The issue of homosexuality has reaped a whirlwind of controversy and acrimonious debate in most Christian communities. I believe that one of the explanations for black homophobia is the realization that if heterosexuality—the supposed “normal” sexuality— has been demonized in the West for centuries, then surely black homosexuality will only up the ante of black oppression. Thus, ironically enough, blacks identify with mainstream sexual values—the very mainstream that has censored and castigated black heterosexuality—when they practice homophobia. I am not arguing that homophobia has no homegrown black varieties; I am simply suggesting that such homophobia allows blacks to forge solidarity with a culture that has excluded them. Thus one form of bigotry is traded for another. In this interview, conducted by the very sharp cultural critic and gay activist Kheven LaGrone, I argue that lesbians, bisexuals, gays, transgender, and all other-sexed people have a right to the “tree of life,” and that they can find theological and biblical support for their religious and sexual existence. Although I have written elsewhere about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other-sexuality, I have never been as extensive, analytical, wide-ranging, or as daring in discussing the subject as I am in this interview, a tribute to the provocative questions posed to me by LaGrone.
Please elaborate on your theology of homoeroticism.
What I mean by theology of homoeroticism is a theology that is grounded in the biblical admonition to acknowledge sexuality as a crucial function of human identity, and as a symbol of the interpenetration of the divine and the human, signifying a fusion of planes. Since we are grounding our sexual ethics in a theology that speaks poignantly to human experience, it is natural to turn to the Bible to justify, legitimate, or sanction our beliefs. I believe that there is theological and biblical space for the articulation of a homoerotic instinct, homosocial ideas, and a homosexual identity. People who happen to be same-sex identified can certainly find support within our churches.
Furthermore, I sought, in my notion of a theology of homoeroticism, to underscore an implicitly homoerotic moment within the ecclesiastical order of black Christendom. Think, for instance, of men claiming to love Jesus standing on their feet in fully enthralled ecstasy, emoting about their connection to a God who became flesh and dwelled among us, as a man. For men to publicly proclaim their intense, unsurpassed love for a God who became a man leaves the door open for homoerotic identification and communion within the liturgy of the black ecclesial universe. In short, the black church provides space for men and women to love their own gender in erotic ways with biblical and theological sanction. My conception of the theology of homoeroticism is an attempt to develop a theologically sound and biblically justified relationship of love that is the underlying ethic within any sensual order, regardless of one’s orientation, whether it is bisexual, transsexual, transgendered, gay, lesbian, or heterosexual. The prevailing ethic in any sexuality ought to always highlight the precise function of love in the adjudication of competing erotic claims. Whenever there is a contest between destructive incarnations of lust and righteous expressions of erotic communion, love promotes the latter. That doesn’t mean that lust or fantasy cannot embody an ethically justifiable sexual urge. But it does mean that we have to pay attention to how a relationship of justice is exercised within the context of a sexual ethic. Sexual relations are related to the theological and moral ideals to which we subscribe.
When I think about homosexuality or any sexual identity, the prevailing idea is not simply satisfaction of the erotic drive and the sexual urge, but the manner in which the human being is recognized as the center of one’s sexual ethic. Corporeal identity, theologically speaking, should exist in relationship to the divine order that prescribes human activity. A homoerotic theology is an acknowledgment that there are legitimate means to express same-sexuality, and the fantasies and erotic desires that grow from it. It also holds that there’s a way of theologically asserting love as the predicate of such unions, since love ought to be the central principle of any sexual orientation. The question should be, regardless of orientation: How does this relationship enable the flourishing of an ethic of selfconcern and other-regard? If that basic test is met within a sexual ethic, then the content of one’s sexual identity should not be dictated by traditional theological proscriptions of homoerotic union. Even in the black church we can affirm the sexual legitimacy of brothers and sisters who do not meet the heterosexual norm, and still support them as fellow members of a religious community.
A theology of homoeroticism points to the effort to embody the full expression of God’s sexual gifts to us, and to find legitimate theological support for the articulation of a broad erotic order within the context of our religious beliefs. If we can’t do it there then we can’t do it anywhere. Sex and salvation should be seen as neither mutually exclusive nor identical. However, they are often mutually reinforcing, since sexual union within a religious ethic is often a symbol of God’s care and love for the other. Erotic unions at their best engender the salvific function of intimate contact between God and believer, a relationship often pictured as one between a lover and his beloved. In that light, a believer’s sexual identity should be fully supported within an ecclesial context that embraces the erotic as a symbol of divine presence and affirmation.
A theology of homoeroticism combats recalcitrant prejudice against alternative sexualities—prejudices, by the way, that parallel bigotry against the black body in Western thought and culture. That makes it even more painful to observe the failure of the black church to embrace the full range of sexual identities that have been mobilized and manifested within our communities. In so doing, we have mimicked the sexual bigotry that has bedeviled us. I suppose such behavior is to be expected, since we have failed to be just and fair with gender relations in the black church. If the gendered character of heterosexual ethics has presented a profound challenge to the black church, God knows that homosexuality and homoeroticism present a formidable challenge. That’s even the case for theologies of liberation that have been promulgated and, in limited form, adapted in the black church.
