Six
Looking back on where this book has traveled, and considering the stakes for the exhibition of sex both then and now, in the United States and abroad, how should we display the history of sexuality? How best might we frame issues in our scholarship, and how might we best practice those issues when we curate within a museum? Today’s queer scholarship touches on these questions in its emphasis on constructing, interpreting, and developing archives; queer scholarship has also foregrounded the politics of historiography. My aim in this final chapter is to bring these fields together in order to suggest and model how we might develop curatorial tactics that ground queer theory in a register of actual practice. I call this practice queer curatorship.
I propose queer curatorship as an experimental display tactic that stages alternative spatial configurations for two distinct purposes: (1) to expose how traditional museums socialize heteronormative relationships between objects and visitors and (2) to cope with ethically fraught objects of queer cultures, which in this chapter take the form of leather whips as objects with historical ties to both gay leather/kink culture and antebellum slavery. As a practice, queer curatorship approaches display spaces as sites for expanding the scope of the theoretical genealogy of performativity theory.1 It aims to explore how object arrangements in display spaces such as museums already produce endlessly reiterated performances between objects and bodies that influence the reception and recognition of certain things as bad or good sex objects. While I focus on museums, I view queer curatorship as an alternative performative methodology that can be mobilized in a variety of different display spaces to do and undo the history of sexuality by constructing new epistemological frameworks for understanding and exhibiting sexuality in the public sphere.
In the pages that follow, I elaborate on this method for displaying the history of sexuality by examining a highly controversial topic in that history: the relationship between interracial SM and the material culture and history of slavery. To do so, I analyze the histories of eroticism and discipline as they crisscross on the surfaces of two objects. The first object, an eight-minute experimental film by Isaac Julien called The Attendant, is shot in the Wilberforce House in Hull, England, but set in the Wilberforce House Museum, an actual museum that memorializes abolitionist and transatlantic slavery artifacts in what was once the home of the English abolitionist William Wilberforce.2 In the film, Julien used the setting of the antislavery museum to reorient the relationship between bodies and objects, namely, the relationship of the Attendant, a black guard played by the actor Thomas Baptiste, to the artifacts once collected by a white abolitionist. After finding a whip in a museum visitor’s bag, the Attendant becomes someone who performs an imagined but overlapping history of interracial SM, a sex practice that incorporates both pleasure and pain. The latter part of the chapter explains how I applied the lessons I learned as a spectator of Julien’s film to a specific museum display conundrum that arose at the Leather Archives and Museum (LA&M) on the discovery of a leather sword sheath and whip that were believed to have been used as instruments of nonconsensual torture on an antebellum Louisiana plantation.
SM as Sexual Performance
Before I move into my textual analysis, allow me to provide a short introduction to SM as a performance that ghosts the ways in which sex and power function in hegemonic environments of discipline. SM, as a theatricalized and ritualized performance of sex and power, allows us “to stand back from the game, to look at all its rules in their totality, and to examine the entire strategic situation: how the game has been set up, on what terms most favorable to whom, with what consequences for which of its players.”3 The ritualistic staging of SM can resemble the performative practices that occur in settings of discipline such as the military and prisons, courts, and hospitals, among others; in both SM and these scenarios, the theatricality of the ritual depends on the consistent incorporation and use of fetish objects such as costumes, cages, handcuffs, gavels, gas masks, and, as this chapter will analyze, whips. But the performances of sex and power that can occur in these settings are ghosted or reinvoked, though not necessarily repeated, in SM performances. In SM, as Anne McClintock argued, “the codes are the same, though the ends are different.”4 This evocation raises the stakes of the theater of SM, especially in the enactment of what are sometimes called plantation scenes involving roles such as “masters” and “slaves.”
The repetition of power rituals in the context of SM acquires and requires a different feel, intention, and affect. But deeply held beliefs about these rituals cause SM performance to be viewed as violent or abusive. The confusion of SM—that is, consensual sex acts—with violence—that is, nonconsensual acts—has a long discursive history. This history reaches back to the feminist sex wars of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the volatile disagreements about good and bad sex, and the backlash against the public pedagogy of sex in the academy, perhaps most notably at the “Pleasure and Danger” conference at Barnard College in 1982 where certain feminist factions cast pornography as rape and SM as violent abuse.5 Also in the 1980s, art world controversies emerged in response to depictions of SM as well as the fetishization of racialized subjects in art, most relevantly in the controversies surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s nude photographs of black men in his (in)famous series Black Book.6
This confusion has not only suffused art world conversations but also had everyday social effects. Those who practice SM in the United States have lost their jobs and had their children taken away. In England, where The Attendant takes place, people who engage in consensual SM have been incarcerated after “Operation Spanner,” the 1987 undercover police sting that targeted the gay community and resulted in the House of Lords’ ruling that consent was not a valid defense for acts that resulted in wounding or bodily harm. I recognize and take into consideration all these histories when I propose that it is the historical and embodied riskiness of leather culture’s reenactment of slave scenes that renders it so useful to contemplating any and all public history projects involving sexuality.
The Attendant is a film in which Julien explores where black men stand in these histories and whether they need to embrace a moral stance that would foreclose the practice of SM. At the LA&M, I was compelled to conduct a similar investigation, one that used the museum as a site for exploring how race and slavery are typically erased when sadomasochistic representations are discussed in white queer discourse.
