The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (48 page)

It’s not necessarily illegitimate, it’s just troubling. It is legitimately problematic, even self-destructive. One cannot, by entering a homoerotic union, escape the ethics of relationality that should govern any healthy relationship.

Now how about educated, successful black men who have prison fantasies?

Again, I don’t think anything is off-limits in terms of the autonomy of desire within the context of fantasy, so I am not interested in restricting such fantasies, even for those who may subordinate themselves to white men because they have internalized a white supremacist worldview. To be sure, I would find such fantasies problematic and self-destructive, even if they are literally instrumental to one’s erotic existence. I don’t have any desire to impose an ontologically grounded black ethic of propriety on the homosexual mind. Still, if such fantasies ultimately prove to be dehumanizing to gay black men, it diminishes the community; and if it diminishes the community, it impacts all of us in some measure. Selfloathing often has social repercussions.

Yeah, but see, I’m thinking that when these black men have prison fantasies, a lot of times their fantasies remind me of inverted white supremacy, where
they are taking the ideas of black masculinity being animalistic, and so on, and they are eroticizing that.

That’s different. It’s like the state of nature meets the myth of the black savage as Jean-Jacques Rousseau shakes hands with Carl Van Vechten, the gay white patron of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. In many ways, Van Vechten was a great guy, and incredibly supportive of black writers like Langston Hughes. But at his worst (and remember, as with most of us, the best and the worst live on the same block, in the same house, and when you get one you get the other), he seemed to go trolling among the Negroes to get in touch with the primitive state of man that was signified in blackness. Indeed, the genealogy of the eroticized primitivism and fetishized animalism of black masculinity stretches back to our first moments on Western soil as slaves in 1619, down to educated gay black men seeking the ideal savage type and the archetypically most unreconstructed black masculinity available—the black prisoner.

What may be erotically attractive to educated gay black men, even in the straight black male prisoner, is the prospect of situational homosexuality, since at any moment in prison, heterosexual agency is redirected into homosexual channels, given the restricted erotic commerce available. By definition, prison sex in male prisons among prisoners is sex between men, excluding the occasional heterosexual alliance in various guises. In prison, the black heterosexual male is often transformed into a vulnerable or victimizing gay man, at least in provisional, situational terms, his body marked by ad hoc homoeroticism. The idealization of the prisoner as the black savage is nothing but the postmodern urban update of the state of nature primitive with a huge sexual organ grinding in the fantasies of an erotically omnivorous culture.

This is a deep conversation. One last topic. I’m thinking about the word “queer.” In your essay on the black church and sexuality in
Race Rules,
you mentioned “Afriqueermericans.” Queer is a word that is really debated in the black gay and lesbian community. I see queers of color, younger gays and lesbians, and I guess they use that word because it’s supposed to be co-opting it, and it’s not white, and it’s not male. When I was growing up, the term queer was used by white people, and it was used in reference to boys—little boys were “queer.” I don’t know where I’m going with this . . .

Where you are going with it, at least in my mind, is that the change in the use of queer points to the dynamic character of linguistic transformation, signifying that words change over space and time. Moreover, they mean one thing to one group, something different to another group, much like “nigger” or “bitch.” Queer is not as demonizing as nigger, or as bitch for that matter, but it carries an ontological negativity that is mediated through its enthralling witness against the norm. Queer: not normal. The riot against normalcy that queer betokens makes it a
highly explosive and useful weapon in the politics of publicity for gay and lesbian causes. I think here the hierarchy of race makes a huge difference even in gay and lesbian communities. Black gays and lesbians, as well as other-sexed people, have been caught in the crosswinds of seeking acceptance in predominantly white gay and lesbian communities that provide erotic and intellectual succor, but which may close them out culturally; or hunting for love in a black culture that provides familiar rituals of home while alienating, stigmatizing, and even demonizing them because of their sexual preferences. They’ve been caught betwixt and between; it has been especially difficult for minority gays, bisexuals, and lesbians to find an appropriate grammar of erotic identification and communion.

