Editor’s Note: Forty-one years ago, Playboy published James Baldwin’s essay “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” a widely discussed essay on masculinity and power. For Black History Month, we brought together Darnell Moore, activist and author of No Ashes in the Fire, and Kiese Laymon, whose memoir Heavy reckons with Black masculinity, to revisit Baldwin’s ideas and consider how much (and how little) has changed.

The pair spoke in late January; this discussion has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Darnell Moore: I want to start by reading a quote from James Baldwin’s essay, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” which was published in Playboy.  

Kiese Laymon: I taught that for a decade.

Moore: I just realized, right before our call, that it was published January of 1985. Forty-one years ago, this actual month. So in many ways, I feel like his spirit is beckoning us to return back to his words. 

He writes, “The American idea, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an idea so paralytically infantile that is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolved into the complexity of manhood.” 

How does this quote resonate with you today? For me, I think about how we, men, are expected to squeeze ourselves into tropes. We’re charged with the task of finding a cage and locking ourselves in them—locking ourselves into lesser versions of a self that chokes off our expansive humanness. And here’s the rub. We’re expected to live while being asphyxiated. That’s our patriotic duty as supposed “real men.” 

Laymon: When we do escape the cage of masculinity, that rigid bruising cage, all we needed was for one brother to remind us that we’d escaped it before we jumped right back in. 

Let me give you an example. We were playing ball in New York and an old-head named Sonny, 65-something years old, started talking about porn stars like Jake Steed. Someone else mentioned Lexington Steele. And all of us were naming these men who we’d watch porn to see. All of us are supposed straight men on the basketball court and here we all are talking about these men that we would watch in porn. And then this one brother says, “Damn, y’all going to talk about somebody that ain’t got no dick yet?” And then everybody was like, “Damn, we were just talking about dick.” That rigid cage, it’s so much more pernicious than I think because I’ve seen us move as groups, and not in a fairytale way, but in a way that blends the homosocial with the homoerotic, which to me is what it means to be fucking human. And all it takes is for one motherfucker to be like, “Hey, get the fuck back in the cage.” And bro, we got back in that motherfucker.

Moore: It is damning to admit, but for so many years, that cage got so fucking comfortable to me that there were moments when I left the cage and immediately got right back in. Those evenings, in my teenage and young adult years, where I’d dip off to mess around with a guy and then the next morning, I’d be in a hot shower trying to wash away the residue of the night before so that I could walk back into this presumed hetero-life. But we don’t lack agency. We do have the power to walk away and not return. But let me turn to another point that Baldwin writes about in the same essay: loneliness.

Laymon: Oh my.

Moore: Baldwin is very specific. He’s describing men in the mostly white Greenwich Village, who, when together, would taunt him, for presumably being gay. But when they were alone and away from their friends, they would try to convince him to take them home. And he was stunned by the loneliness he perceived them carrying.

I think about that today. There’s a lot of research that focuses on men’ s loneliness and isolation, and I know sometimes it’s talked about in a self-pitying way as if we should concede that loneliness is an excuse for our actions. That is not what I am suggesting. But in a country where we are asked by family, by community, by broader institutions to resist vulnerability, to resist breaking ourselves open, to resist appearing as if we need help or rescue, to resist saying that we are scared, how is loneliness not a feature of our experiences? 

Laymon: I turned 50 last year and for whatever reason, it gave me the insight to actually look back at my forties. This is when the conversation is personal. After my memoir, Heavy, came out, let me just say, we were out there grinding together, and I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about trying to find voices, while trying to make a space for other voices, in every which way. 

I invited people in through Heavy. I didn’t think it would resonate the way it did. And the years after the book came out, I was the loneliest. I was so afraid to reach out to others because I thought that I had made it to a space where I didn’t need to rely on anyone. I would be sitting up in a fucking room just crying, thinking, “I wish I had a mama.” My mom is very tenuous. Or I’ll be like, “Fuck, man, why I ain’t got no dog?”

And I remember, Darnell, I thought, “Kie, you have to reach out to a place and institutionalize yourself because this is not healthy.” And then I got a fucking award from a place I was looking to put myself in the next day, which made me feel like I couldn’t let them know that they gave me an award for mental health and I needed to put myself in their joint. And I know so much of that has to do with success, but most of it has to do with me being this fucking Black man who doesn’t know how to hold abundance. And, also, a Black man who has absolutely no idea how to hold. And sadly, I do know how to hold that other thing, sadness. I know how to hold that precarity. 

We are taught to ask for sex, for power. Not care. Not to be held when we are breaking.

