Black Gay Man

Essays

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780814776803
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

At turns autobiographical, political, literary, erotic, and humorous, Black Gay Man will spoil our preconceived notions of not only what it means to be black, gay and male but also what it means to be a contemporary intellectual. Both a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the structures that allow for the production of that identity, Black Gay Man introduces the eloquent new voice of Robert Reid-Pharr in cultural criticism.

At once erudite and readable, the range of topics and positions taken up in Black Gay Man reflect the complexity of American life itself. Treating subjects as diverse as the Million Man March, interracial sex, anti-Semitism, turn of the century American intellectualism as well as literary and cultural figures ranging from Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde to W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, Black Gay Man is a bold and nuanced attempt to question prevailing ideas about community, desire, politics and culture. Moving beyond critique, Reid-Pharr also pronounces upon the promises of a new America. With the publication of Black Gay Man, Robert Reid-Pharr is sure to take his place as one of this country's most exciting and challenging left intellectuals.

GAY

IV Dinge

There is indeed a close interrelation between the predominant Western conception of manhood and that of racial (and species) domination. The notion, originally from myth and fable, is that the summit of masculinity—the “white hero”—achieves his manhood, first and foremost, by winning victory over the “dark beast” (or over the barbarian beasts of other—in some sense, “darker”—races, nations and social castes.)

—PAUL HOCH, White Hero, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism
and the Mask of Masculinity

If there is one thing that marks us as queer, a category that is somehow different, if not altogether distinct, from the heterosexual, then it is undoubtedly our relationships to the body, particularly the expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas, penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, arms, feet, stomachs, mouths and tongues in our expressions of not only intimacy, love, and lust but also and importantly shame, contempt, despair, and hate. Because it is impossible to forget that we hold a tangential relationship to what Michael Warner calls heteronormativity, we often are forced to become relatively self-aware about what we are doing when we fuck, suck, go down, go in, get on, go under. Even and especially when I encounter the nameless trick, even and especially when that tricking happens in the blank, barely penetrable atmosphere of the dark room, I am aware of the immense contradictions at play, the pleasure and the danger located at the end of his cock, pleasure and danger that are intimately linked and that work together to produce the electricity of the encounter. Essex Hemphill writes, “Now we think as we fuck. This nut might kill. This kiss could turn to stone.”¹

It is surprising, then, that so little within queer theory has been addressed to the question of how we inhabit our various bodies, especially how we fuck or, rather, what we think when we fuck. In the face of wildly impressive work on gay and lesbian history and historiography, gender roles and politics, queer literature and culture, we have been willing to let stand the most tired and hackneyed notions of what our sex actually means. If you believe the propaganda, it would seem that every time a fag or dyke fingers a vagina or asshole is a demonstration of queer love and community. The exceptions to this rule come almost invariably from what we might think of as the queer margins. Sadomasochistic practice and the debates surrounding it, particularly among lesbians, reminded us that dominance, submission, and violence, real or imagined, are often integral parts of queer sexual practice. The H.I.V./A.I.D.S. community helped focus our thinking about issues of risk, disease, and decay. Further, and more importantly for my purposes here, nearly two decades of writing and film making by people of color, and in particular the work of black gay men, has spoken to the experience of sex with whites, painting it at once as liberatory and repressive.

It is telling that cultural practitioners as distinct as Marlon Riggs, Isaac Julien, and Lyle Harris all found it necessary to identify themselves as snow queens, or some version thereof, in recent years. Indeed, the articulation of a persistent, if diffuse and diverse, black hunger for vanilla has been such a regular aspect of the various discussions of black subjectivities as to seem rather mundane. In 1853, William Wells Brown published the first Black American novel, Clotel, in which his near-white female protagonist is first seduced, then abandoned by a handsome young planter. Wallace Thurman continued the theme more than seventy years later as he explored the tension generated by thinly veiled interracial and homosexual desire in his Infants of the Spring, tension that is relieved for the white protagonist within the vaginas of several readily available black women and for the black in an ascetic devotion to his art.² In the fifties and sixties, Eldridge Cleaver, Piri Thomas, and Malcolm X all confessed their dalliances on the other side of the line, their moments in the sun. Indeed, black queers as diverse as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Samuel Delany, and Essex Hemphill have all paid considerable attention to the questions engendered when one “sleeps with the enemy.”

