Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen

Negro Faggotry is in fashion. SNAP! Turn on your television and camp queens greet you in living color. SNAP! Turn to cable and watch America's most bankable modern minstrel expound on getting fucked in the ass or his fear of faggots. SNAP! Turn off the TV, turn on the radio: Rotund rapper Heavy D, the self-styled overweight MC, expounds on how his rap will make you happy like a faggot in jail. Perhaps to preempt questions about how he would know-one might wonder what kind of lover he truly is -, Heavy D reassures us that he's just extremely intellectual, not bisexual (BLK Mar. 1990: 3). Jelly-roll SNAP! Negro Faggotry is in vogue. Madonna commodified it into a commercial hit. Mapplethorpe photographed it, and art galleries drew fire and record crowds in displaying it. Black macho movie characters dis'-or should we say dish?-their antagonists with unkind references to it. Indeed references to, and representations of, Negro Faggotry seem a rite of passage among contemporary Black male rappers and filmmnakers.