Content area
Full Text
Qual Sociol (2016) 39:97100 DOI 10.1007/s11133-015-9318-z
E. Colin Ruggero1
Published online: 4 January 2016# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low. By C. Riley Snorton, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 216 pp., ISBN-13: 9780816677979.
Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men. By Jane Ward, New York: NYU Press, 2015, 240 pp., ISBN: 9781479825172.
When a straight man has sex with another man, is it simply a momentary or meaningless aberration in the life of a Btrue^ heterosexual, or evidence he is secretly a closeted gay man? This question, and the sexual binary it implies, has animated predominant approaches to analyzing the behavior of straight men who have sex with men in the popular media and in scholarly research across a range of disciplines. However, both C. Riley Snortons Nobody is Supposed to Know and Jane Wards Not Gay step outside this paradigm, leaving aside the question of their subjects supposed Btrue^ sexualities to explore the social, institutional, and representational dynamics that frame and regulate their sexual practices and identities. Both books pose important questions about the narratives that structure how we think about the behavior of straight men who have sex with men.
Though different in many ways, both Nobody is Supposed to Know and Not Gay forcefully document the dynamics of power that exist at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality with compelling examinations of the ways in which the behavior of men who have sex with men has been alternately normalized (for Wards white men) or pathologized (for Snortons men of color). Whereas Snorton explains how Bdown low^ narratives are symptomatic of how Black sexual representation generally is Bcharacterized by hypervisibility and confinement and subject to regulation and surveillance^ (5), Wards analysis in Not Gay reveals the ways that Bwhiteness and masculinityas a particular nexus of powerenable certain kinds of sexual contact, sexual mobility, and sexual border crossing that are not possible, or at least do not carry the same cultural meanings, when enacted by men of color^ (6).
* E. Colin Ruggero [email protected]
1 Department of Sociology, The New School for Social Research, 6 East 16th Street, 9th floor, New
York, NY 10003, USA
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11133-015-9318-z&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11133-015-9318-z&domain=pdf
Web...