From Five Paintings, a portfolio by Olivier Mosset that appeared in The Paris Review issue no. 44 (Fall 1968).
Popop, who came home to raise me after his release from Holmesburg Prison in ’88, would have never let a white man in a white coat lay a hand on the D, let alone the vas deferens, had he the context to differentiate between the two. He never mentioned any experiments either. If he had, he wouldn’t have seen the wanton use of his body as some epic reveal of treachery but another quotidian instance he might describe by way of an exasperated sigh, shrug, or “Duh, dickhead” hurled at some scholar with the “real” details, or social reformer come to reimagine us in their image, to correct our supposedly devious sexual habits before it was too late, which often meant well before our twelfth birthdays. Given the early onset encroachments of power, that old black adage on suspicion and physicians was never an abstraction at home.
I got snipped anyway.
And I was late, by any reasonable measure, thirty-two with too many kids climbing up my leg, three boys and one girl whose temperaments have long since broken and rebuilt me in their images, the first of whom arrived too soon after his mother stopped taking birth control and forgot to tell me. And I’ve never met people more averse to independent play. Shouts of “Daddy!” and “Dada!” puncture my every attempt to think, coming on as tickles or itty-bitty terrors between each typed word, and so I write this from two worlds at once, where promises of the near future—the local pool or doggie park, Rita’s Water Ice, the school track, the bike trail, or playing Diablo and Super Smash Bros.—defang the demands on my attention for ten or so minutes at a time. The interstices allow collective laughter over new word enunciations—a six-year-old’s “feastidious,” or a question of the utmost importance: Who taught the twins to say “Fresh to def?” My daughter, twelve, takes credit, and my oldest son, two years her senior, is above it all until we remind him how the ticklish remain so, even chin hair deep into puberty. It’s there, between the laughter and all my pleading—“Stop, no, don’t” and “Put that dog down!” and “Stop chokin each other!”—that I give myself over to thought, which is writing, and in this case or every case, correlated with what the children mean to me, and what I might mean to them, and what it meant to ensure that I might conceive children nevermore.
The doctor was quite brown, if that counts for anything in this context, and not one of those people whose entire personality is dedicated to the hatred of children, who seem to be multiplying on every blunt “side” of the political spectrum. Gentler than most lovers, he cupped my testicles and said that everything would be all right. And in this man’s supple embrace I drifted off into a blissful nondream of future agency.
My homie Drake—no, not the former child actor with the slimthick sandworm sex tape, but a real person—had already sworn by it as a matter of ideal if not yet action, watching and waiting for some of us to go first before sliding into the VA hospital with his trademark gusto. In his episode of Hot & Single last year, it was the second bullet point on a little red billboard advocating his potential fuckability:
- Fashion photographer
- Has a vasectomy
- Thinks liking art is a personality
This was much like when we all joined the army in our teens, unable to afford rent, or love—despite whatever J.Lo might have said in 2001—and made another friend go first. It was Bruce that time, exchanging three or so horrible jobs for one in which you might support the empire less obliquely or lose your life, but be fully clothed and have a place to live, groceries for your mom and them, who damn sure weren’t gonna be fed otherwise. None of us had any children yet, though we certainly longed for a kind of family we almost didn’t have.
Drake and I were deployed to Baghdad together and, let him tell it, he always knew better than you that he didn’t want no kids. The threat of possibility cast a limit on pleasure itself. Way back when, a broader contingent of us stacked contraceptives like Jenga pieces, unable to decouple desire from fear. It was always about whose lover had an IUD or who was on the Pill, driving to Rite Aid at 2 A.M. for condoms and VCF or calling your homeboy to call your other homegirl to call yalls coworker who always had a Mason jar full of Plan B underneath their too-low-to-the-ground mattress. But here’s the thing: despite all the contrivances and risk, the discourse around responsibility and desire, the distance we were trying to gain on our forebears in one way or another, getting a vasectomy never really appeared to us as a serious option. It ranked far below the risk of pulling out—especially when your lover, let alone SZA, might beg you not to.
