A Taste for Brown Bodies

Though queer studies is a well-established field, two recent texts ask us to look more closely at its history. Each of these volumes offers important analysis and historiography on gay identity, but they are quite distinct in genre and ideological aims. These authors employ vastly different methodologies—one book is largely a historical account of American black gay men, and the other is an analysis of what the author calls “gay modernity” (Pérez, 1). Yet each book contains important readings on gayness in contemporary society and despite their differences could be of complementary use in any queer theory course. Hiram Pérez’s A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire argues that the rise of the gay modern occurred at the expense of marginalized, racialized others. In this sense, Pérez’s book is a critique of what he calls queer studies’ “racial unconsciousness.” Pérez argues that despite queer studies’ avowed dedication to liberation politics, it remains “susceptible to . . . a racial unconscious shaped by nation, empire, and the dispositions of global capitalism” (1). A Taste for Brown Bodies, then, is not a celebratory examination of gay modernity but rather an excavation of the ways in which queer theory has failed to analyze its own investments in the racial and national Other.Pérez extends this critique of queer theory by arguing not only that the field has failed to analyze its own racial unconscious but that gay modernity is dependent on “brown bodies” to constitute itself. Pérez writes, “I propose a longstanding synergy among capital, whiteness, and homoerotic nationalism” (16). The extent to which gay modernity is implicated in empire is absolute, as Pérez argues that imperialism not only supports gay modernity but “instrumentalizes” it (11). His chapters illustrate the centrality of empire in the construction of gay modernity. Of particular concern are the figures of the cowboy and the soldier. Pérez examines these figures in the first two chapters, deftly demonstrating their reliance on imperialist discourses to mediate desire between men. Chapter 1 examines Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1924), arguing that the “primitive, brown body” is used to cement Victorian homoeroticism into the modern gay male identity (17). Chapter 2, “Going to Meet the Man in Abu Ghraib,” uses a James Baldwin short story to read the torture of Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib as the kind of homoerotic extension of empire that, Pérez argues throughout this volume, enables the coherence of gay modernity. Perhaps the strongest chapter of the book, “Gay Cowboys Close to Home,” reads Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain (2005) not as the story of a closeted man but rather as an attempt to rewrite the sexuality of the iconic cowboy figure.Pérez’s important book offers an unexpected perspective on queer studies, critiquing it for its unexamined imperialist investments rather than simply celebrating it based on an intuitive assumption about queer theory’s radical potential. Readers should not, however, take Pérez’s critique as an attack on queer theory. Baldwin once said that it was out of his love for America that he insisted on the right to critique; Pérez’s book seems to be written in a similar spirit of critique and love. He writes in the service of “contemporary antiracist queer politics,” and as he argues, without a thorough examination of queer theory’s racial unconscious, the field “remains imperiled” (17).Kevin J. Mumford’s book Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis is quite different from Pérez’s, largely because of discipline. Mumford is a historian, and his text is akin to a collective biography of prominent black gay men from Bayard Rustin to Marlon Riggs. Mumford’s aim is to trace a trajectory of black gay male history from “pervasive repression” to the “more visible, collective voice” of contemporary black gay men (1). As such, he begins his study with an examination of the civil rights movement and moves through US history chronologically in the other chapters, examining the black power movement and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Woven throughout Mumford’s book are considerations of Baldwin as a central figure of black gay culture from the civil rights movement through the 1980s. Each chapter after the first examines an aspect of black gay identity that Mumford recognizes as part of the project of increasing visibility for black gay men. In addition to Baldwin and Rustin, the figures he discusses include Jason Holliday, Joseph Beam, and James Tinney. Mumford’s book is a wonderful primer for understanding the cultural context of and many important figures in black gay history. His aim is to create “a genealogy of black gayness” (3). To that end Mumford has succeeded, as his book represents a thorough and accurate historiography of black gay politics and history. Furthermore, his contextualization of black gay society is nuanced by his deep and perceptive understanding of US history.Mumford’s book is a useful guide to the most important black gay men in US history. It not only offers a deep biographical look at the lives of Baldwin, Riggs, Beam, Rustin, and others but also examines many of the political and cultural events that shaped their work. Though A Taste for Brown Bodies and Not Straight, Not White differ in genre, discipline, and intent, both do the work of bringing to light that which is often overlooked

Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Ideology · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Taste · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society