Author Byron Jamal on Sex, Sexual Liberation, and Healing

So, how can a hoe heal? We’ve all heard the term “hoe,” and we’ve all heard it used derogatorily to many a person in the context of relationships, love, and sex. But, in truth, what does it mean? Byron Jamal answers that question and offers advice for all hoes-at-large in his new book, How to Heal a Hoe.

OFM had the opportunity to sit down with Byron Jamal and dig deeper into his ideas of God, sexual liberation, the intended purpose of his book, and society as a whole.

On his past

So, tell me a little bit about who you are and why you decided to write this book.

I am a former pastor, an adopted child who has dealt with depression, suicide, molestation, and abuse, and I’ve taken my work and my story and really applied it in a way that breaks down societal norms and stigmas. My work now, as “The Love Guru” from a former pastor, is to help people merge their everyday life with their spiritual practice to help people connect inwardly which is self-love, upwardly, which is their connection to the divine or source and outwardly which is having healthy relationships … really finding balance and helping people curate balance amongst those three things so that they can live their best lives.

I went to Norfolk State, an HBCU, one of my favorite places (and got an) English degree there. I went to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Queens university for my MBA. I have worked on a lot of publications and was even the national communications chair for the National Urban League a few years back. It’s all come just to help everyday people really find the love that they deserve.

You mentioned dealing with stigmas. What are some of the most common things that you have experienced? Maybe not you personally, but one of the most common stigmas that people have been dealing with in your experience it as a helper?

When it comes to stigmas, especially in the LGBTQ community, we have this notion of masculinity and femininity and the stigma around how a person is supposed to act or is supposed to express themselves, and we end up putting limitations on people. One of the most challenging parts with that is we stop getting to know people because we assume we already do. That’s the most dangerous thing about a stigma or a belief in what someone is based on, what they look like, or how they dress. I think as a community, as a nation, we have gotten to a place where we just say, “This person looks like this, so they should think like this; they should believe like this; they should act like this; they should like these certain things,” and that’s just fundamentally not who we are as human beings.

You go by the name “The Love Guru.” Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?

Love Guru actually is not a term I gave clients because I’m a former pastor, and I still have some ways about me that are a little “churchy” and things like that. There was a client of mine who actually said, “Well I want to call you pastor, but since you won’t let me, I’m going to find something else to call you, and you know, you are, like, this love guru, so maybe I’ll just call you that,” and it just stuck. It was just appropriate in the sense that I am a religious person, which makes me different from a lot of other dating and relationship coaches. I really have a firm grasp on religion and spirituality as a part of my messaging because I know as much as we are relational beings we are spiritual beings.

So, I’m going to shift gears a little bit and talk about your time as a pastor how that experience was for you, being a part of the LGBTQ community, and how has that informed a lot of what you do now?

I’ve had two different experiences, one where I was completely closeted. I had a second experience when I was in divinity school, and I came completely out, and during that time, I actually was free in my sexuality, but I still wrestled with the notion of being in a religion that still preaches and practices even though there are some denominations that are more fluid with it and accepting for as a whole Christianity struggles with the conversation it struggles with conversations about sex in general which as sexual beings which is what we are. We were created with sexual organs that get pleasure from sex. I wrestle with the fact that we just say, “Don’t have sex until you’re married.”

So, for me, not being able to preach about real issues in the pulpit, that’s the main reason I left the church. And the pastoring was because I was able to have better one-on-ones in my office and really help people where they were, than what I was able to do preaching in a pulpit, because I was so constricted and constrained in my messaging and what I could actually address. So, because I feel like the church is normally a decade behind culture, I wanted to be relevant at all times, and I wanted to be able to adjust and adapt as our culture changes.

On the idea of God

You talk about this idea of God as a sexual being, and that’s a very novel idea. I’ve never heard that before. Can you just expand on that a little bit and tell me what kind of pushback you’ve faced within your community?

We are told in Genesis that we are made in God’s image and likeness, and when we look around in the world, most everything in creation has some form or reproduction, where it takes two different entities to make something and there is a form of that. There is even this notion that God breathed life into us, so there is life forming and merging. So, sex is the closest you can get to really merging with someone, outside of naked wrestling. And sex is really a form of intimacy when used correctly. We didn’t have to have any pleasure that derived from sex. Sex could be just another thing that you have to do, like scratching the back of your neck or yawning. But we actually get pleasure, and there’s purpose when there’s pleasure.

A part of our life is not just to have a life that you live but a life that you enjoy. So, anything that brings joy and invokes joy, we have to understand that that came from a divine source. God is sexual. God created us the way we are to enjoy sex, so it would be silly to say that God’s not sexual when it was in God’s mind to create us as sexual beings.

You talk about a sex script in the book, and a lot that resonated with me, but do you see any signs of that script changing as a culture, or do you think it’s still this static thing that hasn’t undergone much change since the before times?

I think it’s both, and right now, we’re at an interesting point in our nation’s history. We’re experiencing a form of sexual liberation through body positivity and people who are taking up their mantle of sexual freedom more seriously. But there is an entrenching and surrounding around traditional values that’s also happening at the same time.

