Refashioning Undesirability in Black Queer Digital Spheres
What a miracle it is that despite everything we are taught we dare to love ourselves and each other.
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Queer Relative”
After a few weeks of pilot interviews for what was then a budding interest in Black LGBTQ literacy practices, I recognized that a number of interviewees had mentioned being users of the same online social network—AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com. While I was already familiar with the site, having a number of friends who were members and frequent users of it, I had not yet visited it. After creating a member page of my own, I was immediately bombarded with an onslaught of fields in which I was asked to declare information about my body type, gender identity and expression, educational background, hairstyle, penis size, HIV status, whether I was a top, bottom, or versatile, and a number of other matters related mostly to physical characteristics, hobbies, and sexual preference. I was then permitted to surf the website and look at the profile pages of other users. In one area, users are invited to say any additional thoughts on what they are looking for, and I noticed a familiar refrain, “no fats, no femmes, no trans,” stated formulaically, though not always in that order. As if the refrain did not already do the job of articulating what was and was not desirable as a body type or gender identity and expression on the site, the photographs on the sites’ homepage and advertisements made the message loud and clear. Image after image showed men possessing the idealized “gym body” or hegemonic masculinity. Such a refrain is, as Caleb Luna writes, one of the ways that “colonization indoctrinates us into the romantic idolization of thinness, whiteness, and masculinity—in ourselves and others,” a reoccurring circumstance of which Luna asks,
How do I, as a fat, brown, femme, decolonize my desire so I can desire myself? How do I love myself in a world that tells me I am not lovable? How can I decolonize my desire so I won’t ever again compulsively glance at a skinny boy who refuses to see me as the goddess I am? Under colonial constructions of beauty and desire, being fat and brown and queer and femme means being ugly. It means feeling unlovable, being unlovable, and no one disagreeing.1
Luna’s articulation of the interconnectedness of colonialism, desire, and the decolonization of desire demonstrate the particular terrain of literacy normativity and restorative literacies as they occur in many research participants’ literacies on Black queer digital spheres.
As I explored AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com, I immediately became curious about how people who did not or could not escape the dehumanization, disavowal, disrespect, and debasement of such refrains could still seek the community of a Black queer digital site and navigate such powerfully hurtful texts and environments? How did they make meaning of literacy within this constellation of idealized beauty, body, and gender politics wherein writings and visual images reinforce this message that label some as undesirable, ugly, and less valuable or wanted? What was the function of their own reading, writing, and use of images in these spaces? What literacies do they employ or create to confer self- and communal love to themselves and others labeled undesirable and unworthy of love in ways that also critique the very notions of desirability, beauty, and lovability?
Pursuant to these questions, my analysis of research participants’ digital literacies provides an informed understanding of the relationship between literacy and the erotic as Black queers confront regimes of normativity within Black queer digital realms. My focus is on the ways Black queers, as agents who challenge literacy normativity, do restorative literacies through digital spheres. It should be noted, as I will explore, that unfortunately some research participants actually enact literacy normativity in these spaces. I raise this last point because, while restorative literacies have an implicit ethical imperative not to be a text that wounds others, as you will see here, there are instances when research participants attempt to protect themselves from literacy normativity and fail to some degree at that imperative in the face of oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics.
The Black queer web is one of the few social spaces (besides the club, Black gay prides, and Black LGBTQ faith and worship centers) where Black queers manage their own public life. It is then an important site in which to dissect the experiences of literacy normativity and restorative literacies that Black LGBTQ people pursue in the everyday. Black queer blogs and online social networks similar to Facebook are sites for digital literacies to pursue romance, friendship, sexual intimacy, and other desires. The uses of technology toward these ends are especially important to consider as they offer dimensions to people’s uses of digital literacies on their own terms that exist outside reductive models of oppression and resistance. Adam Banks has written that studying African Americans’ recreational use of the internet is imperative because it occurs outside of the disciplinary force of institutions like libraries, schools, and organizations that impart literacies to individuals, though these literacies may also, ironically, take place within those institutions.2 Though such recreational uses of literacy online occur outside these disciplinary forces, the presence of literacy normativity is still palpable. With this in mind, here I emphasize how literacy normativity exists within Black queer digital spheres as incidents where literacy resists the impulse to perform, to be socialized into, or to be silenced by literacy normativity deployed by others, and is instead repurposed for one’s own desires and other restorative ends that evidence self- and communal love.
The (Mis)Uses of the Erotic, or Literacy Normativity 2.0
Although Black LGBTQ digital spaces are often successful in being affirming places that challenge externalized forms of normativity, some people use them in ways that perpetuate normativity. As a result, some individuals feel harmed and not affirmed in spaces marked as Black queer because they are not welcoming and nurturing for all Black LGBTQ people. A number of research participants’ experiences with Black LGBTQ blogs, vlogs, and other websites evidence how literacy normativity has emerged as a major concern in Black queer digital spheres. Through writing, audio, visual and other texts, research participants describe ways individuals work from a beauty, body, and gender politics that is hurtful and marginalizing to transgender, femme, and fat people. The role of literacy normativity here is to use writing and other texts to devalue an individual based on race, age, size, facial characteristics, gender, and other factors. These troubling actions, which are not exclusive to the Black queer digital sphere however, classify some Black queers as unlovable, unwanted, and unwelcome because of their physical traits or gender identity and expression. The result is that some participants find themselves relegated to a class of “digital undesirables,”3 to borrow a phrase from S. Craig Watkins, through the formation of textscapes that become minefields of negative comments and social ostracization.
Examining colonial discourses implicit to digital technology, Janell Hobson writes that “revealing the power differentials, we may begin to re-imagine marginal groups’ existence within the technological narrative even as they reconstitute it for their own identity formations.”4 Within a system that gives and takes away value based on beauty, body, and gender identity and expression, there are clear power differentials that exist. Those holding normative standards of beauty, body, and gender attain more power within a public that places so much value and attention on physical appearance and normative masculinity and femininity. Accordingly, others are seen as having less value based on those same standards. These notions reign over the social experiences of the everyday and permeate every facet of lived experience, including at work, at school, in families, among friends, and online.
Several research participants commented on the pervasiveness of oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics within gay and Black gay digital social networks. Born in 1975 in a small southern town, Lawrence Lovett is a Black gay man who frequents online Black gay digital spaces, regularly commenting on blogs and using Black gay social networking sites. Lovett said many site users show how “the gay lifestyle is a very superficial and materialistic lifestyle.” He said, “When you get on the websites, you could be on there talking to somebody for months, and vibe with them, and then you send your full body shot and next thing you know they no longer are responding to your messages.” Such experiences, Lovett says, make these spaces “dangerous places for anybody that does not have their head on straight.”
Sharing Lovett’s assessment is Cole Devereaux, a Black gay man. Born in 1984 in a small southern town, Devereaux said, “Looks are the things that rule this community. . . . undesirables are plus-sized people, really, really, really, feminine guys, and transgender people.” He said, “I was 320 pounds all through high school. I was a big boy.” Halfway through college he lost 120 pounds. Devereaux said before he lost weight, whenever he would try to chat with men on gay social networks he would be dismissed because he was considered the wrong body type, saying, “If you’re not broad shoulders, ripped abs, big chest, big thighs, big ol’ dick that hang to the middle of your thigh or big ol’ ass, a lot of guys are like ‘Oh, I don’t want you. You’re not my type.’ . . . I can genuinely say that.” Devereaux noted that after he began losing weight the response to him has changed: “Now I’m getting model type guys, guys that you would always see walking around with the most skinniest, most body type bottom or most body type top . . . and I am like ‘Whoa! Where were you when I was 320 pounds?’”
Certainly, as John Edward Campbell has observed, “cyberspace has proved to be a hospitable sphere for the discussion and exploration of sexuality, particularly sexualities deemed nonnormative by the dominant society.”5 However, as research participant Dominic Thomas learned and will be discussed, these spheres are not hospitable to all LGBTQ people, particularly on the basis of beauty, body, and gender politics. Andil Gosine writes that the pervasiveness of oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics online challenges the overly optimistic idea of early claims arguing that online social venues would be less hostile than the real world to those who experience social ostracization and discrimination on the basis of race, class, body, age, or gender because in the digital world the emphasis is not immediately on looks.
Gosine says that, to the contrary, characterizations of queer cyberspace as more open “do not hold up on more attentive examination,” citing how racism in queer social spaces offline continues online. Gosine notes that “anxieties about race—held by both White and non-White men—may sometimes determine who is solicited for conversation, friendship, or sex in bars, but they perform the same function in cyberspace.” One incident Gosine describes is about an exchange with a man on the popular online social networking site, Gay.com. In the conversation the man asked about Gosine’s “background,” to which Gosine responded that he is “Indian.” The man then told Gosine, “Oh . . . Not into that Sorry [sic]” and ended the conversation. Gosine notes that this interaction is “among the more polite dismissals” in comparison to “the very many occasions” on which “no disappointments were expressed, no reason given.” This was in contrast to the many other times in which he indicated he was White and “was invited to participate conversations [sic] with many more men and have an altogether different experience than when my descriptor indicated I was non-white.”6 The pervasiveness of this racism and its place in the politics of beauty and body idealism in gay social networks is not surprising. “American racism,” Dwight McBride says, “permeates virtually all aspects of American life and culture,” and “because of this legacy of white supremacy and its persistence in the form of white American racism, the notions we have evolved of what stands as beautiful and desirable are thoroughly racialized.”7 In such notions whiteness holds the value in terms of the currency of racialization, yet this elite and acceptable status does extend to other areas like weight, age, and gender expression, which are used to forge other criteria for what is beautiful or desirable as well.
For people of color and LGBTQ people, the paradox of race, gender, and sexual identity in the physical and virtual worlds has meant that many of those who may be seen as having value or being seen as desirable within some of those contexts may also find themselves treated as unwelcome, unloved, or undesirable in others. Some of these individuals draw on literacy to persist in the formation or upholding of oppressive standards of beauty, body, and gender identity and expression for the purpose of achieving greater value in this “economy of desire”8 over others with whom they actually share the margin as racial, gender, and sexual “Others.” Such uses of literacy are employed to assert their own sense of self-worth and high value by externalizing marginality within an already existing margin to those in the group who they view as worth less than them. The erotic is also visible here in that these oppressive uses of literacy within Black queer digital realms reflect multiple impulses of desire: the desire of a person identified with a group that is devalued to be seen as having great(er) value; the desire to only socialize with carbon copies of yourself; the desire for those whom you classify as abject to desire you, even as you push them further away; the desire for you to see your community as “just like everyone else.” Even though each of these impulses are understood as problematic, they are no less reflections of the erotic in that they draw from that internal source within the self to establish self-connection and connect to others. In any case, however, these actions engender oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics that are powerfully fatphobic, transphobic, and effemiphobic.
