McCune Jr (2008). ‘"Out" in the Club: The Down Low, Hip-Hop, and the Architexture of Black Masculinty’. Text and Performance Quarterly, pp. 298-314.
“Out” in the Club: The Down Low, Hip-Hop, and the Architexture of Black Masculinity”
Nightlife is an important encompassing umbrella of where fashion, performance, identity, and sexuality intersect to create culture. The club throughout history has always offered a platform for Black queer subjects to perform. From the Chicago House era to the Harlem Renaissance, Black club culture has informed music practice, performance and the embodiment of blackness. I argue Black club culture also contributes to the performativity and embodiment of blackness outside the dance floor. There is an ongoing relation between the codes of black performance we learn from popular culture then practice in the parameters of nightlife and those that spill into the everyday embodiment and performance of blackness.
Ethnographic studies of Black club culture are far and few between. However, Jeffery Q. McCune Jr.’s essay “Out in the Club: The Down Low, Hip-Hop, and The Architexture of Black Masculinity” explores the intricate relationship between black masculine performances, the club and DL men.
McCune is a queer ethnographer, who much like me is committed to understanding the making and meaning of communities. He states, “Black queer performance, of any type, must be understood as always informed by the interplay of race, gender, class and sexuality” (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 300). His ethnographic study of ‘The Gate’ a Queer club in Chicago is extremely important as a basis for understanding the way that heteronormative blackness is used as a survival tactic by DL men but also invertedly by other black queer men to ‘de-queer’ themselves.
I argue some black queer subjects who don’t identify within mainstream LGBT+ society’s customs and culture, such as music, use black heteronormativity and adapt and borrow from the performativity of “DL” culture to navigate the complexity and intersectionality of being black and queer. This navigation is not only limited to Queer nightlife excursions per say as by encompassing these displays of black heteronormativity, Black Queer subjects can frequently adapt to other various nightlife scenarios including straight clubs but can also navigate other majoritic spheres and take inspiration from Jose Munoz’s ‘disidentification’ (1999).
This text argues DL men “dis-identify with dominant descriptors and performances of sexuality” (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 299), challenging the homogenised and essentialised construction of a racialised and classed border between heterosexuality and homosexuality. They do this in part as their sexuality and sexual behaviours circumscribe negotiating their masculine ideals, queer desires and challenge of the traditional closet-threshold ideal by being neither in or out. I argue, other black queer men who identify as Gay or Bisexual also to negotiate such ideals not only in straight black club culture, but everyday life and being. ‘The Gate’ is a great example of how club culture provides safe space for black culture, performance and queer community. However, Queer nightlife doesn’t always cater to the specific needs of those who do not (as Judith Butler investigates) have outness as a historically available and affordable option (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 298).
Since 2008, when this study was published, Black/Queer Nightlife, Black Music, Black performance and culture has changed. McCune’s article uncovers that within Queer world-making minoritized subjects’ use of black masculinity enables the possibility for discreet sexual desire, but also the performativity of masculinity within a public setting without having to sacrifice notions of privacy or the politics of sexual discretion’ (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 300). Given the changes and current state of Black culture I too am committing to exploring how black gay men re-mix the closet in act of queer world-making in respects to both Queer and Non-queer Black club culture, and Black performance theory. If DL men perform straight masculine identity, while they also engage their homoerotic desires, how does the performance of identity change for Black Gay men in straight spaces? Are they in turn then “DL”?
McCune argues that what Fiona Buckland describes as ‘queer world-making’- a conscious active way of fashioning the self and the environment, cognitively and physically, through embodied social practices moving through and clustered in the city” (Buckland, 2002), doesn’t deny the possibility of racialized subjects engaging with the practice, but it also does not advance the theoretical application that account for racial subjectivity. Many of Queer nightlife’s patrons participate in black queer-world making through “their appropriation of traditionally black heterosexual space and transforming it into a space of and for queer desire” (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 301). This is true given the space that not only ‘The Gate’ provided, but also London-based black queer nights. London queer nights have a long history of playing Jamaican Bashment and Dancehall, two genres which have specific homophobic songs, to black audiences willing to share, appropriate and dance to it in bid claim ownership of their sexuality and ode to black heritage.
What is also important in the field of McCune’s work, is the notion of room. Not only the specifics of the Hip-Hop music room of ‘The Gate’, but further to this, the structure of space. Its “archictexture”, that McCune argues as a space’s physical frame and the texture of the space which encompass the ideological frames of gender (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 311). Recent studies of ‘Queer Nightlife’ also point to the architecture of space and the continued need to understand the performance within it (Adeyemi, et al., 2021). The dynamics of spaces such as ‘The Gate’s’ Hip-hop room not only circulate contradictory messages that surpass boundaries of gender and sexuality, but they also provide a space for men to negotiate their relationships to/between black Queer culture and masculine bravado (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 302). Thus, allowing room for the experimentation and a performativity of black queer expression that is adaptable by both DL and Black Gay Men.
