RENWL

Ralph Ellison author of literary classic Invisible Man (kinda fine, too)

We were going through our compact home library the other day looking for a book written by Mr. James Baldwin—-the title escapes us at the moment.  Anyway during our search a light bulb went on: maybe we should share this literary wealth of ours with our LGBT and same gender loving Nubian fam’ and friends who might be interested in a little critical reading. We gathered a stack of books and realized it might be best to start out with about 5 or 6 suggestions instead of a two-page list.

Ultimately we picked out six excellent works that we think you’ll enjoy if you haven’t had a chance to read any of them. If we had to choose one of them to take with us on a deserted island we have to say undoubtedly it would be Black Looks: Race and Representation by bell Hooks, hands down. It’s a classic and a must read for all African Americans. By the way, all of the selections here are non-fiction. So if you’re looking for some E. Lynn Harris drama you won’t find it here.  All titles below can be found on Amazon.com or any other major bookseller. We’ve also provided short reviews along with each title.

Here’s our Six Damn Good Reads For Black LGBTs!

Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America

By Keith Boykin

In the past year, J.L. King’s On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men, a New York Times Magazine piece and Oprah attention helped make a cultural phenomenon out of life “on the DL.” Here, writer and activist Boykin (One More River to Cross) addresses what he sees as the implicitly racist and homophobic undertones of the media’s coverage. He offers a point-by-point refutation of King’s take on the DL – King’s book, Boykin says, suffers from overgeneralizations, inconsistencies and distortions – and accuses King of serving up another “stereotypical image of black men as pathological liars, surreptitiously satisfying their primitive sexual cravings by cheating on their wives.” But the heart of Boykin’s argument is that the media, which often blame closeted black men for transmitting HIV to their female partners, are avoiding the opportunity to responsibly discuss the realities of sexuality, gender, race and AIDS. Boykin lucidly draws on science as well as personal experience in this important book. And while many of the cultural manifestations of black sexuality that Boykin documents here are fascinating – e.g., references to the DL (which Boykin defines as cheating on a partner regardless of one’s sexuality) in popular music – the power of his book comes from his impassioned call to examine the real facts of sexual behavior and HIV transmission.

Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

By Kenji Yoshino

Yoshino’s memoir-cum-treatise combines a provocative examination of the current state of civil rights with an account of his experiences as a gay Japanese-American. Arguing that discrimination now targets “the subset of the group that fails to assimilate to mainstream norms,” Yoshino describes a phenomenon that he calls “covering”: the pressure exerted on racial minorities to “act white,” the social acceptance offered to gays as long as they don’t “flaunt” their identities, the ways women in the workplace are expected to camouflage their lives as mothers. Exploring the history of civil-rights litigation in the United States, Yoshino concludes that courts have too often focussed on individuals’ capacity to assimilate, rather than on the legitimacy of the demand that they do so.

What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality

By Daniel A. Helminiak

Helminiak, a Roman Catholic priest, has done careful reading in current biblical scholarship about homosexuality. While cautioning against viewing biblical teaching as “the last word on sexual ethics,” he stresses the need for accurate understanding of what the biblical “facts” are and concludes that “the Bible supplies no real basis for the condemnation of homosexuality.” Using the studies of Yale historian John Boswell (Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, LJ 7/94), New Testament seminary professor L. William Countryman, and others, Helminiak examines the story of Sodom (where the sin was inhospitality), Jude’s decrying sex with angels, and five texts-Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Romans 1:27, I Corinthians 6:9, and I Timothy 1:10-all of which, he concludes, “are concerned with something other than homogenital activity itself.”

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism

By Patricia Hill Collins

Drawing on vivid images of hypersexual blacks and the sociological theses of strong black women and weak black men, Collins explores an astonishing range of ideas and images through history, sociology, and popular culture. Rather than debate the dominance of race versus sex in the history of social injustice to black men and women, Collins offers a theory of “intersectionality,” viewing race, gender, and sexuality together. She explores the social and personal implications of historical images (black men as rapists deserving of lynching and black women so immoral it was impossible to rape them) and more current concerns about the influence of prison culture on urban youth culture that glorifies connections between sex and violence. Demonstrating how the politics of race has traditionally neglected concerns about gender and sexual orientation, Collins explores a range of issues, advocating that black people “ready up some honesty” and redefine notions of masculinity and femininity.

Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

By E. PatrickJohnson

Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of “authentic” blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.

Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.

Black Looks: Race and Representation

By bell Hooks

Hooks continues to produce some of the most challenging, insightful, and provocative writing on race and gender in the United States today. In these new essays,the author/academician expands on a theme introduced in Breaking Bread with Cornel West ( LJ 12/91) and in earlier works: In a society that increasingly substitutes style for substance, how are the races represented to one another? Maintaining that white commodification cannibalizes African American culture, sell ing blacks a supermacho image that encourages violence and the subjugation of black women, hooks successfully confronts last fall’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, imperialist images in yuppie mail-order catalogs, Madonna’s use of black signifiers, the curious color blindness of feminist film criticism, relations between blacks and Native Americans, and other original and important topics. Highly recommended.