Steven W. Thrasher
In journalism and academia alike, I’ve tried to be a queer hustler: a code-switching secret agent who uses discursive hustling to furtively ferry knowledge between two worlds.
Since 2014, I have shuttled back and forth between writing stories for the Guardian and peer-reviewed articles for academic journals, and I’m probably the first person admitted to PhD programs with a writing submission first published by Gawker (and writing a dissertation that began as a BuzzFeed story).
But in journalism and academia alike, over these past few years I have tried to imagine my readers as queer people of color. I write to them as such for three reasons. First, readers are assumed by most academic journals and mainstream publications I’ve written for to be white, straight, male, and cisgender; this misconception is imagined as immutable in both the present and the future (while neither is true). Second, imagining myself writing for white and/or straight readers would cast me in the role of the “native informant” (Spivak 1999), writing about communities of color for the white gaze, which is a dynamic I refuse to engage. Finally, even though there are white readers in my audiences, I think they will benefit from being written to as if they are queer people of color. Queer people of color have long had to adapt to reading work not written for us, which has forced us to develop creative and often renegade reading practices. White straight readers, long denied this challenging extra workload, can benefit from doing extra levels of interpretation and cultivating what Eve Sedgwick called “paranoid and reparative critical practices” of reading (2003, 128). (Similarly, while Moonlight was made in an all-Black world for queer people not used to seeing themselves on film, white viewers got to grapple with how to appreciate the 2016 Oscar winner for best picture when no one looked like them.)
But while I’ve been imagining my readers as queer people of color for years, and while I’ve tried to consciously understand myself as a queer writer of color for even longer than that, I’ve only more recently realized that creating work with both of those things in mind is contingent upon a specific technique. This technique, long unnamed to myself, must be deployed from the moment I begin conceiving of a story. I call it queer of color interviewing.
Although much of my initial training as an interviewer happened by going to film school at the Tisch School of the Arts, crewing on HBO’s film of The Laramie Project, and working for NPR’s StoryCorps project, those experiences on other people’s projects trained me to conduct interviews (with subjects of all races and sexualities) with a straight, white audience in mind. The kinds of questions asked, the location of that questioning, the time constraints of the interviews, the modes of distribution: all of these factors framed the work with a white audience in mind. This imbued the work with whiteness (Lipsitz 1998) and heteronormativity (Warner 1993), even when the subjects being interviewed were Black and/or queer.
It took some years to decolonize my mind such that, as I have produced my own work, I have developed ways to conduct queer of color interviews, which shape my stories from their conception to their completion. Using what Roderick Ferguson coined as queer of color critique or queer of color theory—the process of centering the experiences of queer people of color (Ferguson, 2003)—this essay will explore methods for creating queer of color interviews. It will also provide an approach for a discursive hustle, not from queer communities of color to white eyeballs but in the dance between popular journalism into academia. To do this, I will present two case studies for how I’ve created queer of color interviews: in my reporting on the Michael “Tiger Mandingo” Johnson HIV criminalization case in Missouri for BuzzFeed (conducted from 2014 to 2018), and in my reporting from Orlando, Florida, on the shootings at the Pulse nightclub (conducted in 2016). I will end with a section on how queer of color interviews shade not just the creation of the journalism stories I write but pave the way for this discursive hustling between journalism and academia.
In February of 2014, Mark Schoofs, the new investigations editor at BuzzFeed, met me for dinner to discuss a story he had in mind that he thought I would “work on for a long time.” He thought I should write about the “Tiger Mandingo” HIV story in Missouri, which I had barely heard of at the time. Over the next four years, I would write a dozen stories on the case, including two investigative stories of approximately 7,500 words each: “How College Wrestling Star ‘Tiger Mandingo’ Became an HIV Scapegoat” (2014) and “A Black Body on Trial: The HIV Conviction of ‘Tiger Mandingo’” (2015). It has also become the basis for my doctoral research on race, HIV criminalization, gay politics, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
But when my editor initially approached me in beginning of 2014, little was known publicly about “Tiger Mandingo,” which is an online screen name of a young man named Michael Johnson. In October of 2013, Johnson was charged with “knowingly” exposing at least six sexual partners to HIV and with “infecting” two of them with the virus. There had been salacious, poorly written stories about this “monster” when he was arrested. They amounted to little more, however, than recycling the prosecution’s press release and whipping up hysteria around well-worn “Mandingo” tropes about predatory Black male sexuality.
