Black gay cruising

I cruise a black maze.
—Essex Hemphill

The “emergence” of black gay men in the academy was marked by a curious confession: I have a colorless lover or I acquire sex with white men, as though intellectual legibility within a predominantly light academy was predicated on a desire “for whiteness.” (See foundational work by Isaac Julien, Darieck Scott, Reginald Shepherd, Melvin Dixon, Phillip Brian Harper, Robert Reid-Pharr, Samuel Delany. I take desire for whiteness from Langston Hughes.) Desiring white bodies was deemed “transgressive,” evidence that jet gay men had moved “beyond race,” which is to say, beyond “racial resentment,” that dangerous legacy from the 1970s, and could safely participate in queer studies. Black same-sex attracted intellectuals demonstrated their cosmopolitanism, their participation in global circuits of feeling beyond the resentments of nation-feeling and nation-history, by confessing their still-transgressive desires for white flesh.

It seemed, from a certain perspective, that one needed to articulate this desire to participate the small group of black queer intellectuals. To admit one’s desire for another black queer did not merit academic scrutiny. Thus, a too-polite academy

Picking up men in Algiers, Algeria is easy, if you know how to read the signs in their eyes along the Ave Didouche Mourad, the main thoroughfare running through the heart of the city. On a Friday evening it takes less than 30 minutes. The streets teem with men well after the shops shutter, the lack of late-night entertainment means the sidewalks are the only space for conversing. The city sprawls across hilltops in an endless cluster of white and azure buildings. Wide French boulevards of the colonial center disappear into the constricted winding staircases of the Kasbah district.

In the various Arab cities I've visited over the years, the saying, "We don't have a problem with men who have sex with men, but we don't accept the male lover life," is common. This is a somewhat clearly drawn line, since the vestiges of what many would consider a homosexual lifestyle -- clubs, bars, bathhouses and theatrical parades filled with costumed go-go dancers -- are non-existent from Rabat to Beirut, save in Tel Aviv. Yet, walking down the streets in Algiers provided me endless opportunities to engage with horny immature men.

However, these young men do not identify with an organized or vocal gay commu

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