Of course, we can account for such resistance to a liberating sexual ethic by tracing it to the schism between body and soul that many black believers adapted in the face of feeling that they had to defend themselves against a charge of sexual profligacy, perversion, and impurity. Thus the black church bought into the division of the body and soul that the white church foisted on us to justify its psychic, moral, and material investments in chattel slavery and racial hegemony. The white church justified its assault on black humanity and its evil experiment in slavery by saying, “at least we’re taking care of their souls,” a goal they sought to achieve by containing and controlling the black body. In the minds of white Christians, the black body was a savage body. In a white Christian prism, the ethical end, the moral telos, of slavery was the social, psychic, and theological subordination of the African savage to European Christianity. This ideological matrix provided the crass ethical utilitarianism for European-American Christianity’s justification of slavocracy: “As long as we’re addressing their soul’s salvation, we can do what we will to their bodies.” But this theological schizophrenia that rested on the artificial division of body and soul was more Greek than Hebraic, since the latter insists on the essential unity of corporeal and spiritual identity. Such theological schizophrenia introduced into our culture some vicious beliefs that have negatively impacted our racial self-perceptions, not only as subjects of our own sexuality but also as objects of the criminalization of our sexuality by white culture. The black church hasn’t done a good job of resisting the worst elements of theological schizophrenia, leading us to suppress alternative, unconventional, and transgressive sexualities in the black church and beyond.
So that almost leads directly to my next question: Do you think that black homosexuals can use the Bible for sexual healing? If yes, how, and what kind of healing?
Black homosexuals can definitely use the Bible for sexual healing. They can do so because the biblical texts are a reflection of historical struggles with enlightened revelation. God has placed on the hearts and minds of human beings beliefs about how we should live our lives, even though such beliefs are fallible since they are mediated by the human voice and cognition. The Scriptures reflect the attempt of human beings to wrestle with divine revelation within the context of our particular histories, given cultures and local traditions. In interpreting biblical texts, we must always pay attention to what biblical scholars call the Sitz im Leben—the historical context within which scriptural revelations emerged.
Consequently, we must always be on the lookout for the political hermeneutic of a biblical text. What I mean by political hermeneutic is that the horizon of interpretation is always shaded by the social order in which readers and hearers discover themselves. We must remember that the Bible was compiled over the course of a few centuries. That means that there are an incredibly diverse array of identities, intentions, ethical limits, and political philosophies articulated within the discursive and theological perimeters that shape the interpretation of the Bible and God’s revelation. Even though some of us think of the Bible as the inspired word of God—the transcendental truth of eternity mediated through written revelation—we must not forget the critical role of the amanuensis. Whether it was Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, or the scribes of the Pentateuch, or one of the ostensible authors in the JEDP documentary hypothesis, the truth is, they were secretaries—or as Mary J. Blige might say, and I’ll pronounce this phonetically, seckuh-taries! And secretaries can get stuff wrong, sometimes by mistake! They can leave the i’s undotted, the t’s uncrossed, or they may occasionally impose on a document their own beliefs or shades of their own meaning.
Remember that Paul says at one point in the Scriptures—and I’m paraphrasing—“Now this is what God says, and this is what I’m telling you.” So he at least tried to gesture toward a hermeneutical ethic that acknowledged the implicit human character that shapes the record of God’s inspiration. He at least tried to distinguish between human interpolations and divine revelation—a notion that is fraught with peril, to be sure, since providence and revelation are concepts often manipulated by religious elites or those with claims to esoteric knowledge. Moreover, Paul metaphorically suggested the human limitations of comprehending divine revelation and the fallibility of interpreting God’s word when he declared, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.”
I note all of this as a backdrop to saying, yes, as with any of us, I think gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, bisexual, and all other-sexed black Christians can certainly turn to the Bible for sexual healing. After all, this is the great book of love that points to the appropriate ethical etiquette for our sexual behavior. As such, it points back to God. The mores, folkways, and moral traditions that shape us inevitably impinge on our consciousness and color our understanding of what we should do and how we should behave. Conscience is the product of a historical encounter with ethical ideals. One’s conscience is always shaped by the culture in which one is reared. Therefore our beliefs about the Bible, about ethical behavior, about good and bad, and about how we should adhere to certain principles are unavoidably shaped by the political and social and moral contexts we inherit and create. Depending on how it has been deployed and interpreted, the Bible has been both the Ur-text and Err-text of black ethical existence. It has been the great, grand narrative thread that has been weaved throughout the collective history of African American people and through the individual consciousness of millions of blacks, even if they didn’t officially join the church. “The Book” has been the dominant interpretive touchstone for the ethical behavior of African people in America and other parts of the black diaspora.
Black homosexuals can turn to the Bible for sexual healing, just as many of us heterosexuals have, because it tells us that God loves us, that God created us in God’s image, and that we should learn to accept ourselves as we are. Of course, I realize that the process of self-acceptance is an index of our evolving spiritual maturity. It takes profound spiritual and moral wisdom to claim with our own lives on full theological display that what God made is good. We can make such a claim despite the critical modifications introduced into Christian thought through Augustinian themes of original sin and the ethical miasma that was its consequence in “the fall.” We must accentuate the positive dimensions of human identity and self-conception as the admittedly distorted reflection of the imago dei. Still, we can affirm our re-created goodness through discourses of redemption open to all human beings. There is no asterisk in the biblical promise of redemption that excludes homosexuals. We have to reclaim the primordial goodness of God that ultimately took human form in Jesus. As they say in Christian circles, God didn’t make any junk, and that means that whomever God has made, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is a good person.
I realize there are debates about biological determinism versus social construction in sexuality. I know there’s a dispute about whether gay and lesbian sexuality, indeed all sexualities, reflect an inherent predisposition biologically implanted in the human genetic code that regulates sexual orientation, or if sexual identity is the result of human choice. I happen to believe that gays and lesbians can no more get up tomorrow morning and be heterosexual than heterosexuals can get up tomorrow morning and be gay or lesbian. I’m not gainsaying the fluidity of sexual identity, the elasticity of erotic urges, the changeability of passionate proclivities, or the broad continuum of sensual engagements and stimuli. And I’m not suggesting that biological urges are not socially constructed. After all, even homosexuals who grow up in a culture where their identity and self-perception is shaped in the crucible of heterosexism, internalize the belief that it is a sin or an unbearable stigma to be gay or lesbian. Thus they often suppress their sexual desires and erotic urges, whether they are conceived to be “natural” or constructed.