We might categorize these literacy normativities as forging what Pierre Bourdieu identified as “distinction.” Speaking on the formation of the middle class, Bourdieu describes distinctions as those matters of lifestyle, taste, values, and manners that individuals adopt in order to make clear distinctions between themselves and those they see as less desirable in order to achieve or assign greater value to one over others.9 By using writing, audio, and visual texts to fashion a discourse that recognizes them as normative subjects, these individuals enact a digital literacy normativity in Black queer digital realms. My use of “distinctions” to contextualize literacy normativity in this chapter is about much more than saying one likes one person over another; rather, it is about people who are assigning or enforcing a value system on the basis of identity and difference through their uses of writing and imagery in these spaces that is violent. Such actions have a multitude of repercussions not least of which is how they affect the meanings Black LGBTQ give to literacy. My intent is not to police people’s sexual proclivities, but it is important to identify and deal substantively with the ways some of these proclivities emerge from or reinforce various forms of oppression and domination, including stating that some people have no value because they are of color, or too big, or too small, or too effeminate, or too old, or transgender, or gender-nonconforming. Interestingly, given my look at Black queer space, these incidents take place within a community that is already marked as nonnormative and undesirable. By reinforcing oppression in spaces already made up of marginalized people these individuals are attempting to outsource “outsiderness” (queerness) to those in the space who are fat, effeminate gay men, or transgender and frequent these digital spaces, and further cement thinness and hegemonic cisgender Black masculinity and femininity as norm. These actions represent what Cathy Cohen calls “secondary marginalization” that “can be exercised by the more privileged members of marginal groups, as the ‘management’ of marginal group members is negotiated daily by those they would call their own.”10 In effect, the oppressed police others on the margins while those with unearned privilege within this value system are permitted to passively observe as others experience isolation, violence, or ostracization according to the normative standards that are in place and harm them and those with whom they share identities.
I observe the forging of such “distinctions” even among several of my research participants. A few research participants shared stories that undermine their rightful critique of normative body and gender politics directed at them or others. I highlight such contradictions to engage the full complexity of research participants’ relationships to oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics. Even when people criticized such politics, or offered progressive visions in some regard, the lure of “insiderness” showed up in their adoption of views that reproduced rather than challenged the very politics they critiqued.
Previously I shared details from Cole Devereaux’s and Lawrence Lovett’s criticisms of the pervasive normative body and gender politics among gay men. In their interviews, both also criticized the overemphasis and celebration of the “thug” as an ideal Black man or a more sexually desirable person inside and outside of Black gay circles. However, Devereaux and Lovett—both femme-identified gay men—simultaneously made comments that were effemiphobic. Devereaux recalled that he was very effeminate until his mentor, Lovett told him he was “too out there” and that “there’s a time and place for everything.” Lovett told the same exact story to me in his own interview. After this conversation, Devereaux says, “I changed. . . . I realized that I don’t have to be, you know, super-gay, because I’m really not super-gay.” He said this change consisted of adopting a different style of dress, changing his speaking voice, and hanging around people who were less feminine. As a result, he says, “I still have my masculinity, and I know that I’m a man. . . . I may have feminine qualities about me, and when I do it, I do it in the comfort of my own home or when I’m with my friends. That’s fine. I may have my feminine moments, but I know that I’m a man.” Devereaux’s resistance to his femininity extends to how he sees others. He says, “I enjoy being a man, first and foremost. Can’t no one take that away from me.” In contrast, he says, there is a “young [Black gay] generation that’s coming up” and “somewhere along the line they forgot that they were men.” Here we see that Devereaux’s gender expression is disciplined by Lovett, who is critical of the fatphobia and worship of hypermasculinity on AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com. Devereaux admittedly suppresses his gender expression in public, and looks down upon other Black gay men who are not normatively masculine in public. In these moments, individuals like Devereaux and Lovett, who are themselves otherwise on the margins and resist being maligned because of their gender or body size by other people, become the police and regulators of others they see as less acceptable.
Such actions by those like Lovett, Devereaux, and others on the margins, however harmful and dangerous, do not necessarily start with the intent to go online and terrorize others. Reflecting on the experience of my research participants and field notes from my participant-observation in Black queer digital spheres, I submit that many of those who enact literacy normativity in the form of oppressive beauty, body, and gender standards are actually coming to the site to seek connection to others and a place to cultivate or express love; love for self and community. Sometimes initial uses of these websites go awry when they make comments that are self-hating or deeply hurtful to others. Even so, while many comments are also often clearly mean and intentional, I must confess that some expressions are in fact sincere ignorance in part. In other instances, these incidents of literacy normativity in digital spheres reflect one’s own thirst for some kind of connection even at the expense of degrading and debasing others. Such contradictions, in many ways, are rooted in feelings of self-hatred and low self-worth for those who are textually wounding others and have negative physical and psychological effects. This observation is not to excuse the violence of literacy normativity itself, but rather to expose yet another layer to the power of these oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics: that many of the hurtful comments and actions perpetrated here are reflections of people trying to navigate their own internalized and sometimes unconscious feelings of inferiority by projecting it onto others. These actions might then be more easily understood or summarized as reflecting the oft-repeated wise observation that hurt people, hurt people. What remains then is the reality that these expressions of hurt emerge when one pairs normativity with dominant discourses of beauty, body, and gender idealism. The result is an expression of literacy normativity that categorizes some as less valuable than others.
Rewriting Undesirability: Restorative Literacies Online
While most discussions of abjection and desirability, particularly in LGBTQ studies, focus on ways individuals challenge this abjection to expand rigid ideals and boundaries of who is and is not beautiful, my interests are different. In “Moving toward the Ugly: A Politic beyond Desirability,” Mia Mingus argues that “we must shift from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence. That moves us closer to bodies and movements that disrupt, dismantle, disturb. Bodies and movements ready to throw down and create a different way for all of us, not just some of us” (emphasis in original).11 My examination of Black queer digital literacies explores how participants employ undesire in a restorative literacies that, though asserting ones value and demonstrating a commitment to self and community, is also decidedly uninterested in opening up rigid ideals and boundaries of beauty and desire so that they may be included into them. Through this they are moving beyond a politics of desirability to one that takes, as Mingus writes, the magnificence of undesirability and ugly as its starting place. This is a very delicate balance, as there is an admittedly thin line between making statements that declare oneself desirable and keeping desirability as something people should aspire to, but it is on this thin line and its blurriness that I feel the particularities and complexities of research participants’ restorative literacies are best seen and sociopolitical transformation is most possible. These restorative literacies occur when—in their writings in comments sections, blogs, and discussion forums—research participants use their categorization as undesirables for transformative potential. They confront any claim that they or anyone are undesirable, unlovable, unwanted, and unwelcome in the virtual and physical worlds, even as they simultaneously respond in ways that critique the idea that being desired by those who disavow them is something to which they aspire. Through this positioning, research participants are eroticizing undesirability, not by having undesirability subsumed into normative beauty and desire, but by illuminating their marginality within that construct to explode the very existence of those ideals of beauty and desire. In effect then, these restorative literacies are “moving beyond a politic of desirability to loving the ugly. Respecting Ugly for how it has shaped us and been exiled. Seeing its power and magic, seeing the reasons it has been feared. Seeing it for what it is: some of our greatest strength.”12
Through this strength research participants use digital spaces to perform restorative literacies through variable ways. Some push back through writing on discussion boards, chatrooms, and blog or website comment areas. Others create their own blogs, social networks, and other digital spaces that affirm those rejected on other sites. For example, a number of research participants recount the genesis of a social networking site for fat, gay, bisexual, and questioning men who grew tired of antifat rhetoric on online Black gay social networks. Through the establishment of this site such individuals are drawing upon literacy to establish or promote the importance of self-love and self-empowerment over the dominant discourse that seeks to cast them as unlovable, undesirable, unwanted, and unwelcome because they are fat or larger-sized.
The strength of these restorative literacies is in their foundation as an erotic intervention where individuals give pleasure to themselves, not simply to challenge problematic ideas of who is seen as welcome, lovable, desirable, or capable of giving pleasure. I take my definition of the erotic from Audre Lorde. In “The Uses of the Erotic” Lorde describes the erotic as a power source engendering the vision one has for one’s life and on one’s own terms. The erotic, she says, is a “kernel within myself,” which, “when released from its intense and constrained pellet[,] . . . flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.” The erotic challenges and invites us to see how this kernel of energy animates the entire enterprise of our interventions, and indeed, of our lives as a whole. Lorde cites the erotic as an affective power within individual and collective struggles against oppression. Within such struggles, Lorde writes, “our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.” It provides “the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person” that “forms a bridge between the sharers that can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” The erotic also fosters “self-connection,” or as I say here self- and communal love and self-care, which is imperative because it signals the importance of affective relations with the self as a source of power in our interventions for social change in the face of rhetorics that attempt to disempower within an oppressive politics of desirability.13 The digital sphere offers opportunities for such connection to one’s self and others, from the formation and performance of digital identities in social networking profiles to the function of online social spaces enabling a shared experience among those who do not share the same physical space or place in the world.
Anticipating the importance of the digital sphere for activism, Ellen Cushman argues that LCR scholars “need to take into our accounts of social change the ways in which people use language and literacy to challenge and alter the circumstances of daily life.” When engaging the “particulars of daily living” she says “people can throw off the burdens placed upon them by someone else’s onerous behavior.” Such events demonstrate that “social change can take place in daily interactions when the regular flow of events is objectified, reflected upon, and altered.”14
Indeed, a host of rhetoric and composition scholars use literacy as a framework to engage variable roles in African American and LGBTQ digital literacies, from the role of writing online for resistance and social critique to the uses of writing online for community-building and self-expression.15 My work here charts new ground in scholarly investigations of African American digital literacies by analyzing interventions that are not necessarily formal political or social causes but those through which Black LGBTQ people pursue restorative literacies in the form of self- and communal love, affirmation, sexual pleasure, and play on their own terms. Likewise, the chapter covers new terrain in queer digital literacies by examining questions of digital literacies and queer desire through sustained attention to questions of race and undesire within the constellation of queer digital inquiry, not desire itself.
Studies of queer digital literacies have developed through powerful interventions by a network of scholars of queer literacy, composition, and rhetorical studies. They have introduced and expanded our knowledge of the role of literacy and language in issues of queer sex, sexuality, gender, and digital desire.16 This research has, among other important observations, helpfully shown how writing can be seen as a valuable commodity in experiences of queer desire online. However, among the major subjects of queer technology studies outside of LCR is the role beauty, body, and gender politics play in LGBTQ blogs, social networks, dating, and pornographic sites. These politics include how individuals assign and limit value to persons in queer digital spheres, as in the physical world, on the basis of race, height-weight proportions, gender identity/expression (femme, masculine, transgender, gender queer), position in intercourse (bottom, top, versatile, etc.) age, and so forth.17 Clearly then, this is relevant for LCR, yet the critical uptake of this phenomenon for LCR is lacking as a result of the ill attention to the intersections of race and queerness in the analysis of digital literacies in such social networks. What is needed is a critique that takes up the problematic politics of desire itself but does not overlook how individuals are using literacy to throw what we think we know about desire into a generative chaos when they refuse to acquiesce to it by doing something that is seemingly banal and cannot be neatly coded as resistance. It is these moments where individuals are simply going about their own lives and engaging in their own daily literacy practices while being treated as digital undesirables that are, on their own, worthy of our attention with or without a narrative of resistance.
For example, in an online chat of LCR scholars discussing “Queerness, Sexuality, Technology, and Writing,” Randall Woodland quotes a witty phrase from a friend who, meditating on internet communication, writes, “We exist in a world of pure communication, where looks don’t matter and only the best writers get laid.”18 On the other hand, writing can be used in ways that are dangerous or harmful in experiences around queer desire online. As such, we might challenge the assertion that writing online means looks no longer matter. Either of these arguments, however, depends on centering resistance in ways that may keep the precise label of who is and is not desirable in place and stable. That is not what my research participants appear to be doing or investing in here. Instead, what their stories demonstrate and I explore here is, what is literacy doing when everybody thinks that looks do matter but you just don’t give a damn? It is through writing and other semiotics that what Dwight McBride calls the digital “gay marketplace of desire”19 reproduces the violence of oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics; my focus then is how they remain on the margins as undesirables and what restorative literacies are created and employed in that experience. I am interested in the restorative literacies Black LGBTQ people employ to subvert or transform these damaging incidents into opportunities for self- and communal love.
