BOOK REVIEW -- Black & Bold by Kelvin Mosley
Most of the books on my LGBTQIA+ shelf are either memoirs, where someone is telling from their personal experience what it's like to be a transgender man or a butch lesbian or intersex person or whatever, or they're explanatory books that set out to shed light on the situation of gay or trans or genderqueer people but don't do so by telling a narrative story. Then there are a few fiction books that sort of do the same thing as the memoirs, where the story about a nonbinary child or a pair of gay men in the 20s serves to illuminate what those social experiences are like.
When I began reading Black & Bold by Kevin Mosley, I started out thinking of it as one of those explanatory books, laying out the issues specific to black gay men in our society, and it does indeed do a good deal of that, but I came to realize as I read onward that it's actually more of a self-help book.
This is Kelvin, who having come to terms with his own identity, is reaching a hand back in love and support, saying, "You can, too!" A warmth and supportive reassuring presence is palpable throughout. There are guided meditation-like contemplative thought exercises and affirmations at the end of each chapter.
The most central pastoral care message that comes through is about rejecting self-hate. Mosley talks about the social hostility and negative messaging and how important it is to scrutinize these and set them aside and to feel good about yourself as a valid person -- a message that has applicability to everyone but of specific relevance to folks growing up black male and gay.
Reciprocally, there is a solid message about the emotional positives of being out, both for internal self-acceptance and for external social possibilities.
There is some thoughtful elaboration on the specific ways that being gay or growing up gay is different for black people, although not as much as I was expecting. Mosley is writing for a primary audience of black gay guys and hints and indirectly references a lot of this, though, and much of that may be self-evident for those in that position. That is partially a part of the tradeoff of writing a supportive therapeutic guide rather than a sociopolitical theory book -- the voice is clear and the material is well-organized and entirely absent of jargon, but it relies on more shared assumptions that remain unstated or only peripherally examined than a theory or a manifesto piece might develop.
That's not to say that these issues are unexplored altogether. The author makes the important point that, when compared to the predominant culture, the black community is more respectful of and affected by religion, making religious views of sexual behavior and sexual orientation a stronger force. Mosley spends a lot of time unpacking Christian-positioned judgmental responses to being gay, and does it without an antagonistically anti-religious framework, reaching to an audience that will contain many people who continue to consider themselves Christian, as well as people who don't but have been deeply affected by the embrace of those perspectives within their community.
Another theme often addressed and evoked even without a lot of academic analysis is intersectionality (although he doesn't use the word) --
A person who identifies with the struggles of living their life openly gay might still consider themselves superior to people with different abilities or skin color. Their experiences and identities do not automatically erase their potentially preprogrammed racist tendencies. This is why we often bear witness to gay white men executing racial crimes against a gay black man.
Mosley mentions how being a member of multiple deprecated outgroups increases the likelihood of being viewed negatively -- by police profiling, for instance -- and, on the other hand, how not also belonging to yet other such groups can ameliorate the judgmental attitudes that some people in the community are inclined to bring --
For the white man, he has his skin as his first line of defense. Before he is gay, he is white, and because we live in a twisted world that still indulges in the practice of racism, they are more likely to get fairer treatment from self-acclaimed moral police and preservers of outdated customs.
Mosley puts very little focus on ranting about what needs changing in the world, though, and mostly aims to hold a kind mirror to the individual reader, so as to help them make the internal changes from which they will benefit. He urges us to question the kind of stereotypes that polarize the world. He relates the story of Andrew, a young man worrying that anyone who figured him for being gay would be hostile, perhaps violent... he is conversing with a guy he has a crush on and two older black men approach and he's anticipating an attack, only to have it turn out that they're a couple -- his crush's two gay dads!
This is not to say that we are not discriminated against or that every crime against our race and sexual identity is imagined. If you look behind the veil, self-hatred and the inability to accept yourself for who you are is the first form of discrimination you experience.
Mosley is a mixed bag on inclusivity. Clearly he is writing about, and for, black gay men, but in discussing the processes of inquiry and self-examination, the acts that might lead to coming out as gay, he attempts to incorporate some other possibilities for the reader's consideration. He stirs in bisexuality and pansexuality the best, mentioning in several places that gay versus hetero is not an either-or consideration, that there is fluidity and complexity in attraction and expression and behavior.
