Sliced Bread Writes the New New Testament

Modern pop begins with Little Richard and “Tutti Frutti” (1955): a song whose original lyrics celebrated anal sex, yet whose explosive energy would become the foundation of rock and roll and, by extension, popular culture itself. This is the central paradox of pop. The artist who inaugurated its sonic, visual and affective grammar did so through a form of queer expression that transformed modern culture while remaining structurally illegible. Little Richard did not simply invent a sound; he established a cultural model in which Black performance could remake the world, but only through disembodiment.

Little Richard and the Big Bang of Pop Culture (1955 - 1980)

This essay traces the first twenty-five years of pop culture through a close interrogation of its foundational relationship to Black masculinity. Beginning with Little Richard’s emergence in the mid-1950s as the loud, flamboyant Black gay ingenue of rock and roll, and culminating in the divergent trajectories of Prince’s Dirty Mind and Luther Vandross’ solo debut album in 1980, it argues that modern pop culture was inaugurated by Black quare expression and built through the simultaneous centrality and disembodiment of Black male subjectivity - the capacity to exist as a fully embodied, desiring and politically legible self. Drawing on quare theory, Black feminist thought and cultural history, I locate this founding contradiction within the longer histories of slavery, minstrelsy and Black religion, arguing that the very conditions which enabled Black men to create popular culture also denied them the possibility of inhabiting social reality as political subjects.

To understand this paradox, we must first consider what it means to be recognised as a political subject within queer life. In dominant queer theory and activism - often shaped by white, Western epistemologies - political subjectivity is conferred through legibility: the ability to narrate identity, desire and resistance in ways that are socially and institutionally intelligible. Visibility, agency and self-narration become signs of political life. But these markers are not neutral; they are racialised. Queer theory tends to universalise queerness as subversive fluidity - often drawing on performativity (Butler, 2006) - while flattening the ways race and (anti-)Blackness condition queer existence. For Black queer men, whose embodiment has long been distorted by spectacle and surveillance, legibility is not a given. Their queerness may saturate the culture, but it circulates as aesthetic excess - not as politicised selfhood. The question, then, is not whether Black queer men are political, but whether queer politics knows how to recognise them as such - a failure rooted in anti-Blackness that queer theory has rarely addressed (Johnson, 2001).

This is why quare theory is central to this essay. Coined by E. Patrick Johnson, quare theory rejects abstraction in favour of theorising from the flesh - from the bodily, affective and social experiences of Black queer life. It is not simply a racialised add-on to queer theory, but a conceptual reorientation. In the vein of Black feminist thinkers such as Hortense Spillers, Johnson reveals how gender and humanity have never been stable starting points for Black people. Spillers’ concept of “ungendering” captures how the enslaved were not misgendered but stripped of gender entirely - reduced to flesh (Spillers, 1987), outside the categories white queer theory presumes. Quare theory enables a critique of normative sexuality, but of the foundational violences that make normativity itself inaccessible to Black queer subjects. This essay extends Johnson’s theory by arguing that the historical condition of Blackness itself is structurally quare: produced through dispossession of a normative gender expression long before questions of sexual identity emerge.

Under slavery and its afterlife, Blackness becomes synonymous with the breakdown of normative categories - of kinship, gender, time and even humanity itself. Black studies and Afro-pessimist thinkers have long argued that Black people are rendered always already queer - not through chosen deviance, but through structural positioning outside the normative. For Black queer men, traits like flamboyance, fluidity and excess are not read as radical subversion, but more confirmation of a longstanding cultural expectation: that the Black body is incoherent, excessive, and available for spectacle. As quare theory insists, we must theorise from the flesh - from the embodied realities of survival, distortion, and erasure - to understand how Black queer life operates not on the margins of culture, but at its very centre, denied political legibility all the while.

This structural illegibility is inseparable from the logics of racial capitalism, which has always extracted value from Blackness - not just through labour, but through performance. As Black flesh was commodified under slavery, so too were its cultural expressions under freedom. Popular culture is not a departure from this logic; it is its mutation. The plantation becomes the stage; the whip becomes the camera. These mechanisms adapt and evolve through history, but the system persists - turning Black aesthetics into value while rendering an incomplete concept of Black subjectivity.

Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “scenes of subjection” makes visible how violence lives on through spectacle. Black suffering is not erased but stylised and made legible through tropes that reproduce the conditions of domination. Minstrelsy offers a historicised example of this: translating plantation violence into exaggerated dialects, grotesque gestures, and gendered caricature. It didn’t just depict Blackness; it disciplined it - scripting the terms on which it could appear and ensuring that representation was never affirmation.

