Pacific Standard: Why Are Self-Identified Straight Men Hooking Up With Each Other?

Recent scholarship (Riley Snorton's Nobody Is Supposed to Know) illuminates a demimonde of fluid sexuality among alpha men — and its unforgiving racial double standards.

Nobody Is Supposed to Know (Riley Snorton)EXCERPT:

Riley Snorton, by contrast, focuses on African-American men, a group long ago forced, in the words of W.E.B. DuBois, into adopting a kind of “double consciousness” in the face of hegemonic white culture. Instead of practicing their sexuality in a closet with the door slightly ajar, black men occupy a far more fraught position: Both their race and their sexual desires become unspeakable subjects, kept “down low” in the basement of a society built on assumptions of white heteronormativity.

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Published in: Pacific Standard
By: Oliver Lee Bateman