On Sexuality and Power

Hierarchies of gender, age, and class afford a range of attractive scenarios for sexual power play. Age difference, for instance, may plug into fathers and sons, and teachers and pupils; these may be entirely amiable relations, though they may also afford scope for the enactment of violent and exploitative fantasies. The scenarios that race sustains are centrally and indelibly embedded in slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and servitude; they reference actual practices of torture and ill-treatment of such extremity that they have been outlawed in many countries. Historically, even benevolent relations between white people and people of color have characteristically involved condescension and stereotyping. It is still hard to think of intimate relations between black and white men without invoking a heritage of dominance and subordination.

In an encyclopedia article on “Black Gay Americans,” Ward Houser posits a range of responses to this heritage, often involving role substitutions, reversals, and loops. For some it seems appropriate for a white male to take a “female” role in a mixed-race liaison, because this may compensate for the historic dominance of white men. Others, “being more comfortable in the submissive role, generalize from their experience of whites as holding the major power positions of American society to perceive white males as particularly sexually powerful, and so are attracted to them.” Correspondingly, some whites may “feel more comfortable dominating” effeminate black gays, whereas others are drawn to more “macho” black men because they are supposed to be more virile. (We might hesitate there at the expression “feel more comfortable.” A good deal of the published evidence suggests that such preferences may be passionately driven; as I observe in chapter 3, fantasy is as likely to involve compulsion as freedom.) Even those who are not much affected by those hierarchical factors, Houser says, are likely to be involved in “the attractiveness of the ‘different,’ curiosity, class differences, rebellion against social custom, or a belief that race should not be a factor in discriminating between potential sexual partners.”¹

There is no reason to suppose that gay men and lesbians will be unusually progressive about other disadvantaged groups. In the 1970s and 1980s, Puerto Ricans seem to have been regarded in a notably functional light on the New York gay scene. In The Farewell Symphony Edmund White remarks casually, of a man he sleeps with: “he was himself bewitched by Puerto Ricans, as who was not”; the question is so rhetorical that it doesn’t get a question mark. Midwestern boys, in particular, are said to find Puerto Ricans exotic.² In Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Puerto Rican boys are ubiquitous, beautiful, and said to have “big cocks.”³ They unload boxes at a store, exterminate roaches, and carry messages; they play handball in empty lots; they are never within the social orbit of the narrator and his friends. Malone “loved those boys, as did I, to be among them was enough; he was in thrall to them, he was in the thrall of Puerto Ricans” (188). Again: “My dick would straighten out like a divining rod, forcing me to follow more than twenty blocks in fruitless pursuit” when a Puerto Rican passes, we are told in David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed.⁴ There is no sense that these enthusiasms might be personally and politically problematic; no concern about how it might feel to be the object of such casual attentions.

To be sure, sexual attraction frequently involves objectification. But race supplies the most ready-made, and hence the most crude, repertoire—and all no more than skin deep. In Lyle Glazier’s story, “Chester,” the narrator, who prefers black men, remarks of a partner: “I thought he had no formal education, no book learning, no academic interest in literature, music, the fine arts. I erased our difference. I was engulfed by his brown warmth. He was pure sexuality—gentle, placid, as open to love as the earth is open to the sun. I loved his brown against my white.”⁵ The narrator tries to make his partner a blank, erasing every attribute but two: sex and skin color—and finally just skin color. Further, racial differences are usually permanent. As Rhonda Cobham remarks, the youth in ancient Greece was expected to accept homosexual advances while a boy, on the assumption that this was an interim stage before he became himself a citizen. But you don’t grow out of racial subordination, even if you change class (in the language of race, you remain a “boy”).⁶ Indeed, the white mentor may feel threatened at the prospect of his black protégé rising in the social scale. In Paul Thomas Cahill’s story, “The Reunion,” Rodger (white) has left Julius (black) because he couldn’t cope with his being successful: “‘I couldn’t be in charge, couldn’t take care of you as I thought I was expected to, not when we were … equals.’”⁷

James Baldwin in Another Country depicts Rufus as driven to violence, despair, and suicide by his inability to handle the racial milieu in which he is trapped. Rufus’s sister Ida is tougher, at the cost of total separation: “‘If any one white person gets through to you, it kind of destroys your—single-mindedess. They say that love and hate are very close together. Well, that’s a fact.’”⁸ Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, in his notorious attack on Baldwin in Soul on Ice, alleged that Another Country displays “the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of [Baldwin] himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites.” In Cleaver’s view, “many Negro homosexuals, acquiescing in this racial death wish, are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by the white man.”⁹ Actually, Another Country is not incompatible with Cleaver’s hostile analysis: it amounts to an extended demonstration that cross-racial affairs are irretrievably doomed, because of hang-ups such as Cleaver posits—and, anyway, are scarcely tolerated by people in New York (let alone the South). The good sex, in Baldwin’s novel, is between white men. Notwithstanding, Huey Newton, another Panther, envisaged an alliance between the black, feminist, and gay movements, and labeled Cleaver himself a repressed homosexual.¹⁰ These concerns are still politically active in the United States around Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

There may be scarcely less objectification when the conjuncture of sexuality and race is offered as the ground of spectacular harmony. In the films My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993), a miraculously egalitarian, racially blind gay relationship is presented as a magical opportunity for the overthrow of (merely) cultural misunderstanding. The boys in My Beautiful Laundrette inhabit a world in which “Asian” and “skinhead” are the most antipathetic terms, but between the two of them race is unremarkable. In The Wedding Banquet, Wai-Tung’s Taiwanese family produces intense cultural disruption in the relationship of Wai-Tung and Simon, but the two principals appear ideally harmonious in every other respect, and totally unaware of any complication in the conjunction of sexuality and racial difference. Racial blindness appears comparably in Marshall Moore’s story “Everybody Loves the Musée d’Orsay.” In this instance a Sino/American couple are living happily in Malaysia, when the American mother and the demands of family intrude clumsily upon them. Again, race itself appears to be merely incidental for the two men.¹¹ The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) presents transvestism as the big shock, while making racial difference of little account between Fergus and Dil.¹² This instance is complicated by the fact that the white man, Fergus, is Irish—of a subjugated people—whereas Jodi, who is black and from Antigua (formally independent) has signed up to fight for the imperial power. The simply English person is Dil, who is of mixed race.

The alleged inadequacies of colonial subjects position them as the inferiors that witness to European superiority. Fiction indicates that colonial Europeans spent a good part of their time producing anxious, self-justifying stories about the relationship between the natives and themselves. If colonial fiction “can demonstrate that the barbarism of the native is irrevocable, or at least very deeply ingrained, then the European’s attempt to civilize him can continue indefinitely, the exploitation of his resources can proceed without hindrance, and the European can persist in enjoying a position of moral superiority,” Abdul JanMohamed observes.¹³

In the midst of apartheid, South Africa produced stories exploring the rewards and difficulties of black-white liaisons. David’s initial defining experience, at the start of John Sandys’s novel Against the Tide, is on the beach, with “a golden-brown gypsy boy with dark, curly hair.”¹⁴ David is in his late twenties and can’t settle in England after World War II, personally or to an occupation; there are said to be more opportunities in South Africa. On arrival there he immediately gets invited to a party of same-sex “Coloureds.” They have “dark-skinned shining bodies, beautiful to behold, muscular, deep-chested, narrow-hipped, long-legged” (58); they are “young, virile, gentle and uninhibited, with music in their souls and laughter in their hearts” (61). However, David is quickly told that mixing is not tolerated. He despises the local white men he sees at gay parties, and the married couple who take him in and try to seduce him.