What is striking, given the tradition that I have just outlined, is the fact that so few white artists, critics, intellectuals of all stripes, male or female, lesbian or gay, have found it necessary to cover themselves in the mantle of dinge queen, rice queen, or what have you. The desire for black, brown, and yellow flesh remains largely unspoken within either academia, or even within popular publishing. Not since the mid-eighties and the release by Gay Sunshine Press of Black Men/White Men have I seen a sustained articulation of cross-racial desire by any white person, though the evidence from the personal ads, the 900 lines, and the porn magazines suggests that dark meat is in exceptionally high demand as we enter the new millennium.³

I am not attempting to further police queer sexuality, to suggest that cross-racial desire and fantasy is necessarily a bad or shameful thing. On the contrary, I am enough a product of the “liberal” seventies to imagine that when black dick meets white dick we all are one step closer to the beloved community. Still, the question remains, What do we think when we fuck? Why is it that we often find such sustained discussions of cross-racial desire among people of color, while whites remain largely silent? My attempt to answer this question turns largely on the work that is just beginning to emerge from a variety of scholars in which whiteness is named as a reality, or more accurately, as an ideological structure that stands not so much in contradistinction to blackness, or Latinoness, or Asianness, but in intimate relation to them. David Roediger opens his study of white ethnicity and class consciousness, The Wages of Whiteness, with a discussion of the highly overdetermined manner in which stereotypes of black bodies and desires affect white sexuality. Increasing numbers of critics, among them Alexander Saxton, Richard Dyer, Toni Morrison, and Eric Lott, are attempting to open up our understandings of white subjectivity to demonstrate how blackness is indeed the always already lurking in the netherworld of white consciousness.⁴ Significantly, each of these scholars has suggested that this reality, the blackness of whiteness, is denied precisely because whiteness itself has been rendered transparent. Whiteness seems incapable of recognizing itself until it is put under extreme pressure, until it is confronted with the hypervisibility of blackness. My contribution to these discussions is to argue that sexuality, no, let me say fucking, is one of the primary nodes at which this process of blackness into whiteness takes place. I contend, in fact, that the tendency to insist upon the innocence of our sex, the transparency of desire at the moment of penetration, is itself part of the complex ideological process by which whiteness is rendered invisible, unremarkable except in the presence of a spectacularized blackness.

At the Connection in Berlin, I am accosted by a drunk, white American expatriate. He badgers me and my companions: a six-foot-four, 225 pound dark-skinned psychologist and a small, light brown broker, complaining that he cannot attract the attention of the blond Aryan types that he desires because they are overly interested in us. I counter that just beyond our group there is a door that leads to a maze-like backroom in which dozens of men are literally begging to be taken by dark-haired, moderately developed, white thirty-five-year-olds. He persists, pointing to the German fascination with the exotic and the relative ease this affords blacks, particularly Black Americans, in the sexual economy. I remind him that I am from the suburbs and then tell a story about waiting for a bus in Alexanderplatz and people reaching out to touch my skin and hair, at first gingerly, discreetly, and then with passion, eventually forcing me to break away to the other side of the street. I tell him that a few days earlier an East German scared me when he overtook me on the sidewalk, barred my path, insisted on knowing who I was, then begged me to meet him again while friends gruffly pushed him aside and pulled me away. In his stupor, a stupor imported all the way from America, my friend cannot hear me. Mercifully, he leaves, surfacing hours later with a cache of backroom war stories and a huge smudge on his forehead made from the iridescent ink stamped onto the backs of our hands as we entered the club. Even then, I was struck by the irony that this mark of his transgression, this sign of his desirability, of fully inhabiting a clearly raced and gendered body, was visible only under the black light.

