The Punk Show: Queering heritage in the Black diaspora

What is Bounce music?

Bounce music has very recently gained circulation outside of New Orleans through the Fuse network’s reality TV show “Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce.” Big Freedia, a local artist who performs Black queer sexuality and gender, also introduced me to the Bounce music scene. During my preliminary research in 2008, I first met Freedia when asked to backup dance for the artist during the annual SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. My background as a performer and researcher in Black Queer Studies provided an opportune means of exploring the lives of Big Freedia and his community.

Bounce music emerged in the public housing projects of New Orleans in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, Black queer artists began to record and perform their own songs, and this sub-genre became known as “Sissy” Bounce. Even among artists labeled “sissies,” the term and its associations have been highly contested. The only difference between so-called Sissy Bounce and Bounce in general are the sexual and gendered discourses the artists create. Many people attribute the origins of “Sissy” Bounce to the bold emergence of a transwoman named Katey Red. If one looks at Bounce or local hip hop in general as discreet and unrelated to other forms of performance that suffuse Black daily life, the intersectional dimensions of these cultural productions are lost. New Orleans has been having a conversation with itself for quite some time.

Whereas Bounce is most often seen as “project music,” it is an amalgamation of various musical schools of thought from second line, masquerade, local and national hip hop, RnB, gospel, blues, to southern marching band culture. Many Bounce performers are experienced in various other genres of music or have been at some point in their lives. Almost all of the artists I interviewed participated in marching bands and drill teams throughout primary and secondary school while also performing in choirs. My interviews suggest that theater and cabaret are particularly prominent sites of performance available to Black queer people historically; moreover, theater and cabaret have provided queer performers a way to insert themselves into the Bounce music scene.

Call and response as a highly held principle of Black performance is fundamental to the growth and continuation of these genres from generation to generation. The combination of a syncretic cultural practice in which various community members find a space to participate—using dance, voice, or whatever technical know-how they have—speaks to the fundamental notion of call and response that takes issue with silent voyeurism and demands participation (Woods, 2010). These principles make possible opportunities for the inclusion of Black subjects from various parts of the community. Based on oral histories from my interlocutors, I posit drag and a set of other queer performances used within local cabaret as the repertoires in which memories of an intentional community are deposited. ³ I argue that these histories of performance predicate Black queer participation in the Bounce music scene, its staging, and audience. This genealogy of performance presents a temporal break with linear notions of a heteropatriarchal past and place. This handing down of communal memory via Black queer performances constitutes a form of generation that parallels familial inheritance. I found the actual formation of Black queer kinship systems present in New Orleans particularly among Black gay men and transwomen who become the non-biological mothers and fathers of youth around them. ⁴

Marlon Bailey (2005) has shown that Black queer cultural labor in the House and Ballroom scene has led to the formation of alternative gender systems and forms of kinship. His ethnographic work in Detroit reveals a synchronic mapping of the dislocation of queer subjects from their traditional homes into the House and Ballroom scene. My project elaborates on the work of Black queer diaspora through the very different, yet relative, regional expressions of New Orleans Black queer performers. I want to build on this critique of a Black queer diaspora through a genealogy of performance and the transmission of memory.

I argue that genealogies of Black queer performance provide coherence to the traumas of chronic dislocation, disaster, and disorientation. These performances have the capacity to convey a variety of cultural meanings that reproduce blackness not as a fixed notion of locality and identity, but rather a continuously shifting blackness valued and desired for its very ability to mediate immanent threat. My project diverges from Bailey’s by showing that Black queer performers embody resilience and survival not just among discreet “queer” sites of cultural production such as in the House and Ball scene, but the Black community as a whole. As I will show, genealogies of Black queer performance break with heteropatriarchal notions of the past that exclude people who cannot normalize themselves toward the benefits of liberal inclusion into civil society. ⁵

Memories of a queer past exist within those performative strategies often seen as too ephemeral to constitute meaningful knowledge. In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor’s (2005) theory of the repertoire is described as all those enactments of gesture, movement, and dance that are usually seen as nonproductive knowledge. The repertoire transmits and reproduces knowledge that depends on our ability to “be there” in the moment of transmission as opposed to the archive of recorded and retrievable memory. She points to the

politics behind notions of ephemerality, a long tradition … of thinking of embodied knowledge as that which disappears because it cannot be contained or recuperated through the archive. Nonetheless, multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, reconstituting themselves—transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next. (Taylor, 2005: 193)

Acknowledging the displacement of queers from New Orleans’ Black history means shedding light on the forms of transmission they value and pass along over time. It means tracing present acts of embodied knowledge through that repertoire and bringing them into the realm of evidence. This does not assume an empirical materialism that necessitates particular places, documents, or other archives that would confirm rigid notions of proof. Ahead, I highlight how the cultural production of music and oral tradition, as valuable forms of communal memory and transmission, function in the repertoire of Black queer community.

