Filmmaker Emir Fils-Aime and Music Producer Anthony Avery photographed by Gioncarlo Valentine.
“Black men loving Black men is THE revolutionary act.” – Marlon Riggs
Gioncarlo
A few months ago I asked two friends to sit for a series of portraits so that I could test out lighting. I’ve been friends with Emir and Anthony for about a year, but the pair have been friends for about fifteen years. I’d been looking for a reason to make a series of formal portraits of the two because they felt so much like family to me, so I was happy to finally get the opportunity.
During the shoot I watched them move about in front of the camera with a type of graceful discomfort, a kind of hetero-masculine distance. I quickly decided that the theme for the images would be breeching that discomfort and exploring proximity.
As we continued to shoot I coaxed them to get closer. Apprehensive at first, Emir and Anthony eventually got more comfortable with each other. Then, Anthony remarked, “I’ve never been this close to Emir before.” When I heard this I felt a bit confused. These two considered each other brothers. They’ve been friends for more than half of their lives. They’ve supported each other through deaths, breakups, and breakdowns. They also live together. How had all of that been possible at a distance
After the shoot I couldn’t get Anthony’s comment out of my head. I started to reflect on my own notions of brotherhood.
I never feel at home in masculine centered terms. Words like like “sir,” “Mr.,” and “man” feel a bit too gendered, almost suffocating. However, being called “brother” has always had a unique effect on me, somewhere between inciting and disarming.
As a femme, gay, Black man, “brother” sometimes feels too rigid, like it’s meant to tell me my place along the binary, but other times it feels like a call home, a much needed reminder that my gayness doesn’t render my Blackness obsolete, which is not always clear.
Still, the examples of brotherhood that I’m most familiar with have usually been spaces of toxicity and silence. My relationship with my own brother has long been fraught with difficulty. He is tender, affectionate and has offered me encouragement in everything I’ve strived for, but when we were kids he was torturous. We fought constantly. He made derogatory remarks about my sexuality, my weight, and my appearance and I’d make comments about his struggles with reading. Afterward, I’d feel weighed down by the guilt and shame of taunting something that he was so deeply insecure about. To this day, much of that trauma still keeps us at a distance.
Outside of biological relationships, many of the straight men I know participate in a culture of harmful brotherhood with their closest friends. They don’t air grievances and they don’t always take each other’s feelings into account. I know so many men who have never told their best friends, their brothers, that they love them, that something was done that hurt their feelings. This language is dismissed as feminine and sensitive, reducing an opportunity for accountability and honesty into a space of silence and ridicule.
These examples of brotherhood never felt safe, more forums for anti-woman, homophobic, and transphobic views to run rampid. Even still, since I was a teenager, about 90% of my friends have been straight men.
This started in high school. I was femme presenting as a transgender girl at the time and having so many straight boys around me made me feel powerful. Growing up in Baltimore, femme gay people and transgender people were seen as any and everything but friendship material to straight men, so I felt accepted and protected in a hostile territory. They were a commodity to me in many ways, how straight men treat the act of having a lot of beautiful women around them at all times. I didn’t need to be sleeping with them, but my close ties with these boys made many of the girls, femmes, and gays in my school envious and confused.
As I got older my presentation changed. I accepted that I was not transgender, but that it was the only language I had for my gender deviance at the time. I started to feel a lot more comfortable in my own skin. I became far less interested in the commodification of these friendships, and far more in the idea of exploring my own notions of masculinity and brotherhood.
Loving Black men so often feels like a burdensome task. It’s a balancing act, swaying constantly between trying, fiercely and authentically to love them into shape. Challenging their sexism, their internalized homophobia. At times coaching them toward vulnerability, while also accepting them as they are. Sometimes I feel like it is a duty of sorts, my way of helping the community, but it is exhausting work and oftentimes more challenging than rewarding.
