On Glass Closets and Not-Gay Gay Sex

You know that you are learning something when ideas disorganize you. The three books I review here forced me to rethink, to borrow from Sharon Holland's (2012) recent book, how "the erotic life of racism" has materialized in my own life—in the ways my expectations that sexual or romantic partners be out was always situated within structures of race, or in the ways I have been fetishized as a black man. Perhaps most disturbingly, these texts led me to wonder: "Am I a snow queen?"¹ That racism has an erotic life or that eroticism is shaped by racism are not wholly new ideas, of course. Yet, as Holland (2012: 14) observes, these realities seem to have become largely estranged in both critical race theory and queer studies. Jeffrey McCune's Sexual Discretion, C. Riley Snorton's Nobody Is Supposed to Know, and Jane Ward's Not Gay work toward remedying this estrangement. On one level, each book is a case study about race, masculinity, and desire. The "down low," typically used to describe sex between black men who do not identify as gay or bisexual and who maintain the appearance of straightness, is the focus of the books by McCune and Snorton, while Ward's examines sex between straight white men. On another level, these three theoretical interventions rework key tenets of queer studies by one of its founders, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. For McCune and Snorton, Sedgwick's elision of race in her theory of the closet has serious implications for understanding how racialized subjects experience the biopolitical production and management of sexuality.² As cultural category and identity, the down low complicates Sedgwick's closet theory insofar as racial difference fundamentally shapes the forms sexual identities may take, as well as their relation to the hidden, protective aspects of the closet metaphor, to the risks attendant to it, or to the possible freedoms that might accrue to those who come out. Although Ward's book is not explicitly concerned with the closet, it does, through its focus on the normalization of white male heterosexuality, serve as a sharp reminder of how different sexual subjects encounter the category of the closet. While black men on the down low are pathologized as deceitful sexual predators who need to come clean about their "real" sexual identities, white men who have sex with other men are understood within an exceptionalizing "boys will be boys" framework. Ward's project thereby also extends another of Sedgwick's key ideas, namely, the ways that homosociality, joined with the disavowal of homosexuality and the attendant threat of homophobic violence, shapes heterosexuality. Ward's contribution is the provocative, and ultimately convincing, claim that homosexual behavior itself helps cohere white heteronormativity. In the remainder of this review, I examine how these three books contribute to our shared understandings of the ways race, sexuality, and masculinity intersect in the down low and what Ward calls "dude sex," as well as how they rework two of Sedgwick's most meaningful contributions to queer studies.

The phrase the down low achieved cultural visibility in the early 2000s in mainstream media accounts, including the New York Times Magazine, Essence, and other publications, as well as episodes of Oprah and Law and Order: SVU. These accounts depicted the down low as a sexual practice engaged in primarily by black men that dangerously exposed black women (and perhaps the rest of society) to the risks of HIV/AIDS infection. McCune and Snorton argue that the down low emerged as an eroticized spectacle framed as a public health crisis insofar as discussions about it evinced a voyeuristic, moralizing fascination with down low men's sexual identities and practices, although the voices of these men, and...