Some ethnic gays are coming home; Or, the trouble with interraciality

Textual Practice

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 219-235

  Chu, Wei Cheng Raymond ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Black; Desire; Ethnic; Gay; Interracial; White

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849183271     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369708582275     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. I do not distinguish between 'race' and 'ethnicity' - as some people do - as a wider category and its sub-concept. Instead, 'ethnic' and its derivatives are used mainly to complement where 'race' and its derivatives do not apply. The Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations (1984/8), ed. Ellis Cashmore, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1994) also helps: 'whereas "race" stands for the attribu- tions of one group, ethnic group stands for the creative response of a people who feel somehow marginal to the mainstream of society' (p. 102).
2. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, 'Race, sexual politics and black masculinity: a dossier', in Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (eds), Male Order (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), p. 97.
3. Richard Fung, 'Looking for my penis: the eroticized Asian in gay video porn', in Russell Leong (ed.), Asian American Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 184; my emphasis.
4. Marlon Riggs, 'Tongues untied', in Essex Hemphill (ed.), Brother to Brother (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1991), pp. 202-3.
5. This plea is actually a highly accentuated quotation from pioneering black gay activist Joseph Beam, whose original line is: 'Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act of the eighties' (Joseph Beam, 'Brother to brother: words from the heart', in Beam (ed.), In the Life (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1986), p. 240).
6. Mercer and Julien, 'Race, sexual politics and black masculinity', p. 127. See also Isaac Julien and Pratibha Parmar, 'In conversation', in Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta (eds), Ecstatic Antibodies (London: Rivers Oram, 1990).
7. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1993).
8. See, for instance, Henry Louis Gates, jun., 'The black man's burden', in Gina Dent (ed.), Black Popular Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992).
9. For The Darker Side of Black in this regard, see Bruce Morrow, 'An interview with Isaac Julien', Callaloo, 18 (1995), pp. 406-15.
10. As to Beauty himself, although some critics take his apotheosis in the film as reaffirming the beauty of formerly stigmatized racial features, his ethnicity is in effect rather ambiguous. Kaja Silverman unwittingly describes Beauty in a later appearance (she fails to recognize him here) as 'a man of indeterminate ethnicity' (Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 121). Indeed, Julien himself envisions Beauty as 'more or less light-skinned': see 'States of desire: Isaac Julien in conversation with bell hooks', in Isaac Julien and Colin MacCabe, Diary of a Young Soul Rebel (London: BFI, 1991), pp. 128-9.
11. See Essex Hemphill, 'If his name were Mandingo' (1985), in Hemphill, Ceremonies (New York: Plume, 1992), pp. 141-2.
12. In Mercer and Julien, 'Race, sexual politics and black masculinity', p. 128.
13. Darieck Scott, 'Jungle fever? black gay identity politics, white dick, and the Utopian bedroom', GLQ, 1 (1994), pp. 299-321, p. 301. The black gay/gay black distinction is not followed in this article.
14. Riggs, 'Tongues untied', in Hemphill (ed.), Brother to Brother, p. 202. For the controversy, see B. Ruby Rich, 'When difference is (more than) skin deep', in Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar and John Greyson (eds), Queer Looks (New York: Routledge, 1993).
15. Ron Simmons, 'Tongues Untied: An interview with Marlon Riggs', in Hemphill (ed.), Brother to Brother, p. 194.
16. Scott, 'Jungle fever?', pp. 299-300.
17. Reginald Shepherd, 'On not being white', in Beam (ed.), In the Life, pp. 47, 54-5.
18. Larry Duplechan, Eight Days a Week (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1985); Blackbird (New York: St Martin's, 1986).
19. Christopher Davis, 'CS interview with Larry Duplechan', Christopher Street, 1 (1987), pp. 60-2; quoted from Emmanuel S. Nelson (ed.), Contemporary Gay American Novelists (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), p. 117.
20. Norman Wong, 'Cultural Revolution', in Wong, Cultural Revolution: Stories (New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 1995).
