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Chapter Nine. Identity Politics, Sexual Fluidity, and James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues
- State University of New York Press
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Chapter Nine Identity Politics, Sexual Fluidity, and James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy BlueS James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues, published in 1994, is linked politically to what Steven Seidman calls a“politics of interest” or“identity politics” (116–18), or to what Gayatri Spivak calls “identity claim” (qtd. in Landry and MacLean 294). This refers to a politics organized around narrowly defined grievances and goals—the claims for rights and social, cultural, and political representation by a particular racial, sexual, or gendered group. For Spivak “identity claim” is “political manipulation of people who seem to share one characteristic,” and in this instance it is the homosexual experience (qtd. in Landry and MacLean 294). According to gay-identity politics, one’s sexuality is all-important. It is constructed as a separate, exclusive identity and behavior and is, therefore, comprehensible only to gays. It sets one apart from the mainstream. Gay-identity politics’ main focus is on equality within the social framework that heterosexuals have already established. Gay-identity activists, according to John D’Emilio, want to “emancipate themselves from the laws, the public policies, and the attitudes that have consigned them to an inferior position in society” (1). Thus, gays seek freedom by becoming the Same as mainstream, middle-class, straight society. But gay identity politics and its vision of homosexuality exist in a heterosexual /homosexual binary that otherizes homosexuality and represses sexual fluidity . Sexuality fluidity is the idea that sexuality is plural and fluid, freeing individuals from the constraints of a sex/gender system that locks them in mutually exclusive heterosexual/homosexual and feminine/masculine roles. The first-person narrator and the main protagonist in B-Boy Blues, Mitchell Crawford , is the embodiment of gay-identity politics. Although Hardy through Mitchell humanizes the homosexual African American by defining him as the 199 Same as the heterosexual African American and, therefore, worthy of acceptance , he still reproduces the heterosexual/homosexual binary that defines heterosexuality as normative, timeless, universal, and natural; and homosexuality as deviant, as sin, as unnatural, as marginal, as ugly, or as devalued Other. But there also exists in B-Boy Blues an element—the b-boys—that undermines gay-identity politics and points toward/signifies sexual fluidity. The b-boys define homosexuality not as Other but as normal. B-Boy Blues makes central (homo)sexual themes and experiences that already exist in the margins of African American literary texts—such as Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem; Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring; James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain; Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Eva’s Man, and “The Women” and “Persona” in White Rat; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, John Edgar Wideman’s“The Statue of Liberty” in Fever:Twelve Stories ; Darryl Pickney’s High Cotton; Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo ; and Jacqualine Woodson’s The Autobiography of a Family Photo—and that exist centrally in Alice Dunbar Nelson’s “A Carnival Jungle”; Bruce Nugent’s short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and his poetry; Langston Hughes’s “Cafe: 3 A.M.”; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Just Above My Head; Ann Shockley ’s Loving Her and Say Jesus and Come to Me; Rosa Guy’s Ruby; Audre Lorde’s Zami and her poetry; Pat Parker’s poetry; Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, Oral Tradition, and Don’t Explain; Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man; Gloria Naylor’s “The Two” in The Women of Brewster Place; Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury the Dead; Sapphire’s Push; and April Sinclair’s CoffeeWill MakeYou Black and Ain’t Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice. This homosexual literary tradition in African American literature has been repressed by the sociopolitical mission of racial uplift, the canon of African American literature, and the Black Aesthetic movement in African American literature. Hardy’s B-Boy Blues challenges and exposes this exclusion. From at least the early 1950s through the mid-1970s, the idea was widespread in American society that what was called“gay” was“a phenomenon with a uniform essential meaning across histories” (Seidman 116). Both mainstream Americans and mainstream gays and lesbians assumed that homosexuality marks “out a common human identity, which is fixed, non-problematic, and non-negotiable ” (116). Since the mid-1970s, lesbian and gay activists have fought to build national gay communities and cultures. They formed more than one thousand organizations that directed their energy outward...