Other LGBTQIA possibilities that might lead someone to ponder the possibility that they're gay are nowhere near as well addressed, though. He makes repeated mention of being part of the "LGBTQ+ rainbow" and attempts to separate gender conformity from sexual orientation in a "myths" section titled "Allowing boys to play with dolls will make them gay", but doesn't ever really unpack the possibility of how gender variance or gender nonconformity can be present as something utterly different from being gay.
He makes a better attempt to dismantle the inverse situation, of being gay without necessarily exhibiting gender nonconforming traits, in a different myths section titled "Gay people live flamboyantly" --
It doesn't suddenly turn us into label-loving fashionistas who want to wear feminine lingerie and put on tons of makeup... as a matter of fact, one of my closest gay friends plays football, drinks Guinness through a rusty funnel, and doesn't hesitate to knock a few teeth from the mouth of a homophobic if the moment calls for it.
-- but in many more places throughout the book he re-conflates the notion of being a femme or expressing as such with being a gay male, without holding it up for examination. As anyone who reads me regularly is probably well aware, treating gender and sexual orientation and physical morphological sex as being the same thing is a hot button for me and does get me up on my soapbox.
Before I climb up on it, let me make the disclaimer that Mosley isn't doing it any worse than many a transgender author has done in their narrative story, or worse than I see in many memes posted to LGBTQ spaces.
But on a chapter exercise on page 17, asking the reader "What is your primary sexual orientation?", he lists transgender, queer, and intersex as choices. Transgender and genderqueer are not sexual orientations, they're gender. Intersex is not a sexual orientation either, it's morphological sex.
And while it's nice that we're told that at least one gay fellow is a football hooligan who beats up homophobes, the book is rife with unexamined comments that imply that there's something gay about being feminine if you're male, and when you do that within a book designed to reach out to uncertain self-questioning people exploring their identity factors, that reiterates our culture's mainstream message that gender is an aspect of sex and of sexual orientation.
After years of attempting to blend in, I threw in the proverbial towel and dared to be myself... I slide into my rainbow dress, strut the streets , and stomp this battleground with my 6-inch thigh-high boots.
That's positioned as the author coming out gay. Not as the author coming out femme.
The alpha male and his supposed superiority over his counterparts are an urban legend that has fed the ego of brutish and selfish men who think little of everyone else. These guys perch on the fragile branches of delusional misconceptions...peering down on anyone who acts or talks in a way that is not considered fitting for men in their ranks. But laughably, despite all their show of brute force, it appears that the antidote for toxic masculinity is gay.
That's in a section that comes so close to indicting sissyphobia, misogyny, and homophobia as interrelated but separate processes, and yet for a lack of closer examination doesn't quite do so. Is the antidote for toxic masculinity gay even when the gay person in question is the football fan with the rusty beer funnel? How about the sissy femme male whose attraction is towards female folk, is he not an antidote? When stated as it's stated in the paragraph above, it's conflating being gay with being femme.
When Mosley discusses his own coming out, he says many people said he wasn't telling them anything they didn't already know.
This meant this huge secret I thought I had successfully kept from the world was not so much a secret as much as it was me living in denial...Meanwhile my "shame" was hanging out to dry for anyone to see. I wonder if it was because I dressed as Amy Winehouse for that Halloween party at Chad's?
Why would dressing as Amy Winehouse signal that someone is gay? Well, because we live in a culture that conflates femininity in males with being gay, but when you just toss this out without pinning it to the wall and untying those threads, even in a throwaway line, it adds one more underline to the notion that dressing as a female person would dress means you're attracted to the same sex.
Well... we do live in a world where we grow up hearing those equivocations. And if you happen to be attracted to the same sex as a male and you also happen to have some femme (or for that matter a lot of femme) in your disposition, it's natural, I suppose, to think of them as the same phenomenon. Hateful people react to your femininity and say you must be gay, and despise you for it, and when lo and behold it turns out you are indeed gay, you reject their judgment but have less reason to question the notion that they recognized you as being gay because you were so femme.
