Dave Chappelle and the Queer Body
With "The Closer," Chappelle shows the world what he really values
Dave Chappelle’s new stand up special “The Closer” has taken considerable heat for what its critics call anti-trans or even simply anti-LGBT content. Writing for the New York Times, author Roxeanne Gay deemed it a “toxic performance” and the poet Saed Jones called it a “betrayal.” To that I might add the most egregious sin of all for a comedian: It is not very funny. Or rather, if you find it funny, you might want to reconsider your sense of humor.
What I find more interesting about Chappelle’s rant is its obsessive interest in the body. His special begins with his revelation that being infected with the coronavirus made him feel “dirty” and “gross,” stirring a sensation that he had not experienced since he was molested as a child. Lest you be concerned that he is going to take the topic of child sexual abuse seriously, be not afraid: Chappelle assures the audience that he enjoyed the experience of “cumming in that fellows face.”
And the audience laughs.
Whether he is conscious of it or not, Chappelle opens the Netflix special by priming the audience for his coming screed against the LGBT community, pumping the deepest wells of anti-gay resentment. First there is the fear of infection and contamination, a lingering paranoia that surrounds homosexuality heightened by the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. He links that theme to pederastic experiences from his youth. All in good fun, of course.
What stands out about Chappelle’s routine, however, is the lurid focus on bodies. He even compares his Covid infected body to the (seemingly) healthy appearance of Magic Johnson, perhaps the most well-known person living with HIV in the public eye. Observing that he had no apparent Covid symptoms, Chappelle declares himself “the Magic Johnson of coronavirus.” He goes on to suggest that despite his outward appearance, the inside of his body resembled black men assaulting Asians. His body: The site of violent, criminal assaults by an infectious contagion.
Shortly thereafter, he begins talking about LGBT people. He longs for “glory hole” and “Stonewall” gays, not the modern ones. Like vintage Milo Yiannopoulos (before he joined Team Pray Away the Gay), Chappelle has a hard on for mythical gays who either never existed or have crossed the rainbow bridge, not the actually existing ones with “corn-fed Texas” bodies that he nearly gets into fights with. Be not afraid, because Chappelle was not; this homosexual man may have towered over him, but he assures the audience that the man’s Texan body posed no threat because the “motherfucker’s shirt was tied up in a knot.” Besides, this guy was a racist. The evidence? He was white and he threatened to call the police when Chappelle confronted him in public.
Chappelle’s stage presence lives in a strange dream world where black LGBT people only exist as foils to the racist white ones. It is the kind of world that serves a single purpose: Sales of Chappelle’s shtick. But the opening of “The Closer” is not a topic I have seen explored in any of the essays or articles critical of Chappelle’s recent works. If the obsession with bodies and sickness in his opening was a mere coincidence, it was certainly serendipitous and meaningful. Because I would argue that the metaphors of body and illness and pollution point to deeper phenomena.
The experience of the body is inescapable, but the expression of the body is historically and socially contingent. Against the Cartesian view of the body as a container or seat of the self or the soul, we live in a time of embodiment: The belief that the body is a unity of the organism, its consciousness and its expression. Against the traditional Christian ascetic denial of bodily pleasures and even celebration of physical and mental anguish and suffering, we live in an era of utilitarian maximization of sensory pleasure and minimization of sensory pain. All of this has been enabled by technology that overcomes the limitations of the body in space and time. We think about the body the way that we do because our embodiment has been physically altered by the presence of certain technologies, including the very platforms that deliver Chappelle’s show to millions of Netflix subscribers.
Still, the vestiges of the Old World linger in the New. When he invokes sensations of dirtiness and pollution, Chappelle is stirring the burial grounds of the diseased scapegoats of our past. His recollection of teenage experiences of homosexual predation is not cast as immoral, illegal or even unpleasant, but “dirty,” similar to the experience of being diseased. In the language of Chappelle, the Queer Body is the embodiment not only of perversity and strangeness, but aggressor, predator and contagion. Before his body was polluted by Covid and homosexuality, Chappelle says, he was clean. In the presence of the diseased and the queer, which can be collapsed one into the other, he becomes sullied.
