SOURCE: "Tearing the Goat's Flesh: Homosexuality, Abjection and the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 372-94.

[In the following excerpt, Reid-Pharr analyzes several homosocial incidents in Soul on Ice as evidence of Cleaver's unsuccessful attempt to define a universal black masculine identity.]

Diana Fuss has argued in a recent discussion of contemporary gay and lesbian theory that the figure of what we might call the undead homosexual, the homosexual who continually reappears, even and especially in the face of the most grisly violence and degradation, is absolutely necessary to the production of positive heterosexual identity, at least heterosexual identity produced within bourgeois-dominated economies of desire that, as Eve Sedgwick demonstrates, deploy homophobia to check slippage between (male) homosociality and homosexuality [Between Men (1985)]. The inside/out binarism, then, the distinction between normality and chaos, is maintained precisely through the mediation of the sexually liminal character, that is to say, the homosexual. Fuss writes:

Those inhabiting, the inside … can only comprehend the outside through incorporation of a negative image. This process of negative interiorization involves turning homosexuality inside out, exposing not the homosexual's abjected insides but the homosexual as the abject, as the contaminated and expurgated insides of the heterosexual subject. [Inside/Out (1991)]

Fuss's point is well taken. For she suggests not simply that the innate pathology of the homosexual must be revealed in order to produce the heterosexual community, but also that the homosexual works as the vehicle by which hetero-pathology itself might be negotiated; that is, the homosexual as "the contaminated and expurgated insides of the heterosexual subject."

In relating this insight to the production of African-American masculinity, I would argue that the pathology that the homosexual must negotiate is precisely the specter of Black boundarylessness, the idea that there is no normal Blackness to which the Black subject, American, or otherwise, might refer. Following the work of René Girard, especially his 1986 study of the place of violence, real and imagined, in the production of communal identity, The Scapegoat, I will suggest that homosexuality operates mimetically in the texts that I examine, standing itself as the sign of a prior violence, the violence of boundarylessness, or cultural eclipse—to borrow Girard's language—that has been continually visited upon the African-American community during its long sojourn in the new world. Indeed Orlando Patterson, Henry Louis Gates, and Paul Gilroy, among others, have argued that the Black has been conceptualized in modern (slave) culture as an inchoate, irrational non-subject, as the chaos that both defines and threatens the borders of logic, individuality, and basic subjectivity. In that schema, all Blacks become interchangeable, creating among the population a sort of continual restlessness, a terror. Girard writes:

The terror inspired in people by the eclipse of culture and the universal confusion of popular uprisings are signs of a community that is literally undifferentiated, deprived of all that distinguishes one person from another in time and space. As a consequence all arc equally disordered in the same place and at the same time.

Though Girard's discussion here precedes from a consideration of societies suddenly thrown into confusion: plague-ridden medieval Europe, revolutionary France, his work suggests that all terror, all confusion, works to undifferentiate the subjects of the (newly) chaotic society such that the members of the society come to stand in for one another in their common experience of vertigo. The scapegoat, then, would be the figure who reproduces this undifferentiation, this chaos, this boundarylessness. The violence directed against the goat would mitigate against the prior violence, the erosion of borders that has beset the entire community.