The following oral histories and recorded traces of Black queer performance are not designed to produce a hybrid alternative to any “pure” history, but rather to break down narratives that flatten the complexity of quotidian life. Bounce comes out of working-class Black experiences, memorializes its communities of origin, and continues to maintain a point of identification within them. Attempts at normalizing Black working-class gender and sexual practice via a politics of respectability has been one of the central projects of liberal inclusion. This is one reason Bounce and other forms of emergent cultural production are not seen as meaningful forms of cultural representation, despite their ability to define the severity of oppression and the visceral joy of freedom. These cultural expressions are written off as demonstrations of a moral deficit.

The Punk Show

My early observations in the Bounce club scene and interviews with performers like Fantasy, with whom I spoke earlier, led me to a network of artists and activists. Fantasy became a key respondent throughout my fieldwork and pointed me in the direction of various cultural practices and institutions in Black New Orleans that I would not otherwise have become aware. Little known to many people outside of these communities is the prevalence of Black queer artists, performing across boundaries of race, sex, and class, in the economy of New Orleans entertainment. When I went on to ask other performers about the existence of what Fantasy called “Punk Shows,” many acknowledged the term but said it was not a wholly accepted one.

Another key informant, Carl, shared memories of these events that dovetailed with Fantasy’s and other informant’s experiences. As usual, I met him at the club. Despite our age gap, it was not unusual to find men and women of different generations out together. Moreover, everyone seemed to know one another and recognize any newcomers such as myself. Although different clubs were known to cater to an older crowd, there was still plenty of mixing and socializing within and between. Club Merge was the place to go if you wanted a drag show, Bounce music, and the best dancing. Carl, a man in his mid-60s who identified as Black and gay, spoke at length about his past as a dancer and drag queen throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and about his experience of sexuality and race going back to the 1950s. Carl had evolved from a performer, to club owner, to come full circle as an HIV/AIDS prevention specialist working in the Black gay club scene. After 30 years of witnessing the pandemic, he admitted that out of his peers he was the last to survive:

I’ve been around forever and a day I feel, I started performing in 1977 and I was an entertainer. I was billed as the Two Hundred and Fifty Pound Go Go Boy. I used to dance with about six other entertainers, guy by the name of Ramona, Sambo the African Queen, Tiny, Georgia Peach, Shuga Ducy, and Linda Bridget in the late 70s and early 80s. Whereas there was some stigma behind gay individuals and gay performers, we did not suffer that because we were seen as celebrities. We performed in a lot of the African American venues, nightclubs, social engagements, second line clubs, social [aid] and pleasure clubs would hire us to entertain. The entertainment ranged from pantomimes, I danced, I also did comedy. During that time it was unusual for a person my size to be as light in dancing technique so it made me a celebrity I guess. We enjoyed a lot of the trappings of being known. There were clubs we could walk in and we didn’t have to worry about paying, it was fun, but I also developed my talents as a seamstress, hair [dresser], and make up [artist]. I had to learn. A lot of our costumes I made, I designed and styled our hair when we went to the various performances … I was really able to make a living off of it, back then I was averaging six hundred, seven hundred a week, sometimes two or three hundred a night, the cost of living wasn’t high, so I was able to have a very enjoyable life time …

I asked, “You performed for White and Black crowds? Straight and Gay?”

Primarily African American. There were some White engagements that we had, but we ultimately would perform all over New Orleans, Slidell, La Place, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Covington. We would go on the road with our act because it was unique to find men who could transform themselves and really emulate the artists that we did … Gladys Knight, mine was Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Martha Reese and the Vandellas.