The LA&M is a grassroots, not-for-profit museum located in Chicago and dedicated to the collection and display of artifacts from leather, fetish, and BDSM cultures. Started by Chuck Renslow in 1991 in a small storefront near the now-defunct leather bar the Eagle and the all-male bathhouse Man’s Country, the LA&M assumed its new home in 1999 at 6418 North Greenview in a building that was formerly a Baptist church, then a community performance space, and finally a synagogue before it became a sex museum. The building now houses eight publicly accessible gallery spaces, a 1,425-square-foot archive, a 164-seat auditorium, and a 600-square-foot library for the preservation and study of leather history. The LA&M is almost completely funded, run, and maintained by those in the leather/kink community in and around Chicago. The collaborative efforts of LA&M’s three hundred plus members and volunteers, its status as a tax-exempt charity under section 501c(3) of the federal tax code, and the vigorous fund-raising and administrative skills of past and present directors like Joseph Bean (1997) and Rick Storer (current) eventually enabled the administrative team to officially retire the mortgage on the Greenview building in 2005. Not surprisingly, no government aid was received to purchase the building. “This has been a grassroots fundraising effort since day one,” said LA&M president Chuck Renslow. “Our history is now safe behind walls owned by and controlled by the Leather community.”7 That this community project emerged in Chicago was not a random occurrence; a residence for the LA&M in Chicago, which has a known past for embracing leather communities of various sexual orientations and practices as well as a tactical location in mid-America, maximizes accessibility for leather folk from all over the United States. As a result, the LA&M has become just as much a pilgrimage site for the leather community as it is a museum, a library, and an archive.
In many ways the LA&M project was a response to the AIDS crisis. The original statement of purpose, which resulted from the first board of directors meeting in 1992, endorsed the following: “The items of significance in our sexual lifestyle are not gathered into the biological family’s collection of treasured remembrances. Instead, they are consigned to dumpsters and trash cans either by our own anxieties or by our survivors’ disinterest or revulsion. Every generation of leather men and women has had to invent itself or base its communal knowledge on the memories of living individuals.”8 At this time, already existent national and local gay and lesbian archives, libraries, and special collections were not always interested in collecting the artifacts from leather cultures in which members bonded more from shared outlaw sexual practices than identity politics.
Most of the LA&M’s collection consists of US-based artifacts, though international donations and objects acquired from international tourism are rarely turned away. The LA&M’s acceptance and preservation of most anything and everything kink and leather is one of the defining distinctions between it and other museums that preserve and display sexual history. While the LA&M exhibits alternative sexualities for national and international audiences and possesses collections from different gendered, raced, and national communities, most of its displays, with a few notable exceptions, have primarily focused on white, gay male leather culture in the post–World War II era of the United States. The leather community’s history of persecution both within the dominant culture and within the LGBT community has led to the romanticization of leather as a culture of egalitarian politics and practices as well as a defensive stance when it comes to critique from the outside. The LA&M, like all sex museums, tacitly exemplifies histories of struggle for inclusion alongside histories of exclusion. Fittingly, the overlap of power and sex, both consensual and nonconsensual, is perhaps nowhere more palpable than at the leather sex museum.
I spent over five years with the communities who work and patronize the LA&M, and, while there, I performed many roles: researcher, volunteer, archivist, curator, and programming director. I was on staff as the director of programming and a curator when the leather sword/sheath whip was rediscovered. An intramuseum debate ensued regarding the relevance of this artifact to the aesthetic and historical genealogy of a collection that predominately focused on postwar gay, Anglo leather culture. I approached the controversy as an opportunity to curate an exhibit that used the ethical issues raised by the object’s display as a central framing device to open up a difficult conversation on racism within the leather community and on the ethics of reenacting scenes derived from slavery in the performance of SM. Applying Julien’s filmic methodology to this real-life museum context, I strove to mobilize a queer curatorial praxis that attended to the pleasures and discomforts associated with the representational labor of publicly displaying nonnormative sexualities.
The curatorship that I enacted as a staff member at the LA&M was queer in the sense that it put into practice current concerns in queer theoretical scholarship about communities and diversity. Queer theory scholars such as Jack Halberstam, Heather Love, and José Esteban Muñoz have agreed that the field needs to critique simplistic, celebratory accounts of the queer past in order to create a queer future more in line with ever-diversifying queer constituencies. In order for queer to open up intellectual, political, and sexual possibilities, sexuality scholars need to relinquish nostalgia for what was, is, and will be, always and everywhere, a politically fraught and tendentious sexual community.9 I propose queer curatorship, then, as a mode for putting queer theory on its feet, one that serves as an example of how theoretical concepts can be practically applied in museums.
The Attendant
The following museum scenes in The Attendant demonstrate what happens when fantasy, sex, and nonlinearity collide in a film that dares to juxtapose slavery and SM in its succession of frames:
The Wilberforce House Museum, the birthplace of a famous abolitionist and now a museum, tells the story of the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition through the display of objects.
Cut
Well-coiffed museum guests, among them the well-known cultural theorist Stuart Hall, navigate the museum nonchalantly consuming its history.
Cut
A pair of hands in black leather gloves slowly and sensually caresses each glove as if reveling in the slippery sensation of the material.
Cut
A black museum guard, named in the film’s closing credits as the Attendant, stares blankly into the bags of museum visitors as he looks for forbidden objects. The visitors regard him with a mixture of suspicion, annoyance, and indifference.
Cut
Enter a white man in a leather vest and pants holding a leather bag containing handcuffs and one single-tail leather whip. The Attendant examines the contents of the bag. He looks up: the two men gaze into each other’s eyes, and a knowing smile spreads across each of their faces.
As the film proceeds, Francois-August Biard’s painting Slaves on the West Coast of Africa transforms into a framed tableau vivant depicting a leather-clad sex den surprising in its tender portrayal of the prostrate leather slave. Later in the film, Biard’s painting, with its depiction of a crowded slave market replete with whips, chains, and a white man straddling a black slave, morphs into the iconic hypermasculine fantasies of Tom of Finland drawings created after World War II. Beneath this transformed painting, the black guard and the white leather-clad visitor (played by the actor John Wilson) take turns whipping one another, pleasure legible on both their faces. While this performance may be enfolding in the mind of the Attendant or occurring in real time, Julien shows us how the Attendant adapts his visual intimacy with the objects on display into a fantasy of bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and SM (BDSM).