I would add to this only that anti-homosexual violence operates in the production of Black masculinity on two levels. First, as I have argued already, the strike against the homosexual acts as a seemingly direct confrontation with the presumption of Black boundarylessness, or we might say the assumption of Black subhumanity and Black irrationality that has its roots deep in the history of slavery and the concomitant will to produce Africans as "Other." To strike the homosexual, the scapegoat, the sign of chaos and crisis, is to return the community to normality, to create boundaries around Blackness, rights that indeed white men arc obliged to recognize.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, this violence allows for a reconnection to the very figure of boundarylessness that the assailant is presumably attempting to escape. As a consequence, Black subjects are able to transcend, if only for a moment, the very strictures of normality and rationality that have been defined in contradistinction to a necessarily amorphous Blackness. My point here is to argue for reconsideration of the process of abjection, a process referenced by Diana Fuss and developed most fruitfully by Julia Kristeva, in the dearticulation of meaning and identity. Rather, I would suggest that abjection is characterized by an excess of meaning. As a consequence, we might use the figure of the abject to access "slips" in the ideological structures of modernity, if not a complete reworking of the entire process. To put it bluntly, we must empty our consciousness of that which is contradictory and ambiguous and most especially that which disallows our differentiation. Still we seem not to be able to complete this process. We become uncomfortable with "realness" at precisely those moments when it appears to be most firmly established. Even as the profligate subject is destroyed, we retain "him" within the national consciousness, always on the brink of renewal, lest we find ourselves entrapped within a logic of subjectivity from which the Black is excluded already.

The formal and rhetorical strategies that link Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets are not immediately apparent. Cleaver and Thomas's texts are "autobiographical" and analytical while Baldwin's is fictional. Cleaver documents what has become one of the most recognizable, one might even say trite, markers of Black masculinity, incarceration, while both Thomas and Baldwin attempt to push against the confines of American Blackness altogether. Thomas charts the difficulty that a young, dark-skinned Puerto Rican encounters as he tries to make sense of an American racial economy that creates him as "Black" while Baldwin opts to step outside of the confines of American race literature altogether, producing a novel in which there are no Black characters, but, as I will argue below, in which race is one of the central signifiers.

At the same time, there is the pressing question of how we are to read Baldwin's "gay" novel in relation to the virulent homophobia of Eldridge Cleaver, a homophobia that reaches its apex at precisely those moments when it is directed specifically at Baldwin and his work, particularly Another Country. A similar question surrounds the work of Piri Thomas whose anti-gay sentiment is just as apparent, if somewhat less virulent, than Cleaver's. One might argue, in fact, that Cleaver, Thomas and Baldwin belong to distinct literary camps such that any attempt to read the three together can proceed only by pointing out the variety of the diametric oppositions. Still, as Paul Gilroy has suggested in a discussion of John Singleton's Boys in the Hood and Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied, even as the Black neo-masculinist heterosexual attempts to distance himself from homosexuality he draws attention to the "similarities and convergences in the way that love between men is the common factor" [Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent (1992)]. It follows that the key to understanding the depth of Thomas and Cleaver's homophobia lies precisely in the fact that the universe that both represent in their literature is so consistently and insistently masculine and homosocial.

Much has been made of Cleaver's vicious and repeated attacks on women and gay men. In almost every treatment of this issue, however, Cleaver's misogyny and homophobia have been chalked up to his male privilege and antiquated notions of what constitutes properly Black gender and sexual relations. To date no one has examined seriously Cleaver's tragicomic struggle to construct a Black heterosexuality, to finally rid the Black consciousness of the dual specters of effeminacy and interracial homoeroticism. One might argue, in fact, that Cleaver's woman hating and fag bashing were, for all his bravado, failed attempts to assert himself and the Black community as "straight."

Soul on Ice is in large part an explication of the difficulties of Black subjectification within the highly homosocial, homosexual prison. Women, though present, operate only as the means by which social relations between men are communicated. Early in the text Cleaver confesses to having been a racially motivated rapist, perfecting his craft on the bodies of Black women before he "crossed the tracks" to seek out his "white prey." Clearly the abuse of the Black female body acts as a means to an end, a type of cultural production in which Cleaver's manhood, his sense of self-worth, is established and articulated. I would be wrong, however, to suggest that Cleaver's ultimate goal is to possess and abuse white female bodies. Again women act only as conduits by which social relations, relations that take place exclusively between men, are represented. Cleaver may indeed be raping Black and white women, but it is white men whom he intends to hurt.

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.

