Desire Has A Racial Hierarchy

By Taylor Allyn

On the apps, it is always the same choreography. I open the grid and feel my body enter a market, lit by the cold light of my phone. Faces slide past: white, light, maybe one or two Black men scattered like decoration across a page that was never designed for us. The messages I get live at the extremes, either hyper-visibility or silence, either a category someone waited to check off or nothing at all.

I have been trying to understand this for fifteen years, since before my diagnosis, and differently after it. I used to think this was about me. It is about me. It is also about a system that was running before I arrived and will keep running after I leave it. The way my nose sits on my face, the way my shoulders fill a frame. I thought if I took a better picture, changed the angle, got smaller or harder, I could catch whatever current kept carrying attention away. The longer I stayed on the apps, the clearer it became that nothing changed when any one of us did. The grid stayed the same.

I have been living with HIV for fifteen years now, undetectable and untransmittable, and still the cards feel more stacked than they have ever been. Before my diagnosis, desire felt like confinement with room to move, walls present, but space enough to stretch. After, it became something closer to an overcrowded prison: bodies packed so tightly that the best you can hope for is a spot against the wall. I stopped expecting to be chosen. I started learning how to stand in a way that looked like I had not come to be chosen at all.

People call it “preference” like it arrived clean, like it was not built from the same images that taught them what a nose like mine means, what a body like mine is for. I have watched men work through that training in real time. The way a man’s eyes find my mouth before they find my face. Not desire. Inventory. The slight recalibration when I walk into a room, not rejection, not quite, something more procedural than that. Interest that dims the way a light dims on a timer, not switched off but gradually, methodically withdrawn. A man can be kind to you and still place you somewhere you were not asked to be placed. Can want you and still know, somewhere beneath the wanting, that you are not what he will choose.

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For Black queer men, desire is not just about who we want. It is about where we land in other people’s unspoken ranking systems. It is walking into a room and instantly reading the field, who is being watched, who is being approached, who is standing by the wall pretending not to notice that nothing is happening. We learn to scan for the small clues that tell us whether we are seen as a primary option, a secret, a dare, or a problem.

Those signals rearrange the interior Self over time. We learn to arrive already discounted, to want quietly, to perform the kind of ease that might make someone reconsider. It costs something to perform that ease, and it costs differently when your body has already been categorized as a risk. Every “know who you are” talk gets placed on the tallest shelf, not because you forgot it but because you cannot bear for it to look back at you and see what you are doing. 

We do it anyway. Humans are pack animals, tethered to whatever will let us be included, even when inclusion costs us everything we were told we already had. Some of us only move toward men who have already signaled a welcome. Others carry the hierarchy so deep it becomes preference, and we begin placing each other by proximity to what the world decided was worth having, which is its own kind of grief.

The grief is not abstract. I have a specific address for it.

I learned this in two directions. There was a Black man, sixteen floors up in University Park, a text I always answered because, a year and a half after my diagnosis, I thought getting back out there meant something. It always came late. I’d stay over, wake early, leave quietly, a small adjacency to normal. The kind of almost you learn to accept when you have decided your presence is already too much to ask someone to claim you in daylight. For two years, I asked about life outside those sixteen floors. Thirteen times. He never had an answer. He didn’t think I’d leave. I didn’t think he wouldn’t follow. The elevator down was its own kind of regrounding. We never spoke again. 

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And then there were white men, many of them, predictable in the way they believe they aren’t. I have been trained in white witness since birth, ingrained since 1865. At some point, I was using them the same way they were using me, and that is its own kind of hierarchy to sit with.

Being Black and gay, I am often invited in as a fantasy or a layover, the go-between until someone finds a man with lighter skin, a straighter nose, a story that feels safer to bring home. I have learned what it looks like when someone treats me as a bridge, not a destination. Add HIV, even undetectable, and sometimes what I am offered is not love but rescue. It pulls on me more than I want to admit, because, for a long time, I thought a pass from the white gaze meant I had finally done something right.

I used to believe safety lived in that gaze. I thought we all came from the same Black body and that would mean something. Instead, I learned what it felt like to be handled by my own the way white men handle us, with a casual cruelty that sounds almost bored. A Black lover once told me he had been lying about his status, the confession dropped in the tone someone uses to say “oh, I was going to tell you.” To be made disposable by someone I thought was my safety cut in a way that white rejection never could.

When people defend racialized desire as neutral preference, they pretend our wants live outside of history. But our desires have been trained. We grew up on the same images: the light-skinned man as beautiful and the darker the complexion, the sweeter the captive. In that context, “I am just not attracted to Black men” is not an isolated taste. It is a policy: a thousand small refusals that add up to a quiet segregation of intimacy.

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The cost is not just hurt feelings. It is the way some of us start to read ourselves through absence, the date that did not happen, the message that never came, the hand that moved through the dark and did not find us. We internalize the scarcity so completely that we begin to enforce it ourselves, treating our own desirability as a resource that runs out, as something we have to earn back each time, rather than something we arrived with.

And yet, even inside this hierarchy, Black queer men keep making other kinds of spaces. Group chats where we send screenshots not for pity, but for proof that we are not imagining it. Parties where the room is mostly Black and nobody is performing neutrality, where the gaze carries something closer to recognition than assessment. Relationships where undetectable does not mean untouchable, where someone reaches for you in the morning and does not check his hands afterward, and where Blackness is not a hurdle to clear but the ground we were always already standing on.

I still open the grid. I do not know what that means about hope or about damage or about the particular stubbornness of wanting in a body that has been taught its own excess. I know that I am still here. I know that is not nothing. I am still not sure it is enough.

Taylor Allyn is a cultural critic and essayist. UNSPUN, his Substack, is a record of contemporary American violence and survival, written by a Black, queer, HIV-undetectable man, with essays that move between testimony and record.