Schoofs wanted me to do to what no one else had done: go to Missouri, find Johnson’s friends and sexual partners, get into the jail where Johnson was being held—and interview all of them.
Pulling this off would mean refuting many ways the story had been lazily and erroneously reported thus far. No journalist had interviewed the accused or any of the accusers, employing the unethical practice (increasingly common, particularly as journalism budgets are slashed) of relying primarily upon prosecutor’s talking points to source a story. This practice undermines the ability of accused people to maintain that they are innocent until proven guilty. Ironically, refuting this assumption makes it an increasingly queer practice to adhere to the legal norm of habeas corpus and imagining people accused of crimes as legally innocent until they are convicted.
Primarily, though, finding the “Tiger Mandingo” story meant that I would have to use a number of queer of color techniques for my reporting, culminating in creating a queer of color interview, if I could get it, with Johnson himself.
First, I had to think about myself as a queer of color reporter who was willing to imagine Johnson as legally innocent up to the time he might (or might not) be convicted. I also had to be willing to listen to anyone who would tell me about interactions with him. This meant I had to refute the idea that “neutral” or “objective” reporters were white, straight, cisgender, HIV negative—or that “objective” reporters existed at all. I had to confront myself as a mixed-race Black, queer, HIV-negative writer from New York and wrestle with that. I had to work with how I was coming into Missouri from the afar (which had drawbacks and benefits) and work with myself subjectively. (I also had to acknowledge that white, straight reporters seldom have to reckon with themselves so honestly.)
Then, I had to figure out where I would find the people I needed to interview. As Johnson was a student wrestler, I found the names and email addresses of his teammates easily enough, and I emailed every single one of them (and messaged them on Facebook). This resulted in some gem quotes, including from the player I asked about showering with a gay teammate. He told me that Johnson had “never showered with us—and he was the only Black guy on the team, so if he’d showered, everyone would have noticed!” This revealed the multiply formed anxiety Johnson’s teammates had about his sexuality and race—even before his positive HIV status was known. I also reached out to people who had commented on Johnson’s many public social media accounts. Though these were standard investigative digital reporting moves, they were made in the service of my nascent theory of queer of color interviewing. That methodology crystallized into explicitly queer of color thinking when I realized I needed to use or create accounts for every queer hookup app that I knew Michael had used (Grindr, Scruff, and the more Black-oriented Jack’d), as well hookup websites like Adam4Adam, Manhunt, and BarebackRT, the last a site explicitly for “bug chasers” and people who have sex without condoms.
I had a strong suspicion that “Tiger Mandingo” was probably being charged so harshly because he had had sex with white men. Though my hunch was ultimately proven right (four of the six accusers were white, as was the first accuser to come forward and the one who would drive the case, Dylan King Lemons), I wouldn’t know this for more than a year after I began my investigation, until Johnson’s trial.
So how was I to find people on websites and apps who may have known him?
One way was by finding websites that advertised interracial sex parties in St. Louis. But also, with all the apps and websites I visited, I searched out users who were seeking “BBC,” “Big Black Cock,” and “Mandingo” in their handles and advertisements. There were many people seeking BBC—especially on the campus of the small, nearly all-white, Christian-affiliated college Johnson had attended—but this helped me to narrow down who I approached to a manageable number.
I then approached people under the ethical terms of journalism with immediate disclosure. There was no “catfishing” (Saeedi 2012). I would begin every interaction by writing something like, “Hi, my name is Steven. I live in New York and am doing a piece for BuzzFeed about this ‘Tiger Mandingo’ story. I’m trying to find people who knew him or hooked up with him. If you did, or know someone who did, would you be willing to talk? Happy to protect the identity of my sources—thanks.” Sometimes I would provide contact information for my editors and links to my work, so they could know something about me and ask my colleagues about my trustworthiness. Most people didn’t respond but many did, even a few who had met Michael, slept with him, or could connect me to someone who had. And some people chatted with me in a way that was deeply informative about what life was like for queer people of color in Missouri, which provided excellent background context for my reporting.
