Trapped in the Epistemological Closet: Black Sexuality and the “Ghettocentric Imagination”

This article was downloaded by: [Snorton, C. Riley] On: 29 May 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 911822005] Publisher Taylor & Francis Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Souls Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: https://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713723579 Trapped in the Epistemological Closet: Black Sexuality and the “Ghettocentric Imagination” C. Riley Snorton Online Publication Date: 01 April 2009 To cite this Article Snorton, C. Riley(2009)'Trapped in the Epistemological Closet: Black Sexuality and the “Ghettocentric Imagination”',Souls,11:2,94 — 111 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10999940902910115 URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999940902910115 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Souls Gender and Sexuality, I Trapped in the Epistemological Closet Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 Black Sexuality and the ‘‘Ghettocentric Imagination’’ C. Riley Snorton In the summer of 2005, Robert Sylvester Kelly released the first five chapters of his twenty-two-episode magnum opus Trapped in the Closet, garnering a great deal of attention both from media critics and popular audiences. Elaborating on S. Craig Watkins’s notion of the ‘‘ghettocentric imagination’’ and Eve Sedgwick’s argument on the processes of epistemological production structured by the metaphor of the closet, this essay examines the relationships between and among black popular culture, the ‘‘closet,’’ and the maintenance of certain definitions of ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘gender,’’ and ‘‘sexuality’’; it argues for a deeper understanding of the ‘‘glass closet,’’ a space of confinement and hypervisibility, as a structuring metaphor and trope in representations of black sexuality. Speculating on the relationship between black popular culture and theories of sexuality more generally, the essay suggests that the glass closet must also figure into scholarly assessments of the emergence of the ‘‘down low,’’ a term that typically describes black men who have sex with men but do not identify as gay, bisexual, or queer. Keywords: down low, popular culture, R. Kelly, representation, sexuality, Trapped in the Closet Souls 11 (2): 94–111, 2009 / Copyright # 2009 The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI: 10.1080/10999940902910115 Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 95 R. Kelly’s widely popular, episodic opera Trapped in the Closet (Trapped) begins with the protagonist, Sylvester (Kelly), waking up alone, noticeably disoriented, in the bed of a presumed one-night stand. His sexual partner, Cathy, soon returns to the bedroom to inform Sylvester that her husband Rufus is coming up the stairs. First considering jumping out of the window, Sylvester decides to hide in the closet to avoid the inevitable confrontation. A few seconds later, Rufus arrives, and the couple begins to engage in foreplay until the untimely ringing of Sylvester’s cell phone interrupts them. After searching other parts of the apartment, Rufus approaches the closet to find Sylvester waiting inside, with Beretta in hand. Backing away from Sylvester, Rufus turns his anger toward Cathy at the realization of her infidelity. Sylvester, eager to get home to his wife, threatens to shoot both Rufus and Cathy if they do not let him leave. Rufus, however, somehow manages to make Sylvester stay in the apartment in order to meet the other half of Rufus’s adulterous affair, Chuck, a deacon at the church where Rufus is the pastor. In an effort to silence the escalating assertions of betrayal, competing claims to moral superiority, and finally a declaration from Rufus that he intends to marry his lover, Sylvester climatically shoots the gun into the air. Sylvester, after effectively silencing the room, calls his house and hears an unidentified man. The third chapter ends with Sylvester quickly exiting Rufus and Cathy’s house, hoping to catch his wife in her own affair. The succeeding nineteen chapters are a slow crescendo on the foundational themes of infidelity, concealment, and the inextricability of blackness and queerness in the popular imagination. Part of the appeal of Trapped in the Closet lies in its ability to visualize the interplay among and between many of the most persistent and compelling stereotypes of black masculinity—the minister, the ex-con, the cop, the ‘‘down-low’’ brother, the pimp, and the hip-hop star, setting them against the backdrop of a postindustrial black urban landscape. As S. Craig Watkins argues, popular media culture serves as a terrain on which scholars might understand the processes of social and political struggle in ‘‘constant operation.’’1 For Watkins, the ‘‘black ghetto’’ is a cultural object that serves as a location for ideological struggle and maps the epistemological terrain of postindustrial black space and its inhabitants, thus producing a ‘‘ghettocentric imagination.’’2 Positing her own cartography in Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues that the crisis of ‘‘homo=heterosexual definition,’’ emblematized by the metaphor of the closet, produces myriad binaries that have served to structure culture invisibly in the twentieth century.3 Drawing on Sedgwick and Watkins, I examine how Trapped in the Closet uses affect-laden imagery and music to interrogate, complicate, and even deconstruct Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 96 ^ Souls April^June 2009 the binaries of knowledge=ignorance, urban=suburban, and homosexual=heterosexual that structure and maintain a ghettocentric imagination. Mirroring the form of my principal object of analysis, this essay is structured episodically in an attempt to address the complexities of Kelly’s work. The first section attends specifically to how Trapped in the Closet was received, anatomizing audience responses, including critics, fans, and the broader artistic community and highlighting the way the series effaces traditional distinctions between high and low art. The second section is devoted to the relationship between the form and content of Trapped in the Closet. The third section focuses on the artist, R. Kelly, his celebrity persona and personal life, legal dramas, interviews, and performances to offer a few ways in which we might understand Kelly as figured on the ‘‘down low.’’ Pitched specifically as an intervention in hip-hop scholarship, the fourth section focuses on the spatial landscapes and secondary characters, which structure and queer Watkins’s concept of the ‘‘ghettocentric imagination’’ and converse with Mark Anthony Neal’s writings on gender politics in ‘‘post-soul’’ hip-hop and R&B. This section is particularly interested in how Trapped sheds light on the complex relationships between and among concepts, like the ‘‘ghetto,’’ ‘‘race,’’ and ‘‘sexuality.’’ In the final section, I draw on my analysis of the content and popularity of Trapped to explain the cultural purchase of this work and the concept of ‘‘down low’’ more generally as instantiations of the structuring metaphor of the ‘‘glass closet’’ in epistemologies and representations of black sexuality. By glass closet, I refer to the simultaneity of hypervisibility and opacity that characterize representations of black sexuality in which the closet is both ‘‘obviously’’ transparent and a space for subterfuge. The glass closet, for those who inhabit it, is a space of containment that comprises the possibility for constraint and the possibility of possibility itself. Moreover, the trope of the glass closet produces the context for the creation and promulgation of the ‘‘down low’’ as a narrative to explain the further demonization of black sexuality, and black masculinity more acutely, in media and public health discourses. 1: Reading Closet Drama Described by New York Magazine as ‘‘the cultural event of the year,’’4 Trapped in the Closet has become somewhat of a darling among critics. Since the premier of the first five episodes in the summer of 2005, Kelly’s magnum opus has attracted a great deal of attention. In her New York Times article, journalist Kelefa Sanneh attributes Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 97 the popularity of Trapped to the rise of YouTube and the series’ status as a viral hit.5 Kelly produced and codirected the first twelve episodes, which were released on DVD in November 2005. In August 2007, the Independent Film Channel (IFC) aired ten new chapters of the series on its cable station and day-by-day online.6 In an interview in Variety magazine, Kelly stated that he ‘‘thought of ‘Trapped’ as an independent film.’’7 IFC General Manager Evan Shapiro, in a press statement, cited two reasons for the collaboration. Shapiro writes: Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 Perhaps . . . it’s the way that Kelly pits the most influential, stereotyped elements of black pop culture . . . against each other in an irreconcilable moral conflict. Perhaps . . . it’s because Trapped takes the traditional production values of a music video and turns them on their head. There’s no hit single; there’s no cute hook or catchy lyric. . . . The focus is on story and character, usually at the expense of a hummable tune.8 In other public statements, Shapiro compares Kelly to director John Waters, stating, ‘‘‘Trapped,’ like many of Waters’ films . . . exists on the fringe of mainstream culture, but also on the forefront of the current (or next) cultural shift.’’9 Shapiro’s statements, however, do not acknowledge a history of black sexuality in the United States that includes both a legacy of slavery and a positioning of black sexuality as ‘‘Other’’ to white Victorian sexual norms.10 Commentators have also compared Kelly to Charles Dickens, Homer, Shakespeare, and Tyler Perry. In many ways, Trapped has become a cultural product that proves Kelly’s status as auteur. As one blogger suggests, ‘‘it represents raw artistic vision at its best— which is to say, at its most willfully ignorant.’’11 This ignorance, as the blogger puts it, seems key to the series’ success. As much of the criticism suggests, part of the popular interest in Trapped owes to its ability to exploit numerous potent stereotypes of black masculinity and sexuality. In this way, Dave Chappelle is another interlocutor in a conversation on the themes of Kelly’s work. Like Chappelle, Kelly pushes buttons around race, in what John L. Jackson Jr. has described as a contemporary climate of ‘‘racial paranoia.’’12 Similarly, as the title of Sanneh’s article, ‘‘Outrageous Farce from R. Kelly: He’s in on the Joke, Right?’’ suggests, there is a political investment in believing that Kelly (like Chappelle) control these representations. Sanneh argues that many of the biggest fans of Trapped ‘‘seem to think they’re laughing at Mr. Kelly, not with him, as if the whole thing were some sort of glorious terrible mistake.’’13 The condescension discernable in the interactions between Kelly and IFC News anchor Matt Singer lends credence to her argument. However, as Ien Ang and Della Couling note in their study of the TV drama Dallas, popular consumption of melodrama is rife with tensions produced by mass-culture ideology, which would assign low value Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 98 ^ Souls April^June 2009 (a classist formulation) to melodramatic form and the pleasure produced by watching. Trapped serves as another example of what Ang and Couling call a ‘‘bad object’’ such that the pleasure audiences derive from viewing is rhetorically reconciled through claims that they take pleasure in the absurdity, ridiculousness, or ‘‘badness’’ of the series.14 Kelly adds another layer of rhetorical embellishment in interviews about the series, when he often states that he has no idea how to explain Trapped in the Closet. In an Entertainment Weekly article, Kelly states, ‘‘I can explain all my other songs, but this is an alien to me.’’15 It is difficult not to view Kelly’s comments as anything but a form of posturing, given the history of his music on similar themes. Previously recorded songs like ‘‘Down Low (Nobody Has to Know)’’ and ‘‘Down Low, Double Life’’ demonstrate an ongoing interest in examining themes of infidelity, mistaken identity, sexual ‘‘indiscretion,’’ and the precariousness of black sexuality figured on the ‘‘down low,’’ reminiscent of the themes of blues and soul music to which Kelly’s style is so deeply and explicitly indebted. If mimicry is the highest form of flattery, Trapped in the Closet has received a significant amount of praise. In 2005, the writers of the animated comedy show South Park produced an episode, ‘‘Trapped in the Closet,’’ that parodied the series. In the same year, Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell, and Duane Marin performed a live parody at the BET Comedy Awards. MADtv also aired a parody called ‘‘Trapped in the Cupboard,’’ which playfully evokes the introduction in chapter eight of Trapped of ‘‘Big Man.’’ Saturday Night Live, ‘‘Weird Al’’ Yankovic, and even a Chicago-based Shakespearean troupe performed their takes on the enigmatic series. In 2006, a parody from No Film School called ‘‘Out of the Closet’’ began to circulate over the Internet, in which the creators splice audio from Trapped in the Closet, Kelly’s other songs, and Dave Chappelle’s ‘‘Piss On You,’’ a comedic sketch on Kelly’s statutory rape and child pornography trial, to produce a narrative eerily reminiscent of Kelly’s recently concluded legal epic and suggests that Kelly might have been forecasting his possible future of same-sex sexual relations in prison. ‘‘Out of the Closet’’ vocalizes a significant aspect of popular readings of Kelly’s text. However, I would argue that rather than contemplate whether or not Trapped in the Closet is Kelly’s thinly veiled coming out story, we might view Trapped as a narrative that inextricably ties black sexuality to queerness in the popular imagination. 2: Structuring the Closet (Spoiler Alert!) Although many critics have tried, it is virtually impossible to describe accurately and comprehensively in a phrase the form and Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 99 musical structure of Trapped in the Closet. Jody Rosen, in an article for Slate.com, describes the piece as a ‘‘psychedelic chitlin-circuit soap opera,’’16 while others have used less colorful descriptions situating Kelly’s work in the tradition of the ‘‘hip-hopera,’’ a term that highlights the interplay between hip-hop sound and operatic form.17 In many ways, Trapped in the Closet reminds viewers of B. Ruby Rich’s definition of ‘‘new queer cinema’’: Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 There are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as reworking a history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with previous humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist and excessive. Above all they’re full of pleasure.18 The pleasure audiences derive from Trapped in the Closet is partially explained by the narrative form of the content and musical structure of the storytelling. The signature melodic strain of synthesized strings in the first episode (and several subsequent chapters) sonically conjures the experience of watching a 1950s melodrama. As Peter Brooks suggests, melodrama is a ‘‘mode of excess’’ with a fundamental drive toward ‘‘expressivity’’; its principal mode is that of ‘‘uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era.’’19 Daphne Brooks, citing the mutual constitution of melodrama and minstrelsy in nineteenthcentury American popular culture, explains that the ‘‘moral ethics of melodrama produced ‘racial legibility’ in addition to an apparently clear moral code.’’20 Similarly, Trapped in the Closet, in its deployment of the cinematic codes of melodrama, audio-visualizes the excesses of black sexuality and stages its epistemological unincorporability. The serialization of Trapped in the Closet is reminiscent of the format of soap operas, serial novels, or the Spanish-language telenovela. Trapped employs the structural characteristics of these genres in order to highlight the spatial dynamics of character interaction. The site of Rufus’s church hosts some of Kelly’s most potent messages about the relationships between sexuality and race, as well as the consequences of its contradictory, histrionic representation. As Ang and Couling explain, the ‘‘psychological credibility’’ of soap-opera characters is ‘‘subordinated to the functioning of these characters in melodramatic situations,’’ a fact that emphasizes the series’ emotional effect.21 The imagined situations depicted in Trapped in the Closet as melodrama are constituted and surrounded by cultural myths and fantasies of ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘class’’ among other forms of identification, which draw less on the ‘‘bare facts of these situations than on the metaphorical role they play in the popular imagination.’’22 Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 100 ^ Souls April^June 2009 Trapped is structured as a recitatif, a musical declamation that hovers between song and ordinary speech, and in a traditional opera provides an exegesis of the scene before the song begins. While the operatic recitatif is usually marked by roboto (having no tempo), Kelly’s recitatif includes a driving beat. A two-measure progression of chords, which moves from diminished to E-major, a transition coded in Western music for staging tension, set up a hypnotic loop. The stasis, caused by the repetitious chord progression, allows Kelly to spin out the storylines in a through-composed lyrical narrative, which in addition to the beat further connects the piece to a recognizable hip-hop sound. The instrumentation is minimal and includes synthesized strings, keyboard, and tympani. Inexpensive to produce and drawing on the generic codes of melodrama, opera, musical theater, and silent film, Kelly’s instrumental accompaniment is principally about highlighting the ‘‘drama’’ of the narrative. One could argue that the instrumentation, which draws on well-known, well-rehearsed musical codes, is meant to be understood not at the level of cognition but affectually, since each production convention works to minimize and invisibilize its function. The instrumentation also centers Kelly’s virtuosic vocal performance, as he becomes a modern-day Uncle Remus telling the story of sexual ‘‘indiscretions’’ in urban and suburban Chicago. Common vocal strategies in Kelly’s storytelling include elision, whereby Kelly begins his next line before finishing out the last, stylistic changes in his ventriloquisms of the numerous gendered, racialized, and queered characters,23 and the use of polyphonic vocal clusters to draw attention to key terms and phrases in the narrative, such as ‘‘closet,’’ ‘‘get on the line,’’ and ‘‘the package.’’ The narrative is intricate, and to detail every chapter would exceed the boundaries of this essay. However, here I will provide my own idiosyncratic rendering of Trapped in the Closet, focusing on its settings and the complex, spatially inflected relationships that constitute the drama. The series begins with Sylvester waking up in the bed of a presumed one-night stand. Within the first three chapters, Cathy (a.k.a. Mary), Rufus, and his lover, Chuck, are introduced in a developing narrative about sexual infidelity as Rufus and Cathy’s apartment sets the tone for what ensues at Sylvester’s suburban estate. Upon Sylvester’s arrival home, both the protagonist and audiences come to understand the cause of the unexpected male voice that responds to his call and the possibility of his own wife’s extramarital sexual activity. Following a dysfunctional sex scene, Sylvester finds the evidence of his earlier suspicions: a used condom buried in the sheets of his bed. Sylvester confronts his wife, Gwendolyn, who then reveals that she knows that he has cheated as well. The episode then takes a rather Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 101 Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 strange turn as Gwendolyn, in response to Sylvester’s demand to know the name of her lover (whom Sylvester has already met on his drive home), provides a string of names and connections to characters previously seen and not yet introduced. Gwendolyn states (as told through Sylvester’s subjective lens): Wipes her nose and asks me about a girl name Tina I thought to myself, said, ‘‘It sounds familiar.’’ Then said, ‘‘I’ll probably know her if I seen her.’’ Then I said ‘‘Anyway girl what the hell does that got to do with this man?!’’ She said, ‘‘He know my girl Roxanne’’ I said, ‘‘Who the hell is Roxanne!?’’ Then she said, ‘‘Roxanne is a friend of mine who know this guy named Chuck’’ ‘‘Chuck’s cool with this guy named Rufus’’ And I’m sitting there like what the fuck. Then she says, ‘‘Rufus’ wife Cathy, we both went to high school She introduce me to the policeman that stopped you.’’24 This surprising exposition works in at least three ways: it serves to structure the core characters of the drama, foreshadowing the action in scenes for the succeeding ten chapters; it demonstrates the imbrications of ‘‘heterosexual’’ and ‘‘homosexual’’ relationships within the narrative; and it gestures toward the abilities of sexual relationships to collapse spatial and economic boundaries. Audiences later understand that Gwendolyn’s friend Roxanne is Tina’s lover (chapter sixteen). Tina is also the ‘‘baby’s mama’’ of Twan, Gwendolyn’s brother who has been recently released from prison (chapter fifteen). And Gwendolyn’s lover, Officer James, also knows Chuck and Rufus (chapter eleven); the context of this revelation suggests that perhaps Officer James might also act on his same-sex attraction. Following Gwendolyn’s soliloquy, Sylvester and Gwendolyn quickly make up, sharing laughter over their recent choices, resignifying them as ‘‘drama’’ created by the craziness of other people. Across the twentytwo episodes, a recurring response to moments of sexual revelations is laughter. This emotional response from the characters is also often misrecognized as in the instance when Officer James mistakes Gwendolyn and Sylvester’s laughter for the evidence of domestic violence. James confronts Sylvester; Twan, Gwendolyn’s brother, comes home, and the narrative comes to another climatic moment in the only shooting of a person. Reminiscent of the dramatic climax in West Side Story, Twan is shot in the arm as he intervenes in the duel between James and Sylvester. The commotion arouses the suspicion of Rosie, referred to as the ‘‘nosy neighbor,’’ who provides comic relief to the scene when she rings the doorbell armed with a spatula. While Rosie lightens up the story line, she also signifies a particular class anxiety that remains a subtext within the series. Many of the characters in Trapped in the Closet appear to be middle-class, although they are Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 102 ^ Souls April^June 2009 negotiating problems associated with urban poverty.25 Her spatula emblematizes intraracial class anxieties, which, similar to the logic of bringing a cooking tool to intervene in gunplay, is hopelessly unable to control the potency of fantasies about black deviance or the possibility of black people behaving ‘‘poorly.’’ Chapters eight through twelve stage the story unfolding in three distinct locations: Cathy and Rufus’s apartment, Sylvester and Gwendolyn’s suburban home, and the house in which Officer James and his white wife, Bridget, live. In these episodes we learn that Bridget has also been having an affair and that her lover has fathered the unborn child she carries. Cathy, over the phone, reveals to her highschool friend Gwendolyn that she slept with Sylvester. Cathy and Rufus continue to argue about Rufus’s affair, as Cathy suggests that Rufus has now put her at risk of contracting HIV. While Cathy’s argument signifies a typical response (one that dominates the framing of ‘‘down low’’ in the media) to the revelation of Rufus’s same-sex desire, the narrative of Trapped in the Closet does not allow the audience to view her as blameless victim. In fact, the audience later finds out in chapter thirteen that Cathy promised to pay Sylvester to sleep with her that night. Chapter eight also marks an innovation in Kelly’s storytelling as he creates a new role for himself as omniscient narrator, no longer voicing the subjectivity of Sylvester, and perhaps increasing the role of a traditional anthropological gaze. The scene is particularly striking as it stages two instances of men contained by closets of sorts. At James and Bridget’s home, the narrator emerges, materializing from thin air, from the kitchen closet while Bridget’s lover, a little person named ‘‘Big Man,’’ emerges from the kitchen cupboard. The choice to have the narrator emerge from the closet seems to literalize Sedgwick’s argument in that the relationship between knowledge and the structure of the closet are inextricably linked. However, the staging of two competing closets complicates Sedgwick’s work and demonstrates its blind spot around race. As a counternarrative, Trapped audiovisualizes the contained black male body as purveyor of knowledge and ignorance. Big Man’s cupboard, like Sylvester’s earlier closet, serves as a form of protection in its ability to hide the materiality of indiscretion, although it is never a stable hiding place for long. Rather, the cupboard=closet functions for the black male body as a space of inevitable discovery (and the functions of knowledge) and escape (the embodied opportunity to opt out of epistemological scripts through misrecognition). Chapters thirteen through twenty-two mark