Love's Labors Lost: LGBTQ erasure and the hunt for the elusive Good Black Man (TM)

April 27, 2011

LGBTQ erasure and the hunt for the elusive Good Black Man (TM)

I don't normally talk about the intersections of race and sexuality that much. It's not for lack of awareness, but all too often, the commentary I make can be abused by people who don't know and/or don't care about the broader context. There are people who have a vested interest in seeing Black people as uniquely sexist, misogynist, and homophobic and would take what I say as ammunition to fire that charge. Being that I am Black and woman and queer, I would be less than thrilled if such a thing were to come about.

Cyberstalking trolls take note.

That said, I'd like to address a really persistent meme that keeps going around about Black women and what we want out of life. It goes like this: every Black woman is desperately searching for Good Black Man (TM) to make her life complete. Everything she is and everything she does is made to snag such a rare and elusive creature. He must (among other things):

make good money
have good looks
be Christian
have no Baby Mama Drama
love his mother without clinging to her
be straight

I'm not knocking anyone for having standards about what they're looking for in a life partner. But there's a stark difference between an individual sharing their desires and the sort of stuff that gets shoved at people as being important to the lives of all Black women. There's nothing wrong with straight Black women who want to start families with straight Black men who share their values and don't come with a lot of extraneous baggage. But when that's the only story that gets circulated? Then we have a problem.

In the case of the hunt for the rare and elusive Good Black Man (TM), it's a problem because the assumptions involved in that conversation cut out pretty much every Black person who is not cisgender and heterosexual. Oh, it's never as blatant as "no homos allowed," but not formally excluding Black LGBTQs is not the same as including Black LGBTQs. Saying, "I don't have a problem with the gay lifestyle" is not the same as inviting us into your space. There's a huge difference between a lack of overt hostility and the presence of welcoming.

Heteronormative assumptions about Black relationships used to not bother me. I used to take the attitude that the conversation was by and for straight Black people, and I didn't begrudge them that. Now it's starting to get to me, and I'm just starting to figure out why.

For a long time I couldn't articulate what irked me so much about it. Reflecting on experiences and conversations I've had about this, it's not merely the erasure of queerness. It's the fact that in order to contribute in these conversations - at least around straight people - I need to mute or dilute my queerness. I have to pretend that my queerness is ultimately a different flavor of heterosexuality. Unfortunately, that's not how I experience it.

Queerness is not just about who we want to fuck. It's also about the visceral relationship we have to gender and the nuances of how attraction and affection work for us while single or in a relationship. I am always queer no matter who I'm with or who I like. Even if I were to settle down with a man, I am still queer because I would relate to him as a man differently from the way straight women relate to men.

How can we have that Gotta Find A Good Black Man (TM) conversation in a way that's queer-inclusive? I honestly don't know. Maybe it starts with broadening our ideas about the relationships we can have with Black men. How about we stop focusing exclusively on romance? Think beyond boyfriends and husbands. What about Black men as fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, mentors, muses, students, peers, and (gasp!) friends?

4 comments:

Anonymous4/28/2011 1:47 PM
The other problem I have with this good black men crap is that queer males like myself (even when we aren't being looked at as potential partners), we get looked down upon as deficient or inferior.

My thing is this, it's the 21st century. If finding a good black man is that fucking difficult, then maybe you should broaden your horizons and find a good Latino male, or a good Arabic male, or a good Asian male, or a good white man, because there are plenty of men out there who would love to make a Nubian goddess happy.

And at some point, I have to ask about so many of these sisters, if they can't find a good black man, then maybe the issue is with them.
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RVCBard4/28/2011 2:17 PM
The other problem I have with this good black men crap is that queer males like myself (even when we aren't being looked at as potential partners), we get looked down upon as deficient or inferior.

Yup. And on top of that, because the Hunt for the Good Black Man meme is so heterocentric and so focused on forming nuclear families, so many good Black men who happen to be queer are excluded from contributing their gifts to the youth of the community. I personally know a lot of gay Black guys I'd trust with my children before many of these Babby Daddies running around.
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Anonymous5/02/2011 11:42 PM
This is an interesting post. Reading it makes me think about a tendency I used to see on blogs lamenting the lack of GBM (not coincidentally, the same blogs that tended to pain White men as Black women's saviors) to lump in "become a lesbian" with all of the other negative consequences of not finding a GBM. Apparently Black lesbians are only "like that" because they couldn't find a man. It doesn't surprise me to hear straight Black men say this, but I was really disappointed to read it on so-called Black Women's Empowerment blogs (which is why I can't mess with them).
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RVCBard5/03/2011 9:59 AM
@Jasmin:

Oftentimes, we carry out our own oppression better than dominant groups.
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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932