Open Letter to Tracy Morgan

Media: Open Letter to Tracy Morgan

by Craig Laurence Gidney | The New Gay

Dear Tracy Morgan:

Nothing happens in a vacuum. When you recently expressed yourself in an allegedly comic rant in Nashville this past week, you were adding your voice to a well-established chorus of hate that suffuses the black community. I am thinking of the Hiphop machismo of Dr. Dre (“I don’t care for those kind of people). The calls to violence by reggae “dancehall” stars like Buju Banton and Yellowman. I’ve heard this hatred rise like smog from the pulpits of black church leaders—from Bishop Eddie Long, to Ken Hutcherson. The rhetoric of whipping the demons of homosexuality out of the black body has a long and sordid history. How many black youth have been cast from their families because of these beliefs? How many more stay in the closet—or get married and keep their love and lust “on the Down Low”?

Read the Full Essay @ The New Gay

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Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of the Lammie finalist collection SEA, SWALLOW ME & OTHER STORIES, and an editor at Lethe Press.

Hip-Hop is Gay: Seeing Mr. Cee

Hip-Hop is Gay: Seeing Mr. Cee

by James Braxton Peterson | special to NewBlackMan

Hip Hop is gay. Not in the colloquial/vernacular sense of ‘gay’ as something negative or deplorable, but gay as in actually gay. I am gay too – about the possibility of actually having a real conversation about human sexuality, human resources and Hip Hop culture. It’s high time that Hip Hop had some real discourse about the homophobia that plagues us socially and I think at this point any other front(ing) is simply a thin veneer for the Hip Hop community’s inability to embrace the sexual reality of this culture that we know, love, and sometimes hate.

Recently, HOT97’s Mr. Cee (ne Calvin LeBrun) was arrested for public lewdness when police allegedly saw him receiving oral sex from another man in his car. According to the New York Daily News this is the third time that (in less than a year) Mr. Cee has been caught/detained for solicitation, loitering and now public lewdness. Even more recently, Mr. Cee pled guilty to lewd conduct in public. As J. Desmond Harris reported on The Root.com, the online response to Mr. Cee’s predicament was typically homophobic and at times downright ignorant. To my mind this is simply more evidence that Hip Hop is gay.

In his award-winning documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, filmmaker Byron Hurt unveils hypermasculinity and homosocialism as foundational pillars in the construction and performance of black masculinity in Hip Hop culture. The film also suggests that some of the rampant hypermasculinity, misogyny, and violent themes are ways in which men attempt to over compensate for their own homoerotic and homosocial desires. As more and more narratives like Mr. Cee’s emerge, the response to the alleged activities/crimes seem to be more indicative of Hip Hop culture than the actual alleged acts in question.

For his part, Mr. Cee originally denied these allegations, shielding himself in a playlist of oddly defensive rap tracks, and ramping up a twitter account so that he can defend himself against the perceived ‘plague’ of being gay in the homophobic world of Hip Hop. There are several situations in the not so distant past that have unraveled similarly in the public sphere. Eddie Murphy was arrested for a rendezvous with a transgendered person and rumors of him being gay have pretty much dogged him ever since. In a more honest discourse we might be able to consider that Eddie is more bi-sexual than gay, or better still, he, like many folk, have sexual preferences that can not simply be defined by hetero/homo terms.

You might also remember that New Jersey governor (McGreevey) who frequented Turnpike truck stops in order to satiate his socially repressed desires to be with other men. Or you might likewise recall Ted Haggert’s scandalous meth-drenched affair with a ‘personal trainer’, or former Senator Larry “wide stance” Craig’s arrest for lewd conduct. Maybe you haven’t seen the self-photograph of a svelte Bishop Eddie Long, in full pose – making a virtual/visual gift for his young targets of seduction. Bishop Long also, very recently settled his case. Mr. Cee is not the first and certainly won’t be the last public figure to be “guilty of” engaging in gay sexual activity.

Yet his recent plea, the responses, defenses and protests tell a powerful story of repression and utter fear of severe social rebuke. For the ministers and senators, their professional anti-gay rhetoric belied their personal gay desires. If we situate Mr. Cee’s alleged activity within the context of a long history of homophobia in Hip Hop – and here I am thinking specifically of the ways in which Wendy Williams stoked the flames of hatred and fear in the very first gay-rapper witch-hunt-like scandal. Nothing really came out of it except for the violent verbal attacks on Wendy Williams and the vehement denials of any rapper ever even having a gay thought.

Seriously, we cannot at this point in time as adult constituents of Hip Hop culture believe that no rapper (or DJ/producer) has or will ever be gay. It just doesn’t add up and this is not to weigh in on how/why you think people are gay – whether you think they are born that way or they somehow ‘choose’ their sexual preferences. Somebody in Hip Hop must be gay, but for me, our exceeding willful denials of this fact simply belies our culture’s repressed gay identity. We’re much like those ministers and senators who protest gay sexuality/marriage just a little too much – or just enough to signal the repression of deep-seeded gay sexual desires.

In Hip Hop this repressive denial often takes the shape of hypermasculine narratives with a no-homo brand of homophobia functioning as the frosting on the cake. Check out Funkmaster Flex’s seething defense of his homie Mr. Cee delivered in response to a rival station’s bit about Mr. Cee’s alleged public fellatio scenario. Flex goes on for at least five minutes straight, berating the entire station, defending Mr. Cee, and intimating that (gasp) there may be some folk at that other station who are actually gay, not (as Flex suggests re: Cee) framed by the NYC Hip Hop police.