That is why the coming-out process is often especially volatile: it involves the painful irony of self-identification with the very sexual identity that has been culturally demonized. That’s why there’s so much self-hatred among gays and lesbians. The coming-out process must address the fact that the self has been artificially split off from self-consciousness, at least a self-consciousness that is socially supported. This accounts for why the homosexual ego is coerced into epistemic and ethical isolation, or the proverbial “closet.” In the closet, one must subordinate one’s “natural sexuality” to society’s accepted sexual norms, to its entrenched mores. So the Bible should help Christians liberate the sexual urge from artificially imposed restrictions and repressions. In the case of homosexuals, such restrictions and repressions are fueled by heterosexist values, but these values, I believe, can be critiqued by an appeal to a progressive sexual ethic, an enlightened biblical hermeneutic, and a humane theological tradition. How can black homosexuals use the Bible for sexual healing? They can do as all Christians should do: express their sexuality in the context and pursuit of a right relationship with God, which is the predicate of all sexual ethics.
But critics who seek to proof-text their opposition to homosexuality often neglect to interpret such biblical passages in their larger theological meaning. For instance, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is more about underscoring the necessity for hospitality to strangers than it is about homosexual perversion. In essence, the larger pericopes in which biblical texts are contained are either neglected, severed from their interpretive frameworks through theological ax grinding, or subject to hermeneutical myopia. Hence the practice of biblical interpretation reinforces the heterosexist culture from which the theological repression of sexual difference has emerged. What’s fascinating about black Christian appeals to the Bible to justify suppression of homosexuality is that such appeals are quite similar to those made by whites to justify slavery. Then again, that was already a familiar hermeneutical move in black religious circles, since it had been employed to justify theological strictures against the ecclesial expression of female authority. Those of us promulgating a theology of homoeroticism must engage in hermeneutical warfare and interpretive battle, not only with the text but also with the heterosexist presuppositions that shaped the biblical narratives and their subsequent mainstream interpretation.
Finally, I think that Jesus states the bottom line when he says that all of the law and prophets were contained in his summary of the ethical aim of Christian belief. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
That means that we must embrace and affirm all brothers and sisters regardless of where we stand on the mysteries of sexual identity. Too often we have focused on a subsidiary accounting of sexual identity and thrust it into primary consideration to determine legitimate standing within the religious community. Being in right relationship with God and our neighbor is the crucial factor in our Christian existence. Once that issue is settled, then sexual orientation becomes subsidiary. Sacred orientation is more important than sexual orientation. When the Bible is read through that liberating lens and through the prism of self-acceptance in light of God’s offer of the gift of love and affirmation, it can be read as a source of sexual healing for homosexuals.
One of the most crucial issues a liberating interpretation of the Bible can address is the culture of dishonesty that smothers alternative sexualities. Gays and lesbians, as well as all other-sexed people, often have had to deny to themselves they were homosexual. They denied their sexuality to others who might have perceived it even before they did, a perception that might have caused them great discomfort. They often have had to stay in an epistemological closet, a theological closet, a sociological closet, and to some degree, even a biological closet, because they didn’t want to suffer the consequences of coming out. The culture of deceit imposed on gays and lesbians has to be relieved by the church’s open affirmation of their legitimacy, so that they don’t have a distorted consciousness and a bruised conscience about their own sexuality. In the final analysis, we are liberated into self acceptance by a loving and forgiving God.
Okay. You are going to change everybody’s mind.
We can hope.
Well, I think so. You’ve already largely answered my next question, but I’m going to ask it in case there is something you want to add. How do we reread the Bible as a guide to promoting complete and healthy homosexual relationships?
As I’ve stated, in order to skillfully interpret the Bible, we’ve got to get at the social, political, and ideological history of the time during which its constitutive texts emerged. By so doing, we get a sense of the philosophical reflections on race, gender, culture, class, and of course, sexuality as well, that penetrated the discursive frames and theological views of the Bible. Some of these reflections were egalitarian, but many more were authoritarian. Then, too, we’ve got to acknowledge that the culture in which we live shapes our self-understanding, as well as our understanding of our relationship to the Bible, and what role it should play in regulating our intellectual and moral lives. Our cultural situations even affect how we think we are capable of transforming our self-understanding through a new interpretation, perhaps even radical reinterpretation, of the Bible in light of the moral aspirations that we learn to claim as legitimate components of our individual and collective identities.
But it’s equally important to understand there are multiple textualities within revelation’s household. Of course, the Bible is the crucial, significant, and central text that shines on other texts interpreted in its light, and within the circumference of its ethical imagination. But a crucial implication of revelation is the belief in the variegated modalities through which it is articulated, which means that God speaks and is revealed to us in a number of ways. Even though the Bible is the hermeneutical ground of all textualities and modalities of revelation, it is not the exclusive or exhaustive medium of revelation. I think fundamental Christians in particular fail to comprehend this point, or at least they strongly disagree with this theological belief and interpretive principle. As a result, there is often in such circles a species of bibliolatry, or worship of the Bible. In my view, we should only worship the God who inspired the Bible. Bibliolatry is a way to foreclose wrestling with the complex demand of responsible assessment of the contradictory data of human experience in light of religious belief. Bibliolatry resolves all complexity, nuance, ambiguity, and so on.
