In “Which Way is Down? Improvisations on Black Mobility” by Jason King, many claims are made about the relationships between falling and ascension, verticality and the horizontal, and the intersections of masculinity, activism, queerness, and shame. King uses the extended metaphor of a ladder to convey his ideas about shame and social mobility, elaborating on the general social ideal that, in the United States, one would always rather move up the social ladder than fall down (King 27). But what if you choose to ignore the ladder altogether and make your own rules for how you feel shame? How then do you identify if you no longer have a set of standards to work with? What does it mean to be a man if you turn away from the traditional definition? King, in this essay, asserts through his discussion of Down Low (DL) bisexual men that choosing to extricate yourself from the ladder and fall intentionally away from society’s expectations is in itself a form of the expression of masculinity that goes against the traditionally masculine ideals of persistent rise and verticality.
King first presents the idea of masculinity as verticality when discussing the argument of Michele Wallace, that “Black power, the ascension of the race, at some point becomes inseparable from masculinity,” emphasizing that “The activist has to supposedly stay up, hard; cannot get limp, flaccid, weak” (35). He establishes from the beginning that the extended metaphor of the ladder cannot be separated from traditional ideas of what masculinity is, as the two both rely on the principle of prioritizing ascension in order to exist.
But what about when one exits the traditional ideas of masculinity and instead takes on their masculinity in a new form? This idea is exemplified in the DL men, who did not advertise their bisexuality in that they took secret male lovers along with public female ones (38). These men were promptly vilified by general society and popular media, being blamed for the AIDS crisis and made into pariahs for their secretiveness (39). The secret sexual activity of the DL men being inherently opposed to the ideals of masculinity is what likely contributed most to their vilification. Masculinity is built upon the tenants of pride and strength; there is no place for shame or weakness in the traditional structure of what it is to be a man. The fact that these men operated under a shroud of societal shame and continued what they wanted to do anyway is how they broke away from traditional heterosexual masculinity in its societally pervasive form. For these men to be operating in the shadows was to reject the ladder in favor of doing what allowed them to be their most authentic selves. These men fell intentionally; there was no attempt to conform to that kind of masculinity because they had already redefined it for themselves. Heterosexual men simply cannot subscribe to the same masculinity as queer men because queer men (eventually, in most cases) must move past the shame of being perceived as weak or as “other” in order to be them true selves. King supports this idea when he praises the DLs for the way they took Black identity “in a new direction”: “One can find proud crouching low to the ground, moving under the radar, not just up high, in the air” (40). “Every day, more and more people are choosing to fall off the ladder, opting out of its treacherous game of balance and negotiation”, and as a result, more and more queer men can have the opportunity to carve out their own place in society for themselves, instead of desperately clinging to a ladder that others try to prevent them from climbing (King 40).
Critical Discussion Question: How does the infusion of masculinity into traditional activism affect the way those who do not identify with traditional masculinity practice it? Can we identify the influence of masculinity on movements (upwards or otherwise) in other performative texts we have read?