Black Gay Man: Essays

Introduction

Introduction Perhaps the most difficult aspect of completing this collection has been coming to terms with the work’s title, Black Gay Man. The reason for my difficulty is not only the rather obvious fact that one’s identity cannot possibly be summed up by the phrase or any of its derivatives—Negro queer, colored sissy, nigger faggot— but also that every time I hear the designation, I feel almost as if I am somehow denying a basic reality of my intellectual temperament . Much of my work, much of the work included within this collection, has been straightforwardly designed to help dismantle the American identity machine, to break its hold on the collective imagination. Yet, strangely, I find that, like many of my peers, I continuously use the mechanisms of that machine to affect its dysfunction. One should remember that the articulation of multiple identities was—and is—thought to be a corrective to outmoded binaristic identitarian discourses: black/white, gay/ 1 straight, man/woman. This tendency led some of the nation’s most talented intellectuals to feast at the banquet table of queer theory where one was assured that identity was not simply diffuse and diverse but constructed, unstable, and performative, as well. I have long been skeptical, however, of the political and social efficacy of this line of thought outside the more rarefied precincts of academia. Indeed, I have become increasingly alarmed by the fact that, although remarkable strides have been made within queer theory and other recent theoretical trends with regard to what I will call the disarticulation of identity, there seems to have been precious little movement forward in our understanding of how to affect basic economic and social structures. We continue to exist in a country in which the most assertive and cogent articulations of the problems and possibilities inherent within American life seem to come most often from the right, or from socalled centrists bent on appeasing more sober elements of the right. Meanwhile, left intellectuals seem at times more concerned with demonizing one another or engaging in ever more obtuse forms of theoretical posturing than with speaking to the everyday concerns of our people and our nation. This is not at all to imply that I have remained aloof from the theoretical movements that I have witnessed over the past two decades, movements that have demonstrably altered the manner in which much work within a variety of disciplines gets done. Still, I must confess that the seeming lack of interest in producing work that concretely affects the lives of American people makes it difficult for me to believe that we have changed—or challenged— basic structures of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The disarticulation of identity comes at precisely the moment when many American institutions, particularly American universities, are less INTRODUCTION 2 and less hospitable to poor people, Black American people, and other people of color. Indeed, some of the most successful attacks on affirmative action have taken place within the same locations that nurtured the emergent notions of identity by which many of us—myself included—have been beguiled. I am not asking that we return to notions of strategic essentialism , or any mode of essentialism for that matter. On the contrary , I am as weary of carrying around banal ideas about human difference as almost anyone else. At the same time, I find in rereading these essays that in each of them I am groping for a method by which to bridge the divide between theory and practice , to break down barriers between the ways in which I think about American life as a professional critic and the manner in which I comport myself in my everyday passings. Thus, this collection represents part of my struggle to make sense of a world in which it seems the tired horse of identity politics desperately needs to be withdrawn but in which nonetheless few workable options for the production of a progressive political discourse seem to be in the offing. In the world in which I live and write there are extremely cohesive and active black, gay, lesbian, feminist , and labor movements. There is not a cohesive community of American progressives with, say, national organizations, recognized and respected leaders, clearly defined agendas, a well-developed intellectual class, and a broad-based grass-roots constituency . There is not a fully empowered national political party...