IT'S no secret. Everybody knows the story of the Blacks and the birds and the bees. That story or, to be more precise, that myth--the myth of a never-never land of loveless love and nonstop sex, of hardhearted men and heartless women, the myth of a land of endless Catfish Rows where the living and the orgasms are easy--is one of the enduring fascinations of the American public. It has been debated in Congress. It has been discussed by Presidents. It has been annotated and analyzed by scholars.

Love, Oh love, Oh careless love.
The true story of Black love--love colored by, love warmed by, love Blackened by the Black experience-- For regardless of slavery, regardless of segregation, regardless of everything, Black men and women have created a modern love song in life and art that is the loveliest thing dreamed or sung this side of the seas.

Black love is a product of a particular history. It was born, not on the plantation, not in Harlem, but in Africa, where there were particular, non-European and stable marriage and mating patterns and where women in general and mothers in particular--"The land of the mother," DuBois said, "is and was Africa"--were not cursed by the peculiar sexual demons that seem to be the particular heritage of Europeans in general and Puritans in particular. The African cultures that yielded the African ancestors of African-Americans were dancing, giving, expressive cultures. Polygamy was sanctioned in these cultures, although in practice the poor, like the poor everywhere, generally contented themselves with monogamy.

History teaches us that people believe what they want to hear. Lies can sound so true when people are starving for truth. Even whole societies will feast on their promises . The Inquisition was based on the lie that some people could force other people to change their religious beliefs. American colonists believed the lie that people of one race had the right to own, buy and sell people of another race. More recently, hundreds of thousands of people believed Hitler's lie that the Jewish race should be eradicated. Most of us can hardly imagine that anyone could have believed these lies. And yet we swallow other lies all the time.

Our society is starving for intimacy. And many of the lies we believe in our culture have to do with our hunger for relationship. We want acceptance, loving relationships and deep intimacy, and yet we believe the lie that sex will satisfy our hunger. It's true that we are profoundly sexual beings, but it's time to examine some of the lies we feast on: the lie that premarital sex is one of our unalienable rights, the lie that sexual intercourse is the route to intimacy, and the lie that premarital abstinence is obsolete at best and repressive at worst. These are all lies.