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A Queer Reading Of The Autobiography Of Malcolm X
  Malcolm X and Alex Haley I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, first and foremost, as a collaborative text, a text written by Alex Haley based on numerous interviews conducted over the last two tumultuous years of Malcolm X's life. The autobiography is a chronologically-ordered, mythically-interpreted and literarily-shaped first-person account of Malcolm X's life; alongside the issues and experiences of racism for which the text has been so widely read and studied, it is shot through with anxieties about sexuality and gender, with sexist and sometimes misogynistic characterizations and attitudes. Appended to the autobiographical text is a seventy-odd-page Epilogue wherein Alex Haley reveals enough of the collaborative dynamic to suggest that his--the tale writer's--role in converting oral life narratives to autobiographical text was considerable. I would like to focus on the collaborative nature of this autobiographical project, aided by current critical theories of collaboration, as the best way in to the text's anxieties about sex and gender; ultimately, in sharpening my focus on the homoerotics and homosociality of the collaboration, I suggest a queer reading of Malcolm X.
In Haley's Epilogue we learn that a publisher approached him to write Malcolm's autobiography; how once Malcolm's intentions--that the book exalt and proselytize for his spiritual mentor--were laid down through contractual guarantees and through Elijah Muhammad's own blessing, the interviewing process began; how getting Malcolm to open up about his life--rather than merely spouting Black Muslim doctrine--was like trying to get blood from a stone; how the interviewer took psychoanalytic clues from the interviewee's doodled notes and broke open his subject with a well-timed query about 'Mother'; how Malcolm began to trust his black writer - at first twenty-five percent, later seventy; how stories poured out of Malcolm onto Alex's blank pages; how the writer became friend and confidante and secretary and provider of Christmas presents for the storyteller's daughter; how, after the subject's break with Muhammad, conflict arose over his desired revisions to the draft devotee chapters; how Haley, the writer, supposedly won that round; how Malcolm's penultimate readings and re-readings of Haley's draft text unfolded within a dizzying, ominous (postmodernist?) blur of life in flux and in danger; how assassins’ bullets terminated the collaboration, leaving Haley alone to word and afterword--to fix--the text of Malcolm X's life.
Let’s look at some of the theorizing about autobiographical/literary collaboration.
Mark Sanders calls for an approach to "dictated autobiographies" which reads for "the silences, the fissures, for disjuncture and the moments of upheaval the method of composition necessarily creates" (Sanders 446). Invoking Walter Ong’s work on orality, Sanders articulates theoretical suspicions about written texts produced by collaboration between teller and writer: Briefly put, narrative form itself operates as an independent signifier; as a product of long-standing literary conventions—the naturalized impulse toward linearity, the demand for continuity from moment to moment, the drive toward formal resolution, and so on—it necessarily encodes, perhaps embodies, and ultimately transmits cultural presuppositions and ideological biases capable of creating or redirecting meaning for the text as a whole (Sanders 446). Oral narrative, Ong says, recalls and organizes memory additively, clustering repetitively to make mnemonic meaning; in converting oral narratives to written text, "literary thought tends to place concepts and events in relative (and therefore analytic) association, implying a development or a progression of ideas" (Sanders 447).
In Sanders’ reading of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, then, Haley’s written narrative structure predominates over the additive subjectivities hinted at in the Epilogue, narratives which Malcolm transmitted orally.[1] In converting Malcolm's clustered stories into text, Sanders argues, Haley not only assigns iconographic and mythic value to his life, he also shapes his subject's story in conformance with the American dream: a (black) male journey from obscurity to fame, from rags to comparative riches, from a life of crime to a life of service. Haley inscribes the text with mythic possibilities, further narrativizing Malcolm in his Epilogue: the assassinated hero is tamed, explained and situated in what Sanders terms "the uniquely American tradition of rebellion in service to national mythology" (Sanders 455).
Roxanne Rimstead takes up similar issues and concerns in her study of collaboration between writer and oral narrator. Focusing exclusively on women's oral histories and testimonios, she queries the "covert power relations between oral subject and writer in a scriptocentric culture that would subsume complex experience and orality to the conventions of writing and autobiography" (Rimstead 142). Her quest is to "determine the full extent of how oral narratives might be mediated or shaped by the social relation between teller and writer" (Rimstead 149), and she concludes that "the politics of mediation evident in the relations between editor and subject may reflect not only an idealized and conscious collaboration but also a discursive power struggle about whose voice emerges from the past and how it will be heard and perhaps understood" (Rimstead 158).
