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Introduction
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1 Introduction I can’t remember exactly when I first saw Leroy. It was likely sometime during that first season of the television series Fame, where the actor and dancer Gene Anthony Ray reprised the role of Leroy that he introduced in the original film version of Fame (1980). As a teenager growing up in the Bronx, I had few available examples of masculinity that didn’t play to basic heteronormative assumptions, though there was the transgendered man who lived in the house next to my tenement building, who always elicited hushed tones among my peers and their parents. But indeed by the age of sixteen—my age when Fame debuted on NBC in January 1982—I had inherited enough fictions about black masculinity to be able to discern what male bodies my peers and others suspected of being “gay” bodies or quite specifically , gay “somebodies.” My peers and I all needed to maintain a metaphoric distance from those “somebodies” that might not have been ontologically possible—Robert Reid-Pharr remarks in passing that deviancy does not disrupt ontology—hence the clear gesture toward unfamiliarity that the term “somebodies” suggests.1 We needed language that also efficiently marked those gay “somebodies” as cultural and political strangers (or strangeness to my sixteen-year-old mind). Ironically, my own proclivity for wearing pastel-colored polo shirts with matching hosiery and penny loafers (with shiny new pennies intact), in an era when many of my peers were wearing Kangol hats, unlaced shell-top Adidas, and tightly creased colored Lee jeans, made me a target of the very speculative fictions that I was willing to place on the body of Leroy. Nevertheless, my first reaction to Leroy was, “This cat is gay.” Though little in Fame’s scripts suggested that the character of Leroy was in fact gay (there were clearly sexual tensions between 2 Introduction Leroy and at least two of his women teachers), there were signs that suggested, to borrow from the work of Seth Clark Silberman , a “fierce legibility” about him. Silberman describes “fierce legibility” as a vernacular that “vocalizes black masculine samesexuality within and around black letters.”2 “Fierce,” though, is a term that also resonates beyond the same-sex discourses that Silberman examines. In his essay “The Gangsta and the Diva,” Andrew Ross writes, “Being fierce, in the ghetto street or the nightclub version, is a theatrical response to the phenomenal pressure exerted upon black males.”3 Taking into account Ross’s notion of performativity and Silberman’s focus in a vernacular framework, I evoke the term “fierce legibility” in relation to Leroy’s visual legibility—his cornrows, his red “hot pants,” and the lilting sway of his hips—which could mark Leroy as gay. At least this was the case for my then untrained and virginal sixteen-year-old eyes. Indeed , there was a radical quality to Leroy’s queerness, the confirmation of something that was unfamiliar or not quite what it was supposed to be, since, I mean, “He’s supposed to be gay, right?” Striking, for example, was the way Leroy refused to wear dancing tights throughout the series, choosing instead to wear shorts that always highlighted his muscularity and, ironically, heightened his sexual availability. In another example, when Leroy is confronted by an older brother who challenges his masculinity by demeaning his desire to be a dancer, Leroy responds, “Dancing and working is not what I do—it’s what I am.” The potential of Leroy’s radicalness was consistently undermined , though, by narrative devices that regularly scripted Leroy as a “post–Black Power ghetto baby.” As such, Leroy easily trafficked in the tropes of the angry, disaffected urban black male —the mainstream visual precursor to hip-hop masculinities— who, of course, per standard neoliberal critiques, possessed all the potential in the world, if he could only let go of his rage and stop blaming whites for his fate. That a teenaged and likely unemployed black male might be enraged in 1982, as Reaganomics threatened to erode the very political and social gains that made a series like Fame—with its Glee-fully diverse cast—plausible, seemed beyond the scope of the show’s writers. Instead we were [54.163.14.144] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:01 GMT) Introduction 3 treated to confrontations between Leroy and his white female English teacher, Sherwood (embodying a liberal retreat from the demands of black rage), whose intergenerational and interracial sexual desire for Leroy was palpable in...