Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture

Introduction

Introduction It’s true! There ain’t no good black men out there. They’re either in jail, drug addicts, homos . . . the good ones know they the shit, so they got ten women at a time, leaving babies all over the place. —Jungle Fever Black men loving Black men is THE revolutionary act! —Tongues Untied A ccording to the women in Spike Lee’s film Jungle Fever (1991), good black men are not gay. And being gay is akin to being a drug addict, a criminal, and a rolling stone. The other problem these women are discussing is black men dating white women. One woman in the group (in fact, the one quoted in the first epigraph above) suggests that black women should forget skin color and date white men. She is booed by the group; her interracial solution to their problems is dismissed.1 After indicating that she would never date a white man, one woman argues that for black men, “their responsibility level is not the same as ours.” This woman sees “our” responsibility as one of nation building, of commitment to the black family—a commitment these particular characters profess allegiance to despite their personal pain and hardship. As the black woman jilted for a white lover argues, “My marriage is wrecked . . . the man is gone and I still believe there are good black men out there.” While black men are being criticized for failing the nation, the black women refuse to flee the homestead. They do so to their own detriment, ironically defining their needs as outside the respectable bounds of a community which they increasingly see themselves as occupying alone. They lament that as black women they are “losing their men.” The equation of interracial desire and gay identity connects queer identity to that which is outside. Like the white women who take their men away from them, so too does 1DUNNING_pages.indd 3 3/13/09 11:03:33 AM 4 Queer in Black and White being gay make black men unavailable to black women and hence to the black nation. Though queer identity is never discussed again in Jungle Fever, this moment illustrates the way mainstream black discourse defines black queer identity as untenable to a normalized black identity while at the same time pathologizing it (aligning it with drug addiction and criminality) and connecting it to interracial desire and to whiteness. The idea that to be queer is to be outside the black community is one of the central claims that much black queer theory, as well as this book, contests. We can trace this notion in the contemporary moment most notably to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. The nationalist ethos which underpins this scene in Jungle Fever owes its ideology in large part to the rejection of black gay and lesbian identity professed most notably by Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, and other black nationalists of the 1960s and ’70s. Given this negative characterization of what it means to be black and queer, it is perhaps surprising that contemporary black queer texts would stage, confront, and interrogate the interracial as much as they do. Yet some of the most significant texts about black queer identity consciously and unambiguously represent interracial desire. Queer in Black and White is an examination of a series of those texts. All of the texts examined in Queer in Black and White are important to the nascent canon of black gay and lesbian studies (many of them are “firsts”), as well as by their attention to homosexuality and interraciality. Among the texts I analyze in this volume are Plantation Lullabies (1993), composed by Me’Shell NdegéOcello, the first “out” hip-hop artist; Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1997), the first feature-length film about black lesbian identity; and Ann Allen Shockley’s largely ignored novel Loving Her (1974), the first novel by an African American about a black lesbian, which is often compared to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), the first lesbian novel ever published. I also discuss Tongues Untied (1991), which was one of the first filmic explorations of gay black male life from the perspective of a gay black male director, Marlon Riggs. Similarly, though James Baldwin’s Another Country was not the first novel to represent a black gay (or bisexual) man,2 it is one of the texts in black queer studies that is most widely read and broadly commented on (from Eldridge Cleaver to Robert Reid...