PROTECTORS OF THE LIMINAL

This fourth essay follows the inquiry raised in previous essays—where we began to unpack how distorted frameworks around intimacy, complexity, spiritual patterns, and false safety interfere with relational clarity. This essay will explore the same themes an expand on queerness as a technology and cultural memory code.

Indigenous technologies recognize queer and trans people as spiritual mediators—guardians of the liminal. So when masculinity positions itself in opposition, it creates a cosmic malfunction. A breakdown that fractures our collective transmutation. This isn’t just social dysfunction—it’s spiritual betrayal.

In the quest to feel “safe” in a world built to annihilate Black existence, many adopt a WASP patriarchal form of domination—what some call the oppression Olympics. But within African cosmologies, queerness and transness are not deviant. They are sacred. To be transphobic or homophobic is to violate spiritual law.

This betrayal doesn’t just show up in politics or pulpits—it shows up in bedrooms, in barbershops, salons, and in every place love should live.

DL culture is a prime example. Scorned queer participants may mock unions—some for entertainment, others genuinely seeking affection. But being someone’s secret is not love. It’s extraction. DL dynamics mirror state secrecy: surveillance, disassociation, and emotional disposability. They thrive on demeaning Black male sexuality, compartmentalization, not communion. And too often, queer folks are expected to accept invisibility as intimacy.

Our romantic dynamics begin to mimic state behavior: ownership, threat assessment, punishment. Another manifestation? Boundary-testing. Seeing how far you can push past someone’s limits as a way to assert control. It’s a performance of loyalty that’s really just emotional dependency on someone’s downfall. Their glow becomes your threat. Their growth becomes your trigger.

The Culture still doesn’t recognize how violence against queer and trans people becomes a spiritual weapon used to further infiltrate and destabilize our communities. Queer and transness are wrongly blamed for CSA (childhood sexual assault), when the real danger is the MAPS disconnect—our collective refusal to face, prevent, and heal the harm of minor-attracted persons. Not us.

When queerness is erased from origin stories, when transness is treated as an interruption instead of a key, the whole system glitches. The ancestral line bends—but it doesn’t break. We still hold the charge. We still guard the gate.

There is a deception cloaked in devotion—ritual unions that call themselves divine while siphoning the sacred fire of another. In these distorted trinities, the so-called “divine pair” does not stand in mutual power, but leans on the energy of a third—often a femme, queer, or liminal being whose essence is decolonial, radiant, and in bloom. Not an oracle they consult, but an altar they feed from. They mirror the magic, echo the language, and weave the original frequency into a performance of oneness that was never theirs to hold.

This is not holy union. It is theft.

The third flame is not for your burn of replenishment. Meaning: the life force and vibrancy of an external flame is not yours to unethically patch your flickering bond, to spark false renewal where honesty and transformation are missing. Often, this siphoning appears in unions where the original spark is gone—where dynamics are maintained not from growth, but from fear of collapse.

And here’s where the dysfunction starts: at the inception of interest. When people attempt to access another through indirect means—sideways glances, spiritual flattery, coded compliments—it reveals a lack. A lack of confidence. A fear of rejection. But also a manipulative tactic: to see if someone will consent to intimacy without being engaged directly. That is not vulnerability. That is not sacred pursuit. It is energetic fishing. A hunger that won’t name itself but still expects to be fed.

This siphoning is a form of unethical sadism, masked as mysticism. It is a demonic pledge, anchored in the same spirit that normalizes sneaky links, side-chicks, and careless non-monogamy as cultural norms. These dynamics are not freedom—they are ritual reenactments of colonial extraction, inscribed into Black love to preserve hierarchy, consumption, and confusion.

When so-called conscious couples build their bond by mining a third’s magic, they are not ascending—they are reenacting WASP essence.

In The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships, Sobonfu Somé writes that maintaining a healthy union requires community and elders to consult. These days, we don’t have that. So the desire for guidance often becomes misplaced—or warped by entitlement.

We lack rituals for auditing behavioral dysfunction. We lack shared frameworks for navigating compatibility. We lack sacred methods for exiting with grace.

Everything has been replaced with entitlement, possession, and force. Where love was meant to be freeing, it is now glamorized captivity.

Queer folks also hold deep critiques of mainstream overindulgence in queerness—not for celebration’s sake, but for aesthetic extraction. Our mannerisms, language, and lifeways are often treated like drag for relevance, used to signal coolness, virality, or access to communities we were born to protect. What appears as visibility is often infiltration. These aren’t just pop trends—they’re rituals stripped of meaning and repackaged for clout.

Our sacred codes—born from survival, ritual, and deep cosmological memory—are constantly co-opted by performance artists and social media personalities who mimic our vibration without carrying its burden. They wear queerness without embodying its cost. And more often than not, they become the first point of “exposure” for the broader Black community—shaping how queerness is tolerated or rejected.

And here's the deeper cut: without culturally relevant sexuality and relationship education, our people don’t know how to be in community with us. Because if your first introduction to queerness is filtered through spectacle, non-consensual same-sex harm, performance, or parody, then of course it’s misunderstood.

Visibility becomes the scapegoat for harm. We get labeled “dangerous for the children,” “the cause of feminized boys,” “a threat to the culture.” But what’s really happening is this: the rites of passage are missing. The training is gone. The cultural context has been replaced by algorithm. We’re raising generations through digital simulation instead of embodied wisdom. And that disconnect is the real danger—not us.

We are not your aesthetic.

We are not your phase.

We are not your scapegoat, your signal, or your shadow.

We are keepers of codes you were never meant to mimic—only honor.

Return what you’ve stolen. And if you want to belong here, begin with reverence.

Not replication.

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• In the Dominican Republic, intersex children known as guevedoces (“penis at twelve”) are recognized as having sacred shifts in embodiment, defying colonial binaries of gender.
• Among many Native North American tribes, Two-Spirit individuals held revered roles as healers, mediators, and ceremonial leaders—embodying both masculine, feminine, and enby energies as sacred.
• Within Yoruba cosmology, the Orisha Èṣù (Elegua) governs crossroads and liminal space—genderfluid and vital for communication between worlds, often misunderstood by colonial Christianity.
• In pre-colonial Dahomey (Benin), the Agojie women warriors and spiritual roles beyond the gender binary affirmed a spectrum of sacred embodiment.
• In Southern African sangoma traditions, particularly among the Xhosa, it is understood that after initiation, the healer may receive a same-sex spiritual counterpart. As shared by a community member Thando, a Xhosa sangoma initiated Itola. Thank you Thando for sharing your culture and tribal heritage with me. This offering strengthens the sangoma’s sensual intelligence, intuition, and energetic protection. Queer companionship, in this tradition, is not deviation—it is divine technology.