Darnell Moore

But when the motherfucking world is looking at you and they’re looking at your insides and you feel like you bartered your insides for some success, it feels so lonely. And I just got up out of that shit, thankfully, but it was the worst sadness. The loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life was after our people told me, “You made some art that we value.” And I didn’t know how to accept that shit so I thought I’d dig myself into a hole and hopefully die. I didn’t die, but I made myself really sick. 

Moore: I feel the weight of that. And I’m glad that you’re here. And I’m glad that you are able to put words to the shit that we tend to have to deal with in isolation. 

I’m in therapy now. My therapist once said to me, “maybe people aren’t calling and asking you for what you need because you never told them what your needs are.” And there it is. That’s what I think is at the heart of the loneliness most men experience. Loneliness is not a precondition of manhood. I think many of us suffer loneliness because we don’t ask for what we need. And maybe that is a consequence of existing in a society that tells us we’re not supposed to. We are taught to ask for sex, for power. Not care. Not to be held when we are breaking.

Laymon: I grew up with my mama, my grandmama, my aunties. So they actually wanted me to be the man. They also treated me like a grandson and a nephew. When I started really making money, and before I made money, I took care of them. I started paying for everything. And then there was that moment: I’m a man to my grandmama, I’m a man to my mama. I’m a man to my auntie. And for me, that meant I was an ATM. And the worst thing about feeling like you’re an ATM is you treat people who touch you like users because who fucks with an ATM? Nobody but ATM users. So I saw my family as users of me, but I saw myself as steel. And I’m not one of those people who can feel like steel and survive. 

This is real shit. I didn’t know how to reach out to them and ask for help because I had reduced them to simple motherfuckers who put a plastic card in me and then I give them what the fuck they need. And so the notion of me telling them, “y’all, you know what I need? I need to not talk about money or nothing right now. I need for you to talk to me and for me to talk to you about what we’re afraid of. I’m afraid of a lot at this moment, but I can’t talk to anybody.” The idea of saying that to my people who deserve that, it is like I couldn’t and I didn’t. And I’m starting to understand more why now in this conversation.

Moore: Same. I learned just very recently that I have to curb that recurring thought in my mind that tells me: Keep this here. Keep this hurt to yourself. Don’t burden others by bringing it to them. Your job is to care for them not to be cared for. I have harmed myself by not resisting that thought. And I’m just grateful for people who have shown up despite my resistance. 

Let me turn back to Baldwin. There’s another point in his essay where he writes about violence. “Violence,” he writes, “has been the American deli bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but appears to be admired and lusted after, and the key to American imagination.” 

Everything about this moment and the current administration, an administration that prefers muscular displays of military strength; ruffian geopolitics; Trump’s tyrannical bullying; hordes of masked law enforcement, mostly men, rampaging communities; actual bombs used to blow up people on “alleged drug boats” in international waters and laughing about it as if the so-called “Department of War” are playing video games…I can go on and on and on. But these masculinist approaches are violent. And they are very much at the center of the American imagination.

Laymon: Hundred percent. My grandmama died last year and I think a lot about how she had Alzheimer’s. Before she really had Alzheimer’s, she used to talk about how Trump was the worst person she’d ever seen. She’s one of these Baptists. We grew up going to church three times a week. She’s one of these people who pity white people. They know not what they do-type of stuff. She’s seen it all. She was born in 1929. When that person tells me she’s never seen it worse, it fucks me up. 

She’s saying we fought every which way we could to get something. And all of that shit appears on one level, structurally, to be taken away. So we have to accept, and reckon with, how much has been taken away with nothing but absolute pure might, which is the complete makeup of that cage we talked about in the beginning. It is made with the shit that makes the worst of Donald Trump who wants to dominate. You and I grew up as students of bell hooks. We know that domination is the root of all things evil. I don’t give a fuck. It is unconsented, non-consensual domination. So we are here and we are here because the men won. 

The flip, though, is that there will be revolution in some form or fashion. You know what I’m saying? And I don’t think that revolution necessarily looks like the way you and I thought it might look when we were younger. But masculinity, the worst parts of masculinity, like Baldwin said, reveals itself and harms itself in the way it chooses to live its life. So if we’re wondering: when is Trump going to get his comeuppance? Look at him. He’s getting his comeuppance. America is getting its comeuppance. I just wonder what are we to do with the soft parts of our nation that don’t deserve to be brutalized like this? And I know that’s the question you’ve been dealing with your whole life. 

Moore: Absolutely. We are living in and through America’s comeuppance, which is also masculinity’s comeuppance. And I am thinking about the need for new interventions, new ways to connect, especially with and among Black men. I’ve always said, “to love is to not lie.” So  loving Black men means that we will need to challenge each other, to hold one another accountable, to reckon, and, as you’ve taught me, to revise. 

