By Kwame Holmes | With thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Friday, May 4, 2013.
Though you couldn’t tell from the overwhelming media
attention and, to paraphrase Mark Anthony Neal, a nation-wide collective
backslapping, Jason Collins is not the world’s first black gay man. It is
important to say this, because while Collins’ announcement fundamentally
intervenes into the nation’s notion of who participates in men’s pro sports, we
can not ignore that it matters immensely to a range of folks that the first
openly gay professional athlete is black. Despite evidence that black
voters support gay and lesbian rights, and have recently moved towards support
for same-sex marriage, black communities continue to be pathologized as less
accepting of gays and lesbians than other demographic groups.
African Americans’ overrepresentation within
masculinist spaces like professional athletics seems to confirm this
impression. When it comes to discourse around “black homophobia,” commentators
rarely distinguish between the basketball court, hip hop, or simply “the
block”–interchangeable sites which seem to repel not only the explicit
infiltration of gay men, but a wide range of progressive liberalisms in which
gay identity now comfortably resides. At the same time, there is reason
to think critically about the excitement that surrounds Collins’ announcement
(an excitement I share). While it may be a historic watershed in the nation’s
understanding of black sexuality, or force a reconsideration of black
masculinity, I also worry it reinforces an already class-stratified
understanding of black sexuality that goes back to the turn of the twentieth
century.
Let me be clear. I am not here to pillory Jason
Collins. We know from decades of black feminist scholarship that, in
deciding to tell the world he is black and gay, Collins is bravely volunteering
to enter one of the nation’s oldest and most potent mine fields, the public
consumption of black sexuality. In recent years black male same-sexuality
has emerged alongside black single motherhood, as particularly implicated in
the devastation and destruction of the African American community. The ongoing
HIV-AIDS epidemic within African America has made black men who have sex with
men (or MSM)--regardless of whether they self-consciously identify as gay,
bisexual, “DL” or same gender loving (SGL)— as murderous carriers of disease. Anxiety around declining black marriage rates has
added a new layers onto black Americans’ feelings about male homosexuality,
which, alongside interracial marriage, marks some black men as eager to “jump
ship” and betray their racial obligations to black women. In an age
inflected by rhetorics of austerity, the anti-black racial project of mass
incarceration only heightens concerns around black hetero scarcity. In turn,
those concerns are bolstered by widespread belief that even the most masculine
black men can succumb to same-sex activity, even romance, during their
time behind bars. The stakes of the black community’s
engagement with same-sex desire are, to put it mildly, quite high.
In a world where black masculinity seems always
under attack, sports culture is one of a dwindling set of spaces where it seems
not only ever-ascendant, but unbreakable in the face of declining black male
employment and heightening black male disfranchisement. As Rod McCollum notes on Ebony.com, almost four-fifths of
NBA players and two-thirds of NFL players are black. Jason
Collins has punched a hole in the hermeneutically sealed heterosexuality of
“the locker room.” An intervention that Chris Broussard and Larry Johnson’s unfortunate comments indicate was
sorely needed. And yet, his announcement, almost immediately, repairs that gap
by his seeming desire to signal himself as exceptional, both in terms of his
class position and as an anomalous de-sexed gay man.
Forced to grapple with the complex, at times
contradictory, history of the racialized politics of sexuality in the United
States, Collins’ Sports Illustrated editorial takes refuge in the
secure bunkers of class signification. At the very start of his
essay Collins narrates that the first person he told about his sexual identity
was his aunt, Teri L. Jackson, a superior court judge in San Francisco.
Immediately, Collins signals to readers that trailblazing, economically
successful black people have surrounded him throughout his life. Soon
after, Collins references his gay uncle, who lived in the rarified, elite queer
air of Harlem, and reminds readers of his matriculation at Stanford
University. Collins casually mentions that the decision by his college
roommate, Congressman Joe Kennedy, to march in a gay pride parade inspired him
to start the process of coming out. Indeed, close to the beginning of
Collins’ 12 hour takeover of traditional and social media, President Obama,
Michelle Obama, former President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton released
statements or tweets congratulating him for his bravery; the later referring to
Collins as “my friend.” If that doesn’t signal ones position among the
elite, what else does?