Popular culture thus emerges not as a site of liberation, but as a scene of regulated presence: one where Blackness is hypervisible yet politically inert, expressive yet evacuated of self.

Tropes of flamboyance, excess, and gender instability were not marginal embellishments - they were central. The minstrel stage birthed a version of Blackness that was already queered: gendered as chaotic, unstable and overly emotive; feminised, mocked, and desexualised. This paradoxical template - prefiguring many of queer culture’s aesthetic signatures - was stripped of any claim to subjectivity or politics. This is not a peripheral inheritance - it is the cultural logic that most acutely limits quare men’s cultural footprint. Their performances of camp, fluidity, and gender play do not transgress; they fulfil a script. Their gestures are rendered legible as spectacle, never as self. Unlike their female counterparts, whose expressions may at times register as embodied or politicised, quare men are confined to a model that permits performance without personhood, visibility without witness. Little Richard does not simply exemplify this model - he defines it. 

Little Richard did not just influence popular music; he created it. Rock and roll, and by extension popular music, is inseparable from his aesthetic: the electrifying voice, sequinned suits, gender play, and ecstatic performance that became the blueprint for generations. Artists from Elvis Presley to David Bowie did not just imitate him - they were made possible by him. But what they could later perform as embodied experimentation, he could only offer as dislocated spectacle. His flamboyance was not disruptive; it was foundational, precisely because it reaffirmed a racialised system that demanded Blackness signify through excess, incoherence and dispossession.

Richard’s centrality makes the system’s exclusions most visible. His queerness was not erased despite his fame, but for quare men, queerness does not produce legibility - it produces spectacle.  because it was never legible within white queer theory’s frameworks of transgressive visibility. Quare theory insists that visibility without embodiment is not recognition; it is extraction. Richard did not emerge and then disappear with his multiple oscillations between gospel & secular and his public renunciations of same-sex desire, he was never permitted to fully appear. His queerness did not disrupt the system; it confirmed its ability to consume Blackness as aesthetic labour. His very being became the infrastructure of quare cultural form - usable, foundational, but uninhabitable.

They demonstrate the structural impossibility of embodiment for quare men under this system. His career, among the most expansive in pop history, maps the very limits of political subjectivity for Black queer artists. He sought to exceed the model, but in doing so, revealed its deepest logics. Pop culture was not merely influenced by him - it was built on him, on the disembodied performance of Black queerness.

To grasp the full stakes of this, we must situate Richard within a broader genealogy of Black musical expression, shaped not only by colonial domination but also by spiritual traditions within Black communities. The conditions that defined his career are not anomalies; they are echoes of longer histories in which Black sound functioned both as resistance and regulation. While popular culture aestheticised Black suffering, sonic traditions like spirituals, gospel, and blues were forged as survival - ways to assert presence under erasure. Gospel music most clearly exemplifies the tension between expression and disembodiment. While its power lies in affective intensity and sonic excess, its theological foundation is rooted in colonial logics. Christianity, introduced through enslavement and empire, cast the Black body as a site of sin, temptation, and discipline. Liberation was framed not as reclaiming the flesh, but escaping it. Gospel inherited this logic: its ideal performance is one of surrender - catching the spirit, being overtaken, undone. The voice is celebrated, but only as it departs from selfhood. What appears as spiritual ecstasy is often a performance of disembodiment: an aesthetic that permits emotional expression while displacing the self that feels.

This structure did not obscure Black queerness so much as absorb it - not as identity, but as stylised performance. For Black men, flamboyance, vocal range and emotional abandon were signs of spiritual openness, not sexual or political selfhood. Gender transgression was legible only as divine inspiration. In this sense, gospel made space for the quare presence of Black men - but only under a theology that sanctioned expression while denying embodiment. Gospel becomes simultaneously a site of faith and the crucible in which a model of Black quare male performance is forged: one that legitimises intensity and gender play only through disembodiment. This logic, rooted in colonial violence, insists that feeling ascends while flesh remains unspeakable. Little Richard inherits this framework and transposes it into the Big Bang of rock and roll - a sonic rupture that remade pop culture, even as it carried the same disembodied model that birthed it. His flamboyance, vocal pyrotechnics and sexual ambiguity electrify the genre, under a structure that insists his queerness remain aesthetic, not political. From gospel to pop, a model emerges: one that centres Black queer men as sonic innovators while excusing their embodied subjectivity This tension - between expression and erasure - did not end with Richard. It reverberates most visibly in gospel music, where the disembodied model of performance persists.

