Racial Harmonics: Interest Convergence and Queer Sexual Politics 1980-89

• In Event: LGBTQIA2S+ Studies in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

The Queer liberation movement of the 1970s & 80s is marked as a moment of sexual-political upheaval. Many queer studies scholars, sociologists, and LGBT studies scholars assign significance to this period given the unusual political solidarity organizers developed across the color line. Black and White Men Together (BWMT) is one such organization, whose political advocacy worked to unsettle long-standing racial segregation within Queer spaces. However, the organization’s founding premise remains haunted by the issue of racialized desire: BWMT’s investment in the project of anti-racism originates expressly in a romantic and sexual desire for Black men. Through a process of what Henry calls “racial harmonics,” the chauvinism of the waning Black radical movement incentivized Black and White queer men to seek political solidarity amongst one another on the basis of both political interest and sexual desire. Henry argues that this revolutionary moment marked the point in which racialized desire became transformed into a form of political praxis, cementing its regularity in Queer social life, and cloaking itself in a political-discursive immunity. These historical confluences produced a congenital refusal to engage grammars of racialized sexuality and culminated in a sexual politics that makes pleasure the face of political action. The proceeding political-ideological dominance of BWMT thus represented the solidification of a new regime of desire, such that Black radical critiques against the racialization of desire were censored as an impingement on the entirety of the revolution’s ideals: the right to privacy, sexuality, Queer identity, agency, and racial equality. The author argues that this was not simply an example of one organization crushing its detractors; but, rather, a shift in the sexual specificities of the color line: one regime of desire began to overtake another, the process underpinned and supported by a new sexual politics.

Author

• Hasan A Henry, University of California-Berkeley