At bottom what I learned was that the male desire for a male roams everywhere, avid, desperate, unimaginably lonely, cul-minating often in drugs, piety, madness or death.40
What has same-sex intimacy have to do with the rite of mas-culinity? What does it have to do with the Cross? Not my Jesus?! I think that at the center of masculinity is the male desire for another male. Even though I privilege the sexual aspect of Arthur and Crunch to speak of bodily sacredness and communion between bodies, I do not privilege it in the same way when I speak of same-sex intimacy. Same-sex inti-macy is both homosocial as well as homoerotic. It is homoso-cial in that the male desires companionship, dare I say needs the companionship of males. This fraternal aspect whereby we are accepted by our own roams everywhere. Baldwin says men need each other “in order to deal with women,” their feminine side, and I say this need for one another extends to dealing with their dreams and their desperation.41 Dreaming of love and desperate for wholeness men are drawn to one another. This is the homosocial aspect of masculinity: the desire of men to be with men sexually and nonsexually. It is the need to establish an intimate bond that is both sacred and sacramental. The social aspect of homo-socialism must be understood here to be inclusive of the homoerotic. In fact the homoerotic might be considered the ideal. How so?
What is the Cross if in some way it is not a rite of mas-culinity, or representative of such? The presentation of the (male) body sacrificed for love’s sake drives the male desire for a male. I say this in the sense that we seek out conversion within this ancient paradigm without much of a critique of the events leading up to Jesus on the Cross. In the Passover
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events before his abandonment and death by crucifixion, Jesus conducted an intimate homosocial/homoerotic rite with a group of men who professed an undying love of him.
Jesus disrobed and performed a ritual of washing the feet of those men and presented his naked body as an object of com-munion: sacrament for the eternal remembrance of his body.
This is at the core of the ritual myth of the rite of masculinity:
a search for acceptance of naked flesh as a sign of fraternity with the divine. In this sense Jesus on the Cross becomes a symbol of that homosocial and homoerotic rite of masculin-ity, which signifies that men can love one another and others both socially and erotically. Jesus’ naked body, bruised and battered unto death is a symbol of how “men can treat each other with such vile, relentless, and endlessly inventive cru-elty” for the purposes of indicting nakedness, denying love, and denying god.42 Jesus on the Cross, crucified, is a site of exchange whereby the burden of masculinity is lifted away from us revealing a feminine/androgynous Christology as the way to conversion and liberation.43
The rite of masculinity as a “counter tradition” not only subverts gender but also corrects and balances it. In The Man Jesus Loved, Theodore Jennings points out the role rever-sal captured in the washing of feet. Jennings says, “In every case in biblical literature, the person who washes the feet of another is a woman.”44 He goes on to say, “Jesus’ washing of the feet, his performance of women’s work is to be imitated in his memory and in obedience to his command. In this way through an act that transgresses gender categories, the com-munity is to acknowledge him as teacher and Lord.”45
The idea of Arthur’s tongue washing of Crunch’s “sacred balls” is indicative of Jesus’ example of subverting the power of hegemonic masculinity. What Jennings proposes affirms my development of a feminine/masculine spiritually androgynous Christology and brings into focus the subver-sive nature of Baldwin’s identification of the body as a site of sacredness.
A similarity can be drawn between Jesus washing the
“feet” of the Twelve—the anointing of their sacred balls—
and Arthur’s licking (tongue washing) of Crunch’s sacred sack. At first glance, it goes against religious convention and Christian conviction.46 However, we see repeatedly the homoeroticism of the black church being outed as religious leaders are caught in the crosshairs of homosexual intimacy, which they themselves attack and deny. Therefore many men languish desperate, unimaginably lonely, culminating often in drugs, piety, madness or death . . . just as with Jesus. It is why Jesus suffers in such a horrifying fashion. Jesus’s suf-fering is an example of what can happen to men who privi-lege the feminine: this is the seed of homophobia. Therefore the sign of the Cross (with Jesus’ body removed) is also the sign of homophobia. The bare Cross is a not a reminder of the risen savior or atonement: it is a sign of hegemonic mas-culinity’s power to brutally subdue and erase the feminine/
androgynous as a gateway to the divine. Empire becomes the kingdom and its line of god-kings becomes its/our saviors.