Although “queer” has the resonance of a specific time and cultural identification, it has interpretive flexibility and can be used to signify a transgressive, even playful, resistance to the term’s negative connotations. Queer can be a terminological rallying point to galvanize multiple constituencies within gay and lesbian communities. There can be a postmodern sense of
jouissance
as well, as in, “Damned right, I’m queer,” or “Damned right, I’m a fag”—the latter expression, perhaps, a more tolerable or racially resonant signifier among a certain generation of blacks. Such terms represent the articulation of ethical agency among gays and lesbians that says, “We refuse to be put off by your negative language; in fact, we are going to rearticulate it positively in our world in our own way.” The same was done, of course, by some blacks with the word “nigger,” and by some women with the word “bitch.” Whether that works or not, I think, is an open question. I think it’s more difficult to talk about among gays and lesbians of color because they have dramatically participated in multiple kinship groups in their quest for a home. Only when you find a home can you enjoy the leisure of self-parody or the luxury of grounding a derisive term in the history of your community’s response to bigotry. There has not been, by and large, a stabilization of black gay and lesbian communities. Individual examples of success abound, but authentic homosexual community has been much more difficult to attain.

One thing that I think is different between the words “nigger” and “queer” is that, when I hear rappers use the word nigger, I don’t think they are really changing its meaning. They are reinforcing and personifying what it means. Years ago, we couldn’t point to what a nigger was. If someone called you a “nigger,” you said, “Well I’m not a dumb person, I’m not a nigger.” Now you have these black men acting ignorant, acting loud, cursing, swearing, and so on, and saying, “By the way, I’m a ‘nigger’ and I’m black.” So they personify what “nigger” is. I think what “queers” are doing—even though I hate the word, it sounds nasty—is that they are at least projecting intelligence and projecting respect.

Right, right, right. That is a very interesting point. You’ve touched on one of the great contentions in black life, especially with the rise of hip-hop culture. Some
critics, however, would disagree with you; they would say that there were dumb, ignorant people to whom we could point all along in black history. They would tell you that there have always been people who could justify the stereotype. But they will also tell you that “nigger” as an epithet never represented the complexity of black identity, and that to isolate a minor personality type—the so-called nigger—within the behavioral norms of blackness to justify the demonization of all black people was patently unjust. As a result, blacks questioned the legitimacy of the claim that the epithet was deployed by whites to define the behavior of people who fell outside the norm of good behavior. That’s because every black person in the eyes of most whites was a nigger.

In that light, we might be able to concede the racial daring and subversive attempt among some blacks to appropriate the linguistic negativity of “nigger” and to recirculate, recontextualize, recode, refigure, refashion, and rearticulate the term for their purposes. At least now when it came to that word, the “niggas”—the term as it is baptized in black linguistic subversion—were in control, challenging whites and bourgeois blacks who could never consider using the term in any incarnation. In the eyes of the contemporary “niggas,” bourgeois blacks do not exercise the same level of discretion over their rhetorical and linguistic selfrepresentation as do the folk, say, in hip-hop.

So the argument could be made that there is indeed a flip, that the people who were supposed to be dumb are not dumb at all. Instead, they are playing the culture to the hilt. They are reinforcing certain stereotypes while challenging others. They’re reaping economic remuneration from trying to parody and stigmatize what “nigger” is or saying, “Yeah, if you call me a nigger, I’m going to live up to that, I’m going to be a larger-than-life nigger, and I’ll show you what that might mean.” Or they might say, “I dare you to keep calling me ‘nigger’ in the face of my embracing this term in such a fashion as to not only reinforce the negative behaviors that you think characterize the term, but to deploy it as a rhetorical weapon against the white supremacy that seeks to deny black people the opportunity to choose their own destinies.” So I think the use of “nigga” is much more complex than the either/or absolutism that bewitches too many black critics in their discussion of the term.

