Perhaps no other document in modern African American history stimulated more public debate about intimate matters than what is commonly referred to as the Moynihan Report. Leaked to the press in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case For National Action remains accessible through the comprehensive compilation published two years later, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, which reprinted it and collected dozens of commentaries on Moynihan’s thesis about the damaged nature of the African American family structure. His phrasing was unforgettable and its implications equally disturbing: “A fundamental fact of American Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife,” wrote Moynihan. The “deterioration of the fabric of Negro society” was at heart the failure of the black family—“it is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.” According to Moynihan, this little understood problem had worsened since World War II, and the “tangle of pathology is tightening.” The white family was stable, and the black family was not; in urban centers it was “approaching complete breakdown.” As is often noted, the fallout from the report divided conservatives from liberals, whites from blacks, and feminists from traditionalists, and, as well, transformed Moynihan and his times. The leading historical interpretations conceive of the controversy either as a case of victimization by political correctness, in which a liberal intellectual in search of the truth became a scapegoat for a frank, difficult analysis of African American culture and behavior, or as a case of racial bias and misogyny, in which a white male ethnocentric perspective misrecognized an alternative, and viable, family structure.Footnote ¹

In contrast, this article offers a critical perspective on these and other historical questions by queering the Moynihan controversy.Footnote ² Following Eileen Boris’s call for the diversification of policy history to include multiple categories of analysis and difference, I will examine the construction of the report and the ensuing controversy as an episode in the history of sexuality, a neglected line of inquiry. Although the historian Margot Canaday has charted state discourse about and the regulation of homosexuality, significant questions about the intersection of categories of difference are submerged in the literature. An exception to the invisibility of race in both policy and sexuality studies is the work of Cathy Cohen, who has examined the dynamics of homophobia in black communities, attributing its function to the politics of respectability. She argued that “visible/public black homosexuality is understood to threaten that ‘cultural capital’ acquired by assimilation and protest,” and she adds that an essentialist construction of racial identity, or the idea that all members share an outlook and prioritize race above other aspects of difference, inhibits the extent to which gays and lesbian come out.Footnote ³ My analysis locates the dynamics of homophobia in lateral relations between groups, and in terms of the exercise of government and academic forms of power.

Drawing on the Daniel P. Moynihan Papers at the Library of Congress, published social science, popular periodicals and press, my interpretation of the report shifts attention away from its relatively minor discussion of motherhood (which eventually came to occupy public debate) and toward Moynihan’s more important, and in some ways fascinating, discussion of black masculinity, which is too often forgotten. I trace the forgetting of Moynihan’s masculinity thesis to the disavowal or rejection of the innuendo of homosexuality in his policy language, and present research on the response that shows how homosexuality circled the controversy and how racially inflected homophobia impacted policy matters. Moynihan’s assignment to research the next stage of the federal response to the civil rights movement was a matter of major political importance; his portrayal of the black family stimulated changes in policy (the White House diminished the discussion of the black family at its conference). But his policy recommendations and his career suffered from the public fallout about his theory of black pathology.Footnote ⁴ This article examines the making of policy and its effects from the usual perspective of the state and government officials, but it also considers relations within targeted marginal groups or subcultures who jockeyed for influence and attention from the state. It attempts to understand the history of how policymaking stimulated public dialogues on morality and influenced a broader sphere of the politics of recognition.Footnote ⁵

REMEMBERING THE MOYNIHAN REPORT

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a young Irish American, Tufts-educated liberal recruited from Harvard University to come to Washington and join the New Frontier of President John F. Kennedy. He stayed on under President Lyndon Johnson, serving as an assistant secretary in the Department of Labor. In 1964, he started the research for a special project on the condition of blacks in society in part to assist with the preparations for a major conference on civil rights to be convened at the White House the following year. The literature on poverty and black urban problems had increased significantly in the postwar period, and Moynihan and his research assistants read widely and produced extensive digests and notes based on the scholarship.

In his thinking, the key problem was the unstable family, long a problem in African American history, because of its susceptibility to a breakdown that resulted in increased demand for and dependency on social welfare.Footnote ⁶ Moynihan considered a wide range of statistical evidence that demonstrated this breakdown—rates of crime, narcotic addiction, delinquency, intelligence—but came to understand that these were effects of the female-headed household. In consulting the 1960 U.S. Census, Moynihan found that one-fourth of black families (24.2 percent) were headed by females, while other evidence indicated an imbalance in relations between husband and wife, including disparities in unemployment, increased women’s labor force participation, and higher divorce rates.Footnote ⁷ By the time Moynihan finished drafting the report, he had synthesized statistical information on patterns of unemployment, social theories of dependency, and family problems in African American communities, and called for social federal welfare programs that were, in effect, highly gendered: geared toward retraining African American men for new jobs, roles, and service in the nation.

