Black Gay Man: Essays (review)

In the opening section of his book Black Gay Man, Robert Reid-Pharr expresses some ambivalence about the book's title: "The reason for my difficulty is not only the rather obvious fact that one's identity cannot be possibly summed up by the phrase or any of its derivatives. . . but also that every time I hear the designation, I feel almost as if I am somehow denying a basic reality of my intellectual temperament" (1). Even the book's structure—three distinct sections appropriately titled "Black," "Gay," and "Man"—fails to capture the complexity of the black masculinity that Reid-Pharr wears and celebrates throughout, though the structure aptly describes the way that black men have been drawn, quartered (in this case "thirded") and parceled out to the highest ideological bidders. Rather the book's complexity—and the complexity of black meta-identities—is best expressed if one views black masculinity not as something that is fractured or even hybrid, but something that is fluid—radical in its fluidity—which is what Reid-Pharr ultimately achieves in Black Gay Man: Essays.

In the book Reid-Pharr, whose previous offering was Conjugal Union: The Body, The House, and the Black American (Oxford, 1994), offers opinions on subjects ranging from the late black nationalist demagogue Khalid Muhammad and W.E.B Du Bois to the death of his friend Essex Hemphill and the Million Man March. Also included in the collection is his classic essay "Tearing the Goat's Flesh," which remains one of the critical essays of contemporary black queer theory. Throughout the book Reid-Pharr blurs seemingly logical lines of discourse, providing insights that are genuinely provocative and original.

Ostensibly a review essay of Ross Posnock's Color and Culture and Wilson Jeremiah Moses's Afrotopia, "Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual" challenges versions of the black intellectual tradition that attempt to jettison the figure of the "mulatto." According to Reid-Pharr, "if we are to accept the notion of black intellectualism as it has been articulated by Posnock and Moses, it begs the question of whether there can be a black intellectualism, including Afrocentrism, that is not already a mulatto intellectualism." (46) Reid-Pharr points to Du Bois's conscious decision to obscure his own mulatto identity, writing that Du Bois "did not proclaim that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color lines [my emphasis], and in doing so he helped establish himself—mulatto that he was—as the quintessential pan-Africanist" (56-57).

Tackling the issue of Black anti-Semitism in an era when it is difficult to even offer a critique of the Israeli government without being perceived as an anti-Semite (the corollary being those folks who have offered a critique of American foreign policy being accused of treason), Reid-Pharr bravely sets out to "understand anti-Semitism as an ideological structure, as one of the fictions by which many people, including Black American people, express our alienation within modern society" (25). Reid-Pharr cautions, however, that while "black anti-Semitic rhetoric and the alienation that it demonstrates ought to be taken as markers of the black's complex relationship to modernity, this does not meanthat I celebrate so-called Black anti-Semitism. On the contrary, my thrust in this essay and those that follow is precisely to suggest that the Black American is not alien at all" (28). Reid-Pharr builds on this last argument in the essay "At Home in America," in which he suggests, among other things, that the concept of the "black family" is inherently American because it is a "key site in the production of the very American notion of racial difference . . . the black family allows us to do the difficult, expensive, and apparently quite necessary work of neatly and at a glance dividing up the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners" (63).

Reid-Pharr is himself more at home working through ideas about contemporary black sexuality...