Malcolm X - gay black hero?
(Okay, Adrienne keeps telling me to post, so here's something I was forwarded. I don't even remember what or when it was but recently I saw Malcolm X's name on a list of famous gays or bisexuals and it didn't even register. Given the rampant push in this country to deny gay people their rights it makes for interesting reading.
Today I was walking to the post office and I hear a voice call out from behind me. It was a black man riding his bike up behind me; he has lived here in Taos for 11 months and was surprised to see another black person, particularly a woman. Alright, brother, I'm with you, but then he goes on to say that there aren't enough people of African descent here for him [hello; did you check before you moved to a town where "Other"—that is, anyone other than Latino, Anglo, or Native American—makes up less than 2% of the population?] and that white women here try to talk to him and it isn't right, that we have a 500-year history of horrendous things done to us and no one has even paid for that, blah blah blah. Then he corrals me into the music store to listen to his mediocre reggae CD with a picture of Haile Selassie and his family on the cover. And I'm thinking, hmmm, so mentioning that I'm bouncing down the street to mail a letter to my white lesbian partner is surely going to get me kicked out of the club, huh? God, I hate that kind of righteous intolerance and that way in which I'm implicated through his willingness to confide stuff like that in me.)
On Malcolm X's 80 birthday, Peter Tatchell reveals the hidden gay past of the American black nationalist
leader
Thursday May 19, 2005
The Guardian
Malcolm X was born 80 years ago today, on 19 May 1925.
But amid the commemorations, controversy is brewing.
Some black activists are enraged by suggestions that
their hero might have been gay - or at least bisexual.
The controversy has been stirring since the
publication of Bruce Perry's acclaimed biography,
Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America
(Station Hill, New York) in 1991. Based on interviews
with Malcolm's closest boyhood and adult friends,
Perry suggests that the US black nationalist leader
was not as robustly heterosexual as his Nation of
Islam (NoI) colleagues have always insisted.
Malcolm X, real name Malcolm Little, joined the
militant Muslim NoI in 1949, attracted by its teaching
that Allah would deliver black people from white
bondage. By the 1960s, Malcolm had developed NoI
ideology in new directions, becoming America's leading
spokesperson for black consciousness, pride and
self-help. Sexual freedom was not, however, part of
his agenda.
Yet Perry's book documents Malcolm X's many gay
experiences. A schoolmate, Bob Bebee, recalls the day
they stumbled on a local boy jerking off. Malcolm,
Bebee recalled, ordered the youth to masturbate him,
and subsequently boasted he had given him oral sex.
Later, from the age of 20, Malcolm had sex with men
for money - as hinted at in Spike Lee's 1992 biopic -
and he had at least one sustained sexual liaison with
a man. While living in Flint, Michigan, his roommate
noticed that instead of sleeping in the room they were
sharing, Malcolm sneaked down the hall to spend the
night with a gay transvestite named Willie Mae.
In New York, two of Malcolm's friends from Michigan
remember bumping into him at the YMCA, where Malcolm
bragged he earned money servicing "queers". Later,
Malcolm worked as a butler to a wealthy Boston
bachelor, William Paul Lennon. According to Malcolm's
sidekick Malcolm Jarvis, he was paid to sprinkle
Lennon with talcum powder and bring him to orgasm.
Perry suggests that Malcolm's gay encounters may not
have been entirely financially motivated. His
masculine insecurities and ambivalence towards women
fit the archetype of a repressed gay man and point to
latent homosexuality.
After the death of his father, when Malcolm was six,
he lacked male role models and was dominated by strong
women - in particular, his tyrannical mother. He
feared women and his early sexual experiences with
girls were mostly unsatisfactory. Far from macho,
Malcolm hated fighting and got beaten by other men.
His passionate assertion that the need to feel
masculine is a man's "greatest urge" indicates someone
doubtful of his own manliness.
As for his sporadic gay hustling, as Perry notes,
"there were other ways he could have earned money".
Dope-dealing, thieving and pimping were sources of
income he had pursued with success. There was no
imperative to sell his body. Why, then, did he
prostitute himself? Misogyny and repressed
homosexuality might be the answer. According to Perry:
"His male-to-male encounters, which rendered it
unnecessary for him to compete for women, afforded him
an opportunity for sexual release without the
attendant risk of dependence on women."
