I’m a white man in my 30s. Thanks to preferences formed in my youth, I’ve been sleeping almost exclusively with black guys for the past 15 years. And though I had a pretty good guess what the term meant, I’d never heard it before. Given its taboo nature, I wanted to be very certain I knew what it meant for him specifically. Did he want me to call him the N-word? Hard “r” or the softer “a” ending? Was roleplay involved? A master/slave narrative, or perhaps a hood-thug/white-savior storyline? 

For Jacob, the answer was all the above. This was my first encounter with a fetish that seems to have appeared out of nowhere and has now become common among black gay men. I’d say that half of my hookups now request it. Proponents believe race play is a form of liberation. Or, they say, it’s an insouciant response to the political pieties of Black Lives Matter and DEI. For the white counterpart, it has its own unique complications. 

I’m not judgmental of anyone’s kink, and I’ve come across a litany of fetishes over the years, so I was willing to entertain Jacob’s request. At the time, I thought it was a one-off. I also believe that the bedroom is probably the best place to experiment with breaking social norms and defying societal expectations. Moreover, the past half decade’s media overload on race has had a chilling effect on black-white relations. BLM and DEI produce a cold dynamic of bureaucracy and activism. But in bed, relations are ineluctably individual and even spiritual, not political. If Jacob wanted it, it made sense to me to give this a try.  

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When Jacob finally came over, I did the best I could with his request, but I felt a ringing disassociation when the words started coming out of my mouth. Nothing is really off-limits in the sex-positive world, but this felt taboo. I was a vile character out of To Kill a Mockingbird, and yet when I looked at Jacob, he was turned on and elated. It was disorienting. It also did nothing for me, sexually, and I let the attempt slowly dissolve, moving Jacob and I back into our normal routine.

It wasn’t a one-off, though. Jacob started demanding this vituperation every time. And I went along with it. It made me feel less like myself in bed, but my belief in the transformative power of kink suggested to me that I should push my own boundaries, too.  

Almost immediately after Jacob made the request, I found more and more men wanting it. I recognize the pattern by this point. Guys I converse with on Sniffies, a gay-hookup site, usually start by telling me they’re very kinky and asking if I am, too. Then they mention race play and assure me that I can call them, you know, whatever I want. 

If I were truly a racist, none of these men would be sleeping with me. So on one level, we both know that the suggestion that I want to racially degrade them is a fantasy — they want it. On a deeper level, what we’re both doing is not degradation, but exploration of a dangerous part of the human psyche, in an environment of mutual openness and generosity. 

Other black men I spoke with — friends, co-workers, and lovers or former lovers — mentioned an array of reasons for the trend, from sex positivity and the increasing acceptability of fetishes, to the influence of porn, with its tendency to become more extreme in order to elicit the same sexual response. People find whatever is forbidden to be a turn-on. According to the progressive script, women aren’t supposed to want to be dominated by men (but sometimes they do). Likewise, according to more traditional scripts, men aren’t supposed to want to be dominated by women (but, again, many do). Blacks aren’t supposed to want to be called racist slurs by whites in 2026. But they do. And while everyone may performatively police their thoughts in public, in the privacy of the bedroom, the thought-policing gives way to desire. 

There was the dancer I met on a Princess cruise who kept referring to my whiteness. I got the hint. After the ship was all in bed, we’d find a corner to have sexual banter, with race integrated, at his request. He wanted me to call him my little N-word (hard r). Next, an artist in my neighborhood also asked for it. We’d been hooking up for a while before he dared to tell me. We were at his place, and when I moaned, “Damn boy,” he told me that he liked the slight Southern flare in my voice. Go further, he told me. 

In one sense, playing the abusive cracker is downright creepy, and not something I ever wanted to do. I’m attracted to black men because I find them masculine and beautiful, but also because I feel safe with them. As a gay kid in the South, I got bullied for being effeminate, and it was often blacks who stuck up for me when my white peers were being cruel. Also, maybe because blacks saw my race first, they seemed to see the gayness less and treated me more like everyone else. Now, decades later, I disliked pretending to be the kind of white person I’d always despised. 

