Can someone who knows more that me about African-American history help me with something? I have a question.
The other day, I saw a tiktok clip of a young, presumably queer Black woman that explained why she was of the opinion that calling yourself (or others) a "stud" could only be applied to Black butches because (she claimed) that enslavers referred to enslaved Black people in the way one would horse, with men being called studs and women being called stallions, and later (before women were legally allowed in the workforce) Black women would dress as men so they could work. And when White people got suspicious of the disguised women, the Black men would joke, "No, that's a stud right there." And so that developed into Black butches being referred to as studs within their own community. And so that young woman said "stud" can't rightly be used for anyone else because that's appropriation.
Now, I don't want to say that's not true, but there are a couple points that made me wonder if she misunderstood some things from whatever her sources are.
She said enslavers referred to enslaved Black women as stallions. But this supposedly happened when far more people were knowledgable about horses, so why would they call Black women stallions when 'stallion' is a term for a male horse just as 'stud' is? This couldn't have been a matter of mispeaking on her part, with her actually meaning to use 'mare', because she said that this is the very reason Megan Thee Stallion uses that as her stage-name.
I've heard 'stud' used in old-timey cartoons long before I heard of it used in queer communities to refer to Black butches. This could just be a matter of my general childhood ignorance, but I feel that if it was a matter of being exclusive to Black and queer communities, I wouldn't have learned of it from children-oriented public television.
Obviously, I don't know the timeline of when things came into common use, so maybe it's a matter of me just not knowing when the term got popularized. Someone please come educate me.