David becomes a commercial traveler; it is love at first sight when he is assigned a Zulu driver. “Ugi was the golden-brown gypsy boy and he was in love. He asked God to bless them both” (82). Ugi, we learn, fell in love immediately with David. Their meetings are dangerous and desperate. David is distraught when he learns that Ugi has a wife and children. However, Ugi introduces him to Guy, another white man with a black lover, who explains that marriage is required by local custom. Guy draws David into a circle of clandestine black-white couples, but even here he dislikes the whites.

“‘Why do they refer to a grown man—a husband and a father as ‘boy’?’” David demands (126). Nonetheless, his relationship with Ugi depends on difference. “Ugi gave a wide smile. ‘Me happy to be David’s boy,’ he said proudly’” (126–27). Ugi uses the name given to him by white employers; David himself thinks of him as “this beautiful child” (87). Ugi apparently has a preference for male lovers: he thinks of himself, in the idiom of his people, as a “woman-man” (140).

However, Ugi has educated himself and gives David the best advice on how to establish himself financially. He sees a market opportunity, making and selling lampshades; he becomes the creative force in the business. Compare Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, where Shug and Celie secure their future by setting up a business making pants: it appears that small-scale capitalist development is the key to security, advancement, and affluence. David and Ugi pay no attention to the political situation, and consequently are taken by surprise when business confidence is destroyed by the Sharpeville Massacre. Eventually they are driven from South Africa, but their love survives and they will start again in England.

In Against the Tide, the South African political situation figures mainly as threatening David’s personal and business affairs. In Stephen Gray’s Time of Our Darkness, the personal bears a political message. This novel is set in South Africa during the school boycott which led eventually to the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of white rule. Pete has a fading gay relationship with André, who is Afrikaans and an airline pilot. Pete is a teacher at a private school and well aware of the rule, “never to lay a hand in amorous expectation on a pupil.”¹⁵ Disley, the token scholarship black student in the class, age thirteen, arrives at his house, evidently in need of support. The boy seduces Pete, and they become lovers. Like Ugi, Disley has an independent understanding of sex between men—he knows already about single-sex hostels, mine compounds, André (Pete’s partner), and André’s pickup.

In the metropolitan, egalitarian mode, Time of Our Darkness is inclined to play down the sexual significance of hierarchy between Pete and Disley. “We were more than equal in the dark,” Pete declares, referring, I suppose, to genital endowment (78). He does not admit to any special thrill from age and class difference, and appears not to have entertained any prior idea of sex with black Africans.

I was brought up not to touch black skin. Black skin was unhealthy, scaly like a reptile’s, gave you TB. A whole country has been divided on that prejudice. When I was a child my mother pulled me out of the reach of the nanny, feeding me herself, bathing me. When I was at primary school we’d run down the corridor, make a circle around the cleaner on her hands and knees, reassemble, not having touched black flesh. (138).

For Pete, skin color is a revelation rather than an abiding fascination. “Do I need to describe the sensation that I experienced as the blackness went out of Disley’s skin for me and I felt the person beneath. [Again, there is no question mark.] All of him” (138). In this passage Disley’s skin is sexy not because it is black, but because, for Pete, it is no longer that. In a typically egalitarian gesture, Pete erases the blackness of Disley’s skin and finds “the person beneath. All of him.” Even in such an extreme situation, difference is said to be unimportant.

Yet, contradictorily, Pete does proceed to find positive value in Disley’s skin. He imagines a visit from the police:

Let the man in the raincoat come. I had a few things to tell him: about black skin, about how it felt, the texture, the grain. And about loss. And about deprivation and humiliation. I was sick with it, as my white, police-supporting countrymen were, but they were sick with their aversion for black skin. (138)

Now we have positive qualities of texture and grain; Disley’s skin is relevant after all, it does contribute to an erotics of difference.

According to Gray, in an interview, the age difference in his novel is symbolic. His idea was that “the entire impetus of the uprising in South Africa in the mid-1980s, during which children assumed the role of adults and adults became, to say the least, vindictively childish, should be acted out literally.”¹⁶ The message is that the country has been plunged into turmoil by a pointless phobia, and that children, by refusing to learn Afrikaans in schools, are leading the revolt. Actually, black skin has its own attractions and the children are wise. For the time being—the time of darkness—the system wins: Disley achieves not a gay relationship but martyrdom in the cause of his people.

Evidently, South Africans have not finished with this scenario. A more gloomy version appears in “A Son’s Story” by Tony Peake.¹⁷ Paul (white) is having a loving sexual relationship with young Memphis (black), who looks after the garden, and whom Paul is coaching in English literature. The relationship is destroyed when a grossly violent dispute between ANC and Inkatha factions draws Memphis back to his family home. In his distress, and perhaps resentment, Memphis tears up all the literary books. Unfortunately, we learn nothing more precise about his feelings, since he is given almost nothing to say. This is partly because the action is seen from the viewpoint of an English visitor, a born-again Christian—a rather easy target.

A traditional skill of the fiction writer is entering into unfamiliar consciousnesses. Yet Sandys in Against the Tide makes little attempt to explain Ugi’s thoughts to the reader. We don’t know what the two men talk about when they are together, except business and how beautiful and sexy each finds the other. When David (upset by Ugi’s visit to his wife and child) is unfaithful, we are told Ugi’s response: “Ugi had been badly hurt, and his first impulse was to leave David, to live only for his wife and children, to give up being a woman-man. But he loved David deeply, and when he surfaced after the initial shock he sensed that with time and patience the memory of that awful day would blur, and he would be able to forgive” (140). This is helpful, but perfunctory compared to the central narrative role of David’s thoughts. After twelve years they go to Europe together, and David ponders Ugi’s difference:

David lay, thinking about Ugi’s early days and the way he had changed. “I wish I knew what he thinks—how he thinks. To be taken out of a tribal society and thrust into this strange way of life is a challenge which has needed a superhuman adjustment, yet he seems to succeed without effort. I am so proud of him …” (150)

David allows Ugi to see that he is thinking along these lines. Ugi objects, forcibly: “‘I see David is still conscious that I am black…. I am no novelty. I am not different.’ He stared hard at David. ‘I have the same emotions, the same feelings, I have the same red blood.’” “David was hurt, and ashamed into silence” (151; my elisions). This is perhaps the only point at which a distance is allowed between David and the narration. Still, David feels able to pronounce that Ugi “‘now has a well-developed mind and a personality’” (165), as though he had previously lacked these attributes.

Similarly, in Against the Tide, it would be marvelous to know what Disley thinks about it all. We may infer, with Pete, that Disley is impressed with his lifestyle; he has thrown in his lot with education (while the rest of his township is rioting); Pete can take him forward. Pete’s worry is that Disley will underestimate the gap between their social positions, and will imagine that by imitating Pete’s amiable manner he can progress to a comparable state of affluence and self-determination. The predicament is manifest when Disley is returning to his township: there is no point in Pete giving him a hair drier because they have no electricity. However, Disley’s self-possession, boosted by his success at school, enables him to inspire his people. If the narrator in Time of Darkness does not presume to take us into Disley’s consciousness, the reader is encouraged to share a respect for the other dimensions in his life, in the township and in a rural area that they visit.