the next installment of Kelly’s series. It begins by staging a meeting between Cathy and Sylvester at a restaurant that Tina and Roxanne manage. The restaurant scenes are among the first to visualize the urban landscape of Chicago, a point that is emphasized narratively by Twan’s Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 103 conversation with his friend Streetz, who informs Twan that his coconspirators in the drug bust that put Twan in jail are right inside the very same restaurant. In a high moment of melodramatic tension, Twan attempts to kill Tina and Roxanne for testifying against him in the court proceedings that sent him to jail for drug possession. In this scene, audiences learn that Tina is having Twan’s child and is currently in a relationship with Roxanne. The knowledge of this samesex relationship causes Twan and Sylvester to lose their tempers, and Sylvester initially plans to shoot them until he remembers (visà-vis the structuring logics of patriarchy and homophobia) that he loves watching women make out. Sylvester is also able to persuade Twan to relent by reminding his brother-in-law that any action would jeopardize his parole. The narrative then takes another striking turn as the audience follows the narrator to church. The church scene marks the first time that diegetic music is performed, as it is the first moment where the source of sound originates from action in the film’s world. In many ways the church becomes the central location for the narrative, as Chuck reveals to Rufus over the phone that he’s in the hospital with ‘‘the package.’’ The audience also witnesses an interaction between multiple characters all performed by Kelly, in which Kelly playing visiting minister (Reverend Mosley James Evans) at Rufus’s church attempts to convert Pimp Luscious, also played by Kelly, to Christianity. This scene is particularly important in my discussion on R. Kelly in the third section. Chapter twenty features another instance of a character trapped in the closet. In this episode, O’Dale, the church janitor, Rosie’s husband and Sylvester’s neighbor, and still another character played by Kelly, is eavesdropping on Chuck and Rufus’s conversation from a nearby closet at the church. O’Dale’s eavesdropping and subsequent conversation with his ‘‘nosey’’ wife sets the context for the last episode of the series so far. The final chapter, a riff on the ‘‘Goin’ Steady’’ number in Bye Bye Birdie, visualizes the relationships between all the characters introduced over the course of the twenty-two episodes as they make and receive phone calls about Pastor Rufus’s sexual ‘‘indiscretion’’ and the possibility of the Pastor having ‘‘the package.’’ As the subtitle of the full twenty-two-episode DVD—‘‘The Big Package’’—makes clear, Trapped in the Closet is concerned with the dangerous enormity of fantasies that surround and construct black masculinity and sexuality. 3: The Double Lives of R. Kelly As journalistic speculations and its artistic derivatives emblematize, popular discourse on Trapped often seeks to find some referent 104 ^ Souls April^June 2009 in Kelly’s life to account for the outlandishness of the narrative. In an interview with performance artists Neal Medlyn and Kenny Mellman (Kiki and Herb) featured in New York Magazine, Mellman typifies this sentiment when he states, Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 I just picture him alone in a studio with that same track playing over and over and over and over, and he’s quietly going crazy, and he’s so excited, and suddenly he realizes that he might be going to jail. And suddenly the story takes a turn and we learn why Twan went to jail. I mean, is it autobiography? Are all the characters just different parts of Kelly’s personality?26 There are several narrative elements in Trapped that seem to correlate to Kelly’s life, namely that the drama is set in Kelly’s hometown of Chicago, its main character takes Kelly’s middle name, Sylvester, as his moniker, and the theme of sexual indiscretion comes only a few years after Kelly’s June 2002 indictment for child pornography.27 Moreover, the focus on the church in later episodes not only asks us to remember his popular hit ‘‘I Believe I Can Fly’’ but also signifies Kelly’s vocal training under renowned gospel composer and music teacher Dr. Lena McLin. The song Kelly performs as Rev. Mosley James Evans, a version of Chicago-based Rev. George Allen Jordan’s ‘‘Jesus Can Work It Out,’’ further emphasizes Kelly’s roots in the Chicago church. The action of the church scene (chapters eighteen and nineteen) also provides significant insights into how R. Kelly is figured on the ‘‘down low.’’ Opening with Rev. Moseley (Kelly) singing a spirited version of ‘‘Work It Out,’’ the audience soon follows Rufus into his church office where he has been summoned away to take a phone call from his lover, Chuck. In this moment, the audience witnesses one of the most emotional and tender scenes of the series, as Rufus and Chuck discuss the effects of not having seen one another in some time (presumably not since the temporal era of chapter three). Rufus then attempts to break things off with Chuck, who blackmails Rufus by claiming that he will go to the media. When Rufus offers to meet with Chuck again, Chuck explains that he is in the hospital (which later the closeted eavesdropping figure O’Dale interprets as Chuck having the ‘‘package’’). The audience then returns to the main action of the sanctuary. In this scene, Kelly plays both the visiting Reverend and a nearconverted sinner, Pimp Luscious. (Reverend Evans) Pimp Luscious, you have been on my heart Hallelujah, thank you Jesus, and I looked at you and got a word from God mmmmm now Pimp . . . Luscious God is tellin’ me you don’t wanna pimp no more he sayin to me he saying you wanna stop pimpin’ aaaahlllll these hoes (church man) Amen (Reverend Moseley) and turn your life around Ha Ha (church man) just turn it around, Luscious (Reverend Evans) Now if you want it, God will do it for you, yes he will Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 105 (church man) Yeah (Reverend Evans) come on choir help me sing it, come on (Reverend and choir) You can do it Pimp Luscious (Reverend Evans) just stop pimpin’ (church man) just stop pimpin’ (Reverend) Luscious (choir) you can do it Pimp Luscious (Reverend) just cut it loose, let it go (choir) you can do it pimp Luscious (Reverend) I believe, oh I believe. Now ya’ll just come on