Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis by Kevin Mumford (review)

CLA JOURNAL 515 “This Effort Toward Remaking Black Gay History”: Kevin Mumford’s Not Straight, Not White in Review Kevin Mumford, Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 272pp. ISBN: 978-1-4696-2684-0. Cloth: $32.95. In her essay, “African American Lesbian and Gay History: An Exploration,” the legendary and trailblazing black lesbian feminist Barbara Smith asserts: “The complex scope of Black lesbian and gay history has yet to be defined by Black lesbian and gay scholars, and it has also not been written by persons who are expert in African American Studies.”1 Smith goes on to argue that whenever black lesbians and gays are included in these histories, scholars overwhelmingly negate the dual impacts of racism and sexism on the lives of black lesbian and gay men. Not only does Smith argue for an autonomous black queer history to be written by a black scholar, but she concludes that “the most glaring omissions” that result from otherwise written scholarship is the “insufficient or nonexistent attention to the pervasive impact of racism and white supremacy upon the lives of all African Americans regardless of sexual orientation and upon the attitudes and actions of white [folks] as well.”2 In his most recent book, Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis, historian Kevin Mumford carefully answers Smith’s call and does so with precision and luminous insight— and, might I add, a degree of scaffolding. Indeed, Mumford recalls Smith’s now classic volume, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982). To be clear, since the publication of Smith’s essay in the early 1990s, a number of Black Studies scholars have done critical work in recovering black queer histories. Mumford acknowledges this work with a caveat that positions the critical interventions of Not Straight, Not White. Contending that the “queer turn” in academic research enables “wholly new sexual landscapes” to emerge, many of the “best and most important studies have avoided further investigation into the meanings of race for the gay past” (2). Mumford sees this slight as a “methodological flaw” that, in essence, white washes “the meaning of race for the gay past” (2). Scholars like Cathy Cohen, E. Patrick Johnson, John D’ Emilio and Joshua Gamson have, however, attended to these meanings in their recuperative black queer histories. Thus, for Mumford, a key intervention throughout the book encompasses how race and sexuality operate as immutable analytics necessary 1  Barbara Smith, The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 83. 2  Ibid., 83. Book Reviews 516 CLA JOURNAL for understanding how black gay men navigated, contested, survived, and died within and across hostile, if not dangerously neoliberal, social geographies, cultural landscapes, and political discourses that stretched across the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating rise of the AIDS pandemic. “In other words,” in the face of sexual and erotic propaganda espoused by, for example, Ebony magazine and erotic pulp fiction—whose attempts to understand black sexual politics failed black gay men miserably—Mumford writes echoing current times,“black gay lives matter” (3). Yet, as Mumford offers race and sexuality as hermeneutics to interrogate the sexual politics of respectability, as well as the politics and performance of black masculinity over the last decades of the twentieth century, he beautifully—in ways poetic—humanizes the principal trailblazers under scope throughout the book: James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Brother Grant Michael Fitzgerald, Joseph Beam, and the Reverend and Howard University Professor, James Tinney. Indeed, while one might rightfully quibble Mumford’s choice of selecting individual men and their biographies over a history of black queer collective organizing, his brilliantly clear prose convinces us that these men have unique stories that deserve to be told. Mumford’s method throughout Not Straight Not White is “both recuperative and critical”—approaches that bring “the invisible to light” and give “voice to the silenced” but also critiques “the historical operations of the margins from which I...