Perhaps it is not possible, still, for a white South African to presume to interpret the thoughts of a black person. J. M. Coetzee, in his prize-winning novel Disgrace, doesn’t attempt this; we get only the viewpoint of the white, male protagonist. A black African has a large influence on the outcome of the action, but his thoughts and feelings remain mysterious and ominous. Perhaps such reticence is ultimately a sign of respect: what white people have done to black people in South Africa makes it impossible for one to speak for, or through, the other. Yet it must also undermine any humanistic or paternal argument, that all peoples are, or can become, one. Actually, as Patricia Duncker points out, Coetzee has another character of restricted representation, a white lesbian.¹⁸ She also has no independent consciousness. She does have a lot of conversation with the protagonist, but, being traumatized, she is unable or unwilling to explain how she feels. This is not just a matter of fair shares, so to speak. If Coetzee were to assay the consciousness of these others, he would have to consider more carefully the claims these people might reasonably make upon each other and upon South Africa.

Homosexuality is shown as enhancing the opportunity for exploitation and humiliation in V. S. Naipaul’s novella, In a Free State. Bobby, who is white, works as some kind of civil servant in an independent East African country, in which the president and the military are in the process of overthrowing the more traditional rule of the king. Bobby does this work not because it allows him to lord it over black African people, but because it enables him to abase himself before them in ways that are actually patronizing and condescending, and calculated to shore up his fragile emotional stability. He had a nervous breakdown; “‘Africa saved my life.’”¹⁹ Bobby tells himself that he is recognizing the humanity of the African, but becomes crazily enraged when confronted with irrefutable indifference or hostility toward himself. He seeks to ingratiate himself with Africans by wearing what is called a native-style shirt; this annoys an army officer and he is severely beaten up.

Bobby acknowledges an effeminate side to his nature. For him Africa is empty spaces, long drives on open roads. “‘You want lift? You big boy, you no go school? No, no, you no frighten. Look, I give you shilling. You hold my hand. Look, my colour, your colour. I give you shilling buy schoolbooks. Buy books, learn read, get big job. When I born again I want your colour’” (109). The key moment is the color juxtaposition, the touching of the black and white skin. Unfortunately for Bobby it doesn’t always work. He chats up a South African in a hotel bar: “‘If I come into the world again I want to come with your colour.’ His voice was low … his fingers moved until they were over one of the Zulu’s…. Then, without moving his hand or changing his expression, the Zulu spat in Bobby’s face” (107; my elisions).

Although Naipaul dwells upon the inadequacies of African regimes, he appears to share the opinion of President Sam Nujoma of Namibia and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, that homosexuality is a corrupt European import. His main theme, in this offensive and tremendously written book, is that relations with Africans are impossible. When they are not threatening or actually brutal, they are ridiculous: “The frightened boy brought in the soup plate by plate, pressing his thumbs on the rims. He walked with a stoop, raising his knees high; his big feet, loosely hinged at the ankles, flapped up and down” (134). Above all, for Naipaul, these people are black; the narrative returns obsessively to their blackness. The only man more objectionable than the black African is the white man who takes him seriously, and no one but a pathetic, damaged queer is going to do that. Naipaul’s story shows, in effect, what happens when you allow the native to get the whip hand.

Angus Wilson takes third world peoples more seriously, though his novel As If by Magic is not free of suggestions that they may be amusing, irrational, mysterious, and dangerous. However, it does offer a significant challenge, from within a gay framework, to the complacency of empire. Hamo Langmuir, a famous plant geneticist, tall and clumsy, has such exacting fantasy requirements that he has driven away Leslie, his devoted partner, because at twenty-five he is too old and has to shave. Hamo has found a network of rent boys, but is unable to cope with any sexual relation that might become personal. His sexual opportunities are transformed when he is sent on a world tour to observe the success of “Magic,” the new rice which he has bred, and which is transforming the agro-economy of the developing world. He passes in a haze through Japan, Indonesia, and South Asia, becoming increasingly bold in pursuit of the Fairest Youth, and grossly disrespectful toward his courteous and kind hosts, whose folly consists merely of embeddedness in a social milieu in which there are manners, decencies, and ongoing expectations. “‘Mr Langford, we are here a small community. You have come among us without respect.’”²⁰

Above all, it is difficult for the boys whom Hamo has accosted to carry on as before in their communities; he imagines he can make it all right by writing checks. His remark, that if a Singhalese serving boy, Muthu, gets into trouble he will take him to England, leads the boy to run away from a family where he has been well treated. “‘What can you do with the boy in England? He is a good boy. But he is ignorant. What will he do there?’” his mistress, Mrs. Dissawardene asks (282). This is a pertinent question—we know that Hamo’s attraction to Muthu will last only while he is young. He catches fleeting glimpses of Muthu everywhere he goes (to him, one beautiful youth is much like another), and makes desperate attempts to find him. People die; the forces in play are entirely beyond Hamo’s control.

These interferences in local mores are continuous with the intrusion effected by Magic rice, which is so productive that small farms on poor land are no longer viable. Muthu, for instance, might have returned to his village, but their land is marginal and Magic means that they wouldn’t be able to feed him. A homophobic official accuses:

I suggest that instead of insulting your host by buggering his servants, you look for your leavings in the slums of the cities of Asia. Luckily your very valuable scientific rationalisation of our local agriculture has made sure that the bazaars and public places are filled with the scum overflowing from the waters of hopeless paddy fields. If anyone has such low tastes, they are always ready to oblige for the price of a bowl of rice. (176)

Hamo submits a report calling for social conditions to be taken into account in agrarian innovation, but his employers ignore it. I admire As If by Magic for the sharp light it throws upon metropolitan gay mores, from within a gay perspective that may still endorse the quest for the Fairest Youth and his potential to respond. Also, it illuminates the continuity between psychosexual and sociopolitical hierarchies: Hamo’s private quest is implicated in his professional practice.

On the opening page of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, Will Beckwith, the protagonist, admires a black maintenance worker on the Underground: “The black was looking at his loosely cupped hands: he was very aloof, composed, with an air of massive, scarcely conscious competence—I felt more than respect, a kind of tenderness for him.”²¹ There is a similar moment in the closing pages of the novel.

Will’s new boyfriend, we learn at once, is black, seventeen, and from Stratford East (Will is twenty-five). Will is besotted: “Oh, the ever-open softness of black lips; and the strange dryness of the knots of his pigtails, which crackled as I rolled them between my fingers, and seemed both dead and half-erect” (3). Apparently the enthusiasm is reciprocated: “Then he would give up and fall recklessly on top of me on the sofa, panting in my face, kissing me, full of clumsy humour and longing” (13). Will is in charge. The relationship takes place entirely on his territory, and he expresses his passion with playful spankings.

