Uncluttering Black Gay Dating: The Space Between "Jaded" and "Ready"
- Neal Burks
- May 2
- 2 min read
Listen to the podcast or the summary below...
A couple weeks ago, Fertile Ground continued its Relating & Dating: Beyond the Hookup series with the second installment, The Readiness Reset: The Mindset Makeover, featuring author, speaker, pastor, and BET producer Kevin E. Taylor.
What unfolded was a warm, candid, and deeply engaging evening of conversation about dating, guardedness, hope, and what it really takes to become ready for love. If the first salon named the landscape, this one went deeper — into the tiredness, clutter, fear, over-functioning, and guardedness that can make Black gay men long for love and brace against it at the same time.
Part living-room conversation, part challenge, part testimony, the evening moved through some of the questions sitting just beneath the surface: I’m tired. I’m not really available. I know how to perform strength better than I know how to receive love. Kevin spoke about “uncluttering” not as self-help jargon, but as the work of clearing what has piled up — old roles, old wounds, old performances, old obligations, and the stories we tell ourselves about why we are still stuck. And when the discussion turned toward “coming out,” the deeper invitation became something else: coming in — into yourself, into your own truth, and into relationships with more honesty, more visibility, and more room for tenderness.
By the end of the night, nobody was ready to be done. Time was winding down, trains had to be caught, and the conversation had to be cut off before the gathering had exhausted the subject. Maybe that was fitting. This salon did not close the book; it cracked it open wider. What lingered in the air was not just the ache of the questions, but the appetite for more of them — especially the big one Neal left the gathering with: What does mature hope in Black gay dating look like — hope that is honest and not naïve?
The feeling in the space was clear: the brothers wanted to keep going, and this discussion still has more to give.
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