As I turn to analysis of life stories here, I want to offer a note on the particularities of methodology as it pertains to my research online and analysis of it. While my analysis will center on research participants’ writing online, writing about the digital sphere offers challenges to navigate the commitment to confidentiality in this interview-based study. Accordingly, titles of the websites, discussion threads, blogs, and any other potentially identifiable characteristics have been changed. Also, direct quotes that are locatable through internet search engines have been modified or omitted in an effort to honor my commitment to confidentiality for all research participants.
Circumventing Simulacrums: Effacing Normative Masculinities and Body Aesthetics in the Black Gay Blogosphere
During his freshman year at a university in a large city in the Southwest, Dominic Thomas walked onto campus looking for community. Effecting his search for community was Thomas’s developing identities as a Black gay man. He said that when he first came out, “I really didn’t know where to go. I didn’t necessarily have any friends who were very understanding. I didn’t really have a lot of gay friends.” Also challenging, he says, was “being Black and gay in a predominately white community, where the Black population is still very, very small.” Thomas was well aware that there were a number of Black and LGBT students on campus. He joined the university’s Black Student Association (BSA) and emerged as one of its leaders. Though Thomas loved the organization and made many good friends within it, he said that he did walk on eggshells about his sexuality and did not identify as gay to any of his friends in the organization. He reasoned he was afraid to tell anyone because some individuals had previously expressed unfavorable attitudes toward LGBTQ people, and Thomas feared losing friends and community. Likewise, while Thomas imagined he would have at least the LGBTQ student group to count on, he quickly realized that he might be too presumptuous. He quickly experienced things that made him feel the LGBTQ student group was not hospitable to LGBTQ students of color. When the social relationship with the BSA and LGBTQ student groups became complex, Thomas retreated into a shell and looked for alternative ways to process his sense of self and community. He said, “When I was starting to try to find, you know, just attachments and friends or relationships and things like that, I had to go online,” and “I started reading the blogs a lot.”
Reading blogs about Black LGBTQ life and culture was especially important to him, as he was still formulating his sexual and gender identity and expression, as well as cultivating what all the politics around gender and sexuality meant for his equally developing race consciousness. While Thomas did feel connected to Black gay culture through his readings, he also felt like an outsider in this space. Thomas says that while he was happy to see Black gay men and others in the blogosphere, he thought the writing and the images too narrowly focused on physical traits and normative masculinity, ignoring a diversity of Black gay men in terms of body type and gender expression. For Thomas, this attitude within “the blogging community” is very reflective of the world offline both in the gay community and the U.S. mainstream. On one blog he says images and comments overtly stated that “gym bodies” were in and everyone else was a cast-off. The phrase “gym bodies” symbolizes athleticism, strength, competition, aggression, and a number of other characteristics associated with hegemonically normative masculinities. Thus, a nonmuscular body, or one that is fat, is not just outside the ideal in terms of body, but also in terms of normative masculinity. Such bodies are envisioned as lacking. Also, as my later analysis of fatphobia will show, a nonmuscular male body is depicted as a feminine body. A fat body, and the masculinity of the larger individual, is subsequently disparaged and labeled less valuable because it is read as feminine.20 Fatphobia thus evidences the connection between misogyny and body normativity. Thomas’s experience of these blogs demonstrates literacy normativity. He continuously encounters writing and images on these sites that deploy ideas of what is and is not an ideal Black male body and Black masculinity, which promote ideas that are damaging and harmful to him and other people who do not fit this ideal. This recursive use of print and image creates a Black queer world where rigid and constraining beauty and body politics are reinforced constantly. Observing this, we see the ideas around masculinity and body image that Thomas and others must navigate in actualizing restorative literacies that evidence or encourage self- and communal love and empowerment.
For instance, Thomas was a regular reader of a blog from a prominent Black gay activist. Thomas said this blog was particularly detrimental in reinforcing idealization of normative body and gender politics. He credited the blog with articulating important US and international political news, but “at the same time I was very critical of it.” He especially liked the way it made the news relevant to the Black LGBTQ community, and highlighted the work of Black LGBTQ writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, and activists. Still, Thomas felt that the blog was also very problematic, particularly in terms of the messages he says it sends about who was beautiful on the basis of body type. Thomas said he “started seeing what the image was of just Black, gay society. It was very superficial, very, you know, you got to be muscle-bound. . . . the whole thing that I was getting from the Black gay community was that you’re not fit.” The bloggers, he says, were “reporting a kind of similar image of what they think it means to be Black and gay.” Thomas’s use of “fit” speaks to two matters: being not fit in terms of bodily traits, and being not fit to be a part of this particular social circle.
As Thomas’s experience in the LGBTQ cyberspace demonstrates, such normative beauty, body, and gender politics from the mainstream are reproduced in the margins. This all creates a blogosphere that “can be very selective” in terms of who is seen as possessing an acceptable or idealized gay masculinity. It is a kind of groupthink and exclusivity that Thomas describes as “very, very cliquish.” Thomas takes this cliquishness as an unfortunate representation of the lack of community among some Black gay men, saying, “I don’t think we’re necessarily very supportive of each other as a whole. We’re supportive of only a select few of us.” The message from these blogs and their representations of body type and masculinity say, according to Thomas, “‘this is my clique,’ we’ll be setting the agenda and image for what it means to be Black and gay in America.”
Dominic Thomas’s Erotic Interventions: Restorative Literacies in the Blogosphere
The underlying drive of Thomas’s intervention is a form of love where he defines, affirms, and expresses affection for self. This empowers himself to be fully who he was created to be regardless of other people’s ideals of beauty, body, and gender expression, while simultaneously challenging the ideals employed to categorize him as undesirable. During the interview I asked Thomas what his response was to the problems he identified online, and he answered “I kept trying, to be perfectly honest. I just kept trying,” noting his persistence to push back against these hurtful notions about being fat or a femme. What was at stake was the alternative of accepting the disconnection promised by the body and gender politics online. Feeling that such isolation and disconnection is not a so-called “option” that he was prepared to accept, Thomas uses writing as a way to intervene on behalf of himself and others, exemplifying restorative literacies in the blogosphere that critique oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics and express love for self and others.
The incidents of literacy normativity were so troubling that Thomas walked away from reading and commenting on blogs for several months. Once again, we see how wounding texts negatively inform people’s relationship to literacy and the meaning individuals give to it. In Thomas’s case, it turned him away from one of the only sources of comfort and affirmation of Black LGBTQ identity available to him in a time of need. Eventually Thomas returned to the blogosphere. He explained, “What made me start reading the blogs again was that I know for a lot of straight society and gay culture in general, a lot of them look to these blogs as a main source of information, and as their outlet to understanding Black gay people.” As the issue of Black gay representation is pertinent to Thomas, staying plugged into the ways this representation plays out in the digital realm remained important. Also driving his decision to return to the blogosphere was his intellectual and activist interests. He said research, writing, and activism on Black gay men “is what I want to do with my life,” and as such, “I feel the need to be aware of what’s being stated, and what’s being presented as ‘this is what it’s like in the culture that we live in.’”
Thomas’s sense of why he returned to the blogs shows a revision of his ways of being in the Black gay blogosphere. Whereas before he was just a consumer or reader dependent on the commentary of others to define his purpose or feel affirmed, he now positions himself as a peer-participant in the blogosphere. Through this practice he asserts a definition of himself as a participant in the blogosphere that grows from his purpose. This is a proactive position, not a reactive one dependent on what offenses occur in the blogosphere to define his relationship to the blogs, literacy, or technology. In short, Thomas articulates a purpose for his technology use that is not defined by negative experiences but by his own wishes to be informed, activist, and provide new perspective.
Recall that Thomas’s description of his early interest in blogs was that he was looking to learn information on Black queer life and culture given its dearth in his educational and social life. While his statement that he needs “to be aware” shows that he is looking for information on these blogs, he contextualizes this statement with the comment that seeking information on Black gay men is relevant to what he wants to do with his professional, activist, and personal future. Through these comments Thomas is affirming his vision of self and the future he has in mind, but more importantly he is affirming his agentive capacity as a literate Black gay man in relationship to this information. Thomas’s comments show that as a reader he is not simply partaking in what, again, Freire calls the “banking” method of knowledge development, where he is taking in information as it is given to him by these bloggers.21 Contrarily, through the definition and affirmation of self- and communal love and empowerment, Thomas positions himself as having an important role to play in taking the information he gathers and using it for transformative interventions. These interventions are informed by his articulated concerns about the gender and body politics he experiences. While Thomas’s initial response was to step away as an avid reader of Black gay blogs, he returns convinced that the actions he experiences as harm actually require more of his attention, but in a different way.
While Thomas’s initial relationship to the blogosphere was as a reader, upon his return he began to take a more active role in the blogs. The addition of writing to Thomas’s participation in the Black queer blogosphere is a key ingredient in his commitment to challenge the hurtful politics of hegemonic normative masculinity and body image that are pervasive in and deployed through the Black gay blogs he reads. Writing, along with reading, is a primary tool through which Thomas fashions an alternative view around Black gay masculinity and body positivity. One way to track this shift in Thomas’s participation is to examine his shift to writing in the Black gay blogosphere. Thomas confirms as much when he says, “I do a lot more commentary [on blogs] . . . when they say mean comments, I usually leave a comment.” This is different than in the past, when he would read the blogs actively, but never participate in the discussions even when he disagreed with or felt wounded by the comments. Underlying Thomas’s intervention is his concern for the very same oppressive beauty and body politics he has always noticed in the Black gay blogosphere. As a result, Thomas says that “a lot of times what I will write on there will usually either be challenges to the kind of conventional beliefs or a lot of times I actually write about the fact that we need to make changes just in us as a Black gay culture.” An example of this writing especially shows how Thomas’s digital writing functions as restorative literacies.
Recall Thomas’s frustration with a popular Black gay activist-blogger: he explains that on one occasion this blogger wrote a post where he said that “he feels that us, as Black gay people have a problem with being sexual.” Thomas responded to the blog, writing, “No, we don’t. . . . The problem is that a lot of us feel that we’re being criticized for what we do consider to be sexual.” Thomas said that rather than representing a diversity of Black gay men as desirable, “we’re always being kind of force-fed these beliefs, all these sorts of things are considered to be attractive and only certain things are considered to be beautiful.” He argued that “we need to change that view if you want all [emphasis mine] of us to start feeling more comfortable.”
Through writing, Thomas pushes back on the blogger’s claims about Black sexuality. Thomas’s comments could easily be misread as trying to be accepted by this blogger and those who share his beliefs, but this is not the case. In order to be vocal and formulate the critique, Thomas does, to a lesser or greater degree, have to embrace himself and challenge the literacy normativity that labels him and others as outside the ideals for desire, beauty, and Black masculinity. Additionally, in his response to the blogger, Thomas provides an analysis that critiques that there is even a set idea of who is and is not desirable, and this reveals that he sees it as an illusion that is destructive regardless of who is or is not included. Further, though Thomas begins by addressing the blogger’s claims in his post, he uses the issue as a way to challenge the oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics he sees the blogger espousing. This is most apparent in the indirect way Thomas raises the issue of who is and is not considered to be attractive or sexual. It is also apparent in the more direct way he holds the blogger accountable by stressing that some beauty politics must change if the blogger genuinely seeks positive change for Black gay men. Thomas is returning to the critiques he formulated about this blogger’s comments when he would just read the blog, and he seizes this moment as an opportunity to actualize these critiques through writing.
