I’ve was out all day yesterday, running a blog training session (turns out I have some decent teaching skills and also enjoy it a lot, so I’m morphing in to a trainer), and haven’t had a chance to actually blog yet. But then this came into my mailbox via the LGBTPOC listserv and it’s … well … interesting to say the least. It’s not all that surprising, because this stuff has been going on for a long, long time.

Still, apparently it’s newsworthy when white guys want big black guys to have sex with their wives, and get so turned on by it that they host a network of “Mandingo” sex parties.

Jeff didn’t always like black guys. He was prejudiced?he admits it. As one of the few white kids at his school in the southeast of Washington, D.C., he fought a lot with black kids and was occasionally beaten up. When he later ran a string of gas stations, he was robbed: A black guy held a gun to his head and pulled the trigger?but the gun didn’t go off.

“Honestly, that experience helped me a lot,” he says. “I used to be very conservative. I didn’t spend much money. Now I enjoy life. I’m much more open. Especially sexually.”

It’s a measure of how far he’s come that Jeff (not his real name), now 40, is telling me this while we’re watching a black guy have sex with his wife, Amber (not her real name), 37, at an interracial orgy. In Jeff’s house. On his bed. The man screwing Jeff’s wife is Branford (not his real name), a 30-year-old massage therapist who’s not holding back?this isn’t lovemaking, this is a proper pounding. Forget Amber?that’s just how Jeff likes it.

? The man who arranged tonight’s event, Art Hammer (a name he uses solely for Mandingo parties), started the Florida Mandingo group four years ago, just after his divorce. An enterprising 42-year-old black swinger from Tampa Bay, he has since become the go-to guy when it comes to organizing gang bangs and orgies for couples?the vast majority of whom are white?with a fetish for black men. So it was Hammer who sent the Evites for this “pajamas and lingerie” party and secured the attendance of the guests; it was also Hammer who booked the DJ, paid for the finger food, and brought the “courtesy condoms.” Amber and Jeff just had to open their home. An advertising-sales guy by day, Hammer has done a bang-up job of marketing the Mandingos among the swinger set. The name Mandingo comes from Mandinka, a West African tribe that, in the antebellum South, was prized and bred for strength and virility. (Not that Hammer necessarily has Mandinka roots; he has no idea?”I’m Art Hammer,” he says. “Not Art Haley.”) Mandingo is now a byword for black male sexual prowess. When Hammer established the Florida Mandingos, two other (unaffiliated) groups?the So Cal Mandingos and the NYC Mandingos?were already up and running. Today new groups keep sprouting?in Atlanta, Chicago, Oakland?but Hammer’s is the most prominent, the only Mandingo group invited to host a “Chocolate Fantasy Suite” at N’awlins in November, the second-biggest swinger convention in the country.

“Mandingo” is also the name of a 1970’s blaxploitation flick, set in the antebllum south, that pretty much shares the same theme as the parties.

Again, this is not new, and I guess it’s only news because there are now organized theme parties around it. (Hey, wait a minute. I thought gay people were the only ones who had sex parties, or that we at least invented it. What gives? Never again do I want to hear anything about gay men and sex parties) The fetishizing of black sexuality ? or, more specifically, black bodies ? goes back as far as the first encounters between African’s and Europeans.

The brute stereotype is definitely not new to black men, but in the past it’s always had terrible consequences for black men.

The brute caricature portrays Black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminal — deserving punishment, maybe death. This brute is a fiend, a sociopath, an anti-social menace. Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators who target helpless victims, especially White women. Charles H. Smith, a writer at the end of the 1890s, claimed, “A bad negro is the most horrible creature upon the earth, the most brutal and merciless.”1 Clifton R. Breckinridge, a contemporary of Smith’s, said of the Black race, “when it produces a brute, he is the worst and most insatiate brute that exists in human form.”

? The “terrible crime” most often mentioned in connection with the Black brute was rape, more specifically, the rape of a White woman. At the beginning of the twentieth century, much of the virulent, anti-Black propaganda that found its way into scientific journals, local newspapers, and best-selling novels focused on the stereotype of the Black rapist. The claim that Black brutes were, in epidemic numbers, raping White women became the public rationalization for the lynching of Blacks.

