This wasn’t my plan to do this article as the first one for @Ariesfirebomb. Hell, I didn’t plan to do this article at all honestly. I’m still having an issue with writing this the way it should be written but I suppose that just jumping in is the best way to do it.
Let me begin here: this is not an attack.
Not on a person, not on a people.
But it is a light—cast sharp—on one more face of White privilege, one more mask of White supremacy.
A face most would rather keep hidden.
A truth too many—White and Black alike—dismiss, deny, or turn away from.
Gemmel Moore was twenty-seven. A Black boy. A son. A gay man. A sex worker.
Found dead on the floor of Ed Buck’s home.
And though the coroner may have called it “an overdose,” I will call it what it was—murder.
Ed Buck, an older wealthy White man, known for his kink: to watch young Black boys shoot up meth. He lured them in with food, with money, with the soft promise of care. He offered $500 a hit, offered his body, and asked them to bring more of “their kind.”
Police found Gemmel’s body with needles and glass scattered nearby. They found journals—Gemmel’s own words. They heard the voices of other Black boys who had lived through the same ritual. And still, Ed Buck walked free.
I read about Gemmel last July when the news broke. It saddened me then.
But reading it again today, I felt something break open.
Old wounds resurfaced, traumas I had tucked away.
It sparked conversations with my friends—conversations thick with grief and fury.
For years, I’ve said aloud what many try not to hear:
White gay men—cis, privileged—can be racist. Often are.
And each time, I was met with dismissals: “You’re militant.” “You’re bitter.” “You’re racist.”
But I tell you—truth don’t bend.
Every young Black gay man you know has carried some encounter, some scar, from a White gay man who saw him as less than human. As fetish, as conquest, as commodity.
I know because I am one of them.
I won’t name names. My pockets are filled with debt, not lawyers. The whiten men I speak of? They have lawyers on retainer and checks that never bounce. So I’ll speak truth without labels.
Woodbury, 2009
I was twenty-one. New to Minnesota. Dreaming myself into the film world, my own Maxine Shaw with a camera. My friend Angel said he knew two men—“artists,” he claimed. A playwright, even.
We drove out to Woodbury, me, Angel, and my boy Esteban. The house was big as a cathedral. Pool out back, bar in the basement. Dave Matthews wailing on surround sound.
But what waited inside wasn’t art—it was appetite.
Steve, tall, balding, heavyset, kept pouring drinks for my friends. I didn’t drink, so I swam instead, watched, observed. He kept brushing against me, pawing, grabbing. Called it play. I called it assault.
At one point, he grinned and said: “I can put on some of that rap shit your people like.”
My friends laughed, drunk, not seeing the edge in his tone.
By nightfall, they were naked in his pool, too far gone to understand. And when I stood, sober, watching—he turned on me. Screamed at me for not joining. Screamed because I would not let him devour me the way he wanted to devour them.
I had to drag my friends out, half-dressed, half-conscious, while he called me ghetto trash. I broke a pool stick in my hands and held it like a weapon, ready to protect myself if I had to. A Black man in a White suburb, clutching splintered wood, praying only to make it home.
We made it out. They remembered nothing.
I have never forgotten.
Minneapolis, 2015
By then, I was older, heavier with disillusion. Working nights, writing when I could. Bitter that Vine stars could reach millions while my web series crawled to a few hundred views.
One night off, I went to a Popular Gay Bar in Downtown Minneapolis. A bar that always reeked of desperation—older White men circling younger bodies like vultures. Still, I stayed for my friends.
That’s when I met Gary. Said he knew filmmakers. Said he wanted to write a screenplay. For months, we met. Coffee shops, parks, his house. I thought maybe, for once, it was just business.
But one evening, he set the table with drugs—poppers, meth, powders I didn’t recognize. Told me to stay, to “relax.” When I refused, he grabbed me. Again and again. Until I shoved him hard into his bookcase and ran. Drove home like the devil himself was on my tail.
Another night, another narrow escape.
And these—these are only two stories. I could tell you ten more. Boys fondled without consent. Men offering thousands for bodies they could pass around like contraband. Always the same pattern: White money, Black flesh.
When I posted about Gemmel, my inbox filled. Black gay men whispering, “It happened to me too.” Women telling me of friends who had confided the same. The silence was deafening until it broke.
Because who do we tell?
The LGBT community too often centers only White pain.
The Black community, too often, denies us entirely—sees queer Black life as deviant, disposable.
So boys like Gemmel are forgotten. So our trans sisters are slain without justice. So men like me are left holding trauma in our throats, learning silence as survival.
But silence is a coffin.
And I will not lie down in it.
If no one else will speak for us, then I will.
Because Gemmel’s story is my story. My story is his.
Because—I can relate.
- Ja'Mon Kimbrough, Founder of Ariesfirebomb. IG/twitter: ariesfirebomb