I remember it was a group of Whites who use to come see us at Bon Temps on Toulouse. I had stamina then and I was energetic. I could do a host of things from tumble setting, cart wheeling, dancing on walls, I was very, very limber at that time. We had a bet to see if I could dance to a twenty-three minute song called the “Get Ready Song.” Needless to say I had to listen to a song once, then I would develop my choreography … Not only did I dance those twenty three minutes, I did an accompanying song after that, and it got to the point. We had a group of individuals who would follow us from club to club. If they knew we were going to play, they were there. That’s when they started introducing djs. At first when we entertained it would be to prerecorded tapes, or we would dance to the songs on the juke box. Then after about 3 years into it then the dj phenomena started coming about, so they would start requesting the “Get Ready Song” and Sambo used to dance with a snake and I would accompany with a fire dance. That’s why I don’t have any hair on my legs now, burnt it all off.

What we were doing was called a punk show. “We going to see the punks perform,” that’s a connotation in the Black community, it’s old. A lot of girls are going to straight clubs performing now … that’s what they call it, we going to see a fag show, a punk show.

Carl’s memories of performing among gay Black men in the late 1970s and early 1980s illustrates the uses of performance to escape the social marginalization of being Black, gay, and working class at that time. This alternative life time allowed him, his friends, and audiences to slip through the velvet ropes that bind race, labor, and sexuality to a city of stark and unequal differences, if only during small yet recursive events. Moreover, these performative moments shed light on the contradictions between the dominance of the national narrative and the experiences of quotidian life, and the collective bodies and affinities those contradictions conceal. As Carl states, the Punk Show is old, and, despite the name, both he and Fantasy argue that their Black, White, straight, gay, young, and old audiences take these events seriously because they feel special in relation to “real life.” The Punk Show is constituted by collective attention to and memory of a Black queer ontology. This drag pulls on the temporal coattails of a nationalist imaginary about gender, sex, and race by remixing them. It is important to note that although these artists find empowerment in their performances, the repertoire of drag and dance incorporated into the Punk Show—the wigs, the music, the costuming, the uncanny choreography—are not entirely unique to individual artists or local forms of expressive culture. They are aspects of a larger tradition transmitted to them through the repertoire. Carl and Fantasy’s strategic use of such knowledge, its power, and its consequences enact other types of change. When I asked if performing really facilitates Black queer people’s mobility and experiences, Carl replied,

Depending upon the person, we carried ourselves to certain standards, and … we didn’t allow certain things to happen—none of the fondling, none of that seeking sex or mingling—other then entertainment. Now, after the show if we had somebody we wanted to date or go out with that we’d seen, yes, but while we were performing you couldn’t. While I was dancing you couldn’t come fondle my ass, touch me, you couldn’t make gestures, I didn’t allow it! And because we carried ourselves at a higher standard than some individuals we were given that respect. There were other performers but they did some of everything, in the dressing room giving head and all this, but we carried ourselves at a different standard than a lot of individuals, we requested respect, we didn’t have to worry about name-calling. I remember one incident leaving a club and this guy wanted Linda and she didn’t want the guy, and he was upset, so he started “You ain’t nothing but a bunch of punks and fags,” and two individuals came and said “hey man that ain’t happening, they didn’t do anything toward you.” These were our fans, they weren’t having it, there were people who were advocates because of the way we carried ourselves, now had we been some trashy hoes doing whatever then the response would have been different.

I found Carl’s description of his fans as advocates to Black queer performers around them telling. This suggests that the dialogic relationship between “punk” performers and fans also functions as a means of support. ⁶ This support system being a partial solution to the dominant exclusion and lack of resources that frames Black queers as always and already victims of their own deficiencies. Still, these forms of dominance are pervasive, public, and formalized in ways that advocacy for “vulnerable” groups are not. Carl insists that performance empowered he and his friends despite the ways in which death and loss impacted their lives:

Ramona died in 2002, complications with HIV. Shuga Ducy died, and Linda Bridgette, of the original cast. I’m the only survivor. One person’s lover killed her in a fit of rage, Peaches, she was one of the first early transgenders, she had the breasts, she had the reconstruction surgery, so even though she performed she still lived her life as a woman in the early 80s … people loved it. If there was some negativity, it was by guys who were maybe shunned but for the most part it wasn’t frowned upon because we were entertainers. There was a certain amount of tolerance, but we were accepted by older straight people, men and women.

