The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (47 page)

Fantasy nurtures the erotic life and permits the idealization of possibly perfect unions. If fantasies are read as both political projections and individual assertions of unrealized potential, or even remembered achievement, they become more than neo-Freudian expressions of suppressed sexualities. Of course, fantasy is also a crucial philosophical plank in the argument over offensive, transgressive sexual behavior. For instance, in the Catholic Church right now, the scandal over pedophilic priests is linked in the minds of some critics with outlaw sexual fantasies of illicit sex between men and boys. The fact that at least one accused priest was actively involved in NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, only served to cement the belief in the minds of millions that priests were little more than closeted gay pedophiles out to seduce altar boys. The perception among many straight Catholics is that this is a homoerotic fantasy that needs to be restricted, that if the fantasy didn’t exist then the sexuality couldn’t flourish. And even if the fantasy exists, the behavior should be outlawed.

Sexual fantasies present a template for erotic desire that is reproduced in bodily behavior. The fantasy is literally the prelude to the kiss. If one can control the fantasy life of a human being, then one might control the behavior that issues from the fantasy. Still, one might reasonably question if there is strict causality between fantasy and fulfillment. One is reminded of Jesus’ words of warning that to even imagine an act of adultery is to essentially commit it: “But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Few critics of homosexuality are likely to remonstrate with equal passion against millions who have lusted after a woman in their hearts, and who have, by Jesus’ standards, already committed adultery. (One thinks unavoidably here of Jimmy Carter’s confession in the pages of
Playboy
that he had lusted in his heart and therefore sinned.) Jesus is aiming here not simply at causality, but at the necessity to discipline one’s imagination according to the ethical standards of a monogamous, committed relationship.

Hence, it wasn’t the sexual identity that was the cause of sin—after all, it was articulated within the logic of heterosexuality—but a sexual imagination or fantasy that subverted faithful relations. One supposes, therefore, that one’s sexual orientation would not necessarily alter the ethical prescriptions that regulate one’s fantasies when one is in a committed relationship. One’s moral practice seems more important in the fantasy life than one’s sexual orientation. But I do think that fantasies play a legitimate, even crucial, function in sexual identity by nurturing a vision of the ideal relations in one’s mind that one may not ever live up to. In this positive sense, fantasy is the picture of perfection against which practices are measured. That can be quite punishing because in a heterosexual world, where erotic ideals of perfection crowd the fantasies of many men, the collective imaginary, politically speaking, is often a pornographic one. Most women cannot live up to that ideal and perhaps they shouldn’t have to even try to reach that unattainable goal.
(The reason for my qualification here is that I don’t want to rule out all acts of pornography as problematic, such as those enjoyed within a healthy erotic relationship among committed adults.)

My comments and observations are equally applicable to gays and lesbians. Ironically enough, in the humdrum, mundane, quotidian relations among homosexuals, gays and lesbians end up depressingly similar in their lives to heterosexuals. The lion’s share of that depression is experienced by close-minded heterosexuals who come to realize that in most regards, there’s no big difference in gays and lesbians and straight folk in their day-to-day existence. They just happen to have sex differently and may have the same sexual fantasies as heterosexuals, just with different partners. I’m not suggesting that all fantasies are good, healthy, or edifying, but that has nothing to do with sexual orientation. When they occur in a context of erotic and sexual health, as well as ethical strength, fantasies are just fine.

On an individual level, do you think there are such things as illegitimate fantasies?

For anybody, any group, I think that there are obvious limits. If you are a gay or lesbian person and you fantasize about murdering somebody in the process of having sex, I think that’s a deeply disturbing, perhaps even potentially destructive fantasy, just as it is for straight folk. So yes, there are always ethical norms and limits generated within the logic of a given sexual ethic. You don’t have to step outside of gay or lesbian sexuality to find a restrictive norm that could be imposed as a legitimate one. Within all orientations, sexual liberty should be shaped by moral responsibility. However, I don’t think responsibility is determined by an ahistorical and depoliticized appeal to a transcendental norm of respect for the other, although I’m not knocking Kantian ethics, just disagreeing with aspects of its description of how morality works. I think that responsibility is a highly nuanced ethical concept, shaped by an ethic of respect that finds expression in historically specific and culturally conditioned relations to others. It causes one to ask the questions: How can one seek one’s best while acting in a way not to harm others? How can the flourishing of one’s erotic desire be checked by a sense of community that respects the integrity of the other? For example, rape is wrong, period, and the fantasy of rape that one intends to act on is highly destructive, regardless of one’s sexual orientation. So yes, I think that . . .

Let me step in. There are some fantasies that are not acted on. Or let’s think about if a fantasy is one that imitates or plays out behavior that some find offensive, say a woman who might have a fantasy about being raped . . .

Oh sure, sure. I thought about that immediately, as soon as I made my comments on rape. When it comes to fantasy, the sky’s the limit, and if you tell no one your fantasy, or if you share your fantasy with someone of like mind, or act on it with
consenting partners in a noncoercive, nonviolent fashion, it’s all good. I certainly think that it’s important to acknowledge the irreverence and the transgressive potential of autonomous sexual desire and fantasy within one’s own mind. I think that the landscape of the psyche should be scouted for fantasies that allow people to uninhibitedly embrace their healthy erotic identities. I suppose even so-called illicit fantasies of rape, or of being raped, within a nonviolent context of reciprocal affection—or as a solitary fantasy nurtured within one’s solipsistic universe of erotic desire—may be fine as long as one doesn’t act on that fantasy in a violent fashion. For instance, we’ve got to allow for the pantomime of rape by couples as an erotic stimulation within the moral boundaries of their relationship. But I’m rather more libertarian about these matters and believe in a kind of autonomous sexuality within the limits of fantasy that allows people to sustain a range of irreverent, transgressive beliefs as long as they don’t turn violent.

