‘Him or Her’ or Something Else Entirely: What I Need from Travon Free and Issa Rae’s New Project

I’ll say it, maybe I’m more bored with Black [hetero-normative] Love than I have a right to be, yet I am. Actually, let me back up a bit; when I read the news that Issa Rae and Travon Free had a new project coming out on HBO about a Bisexual Black man I was, and still am, fairly excited. I am a Black Bisexual man and it’s rare that I see anyone on TV who holds that intersection, and by rare I mean that sometimes I see Frank Ocean while I’m flipping through channels, and that’s how it seems to go too often, three notes of a familiar song, a boy and then a brief static before the next thing. I read that the show was greenlighted while I was sitting in a painfully obvious metaphor. It was late and I was waiting for a train to take me to Brooklyn, I’m not from New York and if it hadn’t been for the friends I was with I probably would have gotten on the wrong train, gone the wrong way. That’s maybe the thing about being underground, maybe the same problem as simplicity there’s only but so many directions that you can go. Around the time the train arrived, the rest of the article beyond just the celebratory headline loaded. And so as I stepped onto the train I learned the show was called “Him or Her” just as electricity yoked me into one direction, another fading into possibility.

The first thing I think I need from this show is a name change. I get the sentiment; this is how the siren call goes out to let the theoretical “us” of Bisexual Black people know that we have arrived. Bu…