Here, Carl reveals a very potent notion of self-determination and agency that dovetails with Fantasy’s remark that the challenge of performing for straight audiences is in “the way that you carry yourself.” They suggest that agency is found in their ability to self-determine ontology, control, and self-awareness of the body, and to move within and outside the club with the control and integrity rehearsed within the dialogic relations between performer and audience. For Carl, this extended to matters of sex and power: he and his friends’ ability to determine the boundaries of sex and the consumption of their bodies as skilled performing subjects rather than sex objects. For Fantasy, this knowledge extended to her transitioning from male to female:

It’s not just about the shows, it’s about living day to day. Shows are always gonna be there … If I don’t feel good about myself no one else will. There’s so much hatred and intimidation, I always keep my head up high. I might not be the type of transsexual who have the big ole breasts, and big ole hips. I might not even look so girly to people, or whatever, but I know the way I feel inside and that’s what counts most.

Their stories also show how this agency is frail and highly contingent, that it is coextensive with forms of violence and trauma that threaten their ability to claim themselves as people with lives worth living. When I asked Fantasy about where she learned to perform and her inspirations, she replied,

I watched everyone, they all inspired me, not just one person, and the majority of them are not here. I mean most of them have passed away, like Allegra White, she passed away … after Katrina she kind of lost it, you know that killed a lot of people, the stress.

Allegra, a popular drag artist that inspired and claimed Fantasy as a daughter, is not unlike Carl’s friends and entertainers who succumbed to the compounded challenges of socioeconomic crisis and violence that crosscut the Black community along lines of sexuality and gender. ⁷

The Punk Show’s repertoire is a representational practice that provides a foundation for the transmission of agency and the support of advocates via the Black queer’s corporealized body. These Black queer cultural performances are similar to all Circum-Atlantic performances throughout African Diasporas as they are preoccupied with notions of freedom and death—the pervasiveness of death in life and the notion that death is an escape from a life of oppression. The Punk Show’s living archive brings together Joseph Roach and Diana Taylor’s theories of performance and memory. Carl and Fantasy’s collective memories describe the ways in which Black queer bodies become “performed effigies” that bring those that have been lost back through what Roach calls a process of surrogation. In Roach’s (1996) words,

Culture reproduces and re-creates itself by a process that can best be described by the word surrogation. In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure … survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternatives. (p. 2)

In terms of the Punk Show, surrogation explains the otherwise contradictory roles and conditions Black queer people play in their community. Black queer people are indispensable focal points of public life because they draw distinctions between the mundane and the spectacular. Nonetheless, Black queer people are disavowed because fully acknowledging the conditions that mark these individuals would bring into question the history and politics that accord normative life its power. Carl and Fantasy’s memories conflict with the processes of surrogation that attempt to forget any particular person, their emergence and demise, while creating “punk” archetypes that erase and flatten the complexity of individuals and their struggles in favor of the next best thing. In the dialogic network of relations, audience members and performers work within and against the trope of the Punk Show to create a genealogical basis for their lives. As theorist Jack Halberstam (2005) writes, “Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience-namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.” (p. 2) “Punks” envision pasts, futures, and most importantly a present for themselves that exemplify potential growth and resilience, and in spite of all signs to the contrary. My interviews with Carl revealed the lives of so many Black queer performers. Next, I discuss the connections between one artist who is central to the emergence of Bounce music and quite possibly southern hip hop.

The legacy of Bobby Marchan

Throughout my time in New Orleans, people interested in Bounce mentioned the career of local soul singer and producer Bobby Marchan, a Black vocalist who was publicly gay and performed at the legendary Dew Drop Inn. Marchan’s career spanned from the 1940s through the 1990s with a series of hits and collaborations with famous singers. Marchan was one of the early promoters of New Orleans hip hop and provided seed money and connections for young artists who would eventually become significant figures in southern rap, such as the Williams Brothers of Cash Money Records. Marchan had performed in drag since his youth, inspired by the cross-dressing acts incorporated into the jazz and blues tours of the chitlin circuit (Ankeny, 2011). Although originally from Ohio, Marchan made a home for himself in New Orleans living right between a lively club scene and the public housing projects where a significant portion of his audience must have lived. In his track Strokin’ Part 2, Marchan (1987) represents New Orleans, the projects, and their suggested sexual prowess in a fashion not unlike Bounce artists do:

