The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  These pictures made Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989, one of the country’s most notorious men. Among his most hostile adversaries was the race-baiting Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who called Mapplethorpe’s work “sickening obscenity.” Whatever we mean when we talk about the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s culminates with this—Mapplethorpe’s pictures of black men, S and M scenarios, and fisting, and the 1990 retrospective at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center that led to an obscenity trial. In its defiance and its awkward ideology, that fellatio shot in The Hateful Eight is the opposite of a Mapplethorpe: Tarantino luxuriates in its antieroticism.

  The artist Glenn Ligon waged his own museum-ready critique in Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–93), in which he dismantled Mapplethorpe’s collection and captioned each image with quotes from scholars, from Mapplethorpe’s subjects, from people he interviewed in bars. You could find James Baldwin, but you also had some lady named Rita Burke, who worried that these pictures would give you AIDS. Ligon, whose own sly, emotional work investigates the psychological contours of black ontology, doesn’t condemn his source material; he opens it out, argues with it. In the end, what he asserts is that a black penis is mysterious only to those who don’t have one. He’s right: black male sexuality is of interest in American popular culture only when the people experiencing it are white.

  There is no paradigmatic white penis. To each man his own. But there is a paradigmatic black one, and how do you stunt-cast for that? When people are turning down sex with a perfectly good black penis to look for a perfectly better one, how do you determine what an authentic-seeming black penis even is? What does the Kevin Hart of black dicks look like? What about the Denzel? And how would a white casting director know?

  There’s a more pernicious problem at work here, too. The underrepresentation of the black penis bespeaks a larger discomfort with depicting black male sexuality with the same range of seriousness, cheek, and romance that’s afforded white sexuality. The history of American popular culture is an immersion in, if not loving white people, then knowing that white people can love. There’s been no comparably robust black equivalent. But there is a recent history of black people daring to create one.

  So much is going on in the video for Cameo’s 1986 hit “Candy” that it makes you dizzy. The song is the happiest sort of funk number—hard-edged and insinuating yet bright. (They sing “candy” so that it rhymes with “today.”) In the video, which Zbigniew Rybczyński directed, the surfaces of a cityscape are composited and layered so that figures—musicians, models—keep leaping in and out of them. At some point the women are made to seem as if they’re floating upward, like fizz in a champagne flute. The clothes are by Jean Paul Gaultier, who really has a gift for boldly dressing black people. But the most dizzying thing of all is the red codpiece Cameo’s frontman, Larry Blackmon, wears over his black tights. It looks like a piece of hard candy.

  The same codpiece appears in the video for Cameo’s biggest hit, “Word Up,” and in “You Make Me Work.” Blackmon’s boiled-egg eyes and caterpillar mustache give him an out-of-left-field look, even for an R & B artist near the start of the video era, and in Gaultier’s comically erotic costumes—form-fitting everything, breastplates, cutout chain-mail tops, big polka-dotted hats—he looks like a trainer at a cartoon sex gym. In the opening shot for “Back and Forth,” the codpiece zooms toward the screen, then acts as a pendulum that, in swinging, wipes one scene into the next. The band was contemporaneous with Mapplethorpe, but it controls its own organ. And it’s not as though Blackmon had to do a lot of gesticulating or gyrating. The piece spoke for itself. It never said anything all that dirty, but it let Blackmon mess with presumptions and curiosities about his penis. (And about his orientation—that sex gym seemed pretty gay.)

  You didn’t have to see an actual penis to know when one was speaking to you. Around the time that Cameo was hitting its peak, so was Bo Jackson. He declared himself bi-athletic, playing football for the Raiders and baseball for the Royals. Nike made him the star of a classic campaign—“Bo Knows”—whose crowning image was a black-and-white Richard Noble photograph of Jackson holding a bat behind his head, wearing white baseball pants and football pads over his bare chest. Your eye almost doesn’t know where to look. His arms? His stomach? His perfectly symmetrical face?

