Black Church Rumor

In 1992, Jet published “James Cleveland Infected L.A. Youth with HIV, $9 Mil. Lawsuit Claims,” which detailed how the Chicago-born gospel musician had not only allegedly sexually abused his foster son, Christopher B. Harris, but had also “[given] him the AIDS virus.” This article takes this incident of rumor or accusation as a critical opportunity to think about the archival reality of Black queer sexuality, on one hand, and sexual violence in Black gospel music history on the other. Using the legal documents from Christopher B. Harris v. Irwin Goldring as Special Administrator of the Estate of James Cleveland and commentary from Cleveland's contemporaries, it exhumes Cleveland from dusty church closets for consideration in the history of HIV and AIDS in African American Protestant church and gospel communities and in Black queer studies, ethnomusicology, and gender and sexuality studies. Further, it theorizes “Black church rumor” as a lens for Black queer religious studies and argues that Cleveland's perceived queer sexuality distracted from Harris's allegations of sexual abuse. Thus, it situates Cleveland—the person, the preacher, and the gospel legend—in the literature on “down low” sexuality and explicates the implications of Cleveland's legacy and role in Black gospel music production.

Smithing Queer Empiricism: Engaging Ethnomethodology for a Queer Social Science

Is queer social science possible? Early queer theorists disparaged empiricism as a normalizing, modernist discourse. Nonetheless, LGBTQI+ social scientists have applied queer concepts in empirical projects. Rather than seek a queer method, we ask, Is there an empirical perspective that (ontologically) envisions social relations more queerly—attending to discursive and materialist productions of reality? Dorothy Smith’s work foregrounds people’s activities of engaging texts and satisfies Black queer studies’ and new materialisms’ critiques of early queer theory. Underutilized and often misread, especially its ethnomethodological sensibilities and its vision of actors as relational, practical actors, her work shows how my race is not mine, it is ours; your sexual orientation is not yours, it is ours; their gender is not theirs, it is ours. Smith offers an ontology without essence, grand theory, or normativity, facilitating a range of queer, interpretive projects—from the intersectional to the transnational to the embodied.

Frantz Fanon’s Homosexual Territories

This chapter identifies Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as a fault line between black diaspora studies and queer studies, and argues that it is a central work for theorizing the inextricability of blackness and sexuality in colonial modernity. By the mid-1990s, as queer studies was consolidating into a field, an uneasy consensus had been reached in work by Diana Fuss, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, and Kobena Mercer that queer scholars could learn from Fanon’s work on blackness, but he was too homophobic for queer scholars to engage. So successful has this divide been that almost no contemporary scholarly work in black queer studies and black queer diaspora studies engages Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In turn, almost none of the important scholarship on Fanon takes sexuality as a foundational element of his thinking. My chapter argues that Fanon provides a genealogy of sexuality that has blackness as its foundation. The black person’s body is the psychic object of colonial modernity’s desire and the material through which such desire is expressed. Simply put, within the world created by colonial modernity—I use Sylvia Wynter’s 1492 as a handy starting point—desire and sexuality cannot be imagined without the black person’s body. In the latter part of the chapter, I move beyond this genealogical account and examine how Fanon’s attention to touch—“Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”—can be juxtaposed with Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic to imagine and practice black livability. I read Fanon’s final injunction to “touch” the other as reclaiming frottage for black diasporic collectivity.