Thomas’s writing speaks to the form of community he would like to create, one of empathy in which the popular black gay blogger he critiques as well as others will begin to see the ways their destinies are intertwined with those who are ostracized by the limited ideal of masculinity and body type offered in the writings and images on the site. In short, Thomas is making a claim for the power of community, represented again in his use of “all.” However, I wish to note the way in which Thomas’s individual experience of being marginalized is critical to the impulse he feels to be transformative on his own terms. In this sense, we get a glimpse of the erotic in that Thomas is drawn toward this intervention as an act of self- and communal love and empowerment, despite digital and physical environments that suggest he and others who are effeminate, non–“gym bodied” men do not qualify for love or feelings of worth at all. This pull toward love and empowerment further exemplifies restorative literacies. In the face of effemiphobic and body-negative comments online, Thomas not only loves himself but also feels called to provide care for others outside the normative conceptions of desirability. One way to examine this is through posts on Thomas’s blog.
Dominic Thomas’s blog is a mixture of both telling people about his life and background and also writing commentary on cultural, social, and political issues. He said, “I started writing my blog, actually, first, as more of a personal thing for me. For the simple fact that I wanted a space to just kind of write about my feelings about just my life in general.” In addition, Thomas said he established his blog to interrupt the pervasiveness of exclusion perpetuated by some bloggers. By excluding others, Thomas says, “we further make ourselves look bad about being ourselves and that for me is a very hard thing to understand, in that we have the majority of society already making us feel bad about being different, then how is it that someone else who is also different can make us feel even worse about it?”
Thomas says in many areas of his life, including his sexuality, gender expression, and body type, “I have grown up feeling like I’m the only one. I would hopefully like my experiences and what I’ve gone through to at least help other people know that they’re not the only ones.” The emphasis Thomas places on these issues is further exemplified on his writings on the blog itself.
In one blog post, Thomas uses Kujichagulia, the second principle of the holiday Kwanzaa, as a way to discuss the need to fully be one’s self regardless of other people’s expectations. He writes that he identifies himself as a Black gay man who is “intelligent,” “beautiful,” “and getting better and more sure of himself everyday [sic].” He goes on to say, in a direct articulation of restorative literacies, that knowing he possesses these qualities is what allows him to see the beauty of other people, to work for social change, to know that he is not insecure, and to love himself. Thomas uses his proclamation as a way to empower other readers of the blog, encouraging them to step out and define, affirm, and love themselves even when people may disagree with this proclamation of self. He closes the same blog post with a series of questions to readers about loving themselves, how they self-define, how self-worth and self-definition speak to what they write or create, and finally, how they plan to use their own voice in the world toward social change.
By the time this blog was posted Thomas was already out as a gay man to his family and friends, so his blog post was not a “coming out” blog. Instead his comments offer a snapshot of restorative literacies in the kinds of erotic self-connection that he had grown into over the years, now being appropriated to do work for the good of others simultaneously. Perhaps most evidencing restorative literacies is that Thomas’s writing is continuing the internal healing of his own trauma—being ostracized and mistreated because of his body and femininity—but also using his blog to create a space where others who may feel isolated or oppressed for any number of reasons to hear a message that may compel them to also establish self-connection for healing. Indeed, Thomas says in his very first blog post that he seeks for the blog to enable conversations around complicated issues in people’s lives that are holding them back. The realization of this intention he set is evidenced in the rich responses among the readers of his blog, many of whom affirm too that they have felt disconnected from community and love of others and love of self because of past hurts of feeling unwelcome, unloved, and undesirable. The blog post thus exemplifies the specific ways Thomas repurposes writing in the Black gay blogosphere: he takes the same tools other bloggers used to be harmful and damaging by oppressing men whose femininity and body type were not idealized by others and uses writing to create an environment where Black gay men on the margins can publicly name and affirm themselves.
Exorcising Transphobia in Black Queer Social Networks: Ella Mosley’s “Internet Ministry”
The climate of transphobia in society is damaging on its own. Discourses that foster negative actions engendering discrimination against transgender people in employment through the absence of protections in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA); ignoring how transgender and gender-nonconforming people, especially transgender women of color, are disproportionately targeted for bias-motivated violence22; the higher rate of unemployment and homelessness transgender people face; and continuing to pathologize transgender and gender-nonconforming identities through classification as a mental disorder according to the DSM-V23 are just some of the many examples of the implications of the anti-transgender culture within the United States and around the world.
When transgender identity is considered in connection with race, socioeconomic status, and a host of other identities and factors, the pervasiveness of this transphobia is reinforced to particular detrimental effects. The most recent National Transgender Discrimination Survey finds that “the combination of anti-transgender bias with structural and individual racism meant that transgender people of color experience particularly devastating levels of discrimination.” Among transgender people, “Black transgender people often reported the highest levels of discrimination.” For example, 26 percent of Black transgender people were unemployed, a rate two times that of transgender people of other races in the sample, and “four times the rate of the general population.” When Black transgender people are employed, many experience sexual and physical assault and harassment in the workplace, as 15 percent were physically assaulted and 13 percent were sexually assaulted at work, while 46 percent reported some form of harassment in their life. Also, the report finds that 34 percent of Black transgender respondents live in conditions of “extreme poverty” with a yearly household income of less than ten thousand dollars, a rate that is two times lower than that of transgender people of any other race.24
On a more promising level, Black transgender people reported acceptance of their gender identity and expression by their families at a higher rate than transgender respondents of other racial groups. Still, the complex connections between transphobic, racist, and socioeconomic forms of inequality and violence creates the physical and virtual environments many Black transgender people encounter in their daily lives. These environments exist in queer spaces that are supposed to be welcoming, affirming, and loving of transgender people. Unfortunately, as several of my research participants discussed, these spaces are often among the most hostile to transgender people.
Recall Ella Mosley, a Black transgender activist discussed in chapters 2 and 3. Mosley’s digital literacies have a major role in her advocacy with and for the transgender community. When I first interviewed her, Mosley did not own a computer. All of her work in the digital sphere was being done on computers at the public library, where she would sign up for free use in thirty-minute intervals, or on her work computer during lunch breaks. Examining transphobic writings and imagery in digital realms reveals the specific ways Black transgender people are subject to a multiplicity of oppressions. Such analysis shows how Black transgender people navigate, to refer back to Reverend Irene Monroe’s phrase to describe the experiences of Black LGBTQ people in Christian churches as quoted in chapter 3, a “resident alien” citizenship status within online communities where racial and queer identity should categorize transgender people as insiders, but instead they are treated as marginal and expendable in those sites and in the larger body politic. In Mosley’s case, writing, reading, and imagery online are used to deploy transphobic statements that do damage and inflict harm, existing to debase and dehumanize transgender and gender nonconforming people. Such actions online draw from and reproduce anti-transgender and anti-gender-nonconforming rhetoric in the physical world as well.
My analysis of Mosley’s restorative literacies on her blog and on the internet social network website AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com shows how she writes to disrupt digital spaces where the voices and representations of Black transgender people are often homogenous, fetishized, ignored, or altogether silenced. Mosley speaks to the importance of the digital sphere in organizing against anti-transgender policies and practices in a discussion thread called “Transgender People Coming Together” posted to AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com. In the years since I initially interviewed Mosley and had follow-up discussions with her, there has been a proliferation of transgender activism and cultural production in the digital sphere. In 2013, for example, Kortney Ryan Ziegler began Trans* H4ck, a site that “has become the hub for transgender visibility in tech and entrepreneurship” with “over 600 transgender developers, designers, and aspiring coders” creating mobile apps and other open-source tech products for transgender and gender nonforming people throughout the country.25 There has also been the digital activism of consciousness-raising hashtags such as #GirlsLikeUs and #TransIsBeautiful, which were begun by writer and activist Janet Mock and actress and activist Laverne Cox, respectively.
Min-Zhan Lu has written about the “literate self” as a subject “in the interest of social justice,” which can mean “revising one’s sense of self, one’s relations with others, and the conditions of one’s life.”26 Lu’s articulation of the literate self is useful here, in that it points back to my overarching focus on the role of self-connection in the form of love and empowerment that creates or is sustained by interventions into oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics as they occur in Black queer digital realms. By looking at the element of self-connection, we see how the erotic connection to one’s self is at work in the interventions that are easily read as being primarily about something other than the transformation of one’s self through love and empowerment. To be clear, Mosley sees her digital literacies as activist in nature. I share this description of her work, but I also contend that Mosley’s interventions reflect the erotic in the form of self- and communal love through which she fashions a life on her own terms, even as she enriches the digital and physical world experience of transgender people and others who are treated as unwelcome, unloved, and undesirable in the Black queer digital sphere.
AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com is a very popular internet social networking website frequented by black queer men and black transgender women. There are also a number of Latinx and White people with profiles on the site. As previously discussed, site users have a profile where they can disclose various details about their identities, appearance, relationship status, sexual preferences, and hobbies. Users can also upload photographs and videos to their profile, play music on their page, and add status updates. Users may communicate with others on the site via private messages or on the more public comments wall on each user’s page. There is also a chatroom where users can converse, share links, and message privately in real time. The site features a message board called “The Forum” where users can initiate talk on any topics, and other users can respond to the forum through a comment thread.
In the first few months she used the site, Mosley recalled that there was no discussion about transgender issues on “The Forum,” the AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com discussion board. In fact, while a number of discussion threads focused on specific groups within LGBTQ communities (e.g., DL men), there was no thread specifically for conversations concerning transgender people. In addition, when transgender people did enter into conversations on “The Forum,” Mosley found that ordinarily they were immediately barraged with transphobic comments coming from cisgender gay, bisexual, down-low, and queer men that use the site. These anti-transgender comments occur regularly, creating a constant environment of violence and ostracization in which transgender people, specifically transgender women, are ridiculed, dismissed, or simply ignored. The writing in these comment sections reflects the literacy normativity many transgender research participants describe in their recollections of participating in these internet social networks. Mosley and others experience these damaging uses of print deployed in spaces that one may assume is a supportive and welcoming environment for all Black LGBTQ people. Instead, these spaces are being used in ways that contribute to the larger transphobic sentiments expressed in these queer digital spaces, as well as queer spaces in the physical world too.
I am aware that my observations of the effect of these anti-transgender comments on the site could be misinterpreted as describing transgender people only as victims, or overlooking their agency as users and participants in this site more generally. However, my point is that it is understandable that negative comments against someone or a group to which they belong make for an environment in which it is difficult for anyone to be comfortable. Proof of this appears when Mosley explains that when she views the identities listed by users on their profiles, it is clear that there were many more transgender women frequenting the site than it appeared because they were silent in “The Forum” and other areas of public conversation. No doubt this abusive environment dissuades many interested in “The Forum” from being vocal within it, and certainly from initiating conversations about being transgender and matters pertaining to transgender life, history, culture and politics. As a result, Mosley decided it was time to shake the place up a bit and bring everyone into a dialogue about LGBTQ people, transphobia, and community-building.
Mosley first began with a series of message-board threads addressing disunity among LGBTQ people with titles such as “The LGB and Transgender Split,” and “Where Is the Unity?” In her posts, Mosley comments on her experiences of the transphobia of lesbian, gay, and bisexual users of the site, and in her everyday life, to highlight the transphobia that exists inside and outside of LGBTQ communities. For example, in her post “Where Is the Unity?” Mosley writes that she doesn’t understand “why gays” would “harbor such ill will” against transgender women (or vice versa). Mosley says that this “ill will” comes up in the area of socializing with gay men and romantic relationships. Recalling her experience attending pride festivities in her city, Mosley says that only “a few fellas smile, say hello, and want to talk,” while the “vast majority” ignore her completely.