But let’s pretend for minute that Mr. Cee is gay. Does that mean that his show, “Throwback at Noon” isn’t hot like fire? Does it diminish his pivotal role as Big Daddy Kane’s DJ? Is Ready to Die any less dope to you now than it was before you thought about the possibility that Mr. Cee was gay? I hope that you answered NO to all of these rhetorical questions and I hope that starting now the Hip Hop community can at last be persuaded to confront its irrational fear of the full range of our community’s human sexuality.

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James Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC. Follow him on Twitter @JBP2.

'Left of Black': Episode #31 featuring Aishah Shahidah Simmons & Zaheer Ali

Left of Black #32 

w/ Aishah Shahidah Simmons & Zaheer Ali

May 2, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons in a discussion of sexual violence in Black communities, homophobia, and popular culture controversies surrounding Ashley Judd, Kobe Bryant and DJ Mister Cee. Later Neal talks with historian Zaheer Ali, one of the lead researchers on the late Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Re-invention.

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→Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning African-American feminist lesbian independent documentary filmmaker, television and radio producer, published writer, international lecturer, and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. Simmons is the writer, director and producer of NO! the Rape Documentary, a ground-breaking film that explores the issues of sexual violence and rape against Black women and girls.

→Zaheer Ali is a doctoral student in history at Columbia University, where he is focusing his research on twentieth-century African-American history and religion. His dissertation examines the history of the Nation of Islam’s Temple/Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, New York. Under the direction of Dr. Manning Marable, he served as project manager and senior researcher of the Malcolm X Project (MXP) at Columbia University, a multi-year research initiative on the life and legacy of Malcolm X and was a lead researcher for Dr. Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), a comprehensive biography on Malcolm X.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Also Available @ iTunes U

Another Missed Shot: Kobe Bryant and the Politics of Homophobia

Another Missed Shot: Kobe Bryant and the Politics of Homophobia 
by David J. Leonard

Whistled four his 4^th personal foul and then a technical foul, Kobe Bryant headed to the bench.  With cameras focused on him, he shouted “fucking faggot” in the direction of the referee leading to an avalanche of public condemnation, a fine from the league, and ample debate.  As a Lakers fan, and someone committed to social justice, his choice in words was deeply disappointing.  “Homophobic Slurs Are Always Meant to Offend” writes Mychal Denzel Smith.  “The use of this particular word reveals something deeper. It's the belief that homosexuality is inherently inferior and an undesirable trait; therefore, to refer to someone with slurs usually reserved for gays is an attempt to belittle that person further. The quickest and most efficient way to insult a man has become to call into question his sexual orientation.” 

Yet, as someone committed to social justice, I have also been disappointed by the reaction from both his critics and his defenders.  Not surprisingly, throughout the Internet many have used this as an opportunity to highlight their own anti-gay sentiments.  Others, however, have denounced Kobe Bryant, expressing shock at his comments, while focusing on the necessity of a fine rather than education of not only Bryant but also society at large.

Shortly after Bryant slur became a public story, the Human Rights Council offered the following denunciation of Bryant:

What a disgrace for Kobe Bryant to use such horribly offensive and distasteful language, especially when millions of people are watching.  Hopefully Mr. Bryant will recognize that as a person with such fame and influence, the use of such language not only offends millions of LGBT people around the world, but also perpetuates a culture of discrimination and hate that all of us, most notably Mr. Bryant, should be working to eradicate.  Bryant and the Lakers have a responsibility to speak up on this issue immediately. America is watching.

Others followed suit, demanding apologies, questioning what sort of punishment should be leveled at Bryant, and otherwise condemned not only the slur but also the person in Bryant.  Yet, amid all the shock and self-righteousness, John Amaechi attempted to provide context for incident: “I'm surprised that people are surprised. This is common language when I played. It was an everyday word that I heard. I haven't seen anything new put in place (by the NBA) to tackle homophobia. There's no reason for it to somehow get better.”  Hoping to capitalize on Kobe Bryant’s visibility (and possibly his already negative standing amongst segments of society) GLADD and Human Rights Council emphasized the potential here to educate and inform.

The Human Rights Council called Bryant’s situation a teachable moment.  While correct in a sense, unfortunately effective lessons have not been at the center of this pedagogical exercise.  By excoriating Bryant and demanding an apology, by focusing on his being a role model (the consequences of kids using it in their schools demonstrates that this isn’t an issue specific to role models) the issue of homophobia has been individualized and isolated.  Bryant’s multiple apologies are seen as a resolution as the focus rests with his learning a lesson.  Lesson learned, back to the game.  

Likewise, the decision from Davis Stern to fine Bryant $100,000 further illustrates the ways in which Bryant required disciplining and punishment as part of the education process. Yet, another lesson learned.  In fact, the denunciation of Bryant, the calls for apologies, education, penance, accountability, and punishment is commonplace within the NBA.  The culture of the NBA is one of control, disciplinarity and punishment for intruding, transgressing, and rule-breaking black bodies.  It is a cultural platform where respectability and appropriateness, as defined by the white racial frame, govern the day-to-day operations alongside its cultural reception.  This is especially true for African American players who have a responsibility to demonstrate their respectability, something that Kobe failed at this moment.

For example, GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios stated, “Professional sports players need to set a better example for young people who use words like this on the playground and in our schools, creating a climate of intolerance and hostility. The LA Lakers have a responsibility to educate their fans about why this word is unacceptable.” Likewise, Edward Wyckoff Williams, waxing nostalgically about a better era in sports, further emphasized his failure as a role model:

Older fans will remember the days when sports stars were heroes, admired for their talent and stature. They graced Wheaties and Cheerio boxes, encouraging young people to stay in school and eat a healthy breakfast. Now, in an age where headlines show the growing number of gay and lesbian youth committing suicide, Bryant's rant is both disrespectful and potentially dangerous -- sending the wrong message to young, adoring fans -- who may well take it literally. Members of the NBA and NFL should be governed not just by their professional code of conduct, but with a great sense of obligation -- reflecting the often quoted line -- 'with great power comes great responsibility'.  If our athletic icons use homophobic slurs, how can we expect our children to act any differently on the schoolyards and street corners?

