“You know, you can read something, but if you’re not reading something that’s there to be read, you’re just a fool.”
— Dorian Corey, Paris Is Burning
Preface
The men I am thinking of dress like invitations they refuse to send. Pants hang low enough to reveal the architecture beneath, shirts cut to expose what modesty would cover, posture angled toward a gaze they swear they do not want. They walk through parking lots, grocery stores, gas stations, moving their bodies with the precision of people who know they are being watched and have spent years deciding what watching should cost.
This is not accidental. This is studied. This is the inheritance of men who learned early that their bodies could speak a language their mouths would betray them for uttering. So they let the fabric do the talking. They let the angle of their hips translate what their voices cannot risk. They stage themselves for recognition, then crucify anyone who recognizes them.
I have watched this performance my entire life. I have learned to read the signals sent by men who insist they are sending nothing. I have become fluent in the grammar of want that calls itself accident, attention that names itself coincidence, hunger that swears it is only standing there. And I have also learned what happens when the truth gets spoken aloud: the same men who court our eyes will spit homophobia the moment we name what we see.
But something sharper has been happening lately. These men—the ones who turned trans into an insult, who used queer as a weapon, who spent decades holding different over our heads like a threat—are now panicking at a single word: cis. The offense is instant. The outrage is loud. They land on that term like it just called them out of their name, when all it does is describe them with the same clinical accuracy they once weaponized against us.
Cis is not new. The word has been around long enough to gather dust. What is new is this: naming finally cuts both directions. What is new is that clarity has arrived where hierarchy used to live. What is new is that they are being made visible in the same system they used to subordinate others, and visibility, to a man who built his identity on being the unnamed default, feels like violence.
This essay is about that panic. About the men who need to be seen but cannot survive being known. About the architecture of a masculinity that depends on recognition while punishing anyone who offers it. About the word cis as the mirror that finally speaks back, and the terror that rises when a man realizes the reflection knows his name.
I am not writing this from distance. I am writing from the rooms where these men perform, from the streets where they signal, from the spaces where their contradiction becomes our problem to navigate. I am writing because queer men have been carrying the weight of their confusion for too long, and I am tired of pretending that their hunger is our responsibility to decode or their harm is our inheritance to absorb.
This piece is unfiltered. It is the thing I would say if I stopped cushioning the truth to protect men who have never cushioned anything for us. It is the clarity I owe myself and every queer person who has been punished for reading signals we did not invent.
Because at the end of it, cis is not a slur.
It is a mirror.
And some men would rather shatter the glass than look at what it shows.
The Staging
Black men learn early that their bodies are never just bodies. They are evidence. They are threat. They are spectacle. They are the thing white America fears and fetishizes in the same glance, the thing Black women protect and critique with equal exhaustion, the thing other Black men police with a brutality borrowed from every system that ever told them manhood was a competition they could lose.
So they learn to control the narrative with what they can: posture, fabric, muscle, swagger. They learn that desire has to be coded because honesty will cost them everything. They learn that tenderness is a language spoken in private or not at all, that vulnerability is a wound you cover with performance, that wanting—especially wanting sideways, wanting queerly, wanting in ways the world has not pre-approved—is something you bury so deep it starts to feel like someone else’s dream.
But the body remembers. The body always remembers. And for some men, the body starts whispering a truth the mind refuses to translate. So they do something more dangerous than confession: they perform the want without claiming it. They stage their bodies as if desire were a weather pattern they could gesture toward without getting wet.
I see it in the way pants ride low enough to make you look twice. In the glances that last half a second too long, then snap away like they just touched fire. In the way they position themselves in public—near us but not with us, visible but deniable, close enough to register our recognition without ever admitting they sought it. They move through space like men who need an audience but cannot afford witnesses.
