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Reviewed by:
  • Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing by Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr.
  • Cherod Johnson
Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing. By Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014; pp. ix + 202, $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

Recasting sexual discretion as an enabling feature of resistance and as a unique metaphor that highlights the process of sexual passing within a black public sphere, in Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing, Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. makes an argument about sexual discretion as an erotic practice and a tactic of survival for (queer) black men. In particular, sexual discretion draws our attention to the complexity of sexual identity and the suppressed knowledges of racialized subjectivity. McCune’s scholarly investment in sexual discretion as both a strategy and metaphor for describing identity negotiation is largely in response to the discursive violence enacted on black bodies by the controversial “scripting” of black men in the media as inherently sexual deviants: individuals on the “down low.”

Sexual discretion enacts the metaphor of the “down low” (DL) to call our attention to the erotics of racial and sexual passing and to the media’s fixation on black men as sexual deviants. Sexual discretion also enables a dialogue to emerge about the theoretical paradigm of the closet in queer theorizing and its potential limitations for queers of color. For McCune, sexual discretion is a mode of doing queer differently and the closet as a paradigm for understanding the lives and experiences of queers of color is fraught and limited, as he states that “such incarcerating paradigms foreclose our recognition of sexual autonomy and moments where agency abounds and complex personhood is managed, even within discrete communities” (14). In doing critical ethnographic performance in theory and practice, McCune demonstrates how “DL men practice discreet sexual acts while privileging spaces that are more heteronormative and that often protect or conceal their male-male sexual desires/practices” (4).

McCune’s book is a welcomed addition to the field of black queer studies and queer of color critique, as he illuminates the multivalent ways in which people of color and DL men navigate and build queer worlds differently in discretion. Sexual Discretion is a rigorous contribution to existing scholarship [End Page 169] in feminist studies, queer studies, performance studies, and critical race theory because it shows how race and sexuality are historically entangled. McCune also makes important distinctions between “the closet” and the DL for racialized subjectivities.

McCune handles ethnographic materials, cultural artifacts, and spaces with theoretical sophistication and analytical rigor. Starting his book with a discussion of a classic in the music world—Trapped in the Closet by R & B singer R. Kelly—McCune argues that Kelly challenges dominant readings of the closet and how it differs for people of color. McCune illuminates how R. Kelly “remixes the closet” to account for “a historical mode of performance that has been reincarnated, or remixed” (9). To put it briefly, “inside Kelly’s appropriation of the closet, there is room for agency and pleasure” and “he utilizes the closet but actually unveils the workings of the DL in black communities or society in general” (15).

In Chapter 2, “Yo’ Daddy’s Dysfunctional: Risk, Blame, and Necessary Fictions in Down-Low Discourse,” McCune examines the fraught relationship between the mass mediation of black masculinity and the public consumption of black sexual deviance, particularly as it manifests in the American imaginary. Recognizing how mediated “scripts” of the DL function to render nonnormative sexualities problematic, McCune pursues the contemporary politics shaping—and simultaneously producing—the cultural anxiety and nostalgia surrounding the transmission of HIV/AIDS. He pursues the rhetoric behind the escalating rates of HIV/AIDS to highlight the ways in which a rhetoric of blame and shame pathologizes black masculinity to claim white fears and shift an international crisis to a historical trope that calls forth an image of the irresponsible black male. Showing how a faceless practice is inscribed with racial and sexual meaning, McCune states that the “DL discourse provides a necessary fiction that attempts to reconcile the enigmatic nature of the sexual uncertainty within our society” (8).

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