Moynihan studied the social problems of unemployment and family breakdown, rather than focusing on entrenched patterns of culture or behavior, in part because these variables mattered to policymakers in the federal government, and presumably because policy intervention could address them. At one point, a memo circulated that described how the federal guidelines in social welfare actually encouraged the formation of single female households, and another set of notes paraphrased this condition as “the government is the surrogate family of Negro life.”Footnote ⁸ Moynihan also outlined in broad strokes the dangers to society of uncontrolled black pathology: the loss of social control over the ghetto, leading to “collective unrest” and the “products of broken families and broken societies” filling the prison system, as well as deviance in “sex life.”Footnote ⁹ But ever the reformer, Moynihan described the social ills of illiteracy, father desertion, high school dropout rates, and crime and narcotics in a sympathetic light, urging readers to consider policy initiatives rather than punitive solutions. He also discovered disproportionately high rates of homicide and rape among black men but did not stress these in the report, because, in my view, he wished to present an optimistic, malleable and therefore treatable situation to policymakers. In his analysis, black fathers appeared as the victims of society rather than the perpetrators of crisis (unlike the subsequent discourses that proliferated after the major urban riots in which officials and the public demonized black men as violent and criminal men).Footnote ¹⁰

As many of the critics pointed out at the time and scholars have subsequently noted, the report’s analyses of black society and social problems were not particularly original or rigorous. His formulation of the controversial emasculation and matriarchal arguments drew eclectically from studies by E. Franklin Frazier, Robert Coles, and Erik Erickson, and a host of others.Footnote ¹¹ In addition to sociological statistics, Moynihan incorporated the recently published work of the historian Stanley Elkins, who argued that slavery had infantilized and decimated the personality structure of African Americans. In his notes on Elkins, Moynihan jotted down phrases about “the castration of the Negro” male; on Sambo as “very close to female figure”; and on the advantage of “one good tough Negro father” Footnote ¹²

In preparing the section on the role of black women, Moynihan consulted the growing literature on female deviance, delinquency, and illegitimacy or premarital pregnancy. As the family became a site of government intervention, Moynihan subjected it to measurements of statecraft, achieving further legibility and definition. He constructed tables, graphs, and descriptions of the deviation of the black family, concluding with a graph illustrating that the black rate of illegitimacy was eight times that of whites. More concerned with the rates of desertion than the rates of marriage, Moynihan consulted some of the literature that suggested that many members of the black community tolerated nonmarital pregnancy to a greater extent than white communities. For Moynihan, the problem became one of normativity: these arrangements and the economic success of women, and perhaps their strength as single mothers, undermined the position of the father because it was not the stable white, dominant pattern. The key statistical finding of the final report was that “almost one-fourth of Negro Families are headed by females,” but this reflected a variety of circumstances. Some black men chose not to marry or deserted their families or were only temporary or itinerant parents, but, again, Moynihan argued that this deviation was entangled with every aspect of African American life. In the report, he utilized a theory of roles and role-modeling, arguing that “the child learns a way of looking at life in the early years through which all later experience is viewed and which profoundly shapes his adult conduct.” Footnote ¹³ If the current patterns of behavior were the result of economic disadvantage and isolation, future behavior may take on a life of its own and social welfare reform becomes less feasible, suggested Moynihan.

Much of this has been discussed in the scholarship on the Moynihan controversy, and yet I want to suggest that a closer reading of the report reveals that it was not primarily targeting domineering African American mothers but the problem of diminished black manhood, and that this failure of masculinity was linked not only to the inability to become a breadwinner but to the absence of a manly role model that reinforced a proper heterosexual orientation. Although the section of the report on the “Negro American Family” has been attributed to E. Franklin Frazier, he focused far less than Moynihan on the black father and did not measure the family structure in terms of masculinity. The historian Daryl Michael Scott has argued that Moynihan misunderstood Frazier, and speculated that he cited him because he sought to gain legitimacy and deflect racial criticism by referring to black social scientists. It seems reasonable to imagine that Moynihan anticipated criticism of his white outsider vantage point (though he had not expected the report to become public). Yet Moynihan’s fundamental view of the significance and structure of the family also reflected his own childhood, which he felt suffered from an absent father and overburdened mother, and may have also revealed his personal fears of emasculation or effeminacy as a result of his upbringing.Footnote ¹⁴