But since it was hot for my partners, I tried to play along. Also, I realized that black guys have enjoyed a milder form of race play for years, considering the many cases of those who self-brand on fetish and dating apps as a “BBC,” a controversial reframing of the lore of the well-endowed black man. Race play has even made it into the mainstream, notably in the Broadway production Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris, a gay black man. 

In Slave Play, three multiracial couples engage in race play as therapy for lack of sexual desire caused by racial trauma in the black partner. Harris has said his intention was metaphorical, and in an interview with the comedian Ziwe, he explained that the kind of sexual race fetish he was satirizing wasn’t something he’d personally done or considered particularly realistic. He thought it was “part of our imaginaries via Tumblr and Twitter more so than it was ever a part of anyone’s actual sexual lived experience.” Once the play came out, though, Harris encountered “a lot of black people who do race play and kink intersecting with race.” He found it “exhilarating” to have represented their stories, even if accidentally. 

I talked to some current and former sexual partners to try to understand more. 

Eric (also not his real name), a 38-year-old actor who was once a sexual partner of mine but is now a friend, tells me that he has also noticed race play becoming more prominent, especially on the internet. He believes that the liberal ideal, previously pushed for by all races, is to transform race into a kind of politically correct equality, a process that was turbo-charged in recent years by BLM and DEI. This, he thinks, can feel coercive in its own right. “I think people are moving away from a rigid sense of that identity,” he says, “and have become more like, You cannot police my blackness. I can do what I want, especially with my blackness.” 

Eric told me he’d been tempted to try it himself but hadn’t, because of concerns about how it might impact him afterward. His preference is for nerdy white guys, but he’s not sure he wants to know what imagined racial features make him their preference. “Am I black enough, or am I the kind of black guy they seek?” It’s his relationship to his own blackness that he’s trying to protect, he says. 

When I asked Jacob what he thought about the trend, he got angry. He hadn’t known that his fetish was common, and at first tried to convince me that other guys were “copying” him. Upon deeper reflection, he thought that perhaps the fetish is popping up now because blacks and whites are mingling more. Born and raised in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, Jacob had until recently experienced New York as a very segregated city. As the neighborhood has integrated, there has been more opportunity for him — and everyone else — to meet and explore race through sexual encounters. Jacob questioned his own desires, however, when he learned how common they were. “I think gay black boys have a higher chance of having low self-esteem, racially,” he said. “Is this who I want to be or be validated by?” 

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He wasn’t the only person who took this view. Brian, a 28-year-old black chef, told me, “We’ve all grown up with the same white-savior public heartthrobs.” His implication was that if you see white men as the saviors, it would make sense why you would want them, and you might want to reject your own blackness, too. My friend Ashley, a straight black woman in her 30s, said something similar. When I told her I was hooking up with a guy who insisted on race play, she viscerally responded that “he definitely has some problems.” She went on to say that she could understand why a white man would only be into black men, “because they’re beautiful,” but if a black man was only into white men, it would be “suspect.”

My thinking on the matter clarified thanks to some experiences online. The internet has also in some ways decreased segregation. If race is what gets you going, all you need is a keyboard. X (formerly Twitter) is flooded with porn accounts linking to OnlyFans, where blacks and whites who otherwise wouldn’t meet in person can form parasocial dynamics. One day, I came across a video of a black OnlyFans creator I followed, in which a white boy was calling him the N-word.

It shocked me to be honest — and I hated seeing it. 

I value race play as a terrain where whiteness collides with blackness offline, between people and free of ideology. But once it starts being reproduced and witnessed, the fantasy enters the real world and feels uncontrollable, dangerous, and possibly formative of realities I wouldn’t want to be a part of. 

