Black Gay Man

In the opening section of his book Black Gay Man, Robert Reid-Pharr expresses some ambivalence about the book's title: "The reason for my difficulty is not only the rather obvious fact that one's identity cannot be possibly summed up by the phrase or any of its derivatives. . . but also that every time I hear the designation, I feel almost as if I am somehow denying a basic reality of my intellectual temperament" (1). Even the book's structure—three distinct sections appropriately titled "Black," "Gay," and "Man"—fails to capture the complexity of the black masculinity that Reid-Pharr wears and celebrates throughout, though the structure aptly describes the way that black men have been drawn, quartered (in this case "thirded") and parceled out to the highest ideological bidders. Rather the book's complexity—and the complexity of black meta-identities—is best expressed if one views black masculinity not as something that is fractured or even hybrid, but something that is fluid—radical in its fluidity—which is what Reid-Pharr ultimately achieves in Black Gay Man: Essays

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Masculinity · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social and Cultural Dynamics