Look But Don't Touch: Journey to Me, Part 1
Journey to Me: Celibacy, Reclaiming My Sexuality and Discovering My Identity
Part 1: Look But Don’t Touch
As I endeavor to allow myself the space to reclaim my sexuality, life, and desires, I realize that the most sincere form of therapy I can give myself is to reflect on these learned behaviors, in an effort to change them. I am not a victim anymore, I am a survivor. I am learning to love myself, daily.
It is with this that I begin my journey of celibacy. My saga with sex has been long, spanning most of my life, and it’s time to evaluate where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and how I get over. I want to be able to look back and think about this time of self-reflection, and really see how I was able to get past my addiction, while still allowing myself to lean into my sexual proclivities in a healthy way. I want to understand sex as a form of intimacy, not as a form of survival.
I will use music in this series to help express my feelings towards the subjects at which I am discussing. Using lyrics as reinforcements of my new found confidence. Using the rhythms and flows to weave together my eclectic thoughts with my humanistic approach to sex. It won’t be all sad, nor happy, just real. Just honest. I’m giving myself 30 days to not have sex, engage in any activity, no dates, no porn (damn), and no external forces persuading me that my sexual self is my only self. I hope through this process, I’m able to see myself in a more positive way and see my body and my self as a temple, as beautiful, and worthy to be loved.
I’m starting this off by doing something that I never do, appreciate my body. Since I was little, I never felt comfortable in my own body. I was always told that I was special and cute, but I was never taught to appreciate my body. I wasn’t given the proper tools to enjoy exercise and healthy eating, because in reality, I wasn’t exercising and eating junk food because that’s what was available, and that’s how I coped with what was happening to me at the time. I still deal with a lot of unhealthy eating tendencies, and due to COVID, I haven’t been to Zumba in months, but I realize now that I’m going to have to appreciate my body for me to want to change it for the better.
If you’ve ever watched Empire, you’d know that Hakeem Lyon’s love interest Tiana is an up-and-coming artist trying to make it just like him. In Season 2, she performs a prolific anthem that defined her role on the show as the young hot girl.
The song is called “Look But Don’t Touch”. The song starts off with a synthesized beat that echoes the melody of the track. In it, she sings “I just came in here to dance, I’m not lookin’ for a man.”, a line that strikes me. She also says lines like “Bout to get summertime fine for the bad boys” and “Dammit I, dammit I, dammit I look good.” This song is literal female empowerment. However, in the same vain of female empowerment, it’s also queer empowerment as well.
It is the chorus of this song however that entices me like a lot of songs do. The line is a simple command, and a follow-up question:
Look at my body, look at my body, look at my body, look at my body.
Don’t I look sexy, don’t I look sexy, don’t I look sexy, don’t I look sexy?
For my entire life, my main source of confidence has been my sex appeal. Getting men to see me with clothes on, and using my sexual prowess to get their clothes off. It’s a cornerstone of my identity, that I’m now realizing is a gift. Yes, I said a gift. Many people possess the ability to be fine, have fantastic bodies, and perform well in various sexual arenas. However, I present a certain attitude and ability to stimulate minds before stimulating bodies. I also have a very unique shape that I’m starting to see why I’ve been so successful in my many attempts to get the D.
In Kindergarten, we took a trip to the Augusta History Museum. The message of the day was “touch with your eyes.” meaning, don’t use your hands to physically touch, but use your eyes to imagine the uses and purpose of what you’re looking at. This always stuck with me, even today as an adult.
I’m learning now that my body is also a gift, a prize. Yours is too. The thing about gifts is that they aren’t for everyone. A gift usually comes with a tag, or an indicator that it is from Person A to Person B. For most of my life up until this point, my gifts have been for Persons A-Z, and now we’ve started to identify with two letters, AA-AZ. While I haven’t had enough sexual partners to get through the entire alphabet with two letters each, I have noticed that my selectability isn’t as strategic or as positive as I would have liked. I have to realize that since I was previewed to very “adult” behaviors at such a young age, my life would be altered because of the way that society tells us that sex is a gradual process that’s supposed to be learned as a rite of passage. My mom tried to have the sex talk with me, and I had already had my own experiences more times than I could count, so what was I really learning? What was she showing me that I didn’t already know? I can remember thinking that gay sex was the only type of sex and that it was something everyone did. Once that chapter was over, middle school came, and in middle school, I saw sex as something that I wasn’t comfortable enough to discuss because I had already engaged in it. I can remember being in 7th Grade and asking my teacher to leave the class because I wasn’t comfortable watching the sex education video. I wasn’t comfortable learning about penis and vagina, because I had already had my own experiences of penis and penis.