While my practice of identifying myself and not “lurking” could be used by any journalist, there is a practice known as “Grindr baiting” (Nichols 2015), and I think straight reporters are more likely to use it. Grindr baiting was perhaps most famously utilized by the white, straight Daily Beast writer Nico Hines to out an athlete at the Rio Olympics (Rodriguez 2016). Grindr does make it easy to see where there are gay people anywhere, and many people who use the app post photos that are ostensibly public; but, as a queer person of color, I am used to being surveilled. I don’t want my sources who are mostly private people to ever feel that they are under surveillance or that they have to speak to me lest they will be outed. (However, I will vigorously confront and track down via social media public officials who get taxpayer money to get them on the record, but that’s a very different setting.)
Finding these sources meant putting myself in Michael Johnson’s head and hanging out digitally where he would hang out. A straight person wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) necessarily be hanging in the digital spaces I was occupying. They would not be likely to know enough about barebacking to check out a bareback website. And while a white and/or straight reporter wouldn’t be likely to know enough about Mandingoism (du Cille 1997, 299) as a theoretical concept, interracial pornography is very popular in the United States, and they might know enough to search terms like “Black,” “Black dick” or “BBC.” Still, as a Black gay man, I had access to a knowledge base from a place of empathy—and not coming strictly from the fetishizing surveillance of the white gaze—which allowed me to be inside the head of the person I was reporting on, to get closer to understanding what happened in the kinds of intimate spaces in which the story had unfolded, and to write for other Black men. (Interestingly, this did not create a niche readership; my stories on “Tiger Mandingo” for BuzzFeed have been read by more than a million people.)
I also needed to physically go to places Johnson may have visited. For help on this, I turned to St. Louis Effort for AIDS, the main HIV prevention nonprofit in St. Louis. Because of who is affected by AIDS, whenever I land in a new city to report on anything, I turn to HIV prevention workers to point me toward where work is being done around race, poverty, and medical oppression. They told me the neighborhoods to check out and the bars I should go to (and, in racially segregated St. Louis, what nights I could find Black people at which bars). They also told me about the local bathhouse. I frequented the bars, asking around for people who knew Michael. Even from those who didn’t know him, I got a decent sense from bartenders and patrons about how people in Missouri felt about HIV criminalization and Black gay men. I blended in just fine at a drag performance, which had hundreds of mostly Black people in its audience. And I went to the bathhouse. I didn’t go to find sources, talk to anyone, or even to write about it explicitly; but I wanted to experience what one kind of embodied gay sexuality looked like in a large city far from the coastal cities I’ve inhabited my whole life. (And it taught me a lot about how race plays out in St. Louis’s queer sex scene.)
Only a queer person of color writing for queer people of color could have accessed and utilized this empathetic, embodied knowledge as I did. Finally, I wanted to conduct a queer of color interview with Johnson himself. I didn’t get to do it until the last day of that first trip to St. Louis (and I wasn’t sure it would happen at all). Given all the negative press that had been printed about him, Johnson had little reason to trust any journalist. I was hoping, as one Black gay man to another, to convince him that I wanted to get to know him as a whole person.
But anything to do with prison is queer; it creates space, time, and relationships that are out of sync with dominant notions of straight life—even for a reporter. I had been unable to speak to Johnson by phone. I had written him a letter, but I knew he couldn’t really read. I heard through someone who had contact that he wanted to speak with me, but I couldn’t confirm this independently. The only way I could really communicate with him was to fly to Missouri and hope we’d get to speak, not knowing if I was blowing the lump sum of money I got for the story on a trip that wouldn’t pan out.
There is a shame in jail buildings that is not incongruous with queerness, that extends to everyone who even visits. At the St. Charles Correctional Center (as at all jails), I had to give up a lot of personal information about myself to people who treated me like a criminal. I don’t believe that a white straight reporter would experience this with the same level of anxiety I did as a Black gay reporter trying to connect with someone known as “Tiger Mandingo.” For days, the commanding officer in charge played a game with me, always asking for one more piece of information than he had asked for the previous day (which, if he’d just given all the requirements to me at once would not have been a problem). When I finally met the commanding officer face to face—a portly man in a white uniform that brought to mind the character Boss Hawg from The Dukes of Hazzard—he made it clear to me that he controlled the Black body I wanted to speak to. (Johnson’s lawyer told me sometimes the jail would send the wrong Michael Johnson up to speak to her.)
The waiting for Michael Johnson, the not knowing if the interaction I so deeply longed for would happen or not, was not unlike cruising. Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s belief that “[q]ueerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” is helpful when trying to talk to someone in jail. As a reporter, you wait for hours or days to talk to your subject, as your subject waits months or years for freedom. Gratification is delayed, if it is to come at all.
