I was nine, wandering through a JCPenny with my mother, when my stomach dropped upon the sight of row after row of decollated white bodies in tight black briefs. By the time she reached out to pull me away, I had already been seized—taken to a place where my black body was the brief that hugged the waist of faceless white men, accessorized by muscles in all the right places. Months later, the bodies gained faces: Leonardo from Romeo + Juliet, Ryan from Cruel Intentions, Brad from Fight Club.

I can place the exact moment when white bodies colonized my subconscious, and when blue-eyed men with sun-kissed arms began to hold my desires upon their shoulders like Atlas.

With each new white body I fell for, I distanced myself a bit more from the body I saw in the mirror each morning, bodies that looked like mine in my home and in the halls of my school. The latter proved easy enough, given I was one of the only people of color at my private school in southwestern Virginia—a school founded in 1968, it bears mentioning, the same year the Supreme Court ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional.

The students were nothing if not pretentious; I was introduced to Christopher Marlowe before I was introduced to Harper Lee. It was here where I learned to see my yearning for Leonardo, Ryan, and Brad as obvious, even cliché, compared to the arcane (and egregiously white) cultural references my overeducated and spoiled peers preferred. Did I not also hold a spark for the Louis from The Dreamers? Joseph from Mysterious Skin? What about Paul from Dogville?

But I soon began to discover that my desires could be linked to a valuable type of social capital. And to find my way socially and academically, I became rich in white culture, while it, in turn, seemed to enrich me. I began to devour books, plays and movies to impress my peers, the more obscure the better; in doing so, I found that the world began to imbue me with the same weight and worth with which I had imbued white culture and bodies.