Stalking...
the neighborhood is dangerous, but we go there
we walk the long way,
our jangling keys mute the sound of our stalking
to be under the sky
above or below a man
this is our heat
radiant in the night
our hands blister with feeling
a field of flowers blossoms
where we gather in empty warehouses
our sea falls
without the sound or the grace of stars
we lurk in shadows
we are the hunger of shadows

In the dark we don't have to say "I love you"
The dark swallows it,
And sighs like we sigh
when we rise from our knees.
I am lonely for past kisses
wild lips certain streets breed for pleasure...
Romance is a foxhole.
This kind of war frightens me
I don't want to die sleeping with soldiers I don't love
I want to court outside the race, outside the class, outside the attitudes
But love is a dangerous word in this small town
Those who seek it are sometimes found face-down, floating on their beds
Those who find it protect or destroy it from within
But the disillusioned, those who've lost the stardust, the moondance, the waterfront,
Like them I long for my past.
When I was 10, 13, 20, I wanted candy, five dollars, a ride...
							-Essex Hemphill, Various poems quoted in Looking for Langston

"...Love is a dangerous word in this small town" says the voice as two leather men meet in a graveyard at night. They kiss each other, their faces hidden in the shadows, the color of their skin difficult to perceive but defined by their features. The boots of these men have been treading on dead leaves, looking for a sexual encounter, lurking behind pale statues of unnamed angels. A third man watches as tears stream down his face. A contained sigh‹perhaps of frustration, cartainly of loneliness‹ shakes his frame as the voice speaks to him, itself seeking a place among "the disillusioned, those who've lost the stardust, the moondance, the waterfront..."

The gay culture in which the lonely man in this scene from Looking for Langston is embedded excludes certain people systematically through its quest for definition. The man, as a gay man looking for love, finds his words and ideas silenced by the dark, which swallows the I love you's and "sighs like we sigh when we rise from our knees." The darkness is the essence, the force of a mainstream gay culture. It is the strength of an oppressive definition of inclusion and exclusion. Its desire to generalize its members' experience to every gay man's experience determines who is in and who is not; it defines who identifies and who does not. The two leathermen are not only representative of anonymity and hookup‹the represent that which the lonely man is not, their sexuality not only being gay but also white.

The racial dynamics within Looking for Langston are evident from the first moment at which two black men look at each other. The white dandy with the oleaginous hair resents it, and through a command that carries with it the power of a whip while seeming like a tantrum manages to assert the domination that his color allows him. The racial dynamic emerges when the white dandy takes out a roll of dollar bills from the headboard of his bed and offers it to the black man as compensation for his services. The dynamic emerges when the white dandy walks through a room full of Mapplethorpe photographs and caresses them lustfully as the voice highlights his own misunderstanding of their humanity and his own reduction of these people into wild sexual objects.

Looking for Langston is self-conscious of its blackness and its homosexuality. The dynamics of exclusion and cultural hegemony can be expanded further to describe the reality of the man with desire for men yet alienated from a "gay culture" with which he is supposed to identify if he is to describe himself as gay. Gay culture becomes a weapon of control, one which forces behavior into a pre-determined pattern rather than allowing full self-expression. Looking for Langston becomes a critique not only of a white notion of black sexuality; it takes on an Urban Gay culture that, in its purported openness and acceptance of difference really contains within it similar limitations to self-development and individual liberty. Social isolation becomes the method through which urban gay culture exerts its hegemony, presenting itself as the legitimate form of homosexuality.

"If you look straight, act straight, and think straight, why bother being gay?" asks Daniel Mendelsohn in an article for New York magazine. His definition of gay action and gay behavior maintains that gay culture's forte is to "stand on the margins and throw shade" (29). Its essence lies in style and fashion, regardless of purpose; the theatricality of ACT-UP's demonstrations reflecting more of a "gay" aesthetic than the coalition work of an organization like the Treatment Action Group (TAG) Mendelsohn describes. Mendelsohn emphasizes the role of style in the formation of a Gay Culture, and highlights how

style, whether verbal, sartorial, or social, has been inextricably linked with urban gay culture pretty much since the moment when the word homosexual was first coined‹not coincidentally, just as Oscar Wilde began offering the world his glitteringly arch critiques of bourgeois Victorian convention. Ever since, gay culture has played Wilde to the world's London, using style as a pin to prick the certainties and presumptions of the "normal" universe. You see that sensibility at work from Wilde and Noël Coward to Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner. [...] And you see it even in everyday gay life, where the emphasis on stylization made the most banal routines like breakfast into tableaux worthy of Vincente Minelli (26).

