White Gays, Please Stop Including BBC in Your Grindr Profile

White gays, we need to talk about something important.

Well, actually, we need to talk about several somethings, but for today I want to focus on a particularly vexing tendency that I’ve been seeing with alarming regularity. If you’ve read the title, you know what I’m talking about, and my guess is you’ve probably seen it, too. The white boy (or man) with some mention of BBC in their profile. Perhaps they want to “serve one” or “be wrecked by one” or “need a BBC tonite.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve logged onto Grindr — this seems to happen there more than on Scruff; I’m not sure why —and seen someone with these lines right there in their profile, with not a bit of self-consciousness about them.

White gays, this needs to stop. Yesterday.

First, for those who aren’t conversant with gay slang, BBC is an abbreviation meaning “big black cock.” It’s one of those things that has become so normalized within gay male discourse that it’s almost ubiquitous. No matter where you live, you’re almost certain to see someone using that type of language. It partakes of a long history of objectifying black men, both within gay male culture and within American culture at large. It buys into the myth of the Black male as hypersexual and as particularly potent.