TWs; racism, gaslighting, abuse, transmisogynoir
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Let’s talk Kink While Black.
I joined my local kink community at 18. Trained under two different dom/mes in my home state, I started teaching basic sensory play, bloodless knife play, and other sensory tools after about three years. I began teaching professionally for groups after four years.
All of this to say: I was trained well and for a long period of time, primarily working with potentially dangerous kinks, and am very careful with my kink because of this. Additionally, having grown up Black in Montana, a 90% white state, I’m very aware of the potential racial perceptions surrounding some forms of kink, even ‘common’ kinks.
I don’t do breath play of any kind anymore, because twice I’ve had white folks try to use it to threaten me or allege I’m violent after requesting I do it. The first time was when I was 20 with my most abusive ex while we were still in Montana. They pretended to have suffered memory loss and potential brain damage due to breath play, after telling me that I wasn’t doing it hard enough or long enough for them.They pretended to pass out fully and wake up again, saying they didn’t know who I was or where they were, and repeatedly threatened to call the police on me. They gave me the ultimatum between doing it to them once more “in the hopes it would fix [them]” or them calling 911 on me, with phone in hand.
This was pre-transition. I was a 6’4” Black “man” and she was a 5’5” white woman. The chances of me surviving an encounter with the police in a very white-dominated state and town, where I was supposedly violent and had allegedly harmed a white woman? Extremely low. She made me beg her not to call, that I’d do anything she wanted, until her ‘memory recovered’.
I remained trapped in this relationship until October 2018, and had to live with her until January 2019. You can probably extrapolate how badly that went.
The second time I had breath play used against me, it was done by a white trans woman I knew and I had met up with at a local DC queer bar: As You Are. We were flirting downstairs across a table before moving upstairs to have a bit more comfort in doing so. She asked me to perform breath play with her in the bar, in public, and I turned her down at the moment because I felt it wasn’t the correct space for that.
We walk back to my car, parked just past AYA’s lights, and I turn to her and ask if she’d still like me to perform breath play with her. She gave me her full verbal consent so I pressed her up against my car to do so. When I do breath play, I always count out loud how long I plan to do it for – either down from five or ten – because those are from my experience the safest times to do it for the desired effect and I want to make sure my partner knows exactly how long they have so that if they need to, they can tap out early. Any time more than that needs to be explicitly negotiated.
I honestly don’t remember whether I did five or ten seconds this time, but after I finished, her legs gave out on her, and between holding my cane and not expecting it because I’d never had someone drop on me before, I wasn’t able to catch her. I helped her back up and gather a couple items that had dropped. I checked in further on her, whether she needed anything, and if she was ok. She confirmed she still wanted me to take her back to hers, so I spent the night with her, and left the next morning. We still interacted normally afterwards, including one other instance where I went back to her place with her and spending the night platonically because we had both had a bad day.
Months later, I had a falling out with her friend with benefits at the time. I find out after that she’s messaging people that retweeted a mutual aid post I had up on twitter due to being unemployed at the time and telling them I had assaulted her and strangled her out of nowhere, without her consent. Even more months later, I find out that she’s telling a different, secondary version of events as well, followed by more recently (as of Jan 2024) relating to different person’s tale of sexual violence by “a black ‘nonbinary’ male..engaging in obviously male behavior” and stating how she’s “certainly not far right” but “the bit abt society’s unwillingness to visit judgement upon an NB/minority sex pest is uncomfortably relatable”. (More on this story as a whole, with screenshots, here)
Both of these situations, while different in execution, hinged on a fundamental understanding that society is more willing to believe that Black people are willing and able to inflict physical harm on white folks, and to believe white folks regardless of the actual events.
Because of the potential for situations like these, because of the potential for racialization that Black folks experience, we have to have a completely different risk calculus for what kinks are ‘safe’ for us to participate in than white folks do. Because even if we do it right, we could be targeted by those who are asking to engage with us.
The risk isn’t just in the action of performing the kink. For Black folks, the risk also lies in what social repercussions we might be opening ourselves up to surrounding the kink. What racial stereotypes exist that may affect how we do the kink, or may stop us entirely. And this isn’t to say that Black folks can’t or don’t do kink, but it is to say that we have an entirely different set of concerns and ways we have to interact with the kink lifestyle because racism is just oh so fun.
When it comes down to it, even the most otherwise leftist and/or marginalized of white people will try to Emmett Till a Black person with no remorse, to varying level of success, because they were taught for literal decades, centuries, that they could for any reason and it hasn’t been societally/culturally unlearned yet. Many white people in kink spaces haven’t taken the time to unlearn the lessons that historically, any level of discomfort or ‘danger’ has been used as an excuse to subject a Black person to varying levels of punishment for ‘not knowing their place’, or for ‘being a threat’, or hell, ‘because we felt like it’.
This has not been adequately unlearned yet and is still generally practiced by white folks in today’s society, including those that are not a part of normative society. They often not only know what they’re doing,but are relying on it and people assuming ‘noble intent’ while resting on White Authority.
I don’t have a solution for these kinds of situations. I’ve personally only gotten as far as “stop or never do types of kink that put me at increased risk” despite 10 years doing kink and 6 years educating. Some that are more obvious of a risk such as “consensual non-consent” are easier to avoid outright, but ones like breath play are so ubiquitous with kinky folks that it’s harder to consider or realize the racialized risk factors until something you were asked to do gets used to harm you. If you’ve experienced something similar, I’m so sorry, but I hope that knowing you’re not alone brings you a modicum of comfort. I hope one day we can come up with a real, safe solution without barring this aspect of ourselves all together.