The efforts to link Bryant’s slur to heroes through a paradigm of nostalgia reflects the historic myopia here in that homophobia has always been present within sporting cultures (and the larger culture as well).  In fact, (white) heteronormativity is central to hero worship historically and present nostalgia for it.  Homophobia is not new, nor is it reflective of the a new type of athlete.  

The effort to use Bryant’s offensive remarks to highlight the pervasive problem of homophobia ironically erases the ubiquity and the systemic impact of homophobia inside and OUTSIDE of sports.  In effect, the public condemnation, the fine, and the overall discourse effectively isolated homophobia, linking it to blackness and Kobe’s visible signifier as basketball player.  In other words, Kobe gets constructed as the face of homophobia, evidence of yet another example of homophobia within the NBA and black America rather than society at large.  As evidence by Bryant’s deployed slur and the public criticism, blackness is once again marked as essentially disruptive, uncontrollable, as a source of “cultural degeneracy.”  Rhonada Williams, in “Living at the crossroads: Exploration in race, nationality, sexuality, and gender,” reminds us that blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (1998, p. 140).   The ways in which homophobia has been attached onto Kobe’s body is evident in both media discourse and reader comments.  Imagined as evidence of his “immaturity” and “ignorance,” linked to culture of sports and basketball, denounced because of his failures to be a role model to kids, the responses consistently focused on Bryant as the beginning and end to the conversation.

To fully understand this situation, one needs to understand it within a larger history of the NBA. In 2007, after former NBA player John Amaechi announced that he was gay, controversy and debate ensued as to whether or not homophobia was particular to the NBA culture.  Such questions increased after Tim Hardaway, responding to a question about Amaechi’s announcement and the surrounding media coverage, told Dan LeBatard, “You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known,” Hardaway said. “I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States.” Hardaway was quickly banished from the NBA’s All-Star weekend, while David Stern dismissed the controversy arguing that “the question of the NBA is always, “have you got game?’”   (Breton 2007).  While the invocation of meritocracy is both instructive and without much evidence (think Craig Hodges), what was most revealing in terms of race and the ongoing culture was the efforts to isolate homophobia within the NBA, with hip-hop culture functioning as the source of homophobia within America’s basketball arenas. 

Efforts to invoke Allen Iverson’s rap lyrics, where he uttered the phrase “faggot tendencies,” or the reactions of many players, who spoke of discomfort around having a gay teammate, served as the basis of a simple conclusion: Amaechi’s decision to remain “in-the-closet” and the firestorm that resulted from his “coming-out-of-the-closet” demonstrate the heightened level of homophobia within the NBA (Thiel 2007; Whitley 2007).  It was not a societal problem, but an NBA problem; it was not an American thing; it was a black/hip-hop thing (if an NBA thing it’s gotta be a black thing).  LeBron James fueled the controversy, offering the following: “With teammates you have to be trustworthy, and if you're gay and you're not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy. So that's like the number one thing as teammates . . . we all trust each other. You've heard of the in-room locker room code. What happens in the locker room stays there. It's a trust factor.”. In response, Michael Wilbon similarly confined the issue to the sphere of basketball

Not to be too cynical, but I don't want to pay too much attention to reactions from a 22-year-old ballplayer with incredibly limited exposure, whose life has been little more than a series of tip-offs from biddy ball to AAU to high school to the pros. LeBron's reaction simply reflects the self-absorption of the day when it comes to young athletic gods whose transition from boyhood to manhood is in too many cases put off until retirement from the pros.

If we're lucky, the men and women who are both enlightened and emboldened will not only be supportive but will drown out the knuckleheads and Neanderthals and everybody who wants to slow the march of progress. Even one step away from tolerance, whether we're talking about race, gender, religious beliefs or sexuality, simply slows the march to the day when none of this stuff matters (2007).

Concluding that homophobia and ignorance concerning the GLBT community reflects the culture of basketball, Wilbon unknowingly constructs homophobia as exception, as a problem specific to the NBA.  Even Dave Zirin, often a source of progressive sports commentary, concludes that sports are unique concerning homophobia: “Sports is one of the last grand hamlets of homophobia. Amaechi poses a real challenge to the realities of the locker room, the press box and the owner's box: all places where I have heard homophobic comments used as casually as a comma. I give no credit to Stern's pretension that it just doesn't matter” (2007).  Others similarly wondered if hip-hop contributed to homophobia (Moore 2007; Amaechi 2007) or if other issues – violence, locker rooms – were at work as well.  In a league that regularly reduces women to sexual objects, that celebrates the hyper masculinity of its NBA players evident in the use of gendered/sexualized language (“Pau Gasol is soft”; “Sacramento Queens”), the hypocrisy here is endless.  Within sports culture that works to recode the WNBA as a heterosexual league as a counter narrative to assumptions about its lesbian presence, it is hard to accept the righteousness evident here.

Notwithstanding, the culture and the blackness of the league became a subtextual source of inquiry for the debate about homophobia within the NBA, ultimately exonerating whiteness/American through a scapegoating discourse.  While writing about Don Imus, Michael Awkward is particularly instructive in this case: “Put Simply,” Kobe Bryant “was made to stand in for millions of well-known and faceless” homophobes and other who tacitly protect their heterosexual privilege who GLBT communities and their allies “want desperately to identity, put on trial, and excoriate because of incontrovertible – but to this point often easily dismissed – ‘evidence’ of centuries of anti-gay violence, heterosexism, and homophobia.  With Kobe Bryant, we get a similar reductionist formula, where Bryant and all of his past experiences provide a supposed explanation for his use of this slur. 