… all around the world people strokin’ … but all the strokin’ comes down to New Orleans … I heard the best strokers in New Orleans was in the Project … in the Fischer Projects … I heard the best strokers was in the Iberville … some woman told me she strokes best in the Calliope … then I had one cat tell me he stroke all the way from the Bahamas but he never got down right till he got to the St. Thomas …

Marchan passed away in 1999, right when queer artists began to make names for themselves in the Bounce scene. Many people found the influence of a gay man in the origins of Bounce a matter of sexual exceptionalism among Blacks despite the present queer face of Bounce. Moreover, I found White and non-local interest in this history another aspect of a spectatorship framed by irony. In contrast to an already “modern” and White liberal sexuality and gender, queerness within the contexts of Black community and history, and particularly within cultural work, is seen as a form of sexual exceptionalism and excess. This was articulated through comments about how unusual, unique, and non-normative a life and community such as Marchan’s might have been. Over and over again, I witnessed many non-locals who trafficked in Black culture and representation use such knowledge as a sort of cultural capital defined by their access to and literacy of Black people and Black culture. I watched many of these individuals act as gatekeepers to such knowledge and to the performers themselves. None of them, however, mentioned the existence of the Punk Show.

Although many journalists, promoters, djs, and scholars are involved in circulating, producing, and speaking for the exceptionalism of a Black queer community within New Orleans, very few of the younger artists I worked with were aware of Marchan or seemed to find his story unique. Fantasy and many others were very familiar with the experience of working/performing in and between the context that characterized Marchan’s life: performing for straight and gay audiences, as well as White and Black ones throughout New Orleans and the region. In the following, Carl shares more about his memories of the community and Bobby Marchan’s connections to Bounce music:

How Marchan got into it, in his later years he became a “promoter,” she would pursue the boys and then later on promote the boys, by being a promoter and this was an upcoming new type of rave where you put vocals to the downbeat, she saw it as something up and coming so a couple of the aspiring artists she managed and would bring around to different shows; and since they knew Bobby Marchan she got access. Before the kids couldn’t get anything more than a local set at a club or a party, only until Marchan and a couple promoters started bringing these kids around saying: look, we’ve taken this music, we’ve pulled the vocals out of this music, all we have is the beat. But they can rap to this beat and gyrate their bodies to the beat is how it happened, just like how hip hop started it was sold out of the trunk of cars because nobody would pick it up; they wrote produced and print[ed] their own music. The same thing with Bounce. When it initially started nobody thought it was going to be about anything, so these kids would take already existing beats in songs and then put their voices on top of them. And they started developing a following, ‘cause people here in New Orleans with Mardi Gras and second line, it’s always to a beat and this was something easier; young girls and young gay guys—the girls who hung with young gay guys started seeing them do this dance and gyrate their bodies. And they started seeing the boys saying damn, and easing off and hooking up with them; they started emulating them and suddenly, oh I can do this and it started spreading …

Bobby Marchan used to perform with Otis Redding, Wilson Picket, and he was known to be gay but he performed, his voice was of such a nature … He performed with various artists in the Black community. Now Patsy Valdez [who] was a drag queen and the headliner at the Dew Drop Inn, you had Ramona and Berta at the Bon Temps … You had Big Linda at another club on Orleans, and she was a lesbian, she was wide hipped, large built but she could shake. They tried to get both of us to compete, and she came to a set I had with a young up and coming gay entertainer who thought he was the shaker of shakers—needless to say I won, cause the kid couldn’t do the kind of things I could do: there was a part in the performance where I tumble set, hit a wall, and I could shake from the front and reverse myself while I was on the wall and shake. She couldn’t do that. Once it happened she was off the stage and said I can’t compete with this. Now I can barely walk, I’m old and full of arthritis.

Me: What’s up with the shaking here?

There were a lot of African dancers that focused around gyration and body movements and being able to control … I mean, in my young day, I could stand on one foot and make one side of my ass move and switch it to the other side. It’s about your ability to have your body to conform with beats of the music, it’s a uniqueness and only recently over the last ten years had it become a cult kind of thing where the young kids have taken it on and all they’re doing is passing on what has been done down the ages by other gay entertainers … Do you know there are laws on the books that they’re not enforcing, that it’s illegal for two men to dance close or touch each other on the dance floor?

