Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality
by Dwight A. McBride (New York University Press, $19, 240 pages)
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First of all: what a great title. While the sauciness of Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch is not completely indicative of the tone or scope of the essays in this collection, it's representative of Dwight McBride's incisive contribution to how we think about race, sex, and gay culture. In taking on Abercrombie, McBride addresses the sort of public homosexuality-- embodied in that clothier's soft-core porn catalogues-- that we've all become far too used to over the past decade.

While the title essay here is at the heart of this collection, McBride's primary concern is the way race is discussed in America. In 2003, while reading an article about the social lives of middle-class black women in Newsweek, McBride came upon the sentiment he suspected-- against all hope-- was going to appear: "You're not going to find one [a black man] out there because most of them are either in jail, gay, or taken." So this is where gay black men end up in mainstream American culture: between prisoners and husbands.

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The reality is that gay black men hardly ever get represented, discussed, or even much noticed in mainstream (or, for that matter, gay) culture. Even the endless-- and often homophobic and racist-- media discussions of the "down-low" have essentially erased the specificity of gay identity in black men's lives. Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch is an attempt to correct and rectify this erasure.

McBride, chair of African-American studies at Northwestern, has written ten smart, provocative essays on the ways that gay men (and African-American men) are discussed and represented. In the case of Abercrombie and Fitch-- as McBride documents-- they are almost completely missing. At first this essay seems to be complaining about the bland whiteness, and stereotypical "hot" sexualized photos, that appear in the A&F catalogues. But beneath these lazy, highly commercialized images, McBride finds a pattern of racial profiling. The A&F Look Book-- the employee handbook that details how to dress on the job-- is quite clear in banning most forms of specifically African-American dress and grooming.

Of course it's no secret that the target audience of A&F is upwardly-mobile white teens and young-adults. But the mandated A&F "look" for employees is so specifically aimed at producing a white-skewed staff that that the company paid out $50 million to settle a class-action discrimination suit filed in San Francisco in 2003.

McBride also argues that A&F's "cool" and "classic" style-- the firm's own words about their clothing-- is rooted in a sexualized-- but essentially sexless-- homoerotic image that is pervasive today in mass media and popular culture.

McBride takes aim at other instances of black gay male invisibility as well. "Straight Black Studies"-- the book's first essay-- discusses how both mainstream academic scholarship as well as African-American scholarship has tended to "de-gay" black gay writers such as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes-- or, at the very least, refused to act in full "engagement" with the content of their work. Critics have yet to really take seriously the sexual and racial complexity of Baldwin's groundbreaking 1956 novel Giovanni's Room (or for that matter, his 1961 masterwork, Another Country). McBride's arguments are potent and persuasive-- even in 1986, Langston Hughes's biographer felt the need to dismiss the "speculation" of his subject's homosexuality.

In "It's a White Man's World: Race in the Gay Marketplace of Desire," McBride discusses race's large role in gay porn. He has an engaged discussion of interracial gay porn-- and the construction of black men as potent sex machines, with "give me that big black dick" the emblematic hallmark. As aficionados know, gay porn is generally segregated except for the small interracial genre. McBride isn't interested in just criticizing gay porn (or magazines like The Advocate or Out) for being racist (though that charge could certainly be leveled at them), but rather in looking at how "blackness" and "whiteness" is used, manipulated, and marketed in gay male culture.

McBride's prose is smart, on-target, and very readable. These essays are not simply illuminating, but some of the most eye-opening commentaries on gay culture to be published in years.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com