And then, I finally got to interview Michael Johnson. There were many constraints on us. We were being recorded by the jail. We couldn’t discuss things that could further incriminate him. But we were able to talk to each other in a heartfelt way. Never having met before, we both came from differently surveilled worlds that were similar enough that each of us knew what “Mandingo” meant to the other. Michael wanted people to care about his story and to know what was happening to him was an injustice, and I wanted readers for my work, so there was much that was transactional about our exchange. I was keenly aware of how queer it was that I was hypermobile and could investigate many deeply intimate aspects of incarcerated Michael Johnson, his “Tiger Mandingo” persona, and his sexual interactions with others while he was locked up; to that end, I tried to reveal some things about myself, including that I was also gay, in a small gesture of making myself seem vulnerable and relatable to him. I found that we could just talk to each other with some ease because of this, short-handing certain info in the little time we had—in a way a white and/or straight reporter never could. (Over the past five years, it has grown into the one of the most queer and intense relationships I have, even though we speak infrequently and see each other even less often.)
Reflecting on this interview with Johnson (and several more which were conducted between 2014 and 2017), I have found that there are three elements for a queer of color interview that exceed queer of color theory in their specificity: the interview needs to be conducted by a queer interviewer of color, conducted with a queer interviewee of color, with an imagined queer audience of color in mind. (On this last point, the actual audience can be anyone, but the interview must be conducted between queer people of color and written with queer people of color in mind.)
Integral to publishing a story with a queer of color interview at its heart was who was editing me. The story was commissioned by Mark Schoofs, a white gay journalist who won a Pulitzer for writing about AIDS in Africa in the 1990s and who has been writing and editing about HIV for decades. He edited it with Saeed Jones, the Black queer poet who was BuzzFeed LGBT’s first editor. Mark is older than I am and Saeed younger, and the intergenerational conversations with these white and Black gay men about HIV, gay sex, and race in America shaped the story as queer in a way editing from straight and only white editors wouldn’t have. Particularly in stark relief against the salacious news stories written about Johnson as far away as Australia—which imagined his HIV diagnosis to pose a mortal threat worldwide to an audience of white heterosexual readers, even though the likelihood of being exposed to HIV is relatively small for white heterosexuals compared to Black queer men—the questions my gay editors asked me, and their frames of analysis, made for a very different way of forming the story. I was not on offense in trying to explain this to them, as I have been in the majority of my writing career when my editors were white heterosexuals. We worked in concert to conceive of a story for a general audience but with a queer of color subjectivity in mind, rooted in the queer of color jailhouse interview.
Over the years, this ethos has guided our continued coverage of the Johnson case. In 2015, Johnson was convicted of one count of HIV transmission and four counts of exposing or attempting to expose others to transmission and was sentenced to 30.5 years in prison; he would have gotten out in 2044. However, in 2016—in part due to our reporting in BuzzFeed—Johnson’s supporters began to raise $25,000 to hire an attorney and successfully appealed his case; a Missouri appeals court ruled Johnson’s prosecutor had engaged in prosecutorial misconduct for failing to disclose evidence and overturned the conviction. Then, facing a new trial in 2017, Johnson took a no-contest “Alford” plea deal for ten years and was approved in 2018 for parole about eighteen months before it was scheduled to begin. He is scheduled to leave prison in 2019 instead of 2044, after having served six years.
Around 2 A.M. on June 12, 2016, late into a Saturday night that had become a Sunday morning, I returned to my home from a party hosted by the gay poet Adam Fitzgerald. Scrolling through Twitter as I got into bed, I saw that something awful was happening at a gay nightclub in Florida, on its Latin Night. I found the Orlando Police Department’s scanner online and, as everyone was asleep in the United States and in England, found a Guardian editor working in Australia. We worked together through the night on the news, and I went to bed at 6:00 A.M., only to be awakened at 6:30 and told to write an opinion piece before getting myself on the first flight I could to Orlando. I’d feel sleepy and confused for the next seven days.
Time and space are inseparable things, impossible to consider independently, of course. But if my reporting in Missouri made me rethink “queer space” in regards to making the queer of color interview, my reporting in Orlando made me understand and explore queer time.
“Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction,” Jack Halberstam writes in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. “They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification” (2005, 2). People are not queer necessarily on a tidy schedule and in easily locatable spaces.
Halberstam also notes how “[q]ueer time perhaps emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth century, from within those gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic.” The threat of AIDS forced gay men to live against the concept of futurity (Edelman 2004)—the framing of politics as dependent upon the future of the Child—and to find meaning in life (and pleasure) without it. And so, queer time resides in the pleasure of the now, perhaps, or while “cruising for utopia” in the moment right after this, as Muñoz argued—but not in future of one’s progeny.
But Halberstam writes about queer time mostly in terms of explicitly queer sexual subcultures and in terms of conventional literature, such as Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours. Halberstam doesn’t deal with queer time in journalism, something I will deal with in this section. Halberstam’s interpretation of how Robert Reid-Pharr and Samuel Delany problematize “the elevation of white male experience (gay or straight) to the level of generality and the reduction of, say, Black gay experience to the status of the individual” (2005, 4) will also help me with something else: understanding the temporal and spatial choices made by media and LGBT organizations run by white people (gay and straight) in Orlando in response to the slaughter of queer people of color. That many of the killed (and those close to them) were working-class service workers rendered them queer not just to straight people because of their sexuality but to gay politicos for being poor. And, understanding their queerness meant adjusting to queer time.
But national media and organizations did not embrace queer time. My first morning in Orlando, I arrived near the Pulse to find the same kind of media “scrum” I had seen near the burned-down Kwik Trip gas station in Ferguson and the burned-out CVS in Baltimore. There, I encountered the same fleets of white cable satellite trucks crewed by the same white (and presumably straight) men operating on TV time. There was really nothing to do there except create a backdrop from a distance of the scene of the crime. The only people to interview were government officials and people seeking attention.
I told my editors that I thought that the real story was about queer people of color, and I wasn’t seeing them downtown or in any gayborhood Orlando might have. While they were supportive of this, none of my Guardian editors were gay or people of color, and they would never have thought of this angle; two even expressed shock that this might be significant, but trusted my instinct.
I then went to the Parliament House, the aging gay resort in a bleak industrial section of Orlando, far from its downtown and theme parks. With the closure of the Pulse, Parliament House now housed the largest gay club in town, and many if not most people who worked at one place also worked at the other. I had stayed at a hotel by the airport my first night, but when I went to the Parliament House and discovered it was only $100 for three nights’ accommodation, I knew I had to write my story from there.
I was one of only two reporters who stayed there (the other was also gay, but white), and though others passed through, no one stayed for very long; as a result, I had the queer of color story largely to myself. I learned a lot about who had died, who they were, where and how they worked, and how they lived by sleeping at this rundown motel over time; this allowed me to create an ethnography of the community. I ate in the motel’s seedy restaurant and a young waiter told me, on the verge of tears, that although he knew at least ten and maybe fifteen people who had been killed (they hadn’t all yet been identified), he couldn’t go to the citywide memorial because he was a shift worker and he wasn’t allowed to take the time off or he would lose his job.
This was when I first started considering the deceased existing in a queer time of service workers. Some of them worked at local Disney and Universal theme parks, but almost all of them worked in the service economy that supported Orlando tourism in some way. This meant that they had to get up before Disney-bound tourists, make sure those Mouseketeers had fun, feed them, and put them to bed before they could have some themselves.
At Parliament House and Southern Nights (the other big club, post-Pulse), I found communities of queer people of color—but they didn’t start to congregate until around midnight. Congregating for dancing and drag shows, they’d party until 3 or 4 A.M., before catching a few hours of sleep and getting up to take care of people en route to Disneyland all over again. At Southern Nights, I watched drag queens raise thousands of dollars for the injured.
It was at Parliament House’s Hip Hop night where I made out with a beautiful brown young man who was in a state of shock about the events. It’s also where I met queer Latina activist Paulina Helm-Hernandez on the dance floor. Well accustomed to queer time and space, she came to meet queer people of color when and where they were gathered. And here, around 2 A.M., I saw Angelica Sanchez, a drag queen who had survived Pulse just a few nights earlier, give her first performance since—a drag routine that will live in my heart forever.
Many of the organized mourning activities that drew media and organizations were in Orlando’s central business district, in spaces and at times where queer people weren’t likely to be found. The time to report about, observe, and interview queer people of color was on the dance floor of the Parliament House in the middle of the night. I was the only reporter there, and Paulina was one of few organizers present.