Will admits to his friend James that his world and Arthur’s are too far apart for a love relationship; “‘It must be just an infatuation’” (20). Nonetheless, he does think of himself as “in love” with Arthur—the more so because of his (alleged) limitations:

Even when he spoke, in his basic, unimaginative way, I felt almost sick with desire and compassion for him. Indeed, the fact that he had not mastered speech, that he laboured towards saying the simplest things, that his vocal expressions were prompted only by the strength of his feelings, unlike the camp, exploitative, ironical control of my own speech, made me want him more…. But in sex he lost his awkwardness…. It was a kind of gift for giving. (64; my elisions)

The dichotomy Will produces here is not ungenerous—his own mode of speech is not more attractive. Yet his is the language privileged in the book’s narration. An antiracist will surely wonder whether Will might not have found more various qualities in Arthur if he had not been so ready to stereotype him.

In fact, Arthur is not quite as dumb as Will likes to believe. He finds Will’s speech strange and funny: “Odd words seemed to amuse or offend him, and he gave urchin imitations of my speech. ‘Arse-hale,’ he would drawl. ‘Get orf my arse-hale’” (presumably we should be hearing the entire narration in this upper-class accent). Will is quite disconcerted by such role reversals: “Sometimes I laughed graciously too, and did even posher imitations of his mimicry, knowing no one was listening. Sometimes I caught him and gave him what he was asking for” (14). Will is unnerved until he has reasserted his mastery.

When Arthur becomes trapped in the flat by some obscure, drug-related gangsterism in his family, their incompatibility becomes overwhelming for Will. They fall into a fluctuation between hostility, sexual violence, and sentimentality: “Now it became a murky business, a coupling in which we both exploited each other, my role as protector mined by the morbid emotion of protectiveness. I saw him becoming more and more my slave and my toy, in a barely conscious abasement which excited me even as it pulled me down” (31). It is unclear whether this is to be seen as an inevitable, natural corruption, or the consequence of Arthur’s artificial confinement.

What, we may ponder, should Will and Arthur have been doing? They might have avoided each other, on the axiom that mixed-race couples are inevitably exploitative. They might each have retained their racial interest while looking out for someone of their own class and age, reasoning that taking on several hierarchies at once is too ambitious. They might have gone into therapy together, so that Will might learn to outgrow his domineering impulses and Arthur might receive assertiveness training. But would that have helped? Will positions Arthur as a simple and primitive counterpart because that is what turns him on. As James notes in his diary, “‘yet again he had picked on someone vastly poorer & dimmer than himself—younger too. I don’t think he’s ever made it with anyone with a degree’” (218). Is it wrong, or a mistake, to try to relate to someone of a different educational background? I like to think that they might have proceeded in something like the way they do in the novel, but with Will taking as much trouble to understand, engage, and please Arthur as Arthur is probably taking over him.

A partly comparable pattern is disclosed by Charles, who is eighty-three. His diaries of interwar life record an alternation between idealization of young black men and casual cottaging (sex in public toilets); the love of his life was a Sudanese boy, Taha, whom he brought back to London as his servant. Charles has regarded this as a noble commitment, but Will suggests that it is paternalistic, seeing adults as children (this is rich, coming from Will). Charles reasserts that there was in the colonial service “‘this absolute adoration of black people…. I’ve always had to be among them, you know, negroes’” (242; my elision). Whether Charles’s mode is preferable, personally, politically, and ethically, is hard to say. Anyway, it appears to have degenerated in modern conditions: he now uses his hold over his retinue of beneficiaries to involve them in pornographic movies.

Racial hierarchy is not just Will’s and Arthur’s thing. It is the outcome of historic imperial relations. Will sees Abdul, the chef, “abstractly sharpening his knife on the steel and gazing at me as if I were a meal” (42). Eventually, Abdul is to have Will across a chopping table in the kitchen, tenderized with hard slaps and lubricated with corn oil. This is the only time Will is the insertee; Abdul is Taha’s son; the empire fucks back. Again, Britain may retain the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, but imperial corruption is suggested by the exchange with Gabriel, a wealthy Argentinian, who is visiting London to buy pornography which he can’t get in his own, less decadent country.

David Alderson rejects the idea that The Swimming-Pool Library is “an attempt to lay bare the roots of present-day sexual projections in historically grounded power relations.”²² I agree that the novel cannot be enlisted for an anticolonial agenda; it does not sustain a coherent critique of imperial relations. Rather, as Alderson shows, it tends nostalgically to set an imperialist and preliberation past against a degraded present, now (at the time of narration) menaced additionally by AIDS. Nonetheless, the novel does disclose structural relations between imperialism and racism, in the formative mid-twentieth century and on into the present. Also, it exposes Will’s delusion that he can be free of history. His self-centered personal life is of a piece with his general discovery that he has been arrogant in supposing that he is free, autonomous, and without responsibility. Hollinghurst does not condemn imperialism, together with its interpersonal outgrowths; he explores the seductive and distasteful erotic opportunities for people living in its wake, and locates the sexual energies which they may still release.

What the protagonists find in As If by Magic and The Swimming-Pool Library is that they are less in control of their destinies than they had thought. This theme is to be expected when the decline of empire is at stake: western Europeans do not rule the world any more. It is also continuous with the argument of this book, that our psychic life is organized along the lines of the main hierarchies that determine our economic, social, and political lives at large. Hamo and Will make their personal choices, but they are structured by the imperial scenarios within which they operate. Hamo’s fantasies are those of the European intruder upon South Asia, from the eighteenth century to the sexual tourism of today. Will’s desires are continuous with those which Charles exercised in the Sudan.

For many lesbians and gay men of color, cross-racial relations such as I have been describing spell bad news. The endemic complications and hesitations emerge in a candid and courageous late-night television discussion among three lesbians of color and three gay men of color, Doing It with You Is Taboo (SOI for Channel 4, 1993). Some of the contributors are in or ready to contemplate relationships with whites, some not. Either way, two main alternative propositions emerge: (1) black/white couples are to be avoided because between such people race is bound to be important, and destructive; (2) a black/white couple is fine because, for the speaker and his or her partner at least, race is insignificant. A third proposition, that black/white difference might be both central and rewarding, is not entertained.

This pattern has occurred elsewhere in this book: difference is all right so long as it doesn’t make any difference. It appears again in the British compilation, Lesbians Talk: Making Black Waves (1993). Relationships with white women are vastly problematic because, with the best will in the world, hegemonic white racism is so insidious. Some of the women canvassed eschew them altogether. Yet such relations may be “healthy,” the editors say. One woman concurs: “I don’t think making love to a White woman is any different from making love to a Black woman. All my life in this country I’ve had four beautiful relationships. Three were with White women and the fourth was with a Black woman.” For another, conversely, “the issue of racism was always there. You cannot escape from racism.”²³ The tendency of my argument, I realize, has been to endorse any kind of sexual agenda that promises to work. However, at certain points the psychological and political risks may be too great; these troubled accounts of cross-race liaisons reveal an intensity that bespeaks not only decades of personal discrimination but the histories of peoples.

Fictional and autobiographical treatments rehearse the problems. In Steven Corbin’s novel Fragments That Remain, Skylar (black) and Evan (white) are probably breaking up, mainly because of continuous bickering about race. “I think Evan likes black people for all the wrong reasons,” Skylar observes.²⁴ So what reasons are these? Judging from Evan, they appear to be taking the opportunity to be patronizing and self-congratulatory about one’s liberalism, while maintaining a subdued but persistent level of racist sniping. Skylar declares, in anger, that Evan’s attraction to blacks is like “the master leering at the slave” (173–74).