Jonathan Kirk, the other black comedian Chappelle defends during his routine, is also fond of the body’s purity, defined as the absence of sexually transmitted disease (especially AIDS), men who have not performed oral sex on other men and women with vaginas that smell like water. Chappelle says that he is concerned about those mean queers on twitter “punching down” on stand up millionaires like Kirk. He is motivated not by hatred of the Queer, but something like ressentiment: He assures his audience that far from being a homophobe, he is envious of the Queer Body, which he juxtaposes with the Black Body. The Black Body is long suffering and an eternal victim of oppressive forces, but the Queer Body speeds along to (White) social acceptability. The Black Body bleeds red, but the Queer Body splatters diseased white cum on the bodies of teenage boys. Or mutilates its penis into a twisted approximation of the female vagina, akin to faux meat. The bodies of lesbians are not recognizably female either, although the only lesbians who appear in his sketch are still bitches, he assures us.
It is immediately clear from reading Chappelle’s routine that the Queer Body is a source of revulsion and amusement and anger, even violent fantasy. Chappelle’s rendition of the Queer is one part Leopold and Loeb, one part racial and sexual ressentiment. If comedy works when it reveals some deeper truth, Chappelle’s most recent effort is a dismal failure unless his own animosity is the intended reveal. And if so, what is the point?
It so happened that the day before I read Chappelle’s transcript, the newest issue of First Things dropped on my Kindle. For anyone who is not familiar with the magazine, it is one of the more socially and politically respectable outlets for socially conservative traditionalist Catholics and Evangelicals. The issue for November includes an article by Scott Yenor, a professor of political science at Boise State University and a fellow with the Claremont Institute. Two weeks ago, Claremont was profiled by Emma Green in an article and interview for the Atlantic. Essentially, the Institute today exists to promote a radically traditionalist vision of the United States. Consistent with this goal, Yenor’s article, “Sexual Counter-Revolution,” posits that “liberalized sexual mores” have disrupted the sound relations between the (two, essential and biologically fixed) sexes. It is imperative, therefore, for conservatives to “establish systems of honor and shame” and “buttress institutions” that can shape men and women in the way that Yenor and his Claremont fellows desire.
In this socially conservative vision of nationalism, abortion must be outlawed and contraception stigmatized, if not prohibited. But even that is not enough to save Western civilization from the evil forces of sexual chaos that threaten its longevity: Both modern women and gays must be singled out for social opprobrium and censure in order to re-orient society toward a patriarchal goal. Naturally, homosexuality must be discouraged; the public acceptance of gay men and lesbians has only led to its increased presence. “As society shifts from shaming homosexuality to cheering it, we get more of it.” Even more alarming, says Yenor, conservatives “have no hope of restoring dignity to intimate life and stability to domestic life if we do not insist that our churches sustain traditional prohibitions of homsexual acts.”
The very survival of human civilization depends on opposition to homosexuality!
Obviously, Chappelle does not present his animosity using the same language. He loves promiscuous homosexuals! And he loves talking about their strange sexual practices! But in any event, no one should expect him to use the same language as a Trumpist like Yenor; he’s not a Christian, much less a Trump-supporting Republican. But despite his language, he is a religious man and he has certain nationalist and even traditionalist sensibilities, they just happen to run in a different direction from nationalists of a paler persuasion.
He is also able to prioritize his values when it is important to him. His departure from a wildly successful sketch comedy show in 2006 was motivated by his desire to avoid a re-run of the plotline of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, a film that depicted a black comedic show going off the rails into minstrelsy. And this was a real sacrifice; the offer from Comedy Central was $50 million, which is, today, Chappelle’s net worth.
Misinterpretation is a risk of any satirical project, and Chappelle is sensitive to the risk that racial satire poses to the black community. What happens if your show does just become minstrel hour for white audiences? If they are laughing at the black face, instead of the absurd racism behind the idea of black face? If your root motivation is profit and your capitalist instincts trump other considerations, you plough ahead. If you are comfortable with what you have and/or you have other values that outweigh money, you change course. To his credit, Chappelle changed course.
