Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low

Notes

 Notes Introduction Epigraphs: Robert Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 32; Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 129. 1. “A Secret Sex World: Living on the Down Low,” Oprah: The Oprah Winfrey Show, April 16, 2004, episode transcript (Livingston, N.J.: Burrelle’s Information Services). 2. Ellen Hume, “Talk Show Culture,” Ellen Hume (blog), 2004, http://web .archive.org/web/20110722031713/http://www.ellenhume.com/articles/talk show_printable.htm. 3. J.L. King and Karen Hunter, On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men (New York: Broadway, 2004), 2. 4. King and Hunter, On the Down Low, 20. 5. “Why She Sued Her Husband for $12 Million and Won,” Oprah: The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 7, 2010, episode transcript (Livingston, NJ: Burrelle’s Information Services). 6. Scott Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 204–6. 7. David Malebranche, “An Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey concerning the ‘Down Low,’” Daily Voice, October 15, 2010, http://web.archive.org/web /20120331195633/http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2010/10/an-open-letter-to-oprah -winfre-002652.php. 8. See, for example, Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). 9. As I discuss later in this chapter, the “glass closet” first appeared in academic discourse in Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemologies of the Closet. While Sedgwick   NOTES TO INTRODUCTION used the term to describe how the individual experiences of “coming out” are sometimes met with reactions such as “I already know,” my deployment of the term is meant to evidence the more collective concerns of groups who are presumed sexually aberrant due to racialization. Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 80. 10. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976/1983), 236–38. 11. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama , and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 15. 12. For more on the interplay between race and genre, consult Daphne Brooks’s work on the mutual constitution of melodrama and minstrelsy in nineteenth-century American popular culture: Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent : Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 37. 13. In jazz and blues, blue notes, also referred to as “worried notes,” are played or sung in a lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes . Bruce Benward and Marilyn Saker, Music: In Theory and Practice, Vol. I, 7th ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 359. 14. Viv Broughton, Black Gospel: An Illustrated History of the Gospel Sound (London: Blandford Press, 1985), 39. 15. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 32. 16. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 27. 17. Keith Boykin provides an annotated bibliography of each of these news stories in his book Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 101–4. 18. Jason King, “Remixing the Closet: The Down-Low Way of Knowledge,” Village Voice, June 24, 2003, www.villagevoice.com/2003-06-24/news/remixing -the-closet/. The article ran with an image of recording artist TruDawg and the following caption: “TruDawg, ‘the notorious homothug,’ raps about DL life over a house music beat.” 19. Boykin, Beyond the Down Low, viii. 20. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Persons Reported to Be Living with HIV Infection and AIDS, as of December 2001,” HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report 13, no. 2 (2001): 1–44, www.cdc.gov/hiv/pdf/statistics_2001_HIV _Surveillance_Report_vol_13_no2.pdf. 21. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Table 20. Estimated male adult/adolescent AIDS incidence, by exposure category and race/ethnicity, diagnosed in 1999, and cumulative totals through 1999, United States,” HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report 12, no. 1 (2000): 28, www.cdc.gov/hiv/pdf/statistics_2000 _HIV_Surveillance_Report_vol_12_no1.pdf. NOTES TO INTRODUCTION   22. Boykin, Beyond the Down...