Progress between the two men occurs when Evan sees that Skylar has a point: “‘I do love black people, their passion, their exoticism, their colorfulness, but maybe I don’t look beyond that’” (235). What would one see “beyond”? It might be the fullness of the individual, but Corbin encourages his reader to think rather of the lived realities of racial prejudice, at large and in the relationship. The main point, Corbin is perhaps saying, is not whether people’s sexual fantasies follow racial divisions, but that each person should give adequate recognition to the situation of the other. This means the white man attempting to get some distance from an almost inevitable white viewpoint.

That is surely possible at a rational level. But what about the underlying fantasies? For if, after all, racial difference is the basis of the attraction, that difference is manifest, in our societies, as inequality. Unfortunately, Corbin gives little indication of what Skylar and Evan fantasize about or do in bed, so it is hard to envisage how far and in what ways their interaction depends on hierarchy.²⁵ Corbin protects Skylar from the sissy-stigma by having him tell his brother “a million times, all gay men don’t get fucked. He’s said it so much, I believe he’s one of them” (260). In fact it is not easy to see what Skylar, who is unusually self-possessed about both gayness and race, gets from the relationship with Evan. While all the characters, including Skylar and Evan, make moral progress during the action of the novel, it remains unlikely, at the end, that Skylar and Evan can live together again.

In Larry Duplechan’s novel Eight Days a Week, Johnnie Ray Rousseau is a singer, taking after his mother, in the shadow of his handsome brother. He experiences himself as unattractive and takes Barbra Streisand as his “hero” (note that Streisand’s main film romances show Jews connecting with gentiles). Johnnie’s desire-to-be produces a corresponding desire-for: he fantasizes that he might attract a blond hulk—“a lover. A husband. Some impossible combination of Tab Hunter, Rick Nelson and Steve Reeves.”²⁶ At school Johnnie attaches himself to sporty white boys, abhorring his own “flat nose and (to me) overlarge lips” (25). A friend tells him that he has become “‘the all-too-willing victim of America’s white-supremacist, master-race plantation mentality.’” Whatever the reason, Johnnie replies, he still likes blonds (28).

He seems to have found what he wants in Keith Keller. Johnnie’s adulation of whites tends to place him in the “sissy” role, but he takes up bodybuilding and is delighted when Keith likes to be fucked in turn. It transpires nonetheless that Keith really wants Johnnie in the role of housewife. He starts calling Johnnie “K. T.,” because he looks like Tutankhamen (“King Tut,” but also “Katie,” I think; 186). Keith is unable to cope with Johnnie’s musician’s lifestyle, and his possessiveness breaks up the relationship. However, Keith is not altogether in the wrong. Johnnie admits that his response to the standard message in the contact ads—“‘No fats, fems or blacks, please’”—coming on top of his own initial lack of confidence, is to welcome, flirtatiously, every available instance of white sexual interest in him; he regards it as a triumph over the prevailing racist disconfirmation. “The prettier, the blonder, the more Aryan the man, the bigger (if not more permanent) the sense of victory at the sight of the man’s fair head bobbing between my thighs. I suppose I truly am, as Snookie often tells me, a sick, sick woman” (197–98). Even at the moment of his proclaimed victory Johnnie types himself, self-deprecatingly, as female: race and gender line up in a classic conflation of subordinate roles. He cannot extract himself from disconfirmation and stigma while he stays within the hierarchical framework. Nonetheless, Johnnie moves on to a valuable relationship with another white man, so it appears that cross-racial affairs are not doomed.²⁷

If feelings of racial inferiority and superiority may disturb cross-racial liaisons, they may also interfere with black-on-black relations. Audre Lorde’s inspirational commitment to black women, as she presents it in Zami, does not occur spontaneously. Among school friends she “never mentioned how enticing and frightening I found their strange blonde- and red- and chestnut-colored secrets that peeked out from beneath their pulled-up half-slips.”²⁸ Lorde’s early affairs are with white women. Even in Mexico, where she feels suddenly at home, her main relationship is with a white woman. “‘How beautiful and brown you are,’” Eudora says (144). Back in New York in the 1950s, there appears to be little choice; the only organized scene is white. “It seemed that loving women was something that other Black women just didn’t do” (155). The few that did found themselves “sleeping with the same white women. We recognized ourselves as exotic sister-outsiders who might gain little from banding together” (153). “[W]e seldom looked into each other’s Black eyes lest we see our own aloneness and our own blunted power mirrored in the pursuit of darkness” (197–98). Lorde and her friends colluded in this scene, though they resented the racist admission policies of the bars, because it was the only one they could find. Muriel, her lover, admired by Lorde for her “paleness” (159), believed that lesbians were all equal in their outsiderhood: “‘We’re all niggers,’ she used to say, and I hated to hear her say it” (177).

Lorde makes progress as a lesbian and a black woman through a culminating affair with Afrekete (Kitty): “her chocolate skin and deep, sculptured mouth reminded me of a Benin bronze” (214). She evokes a Caribbean island in Harlem:

And I remember Afrekete, who came out of a dream to me always being hard and real as the fire hairs along the underedge of my navel. She brought me live things from the bush, and from her farm set out in cocoyams and cassava—those magical fruit which Kitty bought in the West Indian markets along Lenox Avenue in the 140s or in the Puerto Rican bodegas within the bustling market over on Park Avenue. (218; Lorde’s emphasis)

This is both impressive and limiting. Some black women may find such determined cultivation of the exotic a high price for a color-affirmative relationship. In the early 1970s, Lorde “began to live together permanently” with her daughter, her son, and her white lover, Frances.²⁹

Lorde’s achievement is to write positively of black-on-black lovers without suppressing the complications. She enlists her mother as an honorary dyke, on the ground that she was a “powerful woman” (6), but is this enough? She seems a monstrous abuser to me. Despite Lorde’s famous skepticism about dismantling the house with the master’s tools, the two projects she declares at the start of Zami—to be both male and female, and to replace the mother-father-child triad with grandmother-mother-daughter—aspire to co-opt the power system of the heterosexual family. Anna Wilson finds here “a crucial lack of alternative conceptualisations through which to imagine community.”³⁰ In fact, Katie King notes, despite her lack of comment on butch/femme roles, Lorde characteristically assumes the dominant and protective role of a “top.”³¹ In her relationship with Muriel she adds fifteen years to her age in order to secure this role (Zami, 160, 165).

when my white lover sees my Black face, does she read in it that I am the mythological, strong Black woman who is more stick than flesh? Am I the dark exotic? Am I the testimony to herself and others that she is not racist, but quite liberal? Does she see the face of her family’s maid who was paid to love her and to take care of her because mother and father were too busy to be bothered?³²

My argument is that we have to entertain the prospect that the answer to at least some of these questions is Yes; that such residues are inevitable; and that they may not always be unfortunate. Jackie Goldsby tells how she and her partner have carefully examined their motives to make sure that neither of them is “succumbing to internalized racism. We say this, even to ourselves, even though we know differently: where, in the context of lesbian political discourse on race, can we acknowledge that our knowingly crossing boundaries of race and class is part of our desire for each other?”³³

For many African American gay men, the most significant pressures come from their own black communities. William G. Hawkeswood reports that gay black men in Harlem generally live there “because they prefer black men as friends and lovers and because they prefer to live closer to family and other relatives. Thus they avoid prolonged contact with whites,” and rarely experience racism. They enjoy a generally supportive environment, despite occasional instances of verbal abuse, mostly from youths. “Generally they feel that gays are more tolerated and better accepted in Harlem than they are in mainstream America,” partly because there are more pressing issues (poverty, unemployment, poor education, teenage pregnancies, drugs, AIDS).³⁴ This may be true. However, many of the contributors to major anthologies of African American gay experience—In the Life, edited by Joseph Beam, and Brother to Brother, edited by Essex Hemphill—record anguish, alienation, and damage in their childhood and youth, as they suffered catcalls of sissy and faggot from within the black community.³⁵ Indeed, they reveal a culture engrossed with the precariousness of male gendering. Reginald T. Jackson remarks that the taunt, “faggot,” preceded any knowledge of homosexuality: had he known that this might involve “the love of a man. A black man,” then he would gladly have endured the name-calling.³⁶ In the terms broached earlier in this book, gender identification precedes object-choice; the stigma attaches to effeminacy.

