By Daniel Nkado.
Malik’s phone lit up with messages the way it always did—fire emojis, quick compliments, the same shorthand that reduced him to a silhouette. He had just posted a photo from a book reading with a caption about the new novel he loved. The replies he got, however, kept circling the same questions about his lean frame, ‘bulge’, and masculine pose. After a while, he stopped mentioning books altogether.
“It felt like I was advertising a product,” he told me. “So I learned to hide the library.”
That sentence—I learned to hide the library—is the quiet heartbreak behind a larger pattern. In many queer spaces—especially on dating apps like Grindr, Scruff, & Jack’d built for quick visual judgment—Black men are often noticed first as bodies, then as fantasies of masculinity, long before the fullness of their personhood is ever considered.
That ordering is not accidental. It is shaped by long histories of racialized sexualization and the design of platforms that reward thumbnails over nuance.
And here’s the part that stings: when your mind is consistently ignored, you don’t only feel unseen—you learn to anticipate the rejection, and begin taking action to prevent it. So, you edit yourself. You simplify. You begin to show the world what they want to see to avoid being punished with invisibility.
The Reality in Numbers: It’s Not Just a “Feeling”
When a Black gay man says, “People like my body, not my mind,” he is not describing a personal insecurity. He is describing a measurable social pattern.
Research confirms that the digital dating landscape is hostile for many Black men. In a study of 550 young sexual minority Black men, 99% reported encountering racialised sexual discrimination (RSD) while searching for partners online (Wade & Pear, 2022). This isn’t a rare occurrence; it is the default experience.
These experiences drive behaviour. Statistics show significant disparities in app usage. A Chicago study found Grindr was used by 75.6% of White non-Hispanic young MSM and trans women compared to 36.5% of Black non-Hispanic participants. The authors suggest this disparity may be partly due to how online discrimination affects platform choice and avoidance (Risher et al., 2024).
How Racial Desire Reduces Black Men to Stereotypes
Dating apps compress people—whole, complex individuals— into pictures and quick categories. In a compressed environment like that, racial scripts get amplified.
Scholars call this Racialised Sexual Discrimination (RSD)—often referred to as “sexual racism” in research and public discourse. The term refers to the sexualized, discriminatory treatment experienced by people of colour, especially gay and bisexual men, when seeking intimacy online, often on dating apps and sites.
For Black gay men, this often manifests as specific “racialised experiences,” such as being objectified, boxed into stereotypes (e.g., the “thug” and “BBC” tropes), and dismissed upon demanding fuller connections (Stacey & Forbes, 2022).
This dynamic creates a stark paradox: On the surface, it may look like you are highly “desired,” but that desire often borders on dehumanisation. It focuses on physical utility—what your body can do for someone else’s fantasy—rather than who you are.
The Role Problem: When ‘Desire’ Turns Into A Script
In many gay spaces, sexual roles (top, bottom, vers) act as helpful shorthand for communicating desires. But they often get mixed with cultural ideas of masculinity and solidify into a rigid hierarchy used to judge, rank and police each other’s behaviour.
Research on gay men’s experiences highlights how “top/bottom” labels are often tangled with status dynamics, not just pleasure (Ravenhill & de Visser, 2018). When you add race to this mix, the pressure intensifies. Black masculinity has long been publicly imagined through tropes of dominance and physical strength—false conceptions that suppress tenderness and intellectual vulnerability (Collins, 2004).
On apps like Grindr, Black men report higher frequencies of “white superiority” (preferences for white partners) and “role assumptions” (expectations of dominance). Meanwhile, on apps with more Black users, such as Jack’d, the issue often shifts to “same-race physical objectification,” where the pressure to be a physical “ideal” comes from within the community (Wade & Harper, 2022).
Why It Looks Like Black Men Sideline Intellect
If you want the honest answer: because many Black men have learned—through repetition—that leading with the mind often doesn’t bring any reward.
- When your curiosity gets ignored, you stop offering it.
- When your vulnerability gets sexualized, you stop sharing it.
- When your interests get treated like a “bonus track,” you stop playing the album.
This isn’t shallowness; it is protective adaptation. The mental health cost of this constant filtering is high. Studies link experiences of RSD (sexual racism) directly to higher depressive symptoms and lower self-worth among Black queer men (Wade & Harper, 2021).
Labels Help, But They Don’t Solve It
Some men try to protect themselves with identity shorthand:
- Demisexual: “I need trust before sex.”
- Sapiosexual: “I’m attracted to minds.”
Both can be useful boundaries. However, “sapiosexuality” can sometimes backfire, turning “intelligence” into a gatekeeping tool based on degrees, “proper” grammar, or Eurocentric cultural references. If what we really mean is curiosity, emotional literacy, and wisdom, we should say that. Otherwise, we risk replacing body objectification with “brain” objectification.
A Practical Toolkit: How to Change the Dynamic
Reuniting body and mind in desire requires small, repeatable choices that disrupt the default scripts.
1. Ask Curiosity Questions
Swap generic openers for questions that invite a story:
- “What’s a book or film that changed how you see the world?”
- “What is something you are learning right now that excites you?”
- Why this works: It signals that you are looking for a person, not a performance.
2. Model Depth Early
Offer one real sentence before asking for one.
- “This week has been heavy, so I’m taking my time—how’s your head?”
- Why this works: Depth becomes safer when someone else goes first.
3. Audit Your “Type”
Ask yourself difficult questions:
- Is my “preference” just a recycled stereotype?
- Do I associate intelligence primarily with whiteness or proximity to certain educational backgrounds?
- Why this works: Preferences don’t exist in a vacuum; they often map onto the social hierarchies we inherited.
4. Push Platforms for Change
Design shapes behavior. We can advocate for apps to:
- Add prompts that reward personality over stats.
- Enforce stricter policies against fetishizing language.
- Improve reporting tools for racial harassment.
The Shift: Being Fully Seen
The invitation here—especially for those who date Black men—is to stop consuming people like content. If you want connection, you must ask questions that make a whole person possible.
Desire that seeks the whole person—mind, history, tenderness, and body—doesn’t dilute attraction. It deepens it. We can change the culture, starting with the very first message.
References
- Collins, P. H. (2004). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203309506/black-sexual-politics-patricia-hill-collins
- Ravenhill, J. P., & de Visser, R. O. (2018). “It takes a man to put me on the bottom”: Gay men’s experiences of masculinity and anal intercourse. The Journal of Sex Research, 55(8), 1033–1047. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2017.1403547
- Risher, K., Adams, M. A., & Greene, G. J. (2024). Racial and ethnic differences in mobile app use for meeting sexual partners among young men who have sex with men. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 10, e54215. https://publichealth.jmir.org/2024/1/e54215
- Stacey, L., & Forbes, T. D. (2022). Feeling like a fetish: Racialised feelings, fetishisation, and the contours of sexual racism on gay dating apps. The Journal of Sex Research, 59(3), 372–384. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2021.1979455
- Wade, R. M., & Harper, G. W. (2021). Racialised sexual discrimination (RSD) in online sexual networking: Moving from discourse to measurement. The Journal of Sex Research, 58(6), 795–807. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2020.1808945
- Wade, R. M., & Harper, G. W. (2022). A good app is hard to find: Examining differences in racialised sexual discrimination across online intimate partner-seeking venues. Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 51(8), 3965–3982. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9316549/
