On the Down Low?: Gay Black Closet

Dr. Roberto Strongman

This presentation utilizes the cultural phenomenon of “the Down Low” to question the historical models of canonical queer texts that locate the transition between homosexual behavior to identity in late XIX Century Western societies. The experience of African-American men who have sex with other men and don’t consider themselves “gay” serves as an important perspective to interrogate the underlying racial assumptions of Foucault, Sedgwick and Butler. Even as it establishes the existence of homosexual non-conformist subjects, J.L King’s testimonial text, On the Down Low, operates as an evangelical treatise that attempts to impose an in/out model on “Down Low” men via the trope of religious conversion. As such, it would appear that theoretical and popular discourses are determined to bring the possibly enabling transgression of “the Down Low” into compliance within racialized and historical models of what might need to be called “the homo-normative.”

Roberto Strongman, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the UCSB Department of Black Studies.