Black Gay Man: Essays

IV Dinge

IV Dinge There is indeed a close interrelation between the predominant Western conception of manhood and that of racial (and species) domination. The notion, originally from myth and fable, is that the summit of masculinity—the “white hero”—achieves his manhood , first and foremost, by winning victory over the “dark beast” (or over the barbarian beasts of other—in some sense, “darker”— races, nations and social castes.) —PAUL HOCH, White Hero, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism and the Mask of Masculinity If there is one thing that marks us as queer, a category that is somehow different, if not altogether distinct, from the heterosexual , then it is undoubtedly our relationships to the body, particularly the expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas , penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, arms, feet, stomachs, mouths and tongues in our expressions of not only intimacy, love, and lust but also and importantly shame, contempt, despair, and hate. Because it is impossible to forget that we hold a tangential relationship to what Michael Warner calls heteronormativity , we often are forced to become relatively self-aware about what we are doing when we fuck, suck, go down, go in, get on, go under. Even and especially when I encounter the nameless trick, even and especially when that tricking happens in the blank, barely penetrable atmosphere of the dark room, I am aware of the 85 immense contradictions at play, the pleasure and the danger located at the end of his cock, pleasure and danger that are intimately linked and that work together to produce the electricity of the encounter. Essex Hemphill writes, “Now we think as we fuck. This nut might kill. This kiss could turn to stone.”1 It is surprising, then, that so little within queer theory has been addressed to the question of how we inhabit our various bodies, especially how we fuck or, rather, what we think when we fuck. In the face of wildly impressive work on gay and lesbian history and historiography, gender roles and politics, queer literature and culture, we have been willing to let stand the most tired and hackneyed notions of what our sex actually means. If you believe the propaganda, it would seem that every time a fag or dyke fingers a vagina or asshole is a demonstration of queer love and community. The exceptions to this rule come almost invariably from what we might think of as the queer margins. Sadomasochistic practice and the debates surrounding it, particularly among lesbians, reminded us that dominance, submission, and violence, real or imagined, are often integral parts of queer sexual practice. The H.I.V./A.I.D.S. community helped focus our thinking about issues of risk, disease, and decay. Further, and more importantly for my purposes here, nearly two decades of writing and film making by people of color, and in particular the work of black gay men, has spoken to the experience of sex with whites, painting it at once as liberatory and repressive. It is telling that cultural practitioners as distinct as Marlon Riggs, Isaac Julien, and Lyle Harris all found it necessary to identify themselves as snow queens, or some version thereof, in recent years. Indeed, the articulation of a persistent, if diffuse and diverse , black hunger for vanilla has been such a regular aspect of DINGE 86 the various discussions of black subjectivities as to seem rather mundane. In 1853, William Wells Brown published the first Black American novel, Clotel, in which his near-white female protagonist is first seduced, then abandoned by a handsome young planter. Wallace Thurman continued the theme more than seventy years later as he explored the tension generated by thinly veiled interracial and homosexual desire in his Infants of the Spring, tension that is relieved for the white protagonist within the vaginas of several readily available black women and for the black in an ascetic devotion to his art.2 In the fifties and sixties, Eldridge Cleaver, Piri Thomas, and Malcolm X all confessed their dalliances on the other side of the line, their moments in the sun. Indeed, black queers as diverse as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Samuel Delany, and Essex Hemphill have all paid considerable attention to the questions engendered when one “sleeps with the enemy.” What is striking, given the tradition that I have just outlined, is the fact that so few white artists, critics, intellectuals of all stripes, male or female, lesbian...