  There’s no real threat in that picture. His hands don’t hold the bat; his shoulders do. The pads cover his chest in a way that, as a teenager, I found modest. But in the original photo you can see the tops of his thighs—twin sequoias—and the substantial bulge between them. With Larry Blackmon, I figured I was supposed to look at his crotch and probably laugh. Jackson’s was paralyzing—in a way that would have further appalled Lieutenant Feltman at that plantation dinner. But I was amazed. Jackson’s cockiness was comprehensive. He wasn’t coming after anybody. We were supposed to come to him. The slight lean of the legs alone had a gravitational pull. I mean, what else was that ad selling? There weren’t even any sneakers in it! Just that man, his black body, its power, his crotch. Just sex. It wasn’t an accidental picture, either. Bo knew. Apparently so did Nike, because many reproductions of that image covered up his crotch with ad copy or started at his midsection.

  The late 1980s and early 1990s might have been the nuttiest time for black male sexuality. It was a height of the culture wars and of identity politics, which pitted creative people against moralists and artists against one another. Black men were often the crux. On one hand, they were the antagonists of news reports and America’s nightmares: rapists, muggers, criminals, gangstas, kids liable to “wild out,” sometimes guilty, a lot of times not. On the other hand, hip-hop, African American comedy, and sports were moving them to the center of the culture, making stars of rappers, stand-up comedians, and athletes, men like LL Cool J, Eddie Murphy, and Michael Jordan. Prince was the 1980s’ greatest erotic adventurer. Madonna made a coffee-table scrapbook called Sex that featured the priapic rapper Big Daddy Kane in a three-way with her and Naomi Campbell. It was the Kim Kardashian’s Selfish of its day, except much further out there.

  America loved famous black men and feared the rest of them. Then someone murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and the prime suspect was her black ex-husband, O.J. After that, the pride certain white people took in letting someone like O.J. be one of them must have seemed like a cruel, postlapsarian joke. Two recent major projects about Simpson, a drama and a documentary, made the whole tragedy seem inevitable, essential to our natures and the races’ relationship to each other, all bound up in the original sin of slavery and the racism it manufactured. No one can ever quite agree on who’s the sinner and who has been sinned against, whether it’s 1994 or right now.

  But at least now it’s easier to find more of the kind of sexual black imagery that was so freighted a few decades ago. The internet contains bottomless warrens of black men starring in their own pornos. There are pictorials of old celebrities and viral images of current celebrities’ wardrobe mishaps. The pride in some of these websites counteracts the fetishizing that sends some people hunting for BBD and the self-reducing that leads other people to offer it up. Mainstream American culture is still ambivalent about what to do with black men’s sexuality, but you can find unequivocal comfort on shows like House of Cards, Broad City, and Jessica Jones, in which white women are convincingly, inoffensively attracted to black men who aren’t the shows’ stars but are permitted to be sexual.

  But needing to be permitted is part of the problem.

  We have a strong, ever-proliferating sense of how white people see the sexuality of black men, but we are estranged from how black men see themselves. Post-blaxploitation, that connection was primarily confined to the art world. The queer film essays of Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien, from the late 1980s and early 1990s, remain different but intellectually conjoined odysseys of the male gaze, aimed at himself—two black mirrors. Otherwise, there was virtually no television and very few movies that were seriously
interested in normal black desire, straight or otherwise. That’s changing. The Starz crime drama Power is about an unfaithful black crime boss (Omari Hardwick), and a few months ago, it made room for a casual cameo by the rapper 50 Cent’s penis. And that bartender who slept with Jessica Jones happens to be Luke Cage (Mike Colter), who now has his own show, a so-so blaxploitation-minded superhero drama that presents Colter as the sexiest man on television (or any streaming service). The record-industry soap opera Empire doesn’t even seem to know there ever was a white gaze; it’s the least self-consciously black show I’ve ever seen. The only people the power family at the show’s core won’t sleep with are one another, but we’re only two and a half seasons in. Give them time.

  There is still something missing from our picture of black male sexuality, though, regardless of who’s looking: romance. We know black men can grind, but rarely do we see them love—as though we’d have to upend too many stereotypes, shed too much pathology, making it impossible to get there.