Years ago I was at a party and I saw a black man walking through the party wearing a leash behind a white man. This was in the Castro, in San Francisco, which at the time was very white supremacist, was very white. And I remember I wrote about it, and it got a lot of reaction. One of the questions that came up was: Does sexual fantasy imitate reality, or does reality imitate fantasy?

It’s a dialectical process, isn’t it? It’s a give-and-take. Can we really divorce Robert Mapplethorp’s
Man in a Gray Suit
—is that the name of it?

Polyester suit.

Man in a Polyester Suit,
right. I’m mixing up Mapplethorp and Gregory Peck, who starred in the film
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
[which I’m actually conflating with a film he did a decade earlier,
A Gentleman’s Agreement
], which was about another form of bigotry: anti-Semitism. Anyway, as erotically charged as
Man in a Polyester
Suit
is, and as full of transgressions against the heterosexual norm as that photo is, can we really divorce Mapplethorp’s imagination from the political context of a socially constructed black male sexuality, with the large black organ it features as the site and source of so much fantasy and fear within the white heterosexual world?

I read in Mapplethorp’s biography that he had fantasies about the black male animal. So that shaped my view of his photography.

Right, right. Technically, that may be true as a precise term of the mammal—the animal—but we both know that “animal” signifies racial primordialism and a savagery of sorts within the context of an eroticized black masculine subjectivity. But even individual fantasies reflect the political context in which people are shaped and in which they mature. The same is true for homoerotic desire, even as it thrives on articulations of nonnormative desire. So it’s dialectical: fantasies shape behaviors and behaviors are shaped by fantasies, though I’d still resist the strict one-to-one correlation between the two, since it fails to account for other causative factors. Fantasies are related to politics, and politics to the articulation of not only the possible—as in politics is the art of the possible—but also to the ideal one holds in one’s mind.

When I think of the black man being led around on the leash by the white man, I think of the Hegelian dimension of the master-slave dialectic—or the relationship between the dominant and the dominated—illustrating, in this case, that there’s a reciprocity of means that promotes a mutual reinforcement of fantasy and its fulfillment. They feed each other and sustain each other, even if in unequal fashion. On the one hand, the white man has the power because he can pull the black man. On the other hand, if the black man is stronger, he can resist; so there’s give-and-take. Even in a relation of inequality, there’s tension. That’s not only Hegelian, it’s downright Foucaultian. Whereas traditional theories of power located authority in conventional spots of domination in a rigid hierarchical schemata, Foucault contended that power breaks out everywhere. Its locus classicus is not simply in an institution or in hegemonic power, but in varied and complex relations and negotiations among and between the powerless as well.

That having been said, there’s no question that when white men dominate black men, even within a homoerotic context, that can certainly be the corollary of a white supremacist ethic, or perhaps its direct expression. White supremacist domination, or fantasies of domination, may fuse with homoerotic desires of union with black men. I’m not suggesting that white gays and lesbians cannot be white supremacists, or that they cannot derive benefits, pleasures, and perks from white skin privilege. In fact, their white supremacist fantasies can be projected onto black bodies. For instance, the big black dick can be sought by gay white men who possess vicious, stereotypical views of black sexuality, aping—pun intended, I suppose—the behavior of some white straight communities. The relations of power and domination, although eroticized within a same-sex framework, can nevertheless express a white supremacist fantasy that is prior to the sexual fantasy, or at least coterminous with it. I think this is relatively untheorized in certain white gay and lesbian communities. Still, I must add, without essentializing them, that white gays and lesbians seem more aware in general of the complex racial dynamics of both intimate and social relations than their heterosexual counterparts. That’s not a law or rule, just an informal ethnographic observation about how one minority is sometimes sensitive to the plight of another minority—although the exact opposite is also true, since we know that in straight black communities and among gay and lesbian white communities, there’s plenty of ignorance and bigotry to go around.

One thing I was thinking about was in terms of the black male’s perspective, and his eroticizing of white supremacy . . .

Oh sure. If heterosexual blacks can internalize white supremacist views where we hate our big black lips, our broad noses, or our big behinds—although there ain’t that much black self-hatred around that, thank God!—and seek to modify features
of our God-given beauty through cosmetic surgery, then certainly gay black men can absorb a white supremacist identity that subordinates black sexuality to dominant white sexualities. There’s no homosexual exemption to racial self-hatred. In fact, for the black other-sexed, there’s an exacerbating effect of self-hatreds, an exponential increase in multiple self-abnegations: with the black self and the gay self in tandem, there are potentially more selves to despise, resent, even hate. (I’m not playing into the additive theory of multiple minority statuses here, where folk don’t integrate their various constituent identities into a “person.” I’m simply trying to highlight how, among those prone or vulnerable to self-hatred, there’s more to hate of one’s self when it integrates a variety of identities and fights a variety of battles.)

Thus there is a reinscription of a pattern first generated within the context of patriarchal heterosexism’s sexual fantasies, so that gay white communities rearticulate dominant whiteness. Some gays get off on white supremacist fantasies, which could conceivably fuse with rough-trade homoeroticism that may be a cognate of white supremacist domination of the other. I’m not suggesting that the two are necessarily the same thing, or that they share a reciprocal relationship. I am simply saying that the two can merge. Homosexuality has modalities that extend the white supremacist’s desire to subordinate the black sexual identity to himself, and the acceptance of that by black men is no less problematic because it occurs in the context of a homoerotic union. Just because the white fist up your ass gives you pleasure doesn’t mean that it’s not meant to rip out your guts.

But is the black man’s fantasy an illegitimate fantasy?