MASK MAKER, MASK MAKER:

THE BLACK GAY SUBJECT IN

1970s POPULAR CULTURE
Bill S t a n f o r d P i n c h e o n
Department o f Comparative American Cultures
Washington State Universi~, Pulhnan, WA 99164-4010
Black gay artists have created a sustained body of literature that has served as
a springboard for their creative and intellectual energies. In the 1980s and
1990s, black gay male textuality blossomed. The result is a minor literature
establishing a black gay male sensibility and a distinctly Afro-Gay perspective. The political and poetic influence of these works is demonstrated visually in Looking For Langston by Isaac Julien, in Tongues Untied by the late
Marlon Riggs, and to a lesser extent, Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston.
These documentaries seek to further a strategy of black gay representation.
This essay explores the historical precedents for such outpouring. By situating pre-1980s representations of black gay men, I examine images of the
black gay subject in the popular literature and culture of the 1970s, especially in one of the most popular works of the decade, Victor Dodson's book,
Black and Gay. I will also mention the ways in which contemporary writers,
poets, film artists, and theater and performance ensembles such as Pomo Afro
Homo allow black gay men to perform satirical roles that signify upon those
earlier characterizations, images, and depictions, which seek to further
marginalize them and, through performance, exhaust those contradictory
conditions, silence often misnamed.

I. Introduction: The Popular Imaginary

Mask maker, mask maker, make me a mask .... If I had read a book like In the
Life when I was fifteen or sixteen, there might have been one less mask for
me to put aside later in life.
- - E s s a y Hemphill, writing on the importance of Joseph Beam's pathbreaking
anthology of Black gay writing, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986).
From the introduction to his Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black gay
Men (1991).

49

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Sexuality & Culture

As Redvers Jean Marie notes, the earliest known writing that

spoke to the Black gay subject is "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" by
Harlem Renaissance writer and poet Bruce Nugent. It was published in the short-lived, iconoclastic literary quarterly edited by
Wallace Thurman, titled Fire! (1926)9 In the story, Alex, the
central character, refers to another man as "beautiful." Jean Marie
points out that this was an act considered "shocking9 The story
alienated and scandalized many readers9 Though others were
also gay, Nugent was the only writer in the Harlem Renaissance or
"New Negro Movement" who dealt with his gayness in his writing
(Marie, p. 5).
The first published volume of poetry by a Black gay male
writer was Black and Queer, by Adrian Stanford (1977)9 But
these items of gay Black culture were not well known outside
of gay intellectual circles and are still generally excluded from
the canon of gay American, African American, or general American literary studies. Writing on the paucity of Black gay representation in literature, Redvers Jean Marie states, "Like Black
history, a realistic depiction of the lives of gay men and lesbian[s].
9 .could not be expressed in literature9 By their refusal to challenge these absurd conventions, many gay writers have acted as
accomplices in this distortion" (Marie, p. 5). He continues that
"Black gay artists of the past encountered overwhelming resistance to any candid expression of themselves and their experiences in art, literature, and music because of the perceived
aberrance of their sexuality9 The white gay community, on the
other hand, "has, until recently, ignored their contributions, and
they have always had only a marginal relationship to a homophobic Black community." Writers of the Harlem Renaissance embraced their Blackness with such concepts as the New Negro
eager to express their dark-skinned selves without fear or shame
as Hughes emphasized. But, the gay writers among them did not
deal with themes that would indicate their sexuality in general
(Marie, p. 5). A few of Hughes' poems indicate male boding and
homoeroticism, while Wallace Thurman and Bruce Nugent were
both more open about their sexuality in their writings. Nugent's
story "Beauty" contained reference to another man as "beautiful,"

Mask Maker, Mask Maker

51

while Thurman's work has long been associated with male homosexuality as a subtext for his outcast protagonist in The Darker the
Berry (1929), which explores the prejudice of light-skin privileges
within the Black community as a dark-skinned woman is stigmatized because of her dark complexion. Dark-skinned and Black
and gay, Thurman would go on to write Infants of the Spring (1932),
which looks at a Harlem salon for denizens of the Harlem Renaissance literati, and the racial, sexual, and social themes that consume them.
This has been the prevailing sentiment in much of early Black
gay literary criticism for the greater part of the 1980s. Charles I.
Nero published "Toward a Black gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black gay Literature" published in Brother to Brother:
New Writings by Black gay Men ( 1991). My doctoral thesis at
Indiana University (Framing Culture: Africanism, Sexuali~ and
Performance Tongues Untied and Paris is Burning, 1997), and
a few subsequent pieces, are on Black gay men in film and video,
and chart the distinct outpouring of Black gay men's literature
during the 1980s. These writings fueled the development of a
number of filmic representations of Black gay men in the late
1980s into the 1990s, and, in turn, helped Americans discover the
voices of a number of Black gay artists and writers, such as Essex
Hemphill, Cyrus Cassells, E. Lynn Harris, James Earl Hardy,
Stephen McCauley, and others. Some of these were involved in
the production of Tongues Untied, others were not. More recently (2000), Siobhan B. Somerville's Queering the Color Line:

Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture,

offers an astute re-reading of Black Harlem Renaissance writers such as Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, and
Jean Toomer. In her essay "Inverting the Tragic Mulatta Tradition," Somerville is able to explore the interracial and homosexual themes in the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, an early
Black feminist and fighter for Black liberation. In Contending
Forces, for example, Hopkins is able to use the figure of Sappho
to both recall and revise the novel of passing and its conventional protagonist. In "Double Lives on the Color Line,"
Siobhan is able to contend with Johnson's Autobiography of

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Sexuality & Culture

an Ex-Colored Man, which she says maps culturally taboo

sexual desires onto the color line, a relationship integral to the
literary and artistic landscape of the 1920s, which she explores while
discussing Johnson's contemporary, Jean Toomer, the author of
Cane. Siobhan reads Johnson's Autobiography as less concerned
with the pursuit of interracial (heterosexual) marriage but finds such
a trajectory both integral to and subordinated by a "perverse" desire--male homosexuality. Specifically, she argues, the representation or erotization of the mulatto body is mediated by the
iconography of gender inversion, and interracial heterosexual desire functions in the text as both an analogy to homosexual object
choice and a screen through which it can be articulated (Pincheon
2000b, p. 48).
Her discussion of Jean Toomer, "Queer to Myself As I Am to
You: Jean Toomer, Racial Disidentification, and Queer Reading," explores Toomer's racial ambivalence and the project of
reading "queer" along the color line. Here, Siobhan takes note
of her positionality as a white lesbian queer theorist and looks at
the ways that Butler and Sedgwick articulate the ways in which
theories of race and racial formation impact queer theory. She
also raises important issues in regard to ways in which we can
and if we should talk about Toomer and his work as "queer."
Her analysis of his life and his difficulties at a point of being
called "Negro" or Black and the ways that he described himself
"queer" in ambivalent racial and sexual terms breaks new grown
in criticism of Toomer. In Somerville's work, the range of approaches for looking at how supposed differences between Black
and white and heterosexual and homosexual bodies summoned
and shaped each other is cogently argued (Pincheon 2000b, p.
48).
Other representations of Black gay men and women (or Black
homosexuality) can be dated to the late 1920s in popular culture
forms such as music. Representations of same-sex sexuality in
blues music, for example, were found in the form of "early blues."
Ma Rainey sang the "Prove it on me blues" with her Tub Jug
Washboard Band in 1928. George Hannah sang "Freakish Man
Blues" with Meade Lux Lewis on Piano, which was recorded

Mask Maker, Mask Maker

53

in 1935. Bessie Jackson would record "B.[ull] D.[yke] Woman's

Blues" accompanied by Walter Roland on piano and Josh White
on guitar in 1935.
Film representations of the Black lesbian or the lesbian "passing" experience start before the premier of The Birth of a Nation,
Griffith's 1915 epic of the South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. A Florida Enchantment, which first appeared as a novel in
1891, was performed on stage in 1896 and was finally produced
as a film by Vitagraph in 1914. It concerns a white heiress and
her "mulatto maid" (Somerville, p. 40). In the story, written by
Archibald Clavering Gunter (transformed for screen and stage
later), Lillian Travers, a white heiress, arrives in Florida with
her "mulatto maid" Jane to visit Lillian's elderly aunt. Like many
early films, the Black or mulatto character is played by a white
actress in Blackface (an event that occurs as early as 1903 with
the first Blackface "Uncle Tom" in Edwin S. Porter's Uncle
Tom's Cabin, and as late as 1950 with the second version of
Imitation of Life.) During her visit, Lillian purchases a mysterious box that contains magical "sex-change seeds" that originated from a tree in Africa. After a tiff with her fiancee, Lillian
swallows one of the magical seeds and begins her transformation
into "Lawrence." Realizing that as a "proper" gentleman, s/he
will need a valet rather than a maid, Lillian/Lawrence forces Jane
to also swallow a seed. The rest of the novel concerns the comedy
of errors and confusion that result from the women's dual sex
changes (Somerville, p. 40).
The next filmed image we see of the Black lesbian is in 1933 in
Dudley Murphy's The Emperor Jones, the "burly, Black
bulldagger" is portrayed as whorehouse madam (Parkerson, p. 234).
She is featured along with Paul Robeson who stars in DuBose
Heyward's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's controversial work.
Robeson makes his first screen appearance by recreating his
stage portrayal of Brutus Jones, king of a Caribbean island. But
it is not until the 1960s and early 1970s that we see a wider,
though still problematic, range of Black lesbian and gay images on
the silver screen, and the incipient birth of Black gay literary expression.

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Sexuality & Culture

II. Race and Phantasm: The 1970s Black Gay Subject

Now that 1 have shed shades
of nigger, boy
for pigments of faggot, queer
gender blender blur
--Essex Hemphill in Tongues Untied, Directed by Marlon Riggs (1989)

Late twentieth century, pre- 1980s representations of Black men

in gay culture were primarily limited to nude and partially nude
images found in erotic greeting cards, pornographic videos, and
male nude magazines; they were mentioned only anecdotally in
the national press. Most played to exaggerated characteristics of
Black male and female anatomy or sexuality, and when gay men
were mentioned in this context, either the victimized or predatory
Black gay man was often highlighted (one recalls Alfred Kinsey's
attempt to "probe" one of his respondents, a Black homosexual,
who, while Kinsey is parked in his car asking survey questions,
attempts continuously to unzip Kinsey's pants and fellate him during the interview--one of the few anecdotes Kinsey mentions in
relation to Black gay men or gay men in general). Indeed, the earliest book on "being" Black, gay, and male is authored by Victor
Dodson and simply titled Black & Gay. It was published in 1969, a
period witnessing the birth of a popular psychology trend on race
and sex, and was marketed as "A Barclay House Psycho-Sex Study"
which constitutes a "survey of interracial homosexual practices."
Loosely following Calvin C. Hernton's thesis on sexual racism,
Dodson argues that the end of racism in America is through a viable, racially-integrated sexuality (p. 10). While admirable on the
one hand, Dodson's thesis insufficiently provides the needed framework within which to adequately comprehend many of the multifaceted lives of the respondents whom he interviewed. The Black
gay man as both the predator andprey is on full display.
Written by a white heterosexual male, the book is today considered somewhat humorous and naive, if not itself furthering a strategy of racism and homophobia by often romanticizing the kinds of
unhealthy social and economic conditions that foster and extend
the homophobic violence directed toward Black men in American

Mask Maker, Mask Maker

55

society. Indeed, Dodson would write that "in view of the fact that
society frowns upon homosexuality and discriminates against the
Negro, one might assume this the Negro homosexual labors under
a double handicap. This has been found not to be the case" (Dodson,
p. 8). What might this "double handicap" be like? How could we
define it, if not as Black and gay? What relation do these bear to the
experience of racism or homophobia? Why is racism and homophobia not mentioned or named in the text?
Though considered ingenuously unsophisticated or rather indifferent, we need to re-examine Dodson's text in light of an evolving
Black gay male literary criticism and explore the impact of his text
on pre-1980s representations of Black gay men. Needless to say,
Dodson's thesis is at odds with the stated positions of many Black
gay men, especially in contemporary writings. Compare the statement by Dodson with that of poet and essayist Essex Hemphill
writing on Black gay male sexuality: "At the baths, certain bars, in
bookstores and cruising zones, Black men were welcome because
these constructions of pleasure allowed the races to mutually explore sexual fantasies and, after all, the Black man engaging in
such a construction only needed to whip out a penis of almost any
size to obtain the rapt attention withheld from him in other social
and political structures of the gay community." These sites of pleasure, he notes, were more tolerant of Black men because they enhanced the sexual ambiance, but that same tolerance did not always
continue once the sun began to rise (Hemphill, 1991, p. xix).
Hemphill seems to suggest that the sexual scene allows a certain
permissibility in terms of interracial sexuality that the social scene
does not, an issue not very often addressed by many gay organizations (although there are notable exceptions).
Dodson continues that Black gay people do not suffer discrimination and in fact are more easily "tolerated" by gay whites than
Blacks in general are tolerated by their heterosexual peers, and that
"the Negro homosexual seems to adjust comfortably to the ways of
the homosexual society," presumably all-male, all-white, and allheterosexual. The "Negro homosexual" does not, he relates, "feel
tied to the Black gay organizations ghetto and to the generations of
ancestral masochism which has played such an important part in