Marlon Riggs in his film Tongues Untied (1989), written around Riggs’s poem of the same name, expounds a personal negotiation of sexuality and racial difference. Riggs experienced oppression in his own community as a sissy, more immediately than oppression as a black man. The solution was part of the problem:

A whiteboy came to my rescue.

Beckoned with gray/green eyes, a soft Tennessee drawl.

Seduced me out of my adolescent silence.

I learned the touch and taste of snow.

Cruising whiteboys, I played out

adolescent dreams deferred.

Patterns of black upon white upon black upon white

mesmerized me. I focused hard, concentrated deep.³⁷

Riggs was playing out racial relations as sexual relations. But it dawned upon him that this was not making him the person he sought to be: in the Castro he was “an invisible man”; the proffered black images were racist stereotypes. “I was a nigga, still.” So he “went in search of something better,” he says, listening to “Rhythms of blood, culture, / history, and race”: black men must love one other (203–204). A concluding section of the film links civil rights marches with a black gay demonstration. The slogan on a banner is from an essay by Joseph Beam: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act of the eighties.”³⁸

However, Riggs admits, the “absence of black images” occurred not only in the books, posters, and films dominated by white people, but in his “own fantasies” (Tongues Untied, 202–203). The film became controversial within black and gay communities when commentators noted that Riggs’s personal life appeared to contradict his argument: his own partner was white.³⁹ B. Ruby Rich objects: “In a film full of the courage of coming out of the closet on the subject of queerness, it looked as though Riggs had stayed in the closet on the subject of race (as object of affection, not identity).”⁴⁰ In the credits Jack Vincent, the controversial partner, is thanked for his loving support; far less is at stake for the white man—he can afford to be sympathetic.

Questions have been raised also about the gendering of gay men in Tongues Untied. Goldsby remarks that drag queens are depicted as pathetic, lonely figures, to be displaced by more macho images.⁴¹ Evidently, Riggs is under pressure from “Afrocentric” commentators who despise effeminacy:

Because of my sexuality, I cannot be black. A strong, proud, “Afrocentric” black man is resolutely heterosexual, not even bisexual. Hence I remain a Negro. My sexual difference is considered of no value; indeed, it is a testament to weakness, passivity, the absence of real guts—balls. Hence I remain a sissy, punk, faggot. I cannot be a black gay man because by the tenets of black macho, black gay man is a triple negation. I am consigned, by these tenets, to remain a Negro faggot.⁴²

The energy in this passage derives perhaps from an unstable combination of resistance to the way black manhood has been defined, and resentment at exclusion from that manhood. Is it that Riggs wants Afrocentrism to incorporate the sissy, or that he objects to being labeled a sissy? Gay-oriented commentators insist that emphasizing manliness is not the answer. Kobena Mercer calls it “another turn of the screw of oppression … when black men subjectively internalise and incorporate aspects of the dominant definitions of masculinity in order to contest the conditions of dependency and powerlessness which racism and racial oppression enforce.”⁴³ Phillip Brian Harper, in comparable vein, rejects the “imagined solution”: “a proper affirmation of black male authority.”⁴⁴

Finally I note that Riggs’s appeal to sameness as the resolution of the dilemmas of racism converges upon a leading theme of this book. He has rediscovered and reaffirmed, in his case for black men loving black men, not a distinctive African American way of relating, but a purer, sharper version of the egalitarian ideology, which asserts that the most productive relations will be founded in sameness. The Castro, Riggs sees, proclaims the community of gayness and the unity of gay experience, while actually reinscribing the racist assumptions of American society generally; the task proposed in the film, then, is to make the egalitarian ideology succeed among black men. Yet Riggs’s work is more important for the struggle it exposes, than for the watchword with which it ends.

As I have said, S/M is best regarded, not as a speciality, but as continuous with the hierarchies that we all experience. Invocation of cross-racial masters and slaves does, however, raise the odds. In “Beneath the Veneer,” in a recent collection of gay African American writing, Kheven L. LaGrone records his shock upon seeing at a party a white man leading a black man by a leash. Have black people forgotten the role of white supremacists in history? LaGrone demands.⁴⁵ No they haven’t: that is what the leash is about.

Isaac Julien has made diverse approaches to these topics. His film Looking for Langston (1988) suggests that sexual relations between blacks and whites were regarded quite positively in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. This interpretation has been supported by Kevin J. Mumford, who finds that there was “a kind of affinity between homosexuals, black/white sex districts, and African-American culture more generally.”⁴⁶ In a poem from around the same time as Looking for Langston, “Gary’s Tale,” Julien observes that race has infiltrated the psyche and infects every relationship:

Because the last fight, the last battle, territory, will be with one’s self, the most important terrain, the psyche.

The mind will be the last neo-colonialised space to be decolonialised, this I know because I have been there, backwards and forwards.⁴⁷

For Julien, this is not a reason to avoid cross-racial contact, or to give up hopes of positive change. In Young Soul Rebels (1991), the killer is a white boy who can’t handle his attraction to black males. However, the film ends in utopian style, with a sexual liaison between Caz (black male) and Billibud (white male), another between Chris (black male) and Tracy (black female), a main-man comradeship between Caz and Chris, a special friendship between Tracy and Jill (white female), and everybody learning to funk.

Julien’s short film The Attendant (1991) is set in an art gallery. The Attendant (Thomas Baptiste) is black; a visitor is white and wearing leather gear; they are drawn to each other. The gallery closes; the Attendant reimagines the paintings, replacing the original figures with men such as himself and the visitor, wearing contemporary leather gear. He focuses especially on an admired nineteenth-century painting by F. A. Biard, “Scene on the African Coast,” showing episodes in the slave trade.⁴⁸ Two of the paintings become erotic cartoons by Tom of Finland. Other tableaux are composed of camp go-go boys. The Attendant whips the visitor. The Attendant sings in a theater—“Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Dido was abandoned on an African coast by an imperial visitor).

Julien has been criticized for depicting a black man with his psyche organized around imagery of historic humiliation. He has replied that images cannot be trapped in one meaning: the implements of slavery have been transformed into “sexualised, stylized fetish clothing for the queer body. The imperialist slave iconography is appropriated and repositioned.” Gay subculture, including black gay subculture, makes its own use of the imagery. Furthermore, Julien adds, there are diverse ways of reading the film: it might be a parody, or transgressive; or it might be “moralistically read into the cheap sociology of a pathological, black/self-hating discourse.”⁴⁹ The sickness resides in puritanical rejection, not in gay sex.