The peculiarity of Cleaver's twisted logic rests not so much in the fact that he saw sexual violence as an insurrectionary tool. On the contrary, the rape of women, is used regularly to terrorize and subdue one's "enemies." The difficulty in Cleaver's logic rests in the fact that he raped both white and Black women. Was he, I must wonder, seeking revenge on the white man when he violated poor, Black female residents of his quintessentially Black ghettos?

This question is not simply rhetorical. Cleaver himself argues that there is a tendency within some segments of the Black community to understand the Black woman as having collaborated, particularly through the vehicle of sex, with the white master. Indeed Angela Davis attempts to contextualize this sentiment in her seminal essay, "Reflections on The Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves" [Black Scholar 3 (Dec. 1971)]. Raping the Black woman could be interpreted, then, as an attack on the white man's stooge. The Black woman becomes the means of telegraphing a message of rage and resistance to the white male oppressor, a figure Cleaver recodifies as the Omnipotent Administrator.

It becomes clear that the ultimate target of Cleaver's sexual attacks is always the white man. Both white and Black women act as pawns in an erotic conversation between Cleaver and his white male counterparts. This fact is emblematically represented in an exchange between Cleaver and a white prison guard who enters Cleaver's cell, rips a picture of a voluptuous white woman from the wall, tears it to bits, and then leaves the pieces floating in the toilet for Cleaver to find upon his return. The guard later tells Cleaver that he will allow him to keep pictures of Black women, but not whites.

The clue to how deeply homoerotic the exchange between Cleaver and the guard actually is lies in Cleaver's description of his initial reaction. He writes, "I was genuinely beside myself with anger: almost every cell, excepting those of the homosexuals, had a pin-up girl on the wall and the guards didn't bother them." Cleaver's pin-up girl acts as not only a sign of interracial desire, but also a marker of his heterosexuality. This fact, which seems easy enough to understand, actually represents a deep contradiction within Cleaver's demonstration of the Black male heterosexual self. It points directly to the disjunction between the reality of the interracial homoerotic, homosexual environment, the prison, in which Cleaver actually lived and wrote and the fantasy of Black heterosexuality that he constructs in his narrative.

Indeed Cleaver's one rather ethereal representation of heterosexual love seems artificial and contrived, coming as it does from the pen of an admitted serial rapist and committed homophobe. He spends some time in Soul on Ice describing the exchange of "love" letters between his lawyer, Beverly Axelrod, and himself. Strangely enough, there is little of Cleaver, the rapist, in these works. His love seemingly transcends the corporeal. By turns he describes Axelrod as a rebel and a revolutionary, a person of great intelligence, compassion, and humanity, a valiant defender of "civil rights demonstrators, sit-iners, and the Free Speech students." And just at the moment when he has produced her as bodiless, transcendent saint he interjects,

I suppose that I should be honest, and before going any further, admit that my lawyer is a woman … a very excellent, unusual, and beautiful woman. I know that she believes that I do not really love her and that I am confusing a combination of lust and gratitude for love. Lust and gratitude I feel abundantly, but I also love this woman.

I am less concerned with pointing out the obvious homoerotic reference than with voicing how strikingly measured and cerebral his relationship with Beverly Axelrod actually was. Indeed lust and gratitude are distinct from "Love," which is presumably a type of transcendent, transsexual appreciation for the intrinsic worth of the individual.

Yet Cleaver's description of his non-corporeal, non-funky love for Beverly Axelrod can only redouble upon itself. It directly challenges the claim that Cleaver's work is a product of the stark reality he has experienced. Cleaver has, much like the white man, the Omnipotent Administrator he so despises, excised his own penis, his lust, his physical self from the conversation.

The Omnipotent Administrator, having repudiated and abdicated his body, his masculine component which he has projected onto the men beneath him, cannot present his woman, the Ultrafeminine, with an image of masculinity capable of penetrating into the psychic depths where the treasure of her orgasm is buried.

