"I Can't Put A Condom on Racism": Adam Sandler, Anti-Blackness and Safer Sex
“Is there anything else you’d like to discuss in today’s session?”
We had 4 minutes left.
“Well, there is one small thing. I’ve been having recurring dreams about Adam Sandler.”
My therapist sat back, and nodded non-judgmentally. Both of us knew this was more than 4 minutes worth of unpacking. I took a deep breath. “So, I guess I’ll start from the beginning.”
I’ve had a crush on Adam Sandler for as long as I can remember. While every other Black girl I knew was gushing over Nelly and his cool but unnecessary band-aid, the sportiness of the cartoon Vince from Recess, or the hot abs and aggressive thrusting of Usher, I was feeling swarms of butterflies throughout my body at the sight of the big-nosed white man who wore oversized t-shirts and cargo shorts. Adam Sandler was - and still is- my celebrity crush. So it came as no shock to me, or any of my friends, that the boy I lost my virginity to had an uncanny resemblance to the 50 First Dates movie star.
What I wanted to say to my therapist is “I’ve been having dreams about Adam Sandler,” what I actually said was “I keep having dreams about the first boy I had sex with.” The dreams are never quite the same, but he is always exactly the way I remember him. Sometimes he’s nicer. Sometimes he’s breaking my heart, but ultimately he is always 17 and his face is always overwhelmingly swallowed by acne. In the last dream he told me he loved me, then turned around to have obnoxiously loud sex with a blonde white woman in front of me. When I wake up from these dreams, for the briefest moment, before my brain can reassure me that it isn’t real, I feel the same way my younger self felt after every interaction with him; I feel undesirable and inadequate. Not because I miss him or because the awkward teenage sex was memorable, but because he was my first introduction to how my Blackness, and others reactions to it, impacts my relationship to sex and romance.
The first time I had sex with bootleg Adam Sandler we used a fluorescent orange condom and asked each other about our previous sexual partners. The second time we even used lube to avoid discomfort. The third time I went to his house his mom called me a porch monkey via text message. And before the fourth time, he told his friends, publicly, that he had gained his Black belt by having sex with me. I did - just about- everything I was supposed to do to check the boxes of safer sex practices. I understood that no meant no. I planned for avoiding STI’s and unplanned pregnancy, I even used the few skills I stole from movies and porn to try to make it more enjoyable, but nothing had prepared me for being screwed by racism.
Rhetoric around harm reduction - particularly in relation to safer sex- often excludes anti-Blackness as a foundational harm that impacts Black folks’ sexual relationships. Some of my earliest encounters were in elementary school, where young white boys would, without invitation, refer to my body as if it were publicly on display for their entertainment, ridicule, or to ease their curiosity. From hair touching, to sexual slurs and advances rooted in fetishization, I was brought to a harsh realization that these countless occurrences during my adolescence- whether microaggressive, or overt- were merely a few examples of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and misogyny manifesting themselves through my predominately white peers, and onto me.
Being a Black, queer girl growing up in a predominately white region, and as someone who was introduced to sexual health education through the limited lens of a Catholic school system, I’ve known from an early age —although I didn’t have the language to describe it — that one of the many components that was continuously overlooked in my sexual health education, was anti-Black racism. I didn’t learn about the sociological impacts of anti-Blackness on navigating bodily autonomy, sexual agency, and sexual health. Which led me, and many young black kids, to believe we were deviant. To believe that something was inherently wrong with us to still experience violence and shame and discomfort in our sexual lives, even when we’ve done all the things that we were taught safer sex is supposed to be made up of.
This failure to acknowledge race and racism in sexual health education came up for me most in conversations about consent. Surface level consent campaigns that I was exposed to didn’t consider how lack of regard for Black folks bodies takes the autonomy out of our choices around consent. Fetishization is non-consensual. Choosing to have sex with someone to “gain your black belt” is non-consensual. Reducing Black women to a checkbox on your list of sexual conquests is non-consensual. How do we ever fully understand consent without acknowledging how certain bodies have been treated historically, and how past experiences of objectification have resulted in social understandings of certain groups of people today (Black women as hypersexual, asian women as docile and submissive, etc)? Or how sexual violence has been a long time weapon used for colonization and ethnic cleansing, disporportionately impacting Black and brown people. Why are race and sexual health treated as seperate subjects when racism has shaped so many of our sexual and romantic experiences? Sexual health education cannot be intersectional without sewing anti-racism into its fabric.
My therapist proceeded to tell me about the power of firsts. How our first relationship, first friendship, first sexual encounter subconsciously creates the foundation of how we understand, and expect, those relationships to be. The concrete of my sex life is tainted by racism, and that impacts my relationship to sex even now, over ten years later. Although I can’t put a condom on systemic issues, as a sexual health educator I am constantly thinking of new ways to expand sexual health education to include race and racism as factors that impact peoples sexual lives and experiences in different ways. And most importantly, to equip Black youth with tools to enter their sexual relationships making informed decisions, and feeling so full within themselves that they won’t long to be poured into by just anyone who will show them attention.
This is way deeper than sex. This is talking to Black kids about consent and instilling in them that their bodies are really theirs. This is stepping towards confidence and self-love. This is conversations about accountability. This is teaching Black youth about the ways in which they are impacted by fetishization, hypersexualization, and adultification before they’re even old enough to spell the word autonomy. This is smiling to myself whenever I see Adam Sandler on the screen, and telling the story of how I chose to reclaim my body, and take back the power from my first.
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Illustration by Chance Mutuku.