saints and give Pimp Luscious a hand as he leaves the stage. Come on give him some of that agape godly love. Then young Bishop Craig says are you seriously gonna stop pimpin’ and give your life to God? And Pimp Luscious stops dead in his tracks and says, shhhhh, shhhhh, shhhhhhhh Then Pimp Luscious says, ‘‘I, I ai—ai-ain’t ee-ee-ever go-go-gonna s-s-s-stop p-p-p-pimpin’, pimpin’s for life. T-tt-tell you what c-cc-cousin. C-church, church (directed to choir and congregation). (Turning back to his friend and sidekick Bishop Craig) The only thing a p-ppimp don’ caught up in here is the ho-ly ghost. Now let’s go-g—go get out of here and m-make this m-mmoney.28 As the lyrics describe, Kelly stages his personal moral antagonisms (also evidenced in the wide variations in his song choices throughout his career) to confront himself about his pimpin’. And although Reverend Evans makes a valiant attempt, it is also clear that Pimp Luscious remains unchanged. Mark Anthony Neal, in his analysis of Kelly’s earlier hit ‘‘Bump ‘n’ Grind’’ aptly describes the dynamics at work here. Neal writes: Kelly’s collapse of the sexual and the romantic—really a collapse of the pubic and the private dimensions of African-American sexual relations—naturally suggests that many of these narratives and artists simply represented a pool of resources that Kelly could appropriate to articulate his own existential concerns, while also acknowledging the constraints placed on previous generations of artists in terms of how they coded sexual innuendo in a language that could be widely distributed.29 Kelly’s career, as Neal rightly suggests, may be another form of ‘‘pimping’’ in its ability to widely distribute sexually charged music and imagery that reference his personal sexual dramas. In other words, Kelly’s musical persona, public=personal sexual drama, and music figure him as trapped within a glass closet.30 Moreover, the precise location of the church as both the scene of Pimp Lucious’s intervention and Chuck and Rufus’s attempts at reconciliation encourages further speculation about Kelly’s double lives, as he locates these emotionally charged moments in the birthplace of ‘‘down low’’ culture in the popular imagination.31 The doubling of narrative structure, in which both sets of men (Chuck and Rufus, Revered Moseley and Pimp Luscious) fail to come to a moral reconciliation on sexuality serve as metaphor for Kelly’s life, as the pairs stand in 106 ^ Souls April^June 2009 for the artist’s inability to unshackle his sexual proclivities from his musical morality tales. Kelly, and the figure of the ‘‘DL’’ brother more generally, therefore explicitly produce anxieties about the intermingling of the sacred and the secular, marriage and infidelity, private sexual relations and public personas. Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 4: ‘‘A Ghetto Love is the Law that We Live by’’ Watkins, in a discussion of 1990s black urban cinema, writes that one of ‘‘the foremost themes that resonates throughout the ghetto action picture is the idea that poor black urban communities are locations of entrapment and repression.’’32 R. Kelly’s work asks us to think about what is precisely trapped and repressed in urban=suburban black communities. Many of the characters in Trapped are middleclass: the minister, the restaurateurs, the police officer. However, Trapped also shows the way alternative and criminalized economies (and particularly economies based on sex work) intersect with black middle-class modes and mores. Big Man, Tina, Cathy, Pimp Luscious, and his sidekick Bishop Craig are all tied to alternative sexual economies. And Sylvester gets drawn into the drama of the closet as a result of agreeing to have sex with Cathy for money. Later chapters of Trapped also reveal that Sylvester utilizes his ties with the Mafia (chapter twenty-one) to support his impeccable taste for fine suits, expensive cars, and mortgage of his suburban estate. Trapped also forces us to rethink the tenor of critical discourse in hip-hop scholarship. Focusing on Watkins and Neal, I suggest that we must think through sexuality (and the spectral quality of queerness) as another vector of identity that constitutes a ‘‘ghettocentric imagination.’’ Watkins and Neal both focus on the ‘‘(dis)organization of black familial life’’ as a major theme in black urban cultural production and a frame with which to more clearly understand black urban space.33 Watkins writes, ‘‘The notion that black familial life is largely responsible for ghetto poverty pervades the cultural landscape’’ of black entertainment.34 Although Trapped is certainly concerned with black familial life, as the love triangle between Cathy, Rufus, and Chuck epitomizes, the connection between sexuality and economics is better described by a politics of disidentification and disavowal than a crisis in a heteronormative, nuclear family structure. Rather than seeing the drama around sexuality and the family as idealizing or privileging heterosexuality, Trapped demonstrates a wide range of sexual activities and desires, posited as inescapable in the narrative. Moreover, Trapped helps us rethink relationships between men and women, particularly as they have been discussed in Neal’s chapter, ‘‘Baby Mama (Drama) and Baby Daddy (Trauma): Post-Soul Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 107 Gender Politics.’’35 In Trapped, the core characters function as couples and siblings, not as parents or children.36 However, even as Trapped presents one case of ‘‘mama’s baby, papa’s maybe’’37 evidenced by the James–Bridget–Big Man triangle, other vectors of identity—namely, race and corporeal difference—complicate reading this subplot as simply a failure of traditional family values. Bridget, the first white character featured in the series, is ventriloquized with a heavy southern accent and visualized as obese. All of these forms of difference obfuscate the notion of black family politics as Neal and Watkins might imagine them by demonstrating a resistance to presenting typical scripts of black female and male coupling. Furthermore, the ubiquity of queer relationships in Trapped forces us to acknowledge that gender politics must exceed an examination between men and women to include the relationships occurring between men and between women. While Trapped admittedly does not focus much critical attention on the dynamics of the queer relationship between Tina and Roxanne, the existence of their