Carl’s memories reveal a critical juncture between the beginnings of New Orleans Bounce music and the beginnings of southern hip hop. This narrative illustrates a continuity between Black queer performances from early RnB and Blues to Bounce music. Marchan was part of a tradition rather than an exception to Black sexual norms. But as I have shown, forgetting the complexity of Black queer performance and its continuity fits into a process of surrogation. Marchan’s career and those of many other artists must be situated within the history of the Punk Show. Moreover, the repertoire of Black queer performance that includes drag, dance, and cabaret must be acknowledged as an intentional practice of critical agency that centers upon capacities of the Black body. A number of scholars have argued that although the performing Black body is celebrated as an object of fascination, projection, and revulsion in the public sphere, the subjective joy and pain of the Black person is at the same time denied (Gottschild, 2003; Hartman, 1997). More than any continuous form of cultural transmission in New Orleans, shaking has, as Carl says, “become a cult kind of thing where the young kids have taken it on and all they’re doing is passing on what has been done down the ages.” The emphasis on shaking seemed to cross the spectrum of gender and sexual identities as Carl’s memories of Big Linda and my own observations in Bounce clubs reveal. Despite identities of male, female, transgender, lesbian, gay, and in between, shaking points to a particularly local and classed performance the community values.

In the face of continuous loss, and its irrational vulgarity, to continue on with self-control, to claim some sense of self-possession, movement becomes a preoccupation; so we dance—and to a beat not even death can apprehend. Black queer desire to recreate space and enact change is highly dependent on our ability to quickly subvert multiple and interlocking social constraints to find intimacy, convey the severity of loss, and the very real fear of that loss. Indeed, the body’s relationship to basic forms of sustenance and experiences of visceral pleasure and pain become frameworks for temporal difference. You take the body on a ride, away from it all. The power of desire can exceed the expectations of history and the inhibitions of the future to render the present potential and dynamic. Among Black queer people of all classes and status levels, crisis and trauma are experienced as normative time and history that necessitate performative breaks from the mundane. In between those moments when people can escape and get their life, pedagogic time or real time is experienced through boredom, melancholy, nostalgia, hope, and anxiety. Call it life on pause, call it sleep, trauma, or an ontological death. The accumulation of such knowledge, communal memory, and its transmission through genealogies of performance work within and against heterosexual inheritance and nationalist dreams. For example, in the next section, I use Black queer performances of Bounce music to show how an alternative blackness, defined by class as much as sexuality and gender, is used to reproduce subjectivities and spaces erased by processes of normalization and surrogation as I have defined. In the context of these performances, an alternative notion of heritage is used to provide coherence in the wake of crisis.

Catch Dat’ Beat

Catch Dat’ Beat, a Bounce musical produced and written by New Orleans native Lucky Johnson (2009), first premiered in the spring of 2009. Johnson, a well-known recording producer of Bounce, had decided to try his hand at theater after witnessing the success of actor/producer Tyler Perry, who he claims as a cousin and fellow New Orleans native (Flaherty, 2009). I thought it ironic that Johnson should cast Big Freedia, an openly Black gay figure, as the central character of the play considering Perry’s own screen drag persona “Madea.” Over the past decade, Perry’s use of drag has taken the Black church community by storm. While never bringing attention to the sexual and gendered politics of drag or queerness, Perry has been able to appeal to a segment of the Black community drawn to his narration of morality, transgression, and status within the church. Johnson, however, addresses queerness through a plot in which Freedia functions as an icon of Black heritage and, even more, a member of a Black family and community who should be accepted.

When I was invited to the play, I was surprised to find it was being shown at a high school auditorium. I was happy to see that the play was in a space I imagined more accessible to young people. The door charge was 20 dollars. A friend and I found that even though we were late arriving, everyone else was too. When the play finally started an hour and half late, the auditorium had filled up, and I took note of all the different faces in attendance. The auditorium was made to seat a few hundred, and the crowd from what I could tell was around 200 people, mostly local Black families. Many were perhaps related to cast members, and most were women and children. There were just a few seniors but plenty of 30–40 somethings, teen boys and girls, and lots of babies and young ones. The production quality resembled a low budget do-it-yourself high school play in some ways with continuous technical difficulties and thrown together props. Despite this, you could see that a lot of effort went into the musical side of production and the casting. Each scene included guest appearances from different Bounce rappers and skilled dancers.