In Mark 8:27 Jesus asks Peter “Who do people say that I am?” In v29 Peter answered “You are the Messiah.”47 In v31 Jesus “began to teach them that the Son of man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes and be killed . . .”48 Peter rebukes Jesus for his remarks and responds with a rebuke of Peter, saying in v33 “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”49 I say that this is the initial moment wherein Jesus queers the Messiah and the Cross. Jesus problematizes the rite of masculinity upheld by the Davidic model of messianic masculinity and its sup-portive role in the maintenance of the Roman Empire. I say more about this in chapter 6. Jesus defies masculinity as it is given to him, inherited by him. I assert that Jesus is crucified not merely for the sins of the people, which is the Christian claim: he was crucified for defying hegemonic masculinity upheld and signified in the form of the synagogue and Roman
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Empire.50 The Cross as a sign of empirical power and male domination is also a sign of homophobia in both ancient and modern/ postmodern contexts. As a sign of power of the Holy Roman Empire, the Cross embeds homophobia into the bowels of Christendom.
What Jesus subverts in his rite of masculinity is seen as an attack on the empirical brutality signified by the Cross of the Roman Empire. He was executed for this subversion of empirical hegemonic masculinity. Because of homopho-bia, the Empire identified this as a treasonous act and his death, in this sense, occurs because he defies the model of hegemonic masculinity upon which it is founded. The Last Supper is a rite, a covenant between men to act righteously and without fear. Jesus takes the burden of masculinity upon himself and in doing is abandoned in the end. What is most interesting is that it is the women who stay to see the cost of masculinity and who eventually pick up that Cross and carry it themselves.51
The account of James Baldwin’s last days is similarly situ-ated with that of Jesus’ last days and the rite of masculinity understood here as the Last Supper. David Leeming writes,
Caring for Jimmy in his sickness was a logical extension of this ritual [of men loving one another]. He was insistent on not going to a hospital or having a nurse. He wanted men to take care of him – not, I was sure, because he disliked or mistrusted women, but because it was important to him that men express the feminine within themselves, that they adopt the kind of tender nurturing usually associated with women.
We became “disciples” of his gospel, “gentle” men of the wel-come table. To put is another way, we ritually experienced the stink of Giovanni’s room. Even as he was dying Jimmy insisted on his role as a witness and lived his prophecy.52
At the “welcome table”, in his pass(ing)over Jimmy sets the table with the rite of masculinity done in remembrance of what Jesus calls us—calls men—to do. Until the last he defies
hegemonic masculinity and homophobia. Therefore his death is reminiscent of Jesus’ own death and defiance on the Cross of Empire. Do this in remembrance of me . . .
The mention of Gionvanni’s Room can be read in light of hegemonic masculinity’s place in the construction and maintenance of Empire, which requires brutality and the sentimentalization of love. David’s inability to love another man, Giovanni, turns him into a “sacrificial victim” who is eventually executed upon the guillotine by the state. Leeming says “David’s denial of love is horrendously expensive” and that his inability to “accept the taste, the smell, the touch of love, merely because Giovanni is a man and he is a man”
dooms Giovanni to suffer death by the hands of the state.53 Arthur in Just Above My Head, Rufus in Another Country, and to a certain degree Wayne Williams (the Atlanta child murders) in The Evidence of Things Not Seen all suffer a fate similar to Giovanni and Jesus. By exposing the effects of denying love Baldwin deftly exposes the xenophobia of the sexual other and the homophobia of the Cross of Empire and Christendom. I do not speak of the latter two in terms of mutual exclusivity for they are one in the same.
Baldwin boldly puts himself on this Cross where the quest for identity—nakedness beyond the labels—is brutally stretched and nailed to the narrow intersection where the vertical way of Christendom and the vastly sprawled horizon of Empire meet. James Baldwin is a true disciple, choosing to travel the road to Galilee—beyond home and all that made him—to following his call to embrace the rite of masculinity given to us by Jesus in the name of love thereby making his conversion complete.