All the Sad Young Men: Whiteness as Melancholic Haunting in Black Queer Independent Film

This article examines the near centrality of assimilation and cross-racial identification as an organizing principle in representations of black gay erotic desire in queer independent film. Readings of Looking for Langston, Tongues Untied, and especially Rodney Evans's Brother to Brother reveal that the queer man of color constitutes his identity through being rejected-yet-retained by the white male queer subject and through the queer of color's traumatic internalizing of his own "difference" and inability to live up to an impossible whiteness.