The play begins with Papa, the family patriarch played by Johnson, as he sweeps the floor of the family hair salon above which he lives with his grandson Freedia who runs the shop. As Papa sweeps, he provides the audience a genealogy of Bounce music while periodically launching into comical dances that make the crowd break into laughter. Each time Papa recounts a new phase in the progression of Bounce music while the house DJ starts playing a song exemplifying that historical moment, Papa starts doing the complementary dance. Soon Freedia arrives from upstairs to the pleasure of the audience and goes about preparing for the day. The plot follows the interactions between Freedia’s customers, his brother, and the local pimp, a Super Fly-like character (also played by Johnson). Freedia’s customers, mostly women, come to get their hair done and, while waiting, recount their own experiences with Bounce music while lambasting each other over hair, style, and who Freedia is going to work on next. As it is a musical, at times everyone on stage would take to singing and dancing and extol the pleasures of “catchin’ dat beat!” To “ride” and “catch” the beat are continually remarked upon as if to transcend mundanity or to find something that is not given but that must be worked for as one surrenders to Bounce’s rhythm. The play suggests that to do so represents a culturally specific knowledge that can be imparted to others, and that Freedia is a knowing person capable of such transmission.

As the play goes on, we are introduced to Freedia’s cousin “Michelle” who is making a surprise visit from Detroit and does not understand the local expressions of dance, music, and style that are Freedia’s expertise. Papa greets his grandniece and encourages Freedia and friends to explain the importance of Bounce as a part of New Orleans cultural heritage. A rich point occurs at this moment when one of the salon’s customers criticizes Michelle’s style of dress and asks her if she likes boys, and before Michelle can respond, Freedia interjects with a great big “I do!” The crowd laughs, children and all, as Freedia’s grandfather feigns a heart attack and acts caught of guard. Freedia simply replies, “What, I thought you knew.” Papa shakes his head and before excusing himself to lie down says, “Sorry yawl, I just found out my grandson plays tambourine.” Freedia shamelessly replies, “Yeah, both of ’em.” The play moves forward as Freedia and fellow Bounce performer 10th Ward Buck begin planning a block party in honor of their visiting guest so she can learn the meaning of Bounce and its significance to the community.

During the intermission, the set is transformed into a block party at a public park that Freedia and Buck have organized through their network of friends and family. This scene goes to great lengths to express the importance of mutual aide among Black people in New Orleans and a moral economy that sees through poverty and depression to account for each person’s unique role in the community. I am not arguing that Catch Dat’ Beat is without a politics of respectability; even within the context of the play, there is an implicit framing of how one should live in this community, although I would say it prescribes a more inclusive politics. It is also significant that the only White person in the play is the pimp’s girlfriend who has no lines, bringing attention to issues of misogyny but also Johnson and the audience’s complicity with what to them may be a just reversal of racialized power. I argue that the play uses the setting of the park and Big Freedia’s casting to reconstruct a space and time that reproduces a “marginalized” blackness as central to the past and future of New Orleans.

In the play, the middle of the block party scene is interrupted by the arrival of the police who attempt to shut down the un-permitted gathering. The police are played by Black actors, but walk and talk with a comical affect Black performers often reserve for self-important White men. When the police threaten to make arrests, Freedia encourages them to enjoy the community and dance, and with some persuasion, the police falter and begin to enjoy themselves. At this point, the music reaches a new high and the characters start to dance to a mix of Bounce songs accompanied by appearances from the actual rappers that perform them. Each rapper runs on stage and presents their trademark dance and lyrical delivery. A couple dance troupes of young men perform flips, choreographed drills, and the most well-known Bounce moves, where hips and backsides are thrown up and down, most often called “pounching.” ⁸ If race is articulated through the regulation of sexuality and gender, a body politic focused on comportment, these dances suggest a resistance to those forms of control. They also evidence a trans-generational cultural practice dovetailing Carl’s earlier description of shaking in New Orleans dance culture. The crowd went especially wild when Sissy Nobby, another local Bounce rapper who Freedia often refers to as his daughter, took to the stage and began to shake and pounch.

