Right before I’d pulled the watermelon-flavored condom from my pocket in the middle of the restaurant, Robby leaned back in his chair and said, “Condoms do not feel good. I wanna feel it and take that load, baby.” Everyone laughed because he was saying what most of us thought.

We were Black and Brown late teens and young adults with the LGBTQ+ empowerment group, Youth First Texas, enjoying an after-meeting dinner during a humid 2005 summer night at Hunky’s, a local queer burger joint in Oak Lawn/Cedar Springs, the Dallas queer district that we affectionately call “the gayborhood.”

Related

These 3 lessons from the AIDS epidemic show how Black communities can combat HIV under Trump

Never Miss a Beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

“You’re playing with your life,” someone told Robby, and he shrugged and replied, “When you are trying to get f**ked, you not thinking about no condoms.” The laughter softened because he had said something honest: Desire overrides caution. Heat outruns logic. That gap between what we know and what we do is where viruses move.

That’s when I put the six-inch brown dildo on the table — amid the fries and ketchup on red-checkered paper — and unwrapped the condom, telling everyone I was going to show them how to put on a condom using their mouths.

There was a brief silence before Erin, a cute, fat Black butch lesbian with an easy swagger, slapped the table and called me crazy, asking where I had learned that. They laughed, but they all leaned in closer to see. 

I pinched the condom’s tip with my fingers and rolled it down slowly with my mouth so they could see every step. It did not taste great — like sweet artificial watermelon with a faint medicinal aftertaste — but it did the job. When it reached the base, I pulled back and explained that it was important to leave a little space between the condom tip and the head, otherwise it could break.

“If you’re going to be hoes, be safe hoes, smart hoes, proud hoes,” I said. It was funny, but it was also serious. I wasn’t performing — I was trying to keep us alive.

As each person followed my lead, they tried to put the condom on the dildo with their mouths — even the lesbians, who had absolutely zero intention of ever needing to put one on a real penis. We laughed until we nearly couldn’t breathe, and an employee told us to chill as our laughter had turned into near screams — even though later, after his shift, he tried putting the condom on with his mouth too.

Earlier that evening, inside Youth First Texas, we sat in a circle with mentors who gave us space to talk about school, familial rejection, and how some people in the group, after being kicked out, were surviving housing insecurity and couch-hopping, relying on those of us who had apartments for somewhere stable to land. We talked about coworkers who had made homophobic remarks at work, how to tell someone you had a crush on them, starting families someday, moving to another city, and beginning a new life.

We talked about sex in our official peer group, but not the down-and-dirty parts — not the questions people actually wanted to ask. It was tame and clinical, like health class: focused on anatomy, risk statistics, and scripted prevention language rather than the messy realities of desire, fear, and lived experience.

The reality of HIV in our group was always present, even when unspoken. Some people were already HIV-positive. Sometimes someone came in crying, needing to get tested. Being a respected figure in the group, almost like an older sibling, I often guided people to testing and incessantly reminded everyone that they could take as many condoms as they wanted from the ones available in the center bathroom.

The patio at Hunky’s, a local burger joint in Dallas’s queer district, was our completely no-holds-barred space. Our mentors had become like parents to us; they cared about us, and sometimes — just like with a biological parent — we didn’t want to disappoint them, so there were things we hesitated to tell them.

A week later, one of the mentors pulled me into a small office after our peer group meeting and told me they had received a complaint about what we were doing at Hunky’s. Someone wrote that we were indecent and that Youth First was encouraging promiscuity. 

He asked whether I understood why some people might think it was too much. I told him that most of us were already having sex and that pretending otherwise would not protect us. If we could not talk openly about condoms, then what exactly were we doing there, I asked.

He mentioned optics and community perception, and I understood that Youth First Texas, the space that had sheltered many of us, could shrink if adults decided our honesty was inappropriate.

As a young Black queer teen, I understood the vitality of learning how HIV was transmitted and how safer sex worked. Adults felt comfortable sharing facts and statistics, but practical demonstrations — like showing how to put a condom on a dildo, a skill someone might actually need in the middle of sex — crossed a line for them because it made prevention visible in ways they feared would look improper.