The lynching of Blacks was relatively common between Reconstruction and World War II. According to Tuskegee Institute data, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the United States: 3,437 Black and 1,293 White.7 Many of the White lynching victims were foreigners or belonged to oppressed groups, for example, Mormons, Shakers, and Catholics. By the early 1900s lynching had a decidedly racial character, that is, White mobs lynched Blacks. Almost 90 percent of all the lynchings of Blacks occurred in Southern or border states.

Many of these victims were ritualistically tortured. In 1904, Luther Holbert and his wife were burned to death. They were “tied to trees and while the funeral pyres were being prepared, they were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears…were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull fractured and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket.”8 Members of the mob then speared the victims with a large corkscrew, “the spirals tearing out big pieces of…flesh every time it was withdrawn.”

And there are several other telling little anecdotes in the Details post about the party, including that the Mandingos “have to have at least 8 inches and must have a college degree” (Damn, and here I am without a tape measure!), that the women “resemble Kathy Bates more than they do Kathy Ireland,” and that while they Mandingos aren’t paid for sex they do pay a $75 annual membership while the rest pay $30.

But the most telling tidbit is this one.

“The fantasy goes both ways,” [Art Hammer] explains. “The women get to fuck our guys while their husbands watch, and we get to fuck rich white women, really mutt ’em out. It works! But people in this lifestyle are affluent?I’m talking judges, CEOs, FBI agents, important people?so before they invite a bunch of black men into their homes, they want to know they’re safe, they’re not going to get robbed, and everyone is discreet. So that’s what I provide?a gentleman in the street and a thug in the bedroom.”

They want to “know they’re safe” but fantasize that they’re not, and perhaps project themselves back to the time when Mandingos quietly made their way into the “big house” while the master prowled around the slave quarters, and everyone pretended ? on pain of death, mind you ? that none of it was happening. Much in the same way nobody in the Details piece seems to address the obvious power balance at these parties. (Here’s a clue. However empowered anyone else might feel, it belongs to he who owns the gaze. Not in the fucking or being fucked, according to one’s fantasies, but in orchestrating and watching it all take place.)

There’s one more angle that the Details post leaves out, probably because they can’t quite “go there” and without losing some readers (who are probably teetering on the brink of bi-curiosity). What do the white guys do while they’re watching? As soon as saw the Details piece, I thought about this guy whose girlfriend wrote to Dan Savage about his bedroom obsession with black cocks.

19-year-old girl dating a 21-year-old guy. We’ve been dating for a year and a half, love each other dearly, have a great time together. In bed the other night, my sweet boyfriend let me put a vibrator in his ass. He wanted to do it to me, so I told him (invoking some advice I remember you giving) that he could do it to me after I did it to him. Everything was fine until a few minutes before he came, when he started (unconsciously?) muttering something about a “big black man” fucking him in the ass.

I wasn’t bothered initially–fantasies aren’t necessarily actual desires, people say all kinds of weird things during sex, etc. It was only upon further reflection that it started to worry me, because he constantly teases me about wanting a big black man instead of him (nice, white, Jewish). So what’s the deal? Does the whole “big black man” thing stem from penis envy, or is he projecting fantasies onto me? Is this a part of him I need to worry about? Help, please, I’m flipping out!

Freaked Out Female

As usual, Dan Savage breaks it down for girlfriend.

Clearly some chunk of his sexual fantasies (and, sooner or later, his sexual reality) involves big black men. And why would an otherwise straight guy have fantasies about big black guys? Since his fantasies are so clearly rooted in cultural and sexual stereotypes about black men, FOF, perhaps those stereotypes tweak, in an erotic way, your boyfriend’s own feelings of sexual inadequacy. But you’ll have to check with him about it.

If you don’t want him sneaking around your back to realize this fantasy, you’re going to have to come to some sort of workable compromise, assuming you’re not interested in having, say, a three-way with a big black man at some point down the road. I urge you not to take “I may fantasize about big black men but I would never act on this fantasy…” for an answer, FOF. If he’s yakking about these fantasies at 21, he will be acting on them soon enough.

Or maybe not, if he gets an invite to one of these parties and can convince his girlfriend to go.

(I could say more about this, probably should, and probably will later, but right now I gotta run.)

Crossposted from The Republic of T.