The first time I went to LaKeisha Harvey’s Zumba class at the Family Y, I will admit I was nervous. I could tell she was a dancer, because we started off the class with an uptempo Chris Brown song, instead of the usual stuff that other people played at Zumba. Keisha is black and has high energy. Her class is no different. She inspires you with her moves and motivates you to let it all out on that dance floor. For a long time, I hated going to Zumba because I didn’t feel like I could be myself there. I felt that everyone was looking at me as this big black gay guy in a room full of women. I thought that my natural femininity while dancing would ostracize me from the group. I didn’t think I would fit in. Keisha saw this as her opportunity to assure me that I was exactly where I needed to be.
I, of course, knew “Look But Don’t Touch” from Empire and my many nights at the club. It’s a bop, plain and simple. However, I never had choreography to put to the words of the song. So when the beat dropped for the first time 45 minutes into my Zumba class, I audibly screamed. Keisha was one of the first Zumba instructors I took that played a majority of songs I already knew. Knowing a song well enough to sing it is like knowing a friend well enough to let them borrow your car. It’s familiar, and you better not fuck it up (hey Mama Ru). Keisha could tell from my scream that this was obviously my song. Within two classes, I had mastered the choreography well enough for Keisha and everyone else in the class, the usher me up to the front of the class to instruct the song. At first, I played shy like I didn’t really know the moves and I wasn’t really that into the song. Who the hell was I fooling? I loved the choreography so much, I did it in the club when I heard the beat drop. Pretty soon, I would be asked to lead more songs, and got more comfortable not only dancing in front of the ladies in class, but being able to stand in front of the mirror as myself, and FUCK THE MOVES UP HUNNY.
This morning, I was shuffling my playlist called “Queen” (which is symbolic because most of the music on the playlist is by females, or have female leaning subjects) and what comes on when I’m about to enter the shower? Yep, “Look But Don’t Touch”. Since I've had time to start reflecting and reckoning with my past, I realized just why that song means so much to me. For so long, I’ve operated under a system that pretty much said, “Look at my body, come f*ck me” as if there’s a prize to how many sexual partners you can have. I’ve also never realized how sexy I feel outside of having sex. Like I know I’m a sexual being, and I know I’m capable of giving and receiving sexual pleasure, but there is something to be said for people who look at their body and intrinsically know that it’s sexy. Not because your boyfriend/girlfriend said so. Not because it makes you money. Not because you had to starve yourself, or get plastic surgery to achieve it (no shade). But simply because it’s yours. I envy those people because they know better. They already know that people are gonna have their opinions, but they’re still committed to loving themselves. They know society is going to cherry-pick their people who are body goals and highlight them for their conventional standards of beauty, and they rise above and love themselves in spite of it all.
However, I don’t. I have needed constant validation through my sexual partners to know that I was beautiful. It’s just how I was brought up. I needed someone touching, caressing, or making love to my body for me to consciously check the box that says, “You’re beautiful”. I needed that itch to be scratched so that when my clothes were off and I’m in the heat of the moment, all I could focus on was how euphoric I was making my partner feel. All I could focus on was pleasing them, and their happiness. Never, until now, did I see this repetitive cycle of sexual pleasure to be something destructive. I realized early on that the best way to keep it to myself, was to move in silence. Reject romanticism in hopes that one day, I would stumble upon my Prince Charming while I was fucking him. Or that somehow the true aspirations of my sexual prowess would make their way to the surface. I just wanted to be loved, and to love myself.
I am beginning to think consciously about how I navigate sex moving forward. I’m unlearning sex as a reward for my little triumphs. I’m unlearning sex as my coping mechanism in the face of adversity. I’m unlearning sex as a method of survival. I’m unlearning sex as a currency. However, I know that doing this work now will only benefit me better in the future. I know that one day, I’ll be able to listen to “Look But Don’t Touch” and sing “LOOK AT MY BODY, DON’T I LOOK SEXY?” with strength and confidence, but simultaneously say, “LOOOOOOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH, DON’T TOUCH.” with the same strength because at the end of the day, my body is BANGIN’ and it’s a gift that I must first protect and preserve for myself before I can give it someone else.