The ease to which Bryant was condemned and the perceived self-righteousness reflect the hegemony of the white racial frame.  Bryant’s homophobic slur, his perceived homophobia, his emotional outbursts, and his evidence “childishness” here fit a larger script about black male bodies.  This instance and the claims about uber homophobia within sports culture (usually linked to basketball and football and not say hockey and baseball) and homophobia within the black community thus fit a larger narrative about black dysfunction, pathology and otherness.  “The casual sexism and homophobia reproduce the oppression of straight black men, providing a justification for ‘the denial of manhood to black men within a racialized society,” writes Michael Kimmel in “Toward a Pedagogy of the Oppressor.”  “‘You see,’ one can almost hear the establishment saying ‘those black men are like animals.  Look at how they treat their women!  They don’t deserve to be treated with respect.”  In other words, “the very mechanism that black men thought would restore manhood” – demonizing homosexuals, using anti-gay slurs, asserting and demonstrating traditional male values – “ends up being the pretext on which it is denied.” 

bell hooks takes up this issue with “Homophobia in Black Communities” arguing that “black communities may be perceived as more homophobic than other communities because there is a tendency for individuals in black communities to express in an outspoken way anti-gay sentiment.”  Furthering the distinction between black and white homophobia she writes, “yet a distinction must be made between black people overtly expressing prejudice toward homosexuals and white people who never make homophobic comments but who have the power to actively exploit and oppress gay people in areas of housing, employing, etc.”  Echoing the criticism offered by Dwight McBride in Why I hate Abercrombie and Fitch, I find myself dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the binaries constructed here as well as the tacit acceptance/privileging of one form of bigotry over the other. 

Yet, hooks challenges readers to think about how and why a public discourse around homophobia relies and focuses on the uttererances of Kobe Bryant, Isaiah Washington or Chris Brown, and not the ways in which homophobia is ingrained in our culture, language, and institutions.  Why do these black men become the moments for public righteousness and concerns about bigotry and not the ubiquity of anti-gay slurs at American schools, anti-gay hate crimes, or any number of examples?  Similarly, these spectacle serve not as a means to interrogate homophobia, heterosexism, and anti-gay violence as manifested in a myriad of spaces but as a moment to celebrate “us” (“the normal) as accepting and progressive in the demonization of the other.  It becomes a missed opportunity to interrogate our own language and prejudices for the sake of imagining the Other as the Other. 

hooks’ comments also mirror the hegemonic belief that black males are likely to express and hold onto homophobic beliefs, a fact that is complicated at best and patently without basis in another sense.   In “A Comparison of African American Men and White College Students Affective and Attitudinal Reactions to Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Individuals,” Charles Negy and Russell Eiseman found that blacks were only slightly more accepting of anti-gay sentiments.  These differences, however, disappear when accounting for religiosity.  Noting, “that most ethnic groups are not very accepting of homosexuality,” the authors conclude, “for both African Americans and whites, gender and religious commitment predicted homophobia.”  Despite these findings and ample evidence about societal homophobia, the reaction to Bryant’s comments and commonplace discussions about homophobia within the black community erases the larger issues at hand.  A CNN poll recently found that 48% thought homosexuality was morally wrong.  In 2001, Human Rights Watch reported that 2 million American teenagers suffered because of anti-gay slurs and taunts.  Similarly, according to one study, “Gay students hear anti-gay slurs as often as 26 times each day; faculty intervention occurs in only about 3% of those cases” while another found that 97% of high school students “regularly hear homophobic remarks from their peers.”

Yet, these sort of spectacles that imagine homophobia as unique to the black community, as particular to basketball culture, as reflecting the values and ethos of hip-hop not only furthers the demonization of blackness but in term safely confines homophobia to the dysfunctional Other in need of education and punishment.  By scapegoating homophobia as a sports thing, a black thing, a hip-hop thing, or a Kobe thing, the discourse lets a lot of people and institutions off the hook.

Responding to increasing criticism directed at the African American community in lead up to the November 2008, which put the issue of gay marriage on the ballot with Proposition 8, Ta-Nehisi Coates succinctly highlighted the danger in ignoring or defending in instances of homophobia, yet not using it as a moment to scapegoat and demonize African Americans:

I don't like the idea of being an apologists for homophobes--least of all black homophobes. Also, I'm concerned that my defense not make black folks think that this isn't an issue worth our attention. But sweeping statements like "no ethnic community [is] as homophobic in America as African-Americans" should induce some serious pangs of skepticism. Are African-Americans really more homophobic than, say, Italian-Americans? Are we really more homophobic than Hasidic Jews? Than Caribbean Americans? Than Puerto-Ricans?

As a teachable moment, we must ask what are we being taught and why?  What is it teaching us about society, others, and our self? Does it teach us about a larger issue of prejudice, homophobia or bigotry?  Did it teach us about language and the normalization of heterosexism and homophobia in our everyday life? Does it push us to think about language constructs “normal” and “Other” and the impact/consequences of language as everyday violence?  When a person (Kobe or otherwise) “hurls that antigay slur at a referee or anyone else — let’s call it the F-word — he is telling boys, men and anyone watching that when you are frustrated, when you are as angry as can be, the best way to demean and denigrate a person, even one in a position of power, is to make it clear that you think he is not a real man, but something less,” writes John Amaechi. “It is an indication of the power of that word, and others like it, to brutalize and dehumanize. This F-word, which so many people seem to think is no big deal, is the postscript to too many of those lives cut short.”  Did we learn this lesson or have we been too focused on what Kobe did and not what Kobe reveals?