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his history," a racist way to examine Black history and the historical experiences of Blacks--indeed, the "sambo thesis" that Dodson
relies upon harkens back to Stanley Elkin's discussion of Sambo
and the childlike "nature" of the plantation slave, always loyal but
lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing (p. 82),
also, as Bogle notes, "hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless,
and oh-so-very kind" (p. 6).
The Negro homosexual "finds a warm and welcome place in the
various homosexual haunts. He has no fears of being refused service in a homosexual bar; he is not classified as an inferior when
socializing with the Caucasian homosexuals; his skin color is not a
cause for rejection from an apartment house that caters
to...homosexuals" (Dodson, p. 8). (In general, we think that the
Black movement of the '60s spurred and gave impetus to a number
of other social movements.) This does not always correspond to
the reportings of many Black gay men who have experienced discrimination at predominately white gay bars where they may be
carded, or asked for an abundance of identification, to enter. Yet to
Dodson, the category of the "homosexual" is sufficient to warrant
the experience of both. The liberation of homosexuals is framed in
terms of their sexual choices and acceptance, which is the defining
aspect in terms of how he chooses to frame his discussion. Race,
class, and gender do not factor into his analysis, that is, the multiple, overlapping areas of experience of Black or "Negro" homosexuals do not come into play because primarily they are unnamed.
"Black and Gay" doesn't in this sense adequately speak to the Black
gay subject as Dodson constructs it. For Dodson, "even a heterosexual will accept the Negro on more or less of an even plane if the
Negro is homosexual and works at one of the 'categorized' homosexual trades." To put it bluntly, Dodson seems to suggest that only
stereotyped, perhaps cute and effeminate, gay Black men are accepted because they are easily identified as homosexual and not as
"Black," which "even a heterosexual" could easily accept though
this does not suggest an even plane.
For Dodson, the homosexual, both White and Black, lives his
life outside the perimeter of polite society. "This twilight society of
homosexuality is dawning more brightly with each passing year

Mask Maker, Mask Maker

57

and with its dawning is coming the acceptance of the Negro as an

equal. The cause of the homosexual justice is doing more for the
advancement of the Negro cause than any other movement for the
Negro's social acceptability. Tolerance seems to be the key that
created the common denominator between the white and Black
homosexual" (Dodson, p. 9). And yet we can ask, how many white
gays have supported interracial gay organizations or Black gay organizations during the period? How do white gays act to subvert
the pressures exerted upon Black men who are gay whose class,
race, or gendered status impact them as much (if not more) than
their status as gays? And what of Black gay men? in a text that
purports to speak to the Black gay subject?
In the early 1990s, Dodson's Black & Gay was the satirical subject of the openly gay Black performance group Pomo Afro Homo
in their off-Broadway run of Strange Fruit. The satire plays and
signifies upon some of the discrepancies many Black gay men recognize in their real, everyday lives, which contradict the book's
premise and the fictionalized scenarios of phantasm that he presents as reflecting the everyday realities of Black men who are gay.
Although Dodson purportedly drew upon "live" subjects for the
gums and varnish of his actual reportage and then "fleshed out" the
material with an authorial imagination, the work advances his myriad
escapades in cultural tourism. Dodson relied upon what he terms
"case histories," denoting an ethnographic emphasis in addition to
a source of collected information about a group or individuals used
especially for sociological, medial, or psychiatric studies. His method
of analysis is a vague psycho-social emphasis that remains undefined except for the use of an authoritative, orchestral voice used to
analyze the stories by drawing upon a discourse of popular psychology. "These histories are, without exception, true-to-life accounts of homosexual experiences. Some of them have resulted
from personal interviews with subjects, and others (sic) are based
upon reported incidents."
Names were withheld within the text, and "the individuals involved have been fictionalized for the protection of all concerned
(primarily Dodson?)." Dodson, however, evidently fictionalized his
narratives to such an extent that it remains difficult if not impos-

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Sexuality & Culture

sible to delineate where the kernel of the story lies and where his
phantasmal imagination begins. In this sense, Dodson, in effect,
becomes the 20th century version of a Joel Chandler Harris, the
story-teller who tells other people's stories to other people.
What might have, ostensibly, been an important collection of
stories by Black men who are gay (and their relationships beyond
racial and sexual borders) becomes an indulgence in an exotic tourism that offers Dodson a platform to advance a naive treatise on
race relations especially in regard to gay men whom he purports to
understand. In adopting this approach to Black gay male textuality,
the Black gay men who are interviewed are desubjectivized in a
shallow view of interracial "harmony." Indeed, to take one example,
one need only look at the story of "Cliff" to understand the extent
to which Dodson fails to adequately comprehend the multiple conditions surrounding the lives he writes about but prefers instead to
fantasize them insignificant and inconsequential except as they conform to Dodson's phantasmic imaginary. In his quest to demonstrate that the path to ending racial strife is through sexuality, Dodson
downplays those tensions presented by his informants that are
present in "their" stories (if indeed they are in fact their stories.) In
these stories of contradiction, he first sexualizes then blames Black
gay men for the relations of power and the racism they encounter.
Although he seems to feel in his overview, introduction, and analysis of these stories that there is no hierarchicalization of race or skin
color, the narratives that he writes about would suggest the opposite (the same may hold true for relations of class, also, I would
add--both romanticized by Dodson).
Black & Gay is not a "great" work of literature. Its importance
here, as the work concerns representations of Black and gay men
(and is in fact another representation of them), is precisely that it is
an artifact that purports to detail Black gay lives and attempts to
argue the position. However, while the book remained in print, it
was well disseminated in popular format, the popular psychology
genre, and was available to a mass audience. Therefore, for the
period, 1969 to say 1979, Dodson was able to produce and disseminate similar kinds of unhealthy symbolic representations without significantly altering or questioning the dominant forms already

Mask Maker, Mask Maker

59

prevalent at the time. Only in the fictive works of James Baldwin,

Jason Holliday in Portrait of Jason, and, later, Adrian Stanford's
Black and Queer were these dominant ideologies and representations of Black gay in American popular media significantly challenged by the voices of Black gay men. The kinds of representations
created by Dodson were more prolific and popular than Black gay
men speaking as Black gay men were afforded the opportunity to
create and disseminate in the span of a decade prior to the 1980s.
This was an important period for Black gay men, many of whom
came of age during this period but who were raised during the
period before W.W. II. Larry Icard points out that not only was
homosexuality viewed as deviant behavior but white homosexuals, in spite of homosexuality itself being considered deviant, were
likely to reject Black homosexual men in love and play (unlike the
criticism of the 1990s by writers such as Joseph Beam and Essex
Hemphill); it was also a time when gender role differences were
important and relationships between men were caught up in the
taking on of masculine and feminine identities and sexual practices. They often found it difficult to conceive of being Black and
gay at the same time, such was the pressure to proclaim one primary aspect of their identities (Icard, p. 35), later phrased by Black
gay activists in Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied as, "which is he
first, Black or gay?"
Interestingly, two years before Black & Gay's publishing debut,
underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke released Portrait of Jason,
a "highly successful" independent documentary-tourist film that
premiered September 29th at the 1967 5th New York Film Festival
at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The festival program
describes the film as "a two-hour interview with a male prostitute."
"And though that is what, in fact, it is, it is at the same time a lot
more. It's a revelation of what being a Negro can do to this man;
it's a terrifying view of a man who is disintegrating before our very
eyes; it is not a very cool sound from Hell; it is an eruption of the
real underground." As this description would seem to suggest, Portrait of Jason is fraught with an ambivalence toward its at once
insurrectory and pacified subject. Portrait "features" Jason Holliday,
n6e Aaron Payne, a performance artist and hustler, who longs for

