Beyond Kevin Spacey: More than Scraps on the Cutting Room Floor

When I was deep in ethnographic fieldwork for Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing,¹ I encountered a twenty-two– year- old man named Demarcus, who was “getting down” with a younger man named Thomas, who was fifteen years old. The two had met during a call on a Chicago phone chat line, where callers could connect with each other in private rooms after hearing their public descriptive narratives. When Demarcus shared with me his public profile, the phrase “don’t really get down with dudes” was most memorable, because he would later repeat this when discussing the first time “a gay dude tried to get up with me.” On that occasion, he repeated “I really don’t get down with dudes.” His commitment to this idea—even while he narrated his pursuit of “dudes” on phone chat lines and online meeting sites—clarified his seeming discomfort with recognition for same-sex desire. When I inquired as to what attracted him to Thomas, he stated, “He gets me; I ain’t never been gay like that; he ain’t never been gay like that.” This conversation would lead him to talk about the kinds of sociality that they shared, which demarcated a traditionally masculine way of being in the world—from basketball to “hollering at females”—and illuminated how their gendered selves masked their sexual relationship. This mutual desire to “keep it on the DL,” as well as to participate in dominant masculine rituals, created a synergy between Demarcus and Thomas—which was most possible because of where each was on the spectrum of comfort and coherent sexual identity. Although struck by the age difference between them initially, I became more attuned to the shared vocabularies, desires, and ways of being in the world—which pose a challenge to regimented notions of proper relationality. Although Demarcus and Thomas were seven years apart, they were much closer in terms of the age of their sexual–social maturation.

With these layered narratives in my reach, I came to October 2017, where rumors of Kevin Spacey’s sexual harassment emerged and he announced that “he chooses to live as a gay man.” This “coming out” on the heels of what would later be several claims of sexually inappropriate behaviors with much younger men was met with much resistance and disappointment. The audacity of Spacey to use the occasion of his own participation in sexual violence as an opportunity to “come out” was both seen as distasteful and opportunistic. Public attention focused primarily on the nature of his coming out, as well as his seeming preoccupation with men much younger than he. Although Spacey’s perverse use of power could be the subject of many essays, here I wish to engage with the perverse discourses surrounding the iconic placement of Spacey’s sexuality. As a case study for understanding queer desire and particularly intergenerational conviviality and sexual exploration, I was most struck by how such mainstream treatment of Spacey foreclosed many possibilities for those of us who live outside the view of dominant media, in the underground and on the margins.

I am most interested in what some in Hollywood know as “what’s left on the cutting room floor.” This frame remarks upon the messy stuff that is unattended, as the iconographic and playable action is taken up—for the sake of public coherency and scopophilic pleasure. Put differently, I want to make room to see Demarcus and Thomas outside the lens of predatory sexing, as we might call it. “Scraps,” as they might be called, although seemingly minor in public discourse or popular media, represent the counternarratives, which are significant in understanding the significance of sexual acts beyond the criminal. In this article, I wish to highlight these other ways of knowing without iconography; the complexity of desire among gay men, which situates intergenerational sex within the context of a homophobic society that actually poses challenges to the heterocentric presumption of coercion and power, always at the center of (hetero) sexual discourses. How do we condemn Spacey and others like...