Black & Bold -- A Guide to Self-Love: Conquer Sexual & Racial Inequality, Proudly Identify as Black & Gay by Kelvin Mosley, publication forthcoming, © 2021
Kelvin Mosley is a member of the LGBTQ Writers Facebook group I'm in.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
When I began reading Black & Bold by Kevin Mosley, I started out thinking of it as one of those explanatory books, laying out the issues specific to black gay men in our society, and it does indeed do a good deal of that, but I came to realize as I read onward that it's actually more of a self-help book.
This is Kelvin, who having come to terms with his own identity, is reaching a hand back in love and support, saying, "You can, too!" A warmth and supportive reassuring presence is palpable throughout. There are guided meditation-like contemplative thought exercises and affirmations at the end of each chapter.
The most central pastoral care message that comes through is about rejecting self-hate. Mosley talks about the social hostility and negative messaging and how important it is to scrutinize these and set them aside and to feel good about yourself as a valid person -- a message that has applicability to everyone but of specific relevance to folks growing up black male and gay.
Reciprocally, there is a solid message about the emotional positives of being out, both for internal self-acceptance and for external social possibilities.
There is some thoughtful elaboration on the specific ways that being gay or growing up gay is different for black people, although not as much as I was expecting. Mosley is writing for a primary audience of black gay guys and hints and indirectly references a lot of this, though, and much of that may be self-evident for those in that position. That is partially a part of the tradeoff of writing a supportive therapeutic guide rather than a sociopolitical theory book -- the voice is clear and the material is well-organized and entirely absent of jargon, but it relies on more shared assumptions that remain unstated or only peripherally examined than a theory or a manifesto piece might develop.
That's not to say that these issues are unexplored altogether. The author makes the important point that, when compared to the predominant culture, the black community is more respectful of and affected by religion, making religious views of sexual behavior and sexual orientation a stronger force. Mosley spends a lot of time unpacking Christian-positioned judgmental responses to being gay, and does it without an antagonistically anti-religious framework, reaching to an audience that will contain many people who continue to consider themselves Christian, as well as people who don't but have been deeply affected by the embrace of those perspectives within their community.
Another theme often addressed and evoked even without a lot of academic analysis is intersectionality (although he doesn't use the word) --
A person who identifies with the struggles of living their life openly gay might still consider themselves superior to people with different abilities or skin color. Their experiences and identities do not automatically erase their potentially preprogrammed racist tendencies. This is why we often bear witness to gay white men executing racial crimes against a gay black man.
Mosley mentions how being a member of multiple deprecated outgroups increases the likelihood of being viewed negatively -- by police profiling, for instance -- and, on the other hand, how not also belonging to yet other such groups can ameliorate the judgmental attitudes that some people in the community are inclined to bring --
For the white man, he has his skin as his first line of defense. Before he is gay, he is white, and because we live in a twisted world that still indulges in the practice of racism, they are more likely to get fairer treatment from self-acclaimed moral police and preservers of outdated customs.
Mosley puts very little focus on ranting about what needs changing in the world, though, and mostly aims to hold a kind mirror to the individual reader, so as to help them make the internal changes from which they will benefit. He urges us to question the kind of stereotypes that polarize the world. He relates the story of Andrew, a young man worrying that anyone who figured him for being gay would be hostile, perhaps violent... he is conversing with a guy he has a crush on and two older black men approach and he's anticipating an attack, only to have it turn out that they're a couple -- his crush's two gay dads!
This is not to say that we are not discriminated against or that every crime against our race and sexual identity is imagined. If you look behind the veil, self-hatred and the inability to accept yourself for who you are is the first form of discrimination you experience.
Mosley is a mixed bag on inclusivity. Clearly he is writing about, and for, black gay men, but in discussing the processes of inquiry and self-examination, the acts that might lead to coming out as gay, he attempts to incorporate some other possibilities for the reader's consideration. He stirs in bisexuality and pansexuality the best, mentioning in several places that gay versus hetero is not an either-or consideration, that there is fluidity and complexity in attraction and expression and behavior.