  There’s a magnificent new movie called Moonlight that knows how hard that is. It’s the story of a young Miami man named Chiron (it’s pronounced “shy-RONE”), who is portrayed, over about twenty years, by three different actors. His mother’s a junkie. A drug dealer becomes a father figure. Chiron flees bullies who suspect—as he does himself—that he might be gay. (“What’s a faggot?” he has to ask, at one point.) Barry Jenkins wrote and directed the movie and fights it past the clichés in Chiron’s biography, which are clichés only in the movies. For one thing, Moonlight is surpassingly gorgeous. The depth-of-field camera work and luscious soundtrack give the movie atmosphere. You can feel the humidity. You can also feel the hormones roiling this kid, who is desperate to connect them to someone, then desperate to bury them. But he can’t. And that’s because—and this is important to say because it’s so rare—Jenkins knows Chiron is a human being. Not because he’s a sex machine.

  It’s as if Jenkins has seen the punks and thugs and clowns who’ve popped up in so many movies, as if he knows about the fetishes and the gazing, about imperfect allies like Mapplethorpe and Tarantino, about all the gawking that’s done at black men and their penises without ever truly seeing. It’s as if he knows all of this and is determined to strip it all away. There’s nothing inherently wrong with black men’s sexuality—only the ways it has been distorted, demonized, and denied. Blackmon had his codpiece for protection. Jenkins is certain that Chiron needs something even stronger: affection.

  When I was nine or ten, I spent the summer at a camp at my school. One day, after swimming, I was showering, zoned out but dialed in. I snapped out of it when I heard two older boys talking. “Yo, he’s looking at your dick!” “What going on, man? What are you doing?” They were talking to me. One of them was lean, very fit, a shade darker than I am and, incredibly enough, named David. His eyes were small but bright. And I had been looking at his penis.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I told the truth. “Yours is so much handsomer than mine!” They almost fell over laughing. The wonder with which I said it probably was funny. “You a faggot!” David said. I stayed a “faggot” for the rest of my school life.

  The only penises I’d ever seen at that point were as black as David’s. But I noticed his. He was twelve or thirteen and more developed. Admiring it got me cast out of our little Eden—but only because that’s how boys are. We didn’t know about sexual myths or racial threats, about the taboos that we would discover are our particular birthright. I didn’t, anyway. Not yet. I just saw a penis. And it was beautiful.

  CHRISTOPHER NOTARNICOLA

  Indigent Disposition

  FROM North American Review

  If your body dies in Broward County, Florida, and nobody claims your body as the body of their next of kin, your body will be burned and disposed of by the Broward County Indigent Cremation and Disposition Program. The Broward County Indigent Cremation and Disposition Program will tend to your body’s final disposition in accordance with the law. According to the law, your body is an indigent body—a body in need, a body lacking, deficient, wanting. Your body is a destitute body, a body which requires aid. Your body is a poor body, an impecunious, penniless, down-and-out, derelict, bum body. Your body is now, and henceforth, the body of a pauper, until such time as your body is burned, and thus, no longer a body. After your body is sufficiently burned, Broward County will box what is left, your cremains, and store this box for 120 days. If your cremains are not claimed by a next of kin in 120 days’ time, Broward County will scatter your cremains in the Atlantic Ocean. If at this time, or at any time following the date of the scattering, your next of kin should wish to acquire the coordinates of the spot from which your cremains were scattered, they may submit a request in writing to the Broward County Medical Examiner records custodian via fax at 954-327-6581.

  The indigent body of Jonathan Welker calls upon Michael Pazin for help. Michael Pazin is not an indigent body. Mike has a job. His job is cutting grass, and in South Florida, that job is a year-round occupation. Mike started his job alone, going house to house with a push mower, finding work where work was needed, and he cut out a name for himself in the landscape of Pompano Beach. Over no small amount of time, he built himself a rather large client base. One large enough, Mike thinks, for a two-man crew. Mike runs his crew out of his pickup truck, to which he attaches an open-air, flatbed trailer every morning in order to transport the equipment he needs to mow, blow, and go. And he goes every day, all day, so long as there’s green to be cut and money to be made. The American Dream.

