A Truer Image of Black Men
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. In the photograph “Snap Shot,” soft light elegantly caresses an anonymous standing figure in a sensual pose. The figure, who is nude, holds a camera in front of his genitals with the lens pointed at the viewer. The image is striking in its careful balance between strength and fragility: The subject takes the risk of being seen while disrupting the viewer’s otherwise voyeuristic gaze. In another photo, a man wearing a birdlike mask kneels and touches his head while his penis, painted gold, is accentuated by a glowing light. Both images were created by the photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and both were intended to celebrate and reclaim Black male sexuality in the 1980s. It was a time when renowned artists like Robert Mapplethorpe were building a narrative that fetishized Black men by reducing them to erotic objects devoid of individual identities, as noted by scholars like the feminist writer bell hooks. Instead, Rotimi Fani-Kayode placed Black men at the center of his images and presented them with emotional depth and a sensitive intimacy.
“I was used to seeing gay men in terms of popular culture, but they were always white gay men, while Black men were always seen in terms of fear and threat,” the British photographer Ajamu X said in an interview. When he first saw Fani-Kayode’s work, he added: “I was blown away. He opened a portal, and I stepped through it.” Fani-Kayode’s artistry was layered, based on his Yoruba culture, his displacement from his homeland, Nigeria, and his queerness; his work was infused with sexuality, race and rebellion. By intertwining these elements, he asserted the joyful, playful and mutually enriching coexistence of both queer and African identities — two forces that were often considered incompatible. He explained his approach in a 1988 essay, “Rage & Desire”: “On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality, in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation and in the sense of not having become the sort of married professional my parents might have hoped for.”
He was born Oluwarotimi Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode on April 20, 1955, in Lagos. His father, Victor Remilekun Fani-Kayode, was the high priest of Ife, a nearby city of ancestral importance in Yoruba culture. He was also a prominent politician: He played a key role in arguing for Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960 and became deputy prime minister of the country’s Western Region in 1964. On Jan. 15, 1966, soldiers stormed into the family’s home at nightfall and ransacked it. They were part of the first of many coups in which young military officers would violently overthrow Nigeria’s democratic government as a means, in their view, of rooting out corruption. “We were hidden in the wardrobe, and when the soldiers came, they wanted to shoot bullets into the wardrobe,” Fani-Kayode’s younger brother, Femi, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC. Their mother, Adia Adunni Fani-Kayode, begged the soldiers to hold their fire. But they took her husband captive and detained him at an army barracks for six months. Rotimi, as he was called, was just 10 years old. Once the elder Fani-Kayode was released, the family fled to the United Kingdom, where he had connections. They settled in Brighton, in the south of England, where Rotimi and his siblings attended elite schools. Rotimi Fani-Kayode moved to the United States in 1976 and graduated from Georgetown University in 1980 with a degree in economics and fine art. He then earned an M.A. at Pratt Institute in New York and trained under Mapplethorpe during his time in the city. He also discovered in the city a Black gay community in which he could express his sexuality. (He nods to that community in the dedication of his first monograph, “Black Male/White Male,” published in 1987.)
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