Toward the end of the play Papa joins the gathering and praises Freedia for showing his grandniece the importance of Bounce music and moreover, local community. Papa goes on to say that he loves Freedia and that everyone should accept his sexuality and others like him because they are family. At this point, I found myself observing the audience where there were applause, thankful sighs, and speculatively, no disagreement. Catch Dat Beat successfully performs a social politic that is inclusive of Black sexual and gender minorities while evidencing forms of exclusion and normalization that impact the Black community more broadly.

Deconstructing heritage in the Black diaspora

To narrate a diaspora through the temporal binds of nationalist heritage would necessitate stalling and excluding forms of communal memory that exceed the imaginaries of capitalist and heteropatriarchal social production. The nationalist imaginary of time as linear, as Homi Bhabha (2005) writes, “is constructed from two incommensurable temporalities of meaning that threaten its coherence” (p. 36). Time as “pedagogic” and “performative” divide this linear and “productive” notion of time. In his theory of hybridity, scholar Tavia Nyong’o (2009) describes these two temporalities when he writes,

The pedagogic, realist form upon which both the nation-state and its fantasy of homogenous, empty time rest is unsettled by performative tactics that seize upon national narratives with a disruptive immediacy, tactics that are filled with the presence of the now and that thereby call the bluff of the ruse of postponement. Pedagogic time is a time of training waiting, and indefinite deferral … The performative moment, by contrast, is characterized by what Bhabha specifies as a “repetitious, recursive strategy,” one that refuses gradualism the reproduction of docile, useful bodies. (p. 12)

Racial history’s assimilation into the discourses of national heritage illustrates time as a pedagogic series of instructive moments that among other things narrate and induce appropriate forms of Black gender and sexual conduct. The doubleness of pedagogic “on the clock” time and performative moments such as the pledge of allegiance together fold alternate histories into nationalist narratives. But even the term “racial heritage” points to a modern temporality in which a wounded, incomplete national narrative follows timeless good ole days when gendered, racial, and sexual subjectivities were supposedly firm (Freeman, 2010). Bhabha and Nyong’o discuss this in terms of hybridity and miscegenation’s capacity to interrupt racial narratives of history. Different yet similar, queers and mulattos have invoked fears of lost history or a temporal dead end to particular notions of racial purity and reproduction.

As a discursive practice that influences our perceptions of time and history, the discourse of heritage “puts upon” diasporic collective memory. These representations, as Stuart Hall (2005) tells us, work within, not outside, the construction of their meaning (p. 25). He writes, “It is through identifying with these representations that we come to be its subjects—‘subjecting’ ourselves to its dominant meanings.” Likewise, literature on performativity and theories of speech-acts show how discursive practices enact what they say, continuously performing on memory and the body itself (Austin, 1975; Butler, 2004; Sedgwick, 2003).

Omi and Winant’s (1986) theory of racial formation theorizes the institutionalization of these discourses and how they are directly and indirectly shaped by the state. Social structures exist as institutional “sites” where to participate one must “accept a set of political rules about who is a political actor, what is a political interest, and how the broad state/society relationship is to be organized” (Omi and Winant, 1986: 77). Other sites of racial formation include the patriarchal family and educational and cultural institutions. Given the context of this project, one might consider the proliferation of these discourses and how formal institutions, and organizations articulate heritage in the wake of socioeconomic and “natural” disasters. ⁹

My research illustrates tension between the dominant narrative of cultural heritage as necessarily heteropatriarchal, and the everyday life and times of communities that such a narrative conceals. The oral narratives of Carl and Fantasy, the life of Bobby Marchan, along with the staging of Catch Dat Beat contradict dominant representations of Black cultural heritage while offering a methodological frame toward revealing alternative social formations in the past and present. What is at stake in publicly responding to the existence of a Black queer community and its performative contributions to the legacy of cultural heritage throughout Black diasporas? Is it that speaking about such subjects interrupts an already narrativized project? Talking about queerness or homosexuality, in certain venues, is to explicitly talk about sex and thus becomes a question of propriety, eliciting a need to smooth out rough edges, shore up loose bosoms and anything else that may protrude. Black queer liminality is an effect of those dissembling gestures, cast into an ideological space that exists between the discursive silences and hushed disclosures of race and sexuality.