  The indigent body of Jonathan Welker calls upon the American Dream for help. Mike tells me that Jon’s body is in bad shape. Jon’s body is afflicted with some type of diabetes and uses this affliction as an excuse to frequently visit hospitals. During these visits, Mike tells me, Jon’s body receives fluids, nutrients, and temporary shelter against the South Florida elements. During these visits Jon’s indigent body is at rest. These visits typically do not last longer than hours, although sometimes they last for days, for the medical professionals at the hospital care for the functioning of Jon’s body, and they sometimes determine that it will not function for long. Even so, Jon’s body finds a way out of the hospital and onto the streets, into the hospital and back out again, over and over, in a cycle that pauses only when somebody else intervenes. Mike and I intervene.

  The indigent body of Jonathan Welker is not alone. Mike and I arrive at a motel to find Jon’s body accompanied by somebody, a girl’s body. The pair appear as though they have been treated quite badly, and both bodies seem to be frail, visibly broken bodies. Two of the same kind of body, as if sculpted of the same earth, grown from the same tree. Overripe and dangling bodies, refusing to fall bodies. Bodies abandoned, or bodies ignored, but for the attention of the American Dream and me.

  The indigent body of Jonathan Welker speaks softly. Softer, I think, than looks allow. Mike tells me that Jon’s body is without a single mean bone, and I think it shows. I think Jon’s body sounds like somebody I could have known from high school, like the guys I used to skip class with, like the anybodies I run into at the gas station near the neighborhood where I grew up. It’s hard for me to hear Jon’s body take on gracious tones, to thank and show appreciation toward me and toward Mike. We just showed up. We’re nothing but additional company for Jon’s body.

  The indigent body of Jonathan Welker speaks of friends and of an evaporating pool of resources. Jon’s body, Mike says, is afflicted with a lack of domicile. There is no neighborhood for Jon’s body to gravitate toward. There is no home base to run to. It is difficult for me to imagine an existence without the fail-safe of patronage, without a house I know I can return to no matter how bad my situation is, without anyone to call upon with any certainty. A zero-consistency life. Mike tells me this disease has been attacking Jon’s body for as long as he can recall.

  The indigent body of Jonathan Welker bargains in desperation. The American Dream and I have only so much to giv
e and the motel is charging more than we, even combined, can afford. Jon’s body confers with this somebody, and the two clash over differences. The pair discuss, body to body, just what a body is worth. The comfort of a hotel bed. A kindness for a kindness. A moment apart for a night alone. A pound of flesh. Jon’s body breaks from the conference and the girl’s body is put forth. A payment for a payment. Jon’s body agrees that this is the best option, the only option left on the table. The girl’s body shudders and then accepts. Mike and I intervene.

  The indigent body of Jonathan Welker watches the American Dream drop twenty dollars U.S. currency, and turn around. Mike picks up his feet and reaches a full sprint before he rounds the corner. He runs all the way home. I stay with Jon’s dejected body for only a short time before I, too, reach into my pocket and hand him what little money I have in my possession. Jon’s body is grateful, more grateful than I think natural, considering the sum does not add up to enough for even half a night in the worst motel in Pompano. Still, Jon’s body is upright and cordial as it latches onto that somebody, and the two turn to walk away without direction.

  The indigent body of Jonathan Welker does not call upon Michael Pazin for help. Mike continues to cut grass and his business continues to grow. He rents a warehouse near Dixie Highway where he stores his ever-increasing stockpile of equipment and spare parts. Like the owners of some of the neighboring warehouses, Mike has installed an air-conditioning unit and brought in a couch, turning the former sweatshop into an effective home away from home. A clubhouse, of sorts. A place for work and a place to relax after a long summer day in the sun. The perfect mix of business and pleasure. The American Dream.