Gay Black Masters
The association between marriage and liberation took on increasing significance as the end of slavery approached. During the Civil War, as many slaves escaped to freedom following the foot trails of Union Army soldiers, marriage often became the first civil right exercised. It was so popular that it overwhelmed the capacity of federal forces to accommodate them. A black soldier expressed the sentiment underlying their determinations this way: "The marriage covenant is at the foundation of all our rights."
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The bitter opposition to the legalization of black marriage was not easily ruptured. White Southerners resisted bestowing equality on black marriage. Federal officials and Northern missionaries voiced the prejudice that blacks by nature did not value marriage.
But the Civil Rights Act of 1866 opened the way for overcoming these impediments by affirming black rights to make contracts of all kinds. Southern states were forced to make provisions in new laws that recognized black marriages.
Mary Angelica Molina is a writer, director and editor. Her films include OH BABY, I LOVE YOU! which won the prestigious cinematography award at Cameraimage in Poland (2009) and is available online via iThentic.com; and LA ROSA Y EL GATO (2006), which won the audience award at the Santa Ana Film Festival and is currently available via iTunes. Mary is currently developing her feature directorial debut DOLORES, MI AMOR, a surrealist story about a woman who has the voice of a man. At present she is also editing the feature documentary THE STATE OF ARIZONA for Camino Bluff Productions (FARMINGVILLE, Sundance, 2002) about Arizona's controversial anti-immigration law SB1070. Mary received her masters degree in screenwriting from the University of Southern California. She was born in Barranquilla, Colombia and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
In his recently published collection of personal essays entitledWhat Color Is Your Hoodie? Jarrett Neal does what he says writers do: Hewrites to make sense of the intersectionalities of his own identities andsubjectivities, mapping these intersectionalities onto his past experiencesin order to make sense of the past and the present--"of a world thatoften makes no sense" (p. 77). Biographical themes found in thesevignettes range from the author's budding sexuality as an eighth graderseeing a naked adult man for the first time, to Neal's circumcision atthe age of 20 and a fairly randy analysis of interracial gay pornography. Inmost instances, Neal (re)constructs these vignettes to make sense of his ownexperiences, to connect his present subjectivities with a number of formativeexperiences from his past. For example, Neal describes accidentally glimpsinghis coach's wet, muscular body in the school's locker room shower,explaining that it was "like watching one of my action figures come tolife" (p. 12). Here he uses this childhood memory to explore hisadulthood fascination with perfecting his own physique through bodybuilding,which he writes about with some detail. In other instances, Neal employs thetools of the comic, sometimes generalizing his experiences to all men who aregay and/or black for the sake of humor. For example, the author credits the"blatant homoerotic imagery" found in Mattel's He-Man and theMasters of the Universe for "captivating an entire generation of gaymen" with a "half-naked bronzed barbarian" (p. 12).
The author's personal vignettes serve as points of entry toexplore various social and cultural phenomena, as he weaves the narrativesinto broad political analyses and social commentaries on a number of issuesthat are of interest to scholars of culture--in particular, issuessurrounding race, class, masculinity, bodies, and power. In these instances,Neal reveals a number of contradictions that tend to arise when writersstruggle to make sense of precarious lives. While Neal, a self-proclaimednerd, explains how he used his academic skills to learn as much as he couldabout fitness in order to perfect his body, he acknowledges, but does not goso far as to explicitly critique, the ways in which such rigid standards ofbeauty are socially, racially, economically, and politically constructed.Though he admits the dangers involved in the health and beauty industriesthat perpetuate cultural stereotypes and consumerism, Neal posits thatbeauty, like writing, should be understood as "an artistic project, acraft of aesthetic possibilities, a form of resistance" (p. 41).Neal's poetic musing, "To be beautiful, after all, is to be trulyseen" (p. 42), makes his assertion that all black men inevitablyconfront the hyper-masculine, sexualized stereotype of the Mandingo seem allthe more pointed.
It is in such instances that Neal acknowledges the contradictionsthat are uncovered by attempts to "make sense" of complexexperiences: The Mandingo archetype is "forged out of a racist past yetperpetuated by a masculine desire to attain alpha male status, to be cock ofthe walk" (p. 31). While the author implicitly critiques the socialconditioning that requires black men to perform a sure-footed "cock ofthe walk" identity, Neal laments that then-President Obama "refusesto crow about his successes." In a chapter particularly relevant inlight of the 2016 election, Neal professes his "love affair" withObama's "brainy coolness," even though the author ultimatelycriticizes Obama's steady demeanor. Neal explains that during hispresidency, Bill Clinton often expressed anger when addressing his critics;however, because "black men are stereotyped as violent brutes, angry,always out to steal from and harm every white person they see," Obamachose to keep cool. Neal suggests that it was Obama's silent"high-minded attitude" that enabled members of the radical right(p. 60) to construct and perpetuate a number of false narratives about hisnationality, religion, and even his sexuality. Indeed, in the days followingthe aforementioned Orlando nightclub attack, Donald Trump implied thatPresident Obama was directly responsible for the murders.
Neal's essays underscore the fact that despite gains madeover the last several decades in educational attainment, political power, andvisibility in film, television, and other popular media, black men are stillmore likely than white men to be negatively stereotyped, incarcerated, andunemployed. In fact, Neal posits, "black men are falling farther andfarther behind all other groups of men" except in one arena, that ofsexual desirability (p. 32): "Everyone, it seems, wants a big blackdick" (p. 31). Indeed, the "black dick" tends to play aprominent role throughout this collection. In the chapter entitled"Peewee's Peepee," Neal maps an analysis of Americanexceptionalism, cultural expectations of circumcision, and popularculture's fascination with penises with his own experience of having hisforeskin surgically removed at the age of 20. It is no coincidence, theauthor suggests, that he elected to have the surgery the same year that hefailed out of college and came out to his family: "Perhaps it has alwaysbeen about my body, this restlessness within me" (p. 150). Thecircumcision, Neal explains, "was my first step towardself-acceptance... a way of wrestling control of my identity, body,sexuality, and destiny from my community, and the culture" (p. 149).Even as he acknowledges extant debates over the cultural practice ofcircumcision, including the loss of sensitivity the procedure brings, Nealconcedes that he would still elect to have a son circumcised at birth inorder to conform to dominant American values.
Neal's perspective reveals several contradictions andcompromises made every day, which serve to maintain the status quo ofsocietal structures. The collection will be of interest to readers concernedwith race, gender, sexuality, queer studies, and perhaps most significantly,the subject of intersectionality: While black men bring billions of dollarseach year to the music and sports industries, the author asks, "doesanyone care if the running back is only semi-literate?" (p. 42)Ultimately, Neal concedes that "every success, no matter how small, mustbe celebrated" (p. 73). 041b061a72