Other LGBTQIA possibilities that might lead someone to ponder the possibility that they're gay are nowhere near as well addressed, though. He makes repeated mention of being part of the "LGBTQ+ rainbow" and attempts to separate gender conformity from sexual orientation in a "myths" section titled "Allowing boys to play with dolls will make them gay", but doesn't ever really unpack the possibility of how gender variance or gender nonconformity can be present as something utterly different from being gay.
He makes a better attempt to dismantle the inverse situation, of being gay without necessarily exhibiting gender nonconforming traits, in a different myths section titled "Gay people live flamboyantly" --
It doesn't suddenly turn us into label-loving fashionistas who want to wear feminine lingerie and put on tons of makeup... as a matter of fact, one of my closest gay friends plays football, drinks Guinness through a rusty funnel, and doesn't hesitate to knock a few teeth from the mouth of a homophobic if the moment calls for it.
-- but in many more places throughout the book he re-conflates the notion of being a femme or expressing as such with being a gay male, without holding it up for examination. As anyone who reads me regularly is probably well aware, treating gender and sexual orientation and physical morphological sex as being the same thing is a hot button for me and does get me up on my soapbox.
Before I climb up on it, let me make the disclaimer that Mosley isn't doing it any worse than many a transgender author has done in their narrative story, or worse than I see in many memes posted to LGBTQ spaces.
But on a chapter exercise on page 17, asking the reader "What is your primary sexual orientation?", he lists transgender, queer, and intersex as choices. Transgender and genderqueer are not sexual orientations, they're gender. Intersex is not a sexual orientation either, it's morphological sex.
And while it's nice that we're told that at least one gay fellow is a football hooligan who beats up homophobes, the book is rife with unexamined comments that imply that there's something gay about being feminine if you're male, and when you do that within a book designed to reach out to uncertain self-questioning people exploring their identity factors, that reiterates our culture's mainstream message that gender is an aspect of sex and of sexual orientation.
After years of attempting to blend in, I threw in the proverbial towel and dared to be myself... I slide into my rainbow dress, strut the streets , and stomp this battleground with my 6-inch thigh-high boots.
That's positioned as the author coming out gay. Not as the author coming out femme.
The alpha male and his supposed superiority over his counterparts are an urban legend that has fed the ego of brutish and selfish men who think little of everyone else. These guys perch on the fragile branches of delusional misconceptions...peering down on anyone who acts or talks in a way that is not considered fitting for men in their ranks. But laughably, despite all their show of brute force, it appears that the antidote for toxic masculinity is gay.
That's in a section that comes so close to indicting sissyphobia, misogyny, and homophobia as interrelated but separate processes, and yet for a lack of closer examination doesn't quite do so. Is the antidote for toxic masculinity gay even when the gay person in question is the football fan with the rusty beer funnel? How about the sissy femme male whose attraction is towards female folk, is he not an antidote? When stated as it's stated in the paragraph above, it's conflating being gay with being femme.
When Mosley discusses his own coming out, he says many people said he wasn't telling them anything they didn't already know.
This meant this huge secret I thought I had successfully kept from the world was not so much a secret as much as it was me living in denial...Meanwhile my "shame" was hanging out to dry for anyone to see. I wonder if it was because I dressed as Amy Winehouse for that Halloween party at Chad's?
Why would dressing as Amy Winehouse signal that someone is gay? Well, because we live in a culture that conflates femininity in males with being gay, but when you just toss this out without pinning it to the wall and untying those threads, even in a throwaway line, it adds one more underline to the notion that dressing as a female person would dress means you're attracted to the same sex.
Well... we do live in a world where we grow up hearing those equivocations. And if you happen to be attracted to the same sex as a male and you also happen to have some femme (or for that matter a lot of femme) in your disposition, it's natural, I suppose, to think of them as the same phenomenon. Hateful people react to your femininity and say you must be gay, and despise you for it, and when lo and behold it turns out you are indeed gay, you reject their judgment but have less reason to question the notion that they recognized you as being gay because you were so femme.
Black & Bold -- A Guide to Self-Love: Conquer Sexual & Racial Inequality, Proudly Identify as Black & Gay by Kelvin Mosley, publication forthcoming, © 2021
Kelvin Mosley is a member of the LGBTQ Writers Facebook group I'm in.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts