Sexual and Sexy Sexy Writing by Kyle Phoenix

I've been writing for decades now.  Been published in lots of places, slowly slogging towards and establishing this as my art, a pseudo-career and an expression of my business acumen and interests.  In 2013 an opportunity was presented to me to focus a lot of my work on relationships, dating, etc. into books and I have.  And it's taken off.   I'd been teaching for a decade to men and women about a wide range of topics related to sexuality and it was almost a natural expression to publish.  I started with The Kyle Phoenix Show on Time Warner Cable then started crafting a blog.

Admittedly a blog initially is a hodge podge---one' on paste board in the cyberverse that you try and make coherent and accessible.  50,000 people following, that's working out and it only took 5 years to start and 1 focused year to ramp up.  Then the challenge became how and why to write about sexuality.  While teaching workshops, particularly on sexualities aside from heterosexuality I was always challenged with finding supporting or launch pad materials that looked like the population I was facing every day, sometimes up to 150 men a week.  Don't get me wrong there are some excellent books out there, some with advice and suggestions that transcend race and I gleefully use and pass them out.  But they're all White.  Unless the arena is around race, philosophy, media and fiction---there's a lack of constructive, useful advice for Black and Latino homosexuals, bisexuals, omnisexuals, etc..  I've worked for several of the big groups around sexuality and their focuses are around HIV and one or two, around race.  Both things that with vaccines and interracial engagements are changing.

But what about just normal folk who want to date, start a business, manage their finances, learn about the emotional pitfalls and so on?  Where do we get together and ruminate constructively over that?  At first I thought it was no big whoop, that I was casting pebbles into the ocean and maybe over time it would become a little perch.  Now I realize how big my effort is and how singular I am in it.  If I get political there's a few others I can link up to; if I get HIV-medical a whole community but anything else, people of color plug in for the sex but shy away from the relationship work.  We, they, I know what's been going on---the feelings of abandonment, stigma, shame and the cheating, thievery and emotional maliciousness ain't working but we draw succor form the wrong sources.  Churches that at best backhand accept you.  (Even the term accept rankles because that wasn't the process for others.)  A media that is pulled between the dazzlingly dark underworld and seediness of DL brothers and hip hop homos.  Or the ever present interracial couples---even Northstar in the X-Men married himself a Black man---named Kyle.

Then I realized while brushing my teeth that in order to do what I do, to broadcast in all of these mediums, I have to be Out.  Sometimes I'm rollicking through chat rooms and Twitter and dialoguing with so many different men from around the country (and the world) that i forget how many Black and Latino men are quasi-Out.  Are not Out.  I've been out since I was about 18---completely,utterly, totally.  I'm also not a Christian so I don't feel belabored by the Church in the way I see other people of color are or the duplicity I notice (men hitting me up in all manner of interests but their Facebook pages are purposefully designed to just show their appreciation of movies, Trayvon Martin and the Black Church----however Freakniks is the group he saw one of my book listings in.)

So I'm really Out compared to other men and I'm really really Out writing about sex and sexuality with a focus on race but skimming around Critical Race Theory and Race Sexuality Theory.  That Outness has brought some scorn---mainly from Black and Latino males and at first I was taken aback, checked my breath, looked over my spelling, until I realized that I'm doing something so unique that I have pieces of counterparts but no singular one.  I've held a minor but public appointed political position in New York---I didn't know I was the first Out and Black man to do so.  I'm not HIV+---which is where the bulk of sexuality activists who are male and homosexual reside.  And I'm not hip hopped out with it's skimming through society and pop culture consumeristic iconography attempting to create a Movement and a way for people to "accept" (that ugly word again) someone because you like their song.

I guess I demand a level of both thinking and exposure that is wholly new in one embodied person and I'm going to have to think on what my sexuality writing and it's inherent sexy-sexy is because there's a prism between me, society and perhaps even my audience that is fascinating, challenging and dynamic all at once.


Enjoy!
Kyle Phoenix
Email: kylephoenixshow@gmail.com
Website: http://kylephoenix.com/
Blog: http://kylephoenixshow.blogspot.com/
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