Other Christians believe that we can’t worship the Bible on the premise that God continues to speak. When we close the Bible, we have neither shut God’s mouth nor closed God’s mind. The radical openness of the mouth and mind of God means there is ongoing revelation in our times. It means that God is still speaking to us. That means that we have scriptural-like, biblical-like revelations that need to be taken seriously. The backdrop of such critical reflection is the understanding that the Bible is, besides a book of faith, also a book of history. It is a text that belongs to time and circumstance. Even though it claims to mediate eternal truth—a claim I take seriously—its medium is birthed in contingency. God’s word is true, but the means by which we know it are limited, finite, and fallible. That means we’ve got to confront the historical conditions of biblical production. We’ve got to ask the questions: Why were all the books in the Bible written by men? Why was the canon largely shaped by masculinist sensibilities? In many ways, the canon reflects a patriarchal code rearticulated as theological necessity. In truth, historical contingency has been recapitulated as transcendental inevitability. Those of us believers who are skeptical, even suspicious of human claims of divine revelation, also believe that God continues to speak to liberated—and liberating—people.
Therefore, in spite of occasional biblical crankiness about (alternative) sexualities, one can conceive of the biblical worldview as an interpretive canvas on which to sketch a liberating ethical intentionality. We must account for the manner in which writers smuggled their biases into the biblical text, even as the biblical landscape accommodated the social perspectives and cultural norms of societies that shaped its construction. We must also take the risk of reinterpretation and posit the principle of extended canonicity. I think we have to appeal to the extrabiblical textualities—of experience, suffering, and oppression—that shape the lives of believers and affect the modalities and anatomy of revelation. It is extrabiblical revelation because it is not contained in the Bible, but the Bible is contained in the believer’s arc of experience. But blacks, women, gays, lesbians, and other minorities have to risk reinterpreting the words of the Bible in light of the Word—to whom the text points and who legitimates the experience of these minorities.
That covers the Bible, but what about the Qu’ran and other sacred Scriptures?
Sure, the same applies to the Qu’ran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Torah, and other holy texts by which religious believers abide. And what I say is significant for all religious communities, whether they believe God speaks through Moses or Muhammad.
I wrote a story years ago about a black man who was rescued by Jesus, and they made love. So basically, it was very erotic, with brown skin to brown skin. What is your reaction to that type of story?
I think that there’s space in our fantasy lives for the fusion of autonomous human eroticisms and divinely ordered sexual identities, especially as we struggle to imagine the dynamic and complex nature of our relationship to God. We have to remember that the intimate relation between believers and God is deeply and profoundly erotic at points, a perception that is reinforced in biblical texts and in theological and religious literature of all sorts throughout the ages. It makes sense that erotic communion is the analogical predicate for the intimate relation between the divine and the human. After all, we start with what we know—intimate human communion—and analogize to what we imagine—God’s identity. Since erotic relations that take place in the context of a committed relationship is one of the most profound unions on earth, it is the basis for understanding the intensity of God’s presence.
I think that whether it’s your story or the story I read once, I think, in the book, Spirituality for Ministry, by Urban T. Holmes, more than twenty years ago—where some nuns were either fantasizing about making love to Jesus or dreaming about him in a sexual fashion—the notion of erotic engagements with God appear to be honored by sacred precedent. Communion with God takes multiple forms. I don’t think we can, in an a priori fashion, determine any sexual orientation per se as off-limits when it comes to understanding our relationship to God. It’s important in this context to view our erotic relations in a metaphoric vein, that is, as attempts to analogize the highest moment of human ecstasy in regard to the ecstatic communion with God. Penetration of the flesh, among other erotic gestures, becomes a vehicle for a realized spiritual communion. I think all forms of edifying, nondestructive erotic play can ultimately become true grist for the mill of our sexual imaginations and express true hunger for God.
Let me ask you this then: I shared this story with a friend of mine, and he was offended. He called it blasphemy and he didn’t want to touch the story; he didn’t want to finish it. It was almost as if he were being contaminated or getting the evil spirit from the story itself, almost like he was afraid of it. What do you think about that?
Beliefs or fantasies that are radically dissimilar to our normal beliefs, behavior, and identity are certainly dangerous. They’re taboo. They are contaminating, but perhaps in a good sense. It conjures for me the title of Mary Douglas’s magisterial work, Purity and Danger. In some religious communities, the sexual relation is never to be thought of in relationship to God; the purity of God’s identity is not to be enmeshed in the passionate, erotic communion. And yet God creates human beings with sexual organs and orientations. I think it is very dangerous and disturbing for many of us to imagine a different sexual order than the one that supports and governs our everyday existence. Plus, let’s face it, we often fear what we don’t understand. Or as Stevie Wonder phrased it, “when you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer”—but he added a key phrase that the dominant society should take to heart: “Superstition ain’t the way.” We could replace superstition with hate, fear, intolerance, bigotry, and the like. America once feared blacks and oppressed us and, when forced to accept us, discovered either that we weren’t so different or that we presented a valuable difference that the nation eventually learned to embrace. The inability to embrace sexual difference says more about a culture or tradition that strangles innovation and creativity in our relationships to one another and to God, than it says about the sinful character of the fantasy or imagination that might offend us. Beliefs and passions that fall outside of the norm often bring terror, perhaps even the terror of self-recognition, which may be the ultimate terror. The possibility that the very thing I despise may represent a suppressed fantasy is all the more cause to outlaw that fantasy.
How important is fantasy to our sexuality?
I think fantasy is extraordinarily important to sexuality. Fantasy draws from the collective or individual expressions of one’s historically shaped erotic and sexual desire. Fantasy is the projection of a possible erotic or sexual engagement with another human being or entity that is driven by our socially constructed and biologically driven conception of what is desirable. So fantasy, in one sense, is indivisible from the political and historical contexts in which our identities are shaped. We learn to desire the things we’re taught to believe are desirable. Sometimes desire cuts across the grain of the socially sanctioned and “appropriate” fantasy. Certain fantasies are ruled as legitimate and others as illegitimate and, unsurprisingly, the rules follow a broadly patriarchal and heterosexist vein. It’s just fine for young men to want to make love to young women at the appropriate age, but it’s reprehensible for men and women to gravitate to their own gender, regardless of age. This notion falls into the realm of permissible fantasy. Permissible fantasy is an index of the sexual relations that may not be explicitly or overtly encouraged, but are nonetheless tolerated because they fall within the realm of heterosexual erotic identity. I’m thinking here, for example, of illicit sex between a married man and a woman. Even though there is a taboo to such sex, it causes nothing like the fear or revulsion of homosexual relations. In fact, the notion of a same-sex union is so profoundly offensive that its very existence is thought to be the mark of perversion, while adultery is viewed as a “sin.” At that level, homoerotic fantasy cuts across the socially constructed object of desire and becomes a subversive political gesture in a heterosexist universe.