Mosley says this attitude experienced at pride also occurs on “The Forum” and in chatrooms of AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com, where she and other transgender women “have been ignored.” On several occasions, Mosley says, she went into the chatroom and said hello to begin a conversation and no one responded. She made the point that these chatrooms weren’t even those that are “supposed to be necessarily sexual” but for general discussion. The exception to this experience was when one young man replied “hell naw” when she entered the room and invited anyone to chat with her, and that was the lone response Mosley received from her invitation. Mosley ended her post by cautioning all that so long as these “negative attitudes exist,” the Black LGBTQ community will cease to be “a cohesive force to be reckoned with” and would instead be subject to perpetually “living life from the back row.” Unity is the key to freedom for all, Mosley writes, a belief she reflects in her push to bridge fissures between Black transgender women and Black gay men in the Black queer digital sphere.
Initially, Mosley received positive and affirming responses from site users thanking her for starting this discussion thread on “The Forum.” For instance, one user named “Untamed1” wrote to Mosley: “I feel you completely”; you are the “first person to even speak truth” on this topic here. However, in some cases Mosley received negative comments. One user, “Royal1” wrote in response to Mosley’s unity post that “I feel some sorta [sic] way . . . about trans girls” since “I don’t understand your lifestyle.” He continued by saying he does not understand “why a male born a male” would want to be “anything eles [sic],” especially “dress like a female.” Interestingly, Mosley responded to “Royal1” by suggesting he could “make an attempt to understand” transgender women by reading about gender identity in general. Mosley also drew a parallel of “Royal1” disliking transgender women because he does not understand them to the ways “society dislikes” gay people because they do not understand gay people. To assist, Mosley offered to prepare and send a reading list to “Royal1,” saying that she assumes his announced misunderstanding about transgender women is a sincere interest in knowing more.
By suggesting the problem, at least in part, is that “Royal1” does not read information about transgender people, Mosley utilizes literacy to disrupt his dangerous and harmful treatment of transgender women. “Royal1” is using literacy as a way to marginalize transgender women on this website, while Mosley enacts restorative literacies to counteract the damage of these writings on two levels: through her writing online and through the potential education about gender identity “Royal1” may receive through the reading list she prepares for him. Through her writing Mosley is positioned to potentially create an opening for “Royal1” to treat transgender people differently on the site than he had prior. Even if he is not “converted” by her actions, Mosley’s written response to him models a line of reasoning and vision for outcomes that other users of the site may draw from. The participants in the forum “Where Is the Unity?” and thousands of other website users can be significantly transformed in some positive way by reading her writing and discussions with Royal1 and others.
Through Mosley’s response to “Royal1” we witness the role of self- and communal love and empowerment at work in that Mosley is asserting self-love and self-definition as a transgender woman despite the comments of users like “Royal1” or the gay men in the chatrooms who ignore her. Mosley’s introduction of the forum topic and subsequent responses to the anti-transgender comments from other users demonstrate her refusal to be silenced by those uses of literacy designed to make her feel unwelcome, undesired, and unloved. Instead, Mosley’s self-connection and its desired outcomes is the driving force of her talking back, evidencing the role of the erotic in her relationship with self and her response to “Royal1.” Self- and communal love is what enables Mosley to deal compassionately though forcefully with “Royal1” and respond with an assumption that his comments are based out of true ignorance. She does not write back angrily, but rather takes his assertion that he does not “understand” and responds in a way that is quite generous, offering readings and reasoning how the readings might be helpful to his future interactions with and attitude toward transgender women. This tough love and compassionate response show how Mosley’s connection to self extends to a connection to others. Ultimately, Mosley’s desire to see more unity among gay men and transgender women on AfricanAmericanQueertalk.com manifests as an intervention through restorative literacies as evidenced in the forms of love and empowerment for herself and others that is expressed in her writings and the interventions they make possible.
Mosley’s writing on AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com helped her garner a following on the site as well as in a popular blog she began separately from her writings on the site. Reflecting this following, she forges friendships outside of the site with some of the young Black LGBTQ people she has met on AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com and through her blog. Parodying her massive following on the website and her blog, many of Mosley’s friends have begun to tease her, calling her writing on the website and her blog an “internet ministry.” In doing so they play on Mosley’s charismatic and “teacherly” way of communication, which her friends and site users liken to a pastor or minister of a church, and her always inspiring and positive comments. Some responses on the message board further exemplify the activism of Mosley’s writings online, especially how these interventions help transform “The Forum” and AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com as a Black queer digital space. For example, as I followed the site over approximately six years, visibility of transgender people in “The Forum” has been much more substantial. Posts have included topics like “Coming Together,” started by one user whose site profile indicates she is a Black transgender woman. The discussion on the forum focuses on the importance of transgender unity and said “there’s no telling what we could accomplish pulling together.” This comment shows how Mosley’s interventions are inspiring others to realize the activist potential for digital spheres. Another thread titled “Uniting Trans Women” was started by a gay male ally of the transgender community and focused on starting a new national organization for Black transgender people. Also the administrators of the website started a permanent forum board titled “Talking Transgender Issues.” Finally, over the six years I followed Mosley’s and others’ participation on the site, the visibility of transgender users has increased significantly, so much so that Mosley and other transgender people and allies used the site as a springboard to establish a national organization focused on transgender activism.
Big Love: Fatphobia and Restorative Literacies
One April evening Allen Baxter sat at his computer in his Midwest home posting messages back and forth in a web discussion with three of his best friends. They were discussing summer vacations, and talk turned to the upcoming Black LGBTQ pride event in Miami known as Sizzle, held annually around Memorial Day weekend. For many Black and Latino gay men Sizzle is one of the more exciting events of the LGBTQ pride season, as it draws thousands of Black and Latino men from all over the United States for a weekend of dancing, drinking, hanging out, flirting, hooking up, breaking up, and making up, all against the backdrop of beautiful Miami Beach in the springtime. Almost as prominent a feature as the beautiful beach itself is the parade of muscular and lean, slim and trim “beach bodies,” who throughout the year can be seen running, tanning, napping, reading, and swimming at the beach. Indeed, Miami Beach is one of the places where people come from all over the country and around the world to show off the physique that some say they have acquired by virtue of their fall and winter fitness regimens, a physique that, as many of them would have you believe, comes naturally. During Sizzle this parade of bodies only changes slightly in that the throngs of those on the beach become noticeably more Black, brown, and male, as Black and Latino gay, bisexual, same-gender-loving, down-low, and questioning men storm Miami Beach, each one doing their part to contribute to the ocean-side city’s reputation as a place to see and be seen. Such performances, says Jason Whitesel, illustrate the power of “a gay male aesthetic” that “rewards those with a lean, taut, and muscular upper body,” as it “exclude[s] imperfect bodies, namely fat, old, or disabled, and divide[s] men along these lines.”27 It is true that there are segments of the queer community in which fat bodies, especially those colloquially referred to as “bears,” are desired, but, as Caleb Luna notes, that too is exclusionary in that
fatness is set against white bodies . . . so when qualifiers of bearness are prattled off—beard, belly, body hair—and my brownness hovers over a single category, what is actually being said is, “it’s ok to be a fat man if you are white.” This is a community whose covert racism and misogyny leave me uninterested in participation, but it’s also the only place where a body, even remotely, like man [sic] can be appreciated or even desired.
Such constructions tend to also privilege normative masculinity and are antifemme when “fatness, in queer male communities, seems to only be desired in hairy, bear bodies, as the beard provides a confirmation of masculinity to offset the feminization of fatness.”28 This is the nexus of fatphobia and hegemonically normative masculinity on the gay male aesthetic terrain of which Baxter and other research participants describe.
Allen Baxter’s three best friends decided that it was their turn to storm Miami Beach, and discussion of plans to attend Sizzle commenced. Baxter, however, was having none of it. As Baxter’s friend Julius excitedly made suggestions about the hotels where the foursome could reside while in Miami and listed many parties that they would be able to attend, Baxter interrupted the fantasy island his friends had constructed in the chatroom when he announced that he would not be going with them. He said, “Convincing me to go to ‘Sizzle’ is like convincing a lion not to roar and bite your head off ‘cause I’m not going.” Baxter recalled that they immediately “got mad at me.” Julius was especially upset that Baxter did not want to go to Sizzle and demanded a reason why. Baxter replied, saying, “Why would I go there? . . . gays are so body conscious. There’s nothing wrong with it, but you do it to the extreme and they go overboard ‘cause they’ll—buy ass, buy pecs, starve themselves, whatever” they have to do to not be seen as fat. Baxter is speaking to the gay male version of the larger society’s obsession with physical appearance and dress and the imposed values put on those optical elements. Accordingly, Whitesel states, many gay men prioritize personal appearance, devoting large amounts of time and resources trying to change their appearance, which then gets replicated in “visual elements of gay culture such as clubs[,] and commercial representations reinforce this standard.”29
Baxter is one among a number of other research participants who discussed the culture of fatphobia and body shaming that exists for those whose bodies are positioned outside what is considered ideal. These research participants used adjectives such as “fat,” “larger,” “thick,” “big,” “plump,” “husky,” “heavy,” and “juicy” to describe their body type. It should be noted that I primarily use the word “fat” or “larger” to mirror the body positive and fat-affirming philosophy shared by the research participants cited in this section and in the scholarly and activist nomenclature of those who redress the pervasiveness of fatphobia and body shaming in the world. Given his body type, Baxter expected that being larger and not muscular would not make Sizzle an enjoyable experience for him, writing to his friends, “I know the attention is not gonna be on me. . . . That’s for people with a size 32 waist.” Julius argued against Baxter, saying, “It’s not about that; it’s about vacationing.” Baxter asserted that what he was saying was true, using comments Julius made earlier in the message board discussion to prove his point, saying to Julius, “You said out your mouth that to prepare for ‘Sizzle’ you’re eating strictly fruit and you’re only eating once a day.” Julius remained silent. Soon after, another of the four friends, Sean, chimed in to encourage Baxter’s decision not to attend, saying that he would miss him at the event but that Baxter was right, and he didn’t blame him for not wanting to attend given that he may feel uncomfortable.
Julius’s strategic silence and Sean’s comments reflect how oppressive standards around body image are pervasive in gay men’s social interactions, sometimes internally and even among friends. The particular form of oppressive body politics demonstrated in their actions and in my discussion to follow may be categorized as “fatphobia.” Baxter’s experience of these comments in the web discussion with his friends is a reflection of literacy normativity, as the use of written, visual, and audio texts are the primary tools of this assault surrounding body image. Individuals, like Baxter, navigate this fatphobic politic in the Black queer digital sphere by employing literacy to construct and actively participate in fat-loving and fat-empowering online social networks designed exclusively for fat Black gay, bisexual, and queer men. The formation and use of these websites, as well as other practices of digital literacies, are scenes of restorative literacies. Baxter and others do not waste their words asserting the desirability of fat people to those who reject them on the basis of body type. Rather, as we will see in the cases that follow, many respond to the terror of writing and images that establish oppressive body politics through a range of writing and rhetorical strategies that affirm their body and the entirety of their being. Formulating subcultures built around desire, sexual pleasure, intimacy, and play as fat people, individuals like Baxter further show how self-connection and the implicit elements of love and empowerment of self is central to surviving the fat-negative spaces inside and outside of Black queer digital spheres.
Fatphobia may be understood as a form of systematic oppression and social structure that identifies some individuals as marginal and less valuable because of their weight, body type, or size by which they are labeled fat, height-weight disproportionate, or obese. Fatphobia is experienced by research participants as online comments, discussions, and images that position muscular, athletic, or slender male bodies as having more value and desirability than those who are fat. Such attitudes establish nonfat bodies as normal and ideal, and fat bodies as abnormal and undesirable. This antifat rhetoric is frequent on gay social networking sites in which “failure to be ‘height-weight proportionate’ exceeds the bounds of how a gay body ‘ought to look.’”30 Certainly, the digital sphere permits one to construct an identity that may include being any body type one wants through one’s description, manipulation of photos, and other actions. The documentary Catfish, which has now become a reality series on MTV, features regular stories about this very practice. However, what the digital sphere does not change is that, as long as keyboards work and images can be uploaded, the power of normativity in body image establishes an idealized body size and rejects those who do not possess it.
Along with the antifemme and anti-transgender comments faced by effeminate men and transgender women on sites like AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com (“no femmes,” “no trans”), there is the ubiquitous phrase of “no fats” on various pages throughout the site and many others. Recall from my analysis of African AmericanQueerTalk.com and Ella Mosley’s experience on the site that oppressive gender politics and idealized body image are not just communicated through writing but also through visual imagery. On many gay social networking sites there is a litany of users who post photographs of muscle-defined arms, legs, and buttocks, built chests, and six- and eight-pack abdominals. On AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com these images are affirmed by the website’s daily feature of the “sexiest” user, which is almost always a user whose body would blend right in among those you see in television, magazine, and mass-media depictions of Venice or Miami Beach. To be fair, the site does include members who represent their ideal of what is sexy in other categories—sexiest forty-year-old, sexiest chubby, sexiest versatile, etc.—but it is primarily hidden away from the main page of the site, so the example that is always seen in the feature is a person that is thin. Though not all queer websites make this dominant image prominent by featuring members, almost all gay social networking sites and blogs deploy it through advertisements on their pages.
Fatphobia is a system of oppression based not only on body size but also on sex. An analysis of antifat rhetoric in queer men’s digital and real-life social spheres shows the connection of antifat rhetoric with misogyny and effemiphobia as “gay men marginalize those who don’t conform to strict bodily standards and use these boundaries to create inequality[,] the most salient of which is gender.” Fat can function as a masculinizing feature for normatively masculine or heterosexual men. For example, a normatively masculine or heterosexual man may be celebrated for their size when it comes to sports and athletic entertainment like football or wrestling, but this is not the case for gay men. Given the power of the idealized body in gay male aesthetics, “gay men experience conflict with their appearance, physique, and relationship to food more than heterosexual men do.” Consequently, “gay men do not retain the benefits of fatness that heterosexual men have historically. They also negatively associate fat with effeminacy.”31
Jason Whitesel notes that “fat produces stereotypical feminized features that threaten masculinity,” including “its archetype of the disciplined, muscular body.” Within this archetype are the ways this association between fat and stereotypical feminized features as fat “reinforces the effeminate label when men develop breasts or hips and [it] diminishes the visibility of their genitals.” On this basis, “gay men often adopt rigid gender roles, such as the straight-acting, masculine male, to create a border between themselves and the stigma surrounding the ‘fats’ and the ‘femmes,’” effectively using “gendered dimensions of the body to make in- and out-group distinctions” [emphasis mine].32 Research participants describe fatphobia and gendered bodily categorizations as a regular occurrence in their social interactions online and offline.
Born in 1974, research participant Foster Campbell, a Black gay man, comments on the prevalence of this link between the fat body and stereotypically feminized features as it plays out in other aspects of gay men’s social interactions. Campbell observes that “if you’re kind of heavyset or what have you, that makes you more of a woman role, that makes you that type—the one who’s gonna cook and clean because that’s what they’re good at.” This attitude produces, he says, “that piece of the thinking of ‘well, if you don’t look rough, if you look kind of soft or pretty, that’s the role you play.’ You can’t be soft and pretty and be the man, you gotta be something else.” Such associations between fat and effeminacy reflect the problematic gender politics within gay men’s masculine anxieties, for as their sexuality marks them as less than a man in a heteronormative context, these men attempt to assert normative masculinity and gay male privilege by categorizing fat gay men as outsiders on the basis of body type, which then corresponds to a stereotypically submissive gender role in relationship to other gay men that is misogynist and effemiphobic.
Taken together, these negative outgrowths of anti-fat rhetoric on gay internet social networks are part of the recursive loop of literacy normativity in which print texts and visual images are employed in ways that do damage and harm to people on the basis of an oppressive body politics and rigid gender ideologies. Research participants embrace the notion that they may be labeled undesirable by others through persisting in their erotic pursuits online by entering existing spaces or creating their own, not to accept or expand an ideal of beauty but to challenge the very hold that beauty and desire have over people in ways that wound them. Through this, Baxter and others push back against fatphobia, and also the implicit effemiphobia in antifat rhetoric and formulate body-positive online communities for themselves as fat Black gay men.
Allen Baxter’s “Heavy” Interventions
Allen Baxter was born in 1970 in Cincinnati, Ohio. A poet and performer, Baxter explains that writing is central to his life: “I write on everything . . . the subject of everything,” a response he offers when asked to detail the wide range of topics covered in his work. In a direct descriptor of restorative literacies, Baxter says, “Writing, for me, is therapeutic. I write my feelings. . . . If it’s getting something off my chest . . . I feel better. I feel better writing it.” While identity was especially important in his writing, Baxter notes that he takes great care in not allowing his sexuality, in particular, to be treated by others as the sum of his parts in casual conversations. “I’ve never broadcasted that I’m gay” he says, “but now if you ask me then I’ll tell you, but I’ve never just gone up [and said it] as part of my introduction.” When it comes to his writing, however, he says, “If you ever hear my work, you’ll know my sexuality because I have no problem expressing it.” Along with sexuality, Baxter says his poetry and performances address themes around race, violence, and other forms of social harm, which have led to him being regarded as an activist writer because “I speak.” For example, he has written poems in protest of an anti-queer shooting of Black gay men at a house party in his city, against sexual and psychological abuse of young people, and in support of HIV/AIDS education and prevention. All of these poems came up as he described the writing that has garnered him the title of an activist writer in his community.
As all of these topics deal with issues of sex and sexuality, it demonstrates the continued way Baxter is conscious of how sex and sexuality figure into his activist writings. As I interviewed Baxter other dimensions of his work as a writer-activist came into focus, namely his writing about fatphobia among gay men. Recall, for instance, that it was online where Baxter challenged his friends who overlooked the fatphobic rhetoric implicit to the annual Sizzle event and their own fatphobic comments about body size. Baxter’s use of writing on this issue is not confined to the web space he and his friends used to communicate about their potential vacation. As we talked, Baxter named multiple digital literacies to address fatphobia on gay social networking sites. Here Baxter’s writing is employed for a different set of disruptive purposes, most notably that he is able to affirm fat gay men, assert their sexual desire, and establish community by participating in what was a pioneering digital space in which being fat, Black, and gay is at its foundation. These interventions, as I have argued about Thomas and Mosley, may act as activism but they are also a source of self- and communal love that Baxter establishes for himself in the midst of encountering writing and imagery online and in the world that could easily make anyone feel low self-worth.
Baxter’s interventions into fatphobia in Black gay social networks begin with self-definition. Baxter describes himself as a “heavy Black gay man,” and he notes that the “heavy” was a double entendre, as it is a colloquial phrase used to denote someone of larger size, but “heavy” is also slang used to characterize the deftness of someone’s knowledge and intellectual power (as in: “Angela Davis’s critique of the prison industrial complex in her speech last night was heavy!”). In this case, Baxter is repurposing language, a form of semantic aversion, as he takes a word that categorizes him as an outsider in terms of his body type and gives it positive affirmation by attaching it also to something else he feels particularly proud of—his intelligence. In fact, one might argue the positive affirmation of his body size is accomplished without the double entendre, as simply including “heavy” as one of his other identities puts it front and center. He owns it. At another point in our interview where we discuss his own perception about his race and sexuality, Baxter says his feelings “are positive,” adding, “I love personally being Black and gay.” The fact that his identity as “heavy” is named alongside his Black and gay identities for which he declares love places it alongside those pieces of self that he feels good about. It is this affirming sense of self as a “heavy Black gay man” that manifests in Baxter’s decision to challenge fatphobic rhetoric in online social networks frequented by Black gay men.
During his interview Baxter mentioned his love of Facebook. This gave way to our talking about what other internet social networks he uses. When I asked if he used any online gay social networks, Baxter quickly replied, “No,” and the next forty minutes of discussion focused more on what online gay social networks he did not use than those he did use. Baxter said he was especially against “[AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com] and [Manloving.com]. . . . I’m totally against them because they all have the exact same line, all of them, no fats and no femmes. That rules me out.” Here Baxter notes that both his body type and his gender expression disqualify him from being seen as desirable on those two online social networks, both frequented by Black men who identify as gay, bisexual, queer, down-low, transgender, or gender-nonconforming. The fact is, however, that a number of fat or femme Black queer men, even if they share Baxter’s opinion, do use these sites despite encountering the very same “no fats, no femmes” rhetoric Baxter discusses. Baxter says that “those people who use them lie” about their body image or gender expression, to which he asks, “Why would you set yourself up for failure?” This question made me think about the pain of being bombarded with fatphobic rhetoric, hiding who you are just so you can be accepted, but still having to constantly suffer the violence of seeing that language and knowing you are not who you pretend to be and this hurtful language refers to you. The failure Baxter speaks to is that such individuals will always encounter negative language in those spaces because of people’s discrimination based on their body size and gender expression, and consequently, as Baxter told his three friends about Sizzle, they will not be treated as welcome or desirable once their being fat is made known to others.
On one occasion Baxter went into a Black gay men’s chatroom and began to talk. In the midst of the chat one user posted to the room an invitation to talk with him through private message outside the main room but requested that “no fats and no femmes . . . no ugly people” write to him privately. Baxter, angered, responded by writing to everyone in the main room, “Why am I expected to look like Shemar Moore or Morris Chestnut and you look like Ol’ Dirty Bastard (ODB) and Flavor Flav?” In these comments, Baxter’s reference of rappers ODB and Flavor Flav are insults to the site user. Thus, Baxter throws shade at the looks of the site user who dismisses people he sees as fat, femme, and ugly. Some reference ODB and Flavor Flav as not idealistically attractive by Hollywood standards, whereas Shemar Moore and Morris Chestnut are seen as being among those who represent the ideal and are often discussed as sex symbols.
Certainly, one might say that Baxter’s comments reproduce the very same oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics the site user aims at fat and femme individuals in the chat room by insulting the other member, and by extension ODB and Flava Flav. However, it is important to note that Baxter is speaking from the position of being wounded by what the person wrote. In this case, Baxter’s comments do not fully escape the trap of being hurtful to the site user, but they do attempt to push back against the demeaning of fat and femme gay men on the website and make evident the ways in which the site user’s comment functioned as a wounding text to Baxter. Baxter’s statement questions the authority this site user feels he has to determine who is worthy of his time on the basis of body type, gender expression, or physical characteristics. This is a meaningful question because the site user is presumably operating from the position of being an insider, a holder of the standards of idealized beauty, body, and masculinity. The fact that the site user dismisses fat and femme gay men with such ease speaks to his ease in doing so, and therefore the pervasiveness of this opinion about fat and femme gay men, on the site. His comments grow from and enact literacy normativity as he intends to do damage or harm to entire groups of people based on his view of who is and is not desirable.