Even the King of Gospel, James Cleveland - widely understood to be gay - was never named as such. This is not because his queerness was hidden or translated, but because, under the theological logic of gospel, Blackness itself is already coded as excessive, emotional, and spiritually expressive. In this framework, markers that might otherwise signify queerness - vocal abandon, flamboyance, affective intensity - are not read as political or sexual identity, but as signs of divine possession. This is not recognition; it is containment. The embodied realities of same-sex desire remain unspoken, even as their sonic traces are sanctified.

Gospel therefore sustains the same model this essay has traced throughout: one in which Black quare male expression is permitted only through disembodiment. It is a structure made explicit in figures like Donnie McClurkin, whose same-sex attraction is described as a spiritual affliction - a burden overcome through devotion. His success, like Cleveland’s legacy, does not depend on the denial of queerness, but on its continual displacement. In gospel, as in pop, Black quare male subjectivity is permitted to surface only as labour - as voice without body, emotion without identity, sound without self. As Spillers reminds us, the Black male body has historically been denied stable gendered meaning - it is flesh, not personhood. Gospel does not merely silence queerness; it sanctifies its displacement. The voice may transcend, but the self must ascend with it - leaving behind the body, the desire, the politics.

In contrast, Black quare women were able to convert gospel’s affective grammar into embodied, erotic, and resistant expression. Angela Davis, in her analysis of ‘blues women’ like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, shows how these artists redirected gospel’s moans and wails toward articulations of sexual autonomy and queer desire. Their music did not simply express feeling - it claimed it. Same-sex desire, as in Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues”, was not hidden but declared. Here, gospel’s spiritual ecstasy met blues’ bodily intimacy, enabling Black quare womanhood to enter erotic and political terrain.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe extends this genealogy. Though rarely named as queer, Tharpe moved between gospel and rock in ways that allowed her sound - and by extension, her quareness - to inhabit body, stage, and legacy. Her 1944 recording “Strange Things Happening Every Day” is widely cited as the first rock and roll record. While her expression remained constrained by the theological expectations of gospel, her movement between sacred and secular allowed her to perform quareness as presence, not just performance. This was not freedom, but it was a different mode of legibility - one shaped by the specific logics of gendered anti-Blackness.

This distinction - between disembodiment and embodiment - is not a hierarchy of freedom, but a different configuration of violence. As Saidiya Hartman reminds us, scenes of subjection are spaces where Black suffering is stylised, regulated and consumed - but they can also become scenes of subversion. For Black women, racial-sexual tropes like hypervisibility and deviance opened paradoxical routes to legibility. Expressions of masculinity, erotic agency and emotional excess were not unintelligible; they were expected. This allowed Black quare women to perform quareness as embodied - to inhabit desire in ways structurally foreclosed to Black quare men. In the hands (and mouths) of artists like Rainey, Smith, and Tharpe, the tools of subjection became technologies of feeling, desire and critique. Their work shows that even within structures designed to contain, Black quare women forged new cultural forms - scenes of subversion, where spectacle became strategy. This legacy lives on in the work of Black female artists who continue to quare the lines within contemporary culture.Their performances of pleasure, femme assertiveness, and erotic play affirm that Black embodiment can now be seen, heard, and celebrated at scale.

Janet Jackson quared pop music for good with The Velvet Rope (1997) - a pop project which stimulates such an abundance of socio-musical innovation and radical potential that makes it popular music’s real Thriller. Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis offer the comprehensive reimagining of pop music in its Black and most complete form creating an effectual door to allow pop culture to enter the Y2K in style. Janet Jackson’s discography since her landmark Control (1986) has been welding together decades of Black musical inheritance - rock, funk, house, new jack swing, queer club culture and electronic experimentation - which refined into a concept project where embodiment itself becomes pop’s central concern. Desire, shame, pleasure, depression, kink, intimacy and queer affiliation no longer exist as coded excess but as explicit themes. Pop music ceases to merely borrow Black quare aesthetics and instead opens an effectual door and begins to imagine Black quare embodiment as a source of artistic and cultural possibility. Missy Elliott extends the quarrying of pop into its visual language, fully embodying sexuality in a way that directly harkens back to the Blues Woman. Like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith before her, Missy refuses the disciplinary boundaries of a desirable femininity whilst still being aggressively embodied - exemplified by avant-bhangra pop classic “Get Ur Freak On”; recognised as the greatest song of the 21st century by Rolling Stone. Her body is not presented for passive consumption but continually remade through equally transgressive and sensual performance expanding the aesthetic possibilities of popular culture. If Janet made embodiment pop’s central concern, Missy demonstrated that the Black female body could become the primary site through which pop’s visual grammar itself was rewritten.

