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

2. Trapped in the Epistemological Closet

  Trapped in the Epistemological Closet The epistemology of the closet is not a dated subject or a superseded regime of knowing. . . . To the fine antennae of public attention the freshness of every drama of (especially involuntary) gay uncovering seems if anything heightened in surprise and delectability, rather than stalled, by the increasingly intense atmosphere of public articulations of and about the love that is famous for daring not speak its name. —Eve K. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet Cultural knowledge . . . is always hedged by the cognitive processes of synecdoche, metonymy, and projection . . . images of black manhood which come to dominate, though they may be based on reality, are always at the service of ideological purposes that can work both for and against the advancement of African American communities. —Marlon B. Ross, “Some Glances at the Black Fag” Robert Sylvester Kelly, known to his listeners simply as R. Kelly, is a recurrent figure in popular representations of the down low as of 1996 with the release of his R&B hit “Down Low (Nobody Has to Know),” which detailed the consequences of heterosexual indiscretion, then in the 2000s with his widely popular, episodic, music video hip-hop opera Trapped in the Closet (hereafter, Trapped).1 Trapped begins with the protagonist Sylvester (R. Kelly) waking up alone, noticeably disoriented, in the bed of a presumed one-night stand. His sexual partner, Cathy, soon returns to the bedroom to inform Sylvester that her husband Rufus has returned and is in fact climbing the stairs to the apartment. After first considering jumping out the window, Sylvester decides to hide in the closet to avoid the inevitable confrontation. A few seconds later, Rufus arrives, and the married couple begins to engage in foreplay until the untimely ringing of Sylvester’s cell phone interrupts their conjugal bliss. Understandably concerned, Rufus, after searching   TRAPPED IN THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL CLOSET other parts of the apartment, approaches the closet to find Sylvester waiting inside, with Beretta in hand. Backing away from Sylvester, Rufus redirects his anger to Cathy on realizing her infidelity. Sylvester, eager to get home to his wife, threatens to shoot both Rufus and Cathy if they do not allow him to leave. Rufus, however, persuades Sylvester to stay in the apartment long enough to meet the partner in Rufus’s own adulterous affair: Chuck, a deacon at the church where Rufus is the pastor. In an effort to silence the escalating assertions of betrayal, the competing claims to moral superiority, and finally a declaration from Rufus that he intends to marry his lover, Sylvester climatically shoots his gun into the air. After effectively silencing the room, Sylvester calls his house, only to be greeted by an unidentified male voice. The third episode ends with Sylvester quickly exiting Rufus and Cathy’s apartment, expecting to catch his wife in an affair. The succeeding nineteen episodes are a slow crescendo on these foundational themes of infidelity, concealment, and the inextricability of blackness and queerness in the public imagination. Part of the appeal of Trapped lies in its ability to visualize the interplay among and between many of the most persistent and compelling stereotypes of black masculinity—the minister, the ex-con, the cop, the downlow brother, the pimp, and the hip-hop star—and to set them against the backdrop of a postindustrial black urban landscape. As S. Craig Watkins argues, drawing on Ed Guerrero’s work on ghettocentric films like New Jack City (1991) and others, popular media culture serves as the terrain on which scholars understand the processes of social and political struggle in “constant operation.”2 For Watkins, the “black ghetto” is a cultural object that serves as a location for ideological struggle and maps the epistemological terrain of postindustrial black space and its inhabitants, thus producing a “ghettocentric imagination.”3 Positing her own cartography in Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues that the crisis of “homo/heterosexual definition” emblematized by the metaphor of the closet produces myriad binaries that have served to structure culture invisibly in the twentieth century.4 Thinking through the relationship between representations of black geopolitics and queer theory, this chapter considers how Trapped uses imagery and music to interrogate binaries like black/white, knowledge/ignorance, urban/suburban, and homosexual/ heterosexual that structure and maintain a “ghettocentric imagination” TRAPPED IN THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL CLOSET   as well as a broader panoptical imaginary attracted and repulsed by black bodies. The signature melodic strain of...