Making Malcolm in Our Own Images

El Hajj Malik-el Shabazz, aka Malcolm X, would have been 80 years old yesterday, and the news was full of stories about new interpretations and appropriations of his life and legacy. As historian Nell Painter demonstrated in her book about Sojourner Truth, the ways in which historical figures are later mythologized says as much about the culture in which they are re-visioned as it does about the figures themselves.

In the 1960s and 70s, Malcolm's politics and courage inspired the Black Panthers and other revolutionaries. Later, he became a hip hop icon. The most recent stories and commemorations about the life of Malcolm X focus more on his personal growth than his revolutionary politics.

The most interesting of these new contributions is "Malcolm X: A Search for Truth" at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. As this New York Times review notes, the exhibit offers viewers the opportunity to see letters, images and personal items from the various stages of his short, frenetic journey from a midwestern boyhood marked by tragedy to his violent, mysterious public assassination at the age of 39 when he seemed on the verge of creating profound and powerful new alliances with Civil Rights leaders in the US and socialist and Muslim leaders abroad.

In addition, while not completely new, it's worth noting that Abdul Alkalimat's "Brother Malcolm" research site has new video and audio of Malcolm's speeches and debates.

Perhaps the oddest of the new expropriations of Malcolm is the attempts by a few authors to turn him into a gay icon. In an article for The Guardian, activist Peter Tatchell contends that a disputed biography persuasively argued that Malcolm's experiences as a child and young man fit the psychological profile of a repressed homosexual. Tatchell refers to statements that Malcolm reportedly made about same-sex experiences he had during his hustling days. Based on this evidence, Tatchell concludes:

Had he not been assassinated in 1965, almost certainly at the hands of NoI 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 NoI 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?

Tatchell's speculations lack rigor and historical understanding.

First, psychohistory is one of the worst forms of biography, because it relies on inference instead of evidence. In this instance, in particular, Tatchell's summary of Perry's argument relies on generalizations about the psyche of gay men that is inconsistent with the American Psychological Association's assessment of the literature.

Even if Malcolm did engage in some same-sex experiences as a young man, there is no evidence that he saw himself as gay or bisexual -- and his statements as a Muslim minister certainly identify him as a conservative on sexual matters. There is evidence that Malcolm might have been more of a feminist than scholars have generally recognized, as Columbia University professor Manning Marable notes in this speech, "Malcolm X, Women and Gender." (According to Marable, some of Malcolm's male colleagues were discomfited by the leadership roles assumed by such women as Maya Angelou in his Organization of Afro-American Unity.)

But much of the way that we talk about gender and sexuality today was alien to Malcolm's time, so an attempt to infer what he would have thought about gay rights is bound to be an exercise in projection, not informed deduction.

There are certainly gay people who admire Malcolm -- this blogger is but one example. In my experience, what they admire about Malcolm is the same thing many others admire -- his intellect, his effort to live in concert with his convictions, his willingness to revise his conclusions in light of new information. Black gay people that I know also talk about Malcolm's emphasis on self-knowledge, self-reliance and black unity.

In any event, Tatchell's last assertion that "there is not a single world-famous black person who is openly gay" is just plain wrong. Perhaps James Baldwin (with whom Malcolm was on friendly terms, although they often disagreed Bayard Rustin (who also knew and debated Malcolm) and Audre Lorde are not famous enough for Tatchell. Tatchell would do better to help spread the word about them as well as living openly gay black leaders such as Keith Boykin, rather than trying to conjure up a gay Malcolm.

(hat tip to Doug Ireland