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Expanding on the notion of the primal “brown body” mediating gay modernity, this chapter argues that this brown body (frequently, though not exclusively, embodied as “Latino”) mediates gay male shame. Andy Warhol’s film, Screen Test #2, Douglas Crimp’s essay on that film, “Mario Montez, For Shame,” and the “Gay Shame” conference held at the University of Michigan in 2003, which opened with a showing of the Warhol film, provide the primary texts for analysis. Crimp (and “Gay Shame” by extension) deploys monolithic constructions of “Puerto Rican” and “Catholic” in order to project and universalize (the urbane, white gay man’s) shame onto Montez’s othered (or browned) body. The chapter argues that Montez, rather than merely providing the passive object of Warhol’s experiments in camera-technique and exposure, skillfully pirates the film’s authority in ways that remain illegible to Crimp’s construction of gay shame.

This chapter situates Tomas Gutiérrez Alea’s film Fresa y chocolate (1993) next to José Martí’s essay, “Nuestra America” (1891), in order to explore the entanglements of race and sexuality in each text. Considering how gay male spectatorship in the US projects a problematic variety of cosmopolitanism onto the film; alternatively, the chapter insists on reading the film within its more local context, situating it as a contemporary expression of Martí’s foundational yet anxious nationalism. The theme of seduction in Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)—the gay Diego’s seduction of the communist youth David—mirrors both the project of reconciliation to which the Cuban state deployed the film internationally as well as the Anglo American projection of erotic desire onto a fetishized Cuba. The global taste for queer cinema (Gabilondo) then directs us back to modern gay male identity’s need for and production of the brown body.

Civil War soldiers were highly musical. In fact, soldiers created one of the Union's national hymn, “John Brown's Body.” This chapter discusses the two leading patriotic songs of the Union. During the Civil War, “John Brown's Body” was the most beloved song in the Army of the Potomac. Its only competitor in the western armies was George Frederick Root's “The Battle Cry of Freedom.”

This chapter focuses on Vincent Benet's epic poem, John Brown's Body, which unpredictably swallowed the marketplace whole in a matter of weeks. In its structure, content, and message, the poem mediated long-standing divisions, not just those that had raged between W. E. B. Du Bois and Oswald Garrison Villard, but even the conflict that had consumed the Union and the Confederacy some seventy years before. While Benet's choice of protagonist might indicate another hagiography, John Brown's Body situated the infamous abolitionist in a broader narrative of reunion and patriotic destiny. Just as Du Bois and Villard urged readers of The Crisis to wrestle with John Brown's meaning, Benet snatched Brown from their hands and gave him a symbolic role in a triumphal story of American progress.

This conclusion discusses Alfred E. Williams' attempts to discern why songs such as “Dixie,” “John Brown's Body, ” “Just before the Battle”, “Mother, ” and “When This Cruel War Is Over” provided more resonance and meaning during the Civil War. Whitman concluded that there was something about them that can only be described as the “singing element”, setting these songs apart from other literary and artistic forms.