The color of discipline: Civil rights and black sexuality

American Quarterly

Volumn 60, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 101-128

  Russell, Thaddeus ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950161994     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2008.0000     Document Type: Review

References (101)

1. Andrew Sullivan, "Integration Day," New York Times, May 17, 2004, 21
2. "Black Ministers Slam Gay Unions," New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 18, 2004, 10
3. See also Tony Perkins, "Gender Is Different from Race," USA Today, May 18, 2004, 19A
4. David Garrow, "How the Brown Ruling Led the Way," Financial Times, May 17, 2004, 17
5. Erin Texeira, "Gays and African-Americans; Parallels on Rights Case Anniversary," Newsday, May 17, 2004, A7
6. Bob Egelko, "Brown vs. Board of Education: 50 Years Later; 1954 Ruling Seen as Model of Judicial Activism; Landmark Segregation and Gay Nuptial Cases Have Similarities," San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, 2004, Al0
7. Found at http://www.andrewsullivan.com/homosexuality.php; Tamar Lewin, "The Gay Rights Movement, Settled Down," New York Times, February 29, 2004, 5; http://www.indegayforum.org/authors/vanasco/vanasco4.html
8. Found at http://www.lambdalegal.org/cgi-bin/iowa/documents/record?record= 1336. Powerful critiques of rights discourse are presented in Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
9. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 244
10. Bruce Nugent was the most notable exception. Eric Garber, "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 318-31
11. Chauncey, Gay New York, 227-332
12. The Committee of Fourteen's annual report for 1928 was released on October 14, 1929. Committee of Fourteen, Annual Report (New York, 1929). Powell's attack began four weeks later
13. See "Night Clubs Found Chief Vice Centres: Committee of Fourteen, in Its Annual Survey, Reports Harlem Conditions Worst," New York Times, October 14, 1929, 29
14. Powell's first antihomosexual article, "Dr. A. C. Powell Scores Pulpit Evils," appeared on the front page of the New York Age on November 16, 1929
15. The heteronormative domestication of African Americans was originally a white project. See Katherine M. Franke, "Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of African American Marriages," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 11 (Summer 1999): 251-309
16. Garber, "A Spectacle in Color," 320
17. Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 98-99
18. Myles Vollmer, "New Year's Eve Drag," 2, Folder 2, Box 140, Series 4, Ernest Burgess Papers, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
19. Allen Drexel, "Before Paris Burned: Race, Class, and Male Homosexuality on the Chicago South Side, 1935-1960," in Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, ed. Brett Beemyn (New York: Routledge, 1997), 119-44 (quotes on 132-33 and 136-37, respectively)
20. Vollmer, "New Year's Eve Drag," 3-4
21. See Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 115
22. Brett Beemyn, "A Queer Capital: Race, Class, Gender, and the Changing Social Landscape of Washington's Gay Communities, 1940-1955," in Creating a Place for Ourselves, ed. Beemyn, 192-94
23. Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 105-9
24. Chauncey, Gay New York, 10, 242-43, 321-24
25. and Drexel, "Before Paris Burned," l44n53
26. "Hamilton Lodge, 710," New York Age, March 5, 1932, 9
27. "Masquerade Ball Draws 5,000 People," Amsterdam News, February 20, 1929, 2
28. "Mere Male Blossoms Out in Garb of Milady at Big Hamilton Lodge Ball," Amsterdam News, February 19, 1930, 3
29. "Hamilton Lodge Ball Draws 7,000," Amsterdam News, March 2, 1932, 2
30. "Snow and Ice Cover Streets as Pansies Blossom Out at Hamilton Lodge's Dance," Amsterdam News, February 28, 1934, 1
31. Roi Ottley, "Hectic Harlem," Amsterdam News, March 7, 1936, 13
32. See Michigan Chronicle, April 19, 1952, 10. Quotes are taken from Michigan Chronicle, November 10, 1951, 18; November 17, 1951, 18; February 16, 1952, 19; February 23, 1952, 23; November 7, 1953, 24; January 2, 1954, 9; and July 28, 1951, 21
33. Marybeth Hamilton, "Sexual Politics and African-American Music; or, Placing Little Richard in History," History Workshop Journal 46 (Autumn 1998): 161-76; "People Are Talking About ...," Jet, January 10, 1952, 49
34. For examples of the black magazines' coverage of the balls and homosexuality, see "The Man Who Lived 30 Years as a Woman," Ebony, October 1951, 23-26; "Gay Affair Names 'Queen,'" Jet, November 15, 1951, 63-64
35. "Male or Female?" Jet, December 13, 1951, 35
36. "Female Impersonators Hold Costume Balls," Ebony, March 1952, 62-67
37. "The Truth About ... Female Impersonators," Jet, October 2, 1952, 26-31
38. "Female Impersonators," Ebony, March 1953, 64-68
39. "Women Who Act like Men," Jet, April 2, 1953, 26-29
40. "Women Who Pass for Men," Jet, January 28, 1954, 22-24
41. and "The Woman Who Lived as a Man for 15 Years," Ebony, November 1954, 93-98
42. The New York Age is quoted in Chauncey, Gay New York, 259
43. Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2000), 338
44. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin, 1994), 37-38
45. Drexel, "Before Paris Burned," 126
46. Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990), 116-17
47. Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 73-74, 86
48. James Baldwin, "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood," in Collected Essays, by James Baldwin (New York: Library of America, 1998), 814-29 (quoted section on 819)
49. Daneel Buring, Lesbian and Gay Memphis: Building Communities Behind the Magnolia Curtain (New York: Routledge, 1997), 91-93
50. Beemyn, "A Queer Capital," 202-3
51. James T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 151, 286, 292