Was Malcolm X gay? Bisexual? In his schooldays, he was
apparently a passive participant. Others masturbated
or fellated him. Later, while working as a male
prostitute, he took a more hands-on role in sex,
especially with Lennon. This part-time whoring may
have been pecuniary. There is, however, plentiful
research suggesting that many guys who have sex with
men for payment are in denial about their
homosexuality. They tell themselves they are doing it
for the money. This is their way of coping with
same-sex desires that they are unable to accept. Was
this Malcolm's excuse? Surely there must have been
some degree of queer desire to enable Malcolm to
sustain his sexual experiences with men over a period
of 10 years? If this desire was within him from
adolescence to early adulthood, could he have erased
it completely in later life?
Sexuality is not like a newspaper - read today and
discarded tomorrow. Established desires can be
sublimated or repressed, but never eliminated. If
people have a homosexual capacity, it stays with them
for life - even if they never act on it. Was Malcolm
an exception? There is no evidence that his same-sex
dalliances continued once he joined the NoI; he
married and had children, and, with all the fervour of
a zealous convert, he embraced the NoI's fiercely
puritanical Muslim sexual morality.
Had he not been assassinated in 1965, almost certainly
at the hands of NoI rivals, Malcolm might have
eventually, like Huey Newton of the Black Panthers,
welcomed the gay liberation movement as part of the
struggle for human emancipation. Instead, to serve its
homophobic political agenda, for 50 years the NoI has
suppressed knowledge of Malcolm's gay past.
Now it is time to blow the whistle. There is not a
single world-famous black person who is openly gay.
Young black lesbians and gays need role models. Who
better than Malcolm X, one of the inspirations of my
activism and one of the great modern heroes of black
liberation?
See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1486997,00.html#article
Today I was walking to the post office and I hear a voice call out from behind me. It was a black man riding his bike up behind me; he has lived here in Taos for 11 months and was surprised to see another black person, particularly a woman. Alright, brother, I'm with you, but then he goes on to say that there aren't enough people of African descent here for him [hello; did you check before you moved to a town where "Other"—that is, anyone other than Latino, Anglo, or Native American—makes up less than 2% of the population?] and that white women here try to talk to him and it isn't right, that we have a 500-year history of horrendous things done to us and no one has even paid for that, blah blah blah. Then he corrals me into the music store to listen to his mediocre reggae CD with a picture of Haile Selassie and his family on the cover. And I'm thinking, hmmm, so mentioning that I'm bouncing down the street to mail a letter to my white lesbian partner is surely going to get me kicked out of the club, huh? God, I hate that kind of righteous intolerance and that way in which I'm implicated through his willingness to confide stuff like that in me.)
On Malcolm X's 80 birthday, Peter Tatchell reveals the hidden gay past of the American black nationalist
leader
Thursday May 19, 2005
The Guardian
Malcolm X was born 80 years ago today, on 19 May 1925.
But amid the commemorations, controversy is brewing.
Some black activists are enraged by suggestions that
their hero might have been gay - or at least bisexual.
The controversy has been stirring since the
publication of Bruce Perry's acclaimed biography,
Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America
(Station Hill, New York) in 1991. Based on interviews
with Malcolm's closest boyhood and adult friends,
Perry suggests that the US black nationalist leader
was not as robustly heterosexual as his Nation of
Islam (NoI) colleagues have always insisted.
Malcolm X, real name Malcolm Little, joined the
militant Muslim NoI in 1949, attracted by its teaching
that Allah would deliver black people from white
bondage. By the 1960s, Malcolm had developed NoI
ideology in new directions, becoming America's leading
spokesperson for black consciousness, pride and
self-help. Sexual freedom was not, however, part of
his agenda.
Yet Perry's book documents Malcolm X's many gay
experiences. A schoolmate, Bob Bebee, recalls the day
they stumbled on a local boy jerking off. Malcolm,
Bebee recalled, ordered the youth to masturbate him,
and subsequently boasted he had given him oral sex.
Later, from the age of 20, Malcolm had sex with men
for money - as hinted at in Spike Lee's 1992 biopic -
and he had at least one sustained sexual liaison with
a man. While living in Flint, Michigan, his roommate
noticed that instead of sleeping in the room they were
sharing, Malcolm sneaked down the hall to spend the
night with a gay transvestite named Willie Mae.
In New York, two of Malcolm's friends from Michigan
remember bumping into him at the YMCA, where Malcolm
bragged he earned money servicing "queers". Later,
Malcolm worked as a butler to a wealthy Boston
bachelor, William Paul Lennon. According to Malcolm's
sidekick Malcolm Jarvis, he was paid to sprinkle
Lennon with talcum powder and bring him to orgasm.
Perry suggests that Malcolm's gay encounters may not
have been entirely financially motivated. His
masculine insecurities and ambivalence towards women
fit the archetype of a repressed gay man and point to
latent homosexuality.
