"Uneasy Hinges" and "Secret Signals"

David A. Gerstner's Queer Pollen—subtitled White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic—examines the role of the cinematic in inventing the textual selves of the twentieth-century artists Richard Bruce Nugent, James Baldwin, and Marlon Riggs. The volume casts the queer textual practices of each of the three authors in terms of the cinematic in order to reveal what Gerstner calls the "secret signals" and "uneasy hinges," perhaps other words for seduction, that whiteness engenders in each. What we find is "the presence of authorship," a kind of relational resistance to the various ideologies doing battle in modern queer black cultural production (9, his emphasis). Further, Gerstner poses the central question about such presence: "In what way do the authorial gestures of black queers make present what Marx once called the 'invisible threads of production' in white Western-industrialized culture?" (10).

A similar challenge, to conceive of whiteness, and in turn blackness, as spatial, is posed in the Baldwin chapter (106). As such, Gerstner looks less at "queer whiteness" / "queer blackness" or "white queer culture" / "black queer culture" as oppositional than he does at how the cinematic, as a method of cultural production, enables these artists to dissolve one into the other such that the seeds of this dissolution remain in evidence on the textual/ filmic surface. Gerstner defines the cinematic as "an aesthetic concept—one that allowed for an envisioning of dynamic modern space and time—and an industrial apparatus that formalized these conceptualizations through the discrete properties the camera-machine offers" (15). In its aim to "investigate what is at stake in the production of queer black identity when the cinematic is put to use," Gerstner's project calls for a new sensual language, named the cinematic, that productively rhymes with current work in the sensory ethnography practices of multimedia and academic digital humanities. Fittingly, then, instead of imposing theory on this varied body of work, Gerstner looks at the works and artists individually in an to attempt to find, through entangling their textual/ cinematic practices, readable and portable aesthetic processes that will become a sort of transitory theory. The author stresses the cultural agency constructed "in the modes of (messy) aesthetic production that black queers choose when they assert their lived experiences through the work of art" (13).

Gerstner is careful to address "the different aesthetic and industrial registers" through which the cinematic filters into the works of Nugent, Baldwin, and Riggs (15). Thus, it is important to frame Nugent's work as relying less upon the "cinematic as an industrial tool and more as a modernist sensibility." Framing the chapter in this way is both necessary and useful, but also limiting because it discourages readers from making productive connections to the works of the later artists; if there is a precedent set anywhere in queer black literary history for such a thing as a postmodern, retroactive blackness tooled by the dissolution of white queerness, it's here, where through Nugent we discover queer Harlem as a "mobile" and "sensorial" experience (21). Nugent's movements, his walks through Harlem, simultaneously look back at the modernist flaneur and forward to "cruising" culture as ways to enact "otherness" in "culturally inscribed repetitions" of difference (28). Throughout his work, Gerstner notes, such inscriptive repetitions take sensorial forms when "light, color, smell and sound traverse Nugent's queer bodies"; in turn, these inscriptions are how Nugent "marshals the haptic through [the] queerly eroticized cinematic dissolves" of the mobile and sensorial textual self (48). Perhaps the most radically queer idea in Gerstner's text is his assertion of the cinematic, through careful readings of Nugent's spatial practices, as a space "where one can love" (52, his emphasis), queerly. Through his mobilization of the sensorial, sensual experience of queerness within white/black space, across its surface, refusing to disperse, Nugent—"in every sensational suggestion"—"sharply homosexualizes what the industry could only homoeroticize" (63). Nugent thus introduced...