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stardom and his shining moment of fame and glory--both before

the camera and in his yet unfulfilled attempts at a career in stage
performance. The indefatigable and undaunting film critic Parker
Tyler would include the following description of Portrait of Jason
in his ground-breaking volume, Screening the Sexes: Homosexu-

ali~ in the Movies:

an odd sidelight on the homosexual as superannuated or outdated was cast
by the decision of Shirley Clarke, the underground film-maker, to do a
straight film portrait of a Black homosexual, Jason Holliday, a man with a
great deal of likable humanity: his sole qualification as a 'distinguished
person.' (Tyler, Pincheon 1997, p. 194)
Oddly, Tyler does not comment upon Clarke's decision to make
a "straight film portrait of a Black homosexual," except to note the
film as a "happy accident" wherein "the fight medium was found
at the fight moment for the right subject." That Tyler would note
the camera's personnel as "assisting" Jason is an understatement.
Upon further consideration and additional hindsight, it is most likely
their "assistance" and representational strategy that has doubtless
proven more superannuated or outdated than the film's subject.
Suffice it to note that perhaps in 1967, Jason Holliday might simply have been before his time--after all, Broadway (and even OffBroadway) was hardly the welcoming space for queens wishing to
perform in openly gay (not to mention Black gay) performance
routines. What then is the status of the desire of the camera to transfigure a type of reverse colonization that transubstantiates Jason as
Black homosexual within a "straight" documentary profile? Does
it not serve the purpose, among other things, of consigning its subject to those discursive domains of silence whose constitution is the
unthinkable? (Pincheon, 1997, pp. 194-195).
In terms of film images of gay Black men and women, the 1970s
were a mixed bag. In 1971, trailblazer Melvin Van Peebles introduced "Sweetback" in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a film
taking on D, W. Griffith's bad Black buck, transforming that muchstereotyped character into a folk hero. Ushering in the "Blaxploitation
era," Van Peebles also introduced the first film to portray positive,
undaunted, healthy gay male characters of different races in one

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61

scene in the fihn intercut with Sweetback's police chase in Mexico

as the main character is on the run from the police. The film suggests that both Black and gay communities are under siege by a
corrupt police administrative force that differentially applies rules
to the communities it serves; we see for example that the chief of
police frequently uses the term "nigger" in reference to Blacks as
he address his police crew (which is also composed of Blacks,
incidentally). Under interrogation by the police, they refuse to give
notice of Sweetback's whereabouts all the while flaunting their sexuality in the face of police authority-one man licks his lips naughtily and states, "I do cops," the other smiles at the police and says,
' T m a militant queen." Jack Starrett directed Cleopatra Jones in
1973 by Warner Bros. In that film Tamara Dobson plays CIA agent
Cleopatra Jones who is out to get a big, bad white mama who
happens to be lesbian. In 1973, Russ Meyer directed Slaves, a softcore racist sex-movie featunn~, S&M, a Black male homosexual,
as well as a castration scene. In 1976, MGM released Norman...Is
That You? directed by George Schlatter, a 91 minute feature,
based on a Broadway play by Sam Bobrick about a butch gay
Black youth who is in love with an effeminate white youth. The
Black youth's middle-aged African-American parents, played
by Redd Foxx and Pearl Bailey, are both about to have a heart
attack over it. Interestingly, during that same year, Drum, directed
by Steve Carver, was released. Drum is set in 1860s New Orleans,
where a bordello house slave endures all types of sexual predators
and sexual depravity, and harks back to Russ Meyer's Slaves
(Pincheon, 2001).
The near-end of the 1970s sees media images by far more positive. Paul Mazursky introduced Next Stop Greenwich Village in
1976, starring Antonio Fargas as Bemstein, a bright but lonely Black
homosexual in this feature story of a white actor who moves to
Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Fargas appears again in the 1976
feature Car Wash by Micheal Schultz, about a group of car wash
attendants. When put down by one of the workers in a verbal exchange about Black masculinity, Fargas, a militant gay transvestite, responds with the famous line "Honey, I'm more man than
you'll ever be and more woman than you'll ever get!"

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And to round out the decade, a spectacularly trail-blazing film

by Frances Reid, Elizabeth Stevens and Cathy Zheutlin, In the Best
Interests of the Children, which appeared in 1977. This
groundbreaking film, on video and 16mm, portrays lesbian mothering and the diversity of experience, race, and class among eight
lesbian mothers and their children (Pincheon, 2001).
Not until 1977 did Adrian Stanford publish his pathbreaking
volume of poetry, Black and Queer. For that reason, it is therefore
much more likely that these kinds of popular works, Dodson in
print media and Drum and Norman...Is That You? in film, which
were not on the whole authored, directed, or produced by Black
gay men (and sometimes not even starring), are the ones that introduced negative perceptions of Black gay men and the dilemmas of
Black gay life in the United States during the period. These were
undoubtedly much more influential in terms of impacting American audiences until the late 1970s, much more so than, say, James
Baldwin's first novel, published in 1953, Go Tell it on the Mountain, or his second work published in 1956, Giovanni's Room; and
undoubtedly more influential toward audience perceptions of African American gay men than Adrian Stanford's book of poetry published in 1977, Black and Queer appearing nearly a decade
later--which is by far more eloquent and displays a greater sensitivity to the nuances of openly Black gay existence and sexuality in
both the 1960s and the 1970s than Baldwin's first novel (his second has been criticized for its representations of homosexuals as
lonely, "deviant," outcasts and lauded for its frankness in broaching the subject of homosexuality).
Black and Queer was published by Gay Sunshine Press, a small
gay men's publishing house in San Francisco. Undoubtedly the
audience was probably limited and would not have the distribution
to reach the same audience as films such as Drum and Norman...Is
that You ? did in the mass media. As with the other works of the
period in print and visual media, which on the whole do not argue
a Black gay standpoint (the work in film of Antonio Fargas in the
latter 1970s and James Baldwin's fictive work is the closest produced during the period that we might refer to as constituting a
more specific Black gay subjectivity), most of Dodson's phantas-

