Los Angeles-based writer and critic Ernest Hardy was in town recently to give a talk titled "Don't Believe the Hype: Refocusing the Lens on hip-hop, Masculinity and Queer of Color identity." The event, attended by approximately 20 people, took place at DePaul University's Student Center. He was also promoting his new anthology, War Diaries, co-edited with Tisa Bryant.
Hardy used an array of film clips, music videos, references to books and short films to point to the ways in which Black sexuality—and Black male sexuality, in particular—have been portrayed in mainstream culture. Pointing to several alternative modes of representation, particularly hip-hop music videos from the 1990s, he argued that it is, in fact, possible to have complicated and nuanced representations of Black sexuality within popular culture.
In order to contextualize his thesis and show how Black sexuality is first often straight-washed, Hardy began with a look at two critical Black male figures—Jean-Michel Basquiat and Malcolm X—whose sexuality has, according to him, been effectively straightened out by mass media. Basquiat was an iconic figure in the 1990s, and his life has been the subject of biographies and films. The film Basquiat ( 1996 ) was directed by Julian Schnabel and the more recent documentary Radiant Child ( 2010 ) was directed by Tamra Davis. In both, the artist is portrayed as something of a "ladies' man," even though there has always been clear evidence that, in fact, he was not straight. Hardy referred to Phoebe Hoban's 1999 biography, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, which provides ample evidence that he engaged in sexual relations with men—sometimes, but not always, for money.
Yet, both Schnabel's and Davis's films insist on perpetuating the myth of Basquiat as purely straight. In Radiant Child, for instance, the off-camera interviewer asks the artist about his earlier life as a struggling artist, "How were you surviving in Washington Park?" and speculates that he must have looked for dollars. Basquiat's response, "That's some of it," is made with a look that clearly indicates that there was more—and Hoban's book confirms that he, in fact, hustled sex for money and was occasionally supported by and/or lived with wealthy white men.
Yet, despite such evidence, the prevalent mythology of Basquiat relies on anecdotes about his womanizing. According to Hardy, such a straight-washing came about because Black radical artists are fetishized as subversive, but their lives are depicted in palatable ways that don't disrupt the status quo. In Basquiat's case, erasing the possibility that he was "not secretly gay but clearly not straight" creates "an origin narrative" because "maybe our culture can't take who Basquiat is": a complicated figure whose economic and sexual lives were not as clear-cut as most of his biographers would have us believe.
Looking at the recent Manning Marable biography of Malcolm X, where the recently deceased author argues that the Black radical icon engaged in sex with men for money, Hardy argued that the controversy that has erupted around this revelation speaks to the ways in which Black men in particular are subject to the pressures of street cred and sexual conformity, and he argued that the cases of Basquiat and Malcolm X indicated the need for "new language around sex and sexuality, sexual behavior ... about sexual identity shaped by power."
Moving on to music videos from the 1990s, Hardy took the audience through several key moments in hip-hop, showing how various artists had resisted the dominant stereotype of the genre as misogynistic and homophobic. Among the examples were Jody Watley's 1989 hit "Friends" and "More Than Likely," by Prince Be of P.M. Dawn. Speaking of the latter, Hardy pointed out that the piece came about in response to allegations that the singer was gay—he was publicly referred to as a "faggot." Instead of painting himself in a veneer of masculinity or homophobia, the singer chose to address the matter by reaching out to and collaborating with Boy George, possibly the queerest artist of the time. Hardy's point in this section of his talk was to recover a history of hip-hop and its resistance to homophobia that has since been lost in the current rush to celebrate celebrities like Lady Gaga for their music's apparent political stance.
Moving to some short films that also explored the theme of sexuality, Hardy showed The Young and Evil, a short 2009 film by Julian Breece about a young man trying to become HIV-positive. Hardy pointed out that while most films on the subject tend to demonize youth who deliberately engage in unsafe sex, this film takes a frank but more sensitive approach by considering the larger social and economic contexts surrounding them. As Hardy put it, the behavior is inevitable when youth of color in particular are "getting the message that [ their ] lives don't matter anyway, so why take measures to protect your life?"