Amaechi efforts to contextualize, to move beyond the individual, to reflect on the consequences have been unique to the discussion.  Unfortunately, much of the public rancor has “become another spectacle, evidence of ‘deviance’ for a mainstream public condition to think of black people and black men in particular as such”   (Neal, 2005, p. 81).  By focusing on intent, on sports, on Kobe, and the larger discourse about black homophobia, we have missed an opportunity, creating another moment where the wrong lessons are being taught and learned.   Homophobia, anti-gay bigotry and harmful slurs directed at the GLBT community are not a black, hip-hop, or sports thing, but an American thing.  A me and you thing.  

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David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.

Homophobic Slurs Are Always Meant to Offend

Kobe Bryant's recent use of an anti-gay slur is a prime example of how we need to directly address homophobia -- by re-examining what it means to be a man.

Homophobic Slurs Are Always Meant to Offend
by Mychal Denzel Smith | The Root

A few years ago, during an awkward attempt at father-son bonding, I found out my father was a homophobe. It was right after the Academy Awards, and there was a lot of discussion about the film Brokeback Mountain being snubbed for best picture. My father and I were watching television together, and he said to me, with a chuckle, "I've watched Westerns all my life, and never once did I think cowboys were faggots."

I don't know that he recognized how visibly uncomfortable I was with his word choice, because he used it again before I left the room. I never thought my father had particularly warm feelings about gays before that moment, but the open-air homophobia was jarring.

It's a big part of the heterosexual-male bonding experience: In an effort to prove a sense of collective manhood, some heterosexual men trade homophobic barbs with one another, denounce and deride being gay and vehemently defend their own heterosexual credentials. It starts pretty early in the socialization process, with "gay" being used as a derogatory term on the playground before most even know what "gay" means, and eventually it makes its way into other spaces that tend to be perceived as havens for heterosexual manhood (e.g., locker rooms, basketball courts, rap music).

This is what Kobe Bryant was doing when he shouted "f---ing faggot" at a referee during Tuesday's Los Angeles Lakers-San Antonio Spurs game. Bryant says his use of the homophobic slur was not intended to offend anyone, which hardly seems plausible.

He is well aware that "faggot" is a homophobic slur, or else he would have felt no need to apologize for his comments; he would have claimed ignorance. Given that he was visibly angry when he blurted out the slur, any comment that he made toward the referee at that point was clearly intended to offend him. But the use of this particular word reveals something deeper.

It's the belief that homosexuality is inherently inferior and an undesirable trait; therefore, to refer to someone with slurs usually reserved for gays is an attempt to belittle that person further. The quickest and most efficient way to insult a man has become to call into question his sexual orientation, and the easiest way to bond with one another comes through sharing a mutual homophobia (regrettably, these are things that I have personally done in the past but now recognize their idiocy).

And no one questions this. Sure, Bryant had to pay a fine and meet with LGBT activists, but apologists for his behavior abound. Society teaches us that manhood, in part, is defined by an ability to impregnate a woman and subsequently provide for the mother and child financially, while exercising control over their livelihoods through the threat of physical domination. For some, gay men and women represent a threat, an attack on the very concept of manhood.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

R&B Artist Marsha Ambrosius Dishes on Controversial Video

R&B Artist Marsha Ambrosius Dishes on Controversial Video
Tuesday, April 05, 2011| by Eddie Robinson

R&B vocalist Marsha Ambrosius is not your typical diva. Her debut album "Late Nights & Early Mornings" — which peaked at No. 2 on Billboard's 200 Albums chart and No. 1 on the R&B Albums chart — features music about passionate romance, bitter breakups and gay suicide.

In her latest music video for her current single "Far Away," the singer showcases scenes of gay bashing and homophobia — subjects that are still taboo in the African American community.

Expanding The Boundaries of R&B

Ambrosius spent the early part of her career as half of a neo-soul duo, Floetry. She's also written hits for Alicia Keys and Michael Jackson, so she's chosen to take some risks as a solo artist.

"Far Away" is a song written by Marsha after a close friend of hers attempted suicide because he was gay. The singer said she realized she was getting into untested territory in the world of R&B.

"It would be easy for me to write a song about a relationship I was in with my boyfriend at the time," said the Grammy Award nominee. "We'd be going through it — fighting, back and forth — and I'm standing in the rain with the big hair and the eyelashes — that's standard! That's all been done before. But for me, I wanted to tell the story that wouldn't be told otherwise."

Read the Full Essay @ WNYC.org

Brave Soul: Marsha Ambrosius' "Far Away"

Brilliant. Timely. Brave. Necessary.

Murder Music: On Jamaican Dancehall and Homophbia

Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation.

Murder Music
by Ilan Greenberg

On a breezy evening in mid-April a committee boasting some of Jamaica’s most venerable citizens convened an open-air meeting under the auspices of the department of government at the University of the West Indies. After almost a year and a half of sifting through charts and listening to old vinyl recordings, the committee co-chairmen, which included the president of Jamaica’s National Gallery and a former finance minister, presented to several hundred members of the public their list of the top one hundred Jamaican songs. Pandemonium ensued.

Audience members objected to the choice for number one song, “One Love,” Bob Marley’s sweet paean to togetherness, as being too saccharine. People jammed the open microphone to point out the under-representation of female artists. Others testily questioned why so few of the chosen top songs reflected reggae’s subversive, anti-establishment politics. Several people demanded a more transparent process. But the most passionate complaint from the crowd—which included members of the media, faculty in the university’s department of reggae studies, music industry figures, and ordinary music fans—was voiced over and over again from younger members of the audience: Where on this top one hundred list were the dancehall songs?