What strikes me now in listening to myself relate this episode is not simply how omnipresent racism is within the lives of blacks and other people of color. That is old news. Nor am I attempting to deny the heightened ability of Black American gay men to participate in a sort of cross-racial sexual tourism outside U.S. boundaries. I am not even particularly surprised at how threatened some whites, many whites, most whites are at the spectacle of the visible black, the beautiful black, the black who is desired. What is really stunning, however, is the honesty and clarity with which this man expressed what I take to be a rather profound alienation from his own corporeality, his so-called whiteness, alienation that is focused and transmitted precisely through racist discourse. Upon consideration, what seems to have been taking place, within a sexually tense leather bar in a Germany that always is understood as wildly racist and anti-Semitic, was a breakdown of the very ideological structures by which we construct our various identities: racial, national, sexual, what have you. We were both out of bounds, existing as anomalies in language and culture, freaks to be either exoticized or pitied. My interlocutor seems to have been thrashing about in a fit of anxiety engendered by his will to recapture normality in the face of the intense sense of vertigo that we shared. Strangely enough, I, with all my familiar bestial, intensely sexual blackness, was the only sign by which he seemed capable of reestablishing boundaries, of maintaining a self in the midst of constant erosion. Paul Hoch writes,

To abandon control over the bestial super-masculinity he has projected outward onto the black male would threaten the racist’s control over his own repressed sexuality (which forms the basis for that projection), and over all the bestial niggers and rapists locked within his psyche who threaten to erupt in a mad orgy of sexual violence. The black man must therefore be “kept down,” not to protect the white goddesses, but because on the subconscious level his liberation would signify the eruption of the sexuality confined in the racists’s own unconscious, hence a catastrophic loss of his conscious self, a “castration.” (Hoch, 55–56)

I stress again the observation that I made earlier in this essay that the process by which the white male might abandon control over what Hoch calls “bestial super-masculinity” is one and the same with the process by which he might lose access to his whiteness. Moreover, the technology that mitigates against this procedure ever occurring is the very technology that renders whiteness transparent. When the black is seen, the white is not. Yet the workings of desire, the will to be recognized, taken, possessed, involves at least a temporary lapse in this invisibility. The black is necessary, then, as a sort of prosthetic, much like the fabricated outer skin manufactured by Orwell’s own invisible man. Our presence gives the white form. But always there is the danger that the most sacrosanct boundaries might be crossed, that the man inside might cease to exist as an entity unto himself and become instead a breach, a break, a horrid violation of both self and other. “Now we think as we fuck. This nut might kill us. This kiss could turn to stone.”

Interestingly enough, it is James Baldwin who has worked most assiduously to tell us what it is that white men, particularly white queer men, think when they fuck. Vivaldo, Eric, Yves, Giovanni, and David all struggle to speak their desire in the course of Baldwin’s narratives. More important, the process by which they come to voice, if they come to voice, is always one and the same with the process by which they come to refuse the inevitability of an inarticulate whiteness. Indeed, I suggest that the difficulty that so many critics have when approaching Baldwin is precisely that they seem incapable of maintaining or even acknowledging his intense investment in understanding the manner in which white masculinity is codified in relation to “blackness,” understood here as that almost otherworldly existence that is not white. Instead, the rather underdeveloped critical literature surrounding Baldwin tends to turn upon proving or disproving his allegiance to an ill-defined black aesthetic. One must remember always that Baldwin is the black author, the paragon of the Black American intellect, the nation’s prophet of racial tolerance, one whose queer sexuality presumably stands in such anomalous relation to his racial presence, intellectual and otherwise, that it works only as the exception proving the rule.⁵

Part of the violence that is visited continuously upon Baldwin’s work, the body of Baldwin, is a sort of collapsing of ontological and epistemological considerations. The black author thinks black. Baldwin seems, though, to always slip the yoke of his various identities, some self-imposed, others not. He refused, throughout his career, to accept the neat categories into which we deposit our multiple selves, preferring instead to insist upon the funkiness of our existences, or, more to the point, he forces us to consider the shocking manner in which what we think when we fuck is not so much dictated by race, gender, and class but instead acts itself as an articulation of the structures of dominance—and resistance—that create race, gender, and class. Baldwin writes:

The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolves into the complexity of manhood.⁶

The ideals that Baldwin points to are ones that are constructed through the erection and maintenance of a set of false, if potent, binarisms: good/bad, punk/stud, butch/fag, what have you. For Baldwin, though, the primary binarism, the model from which and through which he filters the presumably natural divisions in the human condition, is none other than the one that both holds together and separates the black and the white.

It is with these ideas in mind that I suggest that we begin to reread Baldwin’s Another Country, particularly his depiction of the “optically white” Vivaldo. Baldwin so insists throughout the work on forcing consideration of the black/white binarism—white handkerchief in black hands, black tie on white shirt, white dick against black dick against black vagina against white vagina—that the distinctions clearly begin to crumble by the end of the narrative.

He stared into his cup, noting that black coffee was not black, but deep brown. Not many things in the world were really black, not even the night, not even the mines. And the light was not white, either, even the palest light held within itself some hint of its origins, in fire.⁷

That Italian Vivaldo, who comes from a Brooklyn neighborhood much like the Harlem onto which he has projected so many fantasies, is not “white” is far from being the tragedy of this work. On the contrary, the tragedy, the horror that both the white and the black subject must confront in Baldwin’s universe, is the racial fantasy that denies access to the body, that denies access to the beloved, and instead seals each partner into a bizarre competition in which mutual invisibility is the inevitable outcome. Indeed, the “lovemaking” in Another Country is as much an act of rage and hate as of adoration and devotion.

The battle was awful because the girl wished to be awakened but was terrified of the unknown. Every movement that seemed to bring her closer to him, to bring them closer together, had its violent recoil, driving them farther apart. Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body. (Baldwin, Another Country, 131)

Baldwin has clearly identified the catalytic tension in the labored give and take between the two partners, Vivaldo and Ida, the younger sister of Vivaldo’s dead (black) friend, Rufus. Each wants to break, to move beyond identity, not to know, but to surrender to the secrets of the body. Yet their laboring, their performance of intimacy, works only to reconstruct difference. The two are most sealed in their blackness and their whiteness, “in full narcissistic cry,” as Fanon would have it, at precisely the moment of their “joining.”

And what of Rufus, the ghost who haunts even Vivaldo’s most intimate interactions?

It is Rufus whom he tries to save. It is Rufus whom he constantly insists that he loves. It is Rufus whose lost life he carries about as a regretful and irrepressible memory. As Vivaldo fucks Ida, as Vivaldo hires a series of black prostitutes, as Vivaldo seduces/is seduced by Eric, a (white) gay man who is himself a “nigger lover,” who himself has loved Rufus, he is haunted not only by remorse and regret at the tragedy suggested by his friend’s life and death but by a certain half-acknowledged fear that he neither knew nor particularly loved this man around whom so much in his emotional and social economies was constructed. When confronted with Ida’s angry and breathless claim to having loved her brother, Vivaldo responds: “‘So did I’ . . . too quickly, irrelevantly; and for the first time it occurred to him that, possibly, he was a liar; had never loved Rufus at all, but had only feared and envied him” (Baldwin, Another Country, 413).

Vivaldo’s fear of Rufus is one and the same with his fear of knowledge. He is afraid to know not only that he never loved Rufus but that the barrier to that love was the very ideology of seamlessness, the insistence that he does not see difference, the “color-blindness,” that dictates his relationships with not only Rufus and Ida but Eric, Cass, and her husband, Richard, as well. Rufus embodies not simply difference but, perhaps more important, the knowledge and acknowledgment of the processes through which difference is constructed. Rufus recognizes in his fucking, moreover, an incredible opportunity in which to express this knowledge.

He wanted her to remember him the longest day she lived. And, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry. I told you, he moaned, I’d give yo...