While obviously, given her focus, Rimstead does not take up the Haley-Malcolm X collaboration directly, such theoretical inquires resonate productively with issues of collaboration raised by The Autobiography of Malcolm X.. Along with Sanders, she would be suspiciously curious about the editorial and literary choices Haley made in shaping Malcolm's life; she would be excited about the agreements between writer and teller about who gets to say what, who gets the final say; she would no doubt raise her eyebrows at the "Whose book is this?" tiff (Haley 1999 421).
Like me, she would probably think John Edgar Wideman was on to something in this meditative, second-person imagining of Alex Haley's challenge: You are sitting in a room listening to a man talk and you wish to tell the story of the man's life, using as far as possible the words you are hearing to tell it. As writer you have multiple allegiances: to the man revealing himself to you; to the same man who will read and judge what you write; to an editor with an editor's agenda and maddening distance; to yourself, the demand of creating a text that meets your aesthetic standards, reflects your politics; to a potential publisher and reading public, etc., etc. You are serving many masters, and inevitably you are compromised. The man speaks and you listen but you also take notes, the first compromise and perhaps betrayal. Your notes are intended to capture the words you hear, but they are also designed to compress, select, filter, discard. A net, no matter how closely woven, holds some things and loses others. One crucial dimension lost, like water pouring through the finest seine, is the flow in time of the man's speech, the sensuous environment of orality that at best is crudely approximated by written words (Wideman 103). And Rimstead would no doubt be disappointed by the facile, near-sycophantic way Wideman then de-problematizes those same problems of collaboration: "Haley grants Malcolm the tyrannical authority of an author, a disembodied speaker whose implied presence blends into the reader's imagining of the tale being told" (Wideman 106); the voice Haley constructs for Malcolm "attains the godlike veracity and authority conventionally attributed to the third-person omniscient mode of history texts" (Wideman 107). I suspect Rimstead--not to mention Sanders--would have a field-day unpacking the scriptocentric assumptions and valorizing of both autobiographer and subject which Wideman betrays here. [2]
Carole Boyce Davies' work on the "extended autobiographical narrative", the most accessible form of collaborative life story production, also illuminates important issues. Again, her inquiry focuses solely on African American women's autobiographies, but her single passing reference to the Malcolm-Haley collaboration--characterizing it as "essentially male bonding"--sets up an implicit gendered benchmark against which she explores collaborative agency in the African American female life story (Davies 7). In addition, what Davies asks so incisively of her texts can also be productively asked of the Haley-Malcolm collaboration: "What are the implications of editorial intervention and ordering processes in the textual production of a life story?" (Davies 3); to what degree does writing "another person's life…become an act of power and control" (Davies 13)? So, too, her concluding comments on "boundary-breaking texts" resonate for my reading of the Haley-Malcolm autobiography: "Close examination reveals, for example, stories that expose while they camouflage, stories that negotiate public and private space, challenge and retreat, open up some issues and silence others. Gaps and spaces in narration, we know, point to texts in process" (Davies 17).
Armed with such theoretical curiosities, innumerable readings could be undertaken--and speculations teased out--about the Haley-Malcolm collaboration. My ruminations--on the text's silences and fissures and ideological biases and power dynamics, on the social relation ('male bonding') between teller and writer, their autobiographical project's sensuous environment of orality and negotiation of public and private space, the texts in process it points to--lead me to a decidedly queer reading of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a reading for which I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's ground-breaking work on the male homosocial continuum and Wayne Koestenbaum's on the erotics of male literary collaboration.