In response to his pushing back as he did, Baxter says, “People would laugh or say, ‘Well, they have their preference. They just don’t like fat people.’” And though Baxter says he doesn’t see his resistance as telling people what to do about their sexual likes and dislikes, saying, “I mean, you know, we all like what we like,” he does think the spaces are so damaging that he chooses not to use them at all any longer, explaining that he began to ask himself more regularly, “Why waste my time?” I want to spend some time unpacking how Baxter’s written response in the chatroom interrupts the antifat and effemiphobic comments in a number of crucial ways. First, by asking the chatroom why members can hold fat people to a higher standard of beauty and body but don’t embody it themselves, Baxter highlights the absurdity of the standards in the first place, pointing out that even the people who police body size and beauty do not fully possess what is idealized. In fact, individuals like the site user who insult fat and femme gay men make such statements as a means of forging, to return to Bourdieu, a set of distinctions to position themselves as more beautiful if only by comparison to someone whose body or physical characteristics may be further away from the supposed ideal than theirs (even if only in their limited perception). Still, that individual does not necessarily actually meet the unattainable and unrealistic standard that is being set. What Baxter is doing here is a loving act: he points out the ridiculousness of the ideal and affirms himself, but he also hopefully gives the person reinforcing these ideals an opportunity to see just how unattainable this is for anyone and hopefully raises their consciousness and inspires them to abandon such rigid and abusive standards that risk the site user’s pain and also continue to wound Baxter and others.
Second, when Baxter asks the question of the chatroom he asserts the right for a fat individual to speak to the problem of the standards of beauty. Through his shady and disparaging response to the person where he mentions ODB and Flava Flav, his comments say that he who has been positioned outside the category of idealized beauty because of his body size can and will tread into territory people feel he has no right to be upon. Baxter uses literacy in the site to not just interact with people socially but also to subvert the literacy normativity that demands the silence of people who are fat or femme. All in all, Baxter’s question in the chatroom makes room in the discussion to redefine standards of beauty and body size away from those elements that offer only division, pain, and debasement. This is an important intervention for the many; however, it is important to note that Baxter’s intervention is also personally motivated and relevant, as his questioning the harmful comments to a number of people in a chatroom is a reflection of the internal questions he poses as a means of affirming himself. In this regard, Baxter’s navigation of literacy normativity cultivates fat and femme affirming space for others, but also creates and draws from self- and communal love and empowerment. These attributes are further reflected in Baxter’s participation in a pioneering online social network for fat and larger Black gay men.
Though he still encountered problematic beauty politics, comparatively Baxter’s discussion of experiences in the chatroom and other sites with rampant antifat rhetoric differ from two websites he frequents after growing tired of the fatphobia on other sites and deleting his accounts. One online platform is specifically for fat gay men of all races and ethnicities, while the other focuses on fat Black gay men, although it is open to all. The differences are particularly clear, even between those two fat-affirming sites, in terms of the kinds of literacy normativity Baxter encounters, the restorative literacies Baxter chooses to make on the sites, the ways he relates to other site users, and the areas he seeks to affirm through a message of love and empowerment that, in turn, inspire the content of his interventions on these two sites.
The first site he joined, FatGayGuys.com was initially a wonderful experience for Baxter. He said it was great to be in the company of other larger men, or those who found larger men desirable. After a few months, however, Baxter’s experience of the site soured. He says that whenever he would attempt to talk with other Black gay men on the site, some would respond curtly or not reciprocate attempts to get to know them on a deeper level in hopes of pursuing a friendly, romantic, or sexual connection. In one instance, Baxter describes that “there was a dude on there who was fine as ever” but when he attempted to talk with him the man said he was only interested in White men and was talking to someone else on the site. Baxter responded with surprise and frustration, saying he didn’t understand why “he wanted a White man who weighed no less than 450 pounds.”
I want to pause to unpack the ways an intersectional analysis of this interaction illuminates the complexity and contradictions involved and how it informs the need for restorative literacies that does not simultaneously wound others, including my previous comments about the implicit ethical imperative within restorative literacies. In his response to the site user’s preference for White men, Baxter’s frustrations around race cause him to respond in a way that contradicts his express commitment to being in an online gay social network that affirms all body types. Instead of remaining aligned in this commitment, his hurt with the site user’s communication of racial preference in dating devolves into Baxter attempting to shame him by insulting the body image of the White man the user desired. In doing so Baxter establishes a threshold for beauty and size that contradicts everything he argues against and says he came to this fat-affirming website to escape. This, of course, does not excuse the Black gay man’s assertion of “White men only” and his own questionable race politics, but it does point out the confluence of race, racialization, body size, sex, and sexuality that Baxter experiences painfully as a fat Black gay man. A site that affirms only on the basis of body image does not disrupt the anti-Black literacy normativity he experiences in this case, nor does it block him from the frustrations around race that led to his contradictory insult of another fat gay man. Preferably Baxter would not adapt a position that wounds someone else, but he does. The lure of literacy normativity as a quick fix for what wounds is powerful. It is imperative then to acknowledge that what Baxter is doing is attempting to protect himself, but in his efforts to shield himself from pain he enacts a wounding text himself.
Baxter’s experience does not occur in a vacuum. This dynamic continues in discussions on FatGayGuys.com’s message boards and chatrooms for a long period of time, occasionally disappearing only to reemerge at some other point. For example, one day, the message board on FatGayGuys.com included a topic about how Black gay men on the site were not expressing interest in one another. Responses to the post were angry from men of all races and ethnicities. Several Black gay men affirmed the assessment of the post, citing their experiences where they were indirectly or directly told by some Black gay men on the site they were only interested in dating White gay men. Those resistant to the post’s critique expressed displeasure, saying their personal choices in relationships were being policed and they were being judged on a site that was supposedly not about judging other people as fat gay men who had themselves been judged. An outcome of this long and continued argument, explains Baxter, was that a group of Black gay men began talking on FatGayGuys.com about starting a new space. Baxter states “the reason [BigBlackQueerLove.com] came about was because they got tired of [FatGayGuys.com] because the black men that were on [FatGayGuys.com], they wanted White men only.” Baxter’s previous experience of the site as a peaceful respite from oppressive beauty and body idealism ended with all the fighting, and so did his use of the online platform. Shortly thereafter, he learned about and joined BigBlackQueerLove.com, a site frequented by four other research participants.
I spoke with Baxter two years after he joined BigBlackQueerLove.com. Baxter said he came to the site with a completely different outlook. A friend told him, “‘You should go on there. It’s really nice. It’s cool.’ I said, ‘I’m wasting my time with that, whatever!’” Ultimately, he changed his mind and joined the site under somewhat different pretenses. Whereas he had gone to some of the sites where he had bad experiences with a set of expectations, he went to BigBlackQueerLove.com “saying, ‘Well. Let me see what happens just putting my face on here,’ or whatever . . . and it was a good thing.” He said socially “the guys are nice. . . . we talk about issues. . . . It’s big men and muscular and slim dudes who like big men. It’s real cool.” Baxter describes the site as a place “where you can be yourself. . . . and you don’t have to worry about nobody saying no fats, no femmes because if you even say that, then the [web] administrator is gonna put you off of the site and block you. . . . They will not go for that.” Baxter said his reason for using the site was to “be cool with people” though he bashfully admits dating was also a reason, saying, “I ain’t gonna lie I set up a quote, unquote ‘date’ [laughter]. . . . So it ain’t a date; it’s just, you know, getting to know each other so you can be talking on the phone or whatnot.” Still, an examination of Baxter’s literacy activities on BigBlackQueerLove.com illustrates his literacies did not end with writing notes to make romantic connections but to continue his commitment to challenge fatphobia and build the community of fat-loving and fat-empowering Black gay men in the digital sphere.
The message board is a primary area where I further identify and analyze Baxter’s restorative literacies on BigBlackQueerLove.com. Baxter began several of the “most popular” discussion threads on the message board, while others are discussion threads to which he regularly contributes comments that receive frequent responses. A topic that is particularly important to him is a discussion around health and fitness for fat Black gay men. Baxter said he felt it important to “have the conversation about toning up or losing weight” that wasn’t about “people starving themselves or nobody saying, ‘Well, I don’t like fat people,’ because that would be an oxymoron on this site.” By initiating a conversation about body positivity, wellness, and fat fitness, Baxter was very rhetorically savvy because it is the otherwise fat-affirming nature of the website that positions his interest in the topic to not be received as yet another attempt to be fatphobic or judge people’s health and fitness habits. In response to Baxter’s post, comments poured in from users. Some wrote about past experiences and the ways it did more harm than good to balance being healthy with their desire to accept their body as it is without feeling bad or judged. A few noted that just because they are fat does not mean they are unhealthy or not engaged in a regular fitness program and that the denial of fat fitness was misinformation needing to be challenged. Others wrote and shared meal recipes, exercise plans, and self-care recommendations obtained from massage and nail salons, as well as reflections on therapy and counseling. This discussion thread also goes offline, as a number of users residing in the same city write plans to create walking and running groups to do their exercise in a supportive and social environment.
Baxter’s writing on health and fitness on the site exemplifies and promotes restorative literacies for intervening into fatphobia in Black queer digital spheres on multiple levels. For one, he engages people in a conversation that otherwise would not have taken place if not for a space where being larger is not abnormal or abject but is an affirmative beauty and ideal in its own right. Next, one can argue that even in a space that is fat-affirming there still exists a wall that must be broken down to talk about health and fitness; some might be fearful to raise the discussion on a site where people have historically been hurt by comments regarding health and fitness because of others’ ignorance and negative comments about their body size and also because assumptions about health have been racialized as a pathology (e.g., diabetes, hypertension, heart disease) of Black and other people of color. This points out the multiplicity of identities involved and magnitude of having that conversation, even in a space that one may take for granted as always and already prepared to engage the topic given that it hails the corporeal in its very title (bodily, racially, sexually).
Baxter’s writing on health and fitness opens up a space for users to be supportive of one another, witnessing each other’s life experiences with the topic at hand, and feeling safe enough to share their own experiences with others. Safer space is imperative in a literacy environment that can be restorative because it enables people who have understandably learned to distrust texts and people to become more comfortable, and to receive some respite from the duress of cumulative experiences in environments that are harmful. Baxter, and the other discussants, repurpose writing about health and fitness from a past that may have hurt them and turn it around to be something that is good for them while not being fatphobic. This is most clear when Baxter mentions the conversations were not about “starving themselves” but of users sharing recipes with one another. Food does not disappear in an attempt to reach some ideal body type; rather, Baxter and the discussants repurpose the meaning of food to be pleasurable and a good thing in achieving their comfort in their own skin.
Another instance where Baxter challenges the negative effects of fatphobia occurs in another message-board post. Reflecting on the arguments between Black gay men on FatGayGuy.com, Baxter says he wanted to discuss division among Black men as a whole, and especially among Black gay men. Expressing his frustration with divisions between men he said,
I just want black people to get together and just come together as one and I want black gay people to come together as one because we’re separated by black. We’re separated by straight and gay and then in the gay community we’re separated by the fat and the slim or the fems, no fats—the fems and the fats versus the whatever.
To start the discussion he posts a thread asking for thoughts about “Why black brothers are so judgmental of each other?” The emphasis BigBlackQueerLove.com places on Blackness lessens the possibility of the type of catastrophic racial frustrations that took place on FatGayGuys.com and positions Baxter to more easily talk about Black male solidarity in a context that is distinctly Black. It is therefore not held to the same expectation that responses must also confront relationships between Black men as it pertains to interracial dating. I do not say this to suggest that the focus on Blackness on BigBlackQueerLove.com makes it utopic or that interracial relationships are not still a relevant topic on the site and worthy of discussion, but instead I wish to point out how Baxter exploits an assumption of intraracial solidarity as something all the users want, allowing the conversation to proceed in a way that is more potentially productive or solvent than his previous attempt.