Fantasy nurtures the erotic life and permits the idealization of possibly perfect unions. If fantasies are read as both political projections and individual assertions of unrealized potential, or even remembered achievement, they become more than neo-Freudian expressions of suppressed sexualities. Of course, fantasy is also a crucial philosophical plank in the argument over offensive, transgressive sexual behavior. For instance, in the Catholic Church right now, the scandal over pedophilic priests is linked in the minds of some critics with outlaw sexual fantasies of illicit sex between men and boys. The fact that at least one accused priest was actively involved in NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, only served to cement the belief in the minds of millions that priests were little more than closeted gay pedophiles out to seduce altar boys. The perception among many straight Catholics is that this is a homoerotic fantasy that needs to be restricted, that if the fantasy didn’t exist then the sexuality couldn’t flourish. And even if the fantasy exists, the behavior should be outlawed.
Sexual fantasies present a template for erotic desire that is reproduced in bodily behavior. The fantasy is literally the prelude to the kiss. If one can control the fantasy life of a human being, then one might control the behavior that issues from the fantasy. Still, one might reasonably question if there is strict causality between fantasy and fulfillment. One is reminded of Jesus’ words of warning that to even imagine an act of adultery is to essentially commit it: “But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Few critics of homosexuality are likely to remonstrate with equal passion against millions who have lusted after a woman in their hearts, and who have, by Jesus’ standards, already committed adultery. (One thinks unavoidably here of Jimmy Carter’s confession in the pages of Playboy that he had lusted in his heart and therefore sinned.) Jesus is aiming here not simply at causality, but at the necessity to discipline one’s imagination according to the ethical standards of a monogamous, committed relationship.
Hence, it wasn’t the sexual identity that was the cause of sin—after all, it was articulated within the logic of heterosexuality—but a sexual imagination or fantasy that subverted faithful relations. One supposes, therefore, that one’s sexual orientation would not necessarily alter the ethical prescriptions that regulate one’s fantasies when one is in a committed relationship. One’s moral practice seems more important in the fantasy life than one’s sexual orientation. But I do think that fantasies play a legitimate, even crucial, function in sexual identity by nurturing a vision of the ideal relations in one’s mind that one may not ever live up to. In this positive sense, fantasy is the picture of perfection against which practices are measured. That can be quite punishing because in a heterosexual world, where erotic ideals of perfection crowd the fantasies of many men, the collective imaginary, politically speaking, is often a pornographic one. Most women cannot live up to that ideal and perhaps they shouldn’t have to even try to reach that unattainable goal. (The reason for my qualification here is that I don’t want to rule out all acts of pornography as problematic, such as those enjoyed within a healthy erotic relationship among committed adults.)
My comments and observations are equally applicable to gays and lesbians. Ironically enough, in the humdrum, mundane, quotidian relations among homosexuals, gays and lesbians end up depressingly similar in their lives to heterosexuals. The lion’s share of that depression is experienced by close-minded heterosexuals who come to realize that in most regards, there’s no big difference in gays and lesbians and straight folk in their day-to-day existence. They just happen to have sex differently and may have the same sexual fantasies as heterosexuals, just with different partners. I’m not suggesting that all fantasies are good, healthy, or edifying, but that has nothing to do with sexual orientation. When they occur in a context of erotic and sexual health, as well as ethical strength, fantasies are just fine.
On an individual level, do you think there are such things as illegitimate fantasies?
For anybody, any group, I think that there are obvious limits. If you are a gay or lesbian person and you fantasize about murdering somebody in the process of having sex, I think that’s a deeply disturbing, perhaps even potentially destructive fantasy, just as it is for straight folk. So yes, there are always ethical norms and limits generated within the logic of a given sexual ethic. You don’t have to step outside of gay or lesbian sexuality to find a restrictive norm that could be imposed as a legitimate one. Within all orientations, sexual liberty should be shaped by moral responsibility. However, I don’t think responsibility is determined by an ahistorical and depoliticized appeal to a transcendental norm of respect for the other, although I’m not knocking Kantian ethics, just disagreeing with aspects of its description of how morality works. I think that responsibility is a highly nuanced ethical concept, shaped by an ethic of respect that finds expression in historically specific and culturally conditioned relations to others. It causes one to ask the questions: How can one seek one’s best while acting in a way not to harm others? How can the flourishing of one’s erotic desire be checked by a sense of community that respects the integrity of the other? For example, rape is wrong, period, and the fantasy of rape that one intends to act on is highly destructive, regardless of one’s sexual orientation. So yes, I think that . . .
Let me step in. There are some fantasies that are not acted on. Or let’s think about if a fantasy is one that imitates or plays out behavior that some find offensive, say a woman who might have a fantasy about being raped . . .