This is not innocence. This is calculation. They know what they are doing. They know the signals they send. They know we read them. What they are counting on is our silence, our complicity in the performance, our willingness to play along with the fiction that none of this is intentional. They want the thrill of being seen without the accountability of being understood. They want flirtation without intimacy, reaction without responsibility, the hum of being desired without ever confirming they invited it.
And for a long time, we let them have it. We learned to read the subtext and keep the translation to ourselves. We became experts at decoding invitations sent in a language designed for deniability. We carried their hunger as though it were our burden to metabolize. We absorbed the contradiction as the price of existing near their fear.
But then we did something unforgivable: we named it.
The pattern has been documented. In September 2024, NLE Choppa posted “I’m Coming Out” on Twitter alongside mirror selfies—the angle studied, the presentation carefully staged, the phrasing deliberate. The internet read it immediately: he was coming out. The speculation exploded. And within hours, he clarified: he meant coming out with new music. The backpedal was instant. The denial was loud. The performance had worked too well, gotten too close to truth, and he had to shut it down before the recognition became confirmation.
This is what the staging looks like when it’s made visible. He dressed the announcement in language borrowed from queer coming-out narratives. He posed his body in ways that signal availability, vulnerability, aesthetic attention. He knew exactly what he was doing—and the moment we named what we saw, he retreated into safety. The song, the fashion, the boots—anything but the truth his body was already telling.
I have watched this performance repeat itself across generations. Men who lean into feminine fashion but justify it by learning to pronounce haute couture, as though French pronunciation makes gender play intellectual instead of personal. Men who experiment with presentation, silhouette, softness—claiming it as style innovation while demonizing transgender people for the same exploration of authentic self. They get to navigate identity as fashion. Trans people get called confused, dangerous, delusional for navigating the exact same questions about how they want to present to the world.
The hypocrisy is structural. These men borrow queer aesthetics, perform queer legibility, send queer-coded signals—then punish anyone who reads the code accurately. They get to play in the space of gender without consequence because they can always retreat into “it’s just fashion, bro.” But a trans woman wearing the same silhouette? She’s a threat to children. A trans man exploring masculinity? He’s confused. The same navigation that gets called artistic expression when a cis man does it becomes mental illness when a trans person claims it.
The Gaze That Reads
Queer men do not look at the world the way straight men imagine we do. We are not predators scanning for prey. We are archaeologists reading for survival. Every glance we have ever cast has been shaped by the need to know who is safe, who is curious, who is dangerous, who is lying to themselves loudly enough that their lie might turn into our emergency.
We learned this grammar early. We learned to translate swagger into plea, bravado into question, disgust into panic. We learned that a man who performs his heterosexuality with too much emphasis is often performing for something, not from something. We learned to see the boy underneath the man, the want beneath the venom, the invitation hiding inside the insult.
And we learned, above all, that straight men—especially Black straight men navigating a world that hyper-surveils and hyper-sexualizes them—will borrow from us when they need to feel seen. They borrow our aesthetics. They borrow our language. They borrow the way we move through the world as though desirability were an art form instead of a danger. They borrow the queer gaze itself, training their bodies to appeal to an eye that actually looks at men with want instead of competition.
But here is the trap: they need us to see them, but they cannot let us say we see them. Because saying it makes it real. Saying it makes it mutual. Saying it makes them participants instead of performers. Saying it means they wanted this, and wanting queerly—even wanting to be wanted queerly—shatters the fragile architecture of a masculinity built on never admitting need.
So they punish us for looking. They turn our gaze into accusation. They call us predators for reading the signs they planted. They weaponize homophobia as insurance against their own legibility, as though hating us loudly enough will erase what their bodies already confessed.
The violence is not random. It is structural. Because every time they stage their bodies for our attention, they are gambling that we will stay complicit in the fiction—that we will look without speaking, recognize without naming, desire without confirming. The moment we say it out loud, the moment we name what they have been performing, we break the rule that lets them have the recognition without the reckoning.