I’ve done a lot of finger pointing over the years. I just want to be real—calling out, as one example, doesn’t always work, especially as a single tactic. 

And that is not to say that there is anything wrong with naming what’s true. I’m not saying that. We need new approaches, different tactics, a different way of bringing theory into the world of Black men in such a way that it’s felt. What are you thinking about in terms of how we might approach this work differently in such a way that we really can see brother’s hearts change? I want lives to change, relationships to change. And I know in order for those to change, our tactics and approaches have to change.

Laymon: You are preaching right now because we attempt to wield words. And one thing we have both done at times is use those words to club brothers and either subtextually or hyper-textually were pretty much asking, “Why y’all motherfuckers can’t get like us?” 

We have to find a way to use language more effectively. Meaning what? Meaning to go back to that Trump and JD Vance thing, the thing I have a hard time talking about is, again, I’m raised by my mama, my grandma, my auntie, but really my grandma. And my grandma carried the burden of the man and the woman in the house. My grandmama was the shooter in my house. But when I look at JD Vance, and this is a problem, what I’m about to say, I see the weakest motherfucking man I’ve ever seen in my life and I think there’s something wrong with me every time I say that. My thing is why are they so weak? Why the fuck can’t they be men?

That’s what I feel now. What the fuck? Because in my mind I’m like that cage is there for all of all for the taking. And I’m like, why can’t y’all motherfuckers get out of the cage? You’re so weak, you can’t get out. And whatever in me is still holding onto that notion of man being strong enough to even break the cage is still part of me and shows itself in my relationships with women and my relationship with my body. Why you being fucking weak? 

When I am weak, when my hips hurt, I rarely take my medicine and do my stretches. I do my fists like this and I punch my motherfucking hip. Come on, leg. Come on man. 

So I’m saying that one way we connect with ourselves and other folks is by leading—leading with the ways that we might be, with what we don’t understand, by the ways we fuck up and listening to the ways other people might. But not with a prescriptive end. I think we fight, I think we organize, but I think we develop relationships with integrity with Black and brown people we may have different commonalities with.

Moore: Since you’ve mentioned bell hooks. In We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity she uses the metaphor of Isis and Osiris. In an interview she did with George Yancy in the New York Times in 1995, she says, “Osiris is attacked and his body parts are spread all over. Isis, the stern mother, sister and lover, goes and fetches those parts and puts him back together again. That sort of metaphor of harmony and friction that can be soul-healing for black people is so real to me. Often I feel sad, because I think we are in a culture that keeps black men and women further apart from one another, rather than meeting us in that place of shared history, shared story.”

Love that. I want to revise it a bit though. We’ve always benefited from the presence and work of the Isis in our lives—mothering us out of many deaths, sometimes of our own making. What does soul healing look like, feel like, then, in a world where Osiris (and Set, the jealous brother who kills him in the fable) learn to make different choices, to move and be different, to summon their own power to resurrect himself so that Isis doesn’t have to?

That is the journey I am on. I was that dude speaking at events where I’d talk about Black feminism and receive a standing ovation when the sisters before me just said the same thing better but were responded to with less fanfare. I am that brother who was raised mostly by women who know that I’ve benefited from their invisible and visible labor and I get celebrated because my life is a consequence of all that they sacrificed and all that they did. And they still struggle. They don’t get the same dap, the same access to the type of safety.  So much of my life has been about women mothering me out of my circumstances. How do we mother ourselves, is my question? What does mothering ourselves look like? 

Laymon: I can’t act like I’m not a writer. And I do believe we have to think on the level of language. We have to acknowledge when we feel as if we’ve been mothered by people who are not our mothers. Do you know what I mean? And push that conversation.  

I have felt mothered by you. Now why do I say that and not fathered? I was not fathered. I don’t know what that shit feels like. And really I have been grandmothered by you if I’m going to use language, meaning I felt like I have been loved responsibly by you during times in my life when I’ve needed you. You have been there for me. You have loved me responsibly. And I’ve gone to bed knowing that you love me responsibly.

What I need to say when you do that is like not thank you for loving me, but thank you for mothering slash grandmothering me. And then you should be like my nigga, let’s talk about that and what does that mean for the space of fathering? 

What does that mean if we accept that we have been mothered? When I’m at my lowest and I’m just not sure that tomorrow is what I want to see, I just want a mother. And that’s not trying to condemn my actual mother. But what I’m actually saying to the universe: could you give me the strength to tell somebody that I need to be loved responsibly? We just have to continue to summon the space and strength to use language to wrap itself around what we actually need even when there’s no one else around.