Oh sure, sure. I thought about that immediately, as soon as I made my comments on rape. When it comes to fantasy, the sky’s the limit, and if you tell no one your fantasy, or if you share your fantasy with someone of like mind, or act on it with consenting partners in a noncoercive, nonviolent fashion, it’s all good. I certainly think that it’s important to acknowledge the irreverence and the transgressive potential of autonomous sexual desire and fantasy within one’s own mind. I think that the landscape of the psyche should be scouted for fantasies that allow people to uninhibitedly embrace their healthy erotic identities. I suppose even so-called illicit fantasies of rape, or of being raped, within a nonviolent context of reciprocal affection—or as a solitary fantasy nurtured within one’s solipsistic universe of erotic desire—may be fine as long as one doesn’t act on that fantasy in a violent fashion. For instance, we’ve got to allow for the pantomime of rape by couples as an erotic stimulation within the moral boundaries of their relationship. But I’m rather more libertarian about these matters and believe in a kind of autonomous sexuality within the limits of fantasy that allows people to sustain a range of irreverent, transgressive beliefs as long as they don’t turn violent.
Years ago I was at a party and I saw a black man walking through the party wearing a leash behind a white man. This was in the Castro, in San Francisco, which at the time was very white supremacist, was very white. And I remember I wrote about it, and it got a lot of reaction. One of the questions that came up was: Does sexual fantasy imitate reality, or does reality imitate fantasy?
It’s a dialectical process, isn’t it? It’s a give-and-take. Can we really divorce Robert Mapplethorp’s Man in a Gray Suit—is that the name of it?
Polyester suit.
Man in a Polyester Suit, right. I’m mixing up Mapplethorp and Gregory Peck, who starred in the film Man in the Gray Flannel Suit [which I’m actually conflating with a film he did a decade earlier, A Gentleman’s Agreement], which was about another form of bigotry: anti-Semitism. Anyway, as erotically charged as Man in a Polyester Suit is, and as full of transgressions against the heterosexual norm as that photo is, can we really divorce Mapplethorp’s imagination from the political context of a socially constructed black male sexuality, with the large black organ it features as the site and source of so much fantasy and fear within the white heterosexual world?
I read in Mapplethorp’s biography that he had fantasies about the black male animal. So that shaped my view of his photography.
Right, right. Technically, that may be true as a precise term of the mammal—the animal—but we both know that “animal” signifies racial primordialism and a savagery of sorts within the context of an eroticized black masculine subjectivity. But even individual fantasies reflect the political context in which people are shaped and in which they mature. The same is true for homoerotic desire, even as it thrives on articulations of nonnormative desire. So it’s dialectical: fantasies shape behaviors and behaviors are shaped by fantasies, though I’d still resist the strict one-to-one correlation between the two, since it fails to account for other causative factors. Fantasies are related to politics, and politics to the articulation of not only the possible—as in politics is the art of the possible—but also to the ideal one holds in one’s mind.
When I think of the black man being led around on the leash by the white man, I think of the Hegelian dimension of the master-slave dialectic—or the relationship between the dominant and the dominated—illustrating, in this case, that there’s a reciprocity of means that promotes a mutual reinforcement of fantasy and its fulfillment. They feed each other and sustain each other, even if in unequal fashion. On the one hand, the white man has the power because he can pull the black man. On the other hand, if the black man is stronger, he can resist; so there’s give-and-take. Even in a relation of inequality, there’s tension. That’s not only Hegelian, it’s downright Foucaultian. Whereas traditional theories of power located authority in conventional spots of domination in a rigid hierarchical schemata, Foucault contended that power breaks out everywhere. Its locus classicus is not simply in an institution or in hegemonic power, but in varied and complex relations and negotiations among and between the powerless as well.
That having been said, there’s no question that when white men dominate black men, even within a homoerotic context, that can certainly be the corollary of a white supremacist ethic, or perhaps its direct expression. White supremacist domination, or fantasies of domination, may fuse with homoerotic desires of union with black men. I’m not suggesting that white gays and lesbians cannot be white supremacists, or that they cannot derive benefits, pleasures, and perks from white skin privilege. In fact, their white supremacist fantasies can be projected onto black bodies. For instance, the big black dick can be sought by gay white men who possess vicious, stereotypical views of black sexuality, aping—pun intended, I suppose—the behavior of some white straight communities. The relations of power and domination, although eroticized within a same-sex framework, can nevertheless express a white supremacist fantasy that is prior to the sexual fantasy, or at least coterminous with it. I think this is relatively untheorized in certain white gay and lesbian communities. Still, I must add, without essentializing them, that white gays and lesbians seem more aware in general of the complex racial dynamics of both intimate and social relations than their heterosexual counterparts. That’s not a law or rule, just an informal ethnographic observation about how one minority is sometimes sensitive to the plight of another minority—although the exact opposite is also true, since we know that in straight black communities and among gay and lesbian white communities, there’s plenty of ignorance and bigotry to go around.
One thing I was thinking about was in terms of the black male’s perspective, and his eroticizing of white supremacy . . .
Oh sure. If heterosexual blacks can internalize white supremacist views where we hate our big black lips, our broad noses, or our big behinds—although there ain’t that much black self-hatred around that, thank God!—and seek to modify features of our God-given beauty through cosmetic surgery, then certainly gay black men can absorb a white supremacist identity that subordinates black sexuality to dominant white sexualities. There’s no homosexual exemption to racial self-hatred. In fact, for the black other-sexed, there’s an exacerbating effect of self-hatreds, an exponential increase in multiple self-abnegations: with the black self and the gay self in tandem, there are potentially more selves to despise, resent, even hate. (I’m not playing into the additive theory of multiple minority statuses here, where folk don’t integrate their various constituent identities into a “person.” I’m simply trying to highlight how, among those prone or vulnerable to self-hatred, there’s more to hate of one’s self when it integrates a variety of identities and fights a variety of battles.)