And queer men have been breaking that rule more and more. We have been refusing to carry their confusion in silence. We have been saying, plainly and without apology, that we see what they are doing. That their performance is not subtle. That their hunger is not invisible. That their contradiction is not our emergency to manage.
That refusal is what makes them panic. Not our presence, but our clarity. Not our desire, but our willingness to say desire’s name. We have stopped playing the game where they get to be ambiguous and we get to be blamed. We have started naming them as accurately as they once named us.
The cost of reading their signals is not abstract. It lives in the body, in memory, in humiliation that calculates itself in real time. I know because I have climbed through a window to meet a man who needed me invisible during daylight but present at night. Park down the street. Enter through the back. Make sure the neighbors don’t see. The shame of that—being wanted enough to risk sneaking in, but not valued enough to walk through the front door—is the tax queer men pay for reading signals we did not invent.
They text at 3am when the performance drops and the hunger speaks plainly. They need validation, recognition, the proof that they are desirable. They feed off our emotions. They feed their insecurities with our attention. They borrow our gaze to feel seen, then weaponize our presence to feel masculine. We become the mirror they need and the evidence they destroy. We are the audience for a performance they will deny ever staging.
And when morning comes, when daylight returns, when the world is watching again—we are the predators. We are the ones who misread. We are the danger they had to protect themselves from. The same men who needed us enough to risk the window will spit homophobia in public to prove they were never that desperate, never that honest, never that human.
And one word, more than any other, has become the mirror they cannot face: cis.
The Word That Breaks the Performance
Cis lands on them like an accusation they cannot decode. It is not an insult. It does not attack. It does not demean. It simply names. It pulls them into the same system of language they once used to subordinate everyone else. It says: you are not the default. You are not the baseline. You are not exempt from the grammar of identity. You are something, not everything. You are located, not universal. You are described, not assumed.
And to a man who spent his whole life believing his masculinity was the unmarked category—the neutral, the natural, the norm—that naming feels like demotion.
It is not. Cis does not strip them of anything real. It does not diminish their manhood. It does not place them beneath anyone. It simply makes visible what was always true: they occupy a position within a system, not above it. They have been shaped by structures, not exempted from them. They are cisgender in the same way others are transgender—both terms clinical, both neutral, both describing a relationship to the gender assigned at birth.
But neutrality is not what they hear. They hear exposure. They hear the end of plausible deniability. They hear the same thing they felt when we started naming what their bodies were performing: the terror of being seen instead of assumed.
Because here is what cis does that they cannot forgive: it makes them ordinary. It makes them particular. It makes them one option among many instead of the option against which all others are measured. And a man who learned his masculinity through hierarchy, who built his identity on the back of being unquestioned, will experience clarity as attack. He will hear description as insult. He will feel named and call it violence.
The irony is vicious. These are the same men who spent years using trans as a slur. Who turned queer into a weapon. Who threw faggot around like punctuation. Who built entire comedic careers on mocking anyone who lived outside the boundaries they imagined were natural. They treated difference as deviance, identity as illness, and naming as a tool of subordination.
And now the tool has turned. Now they are being named. Now they are the ones described instead of assumed. Now they are being pulled into visibility. And the panic is immediate. Because what they realize, even if they cannot articulate it, is this: if they are cis, then their manhood was never neutral. It was always positioned. It was always sustained by contrast. It was always dependent on someone else being marked as other so they could remain unmarked as norm.
Cis is the word that ends the performance. It says: we see you. We know what you are. We are naming you with the same precision you once used against us. And you cannot hide anymore.
The System That Depends on Not Being Named
Masculinity, particularly Black masculinity, is not an identity men are born into. It is a performance they are trained for. A test they are graded on. A script they are punished for deviating from. It is the thing they are told will protect them, even as it isolates them. The thing they are told will make them legible, even as it silences their complexity. The thing they are told will grant them power, even as it locks them inside a cage they mistake for a crown.