Brian and I had a tryst with Jacob last summer, and when Jacob tried to integrate race into our play, I disengaged. I didn’t want friends involved. “I didn’t really care,” Brian said afterwards. “That has everything to do with him.” 

I agreed, but it had to do with me, too. I’m not moralizing about anyone’s desires, and I haven’t come to any permanent conclusions, but I don’t engage in race play any more with guys from the past, and I have no plans for the future. I might try it again if I met the right person, but I don’t like feeling like I have to do it, and I don’t want to be tethered to that disassociation. While reporting this story, I asked a prominent gay, black male artist who sometimes shares sexual exploits on social media what he thought of race play. His reply: “Is this your sly way of asking me for race play? be honest [heart emoji].” No, I told him, it was merely an honest inquiry. I’m done for now. 

But first back to that church in Istanbul. Unless you’ve been to Istanbul you may not have heard of the Kariye Museum. But it is glorious. This ancient church – converted into a museum decades ago – looks a bit unprepossessing at first. Outside it looks like a bunker. But inside it takes your breath away. For here you will find heaven held in beaten gold and ancient ages stilled on its ceiling. The blue and red and gold mosaics that cover this church from top to toe are some of the oldest still surviving from Byzantium – and arguably the most beautiful.

They are also now no longer in the “Kariye Museum”. Because last month an edict signed by President Erdogan announced to the world that this building was instead to be called the “Kariye Mosque”. Evidently Erdogan has a taste for this, having also just turned the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. It seems that some of the local Istanbul citizens are also pleased. Hundreds hurried to the Hagia Sophia to pray after it was changed. It is said that locals rushed to the new Kariye mosque hoping to pray there too.

Others were less pleased; indeed they are horrified. Byzantinist specialists the world over are holding their breath. In Hagia Sophia, mosaics of the Virgin holding Christ have been covered over with a curtain. That’s not so easy to do in Kariye. This isn’t just about one picture, or two. They’re on every wall. The great fear is that something more dramatic will happen. It happened before: when the Ottomans invaded in 1453, the frescoes were plastered over.

This debate is, on the face of it, about religion. But it is also about history, and how history is written — and above all how it is covered up. Istanbul — part place, part palimpsest — is long familiar with such debates. Any city that has had three names can’t help but know that history is as much about writing over the past as the writing about it.

The Kariye Mosque, that was the Kariye Museum, and that long before that was the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, is as good a place as any to consider this writing and rewriting. This ancient building, first built in the fourth century and decorated in the fourteenth is as much Etch-a-sketch as edifice: it has been written and rewritten so many times that it is hard to know what it “should” be at all.

And even when its frescoes were fresh, back in the fourteenth century, they were themselves based on a rewriting of the Gospel. And a relatively radical one too. For the frescoes that those Istanbul residents are hurrying to pray beneath, refer to a Christian gospel that contained a version of the Virgin Mary’s vagina that could burn human flesh.

The gospel, called the Gospel of James, on which this church’s frescoes are based is enormously important to church history.  It dates back to the second century, and was, for a time, one of the most popular — and one of the most influential of all. If you have ever seen a nativity image that contains an ox and an ass you are seeing its influence. Yet even if you’re from a devout family you’re unlikely to ever have heard of this gospel.

Because starting in the second century this book, and others like it, started to be first denigrated, then denied by church authorities, especially in the west (it survived much better in the east, hence its presence in the Kariye). I hadn’t heard of it – and my parents had been a monk and a nun. My father, despite spending almost 14 years dressed in a cowl, had no idea it existed. The fact that we have all but forgotten this book tells us a bit about Mary — and a lot about history, and about religion, and what they are used for.

This Gospel of James may be ancient but even in the beginning it was itself a rewrite of history (or at any rate of the Gospels, which in Christianity pass for history). This Gospel appeared in a time when Christians were very, very concerned about proving the virginity of Mary. Chiefly, it seems, because their neighbours thought the idea was laughable nonsense. Mary was no virgin, they said. She’d been knocked up by a Roman soldier.