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63

mic stories do not extend Black and gay subjectivity but have the
effect of nullifying it. This is accomplished through the limited aims
of a narrow strategy of representation that both subjectivates and
substantiates the position of the author and simultaneously
marginalizes and limns Black and gay subjectivity. It is, precisely,
the voices of Black gay men that are lost in these fictionalized accounts of everyday encounters as the authorial, overseeing voice
of Dodson mutes Black gay tongues and subjectivity. Thus in these
stories Black men are tongue-tied. How does Dodson's constructed
"Negro Homosexual," tolerated by Whites, work to disadvantage
Black gay men? How does "race" work, in this instance, to mute
Black gay subjectivity? Is Dodson's view of race insufficiently
developed to consider power and cultural representation to advance
a more healthy view of both race and homosexuality, especially in
regard to Black gay men?
Dodson's approach is often simply insufficiently attentive to their
needs as living, breathing, creative, and dynamic human beings,
that is beyond stereotypical representations of Black gay men as
constituting a "problem" people (an all-too familiar portrait), beyond the angry passive-submissive, the extreme effeminate, the
macho sexual predator, the sexual victims, and the sexual prey. In
his effort to advance a racial theory or treatise involving Blacks and
homosexuals, Dodson is not as attuned to Black gay desire and
expression as a later generation would amass, especially in the face
of the AIDS pandemic in which many more Black gay men, following the lead of Black lesbian writers, would come to advance.
III. Borders: R a c e / C l a s s / S e x / P o r n

Metaphorically speaking
his Black dick is so big
when it stands up erect
it silences
the sound of his voice.
It obscures his view
of the territory, his history,
the cosmology of his identity
is rendered invisible.
--Essex Hemphill, "Black Machismo" Ceremonies (1992, p. 130)

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All o f D o d s o n ' s stories traverse borders o f race, class, power,

and sexuality. The first chapter is similar in plot and characterization as Steve Carter's 1976 feature film, Drum, the fictionalized
account o f a male bordello slave "haunted by sexual predators."
Chapter one, "Cliff's Story" opens as the "protagonist" CliffWood
is forced to perform sexual "services" for his boss, "Mister Jarvis,"
at a s u m m e r job on a southern farm. The story combines a fantasy
o f sexual domination with the realities of e c o n o m i c s and p o w e r
relations. I've chosen to focus on this particular story in Dodson's
collection because he includes it as a signal piece that sets the tone
and pace for the volume, and because it is fairly representative of
the kinds o f problems in the study o f sexuality we might want to
focus more attention on for this decade. We noted that in a n u m b e r
of representations of Black gay m e n in popular culture in the decade following the fifties, Black gay m e n are seen as either predators, problems, or sexual victims, and are generally b l a m e d for the
racism and homophobia they often encountered. Dodson's first story
is a good example o f this kind of unhealthy theorizing about the
Black gay subject.
The first scene from "Cliff's Story" begins:
"Hey boy, get over here." The voice was hard and rough, spiked with a
vicious Southern drawl. Cliff Wood dropped the trashcan he was hauling
and walked to the furnace room where a man stood framed in the doorway.
"Move your Black ass, boy !" the man yelled. Cliff did not quicken his
pace. "How many times I tell you to clean out this here bin? You deef or
somethin,' boy?"
He grabbed Cliff by the front of his shirt and pulled him into the room
kicking the door shut behind him. "And whilst you're here, boy, I've got
somethin' else for you to clean up." Cliff's heart was pounding like a
hammer as he watched the man's course, hairy hands rub the crotch of his
pants. "First I think you'd better suck this here joint of mine clean, then
you can git to the bin. Come over here and get busy, boy." (Dodson, pp.
17-18)
W h a t was Cliff's inner dialog? one might a s k - - a n d indeed,
Dodson, as though through some intuitive magic, supplies it in an
all-too familiar tale pornographic. "There were tears in Cliff's eyes
as he knelt b e t w e e n the man's legs. He was only too familiar with
the routine and he knew it was senseless to resist." Cliff's ambiva-

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lence we might note as "his mind was in a turmoil" since "he knew
he should fight off this perversion, yet there was something deep
inside him, some germ of truth that made his cock stiffen slightly.
He reached down and pushed it between his legs so that it would
not be noticed" (Dodson, p. 18).
Throughout these fantasy encounters, Cliff is forever "hiding"
his penis. One reads of Cliff that "he reached down and pushed it
between his legs so that it would not be noticed" (p. 18), "Cliff
cinched his legs tighter together and held his cock prisoner," and in
another instance Dodson notes that "Quickly Cliff again adjusted
his cock so its hardness was not evident" (p. 19). Although the
author reads this as Cliff's embarrassment at being sexually excited
by the scenario, it seems equally instructive to read it as an act by
Cliff to prevent the act of possession by Jarvis, who perhaps wishes
not so much to possess Cliff as to possess the phallus. Interestingly, after the incidents between Cliff and Jarvis, Dodson has Cliff
wondering if he is queer. But the story suggests that it is Jarvis who
might be doing the soul-searching, and not so much that he might
be queer but that he might be a rapist. The intersection of race,
class, and sexuality are here illuminating but thoroughly romanticized to release a violent pleasure, a pleasure gained at Cliff's peril.
The encounter ends with Jarvis' orgasm, and Cliff is ordered to
clean the coal bin, an act which at once highlights the romanticization of the nexus of race and class, which is in turn interwoven into
the stuff of pornographic fantasy. In some cases, white men, gay
and straight, do not focus on the pornographic implications of gay
male erotica or porn, especially in regard to race or interracial sexuality. Indeed, in recent gay male literary criticism, white gay men
seem to come from the opposite angle.
John Champagne, for example, includes essays on the works
Tongues Untied and Paris is Burning (both Black gay productions)
in his book, The Ethics of Marginalia: A New Approach to Gay
Studies. While ostensibly arguing for a new "ethics" his focus in
these essays is very often less a sustained focus on Black gay men
in literature and the visual (he ignores completely the literary precedents for the documentary Tongues Untied) than it is a furthering
of a sustained argument to refute the antipornographic. He finds

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articulations of the antipornographic riddled throughout contemporary Black and gay expression, particularly in the poetry and
prose of Essex Hemphill and in the video Tongues Untied, which
features the work of Hemphill and other poets--and while
Hemphill's essays on Mapplethorpe do argue against an objectification of the Black male they do acknowledge the desire and ambivalence of Black gay men toward those images as well as call for
new images and representations; but this is not to say that Hemphill's
work does not entertain the erotic, as some have criticized, or the
pornographic, but that it isn't racistly objectifying of Black m e n - gay or straight.
For example, in the poem "Le Salon," Hemphill writes "Lowering my pants/before another mouth ;/the cheap movie reel/rattles in
its compartment/while the silent color movie/for a quarter/grinds
around and around./We pant in a dark booth./The musk of hair/
burns our nostrils./I moan as his mouth/swallows me./This is the
first sound in this silent movie.ffhen he moans/giving the movie/its
dialogue" (1992, p. 151). While it may be true that certain feminists who in their desire to end pornography have allied themselves
dangerously with the radical right, and this may negatively impact
those who argue for the legal sanctioning of gay male pornography
(cf., Bronksi, 1984; Watney, 1987; Champagne, 1995; Stychin,
1995) there are profeminist Black gay men who signal a healthy
respect for gay male desire and at the same time articulate the dangers of racism (Beam, 1986; Hemphill, 1986; Riggs, Tongues Untied, 1989; Hemphill, 1992). Clearly Hemphill's poem is not
anti-pornographic so much as it is proerotic, the setting is a porn
house or adult theatre but the love-making in the movie booth outpaces the porn reel; the men are more interested in each other and
the moans they make add the soundtrack to this silent porn flick.
Thus, Black gay articulations of pornography are mostly about men
and not, as some feminists insist, that male homosexuality be about
women by appropriating gay men's images and desire toward an
antipornographic or anti-gay agenda that attempts to inscribe the
very heterosexual matrix, paradoxically, at the heart of the radical
feminist project (Butler 1993; Pinc heon 1997, p. 219). Butler describes such accusations as following the same kind of logic as