And so there we were, most of us without health insurance, hardly ever visiting a doctor for any reason, unless it was to get tested for STIs or the irrefutable breakage of bones or the murkier disintegration of our psyches, all of which happened more often than anyone admitted. But I think the deeper tragedy was that most of us feared a forthcoming decrease in our selectability above all else; we wanted, as my friend Aisha might say, to get chosen. We’d yet to truly accept the fact that our virility was a mode of appeal, especially to straight women of a certain age; we dreaded a trip to the discard pile via the “Want children” field on Hinge. This was a comically Darwinian program we were subject and subjecting ourselves to, with the help of this century’s quite ordinary loneliness. Before and after my decision to get a vasectomy in 2021, I had friends, usually older women, sit me down in earnest, my eyes bleary from late nights and stress with the children I already have and ask, “Are you sure?” or “What if you fall in love with someone who really wants kids?”
My other homie Clarence, who joined the army after he’d seen us do it, sprinted to the nearest urologist in exhaustion right after his daughter was born, despite our jubilation that little Maddie had squeezed through at the eleventh hour before that permanent shutdown. Though “shutdown” is a misnomer: everybody knows you still cum, and, anecdotally, it appears to be more pleasurable, having separated the wheat from the chaff altogether. The day after his procedure Clarence whispered me upstairs giddy with conspiracy, before turning the light on and unsheathing his two tall, dark, and handsome testicles. They were swollen and gleaming a little, but smooth, with just the smallest spatter of blood beneath a wad of gauze. He declined my offer to change his dressings, but the dick was still intact, dapper and healthy as always; it was hard to imagine better results. I think my own decision was made then, at the top of Clarence’s stairs, the light refracting off his nuts like some otherwise unfathomable North Star to sexual freedom.
Being close to other black men who’d done it made the difference. From junior high to circumscribed fatherhood, in shop class and out waiting tables, on the court and in and out of court, we’d always talked openly about manhood and fatherhood and race without having to entertain the boring mandate that some woman be the antagonist; we could touch and say we loved each other, and chastise one another for our dishonest interactions with lovers; but we could also wail on the regular about our lack of say after an accidental pregnancy, or sob our sorry asses home from being made a boy at family court over the years. We didn’t play zero-sum games or belittle one another for public sentiment, all of which fostered a rare honesty I found nowhere else, especially after I finally entered college and obtained the knowledge and health insurance that might have better supported the thing we call choice.
After the procedure, I did and didn’t wonder why more men who enjoy sex with women but don’t want children refuse any concrete gesture upon the scrotum. It was Damon who summed up the shared trepidation of niggas the world over: “I just ain’t tryna take no chances down there,” he said, which is hard to label unreasonable, with history in mind. This is after our grandmothers and mothers, their friends and sisters, and daughters and friends had been made mules of the world, toward the inception and maintenance of—despite enduring exclusion from—this thing we call modern medicine. It is after the heyday of U.S. eugenics programs, which sterilized mostly black and Latino and poor folks. And it is after the natal alienation, systematic rape, and forced reproduction of an entire genre of reinvented people was used to construct both this country and an altogether profitable new trajectory for “deviance.”
So far be it for me to tell any black person that they should cast aside doubts about elective procedures. And, but, against that notion, the default position which offloads the kingship of contraception to your mom or girlfriend hasn’t quite worked out either. Reportage from lovers and friends is variously bad on birth control: the pain of switching out IUDs and the dislodgings; the disproportionate rate of ovarian cysts on hormones; the irregular bleeding, weight gain, libido and lovers lost, and God forbid going back to the hospital for tubal ligation. Standing over me as I write this, and trying (sort of) to keep our twins from jumping on me, Jess tells me for the first time that she got her tubes tied in that two-for-one C-section deal after her new baby with the new dude. And while my friend Kaina asked them to “just take the whole apparatus out” (the doc refused), my sister, who refuses birth control of any kind—because of how it ravaged her body—considers such an operation a fate too close to death; only a few years have passed since my aunt Suzie had her sixth kid and never left the hospital.