And the most important rule of that script is this: never admit you are performing. Never acknowledge that the role is constructed. Never let anyone see the seams. Because the moment you are named as doing masculinity, instead of being masculine, the whole illusion collapses. The power drains. The hierarchy wobbles. You become ordinary.
This is why the word cis breaks something. It is not the content of the word—it is the act of naming itself. Because naming interrupts the performance long enough to reveal the performer. It says: this thing you thought was natural is actually chosen. This identity you thought was inevitable is actually sustained by daily repetition. This self you thought was unquestionable is actually fragile enough that a single descriptor can make you panic.
Men who recoil from cis are not reacting to the word. They are reacting to the mirror. They are reacting to being made visible within the very system they once controlled. They are reacting to the loss of neutrality, the end of being unmarked, the collapse of the illusion that their experience was universal instead of particular.
And underneath that panic is a deeper terror: the fear that without hierarchy, they are nothing. That without someone beneath them to define themselves against, they do not know who they are. That their masculinity was never self-sustaining—it always required contrast, subordination, someone else’s deviance to make their “normalcy” legible.
This is the same fear that drives the performance with their bodies. The same fear that makes them stage themselves for queer recognition then weaponize homophobia. Because both acts are about control. Both are about managing how they are seen without ever letting themselves be known. Both are about needing the mirror while despising what it reflects.
The men who dress for our attention, then spit when we acknowledge it, are doing the same thing as the men who rage against the word cis. They are trying to have recognition without accountability. They are trying to be desired without being implicated. They are trying to be seen without being named.
And what they are learning, slowly and with great resistance, is that we are no longer playing that game. We are naming what we see. We are calling them what they are. We are refusing to let their confusion become our burden, their denial become our silence, their performance become our responsibility to maintain.
Cis is not an attack. It is a refusal. A refusal to let them hide. A refusal to let them stay unmarked while marking everyone else. A refusal to carry the architecture of their fear as though it were ours to uphold.
And that refusal, more than anything, is what they cannot forgive.
What We Stop Carrying
There is a moment in every queer man’s life when he realizes he has been holding someone else’s shame. Not his own—theirs. The shame of the men who wanted him but could not admit it. The shame of the boys who looked too long then punished him for noticing. The shame of the bodies that reached toward him, then recoiled as though his existence were contagion.
We carry that shame because we are taught to. We carry it because someone has to, and they have made it clear they will not. We carry it because love, even love aimed at people who despise us, makes us want to ease their burden. We carry it because we confuse their confusion with our responsibility, their fear with our failing, their violence with our fault.
But there comes a day when the weight becomes unbearable. When you realize that no amount of silence will make them braver. No amount of patience will make them honest. No amount of understanding will make them stop punishing you for reading what they wrote on their own bodies.
This essay is me setting that weight down.
I am done decoding signals sent by men who swear they are sending nothing. I am done absorbing homophobia from men who dress for my attention. I am done pretending that cis is a slur so they can avoid being named with the same clarity they once weaponized. I am done carrying their hunger as though it were my responsibility to feed or deny.
And I am saying, out loud and without cushioning, what we have known in private for too long: these men need us more than they admit. They need our gaze to feel seen. They need our recognition to feel desirable. They need the queer eye because the straight world taught them that men do not look at men with want, only with competition. So they borrow from us. They stage themselves for us. They perform for an audience they claim to despise.
And when we name that, when we say it plainly, when we stop playing along with the fiction—they call us predators. They call us confused. They call us dangerous. They weaponize the very homophobia their performance invites, then act shocked when we refuse to absorb it quietly.
But the shock is not ours to manage. The shame is not ours to carry. The contradiction is not ours to resolve. They built this architecture. They rehearsed this performance. They invited this gaze. And now they are learning what happens when the mirror talks back.
Cis is not violence. It is clarity. It is the word that says: you are not above the system. You are inside it. You are shaped by it. You are sustained by structures you did not invent but benefit from. You are not neutral. You are not default. You are not unmarked. You are this, and this has a name, and the name is not an insult—it is a fact.
