Nobody’s Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low by C. Riley Snorton (review)

This book begins with one of the significant changes that occurred in public health about the transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. During the first wave of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, public health officials identified sex between gay men as one of the routes for transmission of HIV. Yet, by the early 1990s public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control replaced “gay men” with “MSM,” that is, men/males who have sex with men/males. This change drew attention to the fact that there were men who did not identify as gay or bisexual, yet contracted the virus through a sexual exchange with a man. A popular narrative simultaneously emerged that black MSM, but who did not identify as gay or bisexual, were responsible for the increase in HIV infections in African American communities. These black MSM were said to be on “the down low.”

C. Riley Snorton’s argument in Nobody’s Supposed to Know is that the down low is but a variation on a narrative repeated endlessly in American history about race and sexual deviance. The practitioners of sexual deviance are, of course, African Americans, and Snorton takes us on a tour of some important moments in this history. Those moments include close readings of Frederick Douglass’s slave narratives, the 1920s and 1930s blues produced during the Great Migration, homophobic sermons in the black church, gossip blogs, and R. Kelley’s music video opus Trapped in the Closet. What is especially important is Snorton’s discussion about how the down low moved from being a statement about the need for discretion among African Americans about one’s intimate life into the shameful “down-low brotha” indiscriminately spreading HIV and AIDS.

Nobody’s Supposed to Know is for the reader who is highly conversant with literary and cultural theory. Some of the significant theoretical insights in this book are based upon the works of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michel Foucault. Snorton borrows the concept of “the glass closet” from Sedgwick. Sedgwick used this term to refer to the practice of coming out and announcing an already-assumed-and-known gay sexual identity. Snorton repurposes Sedgwick’s term to refer to African Americans as a group already (and always) under surveillance. The idea of surveillance as a historical practice is indebted to Foucault’s influential reading of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon design as a means of controlling incarcerated people. Snorton moves easily among these theorists, and many others.

I have some reservations about Snorton’s book. One is Snorton’s frequent use of complex language whose usefulness is not apparent. For instance, a statement such as the following obfuscates slavery more than it clarifies it: “we might understand slavery as an instance of vertical sovereignty and as a case that aptly shows the collusion of biopolitical and necropolitical modes of governance” (42). Surely an editor should have suggested that some of the language in this book could be expressed with greater clarity.

I agreed with many of the arguments in Nobody’s Supposed to Know, but I wanted Snorton to do more nuanced readings of the material. In particular, in the discussion of the black church, Snorton is appropriately attentive to gospel music as a queer spectacle. Snorton points out that some ministers frequently revile the emotional, gender-queer performances of male gospel musicians. However, in this chapter Snorton does not refer directly to the Holiness movement (to which the quintessential queer James Baldwin belonged) that includes the contemporary Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Snorton’s omission is unfortunate because COGIC is one of the largest African American Christian denominations, and its significant impact on gospel music performance is undeniable.

Also, by not directly referring to COGIC, Snorton misses an opportunity to explore how social class expectations affect sexual discretion. On the one hand, many African American mainstream...