Prisoner of Love: Affiliation, Sexuality, and the Black Panther Party

Abstract

We should be careful about using those terms that might turn our friends off. The terms faggot and punk should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for to men who are enemies of the people, such as Richard Nixon and John Mitchell. Homosexuals are not enemies of the people. --Huey P. Newton (1970) behaved like a prisoner of love. --Jean Genet (1981) French writer Jean Genet revealed in a 1975 interview with German writer Hubert Fichte, I could only feel at home among people oppressed by color or factions in revolt against whites. Maybe I'm a black who's white or pink, but still black. Apparently, Genet was echoing the views of a generation of elite white intellectuals and artists who articulated a revolutionary subjectivity by identifying with the liberation struggles of oppressed people of African descent around the world. (1) Actors, artists, and intellectuals such as Jean Seberg, Marlon Brando. Bert Schneider, Jean Genet, Leonard Bernstein, Agnes Varda, Jean Paul Sartre, Romain Gary, and political radicals such as Ulrike Meinhof of Germany's Red Army Faction, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground all proclaimed an affinity for and affiliation with the Black Panther Party (BPP) and saw the Panthers as providing important models not only for political and social change, but for profound personal transformations. The Black Panthers became masters at creating a radical visual and discursive language of affiliation and identification that expressed the need for personal involvement in liberatory social and political change. In September 1970 BPP Chairman Huey P. Newton declared at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in society. They might be the most oppressed people in society ... maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary. (2) Newton was attesting to the complexities that the Panther model of identification articulated as both a theory and praxis of revolutionary self-making. It is impossible to attribute the widespread appeal of the Black Panther Party to non-African Americans, women, and sexual minorities to the caricatures found in many contemporary accounts that embody a simple phallocentric masculinity and a repository of reductionist racial politics. This essay examines the ways the models of identification offered by the Black Panther Party created and provoked a radical affiliation among people as far removed from the African American struggle as the openly gay literary artist Jean Genet and Hollywood actress Jean Seberg. It asserts that the Black Panther Party's discourse of affiliation and identification created a space within radical political discourse for gender and sexual outsiders to rearticulate themselves discursively as empowered by their outsider status and association with revolutionaries. The Black Panther Party differed from other contemporaneous radical political formations of the Black Power era because the leadership was able to promote the empowerment of African Americans while articulating a vision of radical political possibility and change that included the refiguring of identity across a broad spectrum of political, gender, and sexual categories. Black Panther iconography relied on the models of affiliation and identification reflected in the vanguard model of political activism proposed by Ernesto Guevara in Guerilla Warfare and later cogently rearticulated by Regis Debray in Revolution within the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America. (3) In Guerilla Warfare Che Guevara used the example of the Cuban Revolution to demonstrate the ways in which a small group of revolutionaries could successfully foment revolution in the face of the challenges posed in facing off against a large state-sponsored, professionally trained army. …