After the death of his father, when Malcolm was six,
he lacked male role models and was dominated by strong
women - in particular, his tyrannical mother. He
feared women and his early sexual experiences with
girls were mostly unsatisfactory. Far from macho,
Malcolm hated fighting and got beaten by other men.
His passionate assertion that the need to feel
masculine is a man's "greatest urge" indicates someone
doubtful of his own manliness.
As for his sporadic gay hustling, as Perry notes,
"there were other ways he could have earned money".
Dope-dealing, thieving and pimping were sources of
income he had pursued with success. There was no
imperative to sell his body. Why, then, did he
prostitute himself? Misogyny and repressed
homosexuality might be the answer. According to Perry:
"His male-to-male encounters, which rendered it
unnecessary for him to compete for women, afforded him
an opportunity for sexual release without the
attendant risk of dependence on women."
Was Malcolm X gay? Bisexual? In his schooldays, he was
apparently a passive participant. Others masturbated
or fellated him. Later, while working as a male
prostitute, he took a more hands-on role in sex,
especially with Lennon. This part-time whoring may
have been pecuniary. There is, however, plentiful
research suggesting that many guys who have sex with
men for payment are in denial about their
homosexuality. They tell themselves they are doing it
for the money. This is their way of coping with
same-sex desires that they are unable to accept. Was
this Malcolm's excuse? Surely there must have been
some degree of queer desire to enable Malcolm to
sustain his sexual experiences with men over a period
of 10 years? If this desire was within him from
adolescence to early adulthood, could he have erased
it completely in later life?
Sexuality is not like a newspaper - read today and
discarded tomorrow. Established desires can be
sublimated or repressed, but never eliminated. If
people have a homosexual capacity, it stays with them
for life - even if they never act on it. Was Malcolm
an exception? There is no evidence that his same-sex
dalliances continued once he joined the NoI; he
married and had children, and, with all the fervour of
a zealous convert, he embraced the NoI's fiercely
puritanical Muslim sexual morality.
Had he not been assassinated in 1965, almost certainly
at the hands of NoI rivals, Malcolm might have
eventually, like Huey Newton of the Black Panthers,
welcomed the gay liberation movement as part of the
struggle for human emancipation. Instead, to serve its
homophobic political agenda, for 50 years the NoI has
suppressed knowledge of Malcolm's gay past.
Now it is time to blow the whistle. There is not a
single world-famous black person who is openly gay.
Young black lesbians and gays need role models. Who
better than Malcolm X, one of the inspirations of my
activism and one of the great modern heroes of black
liberation?
See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1486997,00.html#article
posted by Carla at 4:54 PM
5 Comments:
Oooohh, don't hate, Carla. He was trying.
As for Malcolm, hustling "queers" and bullying a younger kid for a hand job does not the gay hero make, methinks. But maybe repressed in the same way the apostle Paul was ... cuz you know he was as gay as the summer days are long. I'm just so glad I am not a man! I'm still gonna love Malcolm for his anti-imperialism and for sticking it to the Man (ha! that's funnier now).
Now Huey maybe. Am I nuts to want Huey to have been a gay black hero?
Well, you're my gay black hero, Carla. Blog on with your bad self!
I'm gonna hate; "trying" is not assuming because I'm black that I'm going to think it's wrong for blacks to date whites. Whenever I get that kind of thing it's an affront to who I am and to my life. Usually some indictment of gay people is in that, too, we just didn't talk that long.
No, the "gay hero" title is not mine; it came from the article. I just think it's good when already anointed heroes take on some public complexity and dimension.
Okay, hate.
I hate the Minutemen.
Hate is good.
I reconsidered.
I have to say, I had issues with Tatchell's article, which I discuss here:http://professorkim.blogspot.com/2005/05/making-malcolm-in-our-own-images.html, especially since his assertion that there are no world famous black people that are gay for young people to look up to just struck me as incredibly uninformed.
Hey Kim,
Yours is a great response, I think. Thanks for calling my attention to it. Certainly, Tatchell's essay also pathologizes black male sexuality, gay or not, lingering on spurious specifics as some kind of "evidence" while not substantively dealing with the issue of black homosexuality in any kind of thoughtful way. But I think raising the question of whether or not a previously non-gay-identified hero can retain his relevance were a revelation about his homosexuality to come to light bears discussion. Even in the arts, for example, presumably one of the more liberal fields we have, it's been virtually impossible to compile a history of black lesbian artists because there remains such a strong denial and disavowal that doesn't exist for white lesbians.
Post a Comment
<< Home