The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  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 am
ong 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?

  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.