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When he was alive, Marlon Riggs, activist, scholar, and filmmaker, used to insist in conversations with me and Essex [Hemphill] that βblack men loving black men was the most revolutionary act.β To Marlon this statemen t was an affirmation of the importance of self-love. He believed that a self-hating individual black male, irrespective of his sexual preference, would never be able to love another black male. While I agree that anyone mired in self-hate cannot love anyone, I used to tell him that the βmost revolutionary actβ black men could make was to deal psychoanalytically with their childhoods.β For it is in childhood that so many black males, gay and straight, come to fear masculinity and manhood. This fear is often based on painful and abusive interaction between fathers and/or male parental caretakers and sons.
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