As Collins narrates his journey to self-discovery,
his middle-class origins enable him to more easily articulate “universal”
concerns that align with the cultural longings of white middle-class life than
would be possible for many of his heterosexual black team mates who hail from
working-class backgrounds. Collins, of course, is who he is, and his relatively
privileged background in no way detracts from the courageousness and
historicity of his announcement. At the same time, his decision to become
engaged to a woman is framed as the natural result of the pressures placed upon
men of his social position. Nor was Collins forced from the closet by
mannerisms perceived as feminine, or the natural intra-racial surveillances
which operate in neighborhoods with limited private residential space;
environmental realities which Marlon Ross notes make the metaphor of “coming
out the closet” incommensurate with most working-class African American’s life
experience. Rather, his narrative includes the trappings of bourgeois
life: a lone pure bred German shepherd, an empty pool, a deserted mansion -- a
series of concentric chokers, if you will, that signal the vast emptiness of
his closeted existence, and yet simultaneously enfold him within media friendly
material wealth.
Meanwhile, anyone hoping for salacious tales of
Collins numerous affairs with fellow players, closeted celebrities or any
living breathing man was left sorely disappointed. In a classic example of what
historian Darlene Clark Hine first identified as a culture of “dissemblance”
among middle class black women, Collins deploys what appears to be an excess of
transparency—we are clued into a profound internal spiritual struggle—while
keeping any manifestations of his same-sex desires glaringly opaque.
Rather, Collins editorial suggests that rigid, masculine discipline of sports-culture
so completely excises same-sex desire that he remained unselfconscious about
himself before his 30s. Perhaps such a claim could stand, uncomplicated,
a century ago. Then, black elites (like their white counterparts) in the
Young Men Christian’s Association movement hoped that homosocial male sports
cultures would uplift poor African Americans; redirecting male sexual energy
towards more productive pursuits and civilizing them for their active
participation in marriage and productive labor. Indeed, Collins ability
to “fool” everyone, including his twin brother, by embodying the reserved,
upstanding sportsman, is as much a classed performance as it is a gendered
one. But in a world of Shawn Kemps and Kobe Bryants, the public is
entirely aware that the regimentation of sports culture does not limit the sexual appetite of black male athletes. Quite the
contrary, our eager and derisive consumption of black athletes and their multiple
“baby’s mamas,” suggests that outlandish sexuality is expected of black male
athletes.
In implying, whether intentionally or not, a
preternatural ability to resist his desires, Collins implicitly reassures
anxious team mates concerned that his eyes may have lingered upon their naked
bodies in the shower or the locker room - as well as, of course, the team
owners who will determine whether he plays ball next year. His apparent
chastity also distances himself from his colleagues whose sexual exploits have
integrated them into longstanding critiques of the failure and dysfunction of
working class black family life. In an odd twist then, Collins decision
to out himself as a desexualized gay man, positions him as significantly more
“respectable” than black male athletes who have been “irresponsible”
parents. If Charles Barkely demanded that we not see him as a role model,
Jason Collins unapologetically asks that we do, and in doing so, he asks us to
reconsider very little of our preconceived notions of proper forms of black
male sexuality.
Once we view Jason Collins’ coming out narrative as
a story of a maturing middle class identity—which culminates in the
irrepressible desire for a monogamous commitment or “settling down” as he puts
it--it becomes easier to understand his outing—and the auxiliary demand for
universal adulation on the part of the media—as part of a well tread genre of
black politics. As a number of historians have noted, Rosa Parks was by
no means the first African American in Montgomery to resist Jim Crow on the
city’s public bus system. Movement leaders decided that Claudette Colvin,
a young Montgomery activist who placed her body on the line to oppose racial
segregation in March of 1955, was an unsuitable symbol of racial progress because
she had defiled that body through pre-marital sex and pregnancy. Though
operating in an entirely different time and context, Jason Collins’
announcement does not merely hit the familiar beats of respectability politics,
its historicity also relies upon a collective forgetting; this time of
trailblazing black gay men from Bayard Rustin, to Joseph Beam, Crystal Labeijia
and Essex Hemphill; an inadequate list at best. Yet those men, for a variety of
reasons never could or wanted to embody the perfect storm of middle classness
and sexual chastity performed by Jason Collins. Many of them chose to
indulge in homosocial contact away from the only territory where such contact
is historically and almost universally sanctioned, the sports arena. In
that sense then, the historic import of Jason Collins announcement may be less
a sea change towards sexual liberation for black people, and more a signal that
now, certain black gay men can be assimilated into the trappings of liberal,
middle class American life.
***
Kwame Holmes is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute
for African American and African studies at the University of Virginia. Next
fall he will be Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of
Colorado-Boulder. He is currently at work on a book manuscript Chocolate to Rainbow City: Branding “Black” and
“Gay” in Washington, D.C. 1957-1983. He
can be reached at kwame.holmes@gmail.com or follow him on twitter @KwameHolmes.