sexual. The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black
Communities is one of the most comprehensive
attempts yet to document and culturally situate
homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender iden-
tities as regular and “normal” components of life
throughout the African diaspora. Published by
Alyson Press, the world’s largest gay and lesbian
press, Taboo won the Lambda Literary Award for
best nonfiction anthology in 2001.
Taboo’s 28 selections are spread over seven sec-
tions titled “Negotiating the Racial Politics of Black
Sexual Identity,” “Sexuality and the Black Church,”
“Homosexuality in Africa,” “Homosexuality and
Heterosexist Dress Codes,” “Iconic Signifiers of the
Gay Harlem Renaissance,” “Heterosexism and Ho-
mophobia in Popular Black Music,” “Homosexu-
ality in Popular Black Literature,” and “The Silent
Mythology Surrounding AIDS and Public Icons.”
The selections systematically explore the discursive
and performative strategies that have been used by
and against transgendered and nonheterosexual
blacks transhistorically and worldwide.
Mixing essays by well-known figures in black
cultural studies such as HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
(who contributes a foreword), BELL HOOKS, and
Philip Brian Harper with work from emerging
writers from a range of academic disciplines and
public locations, the anthology functions as an
activist document. All of the articles straightfor-
wardly attempt to legitimate transgendered, ho-
mosexual, and bisexual identities on the diasporic
stage. This activism is not presented, however, as
a given.
According to the editor of the volume, “The no-
table absence of [antagonistic] views in this anthol-
ogy indicates... an unwillingness to be recognized
on a wider, and possibly global platform, as being
homophobic” (xx). This sense that homophobia is
becoming discursively untenable thanks no doubt
to the kind of counterevidence marshaled in this
anthology is articulated in the cri de coeur by
Conrad Pegues that touchingly, although perhaps
too blithely, closes the book. According to Pegues,
“When the African American community comes
to the expanded consciousness that same-gender-
loving African Americans are not the enemy, then
our ‘other sexual’ truth may set us all free” (454).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Delroy Constantine-Simms and The Greatest Taboo.”
Interview by Raj Ayyar. Gay Today: A Global Site
for Daily Gay News. Available online. URL: http://
gaytoday.com/garchive/interview/O60102in.htm.
Accessed October 16, 2006.
Terry RowdenGreenlee, Sam (1930– )
Chicago-born Sam Greenlee studied at the Univer-
sity of Chicago (1954–1957) and the University of
Thesaloniki, Greece (1963–1964), after receiving
his B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, in 1952. According to Greenlee, he was
born to a “refugee family,” “a second generation
immigrant from the deep South.” His father was
a chauffeur, his mother a singer and dancer in the
chorus line of the Chicago’s Regal Theater. Join-
ing the military with his undergraduate degree in
hand, Greenlee served as a U.S. information officer
for more than eight years in Asia, Europe, and the
Middle East.
Greenlee is best known for his only successfully
received novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door,
which was published in 1969 amidst the CIVIL
RIGHTS MOVEMENT and the hovering discontent
that became the Black Revolt. He almost immedi-
ately became a cult hero and celebrity for candidly
revealing in his fiction the pervasiveness of racism
within branches of the federal government; in the
end, he satirizes and critiques the government for
being more interested in window dressing than for
its true commitment to integrating its most sacred
institutions, particularly the FBI and CIA.
When U.S. senator Gilbert Hennington black-
mails the CIA into hiring its first black agent, in
order to appease the black vote and win reelection,
protagonist Sam Freeman, a social worker from
Chicago’s South Side who works with street gangs,
wins the token spot by outsmarting his middle-class
black competitors. During training, Freeman, a for-
mer marine, isolates himself from the other blacks,
perfects his genuflections, and simultaneously dis-
plays his skills in martial arts when he beats and
shames his white trainer during a competition.Greenlee, Sam 213