If that fact terrifies you, that is not my emergency. If being named feels like demotion, that reveals what you thought you were standing on. If clarity feels like attack, that is because you built your identity on never being questioned. But I am not here to uphold your illusions. I am here to name what I see and let you do with that truth what you will.
And what I see is this: men who want to be seen without being known. Men who court recognition but punish acknowledgment. Men who perform for the queer gaze then weaponize homophobia when we confirm what their bodies already said. Men who rage at the word cis because it does what their masculinity cannot survive—it makes them visible, particular, ordinary, named.
I see you. I have always seen you. And I am done pretending I do not.
Let that be enough—for now.
Author’s Note
This piece came from exhaustion. Not the exhaustion of being hated, but the exhaustion of being needed by people who swear they do not need you. The exhaustion of reading signals sent by men who punish you for literacy. The exhaustion of carrying someone else’s shame because they refuse to hold it themselves.
I did not write this to shame anyone. I wrote it because clarity is not cruelty. I wrote it because naming is not violence. I wrote it because queer men deserve language for what we have been navigating in silence—for the men who dress for us, perform for us, seek recognition from us, then weaponize homophobia the moment we acknowledge what they staged.
And I wrote it because the word cis has become a flashpoint for a deeper terror: the terror of being ordinary. The terror of being named. The terror of being visible within the same system you once controlled. The men who panic at that word are revealing something they do not mean to reveal—that their identity depended on never being questioned, never being described, never being anything other than the assumed default.
But defaults are not neutral. They are positions maintained by power. And when that power is interrupted by something as simple as a word, the panic reveals exactly how fragile the foundation was.
The examples in this piece are not theoretical. In September 2024, NLE Choppa demonstrated the exact pattern I’m describing: staging his body and language to read as queer, then backtracking the moment recognition arrived. This is not about one man—it’s about a system that teaches men they can borrow queerness for style points and validation, but must deny it when recognition threatens confirmation. It’s about the window I climbed through because a man needed me invisible. It’s about the haute couture excuse that lets cis men play with gender while trans people get demonized for the same exploration. It’s about the 3am texts that confirm what the daylight denies. And it’s about refusing to carry the weight of their contradiction any longer.
If this piece made you uncomfortable, sit with that discomfort. If it made you angry, ask yourself why. If it made you feel seen—either as someone who has performed this script or someone who has been punished for reading it—know that visibility is not violence. It is the first step toward something truer.
I am not asking anyone to change overnight. I am asking us to stop pretending. To stop cushioning truths that do not need cushioning. To stop carrying confusion that was never ours to hold. To stop letting men hide behind performance while we absorb the consequences of their fear.
This piece is not about them alone. It is about us reclaiming the right to name what we see, to speak what we know, to live without translating signals sent by people who weaponize our fluency.
And it is about saying, finally and without apology: your shame is not my inheritance. Your fear is not my emergency. Your performance is not my responsibility.
I see you. I name you. And I am done carrying what you refuse to hold.
UNSPUN publishes longform essays, op-eds, and visual documents tracing the language of power in real time.
This essay appears in Off-Record, the column for raw analysis and political commentary—where precision meets conviction, and public noise gives way to private truth.
To engage or contribute, write to taylorallynofficial@gmail.com, or follow UNSPUN for new releases and ongoing dialogues.
Every word here is researched, written, and sharpened by one person—me. If you value work that names what others won’t, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It keeps this space independent, and it keeps pieces like this possible.
we need each other, all Black dudes need each other. without connection there is no chain, only lonely rings. i want to know your thoughts on how do we move forward and progress the Race as brothers, in reading this i've come to the conclusion that my view of 'everybody minding their business until the intersections where we can help each other' is kinda undoable if we don't at least know what business isn't ours or know how to uplift other Black dudes outside of our own circles without subcultural fetishization and cultural cannibalism. peace and blessings