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those homophobic remarks that often follow upon the discovery that
one is a lesbian: a lesbian is one who must have had a bad experience
with men, or who has not yet found the right one (Butler, p. 127).
As Cliff is left to ponder whether or not he is gay, Dodson notes,
"It had to end sometime, Cliff told himself as he busied himself
with the work. 'I wonder when?' he said aloud. Yet there was something in the experience that aroused him. He frowned and wondered if this was what queers were supposed (sic) to be like. Was he
a queer? He got excited when Mr. Jarvis made him suck his c o c k - so if he got excited by it, then he must like it, he rationalized, and if
he liked it, then he must be a queer" (Dodson, p. 20). But in the
narrative, his thinking is quickly, in a familiar trope, disrupted. As
though to literalize the homophobic violence enacted in this fictionalized depiction, Dodson continues: "The door opened behind him
and Jarvis came back into the furnace room. 'You say anything about
this, boy, and we' 11skin that Black hide fight offa your back, hear?"
(Dodson, pp. 20-21 ). From there the rest is "history;' shall we say, in
Black and white with a plantation twist. In the narrative, Cliff becomes the "uppity nigger" who is punished for his "insolence" by a
beating and a force fuck, first by Jarvis and later by Jarvis' friends.
The narrative, although Dodson fails to make the connection, is
quite parallel in situation and plot to Steve Carter's Drum, the story
of a degraded male slave surrounded by sexual predators.
When Cliff returns to school, he reminisces "about those sex
orgies in the furnace room" (Dodson, p. 24). His own thoughts
turn to white boys. He thinks about Matt. "Matt was the most handsome white man he had ever seen in his life. He never knew m e n
could be so beautiful. W h e n Cliff closed his eyes he could envision
Matt's golden blond hair and those piercing blue eyes underlined
by that gentle but devilish crooked smile." Cliff feels his erection
and "Matt's face was shaken from his thoughts" (Dodson, p. 24).
It was during one of these moments of reminiscing that Cliff met Paul. Cliff
sat in the last chair in Miss Emery's class and although he knew he was
supposed to be studying the next day's assignment, he could not stop
Matt's face from creeping into his mind. Cliff's eyes closed and he stretched
out his legs and slumped in his chair as he let himself think about the time
that Matt had gotten into him. He was suddenly aroused from his day-

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dream by a voice that was vaguely familiar. When he opened his eyes, he
saw Paul Hellman grinning at him. (Dodson, p. 25)

Later, Paul asks Cliff to a game that evening. In what seems the
most realistic section of the narrative, Cliff, in his dialogue with
Paul, invokes the racial sanctions against Black and white friendship in their small, segregated town: "'Are you going to the game
tonight, Cliff?' 'Me? You're puttin' me on, man. I'm lucky to be
sittin' in the same class room as you, let along going out socially.'
He forced a chuckle. 'Shit! Who's goin to stop you from going to
the game?' 'Look, friend, not all white boys are as tolerant of us as
you are. This school ain't been integrated long enough to get folks
used to the idea of Black boys and girls together with white boys
and girls. We ain't safe out of our neighborhood at night, and you
know it!'" (Dodson, p. 28). This raises the point that if sexual or
interracial sexual equality is achieved, then is social equality automatically granted?
Paul invokes the power of his father, a prominent white citizen,
in an effort to allay Cliff's fears: "Come to the game with me. They
wouldn't lay a finger on you with me along-side you. You know
who my old man is, don't you?" (Dodson, p. 29). While Paul persists in attempting to pick Cliff up for the evening, Cliff registers
his concerns for the risks (to both himself and Paul) of their encounter. "You're off your bean. You drive into shanty town in that
new convertible of yours and you'd be as safe as I would be if I sat
down at the mayor's dinner table. You'd get your ass ripped right
off you. Don't forget, buddy boy, we Black boys aren't welcome
in your part of town and you white boys aren't welcome on our
side. That's the way it is and that's the way it's goin" stay for a long
time yet." Paul thought, then shot Cliff a playful look, his eyes
twinkled with mischief. "Then I'll pick you up on the borderline."
He held on to his silly little grin (Dodson, p. 29). The borderline in
this case is the railroad tracks separating Black and white residents
in their small segregated town. Historically in many southern towns,
the railroad tracks function as a dividing line, the metaphorical and
literal divide between racial groups, and Cliff and Paul decide to
play not only with a taboo sexuality, that is interracial homosexuality, but with crossing other borders as well.

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Still, Cliff remains unpersuaded. "I ain't goin' to the game and
that's that." "Then we don't have to go to the game. We'll go for a
drive into Raleigh.' .... Oh great,' Cliff said, showing his exasperation." "That'll look just peachy now, won't it? You and me, Black
and white together and all that kind of shit, driving as big as shit
down the highway to Raleigh. Just how far do you think we'd get
before the troops moved in? .... Oh, for Christ's sake, Cliff, I'm just
trying to be friendly. . . . " "I know you are," Cliff said almost in a
whisper," and I appreciate it, but it ain't much use to make friends
with someone who ain't of the same color. It just don't pay in the
end."
On this last note, "it just don't pay in the end," we see some of
Cliff's fears emerge, fears of retaliation, retribution for breaking
racial taboos, racial borders and sexual taboos and sexual borders.
Paul continues his attempt at persuading him. "'I personally think
you're mistaken, my friend,' Paul answered with the affected pomposity of a politician. 'And I'll tell you what I'm a-goin' do.' Cliff
couldn't hold back the smile.' .... Meet me at seven on the tracks
that cross River's place. You can walk there in about ten minutes.'
T l l streak along in my sporty little wagon and pick you up. We go
for a drive along the river and talk about girls--how's that for a
night on the town?'" (Dodson, pp. 29-30).
As they depart, Cliff stops at a drinking fountain and when he
turns to look at Paul, gathered with two of his friends, he notices
when they turn in unison toward him. "He heard Paul grumble
something at his buddies that sounded very much like, 'Go fuck
yourselves!' before he dashed up the stairs to his next class. His
friends were laughing. Cliff had a tight feeling in his stomach. He
was pretty sure he knew what they were laughing about" (Dodson,
p. 31).
The tight feeling that he felt earlier "stayed with him all day, and
when he was walking slowly toward Mr. River's place at about ten
of seven that night, he still hadn't convinced himself that he should
keep his date with Paul." Cliff felt certain that he would get hurt in
the end, and that Paul would get hurt, also by those white boys
who taunted Paul but who had called themselves his friends. "'Hey !
Where are you going?' Paul's voice rooted Cliff to the spot. He