Still even as Cleaver decries the bodilessness of the Omnipotent Administrator his love for Beverly Axelrod is no more physical than is the white man's for the Ultrafeminine. Beverly Axelrod is unlike the victims of Cleaver's rapes in that she is all intellect and no body. The "sexual" passion between the two is even more rarefied than that of the Omnipotent Administrator and the Ultrafeminine because there is never even the promise of physical contact, raw sex, but only endless literary representations of their desire. Beverly Axelrod should be understood, then, as a fiction, or rather as the site of yet another fictional exchange. In this manner the idea of heterosexual normality becomes a sort of caricature of itself. The body gives way to the intellect, lust to love.

"Love" was for Cleaver always the terrain of conceptual struggle. Indeed "love" becomes in Soul on Ice the very site at which normality is constructed in contradistinction to the sense of boundary crisis that mitigates against the production of a stable Black masculinity. Perhaps the most telling moment, in this regard, is Cleaver's confrontation with his white intellectual mentor, Chris Lovdjieff, a prison teacher and a man whom Cleaver describes as "The Christ." Lovdjieff introduces Cleaver to what the great novelists and playwrights had said of love. He reads poetry on the subject and plays his students tapes of Ashley Montagu then instructs them to write responsive essays. Cleaver writes that he cannot love whites, quoting Malcolm X as evidence:

How can I love the man who raped my mother, killed my father, enslaved my ancestors, dropped atomic bombs on Japan, killed off the Indians and keeps me cooped up in the slums? I'd rather be tied up in a sack and tossed into the Harlem River first.

Lovdjieff responds in a fit of tears to what he takes to be a personal attack. Cleaver remarks, "Jesus wept" then leaves. Soon thereafter the San Quentin officials begin to curtail Lovdjieff's access to the prisoners, finally barring him from entry altogether.

The ideological work that the reenactment of this oedipal ritual accomplishes is both to detach Cleaver and his narrative from the deeply homoerotic relationship he maintains with Lovdjieff and to clear the way for a purely Black masculinity. It is important to remember here that the country was in the midst of rather striking changes in the manner in which the official "reality" of both race and sexuality were articulated. In 1949, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESCO) launched a study to identify means by which racism might be eradicated. The result of these efforts was a document, written by the same Ashley Montagu whose words Lovdjieff attempted to use as a bridge between his young protege and himself.

Montagu, who began life as Israel Ehrenberg in London's east end, was trained as an anthropologist first at the University of London's University College and eventually at Columbia where he received his graduate education under no less a light than Franz Boas. By the time he wrote UNESCO's statement on race, he already had published widely in the field, developing a critical apparatus that not only called for a markedly relativistic understanding of "racial attributes," but that altogether called into question the efficacy of maintaining race as an analytical category.

For all practical social purposes, race is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth…. Biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind is the main thing.

I would suggest again that when Cleaver severs his ties with Lovdjieff he is helping to reestablish an ontological economy that would take racial difference as primary. The resolution of the crisis represented by their relationship leads to the renormalization of received racial thinking.

At the same time it is important to point out that the post-World War II period witnessed an incredible bifurcation in the means by which sexual desire was articulated and actualized. The typical narratives of the post-war sexual ethos would have it that Americans rushed into a sort of suffocating domesticity, erecting, in the process, an image of the nuclear family that would maintain a stranglehold on the nation's consciousness for at least two decades. There was also, however, a huge increase in the visibility of homosexual communities, particularly in the nation's cities, the same locations that were opening themselves more and more to Black immigrants. Indeed the most prominent chroniclers of the Black urban male experience, including not only Cleaver, Baldwin and Thomas, but Claude Brown, Malcolm X, and Amiri Baraka all reference the increased visibility of the urban homosexual. What I would argue, then, is that the homosexual, and in particular the racially marked homosexual, the Black homosexual, represented for the authors I am examining the very sign of deep crisis, a crisis of identity and community that threw into confusion, if only temporarily, the boundaries of (Black) normality.