More important than Frazier to Moynihan was the black social scientist Kenneth Clark, with whom he met during the writing of the report. Clark’s newly published Dark Ghetto: The Dilemmas of Social Power discussed at length the debilitating effects of violent behavior and sexual promiscuity on Harlem’s black inhabitants. Clark used the term “pathology” to characterize many of his social observations, but Moynihan’s phrase “the tangle of pathology” stirred far more criticism. Although Clark focused more on the plight of unmarried mothers than single female households, he argued that the ghetto environment itself fueled a pathology that was signified by sexual promiscuity. “If, when the girl becomes pregnant, the boy deserts or refused to marry her, it is often because neither can sustain an intimate relationship; both seem incapable of the tenderness that continues beyond immediate gratification.” After finding that black youth practiced nonmarital or extramarital sexuality, he noted that this “competition in sex is predominantly heterosexual and free.” Only a handful of black social scientists writing on the family had contemplated homosexuality to any degree. But Clark mentioned the subject when he speculated that middle-class men, presumably outside the ghetto, “retreat into noncommittal peripheral relationships with women, avoiding all alternatives—homosexuality, heterosexuality, or verbal bombasts—as risks requiring more ego strength than their resources permit.” While Clark observed “a blank and apathetic sexlessness” among the black bourgeoisie, he strained to avoid a related discussion of the incidence of homosexuality in the middle class and ignored a common perception that effeminacy in a man signified not a middle-class “sexlessness” but rather homosexuality.Footnote ¹⁵

In any case, Moynihan’s report also focused on the pathology of black manhood and hinted at the problem of black male homosexuality. To remember the extent to which the final draft of the report hinged not only on an analysis of social disorganization caused by matriarchy but more specifically on the state of black masculinity, consider the kinds of policy recommendations that Moynihan advanced. One was that black men should enlist in the armed forces, not to improve national security but simply because “it is an utterly masculine world.” He advocated more job training and employment to strengthen breadwinners and called for exploring ways of “making jobs masculine.” His sense of emasculation was pervasive in the report, reflecting a white liberal understanding of race relations as a narrative of the victimization of black men. Moynihan wrote that “it may be speculated that it was the Negro male who was most humiliated” and “the male was more likely to use public facilities, which rapidly became segregated once the process began, and just as important, segregation, and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male personality than the female personality.” In a famous phrasing, Moynihan observed that “the very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general is to strut. Indeed in 19th-century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style. Not so for the Negro male. The ‘sassy nigger’ was lynched.” Footnote ¹⁶

Moynihan’s choice of gendered metaphors resonated with major social science scholarship that connected pathology with black homosexuality, and he surely was aware of these implications. Moynihan’s research team created digests of scholarly books and articles that addressed delinquency and homosexuality, most notably the influential 1951 treatise The Mark of Oppression: A Psychological Study of the American Negro by Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey. They presented case studies of black men who suffered from diminished masculinity, and some of these expressed a fear of becoming a homosexual. The correlation operated similarly for women who were manly. They described the case of A.F., a thirty-three-year-old housewife, who “equates masculinity with power,” and so since the days of being a tomboy she reported that “women look at me and think I’m a Lesbian just on general principles.” Conversely, when the masculinity of the subject was diminished, whether by social repression or the harsh control of the father, the subject became “so fearful that his desire for a homosexual act will become apparent that he attempts to deny it” and “refers to his homosexual fears many times.” He risks disclosure if others detect his “effeminacy.” Kardiner and Ovesey also argued that the compulsory observance of racial caste demanded of men an unnatural level of passivity, and that this loss of prestige resulted in homosexuality. They related a story about young African American youth who admitted to carrying on a homosexual relationship, which his therapist encouraged him to end. After breaking it off, the narrative reports that the subject became more assertive and manly, and “rebelled against his supervisor on his job. He talked back to waitresses and he pushed in the subway.” Finally, in a formulation that clearly anticipates, and likely informed, Moynihan, the authors suggested that “the economic independence of the female plays havoc with conventional male-female roles, and this in turn influences the potency of the males,” and in turn black male potency had to be publicly moderated in the face of white domination, creating internal conflicts about passivity. But black men demanded a particular sense of masculinity among themselves, and thus the study also recommended additional scientific analysis of this “constellation” of behaviors in the world of “Negro homosexuals.”Footnote ¹⁷

