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.

Seeking the Pressure Points: Catalysing Low Carbon Changes from the Middle-Out in Offices and Schools

Non-domestic buildings are frequently characterised as resistant to top-down low-carbon and energy-efficiency policy. Complex relationships amongst building stakeholders are often blamed. “Middle actors”—professionals situated between policymakers and building users—can use their agency and capacity to facilitate energy and carbon decision-making from the “middle-out”. We use semi-structured interviews with expert middle actors working with schools and commercial offices, firstly, to explore their experience of energy and low-carbon decision-making in buildings and, secondly, to reflect on the evolution of middle actors’ role within it. Our exploratory findings suggest that a situated sensitivity to organisational “pressure points” can enhance middle actors’ agency and capacity to catalyse change. We find shifts in the ecology of the “middle”, as the UK’s Net Zero and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) agendas pull in new middle actors (such as the financial community) and issues (such as wellbeing and social value) to non-domestic buildings. These issues may work in reinforcing ways with organisational pressure points. Policy should capitalise on this impetus by looking beyond the physicality of individual buildings and engage with middle actors at a systemic level. This could create greater synergies with organisational concerns and strategies of building stakeholders.

“Wired”

Chapter 5 investigates a case study of Tonéx, a queer preacher-musician who embodies a combination of the most popular archetypes of African-American men’s worship—the preacher and the vocalist head musician—while wielding multifarious rhetorics during his musical performance. Tonéx’s case contests the portrayal of same-gender-loving men as down low, secretive, deceptive, and always withholding information about who they are from their loved ones. Chapter 5 investigates the queer Pentecostal performative strategies behind the creative process of worshipping in Spirit and in truth, as Tonéx grounds his performances in bodily experiences recorded on the Unspoken album. By vocalizing unspoken bodily experiences for gospel music audiences, Tonéx guides his fans through an exploration of what it means to be wired: that is, the occurrence of the embedded, transferred, bestowed, gifted, ridiculed, and surveilled aspects of being a queer masculine survivor of sexual assault in Pentecostal Christian communities.

Maybe the End of HIV

This chapter focuses on HIV, which has been our most politically charged illness and a defining health challenge of our time. The world of HIV care over the last two decades has seen a great, almost miraculous, revolution. Today, a 35-year-old who was HIV-infected in 2018 and takes her daily medication adherently has the life expectancy of a 35-year-old without HIV infection. Monthly injections of long-acting HIV drugs look to be as good as daily pills at suppressing the virus, creating easier treatment. Despite these stunning advances, disparities in detection and care characterize the disease. The epidemic has shifted to groups that are hard to test, hard to get started on preventive care, and hard to keep on daily medication—persons who inject stimulants, men on the down-low, the mentally ill, the homeless, and the rural poor with no health insurance. Lack of information, lack of trust of providers, unfamiliarity with services, and refusals of testing and treatment due to social rejection and privacy concerns make the delivery of care more challenging for these groups. Even among persons enrolled in AIDS clinical trials who have found their way to cutting-edge medical treatment, blacks and Hispanics have poorer outcomes. As such, reaching an end to HIV will require new attention to health systems and social stigma, to geography, to housing and outreach, to the long work of public health.

Branded Beautiful

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.