Desire Doesn't Always Have a Label. That's the Point. SRS Velvet

It wouldn't be me if I didn't start by saying something that might ruffle a few feathers. However, I'll also settle a few nerves at the same time. You do not have to have a label for everything you feel.

I know. We live in a world that loves a category. A box. A clearly defined thing to point at and say that is what I am. And there is nothing wrong with that when a label fits, feels right, and gives you a sense of home inside yourself. Labels can be liberating. They can hand you a community, a language, and a mirror all at once.

But desire? Desire has never really cared about our organizational systems. It shows up when it wants, for who it wants, in ways that do not always make neat sense on a spreadsheet. And a lot of people are walking around confused, ashamed, or silently questioning themselves because what they feel does not fit cleanly into the options they were given.

This one is for those people. And honestly, it is for all of us.

Here is something worth sitting with. Most of us were handed a very limited script when it came to desire. Straight. Gay. Pick one. Stay there. Do not look around. The idea that attraction, desire, and identity could exist on a spectrum, could shift, could hold complexity, could be honest without being a declaration, was not exactly in the curriculum. Not in our schools. Definitely not in our churches. And in many Black households, the conversation around sexuality beyond the heterosexual standard was either absent, coded, or handled, with a level of silence that made the message very clear without anyone having to say a word.

We absorbed it. Most of us stayed quiet. Some of us performed certainty we did not feel. And some of us are still, right now, carrying questions we have never said out loud to a single person because we were never given permission to even ask them.

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Desire does not wait for you to figure out what to call it. It just shows up and asks you what you are going to do with it. ~Velvet Lenae

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Pride Month gets a lot of celebration and a lot of noise, rightfully so. But I want to use this space to go a little deeper than the rainbow flags and the visibility, as beautiful and necessary as both are. I want to talk about the people who are not sure where they fit in that landscape. The ones who feel something but cannot name it. The ones who love who they love and have not decided whether it requires an announcement. The ones who are somewhere in the middle of figuring it out and feel too old, too Black, too religious, too something to be in this conversation at all.

You belong in this conversation. Full stop.

Sexual fluidity is real. The idea that attraction can be more flexible than fixed, that desire can evolve over time or exist on a spectrum rather than at a hard point, is not a trend or a phase or a sign of confusion. It is just how some people are wired. Research has been pointing in this direction for decades. Our lived experiences have been pointing there even longer. We just were not always allowed to say it out loud.

And in the Black community specifically, this conversation carries extra weight. There is the church. There is the family. There is respectability. There is the very real fear of rejection from community that has been a lifeline in every other way. Coming into your full self when you are worried about losing your people is not a small thing. I am not going to pretend it is. That tension is real and it deserves to be acknowledged, not glossed over with a feel good punchline.

But here is what I also know. The silence around desire does not protect anyone. It just keeps people performing a version of themselves that was never fully true. And performance is exhausting. Ask me how I know. Actually, do not. I laid it all out there last month.

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Sweet is giving yourself permission to feel what you feel without immediately needing to explain it to anyone. Raw is the honest, sometimes uncomfortable truth that desire is more layered than the boxes we were handed. Sticky is what happens when you stop performing certainty and start living in the truth of who you actually are. That kind of authenticity tends to linger. In the best way.

SRS | Sweet • Raw • Sticky™

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So what do you do if you are somewhere in the middle of all of this? You start by giving yourself some grace. You are not broken. You are not confused in a way that needs fixing. You are a human being whose inner life is rich enough to resist a single label and that is not a flaw. That is depth.

You talk to someone you trust if you can. You find community, online, in spaces like this one, in rooms where people are not going to flinch at your honesty. You stop waiting until you have everything figured out before you let yourself be seen. Nobody has it all figured out. The ones who look like they do, are just better at the performance. And we just talked about how tiring that is.

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Pride is celebrated this month. We are also celebrating desire, identity, community, and the ongoing, imperfect, deeply human work of knowing yourself.

You do not have to have a label. You just have to be honest. With yourself first. Everything else can follow at whatever pace you need.

You are allowed to be exactly where you are. And you are allowed to keep moving.

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Desire Doesn't Always Have a Label. And That's the Point.

Desire does not wait for you to figure out what to call it. It just shows up and asks you what you are going to do with it. ~Velvet Lenae

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