Contents
1. Introduction
2. Debates of the 1980s
2.1 Political Strategies and Debates
2.2 The Critique of White Gay Racism
2.3 The Debate about Black Gay Identity
2.4 The Debate about Gay Interracial Love and Sexuality
2.5 Constructing Black Gay Myths of Origin
3. Queer of Color Critique – Contemporary Theoretical Approaches
3.1.1 Anti-essentialist Approaches towards Identities
3.1.2 Representational Intersectionality: Stereotypes of Black Men
3.1.3 The Construction of Gayness as a White Identity
3.1.4 AIDS
3.2 Black Queer Studies
3.3 Interpellation
3.4 Disidentification
3.5 Quare/Signifying
4. Looking for the Harlem Renaissance
4.1 Race and Representation
4.1.1 Dissident Voices
4.1.2 Queer Readings of the Harlem Renaissance
4.1.3 Richard Bruce Nugent: “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” (1926)
4.2 Steven Corbin: No Easy Place to Be (1989)
4.2.1 Coming Out in the Harlem Renaissance
4.2.2 Signifying on “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”
4.3 Isaac Julien: Looking for Langston (1989)
4.3.1 Cinematography and Black Queer History
4.3.2 The Burden of Representation
4.3.3 Adapting “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”
4.3.4 Gay Whiteness
4.4 Samuel R. Delany: “Atlantis: Model 1924” (1995)
4.4.1 Meta-Signifying
4.4.2 Inventing Origins
4.4.3 Deconstructing Black Gay Myths of Origin
5. Looking for Baldwin and the Protest Era
5.1 Baldwin and the Protest Era
5.1.1 Transatlantic Baldwin
5.1.2 Richard Wright and the Protest Novel
5.1.3 Black Nationalism and Homophobia
5.1.4 Baldwin’s Heterosexual Mask
5.2 Randall Kenan: A Visitation of Spirits (1989)
5.2.1 Baldwin Revisited
5.2.2 Constructions of Gay Whiteness
5.3 Melvin Dixon: Vanishing Rooms (1991)
5.3.1 Intertextuality and Intersectionality
5.3.2 White Gay Racism and Black Gay Identity
5.4.1 Interracial Desire and Interclass Contact
5.4.2 Experimental Self-Reflections
5.4.3 Black Autobiography and the Coming Out Narrative
5.4.4 “Coming/Out”
5.4.5 Differences and Intersections
5.4.6 Delany and Baldwin
6. Conclusion
Works Cited