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suddenly felt a s h a m e d at the fact that he had intended to stand up

his new friend. ' I ' m early,' Paul added. ~I parked in a clump of trees
and decided to m e e t you more than half-way.' He was smiling,
w h i c h m a d e Cliff feel even more embarrassed at being caught in
retreat. 'Did you forget s o m e t h i n g ? ' 'Yeah,' he lied. 'But it isn't
anything important.' He grinned, resigning h i m s e l f to the unbearable attraction he had for Paul. He b o w e d his head so that his eyes
w o u l d n ' t give h i m away. He felt the seeds of love begin to sprout.
He k n e w he was blushing again (Dodson, p. 32). The author describes what happens in the passage following this as a rousing
bout of oral sex which he paints in wholly racialized terms. Afterward, "the two y o u n g bodies, bathed in sweat, finally relaxed and
lay still and quiet" (Dodson, p. 40).
Cliff again registers his concern for h o w they will be treated
should their close friendship continue:
"You're off your rocker, buddy boy. It'll only mean trouble for both of us"
"~Ah, come off it, Cliff. You sound like some old grandmother. You're
always talking about trouble, trouble, trouble. Look at the bright side of
things. We're a great team. From that first little taste I'd say we were pretty
right for one another. Now what's to keep us from enjoying it as often as we
like?"
"The color of our fuckin" skins, man. I'm a ~nigger-boy' and you're a
'whitey' and that's it in a nutshell."
"I don't mind if you don't," Paul chided.
"Come offit, Paul. You know we can't be friends. Especially down here
in this state. We'll get us skinned alive, both of us. They'll label you a
"nigger-lover' and you'll get *white-lover' plastered all over my big Black
hide." (Dodson, p. 41 )
In an effort offered half in jest, Paul attempts to soothe Cliff's
feelings by responding that they leave the town for New York.
They envision N e w York City as a freer society that w o u l d permit
them to be together unfettered by the small town's attitudes and
sanctions about sexuality, race, and interracial friendships. Cliff asks
Paul h o w they w o u l d survive in N e w York. Paul's response, again
offered flippantly, is that "We could sell that prick of yours by the
inch. That should bring in a small fortune" (Dodson, p. 41 ). Paul's
lack of concern for their survival and well-being upsets and frustrates Cliff, w h o begins to cry.

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Dodson adds in his summation that in this "case study" of Cliff

and Paul, "the young Negro Cliff, is a fine example of the underlying distrust the Negro holds for the white man, but perhaps what he
doesn't add is that this distrust might stem from a system of segregation and the penalties they might face because of their interracial
sexuality and because of their homosexual relationship. Cliff refused to accept Paul's expression of need and desire. In Cliff's young
mind he was looked upon as an inferior--good for nothing but
as an implement of pleasure'" (Dodson, p. 43). And why should
Dodson be at all surprised that Cliff might feel that way, especially since Paul tells him that he is unable to love him? ("you
can't fall in love with a guy," he tells Cliff on page 42 of the
text). Dodson notes that Cliff "was convinced that he would be
used and then cast aside by all he would come in contact with. He
could not see the rare opportunity that was presented to him to try
and rectify an age-old harm that still runs through the cotton belt"
(Dodson, p. 45).
So racism, a societal issue, has been thrust on the shoulders of
Cliff who should have known better in the first place. It's his fault.
Yet viewed from another angle, Cliff withholds the fulfillment of
Paul's desire for sexual affection precisely because Paul is unable
to love him as a man and therefore, for that reason, cannot trust
him. As Cliff relates to Paul his encounters with Jarvis, he sums up
his position succinctly: "All I learned was how to be a faggot"
(Dodson, p. 32), which is his way of expressing how he felt used
by Jarvis instead of enjoying the opportunity for a more rewarding
relationship, which he does in fact attempt with Paul.
Had Cliff maintained the relationship with Paul without having
his own desires fulfilled, his desire for love, then he would have
placed himself in a position of being emotionally and sexually
abused. Paul would have simply been another replacement for Jarvis.
The narrative account of their relationship and Cliff's words and
actions are at odds with the manner in which Dodson frames his
thin analysis.
Undaunted by Paul's perpetual dizziness, Cliff continues after
Paul tells him that "we'll figure something out" (Dodson, p. 42).
Now we get to the heart of the matter for Cliff:

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You just wanted to see what a Black boy's cock was like, didn't you?"
"Wrong !"
"I have a thing for you. I guess if you were a girl I'd call it wanting to go
steady." He drove and spoke without glancing at anything but the lonely
road that stretched before them.
"Not love?"
"Love? You can't fall in love with a guy."
"I can," Cliff mumbled, staring down at the clasped hands that rested in
his lap.
"It's late, Cliff. We'll take [sic] it over tomorrow, o.k.?"
Tears began to roll down Cliff's cheeks again. He turned his head so
that Paul would not see them. "Sure," he said very quietly--barely audible
at all--"sure, o.k."
Cliff Wood didn't show up for school the next day, nor the day after,
nor any other day for that matter. The little town outside of Raleigh never
saw him again. His mother searched but she never found a trace of him.
(Dodson, p. 43 ]My italics])

IV. Who's Zooming Who?: Subject/Subjecthood

Perhaps Cliff was unrealistic in his emotional expectations of
Paul, who d o e s n ' t feel that a man could be in love with another
man, a sentiment that leaves Cliff crushed. After thumbing his way
North to New York City, "Cliff lost himself in the jungle of New
York. He entered the thriving city as a hard, cold, calculating homosexual" (Dodson, p. 43), adjectives that stereotypically describe
urban gay men. It is interesting to examine the imagery that Dodson
presents: "hard, cold, calculating homosexual," a description suggesting a criminal, thug-like perversion o f a man w h o enters "the
thriving city," which b e c o m e s a city of prey as the lines are juxtaposed, positing Cliff as gay phantasm. The position o f Black and
gay in this instance, as posed by Dodson, references not so m u c h a
wholeness or quality of being or a particular stance, but rather an
entire history of the association of homosexuality with the systems
of mental institutions and Black males with the systems of criminal
justice (cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish) all succinctly used by
Dodson to characterize Cliff. C o m p a r e this with Hemphill's statem e n t cited at the beginning o f this section, " N o w that I have shed
shades of nigger, boy/for pigments o f faggot, queer/gender blender
blur/now that I a m freaky, free/initiate me (Tongues Untied). This