This genealogy continues through embodied Black queer female artists including Janelle Monáe, kwn, Victoria Monét and Doechii, whose work demonstrates the continued expansion of quare embodiment within contemporary popular culture. Their performances of pleasure, femme assertiveness, erotic autonomy and gender play inherit a tradition in which Black women’s bodies can become sites not simply of representation, but of aesthetic and political production. It’s attributed that Janet Jackson’s “If” contributed to the rise in cunnilingus.

For Black quare men, the possibility of being recognised as political subjects - of being witnessed in their fullness - remains structurally foreclosed. Their aesthetic labour saturates culture, yet their bodies remain unwelcome in its politics. This is the enduring logic of the cultural system Little Richard helped animate: one in which Black quare expression becomes foundational yet illegible. Often remembered as a marginalised innovator, Little Richard’s erasure is not simply historical forgetting or appropriation, but the inevitable outcome of a cultural model that permits style while denying subjectivity. He built the stage but could never stand on it as a whole person.

The artist who most fully embodies this legacy is not another Black queer man, but Prince. And it is precisely this fulfilment - dazzling, total and politically hollow - that reveals the system’s limits. Prince’s flamboyance, gender play and sexual ambiguity were not deviations from Richard’s template; they were its logical extension. But unlike Richard, Prince was never asked to renounce his expression, because it was never legible as truly homosexual in a political sense. His gestures did not threaten; they titillated. His quareness did not appear as a challenge to heteronormativity, because it never asked to be witnessed. It remained an aestheticised excess that circulated as aura, not identity. It could be consumed precisely because it did not demand recognition.

Prince was allowed to be everything Richard was - loud, glittering, sonically explosive - without incurring the structural penalties of queerness. That is the clearest evidence that this  system does not exclude Black queer men by omission, but by design. It absorbs their innovations while denying their selves. It celebrates their labour while evacuating its meaning.

This becomes clearer still when we consider artists for whom queerness was not aesthetic but lived. In 1980, the same year Prince released Dirty Mind - a landmark in sexually ambiguous performance - Luther Vandross released his debut album. But unlike Prince, Vandross could not flirt with eroticism. His voice conveyed longing and tenderness, but his desire had to remain nameless. Even the suggestion was too much. For Black queer men like Vandross, proximity to embodiment was already a risk. For Luther, the system demanded and consumed a disembodied voice: which is why the true affective power behind Vandross and his music is the fact it’s infused with a longing that could never be located. This is the model: one in which Black quare men shape the sound, style and soul of pop culture but their subjectivity - their capacity to be recognised as whole, desiring, accountable beings - is foreclosed.

The same system that denies them legibility also obscures both harm and violence. Harm is not synonymous with violence: violence names an act or structure of domination, while harm names the injury it produces. A culture can therefore inflict profound harm without overt acts of violence simply by rendering certain lives unintelligible. Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, and Sean Combs have all been accused of sexual abuse - not only against women, but against men. These are not aberrations; they are consequences of a structure that renders Black queer male embodiment unspeakable. When queerness cannot be named, harm cannot be confronted and violence cannot be recognised. This logic persists even in gospel, where James Cleveland - revered as the King of Gospel - was accused of sexually assaulting his stepson and knowingly transmitting HIV. These acts are not merely individual failings; they are embedded in a cultural model that turns quareness into spectacle while denying personhood. The sexual abuse of men, including boys, remains unspeakable not because it is rare, but because the Black male body is not permitted to register violence. Even where violence is absent, the refusal of legibility is itself harmful; where violence occurs, that same refusal renders it culturally unintelligible. Like desire, violence becomes stylised but never witnessed.

This is the final expression of the model this essay has laid bare. It is not just that Black quare men are denied political recognition - it is that their very capacity to be witnessed is interrupted. They may shape culture, move millions, electrify genres - but their subjectivity remains deferred. Queerness, when routed through Black male bodies, is permitted to exist only as labour, never as life. And yet, by tracing this model - by naming its logics and excavating its effects - we begin to make space for something else: a politics of witnessing. One that allows us to celebrate Black pop cultural innovation whilst simultaneously recognising the flesh that produced it. That politics does not simply expand pop culture, but rethinks what queer politics must be if it is to include those who built it. To queer the culture without quaring the structures that disembody Black men is not true liberation. This essay has not simply explored the impact of Black queer male artists; it has exposed the system that renders their presence foundational yet politically illegible. In doing so, it has illuminated the urgent task before us: to make legible what has always been present, and to recognise in Black quare life not just style but subjectivity. Little Richard did not simply begin rock and roll. He inaugurated the cultural universe we now call pop. To understand its history, we must finally recognise not only the sounds and styles Black quare men created, but the subjectivities through which they are created.