This is what’s been playing out in our culture all along: a curiosity about black sexuality, tempered by both guilt over its demonization and a conscious wish to see it degraded. The national terror of black sexuality is a central pillar of the American blockbuster. That naïve, dehumanizing wonder complicates what, at the time, was the radical, defiant feat of inscribing black men — black gay men — into portraiture. The underrepresentation of the black penis bespeaks a larger discomfort with depicting black male sexuality with the same range of seriousness, cheek and romance that’s afforded white sexuality. We have a strong, ever-proliferating sense of how white people see the sexuality of black men, but we are estranged from how black men see themselves.

Source: New York Times October 27, 2016 09:00 UTC