A maternal uncle, only five years older than me, once told me HIV happened whenever two men’s blood came into contact. I took that to mean I should never become ‘blood brothers’ with another boy, like in the movies — as if men’s blood itself was poisonous to other men. He was my uncle, so I didn’t question it.

During free reading time in second grade, I would cautiously flip to the “H” volume in the full set of encyclopedias in the corner of our classroom and read what it said about HIV. I traced narrow columns of text with my finger and sounded out words like “immune deficiency” and “transmission” until they felt less monstrous.

I read about Ryan White, the Indiana teenager who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and was barred from attending school because people feared casual contact. Even then, I remember understanding that ignorance could isolate someone already suffering. Knowledge became my way of replacing myth with science. If adults were going to whisper, I would read.

My mother calmly explained condoms to me after I saw TLC wearing condoms pinned to their clothes in their music video for “What About Your Friends.” But despite her forthrightness, others still whispered, and those whispers carried more fear than fact.

In the 1990s, I watched a PBS series called POV — short for Point of View — which explored different people’s lives and perspectives. In one episode, they showed a clip of who I later learned was Jerry Falwell describing AIDS as God’s punishment. I learned that gay men were among the most impacted and saw statistics showing that Black communities — especially young Black men — were disproportionately affected.

At night, I lay awake doing the math in my head: If gay men were dying and I was gay, what did that mean for me? HIV was in my family, in the news, and in church sermons that warned about sin without explaining any science.

Books were central to my life, and I had long dreamed of working at the Dallas Public Library. When I finally did, at age 20, shelving books and wandering the stacks felt like alignment. One afternoon, I opened a memoir about the early AIDS epidemic and read about men my age dying while churches stayed quiet and families whispered. I closed the book understanding something clearly: Silence was lethal. That clarity followed me back to Youth First Texas and into every conversation about optics.

Later that same year, another mentor told me that researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, were looking for young Black queer men to help build an HIV intervention in Dallas and encouraged me to apply because I had already been doing the work informally.

That opportunity led to the founding of United Black Ellument, an HIV-prevention organization I started with Terrance Anderson and Venton Jones. Venton, who would later become the first openly HIV-positive member of the Texas Legislature, expressed the importance of expanding access to care; and understood how stigma, policy, and lived experience intersected.

We recognized that Black gay men in Dallas were disproportionately affected — in a county where Black residents made up nearly half of new HIV cases despite being a much smaller share of the population — and that much of the prevention messaging currently available to us did not speak our language. 

United Black Ellument was built around cultural fluency — prevention grounded in Black queer culture and the ways we actually spoke to one another. It used Black queer slang, humor, and everyday language to make sexual health education feel familiar, trusted, and real. We tested outside clubs and hosted game nights where the first hour was safer-sex education, and the rest was for partying.

Condoms were everywhere, and conversations were honest; when someone admitted that condoms ruined the moment, we unpacked that tension without judgment because pretending desire didn’t exist never prevented anything. When people came back saying they’d gotten tested or insisted on protection, it felt like proof our approach had worked.

I am writing this now because the Trump administration is cutting HIV/AIDS funding while sexual health education is restricted again, telling queer youth that honest conversations about their bodies are inappropriate.

We have better science now, but stigma remains stubborn. Even now, in the mid-2020s, the United States still sees tens of thousands of new HIV diagnoses each year — roughly 30,000 to 40,000 annually, (with young people and gay and bisexual men continuing to account for a disproportionate share of new infections).

Medical advances have transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable condition and made prevention more effective than ever, yet transmission persists where education, access, and honest conversation are limited.

When I think back to that patio in the gayborhood, I do not see something scandalous. I see a group of young people trying to protect each other with knowledge in a world that prefers whispers.

What felt urgent then still feels urgent now because desire still outruns caution and silence still spreads faster than facts. The only thing that has ever countered that in my life has been the decision to speak plainly, even when it makes other adults uncomfortable, because survival has always mattered more than optics.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.