malcolm x - gay black hero?

By Peter Thatchell

May 19, 2005: London - Malcolm X was born 80 years ago today, on 19 May 1925. But amid the commemorations, controversy is brewing. Some black activists are enraged by suggestions that their hero might have been gay - or at least bisexual.

The controversy has been stirring since the publication of Bruce Perry's acclaimed biography, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (Station Hill, New York) in 1991. Based on interviews with Malcolm's closest boyhood and adult friends, Perry suggests that the US Black Nationalist leader was not as robustly heterosexual as
his Nation of Islam (No. I) colleagues have always insisted.

Malcolm X, real name Malcolm Little, joined the militant Muslim No. I in 1949, attracted by its teaching that Allah would deliver black people from white bondage. By the 1960s, Malcolm had developed No. I ideology in new directions, becoming America's leading spokesperson for black consciousness, pride and self-help. Sexual freedom was not, however, part of his agenda.

Yet Perry's book documents Malcolm X's many gay experiences. A schoolmate, Bob Bebee, recalls the day they stumbled on a local boy jerking off. Malcolm, Bebee recalled, ordered the youth to masturbate him, and subsequently boasted he had given him oral sex.

Later, from the age of 20, Malcolm had sex with men for money - as hinted at in Spike Lee's 1992 biopic - and he had at least one sustained sexual liaison with a man. While living in Flint, Michigan, his roommate noticed that instead of sleeping in the room they were sharing, Malcolm sneaked down the hall to spend the night with a gay
transvestite named Willie Mae.

In New York, two of Malcolm's friends from Michigan remember bumping
into him at the YMCA, where Malcolm bragged he earned money servicing
"queers". Later, Malcolm worked as a butler to a wealthy Boston bachelor, William Paul Lennon. According to Malcolm's sidekick Malcolm Jarvis, he was paid to sprinkle Lennon with talcum powder and bring him to orgasm. Perry suggests that Malcolm's gay encounters may not have been entirely financially motivated. His masculine insecurities
and ambivalence towards women fit the archetype of a repressed gay man and point to latent homosexuality.

After the death of his father, when Malcolm was six, he lacked male
role models and was dominated by strong women - in particular, his
tyrannical mother. He feared women and his early sexual experiences
with girls were mostly unsatisfactory. Far from macho, Malcolm hated
fighting and got beaten by other men. His passionate assertion that
the need to feel masculine is a man's "greatest urge" indicates
someone doubtful of his own manliness.

As for his sporadic gay hustling, as Perry notes, "there were other
ways he could have earned money". Dope-dealing, thieving and pimping
were sources of income he had pursued with success. There was no
imperative to sell his body.

Why, then, did he prostitute himself? Misogyny and repressed
homosexuality might be the answer. According to Perry: "His
male-to-male encounters, which rendered it unnecessary for him to
compete for women, afforded him an opportunity for sexual release
without the attendant risk of dependence on women."

Was Malcolm X gay? Bisexual? In his schooldays, he was apparently a
passive participant. Others masturbated or fellated him. Later, while
working as a male prostitute, he took a more hands-on role in sex,
especially with Lennon. This part-time whoring may have been
pecuniary.

There is, however, plentiful research suggesting that many guys who
have sex with men for payment are in denial about their homosexuality.
They tell themselves they are doing it for the money. This is their
way of coping with same-sex desires that they are unable to accept.
Was this Malcolm's excuse?

Surely there must have been some degree of queer desire to enable
Malcolm to sustain his sexual experiences with men over a period of 10
years? If this desire was within him from adolescence to early
adulthood, could he have erased it completely in later life?

Sexuality is not like a newspaper - read today and discarded tomorrow.
Established desires can be sublimated or repressed, but never
eliminated. If people have a homosexual capacity, it stays with them
for life - even if they never act on it. Was Malcolm an exception?
There is no evidence that his same-sex dalliances continued once he
joined the No. I; he married and had children, and, with all the fervour
of a zealous convert, he embraced the No. I's fiercely puritanical
Muslim sexual morality.

Had he not been assassinated in 1965, almost certainly at the hands of
No. I rivals, Malcolm might have eventually, like Huey Newton of the
Black Panthers, welcomed the gay liberation movement as part of the
struggle for human emancipation. Instead, to serve its homophobic
political agenda, for 50 years the No. I has suppressed knowledge of
Malcolm's gay past.

Now it is time to blow the whistle. There is not a single world-famous
black person who is openly gay. Young black lesbians and gays need
role models. Who better than Malcolm X, one of the inspirations of my
activism and one of the great modern heroes of black liberation?