The article describes a dancefloor aesthetic that is as a result of the congregation of many different forms of expression. However, although different, it still contains homogenous characteristics, looks and poses. As McCune notes, Thomas DeFrantz suggests this aesthetic lends itself to “hip-hop dance... controlling the body, holding it taut and making it work in a fragmented manner” (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 305). McCune continues to argue that, although these dances are informed by some of the ritualistic expression of hip-hop in popular culture, each body in fact tells its own story. It is this articulation of black queer expression found in black club culture I am most interested in investigating through my practical artistic development and practice as research. Can we develop these movement and phrases to create new work, tell new stories and form new ideas of black queer expression? Further to this, why, what, where, when and how do black queer subjects draw from black influences and culture to perform, embody or challenge dominant ideas of blackness.
This embodiment of blackness within black club culture can be read as coolness, McCune reads coolness as a general expression. The text engages with Marlene Connor notion of ‘cool’ who understands coolness as a guiding ethic on the way black men behave, dress and interact with approval from black male spectatorship. I agree with this view, in this circumstance and within what I argue is the performativity of nightlife, ‘coolness’ is then a performative utterance and action, a coping stance and pose and an act of survival that black men engage to define themselves against and within traditional standards. However, this notion of ‘cool’ is not without limitations, it is many times a theory in practice of unspoken rules that monitor acceptability among black men under and outside of white surveillance (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 302)
As Hip-Hop and Queerness has intersected within club culture for many years now, black forms of queer expression have been given the space and room to grow. McCune points to the coupling of queer space and hip-hop as coolness and queerness. He argues of both these formats critiquing dominant structures. Therefore, the recent emergence of Queer Club music genres such as Bounce, and Black Queer Hip-Hop artists and rappers, signify that what McCune states as ‘two-world making formats’ also encourage black performativity outside the realms of normativity and club dancefloors (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 302).
Nightlife practices of black queer world-making according to McCune is a form of history making in a wider-civilisation where black experience of same-sex interaction and desire are under-represented and appreciated. They consist of simultaneously building a sense of home while constructing a history. What ‘The Gate’ authorised was a space in which the black queer subject can engage in traditional black musical forms and cultural styles that are typically read as black heterosexual, or I argue black heteronormative, while engaging in queer desire (McCune Jr., 2008, pp. 302-303). This practice is also important within the performativity of nightlife, as I will demonstrate, because dis-identification therefore not only applies to Black queer subject performance, but also Black queer spaces.
McCune essay specifically looks at a moment in which black queer club goers in ‘The Gate’ chant the “faggot ass nigga” homophobic slur within 50cents track entitled ‘In Da Club’. He calls this moment a “instance of hip-hop heterosexual rage in queer face where black queer men temporarily ‘de-queer’” (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 308), and in doing so, allows for the performance of ‘cool’ that inadvertently create a hierarchy of masculine performance. Within the performance of gender, I agree with McCune where he argues, most of the understanding of gender derive from hegemonic notions which ascribe femininity to the ‘the gay’ and viewed as inferior, typically meaning different styles of masculinity found in black queer expression are often unrecognised. In queer spaces such as ‘The Gate’ and current Black Queer Hip-Hop culture however, performances of gender and sexuality are in flux. McCune argues that men are be able to be queer while acting straight and even straight while acting queer, black queer men can also feel a sense of ‘normal’/ ‘un-queer’ dancing in a heteronormative playground (McCune Jr., 2008, pp. 309-310). However, music and culture has evolved since 50cents hit ‘In Da Club’ and such a study has not been conducted with a focus on UK and European ideals of black performance, identity formation and masculinity within these nation’s black club culture.
‘The Gate’ can be read not just as an LGBT+ space but in fact a black space that dis-identifies with the homonormativity of white queer nightlife to allow for the discreet sexual desires of those who can’t afford to be “out” or identify with majoritarian LGBT+ Spheres. By allowing for the queer performance and appropriation of black heteronormative ‘coolness’ queer subjects are allowed to “de-queer” and DL men to engage in desires otherwise usually neglected or kept dormant (McCune Jr., 2008, p. 307). Black queer men and the space itself are both allowed to adopt black heteronormative stereotypes, and the homophobic performance rhetoric found in straight black club culture. ‘The Gate’ is therefore adapting new forms of black-queer worldmaking and dis-identification by adopting straight club culture in addition to a ‘cool’ persona. Such clubs will be the point and focus of my investigation within my research project titled ‘The performativity of nightlife: Clubs, stages and everything in-between in the diasporic black queer experience’. The distinction between USA club culture and European (including UK) club culture and the black queer experience naturally may encompass similarities, I predict they will have distinct differences. In addition to this, the way club culture and black performance intersect, and how black queer subjects’ remix ‘cool’ I feel will be a pivotal tool in presenting new forms of black queer expression within my own artistic practice. Black Queer Artists are gaining more visibility, many of whom draw inspiration from heteronormative and at times homophobic black music genres. How their embodiment and performativity of blackness informs black queer community, is also an integral part of this study.