Dancehall is a beat-heavy, lyrically-dense, energetic, and synthesizer-driven music that has much in common with American hip-hop. It evolved in the early nineteen nineties out of the classic reggae of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff—the often feel-good, reefer-party music championing the Rastafarian visions of social justice and pan-African celebration, which had powered Jamaica to worldwide recognition in the nineteen seventies and had catapulted Jamaican musicians into the far reaches of global iconography.

Surging in popularity worldwide, dancehall acts routinely fill venues like Madison Square Garden. The biggest dancehall performers sell out their U.S. concert dates within minutes. In Japan some forty thousand fans roar to the beat of dancehall acts in a sold-out stadium concert staged every September. Dance moves pioneered by dancehall fans frequently turn up in the videos of American hip hop stars.

But dancehall is hugely controversial—inside and outside Jamaica. Detractors echo many of the same complaints voiced against American hip-hop, including that the music promotes misogyny and violence. But the brief against dancehall far exceeds criticism inveighed against any other genre of popular music. Dancehall is a crucible for Jamaica’s irreconcilable notions of class and masculinity and identity. Most of all, dancehall is accused of fomenting vicious anti-gay violence.

Read the Full Essay @ Guernica

'Left of Black': Episode #6 featuring James Braxton Peterson and Rashod Ollison

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Bucknell University Professor James Braxton Peterson in a discussion of the legacy of the Million Man March, The Morehouse College dress code, homophobia and bullying, and Hip-Hop Masculinity.

Neal also talks with former Baltimore Sun music critic and current pop culture critic for The Virginian Pilot and Jet Magazine about the current state of R&B Music and the career of Prince.

'Left of Black': Episode #3 featuring Salamishah Tillet and David Ikard

Host Mark Anthony Neal Discusses Sexual Predators with University of Pennsylvania Professor Salamishah Tillet & Florida State University Professor David Ikard.

Professor Tillet is Founder of A Long Walk Home, a non-profit organization that uses art therapy and the visual and performance arts to document, to educate and to bring about social change.

Professor Ikard is the author of Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism.

Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides

Do schools care more about racism than homophobia?

Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides
by Keli Goff

There’s a famous story in the Goff household about my mom’s first week back in school shortly after it was integrated. There was a boy who apparently wasn’t a fan of the progress our country was making and decided to take it out on my mom by shouting the N-word at her repeatedly, every single day. For days mom turned the other cheek, so to speak, but on the fifth day she declared loud enough for everyone to hear, that she was going to beat the stuffing out of the guy. Now anyone who knows my mother knows that she would have, had the principal, who was white, not stepped in and warned Mr. Bully that if he didn’t leave her alone she would have the principal’s permission to hit him and would also be kicked out of school.

That was the end of Mr. Bully.

Most of us believe that the kind of prejudice my mom faced is a thing of the past. The thinking goes, “sure prejudice exists but it’s more subtle” or as an older family friend once said, “people no longer spit in your face but in your food.”

But in recent days we’ve all been reminded that this is not true and that the kind of prejudice and open hostility my mom faced fifty years ago is still alive and well in America’s schools.

In recent weeks Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi and Raymond Chase killed themselves. While we are still awaiting key details in some of the cases, we do know this: All of the boys either self-identified as gay or their classmates believed that they were. Billy Lucas was 15 years old, while Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were just thirteen years old yet they faced constantly bullying, ranging from verbal to physical, at the hands of classmates for their perceived sexual orientation. In the case of Tyler Clementi, the college freshman is believed to have jumped from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate allegedly tweeted, then recorded and broadcast an intimate encounter Tyler had with another man.

Sadly these are not the first instances of this type of bullying resulting in death. Last year the suicide of 11-year old Carl Walker made national headlines when he hung himself after being teased relentlessly by classmates who accused him of being gay.

Let me ask you a question. If a young student was called the N-word every day for weeks or months on end, and after repeated cries for help finally took his own life, how quickly do you think citizens of all races would take to the streets to protest? Or better yet how quickly would Al Sharpton and co. demand accountability from the school, and elected officials under the threat of casting the kind of media spotlight that people like Don Imus have nightmares about?

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

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Keli Goff is a political blogger for TheLoop21.com. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic Books, March 2008).

NBM Saturday Edition:(Not) About Eddie Long: BlackQueerness and Social Life

Special to NewBlackMan

(Not) About Eddie Long: BlackQueerness and Social Life

by Ashon Crawley

Queerness (always already a concept in and of blackness) once and again comes down on us, befalls us, befuddles us. Queerness rears its ugly head, showing itself, laying bare the necessity of the hypothetical and hypocritical in any theology, BlackChristianity notwithstanding. The general question: why are we all up in arms regarding the (al)legibility of the potentiality of queerness in BlackChristianity once again? I am not interested in Eddie Long in his particularity as much as I am intrigued by what his seeming infractions – and the many responses to it – speak about notions of sexuality, religious tradition and the structured life of BlackQueer folks. I want to make a few general observations, possible because of my obsession with the words of Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison and Fred Moten. These three, in my understanding, engage projects that ask how thought and imagination – of gender and sexuality for Spillers (see “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”); of literature and narrativity for Morrison (see Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination); of the western philosophical tradition for Moten (see “Knowledge of Freedom”) – are always troubled by a pathogen that needs be detected, diagnosed and discarded.