Mendelsohn equates stylistic edge and kitschiness with "gay", and asserts that "if you take away both the edge and the kitsch, there's not much left‹and what remains doesn't look all that different from what you find in straight culture" (28). Membership in gay culture, then, depends on the acquisition, possession or development of an aesthetic sensibility somehow absent from the straight world‹somehow connected to sexual desire. Gay culture is restricted to the world of the risqué aesthete and of the loud and out activist. The content of recent novels which "aren't noticeably different from anything else you see at Barnes & Noble"(29) and with have "moved beyond outlaw sexuality to focus on topics that connect gay experience to larger social and familial currents"(30) falls in the same category as the work of TAG volunteers with pharmaceutical companies‹ elided from gay culture for not living up to the aesthetic standards of Mendelsohn's Gay Culture.

Other writers, however, strive to move away from the reality that Mendelsohn longs for. David Leavitt, in his Introduction to The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, articulates what eventually became his own longing, "a gay literature that, rather than fawning over angels made flesh, transformed homosexual experience into human drama; a gay literature that was literature first and gay second" (xix). As a writer with many identities he doesn't feel any particular affinity toward the pining for aesthetic perfection that the widely-available gay novels offered him as he grew up, in which "the obsession with male beauty is an intrusive element" (xix, author's emphasis). Leavitt describes his longing as a teenager "to read a novel in which the gay characters were neither reduced to a subhuman nor elevated to a superhuman level... a novel that told something like the truth" (xvi). He describes how he becomes more and more conscious of the assumption in popular and literary pre-eighties gay texts that the realms of heterosexuality and homosexuality are divided by an "irrevocable gulf" (xxi). Identifying as gay became not only "to announce oneself", but to

change one's way of dressing, speaking, thinking; in many cases it required a literal relocation, to San Francisco's Castro district or New York's Greenwich Village, or in the summer, to Fire Island, Provincetown, Key West. These neighborhoods became meccas for gay men eager to live free, though not always untroubled by the knowledge that in joining their fellow "tribesmen" they were, in effect, accepting residency in a realm that was separate and only perhaps equal: a realm of bars and pornographic card shops and more bars and more pornographic card shops. (xxii)

Leavitt expresses his own resentment at the idea that in coming out he would be thrust into a culture that caused him fear‹not out of internalized homophobia or any other such pseudo-psychological malady, but out of fear that in coming out he would have to redefine himself completely and sever ties to his family, his heterosexual friends, and the culture in which he grew up.

Identification as gay within the gay urban culture for which Mendelsohn is apologizing implies the submission of all of a person's identities into one "gay" identity, one in which sexuality becomes a determinant of what should be appreciated, valued and respected. As such, Urban Gay Culture becomes a colonizing power, one which leaves only loneliness as an alternative to its imperial fist. Its icons must become the icons of the newly out under penalty of ostracism by the only visible group that could possibly provide support; its cultural practices must become the practices of the colonized. Eventually sexual desire becomes intertwined with cultural behavior such that the distinction ceases to be drawn between a person's character and a person's sexuality.

The colonialism of Gay Culture differs from more invasive forms of colonialism, however, in that those who become its subjects eventually become colonialists themselves. Their identity as members of Gay Culture begins to override their other identities. Assoto Saint's introduction to the collection The Road Before Us aids in emphasizing this point, as he describes the debate he had to resolve with the contributors to the volume:

Afrocentrists in our community have chosen the term "black gay" to identify themselves. As they insist, black comes first. Interracialists in our community have chosen the term "gay black" to identify themselves. As they insist, gay comes first. Both groups' self-descriptions are ironically erroneous. It's not which word comes first that matters, but rather the grammatical context in which those words are used ‹ either as an adjective or as a noun. An adjective is a modifier of a noun. The former is dependent on the latter. (xix)

Saint's most provocative statement comes in later, when he cites Mark Thompson's work Gay Spirit as saying that "Gay implies a social identity and consciousness actively chosen, while homosexual refers to a specific form of sexuality." Saint concludes the statement, asserting that "a person may be gay, but not necessarily homosexual" (xx). Saint concurs with Mendelsohn, then, in that "gay" refers not necessarily to the choice of a sexual object, but also to acceptance of and participation in a Gay Culture. "I am very proud of my gayness, which is not to be confused with homosexuality" (xix), Saint says.

This culture that Saint defends, however, is formed around the difference created by a marginalized form of sexual desire. Leavitt maintains that the gay culture of the gay ghetto is created by the people who don't live within it, straight people who will see the gay person only as gay (xxii). He, however, moves away from Mendelsohn's and Saint's acceptance of this cultural hegemony, of this notion of "gayness", and describes a new kind of liberation, "one that would allow gay men and lesbians to celebrate their identities without having to move into a gulag" (xxii).

