“Knowing” is adult business.
It’s a form of foreshadowing and communal clairvoyant wisdom that develops with age because it develops with experience. It’s a grown folks thing to be able to look at youth and know things about them that they do not yet know to express themselves.
I was around Lil Nas X’s age when I started going deeper into the depths of my sexuality. I am Queer. Adults knew I was Queer before I had a word for it, and before I knew I wasn’t alone in this (then) wordless feeling.
I remember being 4 and being banned from a friend’s house because her mother sexualized the way we played together. I remember getting older and having small heteronormative anecdotes prescribed to me because the adults around me were too afraid to explicitly name what they saw, but still wanted to intervene in some way.
It was older people in my family who had mild panic attacks about me going to prom with my similar-in-gender friends. When I was around 18, it was a man 9 years my senior who was the first “adult” to look me in my face and tell me about the Queerness he saw—not with disgust or discomfort, but with consumption this time around.
When youth do find the words to describe who they are, we tell them that they are too young to “know.” Time and experience are things supposedly reserved for older adults, while others are held hostage to them. Youth are not allowed to be in authority of their narrative, even though they can be the subject of the matter or experience punishments, consequences, rumors and whispers as a result of what gets shared under the “grown folks business” umbrella.
It was Queer adults in their upper twenties and thirties who were the first to give more than a whisper to Lil Nas X’s sexuality before his tweet on the last day of “Pride month.” It’s those same adults (in chorus with straight adults, especially before his fluidity was revealed) who desire to consume him sexually. Even Dennis Rodman, a 58 year old man who has likely been sexually active longer than Lil Nas X has been alive, has made repeated sexually loaded comments towards the young and burgeoning star since he revealed his Queerness.
When Lil Nas X came out, many Queer adults also came outwards with their desires for the opportunity to know him carnally. When others pointed out his youth, many declared that “he’s not a child,” citing the “legal” age of adulthood being 18. They want his body; them a decade or more out of high school, him a Queer Black youth who had, in recent months, just stopped being a teenager chronologically, but not in behavior.
At 20 years old, Lil Nas X is at the age where it’s legally declared he’s not “adult enough” to drink alcohol through his own devices. This is ironically juxtaposed against a colonial reign policy that tells us that the rite of adulthood begins at 18, and many Black people have grown to accept this colonial passage of time and communal ability.
Yes, 18 is the legal threshold from childhood to adulthood, but legality has never been something that applied “equally” to Black children, especially Black Queer children. Legality is something that too many adults lean on when they want to encroach upon youth.
Sure, the rapper is “legal” now, if you utilize state sanctioned markers of who is “grown enough to fuck.” But if that is the case, you are relying on a system that does not value their own children to tell us when to stop valuing ours as children.
Black children have always dared to take up space in an anti-Black world while the state legally punishes them for their audacity and brilliance, but this is especially true for Queer Black children who display sexual and gender creativity. The punishment is being locked out of childhood. This “legal” sexualization locks Lil Nas X out of childhood—or at least out of the bumper experience of “youth”—because it positions his body as not worthy or needing protection from sexual consumption of older people. By blanketing him with claims of “maturity,” the state aims to have him share in the responsibilities of older people’s actions and sexual desires towards him.
Our youth are tried as adults inside and outside of the courtroom for existing and confronting the boundaries of their existence, while white adults like Ryan Lotche are painted as just a “boy” for false reports of destructive behavior during the Olympics at 32, all chalked up to youthful misdirection (up until the point of Rio 2016 spokesperson Maria Andrada replying to the situation with, “Let’s give these kids a break”). We are encouraged to recognize white youthfulness while simultaneously upholding their authority and safety to navigate their growing while the world is to absorb their wrongs.
Yet Black youth immediately face consequences. This reflects in parenting that aims to stifle Black children in order to prepare them for the world, and child abuse that aims to show them what the outside world would do to them for daring to test its limits.
Legalities often lack morality and the ability to see Black people as whole. Legalities are never formed with seeing Black people as free. When you are not whole and free, the concept of legality blurs depending on the sexual querant’s morality.
For many Black children, adults suspend the veil of childhood as soon as any sexual navigations are expressed or developed. To an adult that desires to consume, youth become “old enough” to withstand the fantasies or actualizations of the older adult’s proclivities as soon as their Queerness is named.
“We assign identities onto children due to learned behaviors passed down through culture,” writes George M. Johnson, “When a child does not fit into that box, our first response is to suppress and condemn.” Whether the children cooperate under that suppression or not, adults’ next response is to consume the part of them that desires to be free.