So I want to here make a claim that there is an irreducible erotics at the heart of Christianity generally, certainly in the western formation of Protestantism with its focus on and targeting of the body’s behaviors and comportments, even moreso true for articulations of Christianity in Black(ness). This erotics is that which continually is in need of control, in need of policing, in need of curtailment. In Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, Roderick Ferguson convincingly argues that the Black Holiness/Pentecostal church targets the body of individuals as that which needs to literally behave itself. This behaving of oneself is always done through the control of the libidinal excesses, through a rhetorics against eroticism. Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham in Righteous Discontent elucidates how the politics of respectability was likewise used to target and curtail the seeming loose behaviors of Black Folks as a means to citizenship and Christian formation. One may begin to think about the relationship between notions of self-control that Black Protestantism can be said to aspire and reckless abandon that BlackQueer folks may be thought to embody and perform. BlackQueer folks are the performative vestibularity (Spillers’s word) of the particular Black Church context in which I am interested. BlackQueer folks in this religiocultural context come to stand in for everything that the one who is “saved, sanctified and filled with the holy ghost” is not. Joseph Roach might say that BlackQueer folks, though marginalized and placed on the outside, are central to the faith tenets of this particularly raced, sexed, religious context.

This is a longwinded argument regarding the necessity of proximity of a certain BlackQueerness to any articulation of BlackChristianity. Supposedly, being saved, sanctified and filled with the holy ghost is everything BlackQueerness is not. But BlackQueer folk are necessary in church buildings and in mental imaginations as targets of hatred that is nothing other than residue of the patriarchal, sexist, racist, classist society in which we all live, move and have our being. BlackQueer folks, then, must occupy space of choir lofts and the prepared notes of preachers if any of that preaching is to be effective…so it seems. I am convinced that BlackQueerness, as a sensual, sensuous field, is the libidinal, excessive, always already out of control, in need of control, philosophy that preachers write and orate against. Or, more precisely (hopefully), there is an intense and fundamental relationship between the desire for respectability, citizenship and salvation on the one hand with the BlackQueer figure on the other. This BlackQueer figure figures its way into sermons and songs by way of denial (outright, overwrought, write out, wrought over), by glances, by stares, by rumor, by gossip, by condemnation, by celebration (we sing and play the organ very, very well!).

If this is the case – and certainly, Eddie Long might agree with my sentiment of the some purported sinfulness of BlackQueer folks as he has in times past, taking firm stances for the family and against marriage equality – BlackQueerness is a sort of pathogen that exists previous to declarations of salvation; we might even say it is the force that animates BlackChristian formation. Some call it sin. I call it a particular enjoyment and pleasure of erotics that is foundational for life and love that was the condition of possibility for abolition movement, for modes of flight and escape, for what we call freedom. (And I don’t want to be “saved” from that…and I doubt you do either. So the quest of BlackChristianity since enslavement has been to figure out a way to assert desires freedom while somehow striving toward American citizenship – recognition by the state.) Normative BlackChristianity (so intimately related to the Christianity of its origin, though this is not my concern here) suppresses its anoriginal BlackQueerness by recognition, relegation and removal. This removal only a ruse.

Many are astonished by such allegations. Astonishment – given when folks say “I can’t believe it!” or “Let’s pray for him!” or “This can’t be true!” – is the articulation of the betrayal of knowledge by stupefied senses. The etymology of “astonish” is “to stun, to daze, deafen, astound.” The senses – of sight, smell, taste, touch, sound – are cut, augmented by some seemingly new knowledge that, we know, isn’t too new at all. The senses are stunned by the knowledge of BlackQueer folks existing and having social life in the face and place of impossibility. It’s like how Harriet Tubman escaped slavery, arrived to New York only to find herself alone. She then stole her body back to the very place she left in order to bring others with her. There was a desire for and movement toward sociality that animated her notion of joy and happiness, what we call freedom.

This elucidates my concern for how BlackQueerness – in the space of the religious circle that seeks, but is also predicated upon, its exclusion – astonishes by the alleged and the legible. Some folks simply don’t want to believe that a person like Long could even engage in such activities because the activities are supposedly reprehensible. Because of the position of power he occupies, and by way of the rhetoric he utilizes against BlackQueer folks, the putting to question of Long is put to question. Or, how can one allege that he is even allegible? For many, Long and others like him do not even inhabit the zone of the alleged because of money, power, respect is a covering and mode of escape. The concern here, I think is this: what does it mean that a type of BlackQueerness can make even the most successful, blessed, prosperous (and those all should've been in scare-quotes) man succumb, acquiesce, fall? This isn't about him. It's about the notion that he has all these material objects/possessions that should have been able to "protect" him from such penetrations (and I mean that in many resonances, whether or not any of the alleged sex acts were indeed penetrative). We live in a society of possession and he preaches prosperity through possession. Yet, none of that could protect his libidinal borders.

This isn't about him. It's about those of us who don't have these possessions. How ever will we “protect” ourselves? The media harps on the innocence of the accusers and the church speaks about the possessions they lacked (e.g., they were poor kids, broke into the church, tried to steal possessions). The media and church also speak about Long in terms of material possession, his wife and children included. He has attained this stuff, so these intimate zones of contact, these desires for companionship seem contradictory at best, scary at worst. Salient is the relationship between possession of stuff (capitalism) and modes of expected socialsexual behavior. We gotta rethink what it means to be a sexual being. We gotta be attentive to how capitalism works with and against modes of religious desire. As such, allegibility, in my estimation, is a concern for the possibilities to think through and against modes of power, of authority, of religious or embodied text. If we can allege Long, religious tradition is ledged, place on the sill about to topple over and break. To put to question the very questions is to think about alleging as a condition of possibility for new modes of existence that do not depend upon suppression and relegation, but rather openness celebration.