The discussion-board topic Baxter proposed invites site users to be reflective of other areas that are deterrents to community in the absence of body size or racial difference taking up all the space on the docket. For example, though the responses were long and varied and include a number of writings about straight male homophobia, writings about effemiphobia, transphobia, and class and educational elitism were the subjects of most responses to the question. In this case Baxter’s intervention is not directly into fatphobia, but also hits on related issues that are tightly bound to it. As previously discussed, effemiphobia and misogyny are intimately wrapped up in fatphobia, so it is unsurprising that it would emerge as the most discussed response to the question about being judgmental of one another as Black men.
The discussion opens the possibility for people not just to write of how they have been wronged as a fat, Black, and/or gay person but also to read posts about the ways they sit in judgment of others from the places where they are insiders, such as gender identity and expression, economic class, educational attainment, and other experiences. Baxter’s writing offers a discussion on an online Black gay social network that contributes to the formation and affirmation of solidarity among fat Black gay men speaking against fatphobia, but it complicates the matter by offering a way to intervene into fatphobia through naming other oppressive forms that deny people’s worth. In this regard, Baxter’s digital literacies are repurposed to restorative effect in the quotidian twenty-first-century ritual of internet dating and social networking.
“Let’s Build It for Ourselves”: Corey DuBoise’s Digital Restorative Literacies on BigBlackQueerLove.com
Corey DuBoise was born in 1977 in a large urban city in the South. After completing college, DuBoise decided he would relocate to a large urban city in the Southwest where he heard there were many opportunities. He used the internet to “start exploring, I would say, for two years,” looking at sites to teach him more about the social and political life of the place he hoped to call home. DuBoise said online social networks, nonqueer and queer alike, were particularly helpful to figure out these new dwellings and to “connect to folks who have the same interests I do, or look like me.” Two sites named as his “favorites” are both specifically focused on fat Black gay men and those who love them: ThickBoys.com and the previously discussed BigBlackQueerLove.com. DuBoise says that both sites allow “people to be able to find a community for them that affirms them completely, not just one side of them, in terms of being black, SGL, or LGBTQ, but a person of larger size, and whatever other identities or intersections you have, that you can come and just be you completely and totally yourself.”
While he enjoys the two sites, DuBoise admits the novelty of them, saying, “It does seem a little bit difficult, because those spaces don’t exist as much. . . . they really never existed.” But in the last decade, he says, fat-affirming Black gay men’s social networks “are starting to grow, and people are starting to find that space for not just being black or gay or queer or bisexual, but be a larger person.” The proliferation of these spaces has been crucial for DuBoise for all the reasons he has named. From my analytical perspective, DuBoise’s use of online social networks is equally instructive for seeing how these spaces encourage their users to affirm themselves and others like them despite fatphobia in the virtual and physical worlds, but these spaces also draw attention to the robust literacies involved in achieving that work. In DuBoise’s case, reading and writing remain the most central literacy tools under use. However, DuBoise’s experience is unique because it shows how listening functions within restorative literacies on these sites. DuBoise names a weekly podcast on ThickBoys.com as particularly important to him. The podcast, he states, allows him to gather information from “queer and Black gay men who have the same body aesthetic as I do,” which he says “is pretty important because it helps reinforce my own self-identity and my own self-esteem.”
As DuBoise benefits from the site’s use of literacy to challenge oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics—it inspires his own use of literacy to subvert negative sexual stereotypes of larger Black gay men, to engage in self- and communal love and empowerment, and to act on community formation. DuBoise notes that larger Black gay men are represented through a number of damaging stereotypes about their sexual lives. He echoes the observation of Baxter and many others that fat people are not “viewed as being someone that is attractive.” Fat Black gay men, he feels, however, are subject to unique kinds of stereotypes regarding their sexuality and self-worth that he dubbed “the Aunt Jemima effect,” saying,
Aunt Jemima was not seen as being someone desirable, or she was always looked at as being a caretaker, someone you go to with your problems, someone that takes care of everyone. . . . You never looked at Aunt Jemima in the more erotic sphere. . . . Oftentimes larger men, especially larger queer men and black gay men, they either get put into that position, or they automatically take on those traits. . . . You kind of get pinned with that jolly side, always happy. . . . You always get pinned with not being seen as sexual or having any kind of eroticism to you.
DuBoise’s reference to Aunt Jemima has, of course, already been deftly articulated through the work of Black feminist theorists, namely Patricia Hill Collins’s discussion of “Mammy” as a “controlling image” of Black gender and sexuality that misrepresents Black women.33 What’s important to note, however, is the connection he draws between the body size of larger Black gay men, their being stereotypically feminized, and that stereotypical feminization arising as something akin to the “Mammy” figure as sexless, undesirable, and happily caretaking and serving others, having no needs or desires of her own.34 This belief was one that DuBoise found pervasive throughout people’s talk about larger Black gay men and was a driving force for him to find spaces where this representation was not so pervasive. It is important to recognize that for some research participants the pursuit of romance or sex through websites, mobile apps, and other digital technologies functions as restorative literacies because it provides a counternarrative to the “Aunt Jemima effect” since they pursue a sex-positive life despite this restrictive framing. DuBoise realizes that even in seemingly utopic spaces created by and for larger Black gay men, oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics have a way of seeping through. Accordingly, as the following example will show, Duboise employs restorative literacies to challenge literacy normativity attempting to misrepresent sexuality among larger Black gay men.
One evening after work, DuBoise decided to unwind and log onto ThickBoys.com to catch up with some of his internet friends. Enjoying the casual conversation in a chatroom, DuBoise said he noticed that “someone had signed on” and “posted, ‘What is this site about? Just chubby, out of shape, slobby people?’” As insulting as it was, DuBoise said, “That wasn’t the first time we’ve seen something like that.” In fact, Baxter and the other research participants using this site noted the frequent occurrence of people creating an account and logging onto the site, only to then send fatphobic messages to people in the chatrooms. Some mentioned that people would post such comments to the message boards, the walls of users’ individual pages, or even privately through the website’s e-mail-like message center. The frequency of this practice demonstrates the regularity of this wounding text and literacy normativity. On the one hand it is particularly hurtful to have someone enter a space created to stand against oppressive body politics and say the very same things they get to say and do everywhere else without interruption, ridicule, or accountability. On the other hand, the site exists as a kind of collective positioned to manage this assault on its own terms and in a space like few others, a fact that probably makes them more visible as a target by such individuals. This point shows the catch-22 of restorative literacies here in that they build a place to be able to love and support one another, some pursuing pleasure and play, but it is this very hypervisible space that says to progenitors of literacy normativity, “Here they are, come regulate this somehow.”
DuBoise and the other site members exploit this unique position in their treatment of these negative comments through a multilayered restorative literacies intervention. Their initial response was a gut reaction, as DuBoise and several others in the room began to write messages like “You are the one in the wrong place,” and “Who the hell do you think you are? I’m sure you’ve got nothing better to do.” Through this initial response DuBoise and others maintained the integrity and purpose of the site by not allowing it to be transformed through the meanness of someone else, but they wrote their ownership of the space and their responsibility to defend the justness of a body-positive position. In this, unlike Allen Baxter’s hurtful shade to the man who said fatphobic things on AfricanAmericanQueerTalk.com, DuBoise and others employed restorative literacies that reflect the ethical imperative of not reproducing literacy normatives by wounding others as they actualize literacies to protect themselves. After this response, the person began to back off the comments. Following this incident, some users responded with posting messages onto the user’s personal page, some taking a more reasoned approach. One person wrote, “You know, everyone in here is big and okay about who they are.” DuBoise wrote on the page, “If you’ve got issues on body size and body image this is not the place for you.”
DuBoise’s comments, as well as those of other members, deflect the body size and body image issues onto the individual who attacked the chatroom, as they suggest that the person is the one who has a problem, whether with his body size or with that of others. In any case, they state, the problem does not exist in the space they have created and that his comments are literally and figuratively out of place. It is important to note that neither comment is defensive; rather, each follows the communicative ethos of the initial response in the chatroom by assuming ownership of the space, without ceding any power to the individual. For example, both responses are almost informative, the kind of sentence that could easily be part of the “About” section of the website. They communicate that it is they who get to define the meaning of the site. Here DuBoise is part of a collective literacy intervention that affirms the online community they have created, and he writes a response that demonstrates the forms of self-connection in the form of self- and communal love, empowerment, and self-definition he holds inside. In this regard, DuBoise takes the personal power and affirmation he gathers from his reading and writing as a regular user of the site and pays it forward by employing his restorative literacies to hold space for the support of someone else. DuBoise appears aware of this impact, saying, “I think it’s great for those spaces to exist online, and as everyone is connected, that they protect the space. They make sure that no one with these harsh words or sentiments come [sic] into the space and just ruin it for everyone, because that may be the only space safe for a person to be” (emphasis mine).
My attention to how digital literacies are used to assert literacy normativity around issues of beauty, body, and gender expression breaks open theories of digital literacies in which African Americans are only visible in discussions around technology access. Rather, I take up the challenge posed by Adam Banks, Anna Everett, and other scholars of black digital culture by starting my analysis from the assumption of Black digital agency. This focus on agency extends to participation in these technologies in ways that range from the affirmative and justice-seeking to those digital literacies that uphold the very normative restrictions many of them resist in other areas of their life.
I note the significance of Black queer digital spaces where Black queers may manage their public culture on their own terms. As such, we get a view of Black LGBTQ language practices as they occur in a space that assumes Black queerness as its center and not the margin of the social, political, and cultural terrain, indeed a Black queer digital world. In addition, examining the digital literacies of African American LGBTQ people, I connect discourses of race and queerness in technology studies in LCR and Black Queer Studies. While race and queer technology studies remain robust fields of study on their own, studies placing the two into conversation with one another are not nearly as robust.
Composition scholar Kristine Blair has noted that “online conflicts provide a more realistic sense of multivocality than dialogues privileged within a strictly utopic view.”35 My analysis contributes to discourses on the role of conflict and uses of digital technology to do or provoke activism. The analysis shows how everyday people are deploying social and political critique by engaging in forms of digital writing wherein the interventions made are often among other Black LGBTQ people. This action demonstrates the breadth of perspective that comes into focus by embracing the reality of conflict and not resting on a reductive, overly simplistic idea of shared identity and shared values among Black LGBTQ people that ignore the heterogeneity of this group in virtual and physical worlds. Future work in this area might look at the concurrence of these sites as enabling political activism and sexual lives, a fact that is a subtext to some of the life stories analyzed here, though it is not the focus of my work here. For example, how do people like those who perpetrate literacy normativity feel about coming to sites to engage in intimate discussions about sex and “hooking up” only to discover that such discussions are for some always and already political? What kinds of literacies or rhetorical devices are being employed to navigate that vantage point? Further engaging these questions creates another space in which to examine the connections between race and sexuality within such issues.
Research participants use literacy to subvert oppressive beauty, body, and gender politics as they enact restorative literacies in the space for individual and communal change and growth. Taking this perspective we get a glimpse of these interventions that may otherwise go unengaged, but we also see these interventions through the altruism of activism that challenges uses of literacy that are oppressive. That is, I show how these uses of literacy, while being activist in effect, also frame being fat, femme, transgender, and gender nonconforming as remaking desire and embracing undesirability as a liberatory position in the digital and physical worlds. Here, the acts of restorative literacies for political intervention and individual desire and pleasure are not mutually exclusive but co-constitutive for many research participants, thus further emphasizing the old and complex feminist adage that the personal is political and illuminating how restorative literacies manifest as erotic interventions in digital realms.