After the shoot and these reflections, I decided to create a space to discuss ideas of masculinity, proximity, and brotherhood with the men pictured, and how those ideas shaped them.
Emir
Brotherhood for me has always been reflective of my own history with vulnerability and how I display it. A jolt of terror initially rang through my body as I thought about writing this. This is indicative of a specific trauma I have around sharing myself with others, with exposing myself to rejection, to danger.
But brotherhood has served as a springboard to examining these feelings and their origins—a pedagogical process, one might say.
Anthony is one of several men in my life who have helped me define what a relationship between men looks like and, more importantly, what a relationship between two cisgendered, heterosexual men can look like. I think that a friendship, in any form, has its defining components. For us, it’s relatability followed by respect.
A friendship between Black men is one that is layered, rich, and fragile. And it’s one that is ever cognizant of the latter’s role in defining its bounds.
Too many relationships in our lives don’t serve to challenge us. We find ourselves attempting to maintain bonds often without actually communicating and embracing the emotional labor of said maintenance. So, we go through stages of engagement.
I’ve always felt that I had to delicately dance around being open and tender with another Black man. I ran the risk of toggling with his fragility, because I too possess that kind of sensitivity. I understand that fear. It’s tied to the safety of our bodies. This is something that is actively changing as Tone and my friendship ages and as we aim to be more honest (and less fearful) with our respective selves.
Tone’s comment (about being uncomfortable to be in such proximity) didn’t surprise me. The love is surely there. But there’s an unlearning that is actively occurring between us. And that takes time.
A lot of my desire to unlearn stems from not wanting to repeat my failed attempts at brotherhood from the past. After seeing some of the images of Tone and me, I thought about such attempts with my own kin. I thought of my younger brother and the ways in which I actively resisted being his brother when we were growing up. I thought about my mother and the way she would react to seeing me holding another individual as if he were my own brother.
This is because my brother and I lacked physical proximity in our relationship. As the eldest, I felt uncomfortable being forced to love another person. I didn’t understand what love needed to look like between us. I didn’t possess a language for it. Nor did I know the depth of these feelings. I didn’t want to. As self-preservation, I pushed him away. I forced him to direct his very physical ways of expressing love elsewhere.
My friendship with Gio is a revisiting with these entangled emotions around brotherhood and physical proximity. Ours is one rooted in accountability and frequent engagement. I consistently cycle through thoughts and emotions that I typically have the privilege of ignoring.
For us to truly be brothers—that can love each other in the manner that Tone and I love each other—I must examine those behaviors that serve to separate us. Through our bond, I’ve been reaffirmed that Black men truly require one another. That transcends age, class, upbringing, and sexual orientation. I’ve come to acknowledge the club that we are all a part of. We share a truth about the safety of our bodies in this space and social landscape that we can’t untether from.
Anthony
In my eyes, true masculinity is embracing your masculine and feminine qualities. I was raised by three strong Black women—my mother, aunt and grandmother. Their unwavering dedication to their family commanded respect. They remained true to themselves, making them stronger and unapologetic.
Strong Black men, like my grandfather and my uncles, had an equal hand in my upbringing. They received great respect from their community, not because they were the toughest in the neighborhood, but because of the quality of their characters. They’ve always shown me physicality. We embrace every time we see one another and say “I love you” when we end conversations. These relationships are my foundation. They shape the way I show affection in the world.
In our community, especially between Black men, softness is seen as weak and unacceptable. From a young age we’re conditioned to conceal that side and play sports, race cars, and wrestle. This teaches us to be aggressive, competitive and manly. The deck is already stacked against Black men, and softness is an easy target for culpability.
For me, brotherhood helps to alleviate that pressure; it creates a space for honesty, accountability, and communication. It’s crucial that we have a forum that allows us to put egos aside and be vulnerable with another. My earliest example of this is through my cousin Xavier.