The problem with Julien’s argument is that he wants to assert an open plurality of readings while disallowing some readings. He is on stronger ground when he asserts that morbidity resides with those who would deny “the psychic reality of black/white desire.” These desires exist, and they may be more appealing than the restricted and restricting vision of puritans. “The out black snow queen draws attention to the fact of black desire for the white subject and contests pathological racial identities, the products of Afrocentric readings,” Julien adds (125). He regrets what he regards as Riggs’s retreat into Afrocentrism.

However, Riggs in fact bears witness on both sides of the argument. We may perhaps envisage a dynamic process; one in which Afrocentrism might be an appropriate stage on the route to self-affirmation, while investment in cross-racial imagery might be productive of political insights, but not destructive of the relations that promote them. The goal might be a point, not where one or the other is the right answer, but where they can inform each other. Of course, as we have seen in Corbin’s Fragments That Remain and in Duplechan’s Eight Days a Week, this depends as much on the white partner as the black. However, it is likely to be the latter who places himself most at risk.

These issues echo powerfully in the journals of Gary Fisher, published at the instigation of Eve Sedgwick after his death in 1994. Fisher tells of his fantasies and his encounters, and of the link between them and race relations in the United States. He writes a letter to a sexual partner, Master Park (Slavery Defended is a classic collection of “Views of the Old South”): “Here’s that letter you wanted. I’m laying here sideways in the bed with Slavery Defended opened to about midway, sampling the arguments and thinking about how good it felt to serve. Not that it matters, but I enjoyed Thursday immensely, particularly the sleaze and humiliation of some of it” (extended pain he likes less). “The racial humiliation is a huge turn-on. I enjoy being your nigger, your property and worshipping not just you, but your whiteness.”⁵⁰

This is not a generalized masochism, nor just an individual thrill; it is about race, slavery, history, and skin color. In an earlier journal entry Fisher asks himself:

Have I tried to oppress myself—as a black man and as a (passive) homosexual man—purely for the pleasure of it, or does that oppression go right to the point of my perceived weaknesses[?] … Can I divorce sexuality from power in the real world or do I want to[?] … I want to, in effect, give in to a system that wants to (has to) oppress me. (187; my question marks and elisions)

Is his submission to whiteness a personal pleasure, he asks, or does it bespeak a personal weakness? Is it not, rather, systemic?—the operations of real-world ideology in the psyche? Fisher is playing the part that is written for him in the racial script of the United States. Again: “Blackness is a state of frustration. There’s no way out of this racial depression (I don’t feel the frustration personally, but as part of a people I know that I’m being fucked, abused)” (199). Fisher experiences humiliating scenarios not just personally, but as the structural, racial exploitation which he knows to be their origin. In a manner of speaking, therefore, the fantasy is not him: “What is this fantasy that cuts across all of me, racial, intellectual, moral, spiritual, sexual …?” (213; Fisher’s hesitation).

As Sedgwick remarks in her Afterword to Gary in Your Pocket, it has seemed necessary in our time to handle S/M as a stigmatized minority practice, emphasizing the dislinkages between sexual fantasy and activity, on the one hand, and “the social realities of power and violence” on the other.⁵¹ We are only playing, S/Mers are expected to say, our games are entirely separate from real-world violence. A theme of this book is that such a dislinkage is impossible to maintain and ultimately misleading. Yet, as elsewhere, we reach a point at which a violent disjunction becomes so inflammatory that we have to revert to the domains of ethical and political responsibility. Fisher is troubled: “Crandall calls me his nigger. He’s much rougher with me than Ed and talks so genuinely I wonder if he doesn’t believe what he’s saying to me. It disturbs me to write what he says about carving ‘White Power’ into my flesh” (217–18). In fact it is a question, how far abuse is what Fisher wants: “I love snuggling up to him. We’re on our sides. He has one arm beneath me and another round me. It’s so warm…. I feel so safe next to him” (157; my elision). Again: “I want a loving master/daddy” (217). The desire for love and protection from a version of the abuser seems the key to this; the risk—the thrill—is in placing your trust in a person who might damage you. “So, particularly (especially or primarily) a white man, when he holds and protects me from others like him, brings me an excitement which strangely and uniquely parallels that which he causes me when he threatens or frightens me” (237).

This scenario seems to correlate with a persistent trope in black and white American gay writing: the violent and abusive father who gains excitement from punishing his son. Everyone he knows suffered some element of abuse in childhood, David Wojnarowicz says. He describes how his own father systematically beat all his family, and ordered David to play with his penis. He derives from this an abiding sexual preference: “I have always been attracted to dangerous men, men whose gestures intimated the possibilities of violence, and I have always seduced them into states of gentle grace with my hands and lips.”⁵² Rechy’s narrator reports similarly in City of Night.⁵³ Tom in Monette’s Halfway Home was tormented by his father and his brother, Brian, at the same time as being sexually drawn to the latter. This childhood experience has inhibited his love life, Tom believes: “I admit I have mixed them up, Brian and the man I never had.” Now, as he makes a new relationship with Gray, a calm, caring, older man, he revises his model of manliness: “This is what a brother is.”⁵⁴ The eponymous heroes in Tim and Pete both had hostile fathers; Joey’s father was “a monster.”⁵⁵ Gary Fisher reports a violent and abusive father. If his preferred mode of sexual expression mimics the relationship with his father, it also repudiates it. “The ultimate slap was to let it loose that I’d let some other man, not my dad, have me.”⁵⁶ He does “finally meet a white man not twisted by the color thing,” but their prospects are spoiled when Fisher declares his HIV status (Gary in Your Pocket, 245–46).

I have tried elsewhere to distinguish phobic and structural racism. For only some individuals is racism phobic; for the rest of us, it gets structured into the language, into the prevailing stories through which the society seeks to understand itself. It becomes “common sense.”⁵⁷ Structural racism is certainly not innocent; it affords a sympathetic milieu into which phobic racism may expand, and in some cases the two virtually merge. However, in other circumstances it is at least ameliorable: when pointed out it may be worked upon and changed.

Phobic racism, on the other hand, seeks to secure not just the economic, political, and general psychic well-being of the white man; the racial other is invoked as a way of handling profound personal inadequacy. The phobic racist cannot leave the topic—he or she looks for people of other races in order to exercise phobic feelings. Probably there is a more or less permanent phobic minority, the recruiting ground for fascist movements. At a certain point, enthrallment becomes obsessive, grotesque, violent, intolerable. I may seem in danger here of exonerating the system, by making it responsible for habitual structures, while phobic intensity is ascribed to individuals. However, it seems to me that phobia is usually dysfunctional, not actually sustaining the system. Its irrationalism is too unpredictable, too loose, too dangerous.

Homophobia, similarly, is a term that should not be used casually, for general anxiety and prejudice. It is best reserved for implacable, hostile fascination. Of course, racial and sexual phobias may occur together. The serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was so drawn to his male victims, nearly all of whom were black or Asian, that he ate parts of their bodies.⁵⁸ This certainly attests to a consuming desire-for; we might regard it as a monstrous parody of desire-to-be (the ingested person).