More intriguing for me, though, is the notion of legibility, the possibilities for discernment. There is a social life occurring underground, outside, beneath the surface. It’s that open secret that everyone suspects but few respect. Who has this knowledge, this discernment? Astonishment comes by way of the kind of social life – men (and more expansively, all gendered folks) laughing, loving, sexing, hugging, enjoying each other’s company – inhabiting the homophobic zone of BlackChristianity makes possible. To steal a question from Moten for my own purpose: “what if desire is correspondent to a certain kind of event to which a certain set of social conditions make possible?” I want to displace the question of Long’s particularity, of his alleged acts to ask, rather, what are the social conditions in which he (and his accusers, and many, many others in similar positions) have desire?

Being set on the outside of any institution does not mean that life simply goes away, that folks don’t have relationships, don’t want to love. It means that they (we) find ways to do it in the space of impossible conditions. This is not to claim that it’s cool for Long to be homophobic, an abuser of power or boys. But to step aside from that question, I ask what sorts of possibilities for life exist for those who have been and continually are constrained, compressed? The sort that is alleged regarding Long is certainly one possibility. But there are others as well: where having a coke with a lover in the public square can become an occasion fo poetry; where the secret smiles and winks and nods body forth love. I am interested in what the social conditions for desire to be enacted are. The possibility of a BlackQueer social life – not merely as supplement but constitutive – in the face of BlackChristianity’s very denial of this social life allows us to be attentive to how desire for relationship, for sociality, is a spiritual thing.

And…

watch this, watch this, watch this

...someone should preach about that.

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Ashon Crawley is a graduate student in the department of English at Duke University.

Commentary: Why Rev. Long's Sexuality Isn't the Point

Commentary: Why Rev. Long's Sexuality Isn't the Point
by Saida Grundy

This week we were actually not surprised at all to learn that another "mega-church" preacher was accused of doing in his private life the exact thing he threatens hellfire against from the pulpit.

The consistent deluge of moral hypocrisy from evangelist clergymen has them running neck and neck with GOP elected officials in the "Who-can-hate-the-most-in-others-what-they-actually-do-themselves" 4x4 relay race...

Which brings us to metropolitan Atlanta. Two Georgia men have alleged that Eddie Long*, pastor of 25,000-member New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, coerced them into sexual acts that began when both were teenagers. The salacious details of the case unfold like birthday gifts to "The Boondocks" writing team. None of the checklist items of career-ending sex scandal are spared here. The plaintiffs separately filed complaints that accuse Long of exploiting his spiritual authority over them in order to solicit sexual acts in exchange for lavish gifts, trips, cars and electronics.

I have always considered public allegations against sham moral leadership to be good wholesome family fun, and for the moment, we are all entitled to be swept up in the licentious hoopla of it all. But to stop short of understanding what should be our real problem with Long's message and politics only baits our own homophobia. This is not Eddie Long's fall from grace, for he never should have been in our good graces. Let us consider that the Reverend's most serious offenses against our conscience were committed proudly in broad daylight.

Read the Full Essay @ Essence.com

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Saida Grundy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Eddie Long Case Should Mark the End of Black Church Homophobia

Eddie Long Case Should Mark the End of Black Church Homophobia

by Anthea Butler

Bishop Eddie Long, megachurch pastor and prosperity purveyor, has now been named in three separate lawsuits alleging sexual coercion of two young men in Atlanta, Georgia. Bishop Long, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “is one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement.”

Like the formerly-closeted Ken Mehlman, who recently repented for his work to prevent gay marriage, these lawsuits, if substantiated, would suggest that Long’s homophobia began with his own self-loathing.

What is especially disturbing about this story is the manner in which Long is alleged to have lured young men on trips and sexual encounters. Calling the plaintiffs his “spiritual sons,” the lawsuit states that Long used various rituals in a ceremony to “seal” his “sons”—including candles, exchange of jewelry, and discussion of biblical verses that reinforce the spiritual and God-like connection between himself and the young man.

Isn’t this the man who marched with Bernice King alongside five thousand African Americans against gay marriage? As Sarah Posner points out here on RD, this practice of manipulating congregants into sexual relationships stems from “kingdom now” relational theology, mandating close relationships with spiritual leaders or “spiritual parents” in an individual’s life.

Conveniently, Long’s Longfellows Youth Academy was a place where young black men could be “trained to love, live and lead,” with Long and others acting as “spiritual parents.” Though they appear to have been taken down the website had included testimonials such as: “My real journey to Manhood didn’t start until I joined Longfellows.”

Another testimonial powerpoint outlined how the Ishman masculine journey and Bishop Long’s teachings about the bloodline stated that their “bloodlines should not be destroyed” and that “we have to take care of our bloodline because if we don’t, we are not doing our jobs as men.” With the revelations of sexual activity and the link of one of the plaintiffs to the academy, the academy is being sued, along with New Birth church as a corporation.

However, that’s only part of the story. Sex scandals happen everyday in church because leaders and members of strict churches can’t uphold the high standards of living they promote, aspire to, and harangue people over. The endless carousel of revelations about the Catholic Church worldwide is exhibit A of that broken message. In that sense, there is nothing new here.

The real story however, is that this case explodes the cover of the black church’s internal don’t ask, don’t tell policy which has had a profound effect on the community and its followers. It’s very interesting that the Long scandal broke almost immediately after black pastors led by Bishop Harry Jackson came together with the Family Research Council to oppose the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act. Many black pastors have staked their entire ministries on the “family” and the obsession with mainstream gender norms that encourage heterosexual marriage, abstinence, and patriarchal norms. It is an all-encompassing message that is obsessed with the suppression of sexuality in black churches, mega-churches and storefronts alike.

Read the Full Essay @ Religion Dispatches

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Anthea Butler is associate professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making A Sanctified World (UNC Press, 2007)