Kevin J. Mumford on Jennifer Dominguez Jones’s *Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality After World War II*

Over the past several decades, the field of LGBTQ studies has exploded beyond far beyond what anyone had expected or even thought possible.  Queer studies has established itself and produced numbers of critical interventions and excellent scholarship.  If there is a point of lag or conceptual fault, it is the failure to address the problem of race.  It is the inability of the field’s leaders to consider non-white phenomena or persons in their otherwise brilliant theorizing and historiography.

Jennifer Dominque Jones’s first book, Ambivalent Affinities goes a long way toward correcting this trend.  From the first chapter, the material on black veterans and black journalists and editors provides an original perspective on how African American organizations have dealt with homosexual controversy in the ear of World War II.  So much of the book is full of discovery.  For example, there are black veterans facing dishonorable discharges—so-called blue discharges—that are defended by black political organizations, such as the NAACP on the basis of racial bias even though the infraction had to do with homosexual activity.  In this case, civil rights policy unintentionally framed an anti-homophobia stance based on equal protection.

Just as frequently, however, black organizations were on the defensive and repudiated  gay causes and subjects, where their public image remained vulnerable to false accusations or rumours of homosexual infiltration, as it were.   The powerful midcentury black advocates, the National Urban League, was forced to respond to the case of prominent black civic leader involved in an illicit affair with young man.  “They chose to engage in “lavender baiting”—a term that denotes the strategy of playing into the popular hysteria and denouncing the victimized.  For Jones, this decision to publicize the embarrassing gay romance indicates the tendencies of the black public sphere.  But that is not exactly an argument, rather a restating of the events.  This monograph is a remarkable compendium of homosexual incidents or anecdotes confronting a miscellaneous variety of black organizations.

The next chapters intend to show how the rumors or attribution of homosexuality undermined mainstream civil rights organizations.  We know about the damage incurred by accusations that civil rights activists were insatiable “race mixers.”  Jones’s discovery of similar uses of homosexual propaganda is not all that illuminating.  First off, the few extant examples of gay-baiting almost seem unnecessary.  There were beatniks and interracial lovers and commies, but the book has little evidence on homosexuality.  For example, I don’t read the photo of two activists lying injured on the ground as an example of the homoeroticizing of civil rights.  Nor is the propaganda pamphlet on sex in Selma deserving of almost five pages of close analysis for possible homoerotic traces. More to the point, how did this slight verbiage around homosexuality supposedly impact the activism?  Were there actually gay men in the southern demonstrations?

Circling back to the theme of gay demonology, the book presents evidence of far-right extremist accusations of homosexuality and their potential impact on the left activists.  That the American Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan spewed anti-gay rhetoric here and there and everywhere should not surprise.  What does this have to do with blackness and homosexuality I kept wondering.  Then we have interactions between leading civil rights organizations and gay rights groups in the 1970s-1980s.  Jones sees this moment as the one of ambivalence, since key black leaders hesitated to support the gay pride march, to proclaim gay pride week, or to endorse legal rights for gays and lesbians.  Black politics came to gay politics with a great deal of ambivalence, but I am still not clear why that was.  Or what Jones makes of this?

Diving through this thicket of mayoral objectives and political strategies, Jones shows that even the long-submerged black minority may refuse the next submerged group in line.  So often the decisions on coalition were made vis a vis expediency rather than principle, showing a thin commitment of black politicos to the LGBT communities dotting cities across the nation.  Perhaps this was still more commitment than one can find in white-led governments?  Jones doesn’t say.

Ambivalent Affinities overflows with rich and revealing bodies of evidence from places and groups many of us have yet to look into or even know about.  In that sense the research is a revelation and a remarkable achievement.  But Jones has written a book without an interpretation or an argument, and so it becomes almost impossible to understand what it all means.  Are some groups more open or more infiltrated by gays than other groups?  If a black conservative group poorly served people with AIDS, what happened to the black gay men?  Did black equality organizations follow the NAACP moment or did they reject gays, and what should we conclude from such remarkable denial—this remarkable ambivalence?  Many black gay men have turned to mixed or white organizations, no doubt.  But also, what about the black gay men—where are their voices in this treasure trove of archival sources?   No book does everything.  I look forward to Jennifer Jones’s next project.