52. bell hooks, "Homophobia in Black Communities," Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 120-26
53. Courtland Milloy, "The Life and Times of the Queen of Washington's Underworld," Washington Post Magazine, September 28, 1980, 14
54. Sharon Harley, "'Working for Nothing but for a Living': Black Women in the Underground Economy," in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work, ed. Sharon Harley (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 48-66
55. Tim Retzloff, "'Seer or Queer?' Postwar Fascination with Detroit's Prophet Jones," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8 (May 2002): 271-96
56. On Jones's interpretation of Genesis and cohabitation, see Michigan Chronicle, May 28, 1955, 6, and July 30, 1955, 3
57. "Fire Hose Baptism," Ebony, October 1955, 102-6
58. "Farewell to Daddy Grace," Ebony, April 1960, 25-34
59. Richard Newman, "Grace, Charles Emmanuel," American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-02030.html, February 2000 (accessed January 18, 2003)
60. Lenwood G. Davis, Daddy Grace: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992)
61. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 41-51
62. Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., "Sex in the Church," Ebony, November 1951, 27-34
63. Gladys Bentley, "I Am a Woman Again," Ebony, August 1952, 92-98
64. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Transaction, 1944), 928-29
65. Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 125
66. Waldo E. Martin Jr., Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998), 173
67. Jet, which was geared more toward a working-class readership and was less concerned with "respectability," did continue to cover the balls. Gregory Conerly, "Swishing and Swaggering: Homosexuality in Black Magazines during the 1950s," in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2001), 386, 389. Conerly attributes the desexualization of Ebony to the economic recession in 1954, not to the ascendancy of civil rights ideology
68. Retzloff, "'Seer or Queer?'" 279-85; "The Rise and Fall of Prophet Jones," Ebony, October 1956, 63-66
69. James Baldwin, "The Dangerous Road before Martin Luther King," in Collected Essays, 638-39
70. "Conquering Self-Centeredness," August 11, 1957, in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 4, Symbol of the Movement: January 1957-December 1958, ed. Clayborne Carson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 253, 256, 257
71. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1958), 223
72. "Some Things We Must Do," December 5, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Carson et al., 4: 336
73. Martin Luther King Jr., "Advice for Living," Ebony, April 1958, 104. All quotes from "Some Things We Must Do."
74. "Advice for Living," January 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. Carson et al., 4: 348-49
75. John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 372
76. Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Carson et al., 4: "Some Things We Must Do," December 5, 1957, 335-40
77. "Advice for Living," March 1958, 374
78. "The Birth of a New Nation," April 7, 1957, 159
79. Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, "'Dress modestly, neatly ... as if you were going to church': Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement," in Gender in the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 90-96
80. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 317
81. King, Stride toward Freedom, 203
82. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, rev. ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 191, 205, 210, 231, 363, 368
83. E. Franklin Frazier, "Negro, Sex Life of the African and American," in The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior, ed. Albert Ellis and Albert Abarbanel (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1961), 775
84. M. Belinda Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, "Trends in African American Family Formation: A Theoretical and Statistical Overview," in The Decline in Marriage among African Americans: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Implications, ed. M. Belinda Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (New York: Sage, 1995), 10-11
85. Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965)
86. Marion Hayes, "A Century of Change: Negroes in the U.S. Economy, 1860-1960," Monthly Labor Review (December 1962): 1364
87. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 932-35. See also Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 72
88. Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 136-37
89. John H. Johnson, with Lerone Bennett Jr., Succeeding against the Odds (New York: Amistad, 1989), 235
90. Marybeth Hamilton, "Sexuality, Authenticity and the Making of the Blues Tradition," Past and Present 169 (November 2000): 132-60
91. Joel Whitburn, Joel Whitburn Presents Top R&B/Hip-Hop Singles, 1942-2004 (Menomonee Falls, Wis.: Record Research, 2004), 653-58
92. Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)
93. Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock 'n'Roll (New York: De Capo, 1993), 18, 23
94. Martin Luther King Jr., "Advice for Living," Ebony, April 1958, 104
95. Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 52, 150
96. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (repr.; New York: Continuum International, 1999), 176
97. C. Eric Lincoln, "The Absent Father Haunts the Negro Family," New York Times Magazine, November 28, 1965, 60
98. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 70
99. Online at http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm
100. Martin Luther King Jr., "The Dignity of Family Life," in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, ed. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T Press, 1967), 402-9
101. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 107, 125, 161, 162, 167