Moynihan was also exposed to the possibilities of black homosexuality in consulting the scholarship of the Harvard social scientist Thomas Pettigrew, who had argued that prejudice and ghettoes were responsible for mental problems, which in turn led to sexual dysfunction. Moynihan’s research digest noted Pettigrew’s observation that “the effects of father absent families are to be seen in homocide [sic], schizophrenia, and homosexuality.”Footnote ¹⁸ Citing Pettigrew, Moynihan wrote that “the inability to delay gratification is a critical factor in immature, criminal, and neurotic behavior.” Perhaps Moynihan felt that an open discussion of homosexual pathology undermined his primary concern with economic reform, but the innuendo is in the phrasing. Perhaps he chose not to speak more frankly because if the White House or any number of agencies and bureaucrats understood homosexuality as a problem that particularly plagued the ghetto, they may not support the policy initiatives that Moynihan advocated and that the White House planned to take on. Perhaps more important than what he said or didn’t say about homosexuality was the fact that he clearly departed from Clark and other scholars in the culture-of-poverty school, who held that black men compensated for lower status with the performance of hypermasculinity. He chose not to argue for the existence of a compensatory black machismo, but rather that the family structure generated a state of passivity or deficiency that required ameliorative treatments, such as military training and male role models.Footnote ¹⁹

Moynihan constructed an image of the black urban male as essentially adolescent rather than mature, as a hustler rather than a laborer, and as a delinquent more than adjusted youth. By the 1950s, these categories also influenced dominant understandings of the homosexual. According to a number of studies of the Cold War, the new national security state targeted the weak character of the moral pervert at the same time that a dialectic of normal manhood under stress and the pathologization of the sexual other, from child predator to homosexual, appeared in the larger culture. In a recent study of motherhood, Rebecca Jo Plant located a critique of mother-son relations as part of a longer tradition of blaming pathological mothering for a range of social problems, especially various kinds of feminization, among white youth. By 1965, with the controversy over the Moynihan Report, the theory that the absent father and dominant mother increased the son’s homosexual tendencies gained notoriety and was debated, perhaps influencing or echoing etiologies of homosexuality among white and middle-class men.Footnote ²⁰

The point is that this figure was becoming a popular signification of black homosexuality, and a number of writers clearly understood the connection. In a 1966 article in Ebony (one of the arbiters of black popular culture), a Chicago psychiatrist, Kurt Mehlinger, argued that the civil rights movement was impacting the sexual revolution. He dated the connections between the two to the pioneering sexology of Alfred Kinsey, who had conducted studies of both white and black sexual behavior and on occasion presented his findings to black audiences. In a striking formulation, Mehlinger observed that although “the civil rights revolution is more of a black revolution, the sexual revolution tends to be more of a white revolution.” Both were seen as freeing or liberating the liberal individual, but experts also understood the process operating differently for the black group. Whereas whites experienced a lifting of constraints, Mehlinger brought up the sexual problems of matriarchy. “Both girls and boys brought up in the matriarchal family climate find it difficult to assume a mature masculine or feminine identification. In many instances the son will abandon any attempt to free himself from the tyrannical rule of the mother, and will simply identify with her, give up the battle, and resolve his need to be loved by becoming a homosexual.” The son’s anxiety about the matriarch instilled in him a “dread fear of all women so that he has become psychologically castrated and is unable to have genuine sexual feeling towards other women,” while the black woman became a “completely independent, competitive, aggressive female.”Footnote ²¹

In the end, Moynihan’s decision to speak of a pathological matriarchy and more specifically of the problems arising from emasculation (the mama’s boy) was meant to sound an alarm and accomplish what policy reports are supposed to accomplish: justify the interventionist powers of the government and bureaucrats. He had chosen not to use the term “homosexuality,” however, leaving it to the press and other experts to infer and imagine the results of family pathology.Footnote ²²