6.2 Still from The Attendant, by Isaac Julien (1993).
I am not the first to be fascinated by Julien’s film. Elizabeth Freeman described the use of SM in The Attendant as a mode of “time traveling” with the “aim for a certain visceral fusion, a point of somatic contact between a single erotic body in the present tense and an experience coded as both public and past.” Her argument that “S/M relentlessly physicalizes the encounter with history” is useful for devising queer curatorial practices, particularly as they pertain to the topic of interracial SM. For Freeman’s analysis, as for mine, Julien’s depiction of SM is neither a reductive reiteration of slavery nor an extension of that history of violence but rather a complex and parodic performance in which Julien “ask[s] . . . black and white men to examine the traumatic histories encoded in their interracial desires without demanding that they simply give these desires up.”10 Freeman’s focus on temporality helps me theorize the spatial display dynamics involved in communicating the differences and similarities of slavery in the context of American histories of violence and queer histories that incorporate SM as a sexual practice based on pleasure and pain.11 What I hope to add to the already existing discourse on The Attendant is an examination of the convergent and divergent histories of SM and slavery by focusing on spaces of display, such as museums, as sites for the development of queer curatorial praxis, specifically focusing on the placement of objects, such as whips, in display contexts that proffer counterpublic perspectives on the history of sexual equipment, the perversion and eroticization of hegemonic power exchanges, and the mutually constitutive relationship between histories of eroticism and histories of discipline.
After the erotic encounter with the leather-clad white man in the museum gallery, Julien repositions the character of the Attendant as a performer who sings for no one save a lone black woman whose claps echo through an otherwise empty theater. The Attendant stands alone on a balcony as he dramatically delivers a line from the libretto of Henry Purcell’s seventeenth-century opera Dido and Aeneas: “Remember me, remember me, but ah, forget my fate.” Sex and imperialism dominate this operatic adaptation of Virgil’s epic of the Roman warrior Aeneas (the grandfather of Brutus, the mythical founder and namesake of Britain) who abuses the generosity of Dido, the African Queen of Carthage. The result is a celebration of the British Empire via the lies and deception that followed an interracial love affair.12 In his choice to reactivate this grand myth of empire as it connects with the corporeality of an interracial sexual encounter, Julien comments on the impact of microrelationships on world order while also subverting the idea of the post- in the postcolonial museum by positioning the Attendant’s lament very much in the present of the film’s temporal schemata. Thus, when the Attendant sings, “Remember me, remember me, but ah, forget my fate,” he speaks to the difficulty of doing the history of sexuality as histories of pleasure so often involve elements of discipline, control, and power. The burdens of racial politics that his body bears as a black man charged with guarding the artifacts of slavery in a white man’s museum highlight how the eroticization of those histories becomes a mode of recognition not only of the Attendant’s queer sexual desire but also of the nonconsensual past from which such sexual repertoires are partially derived.
In the theater scenes (shot in London’s Royal Academy), the Attendant’s costume changes from the legible trappings of a museum guard to the tailed tuxedo finery of the opera house. It is significant that his costume does change because, even when whipping the white leather man, the Attendant retains his appearance as a museum guard, a member of a working-class labor sector primarily populated by people of color.13 It is not coincidental that the man in charge of protecting the artifacts of antislavery for the legacy of a dead white man, abolitionist though he was, is black. He neither owns the objects on display nor curates their arranged meanings for the meandering well-coiffed guests who visually consume them. In choreographing the museum visitors’ movements through the galleries as wandering and apathetic, Julien critiques both the historical power hierarchies that continue to racialize certain labor roles and the bracketing of the cerebral as the normative mode of museum spectatorship.
What, then, would Julien have us remember as we transition back and forth between the space of the museum and the space of the theater? Julien is proposing that SM be viewed as an erotic performance that painfully opens up a discussion of domination and submission through role playing, which addresses in one instance the everyday theatricality of performing a particular labor role and in another the normative and antinormative embodied performance of top/bottom sexual dynamics. One important intention of Julien’s film is to encourage the viewer to remember and reconfigure the ways in which histories of slavery—particularly how the Wilberforce House Museum memorializes its objects but not the bodies associated with its legacy—continue to dictate the everyday horizon of erotic and social possibilities.
In addition to considering the role that race and class play in this dangerous dance of sex and slavery, it is important to remember gender difference and note that the lone black woman furtively clapping from another balcony in the empty theater also doubles as the museum Conservator (played by the actor Cleo Sylvestre).14 Earlier in the film, when the men enact their role-switching whipping scene, the Conservator meticulously uses a tiny brush to clean the frames of paintings on the other side of the wall. The Conservator, whom the film implicates in possessing insider knowledge of the Attendant’s desires, preserves both the museum’s artifacts and the Attendant’s sex secrets. I will return later to a discussion of black female sexuality and SM and how the consideration of these elements side by side can illuminate how to display the history of sexuality broadly. For now, I want to suggest that the Conservator serves as a foil to Julien’s recuperation of the black male body, which he celebrates in another recurring tableau. In this tableau, a chorus of half-dressed men raise their arms to frame a centrally positioned, muscular young black man who half smiles into the camera. Julien’s preoccupation with the interracial play between the two primary protagonists serves to recuperate these masculine bodies at the vanishing point of black female sexual subjectivity.15 As with many facets of the film, the meaning of this erasure is multiple; Julien is introducing and critiquing the marginalization of black female sexuality while at the same time recognizing the difficulty and the discomfort of exploring black feminine erotics in images as explicit as the ones he uses to portray his masculine subjects. The Conservator never wields the whip, and her only access to the scene of flogging is aural, never visual.
