Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

5. Fear of a Queer Soul Man: The Legacy of Luther Vandross

143 5 Fear of a Queer Soul Man The Legacy of Luther Vandross Where oh where, are all the real men. . . . You got eyeliner on, chillin’ and maxin’/See you’re a man with a spine extraction/ So what I’m askin’ is plain to see/Are there any straight singers in R&B? KRS-One, “Ya Strugglin’” (1990) Superman can fly high way up in the sky (cause we believe he can)/So what we choose to believe can always work out fine/ It’s all in the mind. Luther Vandross, “Make Me a Believer” (1984) Their names ring out like a chorus of singer’s singers—Johnny Mathis, Jimmy Scott, Eddie Kendricks, Al Green, Ronnie Dyson, Rahsaan Patterson, the fabulous Sylvester, and, perhaps most spectacularly, Luther Vandross. These men, whose wildly emotive voices summoned both spirits and gods, have also inspired rumor and innuendo among those who would believe that their voices—soft, expressive, and feminine—betrayed the strength and vigor of black masculinity. Luther Vandross, a child of the post–World War II period, who came of age during the height of the Black Power movement, was more than aware of the soul men–turned–race men tradition and the hypermasculinity and hypersexuality that the tradition emboldened and even demanded. Singers like James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Solomon Burke, Brook Benton, Wilson Pickett, Bill Withers, Isaac Hayes, Barry White, and Teddy Pendergrass captured the imagination of black America during an era when hyperblack, hypermasculine , hypersexual male icons seemed logical retorts to ongoing ideological threats centered on notions of American masculinity. 144 Fear of a Queer Soul Man Possessing vocal ranges that inhabited the lower registers, some of the aforementioned soul singers were the musical embodiments of popular masculine icons such as El-Hajj Malik ElShabazz (Malcolm X) and Soul on Ice author Eldridge Cleaver. This was the cultural terrain that Luther Vandross, a heavyset romantic, confronted growing up in Harlem in the 1960s. Born in 1951, Vandross turned to music to salve the pain of the sudden death of his father in 1959. Whereas many of his male peers were modeling themselves after the soul men who so gallantly represented on behalf of the race, Vandross found his inspiration in women vocalists like Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Cissy Houston and the Sweet Inspirations, and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. As vocalists these women deftly negotiated the worlds of Chitlin’ Circuit soul and supper club pop, providing nuance and range to the whirlwind of emotions that black Americans confronted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Additionally , many of the prominent black female vocalists of the 1960s were paragons of feminine elegance. Vandross’s embrace of these women was not about notions of a diminished or suspect masculinity, but rather a masculinity that challenged the prevailing logic of what the feminist critic Michele Wallace would term in the 1970s the “black macho.”1 Vandross got his professional start in the music industry in 1969, as part of a youth performance troupe known as Listen Up, Brother. The group was founded in the late 1960s as part of public relations efforts by Harlem’s Apollo Theater. As the journalist Craig Seymour explains, the theater was then owned by the Schiffman family, and “at the time neighborhood activists were heatedly raising questions about the large number of white owned businesses in Harlem.”2 Listen Up, Brother was an attempt by the Schiffman family to give back to black Harlem. The group released its first single, “Listen, My Brother,” in 1969 and shortly thereafter made its television debut on an experimental television program created by the Children’s Television Workshop, Sesame Street. Though Listen Up, Brother largely focused on educational uplift—one of their Sesame Street appearances featured a soulful rendition of the alphabet—their style Fear of a Queer Soul Man 145 of performance was akin to that of the Black Arts Movement, with its attempt to reach youthful audiences via the use of black vernacular and style. Vandross’s stint with Listen Up, Brother ended when he enrolled in Western Michigan University in the fall of 1969. After leaving Western Michigan University after only one year, Vandross returned to New York to continue his musical career and began to write songs. In 1973 he sold two songs to Dolores Hall, then performing in the Broadway musical Godspell. Hall, who also appeared in the groundbreaking musical Hair (1968), would...