CONTROVERSY, 1965–1975

In terms of framing policy recommendations, Moynihan advanced what might be termed a post–civil rights agenda, and President Lyndon Johnson apparently read the report. He appeared to refer to it in his famous Howard University speech in 1965, when he briefly mentioned the family as one of a number of problems that the government must address if the nation was to move beyond the civil rights movement, calling for positive affirmative action to help the poor catch up in the economy and education. Johnson’s speech was covered in much of the press, and a key black periodical, Jet, also supported the substance of the speech, though it sought to stress the “devastating heritage of long years of slavery,” and not cultural problems in the ghetto, as the cause of the crisis in the black family.Footnote ²³

In August 1965, at the same time that major rioting broke out in the Watts area of Los Angeles, the report was leaked to the press, but Moynihan denied knowledge of the source. James Patterson’s recent study of the African American family considers the possibility that Moynihan did so, and notes that he did admit to briefing reporters off the record. Newsweek ran articles on the rioting and on the report with the headline, “New Crisis: The Negro Family,” and went on to describe a culture of poverty perpetuating itself. The story repeated the now infamous phrase, “tangle of pathology,” and concluded that the “Negro’s tragic odyssey in white America has worked against family solidarity—and particularly against the very manhood of the Negro father.” Not until a subsection on intelligence, however, did Newsweek bring up the term “matriarchy,” which they defined as a system in which mothers favored daughters and boys were “hit hardest of all.” Another early discussion appeared in The New Republic, which also emphasized the masculinity formulation—that the “Negro male became a subject of intense hostility,” and that (quoting Moynihan) the masculine and aggressive black man, or the “‘sassy nigger’ was lynched.” What one reporter referred to as the “‘emasculated’ Negro” was an effect of the economy rather than the family, to the extent that unemployment forced black men to give up their manly duties and survive without real public status. In my reading of the response, at first the press accepted the basic tenets of the report, referring to the black community as “broken humanity,” recapitulating the tenets of matriarchy, emasculation, and pathology. Yet within the historical context, there was an incongruity between the image of the rebellious black man and the passivity that Moynihan identified as the emasculated man.Footnote ²⁴

Upon the release of the report by the government, the argument for African American pathology and questions about black masculinity dispersed into an expanding audience, gaining national exposure. However, in the months following the leak, new and compelling criticism dampened the initial enthusiasm for the report among liberals. The social scientist William Ryan and African American religious leader Rev. Dr. Benjamin Payton issued damaging attacks concerning its methodology and empirical rigor. A veteran of the civil rights movement, Ryan sought to correct misperceptions that he feared would influence the tenor of the upcoming White House conference, and in The Nation he criticized Moynihan’s use of the data on illegitimacy and refuted the report’s correlations between family structure, deviant behavior, and illegitimacy through a lengthy marshaling of counter evidence.Footnote ²⁵ Payton circulated a paper that also stressed structural inequality but his writing had less impact in part because he had not yet read the report, responding only to news coverage. Payton rejected the analysis as a “classic example of a grossly unrealistic effort to dissolve a problem in the area of intergroup relations into a problem of relations within a single group.” As he refined his critique in a number of published articles, Payton also climbed in the ranks of black leadership.Footnote ²⁶

Despite the many sociological arguments that stressed the economic causes of black pathology, the press reported on the deviant gender dynamics of the black household, referring to “what he [Moynihan] calls white society’s attempt to emasculate the Negro male.” A year after the controversy erupted, the New York Times observed that “children, especially boys, who grow up in fatherless homes tend not to adjust to this country’s essentially patriarchal society, particularly when their problems are complicated by poverty and racial prejudice,” and that these young men failed to have “any stable relationship to male authority.” When Newsweek revisited the report a year later, its headline summed up a now-intractable gendering of the issues: “A Mother Can’t Do a Man’s Job.” It did not require a particularly imaginative reading between the lines of the news to see the supposition that black men afflicted by the tangle of pathology were somehow more susceptible to homosexual tendencies.Footnote ²⁷