21. Ibid., p. 171 (original emphases). Prominent black gay dance artist Bill T. Jones thus intriguingly explains his almost exclusive attraction to white men: 'Not, Jones insists, because of any distaste for men who looked like him - on the contrary. When Jones was seventeen, he remembers, he went to visit an older brother in Rochester and walked in on him as he slept with his genitals exposed. Jones recounts, "I was aroused, and deeply ashamed of my arousal. I panicked and fled". So sleeping with a black man would have felt "incestu- ous" - like sleeping with a brother' (Henry Louis Gates, jun., 'The body politic', New Yorker, 28 November 1994, pp. 112-24. Notwithstanding its relevance here, Jones's explanation for his cross-racial preference, especially articulated through the fear of 'incest', clearly still awaits intricate analysis that is beyond the scope of the present project.
22. bell hooks, 'Is Paris burning?', in hooks, Black Looks (London: Turnaround, 1992), p. 149.
23. See Ann Cvetkovich, 'The powers of seeing and being seen: Truth or Dare and Paris Is Burning, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 124-37.
24. Isaac Julien, 'Confessions of a snow queen: notes on the making of The Attendant', Critical Quarterly, 36:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 120-6.
25. However, in her Afterword to Gary Fisher, Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1996), Sedgwick presents a much more sophisticated theoretical stance that may bring us out of this dichotomic plight. Insisting on exploring 'the richness of experimental and experiential meaning in these [SM] scenes when they are understood as neither simply continuous with, nor simply dislinked from, the relations and histories that surround and embed them', she proposes an intricate view of SM as continuous with a certain kind of trauma therapy that is performed through mimetic enactments of the troubled memory (pp. 281-4).
26. Earl Jackson, jun., 'Oxydol poisoning', in Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi (eds), Names We Call Home (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 190.
27. D.A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: California University Press, 1992), p. 42.
28. Scott, 'Jungle fever?', p. 303.
29. Steven Corbin, Fragments That Remain (London: GMP, 1993). Corbin confesses: 'It was [at a high profile, West Coast university] that I became consciously aware of my attraction to white men: they were "Other". There's a lot to be said for fascination and fantasy of the unknown that is not to be underestimated. Difference is an attraction unto itself (Steven Corbin, 'The black and white of interracial couples: one (African-American) man's point of view', Genre, 14 (1993), pp. 49-51; quoted in Scott, 'Jungle fever?', p. 320).
30. Melvin Dixon, Vanishing Rooms (New York: Plume, 1992).
31. My Beautiful Laundrette, like Kureishi's other work, such as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (UK, 1988), is concerned with negotiating Thatcher's increasingly bigoted England; whereas The Wedding Banquet, like Ang Lee's other work, such as East Drink Man Woman (Taiwan, 1994), is concerned with adapting traditional Chinese patriarchy to the rapidly changed society and culture of Taiwan.
32. M.S. Hunter, The Buccaneer (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1989); Marsha Hunt, Free (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993).
33. A native American becomes involved with a present-day missionary in Patricia Nell Warren, The Fancy Dancer (1976; London: GMP, 1991), whereas Tom Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (London: Secker & Warburg, 1992) sentimentally exoticizes the frontier situation. An exception is William Haywood Henderson's Native (New York: Plume, 1994), which touches upon the native American movement to reclaim their historical heritage.
34. In 'Black is, black ain't: notes on de-essentializing black identities', in Dent (ed.), Black Popular Culture, Julien says: 'Young Soul Rebels could be read as the antidote to Jungle Fever in terms of its presentation of non- pathological interracial relationships. Crossing racial lines usually results in punishment' (p. 263). For an incisive interrogation of Julien on this and other relevant issues, see 'States of desire: Isaac Julien in conversation with Bell Hooks'.
35. For 'conditions of plausibility', see Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 31-5.
36. 36 James Earl Hardy, B-Boy Blues: A Seriously Sexy, Fiercely Funny, Black-on- Black Love Story (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1994); 2nd Time Around(Los Angeles: Alyson, 1996).
37. Alice Y. Horn and Ming-Yuen S. Ma, 'Premature gestures: a speculative dialogue on Asian Pacific islander lesbian and gay writing', in Emmanuel S. Nelson (ed.), Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color (New York: Harrington Park, 1993), pp. 38-9.
38. Scott, 'Jungle fever?', p. 308 and p. 319, note 10.
39. 'Color on color love' is proposed by Ric Parish, James Sakakura, Brian Green, Joel B. Tan and Robert Vazquez Pacheco, 'Communion: a collaboration on AIDS', in Leong (ed.), Asian American Sexualities, pp. 203-4.