I got a sense of the Parliament House and queer life in Orlando not just in those wee hours, but around the clock. When I filed a story at 3 A.M.and went for a walk on the beach behind the motel—excited that the temperatures dropped to the 80s—I learned to be leery. I needed to navigate tweaking men openly masturbating (not such a big deal) as well as what I thought was a crocodile splashing in the water (a much bigger deal, given one had recently eaten a baby at a nearby Disney resort).
During the daytime, as I worked on my laptop in my first-floor room, I kept getting knocks on the big glass window that overlooked the pool. At first, I thought the men (who seemed high on meth) were cruising me. But it wasn’t until I talked to a man I couldn’t wave off that I understood he was offering me money and thought I was “working”—and not as a journalist. (Understanding the code, I closed my curtains.)
Then, there was the young sex worker who approached me while I was writing outside on a patio table. Dark-skinned, painfully thin, and genderfluid, he kept trying to get me to pay him. I gave him a few dollars for bus fare, declined his offer for a $5 blowjob, and talked to him about running out of the Pulse the night of the shooting. He seemed to take the violence in stride compared to the routine violence of his life getting around in Orlando without a car and hustling to make ends meet.
The timing of my interview with him—in the afternoon, during a rainstorm, far from the city center—helped me understand how racially segregated queer people of color are in Orlando from the city’s formal, white-faced LGBT leaders. The timing of the ill-fated Latin Night at Pulse and the Hip Hop night at the Parliament House educated me on the same. The coworkers of those killed at Pulse I met at Parliament House, and their friends who gathered around midnight, were more accessible to a queer person of color like me in general, but they were only practically accessible to me because I gave in to queer time. And I think the white bros of the satellite trucks, who needed someone to give them a succinct soundbite in front of the club live on the six o’clock news, were never going to find these people, were never going to explore the edge of the city in the middle of the night.
After using queer time and space to land the queer of color interview and shape my story as a journalist, the next step is to discursively hustle that knowledge into the academy.
Just what is the queer act of discursive hustling?
Let me rewind a bit to explain by beginning, as James Baldwin (2017) might have, in the Black church. Or rather, in a specific Black church, on a Sunday morning in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward in late October 2007. The neighborhood was still reeling from Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and I had spent the previous week collecting oral histories in it for NPR’s StoryCorps project, camped out in one of the local churches. When they caught wind that I sang in a gospel choir back in New York, the members of the church commandeered me to come to church on Sunday morning and to sing a solo with their choir.
Shortly before the services began, the church musicians arrived. They had all been up all night playing jazz in clubs around the city, and they still smelled strongly of cigarettes. The organist had booze on his breath, mildly mitigated by the smell of mouthwash, and in song after song, they tore that church up like it was a juke joint. (I joined them for Jerry Calvin Smith’s “This Morning When I Rose.”)
That band embodied two old sayings about music in the church. First, the tunes they rocked articulated how gospel music is just Motown or R&B with the word “baby” replaced with “Jesus.” Second, they showed how R&B and Motown tunes create a kind of religious hustling of the Good Word out of the church into the wider secular world, while gospel music is a kind of secular hustling of rhythm into the church. And often, the hustling of the secular-into-the-religious and the religious-into-the-secular is done by the very same people, who jam all night long in Satan’s lair until the sun rises before slugging down some coffee, gargling some mouthwash, and picking up their music makers in the house of the Lord without missing a beat or changing clothes.
The shuttling back and forth between these two worlds, especially when the hinge between them is embodied as Black men who have to navigate such different spaces, can be a very queer thing.
It is writing both as a journalist for mainstream publications as an academic (where I work in universities and write for scholarly journals) that I view myself as a queer hustler. In navigating both of these worlds, I have found that academia can look down upon journalism with as much pious disdain as the Black church sometimes scoffs at secular music; similarly, many a journalist can have as much antagonism towards a professor they feel is safely hidden in the ivory tower as a bluesman can have contempt for a pastor they consider out of touch. And yet, journalism and academia are continuously informing each other, just as the musical genealogies of Motown and the Baptist church did in the twentieth century—often by queer hustlers who slip back and forth between these worlds.