In The Attendant, the leather whip becomes the talisman of a transition from slavery to SM (and back again). On one object’s history of use, Julien curates a phantasmagoric montage of scenes that place into relief a simultaneity of historical remembrances that manage to gel and come apart at separate junctures in his nonlinear narrative of remembering and forgetting pleasure and pain. Using the capability of film to cut rapidly between images to create surprising and unexpected juxtapositions, The Attendant forbids the collapse of singular meaning. Instead, it proposes that, at least in his film, a whip is not a whip but a symbol of two seemingly incongruous histories, the transatlantic slave trade and leather culture, and that the meanings of the two are indelibly bound to each other through the body of the Attendant and his reappropriation of the object. Crucial to Julien’s film is this multivalent staging of the whip in the postcolonial museum as a politically contested site for examining the mutually constitutive histories of eroticism and discipline.
The LA&M
Julien reveals the erotic potentials of the nonsex museum that exist alongside its violent historical legacy. Similarly, the theatrical encounter between sexual subjects and sex objects in museums that specifically display sexuality, such as the LA&M in Chicago, does more than simply attempt to arouse the museumgoer; these museums also raise important questions about the display of sexual vulnerability, the power dynamics between the seer and the seen, and the pleasures and problematics of desire.
Before I dive into the examination of my next object, another kind of leather whip from the Chicago leather museum that pertains to gay male leather culture, I would like to offer a brief historical primer on leather as a cultural performance of post–World War II sexual identity. The history of gay male leather culture most closely resembles the populations referenced in Julien’s film and the galleries at the LA&M, but it also exemplifies how leather men have rehearsed and enacted new sexual-social relationships by reconfiguring the meanings attached to value-laden objects of discipline through embodied performances of eroticism.
Like any cultural group, leather has its own set of values, practices, rituals, styles, and histories. Scholars on the subject such as Guy Baldwin and Gayle Rubin trace the modern leather community to the immediate postwar years. At this time, returning servicemen translated military traditions into their civilian social and sexual lives. Leather men exchanged the insignia of their military branches or units as symbols of their mutual bond and applied the order, discipline, formality, and hierarchy of their military lives to the creation of new social spaces. Motorcycle clubs provided leather men with mobile social spaces where they could experience new risk-taking adventures partially modeled after the experiences they shared in war. The iconicity of what might be called the old-guard leather man, and its accompanying histories of erotic adaptation of spaces of discipline, is referenced by Julien’s film when he furnishes the Wilberforce House with Tom of Finland drawings. Leather (the material) became a practical choice owing to its rugged texture and attractive smell, and it became a symbolic marker of sexual and social identification with a group of people. As a material with a history, it accrued erotic properties as a kind of second skin, a way of performing nakedness without getting undressed or a form of appropriating the skin of marginalized racial otherness (e.g., why is leather so often dyed brown or, more often, black?). The association between leather and rugged masculine labor, as in cowboy culture, and the donning of black leather by members of Goth, punk, and heavy metal band (sub)cultures in the 1980s intensified the connotation between rebelliousness and leather.16 The word leather became synonymous with kinky, fetish, and sadomasochistic sexual practices in the 1970s when it was inscribed into gay male vernacular.
While the erotic component is not the only important aspect of leather culture, a discussion of leather sex and its terms is vital to the history of leather as a cultural identity. Alternative sexuality is an umbrella term used to incorporate leather sex, kink, fetish, and BDSM into a loosely cohesive whole that distinguishes itself from sex practices considered vanilla, a term with both sexual and racial connotations.17 “Safe, sane, and consensual” is the mantra of leather sex communities and a reminder to sexual players both within and outside the lifestyle of the difference between abuse and pleasure/pain sex practice. The key to this differentiation can be found in the concept of consent but also in the concept of power exchange through sexual play that may or may not involve both painful and pleasurable aspects. Concepts like top and bottom, master and slave, dominant and submissive, and sadist and masochist frequently circulate in leather discourse, though identifying with one of these does not necessarily incorporate identification with what might seem like corollaries (e.g., one might identify as a submissive but not as a slave or a masochist). Furthermore, everyday hegemonic power tends to operate on vertical hierarchies, while alternative sexuality practices ideally operate on horizontal hierarchies of power exchanges where all participants enter a sexual or erotic scenario as equals and interchange power via fantasy, role play, and the enactment of erotic scenes. “Leather is thicker than blood” is a principle indicating the ideal that everyone living the lifestyle follows a code of egalitarian conduct when encountering alterity, sexual, racial, gendered, or otherwise. Yet, as much as I support this culture for its inventive approaches to kinship structure and sexual practices, this ideal remains a romanticization rather than a reality, which we can see when we turn to the LA&M.
In the leather community, the LA&M is famous for its focus on white, gay male leather culture; in women’s leather circles and kinky communities of color, it is infamous for its historical amnesia, something that its directors are actively addressing.18 While I served this museum as its director of programming, my colleagues invited me to curate a series of exhibits, called Debates in Leather, in which I focused on the diversity of present-day alternative sexuality cultures.
As in Julien’s The Attendant, the drama of my first Debates in Leather exhibit also centered on a whip, specifically, a leather sword sheath/whip believed to be the oldest artifact in the collection. My exhibit told the story of this object, and the text read as follows:
In 2006 one of our volunteers discovered a 170-year-old, brown leather sword sheath/whip that was already on display in a case filled with other toys and erotic equipment. There was a small scrap of text that attributed the artifact to the 1840s and its probable use on a southern cotton plantation in Louisiana. The original owner of the sheath/whip was and is unknown. The display of the leather sword/sheath whip was a source of great debate at the museum. The board of directors felt it to be irrelevant to our collections and argued that it should be immediately removed from the museum, while some volunteers felt it offered a pedagogical opportunity to discuss the history of implements that leather culture now calls “toys” and how alternative sexuality practitioners adapt scenarios of non-consensual torture into consensual scenes of punishment for pleasure and power. In the end, we decided to keep the leather sword sheath/whip on display so as to invite the visitor to consider how histories of eroticism and histories of discipline are not mutually exclusive.