Thus there is a reinscription of a pattern first generated within the context of patriarchal heterosexism’s sexual fantasies, so that gay white communities rearticulate dominant whiteness. Some gays get off on white supremacist fantasies, which could conceivably fuse with rough-trade homoeroticism that may be a cognate of white supremacist domination of the other. I’m not suggesting that the two are necessarily the same thing, or that they share a reciprocal relationship. I am simply saying that the two can merge. Homosexuality has modalities that extend the white supremacist’s desire to subordinate the black sexual identity to himself, and the acceptance of that by black men is no less problematic because it occurs in the context of a homoerotic union. Just because the white fist up your ass gives you pleasure doesn’t mean that it’s not meant to rip out your guts.
But is the black man’s fantasy an illegitimate fantasy?
It’s not necessarily illegitimate, it’s just troubling. It is legitimately problematic, even self-destructive. One cannot, by entering a homoerotic union, escape the ethics of relationality that should govern any healthy relationship.
Now how about educated, successful black men who have prison fantasies?
Again, I don’t think anything is off-limits in terms of the autonomy of desire within the context of fantasy, so I am not interested in restricting such fantasies, even for those who may subordinate themselves to white men because they have internalized a white supremacist worldview. To be sure, I would find such fantasies problematic and self-destructive, even if they are literally instrumental to one’s erotic existence. I don’t have any desire to impose an ontologically grounded black ethic of propriety on the homosexual mind. Still, if such fantasies ultimately prove to be dehumanizing to gay black men, it diminishes the community; and if it diminishes the community, it impacts all of us in some measure. Selfloathing often has social repercussions.
Yeah, but see, I’m thinking that when these black men have prison fantasies, a lot of times their fantasies remind me of inverted white supremacy, where they are taking the ideas of black masculinity being animalistic, and so on, and they are eroticizing that.
That’s different. It’s like the state of nature meets the myth of the black savage as Jean-Jacques Rousseau shakes hands with Carl Van Vechten, the gay white patron of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. In many ways, Van Vechten was a great guy, and incredibly supportive of black writers like Langston Hughes. But at his worst (and remember, as with most of us, the best and the worst live on the same block, in the same house, and when you get one you get the other), he seemed to go trolling among the Negroes to get in touch with the primitive state of man that was signified in blackness. Indeed, the genealogy of the eroticized primitivism and fetishized animalism of black masculinity stretches back to our first moments on Western soil as slaves in 1619, down to educated gay black men seeking the ideal savage type and the archetypically most unreconstructed black masculinity available—the black prisoner.
What may be erotically attractive to educated gay black men, even in the straight black male prisoner, is the prospect of situational homosexuality, since at any moment in prison, heterosexual agency is redirected into homosexual channels, given the restricted erotic commerce available. By definition, prison sex in male prisons among prisoners is sex between men, excluding the occasional heterosexual alliance in various guises. In prison, the black heterosexual male is often transformed into a vulnerable or victimizing gay man, at least in provisional, situational terms, his body marked by ad hoc homoeroticism. The idealization of the prisoner as the black savage is nothing but the postmodern urban update of the state of nature primitive with a huge sexual organ grinding in the fantasies of an erotically omnivorous culture.
This is a deep conversation. One last topic. I’m thinking about the word “queer.” In your essay on the black church and sexuality in Race Rules, you mentioned “Afriqueermericans.” Queer is a word that is really debated in the black gay and lesbian community. I see queers of color, younger gays and lesbians, and I guess they use that word because it’s supposed to be co-opting it, and it’s not white, and it’s not male. When I was growing up, the term queer was used by white people, and it was used in reference to boys—little boys were “queer.” I don’t know where I’m going with this . . .
Where you are going with it, at least in my mind, is that the change in the use of queer points to the dynamic character of linguistic transformation, signifying that words change over space and time. Moreover, they mean one thing to one group, something different to another group, much like “nigger” or “bitch.” Queer is not as demonizing as nigger, or as bitch for that matter, but it carries an ontological negativity that is mediated through its enthralling witness against the norm. Queer: not normal. The riot against normalcy that queer betokens makes it a highly explosive and useful weapon in the politics of publicity for gay and lesbian causes. I think here the hierarchy of race makes a huge difference even in gay and lesbian communities. Black gays and lesbians, as well as other-sexed people, have been caught in the crosswinds of seeking acceptance in predominantly white gay and lesbian communities that provide erotic and intellectual succor, but which may close them out culturally; or hunting for love in a black culture that provides familiar rituals of home while alienating, stigmatizing, and even demonizing them because of their sexual preferences. They’ve been caught betwixt and between; it has been especially difficult for minority gays, bisexuals, and lesbians to find an appropriate grammar of erotic identification and communion.
Although “queer” has the resonance of a specific time and cultural identification, it has interpretive flexibility and can be used to signify a transgressive, even playful, resistance to the term’s negative connotations. Queer can be a terminological rallying point to galvanize multiple constituencies within gay and lesbian communities. There can be a postmodern sense of jouissance as well, as in, “Damned right, I’m queer,” or “Damned right, I’m a fag”—the latter expression, perhaps, a more tolerable or racially resonant signifier among a certain generation of blacks. Such terms represent the articulation of ethical agency among gays and lesbians that says, “We refuse to be put off by your negative language; in fact, we are going to rearticulate it positively in our world in our own way.” The same was done, of course, by some blacks with the word “nigger,” and by some women with the word “bitch.” Whether that works or not, I think, is an open question. I think it’s more difficult to talk about among gays and lesbians of color because they have dramatically participated in multiple kinship groups in their quest for a home. Only when you find a home can you enjoy the leisure of self-parody or the luxury of grounding a derisive term in the history of your community’s response to bigotry. There has not been, by and large, a stabilization of black gay and lesbian communities. Individual examples of success abound, but authentic homosexual community has been much more difficult to attain.