In some ways, my model for discursive hustling is based on the Grammy-winning gospel composer Andrae Crouch, who also arranged megahits for Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson. But musically hustling church into Diana’s Motown tracks or Jacksonian “Man in the Mirror” beats into a choral arrangement isn’t entirely queer. For a Black man like Crouch, the slipping back and forth between a sanctuary and a studio might be a queer act; however, it’s not especially queer for a Black man to be in the worlds of gospel or R&B.
It is, however, extremely queer for a Black man to be in academia or in journalism, both of which practically have “whites only” signs over their doors. Even as a majority of babies born in the United States are not white (Cohen 2016), and “majority-minority” status is only decades away, an annual survey of the American Association of Newspaper Editors (2015) has found that print journalism jobs have been about 87 percent white for the past decade; similarly, the National Center for Educational Statistics (2013) found that 84 percent of full university professors are white (with 56 percent of those professorships being accounted for just by white men).
So, the mere act of trying to work in journalism or academia (let alone both) for Black gay people like myself is itself a queer, nonnormative, somewhat rebellious act. Unless I were to engage in the likely foolhardy task of trying to blend in with my white straight peers (which I don’t), I am never going to blend into a newsroom or a faculty (other than at an historically Black college or university) the way a Black person might within a Black band or church choir.
In primarily white newsrooms or universities, there’s a feeling that at any time, I could be thrown out. Often treated with suspicion in media and academia alike (for my race and sexuality, but also because I have a foot in both worlds), I have decided to embrace feeling like a thief. To that end, I hustle as much knowledge as I can out of both settings, whisking it from one world into the other. I try to steal everything I learn in universities and share that knowledge I learn in popular media with people who will never get to be inside of the universities I infiltrate. At the same time, I try to infect academic jargon with the communication tools I practice in mainstream media, so that my academic research may become more widely accessible to more kinds of people.
And in recognizing that I will never fit in so well in either world, I try to take solace in the slippage between them. In his book Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (2018), Jeff McCune writes of the “downlow brothas” not as a pathologized villains, but as Black men negotiating the “downlow” as a discursive space. In negotiating this space, McCune writes:
[T]here is an intentional slippage between “discreet” (showing good judgment in conduct) and “discrete” (individually distinct), as particular commitments to normative gender muddies the ability to mark a clear distinction between these terms. For those who are under repeated surveillance, they often dance between the discreet and discrete, sometimes embodying both in one moment—signaling the collapse of these terms, especially for those who are very clear that they are sexually distinct, but also sexually protective. (2014, 8)
In creating queer of color interviews, I similarly try to show the good judgment of centering the stories of queer people of color and the individually distinct nature of queer stories of color, because a commitment to telling good stories in general (as a journalist or scholar) muddies an ability to mark a clear distinction between the two.
In this essay, I have shown how to create queer of color interviews by interviewing queers of color within queer time and space. I have then argued that the queer knowledge I have gained in academia should be used to inform creating these interviews, and that the knowledge produced should be hustled back into the academy, into a mutually informative circle of exchange. Finally, I am noting that queer of color interviews don’t just inform the work of the queer scholar or journalist of color; they also empower us as queers working in primarily white and heteronormative institutions.
At BuzzFeed, I am grateful to Investigations Editor Mark Schoofs for commissioning my work on “Tiger Mandingo,” as well as to LGBT Editor Saeed Jones, Investigations Assistant Talal Ansari, Deputy Investigations Editor Ariel Kaminer, Executive News Editor Shani Hilton, and Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith for developing and editing various iterations of my reporting over three years. At the Guardian U.S., I am grateful to Features Editor Jessica Reed for commissioning my feature on queer people of color in Orlando, as well as to reporters Ed Pilkington and Jessica Glenza for their aid in our team coverage from Florida. At NYU’s American Studies program, I am grateful to Julie Livingston, Lisa Duggan, Andrew Ross, Nikhil Singh, Jennifer Morgan, and Philip Brian Harper, and I’m especially thankful to Gayatri Gopinath for being the first person to tell me that my reporting represented “queer of color” theory in action. The term “discursive hustling” is a riff of Elena Gonzalez’s phrase “recursive hustling,” which developed in an email conversation among her, Kevin Murphy, Molly McGary, and me in preparation for a panel on Publicly Engaged American Studies Scholarship at the 2016 American Studies Association annual conference. Finally, I indebted to Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim, who came up with the term “queer of color interview” and wanted me to develop it for this essay.
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