Blackness simultaneous with Queerness quickens social matriculation even if a person is ill-prepared. Hastily graduating Black Queer youth into adulthood is not talked about because if it was many older adults would have to grapple with how they consume youth instead of protecting childhood as a result of their own youth being consumed. This topic is shied away from because it would have people explore their own monstrosities, and how they’ve become part of the same machine that has chewed on them. It would reopen wounds of being “failed” that have long been sutured using the master’s tools.
I don’t know many LGBTQ+ people, myself included, who weren’t sexually or romantically involved with older adults when they were very young. Adults whose propensity to siphon youth was masked under the cultural norm that we do not allow Queer Black youth the safety of childhood when they need it most. These adults with the sanguinian taste for Queerness, whether they are Queer themselves and/or enjoy it as a delicacy, fly under the radar of unacceptable behavior.
For Queer Black youth, it is unsafe to express oneself. Blackness and Queerness combined—or Blackness as Queerness—is seen as an antonym to the rigid lines of innocence, something to be locked out of the cocoon of childhood. This belief within the Black community, and even amongst Queer Black adults, is symptomatic of how whiteness teaches us to regard ourselves.
If someone wants to be a child, they have to perform as less Queer and less Black than they are.
Older adults sideline internal and expressed truths within Black youth to keep them in a position of despondency. When they defy the gatekeeping that adults have around time, experience, and creative sexuality and gender, many adults declare that since these youth are “grown enough” to know, then they’re grown enough to bear the consequences of knowing things when we want them to be ignorant.
“There is no population on this earth that is as heavily disregarded, policed, abused, brutalized, flattened and turned inside out as Black children.” – Amber Butts
Before they are programmed to the contrary, children know that Blackness and Queerness are “normal” in the primordial indigenous sense. Blackness and Queerness did not need names because they were natural occurrences in the human indigenous experience. In a colonial world, which is a perversion from what is natural, those things are considered abnormal. Adults who have bought into the milling of Black Queer youth into consumable bits are threatened by children who contradict and expand labels through that desire for freedom.
In times of indigenous reign, there was a more circular understanding of time, where children are our ancestors returned. Children were both endowed with pre-reincarnated wisdom, and with the need to be sheltered while they navigate the first decades of this current lifetime. Delineations of the boundaries between childhood, adulthood, and elderhood were completed after a series of rites and village-sustained safety. While undergoing these rites, it was necessary for them to to be protected in order to continuously add to the cultural production of memory, without older adults trying to consume part of their story.
Queer youth, especially Queer Black youth, should be able to experience all of their ways of existence simultaneously, without the people who should be protecting them sexualizing them. Queer youth look to older adults to seek refuge, safety, to be taught, to arm them for the world, answer questions that don’t have words, and adults of all sexualities should have the morality to educate youth without gnawing at them.
This treachery towards spans orientation and the gender. It is the fallout of what happens when we teach children to be ashamed of their bodies and give them sexual education that is not comprehensive enough. It leaves the door open for this dynamic to occur on a consistent basis. When we don’t allow them the space to explore within their own age groups, they wait for permission from an adult to not be afraid or ashamed, to feel accepted and be in pleasure of their own body.
“Queer as in free. Queer as in free to be free. Queer as in what all Black children are when they reach this world, even if not for too long. Queer as in what we should all make sure Black children are allowed to be forever.” Hari Ziyad
We can allow childhood for Black youth. We can transform how we treat children and how we declare who gets the protection children are supposed to get, and how we declare that as adults we still get to be protected ourselves. It’s more than possible to have levels of intimacy and impart wisdom on young people without sexually and/or romantically consuming them. They should be able to look towards older adults without it being a norm that it would lead to something sexual.
The goal shouldn’t be to infantilize young people or make it seem like they are incapable of being autonomous and making decisions. We should be compassionate enough towards youth to give them the opportunity to be young without people in their way who would compromise or corrupt their experience and time. To not have them be in situations where people are sucking up their time and energy in a morally nefarious way when they could be dealing with folks who are better suited for them. It’s about loving them and declaring space for their freedoms even when we’re still working on those things for ourselves. It’s knowing that we all deserve better and more.
Suggested Readings:
Hari Ziyad, “In and out of the closet: Rejecting the heteronormative binary of ‘coming out’“, Black Youth Project, 2019
Phillip Atiba Goff, Matthew Christian Jackson, Brooke Allison, Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie Ann DiTomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014
Born in Annapolis and currently in love with Baltimore, Hess is the accumulation of her mother’s and grandmother’s and foremother’s love. Creative, fluid, compassionate and fierce being that is very protective of what and who she loves. Water and all of it’s abilities personified. Fire too. Student of the world. Made of stardust and her ancestor’s wildest dreams.
