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Walk-on Parts and Speaking Subjects: Screen Representations of Black Gay Men

Various cultural-political developments of the past five years or so make it possible to correlate a widely perceived crisis in the arts with the emergence of the black gay man as both subject and object. Continuing challenges from members of Congress to the National Endowment for the Arts reached a peak in 1989 with Senator Jesse Helms' attacks on Robert Mapplethorpe's retrospective exhibition, "The Perfect Moment," whose controversial nature stemmed largely from the intensely conflicted issues of race, power, and sexuality raised by the photographer's aestheticized images of black male faces, bodies, and genitalia. In the ensuing months, numerous public television stations across the country refused to air the edition of PBS' POV, which featured Marlon Riggs' video Tongues Untied, citing the graphic sexual images that interrogate a range of experiences undergone by black gay men in the United States.' In a somewhat different vein, participants in New York City's black and latino drag ball circuit featured in Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1991) brought suit against the filmmaker for unlawful use of services, raising critical questions about the status and position of the "subjects" of documentary film.2 Given the notoriety of these examples, it would be easy to conclude that homosexuality among black men is not just a highly social and politically charged phenomenon, but that its representation in U.S. culture became crucial only at the turn of the present decade, amid a general preoccupation with racial and sexual difference, multiculturalism, and political correctness that seems destined to characterize the period. As is becoming increasingly clear, however, from critical work undertaken in a range of fields since the 1970s, the social categories that seem essentially to exemplify the condition of marginality have in fact long been key components of the cultural "mainstream," insofar as they have served to define and delimit the recognized "center" of the social structure.3 While the black gay man seems recently to have become a key figure for crises that, at present, threaten the very foundations of institutionalized culture in the United States, this should not be taken to mean that his representations have not functioned to buttress (often specifically by challenging) normative conceptions of race, sexuality, and gender identity since at least the Black Power era of the late 1960s.