In Sedgwick's study of 'male homosocial desire'--the structural spectrum of men's relations with other men --she problematizes the usual distinction between 'homosocial' and 'homosexual': "To draw the 'homosocial' back into the orbit of 'desire,' of the potentially erotic…is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual--a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted" (Sedgwick 1-2). The desire men have to socialize with one another is posited as part of the same continuum along which homosexual desire can manifest. Sedgwick defines 'desire' as "the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship" (Sedgwick 2). By the twentieth century, this homosocial continuum between men[3] was thoroughly ruptured, leading Sedgwick to argue that concomitant changes in the structure of the continuum of male 'homosocial desire' were tightly, often causally bound up with the other, more visible changes; that the emerging pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality was in an intimate and shifting relation to class; and that no element of that pattern can be understood outside of its relation to women and the gender system as a whole (Sedgwick 2). She also incorporates Gayle Rubin's theories on the 'traffic in women', "the use of women as exchangeable , perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men" (Sedgwick 25-26); Sedgwick's resultant antihomophobic readings of how homosocial desire gets routed through women in canonical texts from Shakespeare to Whitman lay important groundwork for analyzing the emergence of modern homosexual identity and panic.
Building upon Sedgwick's groundwork, Wayne Koestenbaum analyzes the ways in which literary collaborations between men refract, contain and dispel homosocial and homoerotic anxieties. Male collaborators, he argues, "express homoeroticism and they strive to conceal it"; "[w]hen two men write together, they indulge in double talk; they rapidly patter to obscure their erotic burden, but the ambiguities of their discourse give the taboo subject some liberty to roam" (Koestenbaum 3). Based on his reading of Sedgwick, Rene Girard and Claude Levi-Strauss on the exchange of women between men and his reading of collaborative texts from Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria to Pound's input on Eliot's The Wasteland, Koestenbaum's conclusion is tantalizingly blunt: men who collaborate engage in a metaphorical sexual intercourse, …the text they balance between them is alternately the child of their sexual union, and a shared woman. …male collaborative writing…[is] an intercourse carried on through the exchange of women or of texts that take on "feminine" properties. … A writer turns to a partner not from a practical assessment of advantages, but from a superstitious hope, a longing for replenishment and union that invites baroquely sexual interpretation (Koestenbaum 3-4). Okay, so I'm definitely moving into psychologized, Freudian territory here. While a psychological curiosity informs my reading, I pretend no particular Freudian allegiance; I anticipate and look forward to the poststructural, deconstructionist responses which previous class discussions lead me to expect. Nonetheless, as I pondered the collaboration between these two men, Sedgwick's homosocial continuum and Koestenbaum's paradigm of the erotics of male literary collaboration helped me make some sense of my visceral response.
You see, the most charged, exciting moment of engagement I had with this text was in its Epilogue, when Malcolm danced for Alex: Then it was during recalling the early Harlem days that Malcolm X really got carried away. One night, suddenly, wildly, he jumped up from his chair and, incredibly, the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, "re-bob-de-bop-blap-blam--" and then grabbing a vertical pipe with one hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying as they had in those Harlem days. And then almost as suddenly, Malcolm X caught himself and sat back down, and for the rest of that session he was decidedly grumpy (Haley 1999 398). The scene aroused me; there's something queer going on here, I thought. No doubt, Haley cited this anecdote as further example of the friendship and trust growing up between the two men, of how much Malcolm "enjoyed being around someone, another man, with whom he could psychically relax" (Haley 1999 406); to me, however, the passage was also one of Sanders' 'moments of upheaval' in this collaborative endeavor: Malcolm's embodied, exuberant performance of memory before his trusted scribe, a performance brimming with erotic energies. (The vertical pipe around which he so sexily dances: Haley's phallic pen? I don't necessarily need to go there, do I.) What gets heaved up here, possibly inducing Malcolm's grumpiness, is a palpable sense of the homoerotic working itself into--and out through--the collaborative dynamic between the twosome.