The gay tradition includes powerful and equivocal evocations of phobia. In Tennessee Williams’ story, “Desire and the Black Masseur,” Anthony Burns, a nebulous and ineffective clerk (white) has been waiting, obscurely, for something to swallow him up. He finds it in the rough treatment of a black masseur (who isn’t given a name).

The knowledge grew quickly between them of what Burns wanted, that he was in search of atonement, and the black masseur was the natural instrument of it. He hated white-skinned bodies because they abused his pride. He loved to have their white skin prone beneath him, to bring his fist or the palm of his hand down on its passive surface. He had barely been able to hold this love in restraint, to control the wish that he felt to pound more fiercely and use the full of his power. But now at long last the suitable person had entered his orbit of passion. In the white-collar clerk he had located all that he longed for.⁵⁹

This might be a mutually rewarding project—“The giant loved Burns, and Burns adored the giant” (221)—but the violence of the massage increases. While a preacher across the street invokes the atonement of Jesus, the masseur devours the body of Burns; he moves to another town and new customers.

All this, we are told, illustrates something about “the earth’s whole population” as it “twisted and writhed beneath the manipulation of night’s black fingers and the white ones of day” (223). The referent seems to be both color and humanity; guilt at historic racial exploitation is made to coincide with the Christian notion that everyone needs atonement. David Bergman emphasizes the racial implications: “Like Melville, Williams believes that an egalitarian relation between so-called civilized men and their primitive brothers can be achieved only through an act of cannibalism in which the civilized will be consumed.”⁶⁰ Unfortunately, this is at the expense of reconfirming the black primitive. “‘What do you think this is? A jungle?’” the masseur’s boss demands, not altogether unreasonably, when Burns’s leg is fractured (221).

Getting eaten is the fate also of Sebastian in Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer (1958, filmed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1959), where the agon of homosexuality again seems to coalesce with the supposed human condition. In a mythic Latin country, Sebastian is consumed by the native boys whom he has courted—“a flock of featherless little black sparrows,” with gobbling birds on the Galapagos Islands, that prey upon the newly hatched turtles as they try to reach the sea, making “the sky almost as black as the beach.”⁶¹ How far Williams is in control of this scenario is in my view a question. It seems to me that he is making a melodramatic projection of queer guilt onto the universe, and positioning black males as angels of death.

James Robert Baker’s novel Testosterone is, like Tim and Pete, a quest which takes the reader back and forth on the L.A. freeways. Whereas Tim and Pete mean well, Dean’s mission is partly to get back together with Pablo Ortega so that they can share an ideal future—but mainly to kill him. This is because Pablo abruptly terminated their relationship. Dean doesn’t consider whether he might have turned Pablo off in some way (Dean emerges as very strange), but interprets Pablo as an emotional serial killer. He tracks down Pablo’s other lovers and finds ample confirmation of his malevolence. How much of this is true the reader cannot tell, since we have only Dean’s word for it and he is evidently obsessive. He believes Pablo burned his house down, and took his dog for medical experiments or black magic. Anne, who says she had an affair with Pablo, claims he was a notorious doctor who tortured political prisoners in Chile in 1987, and Dean believes this, although Pablo would have been about twenty at the time. Anne retracts this story, but Dean goes on believing it. Then he credits another story, that Pablo was part of a notorious drug gang in Mexico, also in 1987. He becomes out of control and violent with people who frustrate him in any way. He attacks a man who looks rather like Pablo (he’s not wearing his glasses). With increasing abandon, he imagines what Pablo might be saying or thinking.

What gradually becomes apparent is that Dean is preoccupied with Pablo’s Latino race. Initially he reassures his friends that Pablo is not stereotypical: “He’s Latino, but he doesn’t have an accent (like your typical dumb beaner).”⁶² Indeed, the stereotypes are reversed: Pablo is cool and dispassionate, Dean is spontaneous, expressive. This becomes an accusation: “I think his brown skin fooled me at first, so I didn’t realize how much he was really like my father” (16). A sense of Dean as phobic develops when he laments the old days, when Southern California was a white boy’s utopia, before “the killers of color shot you in the head and took your T-bird away.” He has been noting contact ads in which Latinos offer to mistreat white boys, whereas the other way around would not be allowed because of “PC.” “But I’ve made an effort through all this not to get racist. And I haven’t. I really don’t think I have” (51–52). This is a love/hate thing: Pablo’s “skin was really amazing. So smooth and warm” (58); Dean imagines himself having a “faithful, young, smooth, brown-skinned fellow lifeguard/slave” (28).

The idea that Pablo has killed Dean’s dog, either for scientific experiment or for Palo Mayombe black-magic rituals, depends on superstitious, racist notions of what Latino people are like: “Latino’s do have this different feeling about cruelty to animals. I know that’s a blanket statement…. Call me a racist if you want to, but it fucking happens. That’s why it’s taking a great effort on my part not to think all Latinos are sick” (94; my elision). Pablo becomes the dog: “He’s like a mad cornered South American dog” (84). Dean believes a hairdresser who says that killing Pablo would not be enough to remove his curse; he takes the fact that the Sam Peckinpah horror movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is showing on TV as a sign that he must behead Pablo. He steals a machete and an ice chest to store the head. It is Dean, the white man from a Presbyterian background, who turns out to be the superstitious killer. The last sentence of the book shows Dean fixed in his obsession: “The smooth warmth of his brown skin” (200).

Eve Sedgwick put the concept of shame into gay circulation in 1993, in an article heading up the new journal GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly). Her title, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” announced a recognition of Judith Butler’s work (performativity had been Butler’s key contribution at that date), while moving, via James, toward a more inward, literary, intimate, and intense register. Sedgwick presents shaming as a condition of queer sexuality, and as constitutive of queer identity. Butler, in response, acknowledged an element of shame in performing queerness, while drawing the argument into collective and practical aspects of identity management and activism.⁶³

I had not seen much potential for the development of shame; as Sedgwick remarks, it seems negative to dwell on the terms of our stigma. Then I noticed a line in Tennessee Williams’ play, Sweet Bird of Youth, and its quotation in Neil Bartlett’s novel, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall. The Princess (an aging movie star) has been fencing verbally with Chance (a still-youthful hustler). In the last line of the scene she appeals to him: “Now get a little sweet music on the radio and come here to me and make me almost believe that we’re a pair of young lovers without any shame.”⁶⁴ Good lovemaking retrieves youth and confers emancipation from shame—almost. As I conclude this chapter on race—the most sensitive, threatening, and exciting hierarchy—it seems to me that, while shame is indeed loaded upon us by our societies, that does not altogether account for the cultural energy that attends it. In a parallel movement (for social structures, once more, are continuous with psychic structures) we generate shame among ourselves.

As I have said, people on the downside of the binary model are under the greater pressure. They put more at risk. Yet to exercise dominance also is to expose oneself; even the relatively powerful place themselves in jeopardy—of rejection, humiliation, and the sudden inundation of unwelcome self-knowledge. Shame, I suggest, derives from awareness of exploitation—both for the boy who turns over, and for the man who takes advantage of his willingness. It is a product of the hierarchies I have been discussing; it is integral with sexual passion, therefore; it is sexy. If this view is correct, the shame of exploiting and being exploited will be hard to exclude or evade. Maybe there are magical remedies—youth and beauty, according to Williams and Bartlett. And something for the older and less beautiful person to contribute—perhaps strength, accomplishment, style, generosity, validation, trust.