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10 “Beyond Heterosexuality” Toward a Prolegomenon of Re-Presenting Black Masculinity at the Beginning of the Post–Civil Rights, Post-Liberation Era EL Kornegay Jr. The great problem is how to be—in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word—a man. –James Baldwin My older sister made a statement shortly after the death of our mother I will never forget: She felt our mother “was a lesbian.” My sister laid out a historical accounting of the evidence she felt supported her claim. There was a certain discomfort that came along with the statement: one that I always felt rested with my sister, but came home to roost with me. I understand now that source may have been what she saw as a contradiction between our mother’s somewhat pious Christian faith claim and the possibility of her being a lesbian. Whether or not my mother was a lesbian remains a mystery. However, what remains is the great problem of how to reconcile my own reality of who I am with the mythic truth of who my mother is to me. My sister’s point of view caused me not only to reflect on what it meant to entertain the idea that the woman I cherished and loved as my mother was possibly a lesbian, but how her approach to sexuality and gender translates into the problem of raising a boy to face masculinity and my ability to endure it. I see my mother’s sexual orientation as such, and had not, until now, ever searched my mother’s garden for answers to the possibility my sister raised 161 concerning who our mother was as a sexual creature and who I might be as the living fruit of her sexual allowances.1 And yet, if I am to go forward, I cannot, as Baldwin notes, lean heavily on the examples of dead great men [or women], of vanished cultures, natural history, or scientific or religious theories: I must expose something private about my mother and about myself that was nurtured in her fertile womb. Such is the case, if I must go in search of something that helps to explain who my mother was and is to me. This might help my sister to “get over” the messiness of our mother’s life so she can accept her own, and it might help me to have a “stiffening of the will” that enables me to move beyond the limits of the prison of masculinity that she raised me to resist. Using my mother’s story, the essays and novels of James Baldwin require a different kind of approach and a different way of reading, which I call narræ̈ontology.2 This term signifies a shift in how we tell the story of Being. It is a neon theology or a “graphic” theology that is a hermeneutical and exegetical disruption of the dialectic between the sacred and the profane used to produce the politics of respectability informing black religion and policing black life. If the difference between womanist to feminist is like “purple is to lavender,” the difference between womanist to narræ̈ontology is what Alice Walker might be to James Baldwin. It is a womanist-like approach inasmuch as I find that the life of my mother and the literature of Baldwin have helped me outwit oblivion in a world that continues to tell me the answer to who I am naturally can never be “yes.”3 It is a way to talk about how the ascension of a black male to the pinnacle of American hegemonic masculinity does not change that sentiment. It is a way to talk about how the things I have used to identify myself—blackness and heterosexuality—have not as yet improved my condition when I consider the low yield relative to my lifelong investment in both. Navigating this new epoch requires a side-by-side womanist/narræ̈ontology reassessment of the race, sex, and gender rubric used to define myself and others like me. This prolegomenon serves as a model for possibly doing something other methodologies have yet to do—try a different way get beyond heterosexuality. When it comes to religion and sexuality it seems that we prefer to talk about it at arm’s length. In other words, through theory and theology we distance ourselves from the very things we are subject to be living out. It is easier to talk about other bodies’ penises and vaginas than it is to talk...

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