‘Dark and Tender’ Examines the Lack of Platonic Touch Amongst Black Men

A group of mostly middle-aged Black men are gathered inside the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island. Their task? To tuck each other in. Carefully, the men take turns being the tuck-ee and then the tucker, gingerly making each other into blanket burritos on the floor. It’s an exercise in vulnerability, trust, and — most important for them — platonic touch.

The scene is one of many vulnerable moments depicted in Dark and Tender, a short documentary film playing at The Beacon Cinema on Thursday, Nov. 7. Directed by Aaron Johnson and produced by Color of Sound and Ben Wilson, the short focuses on Johnson’s efforts with his Chronically UnderTouched (CUT Project) to dispel the “Black brute” stereotypes ingrained within our culture and open Black men up to platonic touch and tenderness. Specifically, it focuses on a weekend retreat featuring 10 Black men, who all share their “touch stories” and break down negative self-perception, replacing roughness with care.

There’s been much talk of a so-called “male loneliness epidemic” in the past several years. Studies have found that men are extremely disconnected from society and platonic relationships, which profoundly impacts their mental health. For Black men, that isolation is twofold. Society often sees and depicts Black men as inherently aggressive or violent, a stereotype often referred to as the “Black brute” — a danger to himself, women, and the world. Not seeing any resources to specifically address that problem, Johnson started the CUT Project as a means of building resources for Black men looking to undo the harm caused by society and self-policing.

“I started actually doing the practice [of platonic touch] myself first and then with others. I found that if I got some boxing gloves out and said, ‘Hey, I got 100 bucks, you knock that dude out.’ And these young men are at each other trying to knock each other out,” said Johnson. “For the same 100 bucks I say, ‘Hey, I want to sit down. I want you to listen to each other and hold hands for five minutes.’  And I get interrogated like, ‘Why do you want to hold hands?’”

He continued: “We know how to fight each other. That, to me, is a result of how our bodies have been colonized for violence toward each other. And so for me, that's when I realized that platonic touch can be a living, breathing interruption of how we were presented or how we were conditioned to react to each other.”

Johnson defines the state of being chronically under-touched as not having had three minutes of thoughtful platonic touch in the last 12 months. In the documentary, the men go through an array of exercises to get them more familiar with platonic touch and intimacy — they hold hands and share feelings, hold one another’s heads, tuck each other in, sing together, walk outside barefoot. Johnson drew from practices that felt both childlike and nerve-wracking, nourishing and clarifying. The work is simple, but obviously very moving for the people involved. Throughout the film, the men share their own relationship to touch, trauma, and the effect this workshop had on them. For many, they see the project has a map to the future of care.

“My father, who's a Black man, struggled with substance abuse, specifically alcohol. He got into AA and stopped drinking but never really addressed the underlying mental health issues that he had experienced or found a model that fit for him,” said Ben Wilson, who served as both a producer and participant in Dark and Tender. “Today's mental health infrastructure doesn't really address the needs of Black men directly and, in a way, it sort of failed them. We're looking for new models to address that, and I think this is one of them.”

For the screening at The Beacon Cinema, Johnson will host an opening talk, Q&A, as well as a song circle with attendees. It’s a free screening with suggested donation — make sure to nab a ticket soon.