I asked Reginald Harris to offer up some thoughts,from the perspective a poet who is both black and gay, on Major Jackson’s recent essay, “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black,” in American Poetry Review. He was kind enough to agree and penned the following. Kudos and many thanks, Reggie! Visit his website for more information on him.
------------------------
Major Jackson’s recent essay, “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black,” in American Poetry Review brought up a number of intriguing and important questions about how issues of race are not being handled by white writers, and set off discussions among other African American poets about the nature of how blacks are portrayed – or not – in the works of non-black writers.
A similar discussion could be had about how issues of sexuality/ sexual orientation have been avoided as well. Whether it be out of fear of exposing their own homophobia or simply worry about saying something potentially ‘politically incorrect,’ most non-gay writers dare not veer beyond their own experiences. The straight writers are supposed to write about being straight, the gay writers about being gay, and seldom do the twain meet. In much the same way that blacks are expected to talk about racism, and women about sexism, so we gays and lesbians are the ones that are charged with bringing up issues of sexual orientation. Sadly, this is a typical, and very old, position taken by those in the ‘mainstream’: WE (i.e. straight, white, male, etc) don’t have a problem, YOU (the non-straight, non-white, not male) are the ones with the ‘issues’ and we look to you to tell us what they are.
Personally, I haven’t had the same problem that some of my friends have had when artists like Woody Allen or TV shows like Seinfeld or Sex and the City have went through film after film, or season after season, with no black characters. To my mind, there’s a more accurate representation of the world they see and live in than it would be if they threw in a token dark face. As Toni Morrison pointed out in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination, when white authors are not talking about race, they’re often actually talking about race. Something similar holds true for sexual orientation as well to some extent: non-gay people don’t write about those of us over here on the other side of the sexual street very much, if at all, because they really don’t think about us and our lives all that much.
Considering how stereotyped the depiction of gays and lesbians have been over the years, the similar silence around us might be for the best. When gay men (and more rarely lesbians) appear in the work of poets, it is usually as objects of scorn. Some of the more famous examples come from Amiri Baraka. Written during the height of the Black Arts Movement, his poem, “Black Art,” for example, positioned black gays as anti-black:
Another negroleader
on the steps of the white house one
kneeling between the sheriff's thighs
negotiating coolly for his people.
And slow-moving, integrationist leaders of the 1960’s in similarly negative sexual terms
Roywilkins is an eternal faggot
His spirit is a faggot
his projection and image, this is
to say, that if i ever see roywilkins
on the sidewalks
imonna
stick half my sandal
up his
ass
(from "Civil Rights Poem")
Gay and lesbian readers have had to skip, elide, and ignore lines and phrases like these. Or else intellectualize them, attempting to mitigate them by ‘understanding’ why Baraka and others use us as targets (“Well, the use of the word ‘faggot’ in this poem is not referring to REAL gay people, but rather is a metaphor for ‘weak’ or ‘ineffective’ – just like young people nowadays call things they find different or strange ‘gay’. They don’t really mean it…..”). It remains the case, however, that, as a black gay man reading these poems, I can’t help but think he’s talking about me, my partner, my friends. I can’t NOT take it personally.
Rare is the case of a poet like Sonia Sanchez, who in her book Does Your House Have Lions? eloquently writes about the death of her brother who died of AIDS, and the toll and tensions surrounding his illness and orientation takes on the family. Sanchez shows that it is possible for a non-gay writer to write about us, and write about us well, but it takes more empathy and imagination than many writers seem willing to give.
The most breathtaking case of a heterosexual poet encountering gay culture that I know of is Terrance Hayes’ poem ‘At Pegasus,’ which opens his first book Muscular Music. I had the pleasure of hearing Terrance read this poem prior to the book coming out (a podcast of Hayes reading and discussion this and another poem is available at the Poetry Foundation website, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio.html) and was touched and deeply moved by the poem, and very impressed at his ability to make connection and find common ground across the orientation divide.
At Pegasus
They are like those crazy women
who tore Orpheus
when he refused to sing,
these men grinding
in the strobe & black lights
of Pegasus. All shadow & sound.
"I'm just here for the music,"
I tell the man who asks me
to the floor. But I have held
a boy on my back before.
Curtis & I used to leap
barefoot into the creek; dance
among maggots & piss,
beer bottles & tadpoles
slippery as sperm;
we used to pull off our shirts,
& slap music into our skin.
He wouldn't know me now
at the edge of these lovers' gyre,
glitter & steam, fire,
bodies blurred sexless
by the music's spinning light.
A young man slips his thumb
into the mouth of an old one,
& I am not that far away.
The whole scene raw & delicate
as Curtis's foot gashed
on a sunken bottle shard.
They press hip to hip,
each breathless as a boy
carrying a friend on his back.
The foot swelling green
as the sewage in that creek.
We never went back.
But I remember his weight
better than I remember
my first kiss.
These men know something
I used to know.
How could I not find them
beautiful, the way they dive & spill
into each other,
the way the dance floor
takes them,
wet & holy in its mouth.
As someone very familiar with dance floors and spaces similar to the club described in ‘At Pegasus,’ I can’t help but be moved every time I encounter this poem. I wish more poets were as observant, sensitive, and self-aware as Hayes is here, and would attempt to get out of their comfort zones and try to make contact with and understand those different from themselves. During the years when I was struggling with coming out, I read in an issue of the Village Voice an article that included a discussion of how sexuality can “become a prison.” The writer was talking about men and women who lived in the ‘gay ghettos’ of major cites, whose lives and experiences were ‘all gay, all the time.’ The same holds true for non-gays as well. They need to step out more, think and write about encounters with difference, both positive and negative. I’m sure we would all learn from these experiences, and perhaps even get more good poems.
------------------
Reginald also recommends
Richard Bruce Nugent's novel Gentleman Jigger
by Da Capo Press. Publication: January, 2008.
Posts
