What Is Love?

I remember the first time love hit me like a freight train. His name was Tom. We met at a house party thrown by mutual friends, and he was this tall, smoldering vision of quiet intensity — an aspiring DJ with impeccable taste in house music. We shared that passion, and I'd hang out at his place for hours listening to him spin, the bass vibrating through the floorboards like a second heartbeat. Tom had these eyes that pierced straight through to my soul, and when he smiled — which wasn't often — it shined as bright as the sun. He was straight. He was fairly introverted and painfully shy, which only made the ache of wanting him more exquisite. A couple of years ago, we reconnected on Instagram. Still beautiful. Still with the most gorgeous smile that made my heart skip a beat. And sitting with that feeling after all these years, I had to ask myself: What is love? As bell hooks wrote in All About Love, "The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb."

James Baldwin, who knew something about loving across impossible lines, put it this way:

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle. Love is a war. Love is growing up."

The truth is, Black queer people have always loved boldly — long before the Western world gave us language or permission. In pre-colonial Africa, queerness was woven into the spiritual and social fabric of countless societies: the mudoko dako of northern Uganda, the Chibados of Angola, the female husbands of Igbo Nigeria, and the openly gay King Mwanga II of Buganda. It was European colonialism — armed with penal codes and missionary zeal — that criminalized same-sex love and imposed rigid gender binaries where fluidity once thrived. As bell hooks observed in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, the assumption that Black communities are inherently more homophobic ignores the colonial roots of that homophobia.

She wrote,

"The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others."

In America, the legacy of slavery, the Black church's adoption of colonial Christianity, and systemic racism compounded the erasure, pushing Black LGBTQ people to the margins of a community that was itself marginalized. Hooks understood that love and justice are inseparable:

"There can be no love without justice."

So what is love? And does it even exist? Yes — fiercely, stubbornly, undeniably yes. I know it exists because I felt it watching Tom's hands move across vinyl, because it lives in the quiet ache of a smile that still undoes me after all these years. Love exists in every queer Black person who dared to reach for someone's hand when the whole world told them not to. Baldwin — a Black gay man who had to flee to Paris just to breathe — said it best:

"You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all."

He also reminded us, "Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn't want to admit." For Black queer people, love is an act of revolution. It is choosing tenderness in a world that weaponizes our softness. As hooks wrote, "Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life." Love is a real fact of life — for us, through us, because of us. It is a practice, a defiance, and a homecoming all at once. And it has always, always, been ours.

Sources:

• hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2000. Goodreads Quotes

• hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press, 1989. Taylor & Francis

• hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. Routledge, 2012.

• Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Dial Press, 1963.

• Baldwin, James. Interview with Richard Goldstein, The Village Voice, 1984. The Marginalian

• Baldwin, James. James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Melville House, 2014. Goodreads

• AnotherMan. "'Love Him and Let Him Love You': James Baldwin's Quotes on Love." AnotherMan

• Philadelphia Gay News. "Black History Month: James Baldwin." PGN

• Democracy in Africa. "Fake History, Misunderstanding Colonial Legacies, and the Demonization of Homosexuality in Africa." Democracy in Africa

• AAIHS. "Did Europe Bring Homophobia to Africa?" AAIHS

• JSTOR Daily. "The 'Deviant' African Genders That Colonialism Condemned." JSTOR Daily

• Philadelphia Gay News. "Author bell hooks: Love, Activism and Intersectionality." PGN