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refrain in Black gay men's writing and poetry succinctly states how
Black gay men can characterize ghettoized Black gay male life and
one's introduction and/or initiation into Black gay male culture.
White men, Dodson notes, might conclude from Cliff's anger
that he harbors "a pure unadulterated hatred" for white males. Black
nationalists might read into the story that Cliff wanted to escape the
"responsibilities of manhood and submit to white men," and thus
that he hates Black people. Perhaps this story calls for a re-reading,
one which acknowledges that what the narrative itself suggests Cliff
wants first is love. Perhaps, as the narrative suggests, what he hates
is the white men's behavior and those actions directed toward him
which they do not recognize as harmful, that he might be hurt by
not receiving the love that he wants from a mutually rewarding
relationship. We are accustomed to reading this and other stories as
Dodson has, through a simplified prism of Black and white, which
in this instance yields no spectacular insight on Black gay men as
sexual subjects, as the center of their own beings, but merely the
snug conformism of a dull, uniform gray which would obscure
Black gay male desire, subjectivity and creativity.
Dodson concludes his summation of"Cliff's Story" by aligning
himself with the psychiatric institution, offering a psychological assessment which reverses the cards, so to speak, and places the kinds
of negative experiences that Cliff encounters in the narrative solely
on Cliff's shoulders and in fact blames him for those experiences:
A psychiatrist might claim that it was Cliff's first exposure to sex with
white males that seeded this feeling of resentment and distrust, hiding
Cliff's true inner feelings of pure unadulterated hatred. Under psychoanalysis it might be proven that Cliff did not want to perpetuate or continue the relationship with a white boy. It is not inconceivable that it was
Cliff who was actually using Paul, rather than the other way around.
(Dodson, p. 46)
- - B u t why resentment and distrust toward Paul? whom Cliff
professes love if not that Paul weren't able to return that love? This
would support my premise that these are not the stories of Black
men who are gay. Who's zooming who? If homophobia is an irrational hatred or fear of homosexuality, then it is hard to characterize

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Cliff's feelings as "pure unadulterated hatred" or fear of h o m o sexuality in this instance since Cliff isn't afraid o f a relationship
with Paul (on the contrary it is he who expresses an unrequited
desire for a relationship) so m u c h as a pure unadulterated fear o f
possible racial penalties. The stories that D o d s o n records are not
n e w to some. Writing about growing up in the south o f Georgia,
Little Richard would write:
I went through a lot when I was a boy. They called me sissy, punk, freak,
and faggot. If I ever went out to friends' houses on my own, the guys would
try to catch me, about eight or twenty of them together. They would run
me. I never knew I could run so fast, but I was scared. They would jump on
me, you know, 'cos they didn't like my action . . . . Sometimes white men
would pick me up in their car and take me to the woods and try to get me
to suck them. A whole lot of Black people have had to do that. It happened
to me and my friend, Hester. I ran offinto the woods. My friends, he didn't.
9.I was scared. (cited in Julien and Mercer, p. 167)
T h e first person voice rings true in a m a n n e r that D o d s o n ' s stories are not allowed to infuse the tone and texture o f his volume.
The authorial voice of the author, his insinuating tone, transforms
the stories from Black gay texts more properly to mediated ones.
For example, instead o f approaching the stories f r o m this angle,
that is the Black gay man often afraid for or unsure of himself in the
face o f homophobia, often uncertain of the racial climate in which
he is emersed or afraid of acts o f hatred and racism, Dodson blames
Cliffas though those feelings are uncomprehendable. In Dodson's
analysis of these stories, neither racism nor h o m o p h o b i a are m e n tioned. Thus, Dodson's stories are often, instead o f first-person singular texts of Black gay male experience, summations of sexualized
racial fantasies and those negative conditions and experiences which
m e n w h o are both Black and gay m a y encounter in a racist and
homophobic s o c i e t y - - e v e n t s both actual and real, and those fantasies riddled throughout the popular imagination as they concern
Black gay men in general and interracial male relations in particular-which the phobic imagination always attempts to vividly concretize
and steadfastly engender, and which because of the historical context
of a racist society are not for that reason to be divorced f r o m those
oppressive acts and situations e n g e n d e r e d by a racist society.

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But therein lies the evidence of things not seen, the inner workings of the phobic imaginary, offering itself up as the "true" and
real against the actual words and voices that constitute the texts of
gay Black men, texts vocal and written that are worthy of sustained
attention. In their off-Broadway run of Strange Fruit, the Black
gay performance trio Pomo Afro Homo take more creative license
with "Cliff's Story." While Paul and Cliff are sitting in the car making love, they are caught by their teacher, Miss Emery. The teacher
is shocked to find the two boys together (the town is still segregated) and even more shocked that they are "caught in the act," so
to speak, as the two are engaged sexually. She impresses upon
Paul that he should not be with Cliff who is Black. Paul's sexuality
is not an issue for Miss Emery because she obviously feels that it is
Cliff who "instigates" the act (and therefore, such goes the logic,
somehow responsible for Paul's homosexuality) and who is in fact
then blamed for the whole scenario because of his race and because he is gay. Cliff is then the predatory homosexual in this instance, just as Dodson in the end describes Cliff as a hard, cold,
calculating homosexual as he leaves the small town to enter the
"thriving city" of New York. Paul, however, does not speak up and
come to his defense. Cliff, unlike Paul, has prejudicial penalties
levied against him. Miss Emery informs him that for such "unseemly" behavior, she has decided not to recommend him for a
scholarship that he desperately wants to attend college. The penalty is severe and Cliff is crushed.
This scenario highlights what Cliff, who is young, Black, and
the son of poor parents, attempts to communicate to Paul who,
although young, is the son of wealth and whiteness. When the gauntlet falls, it falls unevenly. This was so in early American society
when Blacks who were apprehended for engaging in acts of sodomy were punished much more severely than Whites (Pincheon,
2000b). The differential treatment of Black and White gay men by
society is what might have emerged from Dodson's analysis.
That Black gay men and gays of color more generally are often
blamed for conditions of homophobia and racism, and those situations of violence in which they often find themselves and which
they did not manufacture is but a legacy of such discrimination.

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But this perspective is erased in Dodson's authorial, overseeing

voice.
By the mid-1980s in writing and support groups around the country, Black gay men had begun to share and explore their experiences. In the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, the women's
movement, and the growing discontent among gays, Black gay
people had begun thinking about their lives as Black a n d as gay
Americans and their encounters in Black and gay society. Some organizing had begun in the Post-Stonewall, mid-1970s as gay liberation
groups denounced homophobia and the willful vilification of gay men
and lesbians in American culture. While in gay communities many
Black gay men felt a refuge from the stings of homophobia and the
sanctions against same-sex practices, many felt isolated and alienated
in this "new" gay culture, primarily White, resulting from their unique
experience of being both Black and gay. The networks these men
later formed impacted their creative production and, in part, resulted in an explosion of creative production in the 1980s and the
1990s. The plethora of works bearing their names and creative energies are but a testament of the fire, as Baldwin noted, n e x t time.
Note

This paper was presented at the 1999 29th Annual Popular Culture Association and 21st American Culture Association Annual
Conference in San Diego, CA, as "Constructing the Black gay
Subject in the Popular Literature of the 1970s."
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