"Enough to Make a Body Riot": Pansies and Protesters in Himes' Harlem

JUSTUS NIELAND "Enough to Make a Body Riot": Pansies and Protesters in Himes' Harlem I was writing some strange shit. Some time before, I didn't know when, my mind had rejected all reality as I had known it and I had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence was funny. . . . All ofreality was absurd, contradictory, violent and hurting. . . . The only time I was happy was while writing these strange, violent, unreal stories Chester Himes, My Life ofAbsurdity I have a lot of sex in my books because my stories require it. Sex moves Harlem. The only release blacks have is sex. What is there to believe in? They don't have any money; they don't have any recreational activities, no place to go. Sex is the last motivation and the most forceful. Chester Himes, Conversations with Chester Himes by Fabre and Skinner FTER years of critical dismissal in the United States, Chester Himes is rightfully receiving recognition as one of the most important African-American writers of the twentieth century. Traditionally , critiques of Himes' literary-historical significance (echoes of which remain faintly audible in contemporary critical discourse) relied heavily on catch-all adjectives like "absurd," "violent," "grotesque," and "salacious" that worked to foreclose a careful examination of his fiction for several decades. Unfortunately, as the epigraphs suggest, Himes' own descriptions of his writing, and its relative complexity, are marked by a certain ambivalence, as they simultaneously fuel and frustrate the reductive critiques leveled at him throughout his career. To be sure, Himes' novels—especially the famous "Harlem Domestic" series Arizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 1, Spring 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 io6]ustus Nieland of detective novels written in France for La Série noire—are absurdly violent and grotesquely salacious. But, as pulp descendants of the "social protest" genre, they are also powerful interrogations of the vexing (and evolving) intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power from the mid-1940s through the late 1960s. Perhaps the most remarkable, and least critically remarked, dimension of Himes' detective fiction is its obsession with homosexuality, bisexuality , and transvestitism in the highly libidinal Harlem of Himes' imagination. Such themes are particularly suggestive in the work of a self-styled "sensualist" writer who claimed with pride in 1971 that "black protest and black heterosexuality" were his two "chief obsessions " (Black on Black 7). Critics like Albert Murray, noting Himes' fascination with homosexual subculture, have located Himes within a larger trend of African-American "exhibitionist writing" that developed at "the height of the integrationist civil rights movement" and detailed "the social and sexual habits of life 'on the street,' in the 'ghetto,' or in the prison" for the "puritan-prurient" tastes of a white America interested in vicarious social transgression (Ross 210-11). Yet Himes' novels are rarely as simplistic in their deployment of homosexuality as many of these popular accounts of street life that, in keeping with the dominant hetetosexist ideology of the 1950s, presented homosexuality as "arrested, sick, and impotent" (Gubar 182). Although Himes never commented explicitly on the apparent contradiction between his unrepentant, obsessive heterosexuality and his explorations of sexually "transgressive" behavior, in a 1970 interview with John A. Williams, he noted in passing, but with passionate disdain, how "black homosexuals and black eunuchs have always been profitable in white literature," functioning as "cute gimmicks" to titillate white audiences (Fabre and Skinner 72). That black characters, including homosexual ones, are routinely deployed "to titillate the emotions of the white community," is, for Himes, "one of the saddest parts about the black man in America" (47). As they imply a self-conscious use of the non-heterosexual in his fiction, these remarks trouble Himes' putative "exhibitionism." How, then, do homosexuality, bi-sexuality, and transvestism complicate the relationship between racialized power and sexuality in Himes' detective fiction? How does Himes' use of the homosexual relate to how homosexuality variously "signifies" within the Pansies and Protesters in Himes' Harlem107 intersecting discourses of Black Power and pulp protest fiction—because , or in spite of, its trangressive nature? To begin to answer these difficult questions, I limit my analysis of Himes' fiction to...