"The Bright African Son", 90 Day Fiancé realism, and r/passportbros.

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I’m very excited to direct you to click a link. Today I’m officially a Hobart femme-fatale: my story “The Bright African Son” is now online for your enjoyment. I’m aware that the title is cheeky and potentially off-putting, but I just can’t help it.

“The Bright African Son” is the first thing I wrote this year. I just arrived back to New York after binging seven episodes of 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way with my mom (one of the best shows ever put on television), and christened the New Year with Egger’s Nosferatu (hated it). So this is my Blacula story inspired by both of those pieces of media... but I have to say, the real impetus here was my longstanding obsession with “passport bros”.

Quick Passport Bro Primer

Passport bros, found mainly on r/passportbros, are men who encourage other men to get their passports so that they can date foreign women, often women in precarious financial situations, often women much younger, and often women with “traditional morals”. So, basically, gamified sex-tourism. They’re fun to make fun of because they’re stupid and generally extremely misogynist. They tend to have the view that western women are too obsessed with money (haha), but foreign women are… not interested in the power of the American dollar… sure. Just general cognitive dissonance. Again, funny. And honestly not all that interesting.

A… sponsored ad?

What interested me about the passport bro “movement” was that in it’s initial conception, it was entirely targeted towards black men. There was a lot of advice floating around in the black “manisphere” to go to Africa, find a good woman, and marry her. (This advice has since been tweaked to never bring a woman back to the USA, as she’ll be tainted by western culture). I just found that very striking. Who here is really being tainted by western culture in this scenario? To me this was all the bad shit that the west is known for: conquest, imperialism. To be totally straight up I am a believer that America is a sick country with parasitic impulses that can psychically trick you into becoming evil. I believe these Passport Bros are and were imperfect-victims of that brainwashing. So I wrote “The Bright African Son” to ruminate in that sickness.

I have some new friends here.

This newsletter has grown exponentially over the last month. I am so incredibly grateful and shocked that so many of you connected with “Cold Hard Sex”. I wrote it in a “zen” state at the Korean Spa a week or so after writing “The Bright African Son”. To fact check that I looked through my journal. This entry made me laugh because you can tell I hate myself on a fundamental level.

My real journal.

Thank you again! If there’s anything YOU would like to say you could say it here, or you could DM me, or we could grab coffee (you pay).