relationship spurs an extended conversation on black masculinity between Sylvester and his brother-in law, Twan. Moreover, the issue of Tina’s unborn child queers a narrative about the need for a hetero-nuclear family. Instead Roxanne, with her kiss and declaration ‘‘I’m f—king her now,’’ performatively enacts a space for queer families. The portrayal of Rufus and Chuck’s relationship is in large part what is most compelling to me about the series. At first glance, it seems that the series, like other popular representations of ‘‘down low,’’ demonizes the couple’s desire. Cathy and Sylvester’s initial reactions support that reading. However, Trapped does not vest Cathy or Sylvester with moral authority; rather, it encourages the viewer to think about how each character interacts with the structure of the closet, literally and metaphorically. Trapped also suggests that we think about the various functions of the closet, adding a crucial nuance to Sedgwick’s theory by highlighting how the closet does not only structure knowledge (about the self and the world) but also has particular ramifications for the constitution and maintenance of ‘‘class,’’ ‘‘race,’’ and ‘‘gender.’’ In the ‘‘Special Features’’ section on the Trapped in the Closet DVD, R. Kelly reveals that another figure lurks in each of the closets, which alternatively contain Sylvester and O’Dale: a set of Rufus’s golf clubs. It is not simply Rufus’s sexuality that might be structured by a closet but also his class status and the expression of classed leisure. Reflecting on its entirety, Trapped pretends to be an urban drama but focuses on the way sexuality effaces the distinctions between the urban and the suburban and exposes the false dichotomy between the black middle-class and underclass. Kelly’s ‘‘outing’’ of middle-class sexual improprieties 108 ^ Souls April^June 2009 prevents the kind of behavioral bracketing enacted in middle-class assessments of the underclass (where out-of-wedlock births, suicide, and even drug use are screened off from scrutiny). Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 5: Trapped in the Epistemological Closet Understanding the glass closet may not only help us refigure our understandings of black geopolitics but also point to reasons why there is a transpolitical (that defies categories such as conservative or liberal) investment in the notion of the ‘‘down low.’’ Fanon, among others, demonstrates how blackness becomes the object of (white) ways of knowing. As an object, blackness becomes the thing we always already know—that is, the opposite of white. And as both Du Bois and Sedgwick allude to in their prescriptions of the twentieth century, the problem of this period is fundamentally tied to a crisis in visibility. Trapped in the Closet encourages us to think precisely about how race, class, gender, and sexuality, both popularly and epistemologically, are structured by the space of the glass closet. Moreover, the popularity of Trapped urges us to consider how the concept of the ‘‘down low’’ functions as an ideograph, which requires racist fantasies about black masculinity and sexuality to infer its meaning. Since the mid-1990s, we have witnessed the ascension of the ‘‘down low,’’ a term that is generally used to describe the experiences of black men who have sex with other men (and women) and do not identify as gay, in black popular discourse. Two major conceptualizations or explanations have emerged to describe this ‘‘subset’’ of black culture. The identification model, typified by the here! series The DL Chronicles and Keith Boykin’s Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America, suggests that ‘‘down low brothers’’ are victims of excessively homophobic black communities, which are unable to make room for gay and lesbian identities within blackness. The second mode of explanation, as seen in Oprah Winfrey’s special on the ‘‘down low’’ with self-appointed expert J. L. King, relies on fantasies about black masculinity that mark black men as inherently dangerous, deceptive, and prone to trickery. Both explanatory models make invisible the nature of sexuality as a dynamic, fluid process constructed, at least in part, at the intersections of space (actual and imagined) and desire. Trapped offers a different mode to explain the popularity of down low by highlighting its ideographic nature, akin to Raymond Williams’s ‘‘structure of feeling,’’ which he defines as ‘‘firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity’’38 Trapped audiovisualizes the manner with which emotion and sexual desire are partially derived from broader structural forces, including economic shifts, migration, Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 109 and negotiations with (urban=public) space. As the golf clubs in Rufus’s closet suggest, discourses on the down low mask class-based anxieties about blacks behaving badly (read: poorly) and middle-class fears regarding the contagion of inappropriate sexual relations. Examining the trope of the glass closet and its structuring relationship to epistemologies of black sexuality, therefore, allows for the examination of black sexualities as historically situated, culturally embedded, and dynamically produced. Moreover, understanding the ‘‘glass closet’’ helps to situate the ‘‘down low’’ as one string in a broader symphony of epistemologies and representations of black sexuality.39 While numerous scholars have looked to popular culture to discuss representations of race, gender, and sexuality, studying these moments of signification not only allows us to apprehend broader cultural and social forces in operation but also to perceive how the process of representation mirrors processes of identification, namely in its ability to articulate relationships between meaning, language, and culture. As Trapped in the Closet evidences, the ‘‘down low,’’ as it appears in popular representations, signifies a process and paradigm that signals a gap in the critical literatures of sexuality studies as well as an absence of epistemological frameworks that are able to address the complexity of black sexual expression. The discursive formation of the ‘‘down low’’ is the presence of that absence. Acknowledgments Thanks to the guest editors of Souls, Elizabeth Kai Hinton, Herman Beavers, John L. Jackson Jr., Mark Anthony Neal, Marc Lamont Hill, Camille Charles, Sunny Yang, Benson Gilchrist, and Jasmine Cobb for comments on this article. Special thanks to Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. for assistance with analysis of the musical form of Trapped in the Closet. Notes 1. S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip-Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 197. 