This is a story about how this girl introduced me to Prince and in turn, how Prince taught me how to have sex.
When I was young, I met with him daily, and he repeated the same lessons to me—over and over until I wore out the tape, until I understood what he was saying. We were almost always alone. I hadn’t yet gone through puberty, but I already knew certain things were taboo and sacred. Even as children we learn which secrets are safe to share, and which ones we take to the grave. What Prince and I were doing wasn’t the kind of thing to be shared lightly.
I met him through my first love. In another era I'd say her name here in full, First Name Last Name, because that's how we do when we recount life-changing events of our youth. But in this era of deep Googability and Facebook connectivity—and particularly when you're talking about a guy who once went by an unpronounceable symbol—the idea of a name seems both too much and not enough. First Name Last Name was my very first crush, one that started when I was younger than 10 and lasted years, all the way through high school. She's also the one who introduced me to Prince—not the man himself, but his magic. And, to this day, I can't think about her without thinking about Prince; and I can't think about Prince without thinking about her.
I'm not good with dates—not in my personal life. I'm better with album dates, so I can recall how old I was when Purple Rain came out in 1984, and I'm guessing that it was a year or two later that First Name Last Name introduced me to Prince—and to the mind-shattering revelation that women found pleasure in sex. Mind you, we were both preteens and had pretty much no working knowledge of how sex was supposed to go, much less feel. But First Name Last Name, being a woman in training, obviously knew infinitely more about it than I did. Boys may be more exposed to sex than girls, but we were likely taught everything we know about sex by men and other boys who know nothing about women and girls. Prince is the exception to this rule. Regardless of what his biographies say, I was (and remain) convinced that Prince was raised by ascended master goddesses, not mortals.
When First Name Last Name played "Darling Nikki" for me, she changed my world, redefined my understanding of sex and sexuality and even gender fluidity. It was like giving cheat codes for seduction to someone still tongue-kissing with training wheels on, like breaking down allegory for someone who was still mixing metaphors.
I can't properly recall the context and the circumstances—it comes in feelings and colors. Waves of purple moving in circles, always grinding. It's mystical and it feels like calculated manipulation that originates somewhere primal. Grinding. Always grinding in a primordial way and… wait, "What's grind?"
I got an eye-roll from First Name Last Name and her then-bestie when I asked this. Grinding was what Nikki did when the lights went out, what she said Prince should call her for whenever he liked. Prince didn't just quote the note she left for him on the stairs, though; his tone in recalling it was something between a moan and a sigh, a cry and a yell. "Call me up whenever you wanna grind." This was all new to me. Was this rock ‘n’ roll? Was this music? Is this allowed? Of course, I didn't verbalize my lack of experience. Or maybe I did when I asked, "What's grind?"
"You know, grind…" First Name and bestie duh'd. Bestie mimicked a poking motion with her fingers, but First Name did a little motion with her hips that went side to side and back and forth, rotating in circles. She was grinding and my head exploded.
From that day, I listened to Purple Rain religiously, but "Darling Nikki" most of all. It was weird and Prince was scary. He wasn't masculine in the ways that the culture was telling us was masculine. Sure, Boy George was expanding how we thought about gender, but I was years away from knowing that Boy George was actually a boy. Prince wore tight clothes and leather in ways that was different from how Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five did. Prince was extra. He wore makeup. But he obviously knew more about women than I would ever live to forget.
First off, he knew about this mysterious grind thing—which, in my Caribbean milieu was something done with clothes on. When the clothes came off, it was all thrust—or so I had assumed from my extremely limited exposure to sex at that point. This idea of actually moving and not just humping was foreign. I didn't understand, but I got it. There was something about Prince's music, the way the grooves sounded like sex at a time when nothing sounded like sex. Smokey Robinson had introduced the concept of the quiet stormnearly a decade before, so there was this idea of what love sounded like—but not sex. Prince was all sex—even when he wasn't—and it was a wet heat that was androgynous and pluralistic and incredibly unselfish.
There was also this idea of masturbation in "Darling Nikki,” which furthered the notion that women were sexual beings and actually capable of enjoying sex, as opposed to being a repository for male desires. Nikki had full agency—she was freaky but she wasn't a freak; she was a male fantasy, but one that also had her own life outside of our gaze.
Prince introduced the ideas of sexual feminism and femininity to me, to a generation of men, to culture. We we were being sold romance and dedication in R&B. Hip-hop was the hardest of the hards—rappers were not even making love songs on a regular basis. But there was Prince, saying things taboo and sharing keys to the secret kingdom willy-nilly. “Beautiful Ones” was about ownership with permission. “Do Me Baby” was a song of lust that men and women could sing with equal abandon. “Adore” was devoted sex music, but also breakup sex music, one-night-stand music, and escapist sex music. It was just about good sex, in a way that transcended the physical act of sex to the point where lies sounded true.
For so many of us, our proximity to Prince and how much we retained of his ideas determined whether or not we would grow up to be feminists, players, and/or womanizers in a very basic way. With his music and his message, he opened doors to gender fluidity, but more so he elevated the pop culture conversation about carnality and explicitness to being about something more than just pieces of meat slapping against one another. What we did with that knowledge was, and remains, up to us.
For the past handful of days, we've all been talking about Prince. He's been impossible to escape and there's always going to be someone with a better and cooler Prince story. "Are you a Prince fan?" people ask, with the question really being, "How big of a fan are you?" I don't know. I've never travelled miles and miles just to see him live; never was in a club when he popped up at 2 a.m. and jammed for hours. All I know is he took my virginity and taught me about sex. He was my first love. And I only ever refer to him by his first name.
Find more on Prince and his legacy here.