One thing that I think is different between the words “nigger” and “queer” is that, when I hear rappers use the word nigger, I don’t think they are really changing its meaning. They are reinforcing and personifying what it means. Years ago, we couldn’t point to what a nigger was. If someone called you a “nigger,” you said, “Well I’m not a dumb person, I’m not a nigger.” Now you have these black men acting ignorant, acting loud, cursing, swearing, and so on, and saying, “By the way, I’m a ‘nigger’ and I’m black.” So they personify what “nigger” is. I think what “queers” are doing—even though I hate the word, it sounds nasty—is that they are at least projecting intelligence and projecting respect.
Right, right, right. That is a very interesting point. You’ve touched on one of the great contentions in black life, especially with the rise of hip-hop culture. Some critics, however, would disagree with you; they would say that there were dumb, ignorant people to whom we could point all along in black history. They would tell you that there have always been people who could justify the stereotype. But they will also tell you that “nigger” as an epithet never represented the complexity of black identity, and that to isolate a minor personality type—the so-called nigger—within the behavioral norms of blackness to justify the demonization of all black people was patently unjust. As a result, blacks questioned the legitimacy of the claim that the epithet was deployed by whites to define the behavior of people who fell outside the norm of good behavior. That’s because every black person in the eyes of most whites was a nigger.
In that light, we might be able to concede the racial daring and subversive attempt among some blacks to appropriate the linguistic negativity of “nigger” and to recirculate, recontextualize, recode, refigure, refashion, and rearticulate the term for their purposes. At least now when it came to that word, the “niggas”—the term as it is baptized in black linguistic subversion—were in control, challenging whites and bourgeois blacks who could never consider using the term in any incarnation. In the eyes of the contemporary “niggas,” bourgeois blacks do not exercise the same level of discretion over their rhetorical and linguistic selfrepresentation as do the folk, say, in hip-hop.
So the argument could be made that there is indeed a flip, that the people who were supposed to be dumb are not dumb at all. Instead, they are playing the culture to the hilt. They are reinforcing certain stereotypes while challenging others. They’re reaping economic remuneration from trying to parody and stigmatize what “nigger” is or saying, “Yeah, if you call me a nigger, I’m going to live up to that, I’m going to be a larger-than-life nigger, and I’ll show you what that might mean.” Or they might say, “I dare you to keep calling me ‘nigger’ in the face of my embracing this term in such a fashion as to not only reinforce the negative behaviors that you think characterize the term, but to deploy it as a rhetorical weapon against the white supremacy that seeks to deny black people the opportunity to choose their own destinies.” So I think the use of “nigga” is much more complex than the either/or absolutism that bewitches too many black critics in their discussion of the term.
I understand your point in terms of queer. But your perception that “queers” are engaging in their linguistic subversion in an intelligent way has to do with the fact that gay and lesbian people have not been subject to the same stereotype of being unintelligent that blacks have been saddled with. For centuries now, blackness has signified stupidity and ignorance in the West. But gays and lesbians have not been perceived as intellectually inferior to heterosexuals. In fact, the opposite is true: gays have been tied, at least in the West, to the Greeks, who were viewed as exceedingly intelligent. So what you face as a queer minority is the improbable complexity of black gay identities because you’re dealing with both stereotypes collapsing on your head: dumb nigger and smart queer. Although I’m sure an exception is made for black queers, whose race may cancel out their sexual orientation, at least in the intelligence sweepstakes. How much more degraded and contradictory can one get in one body? So I think that black gays and lesbians would certainly be much more sensitive to the nomenclature of self-disclosure and self-description than even most white gays and lesbians might ever imagine.
One last topic: class issues. By most people’s account, we would be considered bourgie. I think, like W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “the talented tenth,” we’re leading the masses. Don’t you feel that as such we should set an example . . .
Set an example for whom?
In general for the masses of African Americans, since we’re going to be leaders. Say for instance, earlier you mentioned bourgie blacks, and it was kind of in a derogatory sense. In fact, I think most “bourgie blacks” are doing positive things.
Sure, sure. What I mean by “bourgie”—which is a pejorative term shortened from bourgeois—is not simply middle class. I mean by bourgie the construction of a selfdetermined persona that is hostile to, and scornful of, ordinary black people. You can be rich and not be bourgie. Class in black America has been less about how much money you make or how many stocks you have than the politics of style. Still, your overall point is well taken. I think that those of us who are privileged—and that includes gays and lesbians who have high levels of education—have an absolute obligation to “give back” to the less fortunate. I think we are bound by blood, history, and destiny to our brothers and sisters, especially to those who will never know the privilege or positive visibility that many in the middle class enjoy. And we should cross all lines—sexual, economic, religious, gender, geographical, generational—in speaking for the oppressed. For instance, that’s why I think it’s incumbent on me as a heterosexual black man to speak against the bigotry and injustice faced by my black brothers and sisters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other-sexed. And it’s equally important for educated, upwardly mobile blacks to not forget those who have been entombed in permanent poverty and miseducation.
It is part of the hidden courage of black gays and lesbians that despite the stigma they have endured, they continue to work within the arc of black identity and community in fulfillment of their sense of personal and political destiny. I think that’s a beautiful thing. Being “queer” or “gay” is a tremendous struggle, but even before the enemies of black people see a fey snap of the wrist or the “butch” dress of lesbian women, they see black pigment. So pigment may trump sexual orientation in a manner that many black gays and lesbians intuitively understand in their bodies, even though deeply inscribed in their bodies at the same time is the recognition of their unalterable sexual identities that need to be sustained, affirmed, and prized. To the degree that black gays and lesbians struggle with the complex convergence of racial, sexual, gender, and class issues, they already represent courageous role models of negotiating differences in one body at one site. They represent to us what blackness will look like well into the twenty-first century.
What a beautiful ending.
Thanks, brother.
Interview by Kheven LaGrone
Chicago, Illinois, 2002