The other four Gospels, somewhat problematically, are not that helpful on this point. Most biblical accounts of Jesus’s birth are brisk to the point of perfunctory: after Jesus is born, they largely fade to black. They offer precious little in the way of proof that Mary was, indeed, a virgin.

Which is where the Gospel of James comes in. In it, after Jesus’s birth, a woman walks past, hears that a virgin has given birth and says: what nonsense, I don’t believe it. Mary’s midwife (this story has a midwife) says: test her yourself. In other words: check she has a hymen. So, strange as it may sound to a twenty-first century listener, this is what the woman does. She comes over to Mary, inserts her hand into Mary’s vagina – and it is promptly roasted off. “Woe,” she says, which is fair enough.

This gospel was immensely popular — though not among church authorities. When in the fourth century, the final form of the Bible was decided on, the Gospel of James didn’t make the cut. Then, Church authorities started to get stern about the offcut gospels. They were, declared a later decree, “not merely rejected but eliminated” from the Church, while their authors followers should, it added, “be damned in the inextricable shackles of anathema forever.”

The coming of Christianity ushered in an era that was distinguished by almost hysterical desire for purity against all wrong thought. Bishops encouraged the faithful not to read all parts of all “heathen” books lest  they “receive some contamination unawares”. To be not Christian, or worse, the wrong kind of Christian, became a crime. “Pagan” statues were torn down or defaced lest they pollute the eyes of those who saw them. Public show trials forced heretics to recant, grovellingly and humiliatingly, to their former wrong-belief. The most influential history book of the era explicitly stated that it would, in general, record only the Christian behaviour that set a good example — and not mention the rest.

This, the Christians said, was “liberation” not oppression. But being liberated is not always that much fun. The dialogue that this earnest, pure Christian world created was characterised, as the academic Brent D Shaw has put it, by a “hectoring moralizing of the individual, and a ceaseless management of the minutiae of everyday life. Above all, it was a form of speech marked by an absence of humour. It was a morose and a deadly serious world.”

The results on what we know about the church, and history, can still be felt. Even today, the Gospel of James has barely been studied by theologians. Discreet intellectual curtains covered it over. Our minds were protected. What a pity.

Our smiles have faded again. In 2020, an earnest desire for purity is once again in the air.  Make a joke about gender, or women, or the wrong bit of history and Twitter — as JK Rowling knows well – will have you. Books that might cause offence are getting “trigger warnings” or being removed from syllabuses. To Kill A Mockingbird was removed from classrooms in Canada and taken off the syllabus in a city in Mississippi because “there is some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable.” Statues are, once again, under threat. Edward Colston has gone. Rhodes is going to go. The souls of other statues are started to be weighed in the balance – and found wanting. And in Istanbul, the fate of the Church of the Chora hangs in the balance.

Let’s be clear: those who are banning books and toppling statues and no-platforming speakers are not doing this because they are unkind. On the contrary: they are doing it because they care. Either because they care about an ideal; or a god; or a religious law. They are all, every single one of them — Erdogan, the anti-Rowling Twitter mob, topplers of statues — acting — or so they say — to protect vulnerable hearts and minds; to liberate people from oppression. Erdogan, when opening Hagia Sophia to worship, said that that the building “is breaking away from its chains of captivity”.

Maybe. But it’s worth remembering that history is unlikely to see any of this as “liberation”. History, as much as anything else, is on a side: its own. And history dislikes those who destroy its evidence; those who ban books or silence speakers or pull down statues. Yes, people who do these things have their reasons. Arguably, they may be very good reasons. That doesn’t matter to history. When it says in a history book “they burnt books” no reader ever pauses to ask: which books? It is enough that they burnt them.

And now, history may well be about to rewritten again. So the world watches the frescoes in Istanbul, and waits.