The Sex Work of Malcolm X
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Sex Work, History, Politics, Race, Massage

The Sex Work of Malcolm X

A long-awaited biography, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, came out in 2011, and readers eager to learn about the icon of black masculinity faced unexpected scenes. A teenage Malcolm did some erotic work on a rich white guy, and there were sleepovers with someone named ‘Willie Mae’.

The phrase “homosexual lover” particularly stung, if even as a backward glance at Malcolm’s early hustling days. There was more in the book to upset hero worship. Marable realized his subject had been a highly theatrical being, with “layers of personality,” generating characters, “‘Malcolm X’ being just the best known.”

It might’ve been seen as time to get to know a fuller Malcolm. But the task became: dismiss that sexy scene with the white guy.

Malcolm’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, interviewed on NPR, protested the description of “a bisexual relationship, a homo — you know, he had a gay lover who was an elder white businessman, I think, in his late 50s when my father was in his teens.”

But I was struck by the possibility of Malcolm, on the way to his transformative critique of race, sex and power, pursuing and benefiting from time with a white gay man and a black transvestite.

How could a part-time rent boy be responsible for the revolutionary transformation of black masculinity in the twentieth century?

The evidence was tough. Marable had found the Autobiography to be “highly exaggerated” and maybe a conscious effort at mythmaking more than memoir. But some scenes might’ve been about Malcolm—in disguise. Like the story about ‘Rudy’, a “pretty boy type.” As the passage reads:

Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.

But it appears Malcolm was the “pretty boy,” and the man was William Paul Lennon, a wealthy Bostonian for whom he’d gone to work as a kind of houseboy in 1946. Here Marable was citing the research of a scholar named Bruce Perry who’d done biographical digging on Malcolm for years. A source told him Lennon paid “to disrobe him, place him on his bed, sprinkle him with talcum powder, and massage him until he reached his climax.”

Perry’s research, published in journal articles in the 1980s, ended up in a 1991 biography, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. It caused a bit of an uproar, with the sex stuff highlighted.

Spike Lee, then filming a bio-pic, Malcolm X, called the book “blatant character assassination,” as Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, called it “‘an unfortunate attack by a white author ‘who is no friend.’” Some black scholars accepted there was something there which would have to be sorted out. As Gerald Early writes in a review for the L.A. Times:

As a boy, Malcolm had been called a sissy, as a young hustler he apparently had some homosexual liaisons of which he refused to speak later in life. By accusing the civil rights leaders of being less than men, Malcolm was able to conceal his own inability to find a suitable ideology which could challenge the white power structure. Much of the Civil Rights movement was in fact driven by black men’s struggle with their masculinity, and for many young men, Malcolm was the model of manhood.

It was a tough pill to swallow. And mostly, it was spit out.

Black male readers felt close to Malcolm. In a 1992 essay, “Malcolm’s Mythmaking,” David Bradley relays a common story of young black men, “young and earnest but callow, and oh, so confused,” finding the Autobiography, and “somehow that book…took hold of them. Got inside them.”

To consider the possible gay origins of this ability, then, was tricky.

Bruce Perry seems to have died with his book rejected, now long out of print. In 1998, a memoir with letters and memories from Malcolm’s half-sister Ella was published which affirmed the story of the rich white guy—or as she puts it, “one of those decadent whites whom he had been hustling.”

What was Malcolm’s sexuality?

Did he have one? He got out of military service in 1943 by saying he was homosexual, which doesn’t always mean it’s true. But there’s evidence he’d been having erotic experiences, when young, with boys and girls, and later, men and women.

Then there was Willie Mae. As Perry reported:

One of Malcolm’s roommates had jokingly suggested that he might be able to raise some rent money by striking a deal with a fellow boarder called “Miss Jones.” Shortly thereafter, the roommate began noticing that Malcolm wasn’t sleeping in the room they had been sharing. Instead, he began stealing down the hallway to Miss Jones’s room. But Miss Jones, who sported a bright yellow jumper with matching slacks and umbrella, was not a woman. He was a well-known transvestite named Willie Mae. Malcolm’s roommate concluded that Willie Mae was sleeping with him.

Stepping back, we might note that Malcolm was later an expert in fashionable poses, as were key to getting him media prominence. As the scholar Carol Tulloch writes in 2000 study of his clothes: “Malcolm X was acutely aware of the powerful poetry of self-adornment.” It might’ve been nice to mention his early association with a ‘well-known transvestite’.

But scholars mostly downplayed anything “queer.” In a 2013 paper, Khary Polk tries to identify the problem faced.

How could a part-time rent boy be responsible for the revolutionary transformation of black masculinity in the twentieth century? For far too many scholars, this remains an unthinkable and thus unspeakable query unfit for public address, and politics of respectability insist upon strategic silences that foreclose any meaningful discussion of the matter.

In 2017, a scholar named Christopher Phelps came along with with a paper, “The Sexuality of Malcolm X,” in the Journal of American Studies, that claimed to go through the evidence of Malcolm’s homoerotic contacts. The mission was to find a sexual category for him, and the conclusion was: “straight.”