Alongside the leather sword sheath/whip, the exhibit included “The History of Black BDSM” composed by Dark Connections, a nonprofit educational online collective dedicated to providing BDSM resources and personal ads for people of color. Also displayed were excerpts on interracial leather sex and the performance of slave scenes from Cain Berlinger’s book Black Men in Leather,19 a cat-o’-nine-tails whip commonly used aboard naval vessels until the late nineteenth century, a 1950s homemade flogger (a direct descendant of the exhibit’s central artifact), and a photo of the freed slave, author, and minister Thomas Johnson holding shackles in his hands. On a blue-clothed table, a comment book invited visitors to express what they thought about the exhibit. In the multimedia gallery next to the exhibit, Julien’s The Attendant played on a loop with three other short films. I chose to intersperse objects of different historical time periods in order to recognize the original use of the object as a tool of discipline, empire, and nonconsensual torture and the later adaptation of the object as an instrument for enacting an erotics of pleasure and pain.
As evidenced by the writing of these authors, black kinksters perform an amazing psychological mind fuck (to borrow a commonly used phrase in alternative sexuality culture)20 on history when they become slaves or masters and even more so when they perform slave scenes as an erotic and therapeutic practice. The excerpt from Dark Connections’ “The History of Black BDSM” included in the LA&M exhibit discusses this relationship between BDSM, slavery, and kinksters of color:
The ability of people of color to survive under the cruel conditions of slavery and be able to retain internal strength, fortitude and resolve is an amazing feat. To some it would seem strange that we would willingly participate in BDSM and refer to ourselves as masters and slaves after such a horrific past, however most participants in this lifestyle feel there is no connection between the two at all.
Historical slavery role-play is a form of BDSM usually involving a White master who wields his or her power over a Black slave and uses racially derogatory terms. It is also not uncommon for Caucasians to engage in historical slavery role-play where they take on the role of the slave as a way to repent for the sins of their race.
Some find this type of scene to be emotionally healing, believing they can better cope with the past if they confront it through role-playing. Others are greatly offended by historical slavery scenes, which is why they are rarely acted out in public dungeons.21
In contrast to Dark Connections’ claims about the disidentification of twentieth-century kinksters of color with the history of antebellum torture of black slaves, Black Men in Leather, a compilation of interviews that Berlinger conducted with men of color in leather from across the United States, demonstrates that the relationships of these men to the legacy of slavery may be complicated, contradictory, and diverse but that they are always persistent. I chose the following excerpts for Debates in Leather:
Q: What are your opinions of White Men who play “slave” to Black Men?
“So many white guys are so unused to dealing with black men, that the only way they can communicate is if one is a slave to the other.” Lamar R., Las Vegas, NV
“Not a problem, however, I am sometimes suspect as to how much emotional involvement with their ‘Black daddies’ exist.” Rolf G., San Francisco, CA
“I have no problem with the reversal of roles. I do believe White men who play slave to black men have a desire to be humiliated by black men who are humiliated in everyday life.” Hank G., New Orleans, LA
“I love pissing on White slaves as they say, ‘Thank you, Sir.’” K. Delaney, New York, NY
“I personally have yet to encounter a white ‘slave.’ I have however encountered pushy bottoms and ‘boys’ who claim that they are slaves! Sometimes I think they are getting off on some sort of reverse role play.” Ron L., Tampa, FL
Q: What is your opinion of Black Men who play “slave” to White Men?
“Most of the brothas I know are tops exclusively and would never play slave or bottom to any white man or black man. I know a guy that would like to bottom but he says white men only see him as a top and won’t accept him any other way.” Jason C., St. Louis, MO
“This is entirely up to the partners. There is no such thing as politically correct sex!” G. Bates, Chicago, IL
“I would kidnap and reprogram each one I see!” M. Weems, Long Island, NY
“I am a Black Man with a White Master and I am not ‘playing.’ It is somewhat of a powerful statement to make, but I simply refuse to live my life according to the sensibilities of others.” Nadju B., Atlanta, GA
“I feel very uncomfortable with this. I guess because of the thought of slavery in our past.” J. Conley, Dallas, TX22
In using their bodies to stage and remember scenes of nonconsensual and, most often, violent torture and adapting those histories for the attainment of pleasure through pain in the present, these men rewrite the histories of the objects used and transform the material culture of nonconsensual torture into sex objects that play on the taboo and the intensity of their previous uses, for example, in American histories of slavery. The reasons behind engaging (or not) in the choreography of scenes in the present have everything to do with physicalizing the historical to reconfigure the rules of engagement between racialized and sexualized subjects.
Visitors responded to the display in a multiplicity of ways, I hope encouraged by the dialogism of different perspectives and arguments I included in the exhibit. Responses ranged from discomfort (“Not sure what to think about the connection to slavery”), to brainstorming future exhibits of debates (“I would like to see more non-white exhibits or histories on display”; “I would like to see information on transsexual leather history”), to cautionary remarks (“I agree with including these artifacts ONLY in the context of a politicized discussion about oppression as separate from sexual freedom”), to kudos (“I think it’s gutsy to take on the discussion openly, rather than avoiding race in relation to leather culture”).