Xavier and I were raised as brothers. We grew up in the same house and, like most kids, we fought and argued constantly. He was energetic and impatient. I was shy and soft spoken. Our family always stressed the importance of sticking together, letting us know that we were more than cousins, we were brothers.
I never realized the gravity of that idea until we aged and I watched him mature into his own man. I was the first person that Xavier came out to. Although it was something I already knew, that level of vulnerability and trust meant the world to me. It strengthened our connection and inspired me to look at my relationships with men more critically.
Since the very beginning, Emir has pushed me to challenge my way of thinking. When we met in middle school, I had become bossy and impatient. Emir was a deep thinker. He kept to himself. Over the last 15 years, we’ve grown together in inexplicable ways. He’s called me out on my arrogance and holds me accountable for my actions towards myself and others. We’ve been through everything from girlfriends to heartbreaks, college graduations to career successes. Emir has shown me the importance of loyalty and respect.
When I made the comment about Emir and I never being that close, it was the truth. We’d never been that physically close in our entire friendship, and that realization honestly made us laugh. We weren’t even cognizant of the idea of physical space until that moment. As straight Black men, there’s an unspoken understanding about what’s comfortable and uncomfortable in terms of space. We were definitely in the uncomfortable space, but the laughter helped dispel any awkward energy.
Having this experience made me realize how trivial “appropriate” or “normal” proximity actually are.
My friendship with Gio has shown me the importance of honesty with self and honesty with others. He’s one of the most blunt people I know, and he loves hard. Those ideas of comfortable/uncomfortable space don’t really exist in our friendship, it never has. We always greet each other with hugs and always say “I love you.” He’s challenged me to confront my own masculinity and how problematic my ideas around it can be to personal growth.
He, much like Emir, holds me accountable for what I say and do and gives me a different vantage point on how a simple action could affect someone in a greater way. Gio pushes me to strive for more. Both he and Emir have shown me the true essence of brotherhood—an uninhibited bond with love, honesty, respect, and loyalty at its foundation.
***
Gioncarlo
Being a Black man in this country, in this world, is unquestionably difficult. There are endless systemic barriers and biases, anti-Black cultural conditioning, a seemingly insurmountable wealth gap, and a myriad of other hurdles that stifle us from being able to make measurable progress. These things cause real and oftentimes catastrophic emotional and psychological trauma, so having a support system that you can be your most vulnerable self with is invaluable.
This week a video of two men, Atlanta Braves’ Ozzie Albies and Ronald Acuna Jr. sharing a moment of affection in the dugout during a game, went viral. Although the moment was beautiful and tender, it was met with intense vitriol and homophobia. Initially people believed that this display of affection was due to Acuna’s mother dying, because of course there had to be an extreme situation to explain away their actions. Luckily, this was proven to be untrue and Acuna’s mother is doing just fine. What feels most telling is that even though people believed that Acuna’s mother had passed, so many chose to continue bashing the pair.
Having such rigid and limiting confines around physicality between men and how we define and share intimacy is literally killing us. This is the work that we need to be focusing on in our community. This is the work that has and will continue to be our undoing.
Suggested Reading
“We Real Cool“— Bell Hooks, (2004)
“Ceremonies” — Essex Hemphill, (1992)
“The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” — Junot Diaz, New Yorker (April 16, 2018)
Gioncarlo Valentine is a writer and photographer from Baltimore, living and working in New York City. His written and photographic works have been featured in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Fader, Philadelphia Print Works, Essence, Harper’s Bazaar, and Apogee Journal among others. Gioncarlo is a transgender rights advocate, self-care enthusiast, and has a life goal of marrying and divorcing Frank Ocean.
Emir Fils-Aime is a Storyteller, based in New York City. He holds a M.S. in Integrated Digital Media from New York University. He is currently an IDEALAB Fellow working on Gaze, a forthcoming V.R. film.
Anthony Avery is a music producer and writer from New York. He holds a Marketing degree from Sacred Heart University and is currently at work on his debut E.P. “The Prelude.”