A similar rejection of that cultural hegemony emerges within Joseph Beam's introduction to the volume In the Life. Beam describes, more forcefully than Leavitt, how "clearly, gay male means: white, middle-class, youthful, nautilized and probably butch; there is no room for Black gay men within the confines of this gay pentagon" (14-15). The exclusion present in the definition is the same exclusion that Mendelsohn and Saint posit: there is a standard by which things can be categorized into "gay" and "not gay", in which expressions by homosexual men can be left out of the realm of things gay. The definition converts the world of once marginalized men into a world that can afford to marginalize others.

Beam's frustration with the restrictive representations of male homosexuality in literature is summarized in the opening lines to In the Life: "All the protagonists are blond; all the Blacks are criminal and negligible" (13, author's emphasis). The same dynamics of racial exclusion emerge in both gay writing and writing by the heterosexual mainstream, the same set of power dynamics wherein the only place for the black man is either as sexual object or as subordinate to the life of the gay men (the white men, the stylistically aware men). Beam summarizes the types of literature available to him as an employee of a gay, lesbian and feminist bookstore, Giovanni's Room,

...literature by white gay men who fell, quite easily, into three camps: the incestuous literati of Manhattan and Fire Island, the San Francisco cropped-moustache-clones, and the Boston-to-Cambridge politically correct radical faggots. None of them spoke to me as a Black gay man. Their words offered the reflection of a sidewalk; their characters cast ominous shadows for my footfalls (13).

The lonely man in Looking for Langston finds as much of a reflection of himself in the sidewalk of the graveyard as Beam finds in the narratives of white gay men. He sees in the encounter of the two leather men as much of a reflection of his own desires as Leavitt finds in Dancer from the Dance and in The Family of Max Desir, the narratives of gay men looking for physical perfection.

"I want to court outside the race, outside the class, outside the attitudes/ But love is a dangerous word in this small town," says the voice as the two leathermen exhale the smoke from their cigarettes and kiss each other. The disillusioned lonely man has been walking, wandering aimlessly, kicking cans on the street, not wanting to go to any of the places where he has ended up. The lonely man is thinking of his quest for love in a town where "those who seek it are sometimes found face-down floating on their beds", where "those who find it protect it or destroy it from within." This small gay town of darkness is where the disillusioned have lost everything, "the stardust, the moondance, the waterfront"‹it is now something in their past, something which he longs for.

The illusions of the lonely man are pushed away by the culture of the hookup, the culture of anonymity, laden with the style of the leather jacket, boots and carefully-trimmed hair of a well-hung Death. A hookup in a graveyard happens naturally, almost mechanically in this setting‹same setting where angels wrapped in fog will later talk of not leaving injured soldiers, only casualties. "This kind of war frightens me," says the voice as the angels cast in plaster loom over the two leather-clad hunters, soon to be wounded in the cultural war between the Hookup and Romance, hidden in a foxhole. "I don't want to die sleeping with soldiers I don't love," says the voice, tears streaming down the lonely man's cheeks. Courting outside the race and the class and the attitudes is not something that has its place in this realm. This Gay world of Gay hookups does not understand that‹it is not part of it. Those who define the world of gayness in which Looking for Langston is embedded do not consider the search for romantic love; the darkness of that world swallows its expression and mutes it with a sigh, the same sigh of the rising fellator in the alleyway.

As Looking for Langston opens into the wake for Langston Hughes, a voice announces that "a person does not elect to oppose his society: one would much rather be at home among compatriots than be mocked and detested by them." Similitude of ideas, of customs and of background determine comfort, the voice says. Can a black man find comfort in the world of gay men defined by white customs and white norms without sacrificing his own customs and norms? Can a homosexual man find comfort in a Gay Culture defined by style and trendiness without sacrificing his own customs and norms?

The influence that the mainstream, the gay white mainstream, has in defining inclusion and exclusion determines the success of the black man and of the homosexual man in finding a place within the world of "gayness". That influence lessens when members of groups that are systematically excluded from that definition find each other and gather to have their reality included in the definition or to create an alternative definition that may or may not include the original. The definition of Gay Culture that Mendelsohn and Saint articulate in terms of aesthetic trends and concerns places the etymology of gay over the ethnology of a gay community. Those men that nowadays identify as gay cannot so easily be categorized as critics of the bourgeois. Their definition looks back to the times of the dandy to define a gay culture, neglecting in that process the cultural and ideological spectra that now recursively re-define gay culture on a daily basis.

Looking for Langston is, amongst other things, a manifestation of that need for a broader definition of Gay Culture. It rejects the impersonal and polyandrous sexuality that other works of fiction about and by gay men emphasize and present as an only reality. It condemns the ways in which Gay Culture systematically exoticizes the non-white yet consistently ignores the cultural expressions of black men. It emphasizes the need for the excluded and marginalized to join and establish their own environments. Looking for Langston emphasizes that a Gay Culture defined in terms of Wilde and Crisp cannot continue to speak for all gay men if it does not start defining itself in terms of Baldwin, Hughes and Hemphill.

Works Cited