Beyond the daily news, the Moynihan thesis attracted a range of public intellectuals and sparked a significant public debate on the state of race relations and black culture. Of the dozens of commentaries on the report, perhaps the most ironic was penned by the black gay activist Bayard Rustin. On the one hand, Rustin’s political writing had inspired Moynihan to look beyond the framework of civil rights (though he criticized Moynihan for not centering enough on economics and employment), and, on the other hand, he accepted the report’s premises of gender normativity wholeheartedly. Rustin proclaimed in the progressive magazine America, “There are two theses I believe we can all accept. The first is that the Negro family can be reconstructed only when the Negro male is permitted to be the economic and psychological head of the family,” and the second was to denounce the existence of racism, charges of which he sought to defend Moynihan from. Rustin quoted from Kardiner and Ovesey’s Mark of Oppression, and also recounted a story of troubled family life not unlike his own to justify Moynihan’s call for reform. “Often a sister or brother has to take care of the child, who is thus exposed to bitter rivalries with other children. Here he elevates his self-esteem through exploits with other boys, obtaining rewards he cannot get at home.” Rustin’s biological mother, Florence, had neither married his father nor openly mothered him, with Rustin growing up under the mistaken impression that she was his sister. Also, Rustin had sexual relations with men: not necessarily in juvenile gangs of the ghetto but in prison (and there is a slippage between delinquency and incarceration in African American history). In other words, while his grandparents made a respectable home for him, Rustin never achieved the full-blooded masculinity called for in the report.Footnote ²⁸

Novelist Ralph Ellison more explicitly addressed the issue of homosexuality in a 1966 New York Times interview where he complained that “Moynihan looked at a fatherless family and interpreted it not in the context of Negro cultural patterns, but in a white cultural pattern.” He was quoted as stating: “The Moynihan report complained that Negroes don’t strut any more,” at which point the New York Times described his demeanor as “Annoyed.” Ellison then retorted, “‘Why Negro faggots are the struttiest people I know.’” Ellison concluded with the observation that even though black fathers may be absent, “the kids identify with stepfathers, uncles, even the mother’s boy friends.” But Ellison left unexamined the correlation between pathology, effeminacy, and homosexuality.Footnote ²⁹

As the controversy unwound, the White House quietly dropped the report, and Moynihan left the federal government. For years, however, he received letters of commentary and requests for copies of the report, and he continued to defend its accuracy as well as his good intentions over the years. Notably, in one published article on race and policy, he chose to use the example of African American girls, rather than the sensitive subjects of black men and manhood, and in other communications appeared to deliberately avoid the mention of masculinity. At a later point, he reflected, “It is very difficult to raise the subject of ‘family’ in American life. You can never prescribe for people of different races, creeds, and color. You pay a price for doing it.”Footnote ³⁰

Even as liberals defeated not only the report but also Moynihan, they were losing influence to conservatives in debates over both black culture and social welfare policymaking. If the civil rights moment had inspired new concerns for race and social justice, now political observers discovered an ideological divide over how to reach the next stage in the struggle to fulfill those rights. Some asserted that social welfare may “do more to help the Negro out of his ghetto and bitter circle of poverty than all the Freedom Marches that have been and are to come.” But, as the New York Times noted, “Public support for the Negro and his problems is waning, white opposition is growing, and the civil rights movement is falling into increasing disarray.” The case in point was the failure of the White House Conference on civil rights and the controversy sparked by Moynihan’s report. In neoliberal and conservative circles, writers expressed impatience with special pleading and expensive proposals, while the stain cast by the Moynihan Report remained. “Can the Negro be expected to follow the path of previous immigrant groups,” Irving Kristol asked in 1966, or “is his a special, ‘pathological’ case?” He defended Moynihan and his report but also questioned Moynihan for “prissily categorizing the Negro as pathological.”Footnote ³¹

By the 1970s, few liberals remained to defend the report, and new groups of detractors found fault, as the controversy relocated from the pages of the national press and the White House to academic discourse and African-American periodicals in particular. The thesis that black families were matriarchal and therefore dysfunctional became something of a straw horse, easily repudiated in the service of legitimating alternative visions of gender roles and family structures. In a sense, the transformation of the debate on policy into a question of culture had more to do with the times than with Moynihan’s analysis, for he had not particularly stressed the influence a distinct black culture. But the reaction against his putatively insulting critique of the black family overshadowed the subtleties of Moynihan’s analysis and distracted attention away from his original purpose in reforming manhood. In a recent reflective article on the demise of the Moynihan report, the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson has blamed the emergence of Black Power and its “racial chauvinism” for discrediting Moynihan and wrongly dismissing his key findings.Footnote ³²

