Black Gay Man by Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Author:Robert F. Reid-Pharr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2001-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolves into the complexity of manhood.6

The ideals that Baldwin points to are ones that are constructed through the erection and maintenance of a set of false, if potent, binarisms: good/bad, punk/stud, butch/fag, what have you. For Baldwin, though, the primary binarism, the model from which and through which he filters the presumably natural divisions in the human condition, is none other than the one that both holds together and separates the black and the white.

It is with these ideas in mind that I suggest that we begin to reread Baldwin’s Another Country, particularly his depiction of the “optically white” Vivaldo. Baldwin so insists throughout the work on forcing consideration of the black/white binarism—white handkerchief in black hands, black tie on white shirt, white dick against black dick against black vagina against white vagina—that the distinctions clearly begin to crumble by the end of the narrative.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.