"I Was a Nigger, Still": Black and White Bodies in the Gay Art of the Twentieth Century

Psi Sigma Siren Volume 8 Issue 2 Article 2 6-2015 "I was a nigger, still": Black and White Bodies in the Gay Art of the Twentieth Century Franklin Howard University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/psi_sigma_siren Recommended Citation Howard, Franklin (2015) ""I was a nigger, still": Black and White Bodies in the Gay Art of the Twentieth Century," Psi Sigma Siren: Vol. 8 : Iss. 2 , Article 2. Available at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/psi_sigma_siren/vol8/iss2/2 This Article is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Article in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. 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Psi Sigma Siren The Journal of the UNLV Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta: Spring 2015 “I was a nigger, still”: Black and White Bodies in the Gay Art of the Twentieth Century - Franklin Howard “It’s amazing to me that even the rampant homophobia in the South doesn’t put a dent in the sense of racial privilege presumed by the white gay men who patronize this clear example of racism and misogyny disguised as entertainment.”1 Lecia Brooks, the education director for the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Alabama, gave this statement to Rolling Stone magazine in 2007 to explain her protests against comedian Charles Knipp, known on stage as Shirley Q. Liquor. While Knipp’s jokes are racist, the major issue with his performances, as Brooks tells us, is his use of blackface minstrelsy as his act. Knipp, a white gay man, dons a large muumuu and masquerades as “a welfare mother with nineteen kids who guzzles malt liquor, drives a Caddy and says in an ‘ignunt’ Gulf Coast black dialect, ‘I’m gonna burn me up some chitlins and put some ketchup on there and aks [sic] Jesus to forgive my sins.’”2 The racism inherent to contemporary gay male society stems from practices of the previous century. Artists and audiences engaged the male nude, in both pornography and “high art,” differently for white and black men during the 1900s. At the beginning of the century, though a racial hierarchy can be seen, a feminist critique of the works reveals that both white and black men could be used as sexual objects. White men, however, moved beyond this point by becoming sexual actors, but black men remained a fetishized object through the 1980s. American homoerotic media of the twentieth century protected a racial hierarchy by reducing the black male body to, first, an exotic other and, later, a phallic symbol. For some men, exposure to these images connected them to the homosexual world. Kenneth Krauss, author of Male Beauty, remembers how finding a collection of physique magazines helped him realize that he “wasn’t the only male in the world… who came to appreciate the beauty of males and that there were obviously a sufficient number of such males that magazines were published for them.”3 James M. Saslow explains this phenomenon in Pictures and Passions where he explains that the “dynamic interplay of sex, art, and society is 1 David Holthouse, “The Most Dangerous Comedian in America,” Rolling Stone, May 31, 2007. 2 Ibid. 3 Kenneth Krauss, Male Beauty: Postwar Masculinity in Theater, Film, and Physique Magazines (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 4. 4 Psi Sigma Siren The Journal of the UNLV Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta: Spring 2015 nowhere more visible than in images related to homosexual experience.”4 Of course, these images could serve more than one purpose. Richard Meyer argues that homoerotic visual media contested heteronormativity in the late twentieth century by “restaging” the negative representation of homosexuality.5 This draws upon arguments made by philosopher and historian Michel Foucault who posited that gay men utilized medical language in a “reverse dialogue” to assert the legitimacy of their identity.6 We can examine the dialogue between homosexuality and race throughout the twentieth century by applying racial and feminist frameworks to an interpretation of art. Here, it is important to note the potential variation in interpretive scholarship for the described images that follow. Though not an image, per se, Knipp’s performances are an example. He contends that his work draws attention to the critical issues of black womanhood through humor. Others in society, like Brooks and other scholars of race, see the acts as an extension of white privilege in the gay world. To avoid the controversy of absolute claims, this work suggests a series of “relevant counter-possibilities.”7 In essence, pieces of visual media can be interpreted through the racial and feminist frameworks outlined in subsequent paragraphs without directly engaging a true/false claim. This form of analysis promotes multiplicity as a tool to complicate and problematize visual media and its messages. While Meyer’s work can positively interpret the representation of homosexuality in gay art, scholars of race can also interpret such portrayals negatively. Both activists and historians have dissected the experiences of black gay men and found that their race conflicted with their sexual orientation both within themselves and within society at large. Historian Martin Duberman criticized the “endemic racism” that infected the gay rights movement as it shifted away from radicalism.8 Other contemporaries joined him in their attack on racism in the gay rights movement of the 1980s. For example, Marlon Riggs produced Tongues Untied in 1989, which was a ground-breaking essay film that combined personal testimonies with spoken word 4 James M. Saslow, Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in The Visual Arts (New York: Viking, 1999), 1. 5 Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, Ideologies of Desire (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8. 6 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 101-2. A similar argument is made in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1983). 7 A detailed description of this form of analysis can be found in Annette Barnes, On Interpretation: A Critical Analysis (New York: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1988). 8 Martin Duberman, “Racism in the Gay Male World,” in The Martin Duberman Reader: The Essential Historical, Biographical, and Autobiographical Writings (New York: The New Press, 2013), 305–10. 5 Psi Sigma Siren The Journal of the UNLV Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta: Spring 2015 art to portray the black experience in the gay male world. During one of the testimonies, Riggs revealed that, after traveling to the Castro, a gay neighborhood in San Francisco, he realized that he was “a nigger, still.”9 This statement speaks to the white agenda of the gay male world. Essex Hemphill, a black and gay poet, revealed that he was reduced from a person to a sexual object when visiting bathhouses in D.C.10 Roderick A. Ferguson argues, however, that the separation of white and black gay men began several decades before the gay liberation movement.11 In the early-twentieth century, whiteness was both the standard for race and gender in America and a tool of assimilation. As certain immigrants, like the Italians, transitioned from “non-white” to white, the gap between the races widened. Black clubs, called Black and Tans, became sources of non-normative racial and sexual behaviors.12 In part, homosexuality obtained its non- normative status because of its connections to these non-white venues. White gay men established the racial hierarchy to bring themselves closer to the standards set by the dominant, white, heteronormative society. Art helped white gay men accomplish their goal. Typically, conversations of the male gaze are restricted to an imbalance of power between men and women. In this instance, the power of the gaze takes a racialized perspective. Because the artist, the subject, and the audience are assumed male, the imbalance of power stems from the racial difference between the artist and the subject.13 Art historian Carol Duncan argues that modern erotic art receives ideological protection because society teaches that “art, qua art, if it is ‘good’ art…never has anything to do with the oppression of the powerless, and never imposes on us values that are not universally beneficial.”14 A close examination of some of the prominent pieces of gay art and the trends in American nude portraiture reveals that not all art is beneficial for all. Eldridge Cleaver best summarizes the imbalance of power between black and white men in the art discussed below. He 9 Marlon T. Riggs, Tongues Untied: Malon T. Rigg’s Classic Documentary, DVD, 1989. 10 Essex Hemphill in Martin Duberman, Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS (New York: New Press, The, 2014), 81. 11 Roderick A. Ferguson, “Race-Ing Homonormativity: Citizenship, Sociology, and Gay Identity,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 52–67. 12 More information on Black and Tans can be found in Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (University Of Chicago Press, 2010).

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