Two prominent members of the black leather community recorded the longest comments. In the first, an African American leather “Sir” named Trooper wrote that he felt encouraged by the inclusion of materials that “differentiate between consensual whipping as a part of the BDSM we enjoy, and the non-consensual abuse inflicted upon millions of slaves.” He continued, specifically addressing the kinky spectator and, perhaps, the museum staff: “I would like to remind everyone that the term ‘plantation’ is very romanticized. These slaves who were regularly whipped worked in SLAVE LABOR CAMPS . . . I am a BLACK MAN and would love to see MORE exhibits and implements of torture from American slavery days.” Trooper’s comments reflected the subject position of the black gay spectator and leather man who performs domination in his erotic lifestyle. In alternative sexual practice, plantation scenes are one of many possibilities for erotic adaptation, again with players ideally entering and leaving those scenes as equals and enjoying a choreographed and carefully negotiated encounter of power exchange during them. Trooper was careful to note, however, how the discourse surrounding such scenes has become romanticized with little reflection on the high stakes of adapting histories of slavery into modern erotic contexts. For Trooper, it was necessary to remind players and the curators at the LA&M of the profound difference between consensual and nonconsensual plantation scenes and how, in his experience, the two have been too flatly conflated.
Typically, I was not present to witness the inscription of spectator affect and ideas into the Debates in Leather comment book. However, this was different on one occasion. At the kick-off event of the May 2010 International Mr. Leather competition, a conference that was attended by sixteen to eighteen thousand people and that takes place every year in Chicago over the Memorial Day weekend, leather men (mostly) and some leather women converged at the museum to celebrate leather history and the outgoing 2009 winner Jeffery Payne. All the leather glitterati (the titleholders, the contestants, and the leather legends) gathered at the LA&M to pay their respects to both Payne and the museum. Among those attending was the recently crowned International Ms. Leather 2010 Mollena Williams, the self-proclaimed “Perverted Negress.”
I was mingling in the main gallery when I noticed Williams pull her group over to examine the exhibit. She wrote a response with what seemed like great passion. Later in the evening I introduced myself, congratulated her on her recent title, and asked her what she thought about the exhibit. “I wrote an essay,” she explained smiling. The next day I had the chance to return to her words, which were accompanied by a big pink lip kiss:
Please, never EVER bow to pressure to hide or diminish the reality of our history. As a Black Leatherwoman, I am deeply moved by the inclusion of these artifacts in this collection. The reality of slavery and the enslavement of my ancestors ABSOLUTELY influences my current life and lifestyle in leather. To forget or disregard is to disrespect the reality of the “peculiar institution” and its inescapable influence. Kudos for an exhibit that reflects me as a person who bears the ancient and social scars of slavery . . . and who embraces the fact that TODAY I may choose to be a slave, and I may choose my fate.
Williams’s comment returns me to the scene in The Attendant where the tuxedo-dressed museum guard repeatedly sings one line from the opera Dido and Aeneas: “Remember me, remember me, but ah, forget my fate.” As Elizabeth Freeman explained: “[The] reanimation of slave scenes bring[s] the static, supposedly ‘dead’ historical object of slavery and the dead bodies of the slaves back to life.”23 In using reanimation to describe the performance of eroticized slave scenes in the present, Freeman accesses a performance concept with a long history, one recently taken up by José Esteban Muñoz, who combines affect theory and queer studies to contemplate a utopian futurity for queer politics.
At the core of Muñoz’s project is the emphasis on “hope” as a “critical methodology” that is “best described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” In the case of Williams’s contribution to the exhibit at the LA&M, this sort of critical methodology assumes a form of pleasure felt in the present but not divorced from structures of feeling typically associated with archives of pain. Williams’s contribution signaled a recognition of what Muñoz characterized as the “anticipatory illumination of certain objects,” in this case a whip, to contextualize the affective switch that occurs when reanimating the codes of past slave scenes in the present. For Williams, the reanimation of the slave as a sexual persona in the present implies not a direct return to an exact re-creation of the original but rather a creative and embodied exploration via a sexual practice that is very much aligned with Muñoz’s concept of queerness as a political and social “not-yet-here”; this utopian performance encompasses a refusal of forgetting and, at the same time, a denial of the “disabling political pessimism” that has gathered around the forbidden object, which in this instance refers equally to the masochist desire to be dominated in alternative sexuality practice and the staging of the material object of the antebellum whip in the leather museum.24
6.3 Mollena Williams’s visitor book entry and lip stain, Leather Archives and Museum, Chicago, May 2010. Photo by author.
Many other scholars have debated whether reanimation means faithful re-creation or reenactment with transgressive difference.25 Williams’s words add another component to this debate and another possibility for the spatial dynamics of queer curatorship that I strove to apply in the exhibition. Forgetting histories of nonconsensual torture, discursively or in practice, does not safeguard vulnerable sexual communities; rather, it erases race and slavery from the conversation. In this sense, Williams’s reanimation of slave scenes in the present includes a component of reauthoring through language and the body. In her response to the exhibit, she referred to the ways in which the codes and objects of the archive of slavery can be reconfigured to construct performative simulacra that incorporate new sexual repertoires and archival corporealities and that refuse the erasure of both the politics of and the pleasures that come with performing this precise yet unfaithful likeness. Williams’s inscription in the visitor book, like my queer curatorial intentions and desires as I have discussed them here, encompasses the kind of utopian longing that Muñoz insists must accompany the work of queer historiography.
This brings me back to the role of feminine erotics and in particular black female sexuality and its relationship to SM. How do we display the history of sexuality with this relationship in mind? For the answer, I return to Julien’s Conservator character, who kept the Attendant’s sex secrets but seemingly possessed none of her own. The film never embodied her desire, and, in the end, there was no trace of her sexuality to speak of. In contrast, when Williams wrote herself into the Debates in Leather exhibit, she reconfigured her role from passively viewing the display to directly affecting its meaning through the insertion of her female absence. Her words filled the page with both the pleasure and the danger of remembering black female subjectivity in this daring dance of slavery and sexuality. Sealed with a bright pink kiss from the impression of her lips, her words became an artifact, a locatable document of her emotional and intellectual response in the moment of encounter with the exhibit’s objects.
