Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low

4. Rumor Has It

  RumorHasIt We search for images or stories that confirm our beliefs, and often we can be loose about the standards of evidence that we demand. . . . By transforming unacceptable impulses into a narrative that is claimed to have actually happened, we are able to express the inexpressible. This is what legend and rumor are all about. —Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner, Whispers on the Color Line In a 2007 interview for Vibe magazine, then 24-year-old R&B singer and songwriter Shaffer Chimere Smith, better known to his fans as Ne-Yo, replied to the various rumors circulating about his sexuality. “This is the way I look at it now,” Smith explained. “For one, you’re nobody ’til they think you’re gay—that’s the truth of the business. Two? You really gotta [sic] take the good with the bad.”1 While the question of the “bad” is up for interpretation, perhaps the “good” to which Smith refers was his platinum debut album In My Own Words, which reached number one on the pop and R&B charts in 2006. With hit singles that included “So Sick,” “Sexy Love,” and “Because of You,” Smith exploded on the music stage after a long career behind the scenes as a songwriter. As Smith explains, there is a certain inevitability to gay speculations, and rumors have doggedly surrounded many of the most celebrated stars, from Michael Jackson to Will Smith, Oprah Winfrey to Dana Owens—better known by her stage name Queen Latifah. In the same interview, Ne-Yo also provides an explanation for why he believes the rumors persist: “I was having a conversation with my management and the label, and they said, ‘We’ve really got to get you out in public more because after they say you’re a great songwriter, what else is there to say? Nobody knows anything about your lifestyle.’ I think that’s why the gay thing was so easy to believe, because it was one of the only things that came out about me that didn’t have to do with music.”2 Smith’s response represents a lucid meditation on the relationships between race and sexuality in the entertainment industry and frames many of the questions this chapter addresses.   RUMOR HAS IT Through an analysis of gossip blogs that focus on black celebrities, this chapter expands traditional definitions of the down low—and its focus on black masculinity and secretive sexual practice—to include a range of genders subject to homosexual or transsexual speculations. From Queerty.com, the Rodonline blog, and Starpulse.com, who picked up the Ne-Yo interview, to Bossip.com and The Young, Black, and Fabulous, which routinely report on “suspect” imagery of black stars, I argue that the thriving industry of popular gossip blogs makes evident the way public black sexualities are figured as queered in popular imaginaries.3 Grounding my analysis in rumor and gossip studies as well as the growing literature in hip-hop studies on queer sexuality and homophobia, I suggest that we must understand how rumor and gossip articulate with modes of popular panopticism that regulate queer and black bodies through seemingly innocuous acts of consumption. Although rumor and gossip studies span numerous academic disciplines : folklore, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and communication , among others, one deceptively simple question continues to animate the debates in the field: what kinds of cultural conditions create and sustain a climate for the transmission of rumors and gossip? Addressing this question requires a complex understanding of human behavior, culture , information, and technology. As Fine and Turner suggest, studying rumor is an attempt to understand expressions of the inexpressible, which is often inextricably linked with questions of identification.4 In previous chapters, I have discussed how representations of the down low are fundamentally paradoxical, such that whenever film or television attempts to represent down-low figures, audiences are forced to encounter the necessary contradiction between the visual on one hand, and the verbal or textual on the other. Visual depictions of the down low necessarily transform what audiences view, as the down low is principally defined as the unrepresentable and invisible presence animating an ongoing story about race and HIV. In this sense, efforts to depict the down low operate within the logic of rumor, which this chapter explores in an effort to demonstrate how rumor and gossip figure into the complex entanglements of blackness, queerness, and public life. Definitions of “rumor” and “gossip” vary across disciplines, although there has been some commonality in...