I am frequently asked why I have created this thing called Black Funk. Within their questioning, people hope to understand the means by which I am able to approach as normal, everyday and casual even, the expression of sexuality and sensuality by people of color. For them, the “how” is an important way to map my journey to work in an area of human development and with an approach to that area that most find provocative, oppositional, controversial, profane, iconoclastic, confrontational, transgressive, and obscene. There are certain topics that we don’t discuss in polite conversation, in public discourse, or in the myriad of simultaneous monologues that we call the “academic community.”

When we turn the questions of “why” and “how” around, there are penetrating (see the dick) and enveloping (see the pussy) truths waiting there—why/how did Black Funk create me. Black Funk created me through the preparation of my soul gestating in the black primordial waters of the Great Mother. Black Funk stirred the lust, love, passion, and cravings of my mother and father to desire each other, to want to taste each other’s sun-baked flesh. My mother wanted to feel my father’s firmed phallus seeking a home in her—if only for a moment. My father wanted to experience the deep guttural satisfaction of my mother’s warm wet yoni surrounding his erection with the rhythms of her womb. Their sex was Black Funk. Their sex, Black Funk, provided the conduit through which my soul re-entered this world to produce my life purpose.

I was born of passion. Think about that for a second in relation to how you came into this life. We are born in/of/because of passion (many of us). That passion—that Black Funk—courses through our blood vessels. It heats our blood, warms our hearts, and stirs our souls. Black Funk is the germinating force of existence.

There has been no more appropriate time in human history to acknowledge the power and presence of Black Funk. There are reactionary forces at work to de-Funk the world. Those forces use the military power of government and commerce as well as the dogmatic power of religion to de-Funk the world. While HIV/AIDS—one of the greatest threats to the full enjoyment of sex and intimacy—has raged across the globe endangering the lives and loving of EVERYONE regardless of sexual identity, we have had:

• a US president remove a black woman from the position of the nation's chief medical officer because she dared to suggest that we teach young people how to manage their natural sexual urges through the practice of masturbation,

• two other US presidents who have made medical professionals in the non-European world choose between having the funds to adequately address the medical needs of their patients and providing their patients with a comprehensive set of reproductive options,

• pharmaceutical companies that have exploited the consequences of neo-colonialism in their pricing and distribution of HIV medications,

• decision-makers and personalities in the media (news and entertainment) who have used scapegoating, sensationalism, and fabrication to pit us against each other under the guise of providing public health information and identifying the risk factors in HIV transmission,

• so-called community leaders who have turned a blind eye, a deaf ear, and a hardened heart to the very real, very human factors associated with negotiating one’s natural desires for sexual/sensual pleasure and human connection in an environment in which greater risks are associated with doing so then ever before.

I believe that the healing, liberating, and rejuvenating resources we need for ourselves and the planet are stored within Black Funk. So I return to the funk, the Black Funk in an effort to reclaim, affirm, and resurrect my birthright—to live, to love, and to learn.

Are you ready to walk into Black Funk with me?

Peace Pleasure and Passion,