Queer curatorship is a process of heritage making at public history sites dedicated to physicalizing the encounter with diverse sexual histories; but Julien’s film and arguably my exhibit can be, and in the case of The Attendant have been, critiqued for the marginalization of women from that aspirational counterpublic push toward a queer sexual inheritance. Casting the black female as a conservator, at once responsible for the preservation of the museum’s transatlantic slave trade artifacts and separated from the scene of erotic encounter, seems to suggest the disqualification of a feminine persona from the counterpolitical potential of SM as erotic reanimation. Mollena Williams’s words, conversely, informed the spatial dynamics of the exhibit from a differently gendered perspective. For Williams, the ways in which she performs her sexual subjectivity as a slave within the context of an erotic scene mobilize a sexual repertoire that incorporates and adapts histories of nonconsensual torture that speak to her as a sexed, raced, and gendered subject. In so doing, she uses fantasy to reorganize histories of object use and choreographies of power exchange between social actors in the racially fraught past from which sadomasochistic sex scenes derive.
Through a rigorous and performative citation and reiteration of certain discursive and visual formations that in turn gain the force of common sense, all museums, including the LA&M, establish taxonomies of normalcy. The result is that certain objects of desire—in this instance, the often unspeakable masochistic desire for sexual domination and the whip—become bad sex objects; in the case of queer kinksters of color, such as the Attendant, Trooper, and Mollena Williams, their desires could be misinterpreted as embodiments of a pathological discourse rather than a performance that turns the Fanonian trappings of the master/slave dialectic into the invention of subversive simulacra. Cultivating the visual lessons I learned as a spectator of Isaac Julien’s film to apply queer and performance theories in museums, my queer curatorship staged the leather sword sheath/whip as a tool for examining sexual values, namely, how this sexual artifact organized a certain set of fears, anxieties, and affections regarding race and sex. A big project for a little exhibit, I admit, but I aimed to rechannel the intense affect associated with leather culture’s adaptation of slave scenes as well as the politics of belonging and racism within the leather community to cultivate a self-reflective stance in both the practice of leather sex and the practice of history making.
The Speculative Historiography of Women of Color and SM Erotics
While working in various capacities at the LA&M, and with my interest in developing collection, display, and patron and researcher services that attended to what I saw as lacunae in the LA&M’s offerings—particularly a more focused attention on leather histories of women, people of color, and transgender participants—I encountered many obstacles. At times, the archives simply did not exist, so I created some, for example, the archive I started called “Latino/as in Leather,” which centralizes the enormous contributions and specific experiences of these groups to the continual development of leather cultures and that primarily depended on email correspondence and phone calls with those who identified as both Latino/a and leather. At other times, I constructed exhibits by piecing together archival fragments that pertained to the debates about trans inclusion in spaces traditionally deemed exclusive to the cisgendered male experience. And, finally, I used debates about the inclusion of controversial artifacts, such as antebellum whips, and tactics I learned from experimental queer films to create exhibits that explored the convergent and divergent histories of consensual and nonconsensual torture and the politics of inclusion and exclusion in certain segments of leather culture.
While limited by the available resources in the LA&M archive and by space in the small Debates in Leather exhibit, I conformed to those limitations by absenting the female body of color, relative to my attention to male leather constituencies in my other exhibitions. There are innumerable women of color who have contributed to women’s leather history. For example, consider Mollena Williams, Sandy “Mama” Reinhardt, Jill Carter, Vi Johnson, Lamalani Siverts, and the Native American Judy Tallwing-McCarthy, the first winner of the International Ms. Leather (IMSL) contest. But others still remain invisible within the historical archive. The need for a methodology based in memory, embodiment, affect, and imaginative archival approaches is important to the recuperation of all leather history, but it becomes even more important in the case of women’s leather history, a highly contentious topic in the genealogy of feminist discourse. While the speculative in the speculative historiography of this section’s title indicates a procedural move, it also points toward a revision of visuality, or how we see and manage the archive and what sort of influence this altered archival visuality can have not only on what constitutes sexual displays but also on how sexual displays are constructed from the perceived contents of sexual archives.
Still, several questions loom large. How do we do the sexual history of women of color when their desires and stories have so often been pushed to the margins of or erased from the archive? Is it always politically and personally efficacious to collect, display, and make publicly available the sexual histories of women of color considering the ways in which sex has been used as a tool to control, police, and stigmatize certain racialized and gendered groups? Considering both these elements simultaneously, how can we develop a method for archive creation, display construction, and history writing that pays attention to both the pleasure and the pain of remembering certain sexual histories and that allows for conjectures and propositions about how things might have been? I want to suggest that doing the history of women of color in leather provides a fertile entry point for developing a historiographic method that remembers the pleasures and dangers of recuperating sexual history broadly but particularly sexual histories of historically marginalized and highly policed populations.
A speculative historiography as it relates to marginalized sexual populations can be found in queer experimental films and other avant-garde art forms that play with the linearity of dominant narratives, but finding such material also requires a renegade archival approach that resists materiality and visibility as the sine qua non of museum display. To return to The Attendant, is there another possibility or another what-if for the role of the Conservator in Julien’s film? Is she neither his wife nor his accomplice in keeping secrets but rather a woman who desires or perhaps even already enacts the sexual practices exchanged only between the men in the film? Here, I would like to transition from the what-if of the woman of color potentially in leather to conclude with one of my encounters with the traces of embodied feminine SM pleasures in the LA&M archive. In homage to Mollena Williams’s lipstick-stained page in the visitor comment book, I want to suggest lipstick traces as one ephemeral but potent component of queer curatorship that I would otherwise have missed had it not been for Williams’s intervention in the Debates in Leather exhibition.26
In chapter 2, I drew from Constance Classen and her emphasis on touch in the museum as one of the most informative but difficult corporeal histories to investigate.27 A passage from the performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider bears repeating in its entirety here for its emphasis on residue as one way of reading histories of sensuality, in museums and erotic experiences: “Indeed the place of residue is arguably flesh in a network of body-to-body transmission of enactment—evidence, across generations, of impact. We understand ourselves relative to the remains we accumulate, the tracks we house, mark, and cite, the material traces we acknowledge.”28 I want to position this citation in relation to archival remains, as Schneider does, but also in relation to the residues of alternative sexuality practice (as in the imprint left on the body by the stroke of a whip). Like Schneider, I agree that we can only ever revive history by paying attention to tracks and traces, a historiographic lesson particularly important for archiving and displaying sexual history. Mobilizing new approaches to sexual display requires a reckoning with barely perceptible or seemingly invisible traces of erotic life, hovering at the parameters of the archive. The queer experimental film tradition as exemplified by The Attendant has invented a variety of different methods to perform sexual heritage work. But what could this look like on the ground, or, as I like to say, on its feet in museum practice? Lipstick traces describes one realm of possibility for remembering agential feminine women’s pleasure, “the place of residue” or “flesh in a network of body-to-body transmission of enactment.”