In my reading of the sources, however, Black Power politicos and activists did not display a great deal of criticism or concern with the report. Rather, an emergent academic discourse sought to rebut Moynihan and along the way distanced black masculinity from homosexuality. Of particular importance in this effort were the writings of the black sociologist Robert Staples, who published voluminously on gender, families, and cultural roles, drawing on social science, history, and sexology.Footnote ³³ To a certain extent, Staples shared a set of normative conceptions of the family with Moynihan, but he defended the integrity of its gender roles, blaming the ordeals of the diaspora and slavery for the particular cast of black sexuality. He identified a kind of a black sexual double standard in which black women, unlike white women, lacked the ability to protect or defend their chastity and then were depicted as sexually ravenous. Nonetheless, in this narrative, black women enjoyed greater or equal access to economic resources and education, and therefore their social status contradicted the ideals of masculine control and dominance. For Staples, black women’s position as a matriarch signified not only a larger system of black inequality but, again in agreement with Moynihan, the reversal of gender roles. He appeared to understand the homosexual implications of Moynihan’s analysis, as well as some of the studies upon which the report was based, including Pettigrew’s work, which he characterized as a study that “purported to show how black males are de-masculinized and in fact may be latent homosexuals.”Footnote ³⁴

Staples continued to press his anti-Moynihan perspective in issues of the new intellectual organ, The Black Scholar. When author Clement Vontress addressed Moynihan’s “myth of demasculinization” and carefully argued that “the child may acquire the proper sexual identity in the absence of one parent, or he may acquire the wrong identity in the presence of both, depending on the psychological atmosphere and interactive patterns of the home,” Staples stepped in to criticize him for even raising the issue.Footnote ³⁵ He wrote that his article “was the Moynihan report reincarnated . . . a brief indictment of slavery and racism to justify [the] subsequent slander of the black population.” The slander in this case, argued Staples, was acceptance of “the decadent literature purporting to show that in every black man there is a woman trying to get out.” Staples accused Vontress of accepting the “fallacy of black matriarchy and emasculated black male theory” and concluding that exhibitions of manhood reflected “latent homosexual” status. But Vontress rightly responded that it was a general psychological theory that social and economic impotence “leads to a host of problems.” In either case, what was latent in Moynihan’s report had become a set of well-known references and suppositions about family structure and the incidence of black homosexuality.Footnote ³⁶

Whether or not Black Power activists were ultimately responsible for discrediting the report, the matriarchy thesis reverberated among some black female activists. In a 1970 collection of feminist writings, The Black Woman: An Anthology, several contributors questioned the prioritizing of the attainment of black masculinity in discourses of black liberation and cultural nationalism. Frances Beale charged that “those who are exerting their ‘manhood’ by telling Black women to step back into a domestic, submissive role are assuming a counter-revolutionary position,” while Toni Cade linked female oppression to a distant past when African matriarchal and communal structures were replaced by the concept of property in the “Motherland.” Although none of these authors in the anthology mentioned the report by name, another black feminist writing in The Black Scholar, Barbara Sizemore, explicitly rejected its finding as detrimental to mobilization for empowerment. According to her 1973 essay, “If black boys are to be socialized as warriors, black men must enter into the dialogue which will define the relationships linking black men to their environment and their land.”Footnote ³⁷

Into the 1970s, academic feminists and women’s studies scholars criticized the matriarchy argument, recirculating the controversies in classrooms and conferences across the nation. They criticized Moynihan for imposing the values of the white middle-class on the family life of others, countering with the argument that single black mothers sustained complex networks of adaptive family structures that compensated for absent husbands. In what became a classic text in urban ethnography, All Our Kin, the feminist scholar Carol Stack claimed that the critique of matriarchal structures “seem to imply that female-headed households and illegitimacy are symptomatic of broken homes and family disorganization. These studies failed to account for the great variety of domestic strategies in urban black communities.” Despite calling for a kind of relativism in the recognition of alternate gender roles and relations, Stack chose not to discuss either homosexuality or masculinity, and barely touched upon the masculinity model that had driven Moynihan’s pathology thesis in the first place. In effect, this feminist valorization of black community life silenced an emergent albeit negative discussion of the effeminate black man. Feminist scholarship that normalized the black female-headed household overlooked the possibilities for black gay youth that the report signified.Footnote ³⁸

