the life partner of 2X DTP guest Damon Jacobs). Two things from our lively conversation really stuck out for me.

Our discussion around consent struck a chord with me.

I’m not sure I had a conversation about consent with anyone until I was in my mid thirties. I was close to thirty before I even went on an actual, mutually expressed as such, date. Sexually, I was socialized at a time when, even in the liberal bastion that is New York City, male queerness was expressed furtively for the most part. The generation or two that came before me had to be even more stealthy regarding their attractions, and they were also dealing with the trauma of seeing their ranks decimated (more like obliterated) by AIDS.

The way guys interested in other guys found one another, before apps or even phone lines, was mostly in bathhouses, porn theaters and bar backrooms or even more furtively, in public places like restrooms or parks. In those places, opening your mouth to ask for consent could get you arrested or worse. So, at best, consent was given by meeting eyes with someone. In a lot of cases, consent was implied simply by virtue of you being there. So a lot of my introduction to gay dating and sex came via a series of what would now be understood as consent violations. I’d be standing in a bar and guys (especially older ones) would brush against me, or stand really close behind me, or quite often literally grab my dick or my ass through my pants.

Now, these men presumably knew they were risking getting punched in the face by being so bold, but to them, being socked (or more likely, getting their hand slapped away, or being told “no”) in a gay space was preferable to being arrested (again, or worse) in a presumably straight space. It doesn’t make what they did right, but I (with the benefit of context and hindsight) understand why it happened.

What I understand Rodney’s point to be is that modern-day sex-positive spaces don’t necessarily make allowances for the way that some people are socialized sexually. What I know is that a lot of these modern-day sex-positive spaces (many of which are either led by or prioritize femme or non binary humans and many more of which act like gay or especially bisexual men don’t exist) create rules around consent for totally valid reasons. No one wants to feel violated (and I’ll admit that while I did on occasion feel violated back in the day, the level of violation I felt fluctuated according to how attractive I found the person committing the violations). What I see is that there are people setting hard-line rules that don’t understand nuance and a lot of people who would probably change their behaviors if they were maybe approached with a bit more empathy. And we can extract that theory out of queerness and sex-positivity and drop it into almost any other social or political situation and it would make just as much sense.

Rodney, like me, grew up in Brooklyn. His memories of the “old neighborhood” also struck a chord with me. I’ve been in an especially nostalgic mood these last few months (world falling apart, about to turn 50, I’m sure you understand) and his memories of growing up in Red Hook in the mid-late ‘70s more or less match my memories of growing up in East Flatbush in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. I grew up surrounded by families, many of which were helmed by a single parent or a grandparent. But at that time, everyone knew everyone and it felt like as a kid, everyone on the block took some level of responsibility for you. I knew if I acted up, Mr. Lincoln at the house on our left, or the Stewart and Hall families to our right, were going to have a conversation with my grandparents. Lots of families on the block knew our house intimately because my grandmother (and later, Mrs. Stewart next door) ran a day care center and took care of all the neighborhood kids while their parents were working. Mrs. Jones, my friend Chris’s mom, was a school safety officer two blocks away, so the extended family’s tentacles spread long and wide. Those days seem long gone now. Hell, I’ve occupied my current residence for almost ten years and the only other occupants of the building that I’ve had more than a passing conversation with are now either dead or moved out years ago. I do feel like I’m falling into the “things were better back in my day” portion of my life, but that’s because, in some ways, they were.

I’ve released a DTP episode since my conversation with Daddy Rod, and I was gonna discuss it in this post, but my thoughts have run a bit longer than I intended. The through line between this set of thoughts and the set of thoughts I’ll revisit when I write about my conversation with Tom Gentry in episode 195 is the idea of us all being broken people. Everyone I know (yes, including you, and definitely including me) is broken in some way. Most people I know are broken in several ways. We, mostly, come from people as broken or more broken than us. I know I do. We, mostly, are having children that become people as broken or more broken than us (I can make a fairly long list of people I know and care about who are literally passing their inherited baggage forward). The thing about brokenness, though, is that once you realize that you’re broken, you’ve already made a step towards repair. There are quite a few folks who refuse to believe that they’re broken and pass on their generational (and socialized) damage and trauma. Others recognize it and choose to ignore it. Others propagate and exploit brokenness—via reality TV, via social media, via the music so many of us consume, via capitalism. It’s a vicious cycle, and we don’t have the power to stop it completely. But we do have the power, within us and our direct spheres of influence, to repair the brokenness in ourselves and to take our learnings from those repairs—whether it be through therapy, through being honest with ourselves, through living authentically, through showing up for others or through direct and often uncomfortable conversations—and have that reflect out into the world.

And in this moment, we probably have a responsibility to do so. How many of us are going to realize this, though?