It’s maybe a little obvious that the risk of vasectomies is not comparable to pregnancy, or the labors that women endure staving it off. And whatever we might think about the specific pathological imprint of black men and boys—which in the public imagination is essentially limited to our genitals and “leadership potential” (whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean)—one would be hard-pressed to call us the prime architects of dubious family planning in this country. The hegemonic sense that we are all lazy superpredators packing the “last taboo” in our gray sweatpants, that perhaps we are also too well loved, or loathed as transparent subjects, or that goofy aphorisms like “black-on-black crime” represent true phenomena, really gets in the way of saying, feeling, thinking, or doing much of what makes being alive worthwhile, which certainly includes fucking , or else the thrill of responding to the desires of others with your own in equal measure, if, when, and however two or more grown and consenting and hopefully nasty-ass people feel like it. But this is all one small part of the larger problem we have where sex meets anything. Among the many issues that stem from our relation to, yet inability to wholly inhabit white patriarchal norms, we’re only now beginning to think of black men as potential parents. I’ve never been treated worse than when I begged the courts for joint custody.
Perhaps this is worth saying too: vasectomies won’t prevent STIs or normalize talking about them openly, but neither does all that pulling out; they won’t fix your relationship, but neither will that new baby; and they’re not some heroic sacrifice or inoculation against the post-Roe apocalypse. And facts: I think getting cut even this late in life has been just one node toward accessing greater pleasure, uncoupled from the anxieties of accidental genomic narcissism. The space made real by eliminating this fear has only clarified my desires in sex and life, including the energies dedicated to loved ones already living, like my friends and their kids, my kids and their friends: little Eva and Imani down the street; my own mother, whom I now care for; Jess’s new cute little angry baby by her new man; my sister’s high-needs son and little Lala, the smoothest baby to ever waddle across the earth; Tasia’s Lily, and elf-eared Leon; Luke and Bruce’s half-dozen progeny, who don’t come around enough; my brother’s Aubree and brand new baby Glory; and of course sweet Maddie, who says “Uncle Joe” like I owe her money and dubbed one of our backyard ducks Mr. Quackers before he was eaten by the Fantastic Mr. Fox.
As a child in what I’ll call a hostile home and world system, to be polite, my fantasy life had been populated by a socialist collective of animals more tender than Orwell’s piggies, so I was unhappy, to say the least, that Mr. Fox decimated half our flock. No surprise then that after the primary sadness of my grandfather’s death last year, I not only went back to collecting and battling Pokémon on Nintendo Switch—and no, I’m not interested in letting the kids win—I also opened the backyard up to baby ducks and chickens, and two friendly, if loud, geese. I had the kids tend the yard with me and collect eggs, let them package the product into cartons to share with our friends and neighbors. As told by my partner, Panini, I have externalized a biological drive for life in such a way as to make it more respectable, albeit no less crazy or exhausting.
What I really want, perhaps, is a more collectively responsible way through our predicament and desires, some manner of speaking and doing honestly that feels good in relation to ourselves and the women in our lives, that is neither hypersaturated by fear and white supremacy, nor curtailed by the shallow dishonesties of public sentiment.
But who am I anyway, strolling through Target at eight this morning in a BABY DADDY T-shirt Jess got me two Father’s Days back, buying a thirty-six-pack of SKYN Elite condoms—could be large or regular, mind your business—and sexting back one of your friends about what she likes and where. Four kids too late, I’d like to say that getting a vasectomy was the best sexual decision I’ve ever made, and that you can love someone, many people, in fact, and not want any more of them at all.
Back when I got home from the hospital with this swollen lump between my legs, they were all waiting for me, though, those people who live in my house, having run the sitter ragged, reminding me that I’d promised to teach them how to skateboard. And so there I was, kick-pushing like Lupe out back as the little gremlins cheered me on, all of us cheesing for not-so-different reasons.
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of the memoir Sink and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.