2. Ibid. The term ‘‘ghetto’’ has relatively recently acquired a pejorative quality in black speech. That quality certainly reflects tensions that have long been present in the black community, but it also reflects the more recent—and constantly growing and rigidifying—gap between the underclass and the middle class. To articulate the existence of a ‘‘ghettocentric imagination,’’ then, is also to articulate that this is a cultural imaginary whose performative characteristics are assumed to refer to only one segment of the black community. 3. Eve K. Sedgwick, Epistemologies of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 11. Sedgwick’s assessment of one key crisis in the twentieth century comes roughly eighty years after W. E. B Du Bois’s prediction that the ‘‘problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 110 ^ Souls April^June 2009 color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men.’’ I envision this article, and my larger dissertation project, as an opportunity to examine exactly how Sedgwick and Du Bois’s declarations describe black sexuality in the twenty-first century. 4. ‘‘‘Trapped in the Closet’ Chapter Fifteen: Up in Smoke,’’ New York Magazine, August 15, 2007. 5. Kelefa Sanneh, ‘‘Outrageous Farce from R. Kelly: He’s in on the Joke, Right?’’ The New York Times, August 20, 2007. 6. Jive Records also released a DVD of episodes 13–22 on August 21, 2007. 7. Steven Zeitchik, ‘‘IFC climbs into ‘Closet’ with R. Kelly,’’ Variety.com, July 11 2007. 8. J. Kimball, ‘‘The Independent Film Channel’s GM on R. Kelly’s TitC,’’ Thelistnerd.com, August 12, 2007. 9. Evan Shapiro, ‘‘Reeler Pinch Hitter: Evan Shapiro, IFC,’’ Screening Gotham, August 2, 2007. 10. Countless scholars have made this claim. Instructive to my work is Daphne A. Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent and Fred Moten’s piece, ‘‘Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,’’ Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2: 217–246. Both Brooks and Moten theorize the relationships between race, space, and sexuality and focus in part on the condition of containment. Fanon’s canonic Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967) is also deeply instructive on these issues. 11. Sanneh, ‘‘Outrageous Farce from R. Kelly.’’ 12. John L. Jackson Jr., Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008). 13. Sanneh, ‘‘Outrageous Farce from R. Kelly.’’ 14. Ibid. 15. C. Schonberger, ‘‘R. Kelly Returns to the ‘Closet,’ ’’ Entertainment Weekly, July 27, 2007. 16. Jody Rosen, ‘‘R. Kelly Gets the Joke Why Trapped in the Closet Is a Brilliant Career Move,’’ Slate.com, August 22, 2007. 17. A notable example of the ‘‘hip hopera,’’ includes Robert Townsend’s MTV made-for-television movie Carmen: A Hip Hopera, which featured R&B and pop darling Beyoncé. 18. B. Ruby Rich quoted in D. Contreras, ‘‘New Queer Cinema: Spectacle, Race, Utopia,’’ in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2004), 119. 19. Peter Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 15. 20. Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 37. 21. Ibid., 64. 22. Ibid. 23. The vocal stylization of each character becomes more pronounced in the latter part of the series. 24. Trapped in the Closet, Chapters 1–22: The Big Package (Zoomba Films, 2007), chapter 5. 25. The characters’ lifestyles might also signify the ways that ‘‘ghetto fabulous’’ constitutes a replication of middle-class consumption and a new configuration of poverty, whereby the relatively easy access to cable TV, cell phones, and other cheap audio and visual technology allow for a much higher standard of living than one might find in rural poverty even as it is a highly unstable economic circumstance. 26. ‘‘Trapped in the Closet, chapter 15.’’ 27. Another reading of Trapped in the Closet may be that R. Kelly has created his own version of a story akin to Humbert Humbert’s subjectivity in Nabakov’s Lolita. Here I am thinking particularly about the dynamic between Humbert and Clare Quilty. 28. Trapped in the Closet, chapter 19. 29. Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17. 30. Michael Jackson is another figure that exemplifies this paradigm, although his music speaks less consistently to these issues than R. Kelly’s. 31. J. L. King, in his part-memoir, part self-help guide, and part-exposé, suggests that the church is one of the primary cruising grounds for ‘‘down low brothers.’’ 32. Watkins, Representing, 198. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 219. 35. Neal’s use of ‘‘post-soul’’ seems to correlate to Mark A. Reid’s suggestion of post-negritude as a temporal and political category of analysis. Neal writes, ‘‘I use the term post-soul to describe the political, social and cultural experiences of the African-American community since the end of the civil rights and Black Power movements’’ (3). 36. One possible exception is that Sylvester calls his neighbors ‘‘mommy’’ and ‘‘daddy,’’ although the narrative is not particularly clear on whether O’Dale and Rosie are his biological parents. 37. Hortense Spillers, ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’’ in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000). Gender and Sexuality, I ^ 111 Downloaded By: [Snorton, C. Riley] At: 18:15 29 May 2009 38. Raymond Williams, ‘‘The Analysis of Culture,’’ in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. John Storey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 53. 39. In his article ‘‘Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,’’ Fred Moten cites Theodor Adorno’s theory on radio symphony, which is similar to how I regard the relationship between the down low and black sexuality. Adorno writes, ‘‘The particular, when chipped off from the unity of the symphony [as trivia, quotation, reductively expressive detail], still retains a trace of the unity in which it functioned. A genuine symphonic theme, even if it takes the whole musical stage and seems to be temporarily hypostatized and to desert the rest of the music, is nonetheless of such a kind as to impress upon one that it is actually nothing in itself but basically something ‘out of’ something else. Even in its isolation it bears the mark of the whole’’ (238).