People are simply afraid to have the conversations. I think it is just a lack of information. People don’t want to talk about what they don’t know, right? So, when people don’t have the information, they are quick to say no to it, and so the point of this book is to help with that revolution and helping people see that sex is not shameful and we can have the freedom of expression through sex and sexuality, and it can be a very helpful and positive addition to our everyday lives.

On culture and the self

What are the ways that you think that positivity can come through? It can be a very negative thing for people to be having sex when they are not in their mind in the proper way. What kinds of tips would you have for people that want that positivity to come through?

Part of starting that process to really loving yourself to where you can express your sexual side is first to understand that you’re a sexual being, and that’s a part of who you are. You don’t have to pray, but you’re still spiritual whether you do or not. You don’t have to have sex, but you are still sexual whether you do or not. It’s a part of who you are. Being able to express the fullness of yourself is something that connects back to you.

Self-love should be a major component of our everyday lives. I incorporate practices and meditation and breathing exercises in the book because a body that you don’t know, you won’t trust, and a body that you don’t love, you won’t trust. You have to learn to accept that you might not even be loving yourself fully, and that could be making it difficult to have conversations around sex.

You talk about the many uses of the word “hoe” in the book, How do you think the changing landscape of language—being that in the English language, one word could have 15 different meanings, and then 15 more in colloquial speaking—How do you think that those changes has affected the themes in the book  e.g.: self-love, people as sexual beings, and community?

When somebody asks me what is a “hoe,” I say, “A ‘hoe’ is someone who thinks they’re a hoe, who believes they’re a hoe. They’ve internalized it.” Grandma might say you’re a hoe because you went on too many dates in a week, or a month. You didn’t even have sex; you just went on too many dates. Some of your friends could think you’ve had sex with two random people in a year, and you’re not a hoe; and someone else could think you’re a hoe because you had a single one-night stand. I think that’s the power of words in our culture. We have to own the word, just like the N-word in the Black community. You have to own the word for it to mean something to you. In our culture, we get to make the word what it is, so I’m trying to bring back some hoe positivity, so we can take that word and transform it to be something that is transformational and educational.

What kinds of experiences should someone be having in order for hoeing to be a positive experience?

For hoeing to be positive, you first have to accept that you’re a sexual being, and you have to remove that idea that the act of sex itself is shameful. You have actual married people who, because of their faith, are taught that certain acts are shameful, even in their own marriage bed—things like toys and bondage. Those are just different forms of expression of the same thing. Somebody wears leather, and somebody wears lace, and somebody wears cotton. It’s just different forms of expression. A lot of people are being called hoes, and a lot of people need to reclaim it because being able to talk about sex openly, in public, with people, is still so taboo. Sex is one of the things that, fundamentally, outside of a laboratory, is the way that the world is able to reproduce. The world spins because of sex, and it’s surprising that we have made it something so shameful.

What do you hope people take away from this book, and what do you hope they apply to their own lives?

My biggest goal is to start conversations around sex, sexual stigma, and sexual trauma. I hope people are able to truly heal from what their moms said about them sexually, feeling shame the first time they masturbated, and really heal from some of the early things they didn’t even realize were traumatic. Someone shaming you because you masturbated is traumatic. That’s a horrible way to come into your sexual being and understanding and awareness. And we take that same trauma into all of our relationships and all of our sexual encounters. I really want the opportunity for people to read this book and do the actual healing and view sex as something that is beautiful and magical instead of something that is shameful and nasty.

On shame

Around the concept of sexual shaming, do you think that the queer community has a heightened sense of self-shame, or do you think that concept is generally the same within all communities?

I think the queer community has a unique issue, not just because a man or a woman who masturbates for the first time gets shamed for that. We’re talking about your entire sexual being, being shamed for who you are. That’s a level of trauma that’s heightened way beyond just being shamed for an act. So, we walk into this early on, already being traumatized by parents or guardians that told us that we were so wrong. Fortunately, there are some people who haven’t experienced that, but for those who did, like many of us, it can be so harmful and really create a dysfunctional relationship with sex, when we then go into our adult sexual lives.

People who are traumatized can often times cut out sex, and it’s unhealthy, or they over-sexualize it to try and master it without having the appropriate tools to make it healthy. That’s why a lot of times in our culture, when we talk about LGBTQ issues, sex is the first thing to come up. I love the expression (of sex), but I think it needs to be because it’s a healthy form of it, not because we are operating out of the trauma that we’ve encountered.

What would be the best way to avoid that shaming of other sexual beings? There are a lot of parents out there, a lot of queer parents, who as open as they might be, there’s still this visceral reaction to things that their children might do. What would be the best way to approach that?

Normalize it. Humanize it. Don’t make it something that’s like that thing that you do at special moments. You may never see a lion, but don’t make a lion out to be a unicorn. Don’t treat it as something that’s so odd and rare. People who are around lions all the time are just going to go, “Oh, that’s just a lion,” and so when we make sex like that, when you don’t make something a weird thing, then kids grow up and have a healthier appreciation for it.

Do you have anything else to add?

It’s really important for me that people understand they have to capacity to love themselves fully and unashamedly. When we love ourselves completely for who we are as spiritual beings, as natural beings, as sexual beings … then we experience the fullness of life. My goal is to enjoy their best lives long before they get to this supposed heaven. We can have a little heaven on Earth by living your life to the fullest.

How to Heal a Hoe can be found on Amazon.