Allow me to demonstrate as I retrieve some of the catalog entries I created as a volunteer archivist at the LA&M:
A black arm or waistband with nine holes reads “Crisco.” Possibly the residues of erotic play, a jelly-like substance seems to coat most all of the band, especially around the studded “Crisco” lettering and the nine holes.
First Leathersex on the Beach Party Supersoaker. A signed plastic, green and orange water gun; some cracks in plastic; Text reads (one side): The First Leathersex on the Beach Party; IML–May 1995; Hosted by Sarah Humble, American Leather Woman 1994, Cindy Bookout IMsL 94 and Glenda Ryder Ms. Baltimore Eagle 1992; (other side): Wet T-Shirt Contest; Wet Boxer Shorts/Jock Contest, inspired by Shan Carr, The Fake Orgasm Contest; Best Cocktail Party of IML ’95 as reported in The Leather Journal.
White “Cum rag” used to remove lipstick from Judy Tallwing-McCarthy’s Lips, American Brotherhood Weekend—2003.
6.4 “Cum Rag.” Realia Collection, Leather Archives and Museum, Chicago. Photo by author.
6.5 “I was there. . . .” Note by Bob Guenther. Realia Collection, Leather Archives and Museum, Chicago. Photo by author.
Cataloging what museum planners and scholars refer to as realia in the LA&M is a performative practice simultaneously incorporating moments of humor, boredom, ambivalence, confusion, and arousal. Realia is defined as an object from real life, in contrast to those objects typically included in an archive or museum collection. A piece of realia draws attention because it is a common example of its kind—“an exemplum rather than an exemplar.” Examples “might also be described as artifacts, ephemera, bric-a-brac, gewgaws, found objects, or memorabilia, but they are seldom prized for any qualities of their design, for their fine materials, or for the craftsmanship with which they were made.”29 I began the realia collection at the LA&M in order to group mundane objects from leather culture within one intelligible category. That collection “fleshes” out the culture as it focuses on the banal side of leather history and preserves the forgotten or ignored traces of embodied and ephemeral leather performances.
In a less frequent gesture of saving the fleeting moments of leather women’s history, the leather man Bob Guenther accompanied the white, lipstick-stained cum rag he donated to the realia collection with a short note that provided the proof of what the artifact signifies as a performative prop of past pleasures. This cum rag is an object that symbolizes a bridge between an unfortunate gendered and racial divide in leather/kink communities. It also lends credence to an archival method that enables the display of the residues of sexual performance that, in this instance, were impressed on the surface of the cum rag as sex object. I repeat the description of residue as artifact: “White ‘Cum rag’ used to remove lipstick from Judy Tallwing-McCarthy’s Lips, American Brotherhood Weekend—2003.” The note gives a description of the event but, more importantly, lends power to the artifact by identifying Guenther as a witness to the original moment in three simple, and parenthetical, words: (I was there).
Back to the Archive
Rethinking the ways in which seemingly nonsexual spaces, such as museums, tacitly exhibit normative sexual histories goes beyond the examination of slavery and sexuality and beyond the racial politics that make up and divide all sexual communities. Alternative sexuality is a sexual practice that adapts archives of nonconsensual domination and discipline toward performances of consensual and eroticized power exchange. Museum practitioners can use alternative sexuality as a model to queerly curate overlapping histories of race, sex, and power in museums. They can also look to alternative sexuality practice as a tactical tool for juxtaposing seemingly incongruous subject matter. How we display the history of sexuality becomes a question of looking back at the chaos and disorder of the sexual archive, as Heather Love reminds us, without the nostalgia for a purer time and place of queer pleasure.30 Returning to the archive, always already a sensual and embodied practice, requires that we consider the form as well as the content of our exhibitionary intentions (and obsessions). To expand the scope of the sexual order of things in the late capitalist, postcolonial museum requires the cultivation of hopeful curatorial methodologies that recognize and reconfigure the performavitity of object arrangements by unraveling the imbricated histories of pleasure and power that characterize the sexual past.
I have proposed queer curatorship as one such methodology and lipstick traces as one facet of this method particular to excavating the sexual histories of women of color. Queer curatorship is simultaneously a mode for studying how museums place objects in normative sexual relationships through the curatorial citation and repetition of familiar arrangements, juxtapositions, and chronologies and a method for experimenting with object arrangements toward the cultivation of other sexual-social relationships. Above all, queer curatorship describes a diagnostic and procedural tool for studying how performative displays affect the ways in which objects and bodies are made to relate to one another in space while also coping with the danger of experimenting with alternative configurations. If, according to the performance studies scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “ordinary things become special when placed in museum settings, [and] the museum experience itself becomes a model for experiencing life outside its walls,”31 then the museum becomes an ideal space to enact this artistic and activist function of playing with objects and artifacts to reorganize the sexual future.