By the 1970s, most liberals abandoned the matriarchy thesis and rejected the concept of pathology, while African American leaders carried on a pro-family defense of the community. In a 1978 article, Staples acknowledged that “family background” determined the shape of masculinity, leaving open the possibility of matriarchal-caused pathology, but he now focused less on homosexuality than on the reform of compensatory hypersexuality, which was a core assumption of the culture-of-poverty scholarship informing public policy. Now he wrote about the “association of masculinity with hypersexuality and violence,” reorienting his analysis from a defense or explanation of emasculation and matriarchy toward questions of permissiveness and promiscuity that were clearly heterosexual in nature. Staples viewed black and white sexual attitudes as deriving from distinctive sets of moral constraints and authorities, but in this later writing he seemed to avoid further discussion of homosexuality.Footnote ³⁹

Another important figure in the debates on family policy, writing over the same span of time as Staples, was the black psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. A professor in the Medical School at Harvard University, Poussaint published frequently on topics in African American life and became a major public intellectual in the 1980s, when he served as a script consultant for Bill Cosby’s A Different World (a television program that sought to portray respectable, normal middle-class family life). In the 1970s, he was a public expert on the family, and authored long features for Ebony magazine, several of which weighed in on the merits of the sexual revolution. “Today, the long tradition of repressed sexual fantasy is surfacing and some whites are indulging in sexual overkill, wallowing in an orgy of smut, pornography, and obscenity,” wrote Poussaint, and black men no longer signified excessive sexual potency or the distorted eroticism produced by racist societies. Because the sexual revolution had encouraged the expression of erotic behavior, it also expanded the options of acceptable behavior beyond a strict code of sexual respectability among African Americans.Footnote ⁴⁰

A half-dozen years after Moynihan’s report first made headline news, Poussaint wrote that he doubted the validity of claims that “blacks have a greater incidence of male homosexuality than whites” due to “woman-headed households” and “a lack of male role models for growing black boys.”Footnote ⁴¹ Concerned that the positive aspects of Black Power manhood would be conflated with the old image of sexual savagery, Poussaint cautioned that “not all black men are super-studs,” and reported on sexual dysfunction: “significant incidence of homosexuality, impotence, and premature ejaculation among black men.” He suggested that African American homosexuality was linked to a “deep feeling of masculine inadequacy and/or castration fear.” Poussaint appeared to consider homosexuality a sexual deficiency and disturbance at a time when academic social scientists increasingly labeled it an acceptable social role or societal script.Footnote ⁴²

Over the past two decades, the rise of multiculturalism and the growth of gay identity politics have extended into African American urban communities, while the crisis of AIDS urgently focused demographic research and policy analysis on African American male sexual identities. With the rise of queer studies has come black queer studies, and new media outlets have increased the capacity for black gay men to resist the level of silence and invisibility that characterized the black public sphere at the height of the Moynihan controversy. Yet too often, academic social science inquiry and policymaking on issues related to African American men remain aloof from these and other shifts in sexuality discourse, developing scholarly analyses of race and poverty from much the same hetero-normative vantage as the generation of the Moynihan Report. In 2009, The American Academy of Political Science released The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections that surveyed the social landscape in the past four decades. Authored by social scientists, as well as historical figures involved in the Moynihan controversy, many of the articles offered a powerful moment of reflection and cutting-edge analyses on race, gender, and poverty based on impressive qualitative, demographic, and institutional research.

But in my view, social science predilections and normative agendas distorted the memory of the controversy, particularly the sexual politics. For example, Douglas Massey sought to defend Moynihan by arguing that he was writing in a “prefeminist era,” and had suffered unjustly from feminist criticism and the denial of the matriarchal disadvantage. But (white) feminists were only one among several groups critical of the report. In separate statistical analyses, Harry Holzer and Frank Furstenberg stressed the pathology arising from black male unemployment in order to advance their research on worsening demographic and economic conditions, and yet Moynihan had advocated not merely jobs but training in manhood. And Kathryn Edin, Laura Tach, and Ronald Mincy latched on to Moynihan’s concern with female-headed households to outline policies to reform African American fatherhood, an important trend in social science approaches to inner-city male communities. Yet some fathers are also gay or bisexual.Footnote ⁴³ A particular memory of the Moynihan report has continued to structure intellectual inquiry: the myth that Moynihan had focused on mothers rather than emasculated men, that the performance of black masculinity was always incompatible with homosexuality, and that race, class, and gender inequalities operate in the inner city without regard to sexuality. In many ways, homosexuality is no longer controversial in American popular culture, but the apparent refusal of leading policy analysts to address obvious questions of desire seems as entangled with misunderstanding and deflection as it was in 1965.