Malcolm, Phelps said, was “gay-for-pay,” as the phrase goes.

But was there more evidence than he had admitted? In the Autobiography, the “Rudy” character has knowledge of the sexual underworld, and works with “predominantly old men, past the age of ability to conduct any kind of ordinary sex, always hunting for new ways to be ‘sensitive.’”

This seems to be a profile of a busy male escort.

One might wonder why Malcolm seems to know such a person, and be interested in such details—then to pass them along to his readers whom he would understand to be anti-gay. It’s a queer situation.

Malcolm’s story in the ‘Autobiography’ is that he finds himself in prison as a disciple of Elijah Muhammed.

He says this was a path of celibacy. “From the time I entered prison until I married, about twelve years later, because of Mr. Muhammad’s influence upon me, I had never touched a woman.”

There might be other takes. As bell hooks writes in a 1990 essay:

He had probably engaged in all manner of illicit taboo sexual activity, some of which he describes in his autobiography. It is possible to see in Malcolm’s celibacy a desire to suppress and deny those earlier years of hedonistic sexual practice, the memory of which clearly evoked shame and guilt. Celibacy alongside rigid standards for sexual behavior may have been Malcolm’s way of erasing all trace of that sexual past.

Marable mentioned that in 1959, Malcolm writes a letter to Elijah Muhammed about marital troubles. The letter was circulated, and Malcolm found himself becoming the butt of jokes about “sexual nonperformance.”

In May 2017 — three months before Phelps’ paper was published — the letter was put up for auction at MomentsInTime.com. Reporting on it, the New York Post notes it was typed, and quotes from the letter. Malcolm says that his wife said he’d “never given her any real satisfaction” and “if I didn’t watch out she was going to embarrass me and herself (which under questioning she later said she was going to seek satisfaction elsewhere).”

The Post had a second excerpt of Malcolm writing:

The main source of our troubles was based upon SEX. She placed a great deal more stress upon it than I was physically capable of doing. One day, she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction . . . [She] outright told me that I was impotent . . . and I was like an old man (not able to engage in the act long enough to satisfy her) . . . Her remarks like this were very heartbreaking to me.

Under such antagonistic conditions, I have to suspect she’d be accusing him of being gay. As Lenny Bruce was saying in his comedy routines of the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Chicks are always calling you a faggot.”

And it begins to seem like an alternate profile of his life, a gay history, could be possible. The only time, in photos, Malcolm seems really happy is when he’s hanging out with Muhammed Ali. The relationship is charted in Blood Brothers (2016) by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, which highlights a quote from Ali’s physician: “Malcolm X and Ali were like very close brothers. It was almost as if they were in love with each other.”

Ali himself says of Malcolm: “I fell in love with him after watching him on television . . .” Though not expecting to find the two men being sexual, I am unsure how the interaction between them could not be called a love story.

Malcolm doesn’t really read as ‘straight’. He was often in dialogue with women, and, ever-evolving, something of a proto-feminist by the end.

He’ll throw in talk about male power and responsibilities, but the real code of masculinity is typically about punishing, policing, and eliminating rivals. Malcolm speaks, rather, of all people having agency, power, and equal standing.

This wasn’t coming from a consciousness of gender. It’s a spiritual idea.

The massage scene with Lennon is interesting as a study in power.

Malcolm—or ‘Rudy’—would treat the white man like a baby, laying him on the bed, sprinkling baby powder. A strange scene.

It’s known about mostly because he’d gotten in trouble with the law, and from prison, hoped that Lennon would come bail him out. All the evidence for the connection arises from a need to explain why a feminine white man would be paying him such attention.

I go through the evidence. A letter he’d sent from prison, in 1946, to his half-sister explained that Lennon “would pay them to rub powder over his body…” Perry’s source, Macolm’s friend (Malcolm Jarvis), called Lennon “the queer” and “Mrs.,” and he also said that ‘massage’ to ejaculation was involved.

Was Malcolm just doing it for a buck? It’s not like anyone knows, but how about this? The powdering scene has Lennon, a white man, offering himself as exposed and weak. Was that interesting to Malcolm, the future black radical? I might think so.

Perhaps it even reverses history? I think of a passage in Vincent Woodard’s The Delectable Negro, a 2014 study of erotic use of slaves:

The naked, unintelligible slave body served as fodder for the white imagination. It allowed whites to entertain the idea of the Negro as the lady of the race, as passively subject to the more aggressive will and ways of the European. It also reinforced the idea of the slave as infantile.

For Malcolm to see a white male body as feminine and passive had to be startling.

But the powder — or power — he is given, he learns, must be more humane than what white people had practiced. He approaches the man maternally, lifting this helpless being as an infant, powdering him. That powerful whiteness now . . . simply dust.

A thought occurs to me? Maybe life tries to give you experiences you, and the world, need.