But so what? Commitment to a group above the profit motive is not necessarily a virtue even if that motive is a vice. People with wildly different views about pretty much everything will impose limits on human greed that upset Ayn Rand or the Republican Party’s donor class; even the white nationalist Richard Spencer, a man who is one goose step away from wearing a Nazi uniform, is a critic of the way that capitalist society often acts to corrupt individuals and social groups. The point of being a nationalist is that group loyalty and the commitment to the body politic that is the nation overrides any individual desire for profit. The nation in question can be any number of things of course; religious nationalism does not require any common descent or ancestry, and there are plenty of people who feel a deeper commitment to the religious commitment embodied in the Christian Church or the Islamic Ummah than they do to accidents of birth.
What is truly sickening about these works produced by Yenor and Chappelle is not their pride in their religious and racial identity; it is their dismissive, even contemptuous disregard for queer bodies. This week marked both National Coming Out Day and the anniversary of the modern martyrdom of Matthew Shepard, a young man whose body was found hanging on a wooden fence in an event replete with political, social, spiritual and even sacrificial significance. In a (post) Christian society infused with incarnational theology, Shepard became the embodiment of the (white) queer body in America in the late 1990s. He became a rallying cry for gay men and lesbians across the country, and the first significant piece of federal legislation protecting LGBT people bears his name.
Now, I do not expect Yenor to care about this at all, and given that Shepard is white I should not expect much from Chappelle either. But in invoking black LGBT people as a foil to “white gay” criticism of his shtick, Chappelle should be concerned about Tyianna Alexander, a Black trans woman killed the morning of January 6, 2021. And even if I can forgive Chappelle for forgetting her, given that the day she was murdered also involved a coup attempt in US capitol , how could he plausibly ignore the fact that some forty trans or gender non-conforming people have been murdered just this year? And that most of these women were Black?
Unlike these Black women, Chappelle is extremely privileged. Even before he became a millionaire comedian in his early thirties, he was the first person in his family since the end of slavery to skip college. His family’s history of educational and social attainment puts mine to shame, and that is something he should be proud of. But his wealth and education are also tangible examples of actual privilege, and the debate over Chappelle’s comedy specials and his attacks on LGBT people illustrate how the American left has gone far afield from a grounded conversation about the intersection of class, race, gender and sexuality, and its impact on status and privilege in contemporary America. Or to put it another way: If a man worth fifty million dollars is not punching down when he mocks the bodies of poor queer people on a Netflix platform that reaches hundreds of millions of subscribers, does the idea of “punching down” have any merit at all?
The truth is, Chappelle can cloak himself in a shield of leftist incoherence when it comes to the intersection of identity and class. Chappelle’s commitment to “his people” serves as a foil to left wing criticism of his treatment of LGBT bodies. He can ridicule and demean them to his heart’s content, because as long as he disclaims any actual homophobia he is a Righteous Victim.
As someone who is, like Chappelle, spiritual, it seemed somehow fitting and serendipitous that I finished reading Abdellah Taia’s “Another Way to Love This World” just hours before sitting down to write this essay. This piece, written by a poor Moroccan man, recounts the violations commonly experienced by queer people in traditionalist, patriarchal societies, especially when they are gender non-conforming.
When I was little, my parents didn’t do anything to keep the world, Morocco, and the men of our neighborhood from raping me. Raping me again and again. It was an open secret. And a taboo at the same time. He’s a fag. He’s a fag and he’s for everyone. Help yourself. You can do anything to his little body with total impunity. Touch him. Caress him. Penetrate him. Hit him. Spit on him. Transform him into a sexual object for anyone who is sexually frustrated. He is a communal object. He doesn’t complain. He’s so docile. Such a feminine little thing, prancing around and getting everyone excited. Look, look how he walks and how he makes his eyes dance. It’s his fault, let’s go, let’s go rape him. Everyone gets a turn. Everyone gets a turn.
No one will ever tell. It’s like that here, and everywhere in the world. A universal law, I tell you.
Thankfully, this is not the case everywhere and always. Queer bodies were once subject to ridicule and rape and ruin without much fear of consequence, but times change. Those bodies, our bodies, that were once objects to be used, are now, sometimes though not always, given the dignity and respect that every human deserves. Not by the likes of Chappelle or Yenor, to be sure. Nationalists of every stripe, black and white, have always viewed the Queer Body with suspicion. We have been rounded up as perverts and sent to camps, killed, raped, experimented upon, and so forth. Stigmatized in ways that Chappelle either cannot understand or is unwilling to.
And that is no laughing matter. Much like “The Closer.”