I understand your point in terms of queer. But your perception that “queers” are engaging in their linguistic subversion in an intelligent way has to do with the fact that gay and lesbian people have not been subject to the same stereotype of being unintelligent that blacks have been saddled with. For centuries now, blackness has signified stupidity and ignorance in the West. But gays and lesbians have not been perceived as intellectually inferior to heterosexuals. In fact, the opposite is true: gays have been tied, at least in the West, to the Greeks, who were viewed as exceedingly intelligent. So what you face as a queer minority is the improbable complexity of black gay identities because you’re dealing with both stereotypes collapsing on your head: dumb nigger and smart queer. Although I’m sure an exception is made for black queers, whose race may cancel out their
sexual orientation, at least in the intelligence sweepstakes. How much more degraded and contradictory can one get in one body? So I think that black gays and lesbians would certainly be much more sensitive to the nomenclature of self-disclosure and self-description than even most white gays and lesbians might ever imagine.

One last topic: class issues. By most people’s account, we would be considered bourgie. I think, like W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “the talented tenth,” we’re leading the masses. Don’t you feel that as such we should set an example . . .

Set an example for whom?

In general for the masses of African Americans, since we’re going to be leaders. Say for instance, earlier you mentioned bourgie blacks, and it was kind of in a derogatory sense. In fact, I think most “bourgie blacks” are doing positive things.

Sure, sure. What I mean by “bourgie”—which is a pejorative term shortened from bourgeois—is not simply middle class. I mean by bourgie the construction of a selfdetermined persona that is hostile to, and scornful of, ordinary black people. You can be rich and not be bourgie. Class in black America has been less about how much money you make or how many stocks you have than the politics of style. Still, your overall point is well taken. I think that those of us who are privileged—and that includes gays and lesbians who have high levels of education—have an absolute obligation to “give back” to the less fortunate. I think we are bound by blood, history, and destiny to our brothers and sisters, especially to those who will never know the privilege or positive visibility that many in the middle class enjoy. And we should cross all lines—sexual, economic, religious, gender, geographical, generational—in speaking for the oppressed. For instance, that’s why I think it’s incumbent on me as a heterosexual black man to speak against the bigotry and injustice faced by my black brothers and sisters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other-sexed. And it’s equally important for educated, upwardly mobile blacks to not forget those who have been entombed in permanent poverty and miseducation.

It is part of the hidden courage of black gays and lesbians that despite the stigma they have endured, they continue to work within the arc of black identity and community in fulfillment of their sense of personal and political destiny. I think that’s a beautiful thing. Being “queer” or “gay” is a tremendous struggle, but even before the enemies of black people see a fey snap of the wrist or the “butch” dress of lesbian women, they see black pigment. So pigment may trump sexual orientation in a manner that many black gays and lesbians intuitively understand in their bodies, even though deeply inscribed in their bodies at the same time is the recognition of their unalterable sexual identities that need to be sustained, affirmed, and prized. To the degree that black gays and lesbians struggle with the complex convergence
of racial, sexual, gender, and class issues, they already represent courageous role models of negotiating differences in one body at one site. They represent to us what blackness will look like well into the twenty-first century.

What a beautiful ending.

Thanks, brother.

Interview by Kheven LaGrone
Chicago, Illinois, 2002

Over the last decade, I have occasionally embraced a genre of writing I
term “biocriticism,” a critical examination of a figure’s career and cultural
impact through the prism of biographical details and life episodes.
With biocriticism I hope to open an intellectual window onto the cultural
and intellectual landscape that shapes a figure’s life, using biography as
a means to social and cultural criticism. I have used a biocritical approach
to probe the lives and times of black icons like black nationalist
revolutionary Malcolm X, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and hip-hop immortal Tupac Shakur. The virtue of biocriticism is a
wide-ranging exploration of the forces and figures that define a particular
movement or era through the lens of a single figure, combining the
best of biography, cultural analysis, historical examination, and social
criticism. I am presently at work on a biocritical analysis of Marvin
Gaye, the legendary artist whose work altered the American musical and
cultural landscape.