This titillating moment in Haley's Epilogue sent me back to the autobiographical text he constructs for Malcolm, to its one homoerotic instance, the story about Rudy from 'Red's' Boston days: Rudy's mother was Italian, his father was a Negro. He was born right there in Boston, a short, light fellow, a pretty boy type. Rudy worked regularly for an employment agency that sent him to wait on tables at exclusive parties. He had a side deal going, a hustle that took me right back to the old steering days in Harlem. 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 (Malcolm X 143). The text goes on to describe other 'perverse' practices for which "predominantly old men, past the age of ability to conduct any kind of ordinary sex" sought out black heterosexual couples: Rudy, I remember, spoke of one old white man who paid a black couple to let him watch them have intercourse on his bed. Another was so "sensitive" that he paid to sit on a chair outside a room where a couple was--he got his satisfaction just from imagining what was going on inside (Malcolm X 143). This reminiscence--the only reference to male homosexuality and, equally interestingly, the most sexually explicit passage in the entire text--accomplishes several things: it relegates same-sex desire to decrepit, depraved white men, it sets up an opposition between such "sensitive" desires and the masculinist concepts of black maleness with which the text--and its subject--are so overdeterminedly constructed, and most of all, it attempts to dispel the collaborative erotics hinted at above. As Koestenbaum argues, both homosexual panic about the collaborative process and resultant (unsuccessful) attempts to dissipate that anxiety are always embedded in the process of two men creating a text together.
My curiosity about such homoerotic anxieties intensified when I learned that a 1991 biography by Bruce Perry claims Malcolm X had homosexual experiences in his adolescence and--possibly for money--during his pre-conversion 'hustler' period (Rampersad 130; Dyson 58). I wasn't able to track down Perry's Malcolm: The Life Of A Man Who Changed Black America, and I do not wish to ground this queer reading of the autobiographical collaboration in any essentialist 'outing' of its subject.[4] However, the cultural and critical responses to these assertions of homosexual experience in Malcolm X's life help me flesh out my approach to that collaboration. While I expected to encounter spluttering homophobic outrage by black male writers for whom Malcolm embodies, as Ossie Davis eulogized, "our manhood, our living, black manhood!", the closest I found was Amiri Baraka's blanket condemnation of Perry's text as a "calumny…whose mission is to cover Malcolm's real life with a barrage of psychopathic untruths", a condemnation spluttered without specific reference to the homosexual 'allegation' (Haley 1999 462; Baraka 19). On the other hand, Michael Eric Dyson offers a thoughtful, antihomophobic articulation of the discursive potential such claims raise, a potential he argues the biography failed to probe: Perry's remarks are more striking for the narrow assumptions that underlie his interpretations than for their potential to dismantle the quintessential symbol of African-American manhood. If Malcolm did have homosexual relations, they might serve Perry as a powerful tool of interpretation to expose the tangled cultural roots of black machismo, and to help him explain the cruel varieties of homophobia that afflict black communities. A complex understanding of black sexual politics challenges a psychology of masculinity that views "male" as a homogenous, natural, and universally understood identity. A complex understanding of masculinity maintains that male identity is also significantly affected by ethnic, racial, economic, and sexual differences (Dyson 58). My curiosity about Malcolm and Alex's anxious attempt to codify African-American manhood--to replace racist emasculation with black machismo--in their collaborative text can contribute to such an understanding of black erotic politics and masculinity.
And here are two black gay men, writer Ron Simmons and filmmaker Marlon Riggs, discussing Perry's 'revelation' of Malcolm X's homosexual encounters: RON SIMMONS: When I told some of my gay friends that we were going to discuss Malcolm X's homosexual experiences, a lot of them were apprehensive. Many of them cautioned me to be careful because they were afraid of seeing another Black icon torn down, another Black hero tarnished. How do you feel about this? MARLON RIGGS: I'm a little bit disturbed--actually a lot disturbed--by the idea that we can't discuss the complexities of Malcolm's life, particularly in regard to his sexuality, for fear that it will be used to tarnish our hero and in turn tarnish Black America. I'm resistant to that because it says to me that this admission of Malcolm's potential--or actual--homosexuality is something that we should be ashamed of. Or that, even worse, we should simply buy into the majority culture's views about homosexuality and for that reason censor what we say, or explore, in terms of our subjectivities as black people. Historically, there's a lot we simply don't say about ourselves, about our sexual identities, about our actual behavior, for fear that white folks will abuse it. And that's not to say that white folks have not abused, misused, misappropriated, and distorted our character; it is to say that in the process of censoring our lives and our histories, we've failed to come to an understanding of who we really are and the complexities of Black humanity. We continue to insist that those who become Black leaders adopt these very restrictive molds, these kinds of minstrel masks. I think it's necessary for us to enter into a discussion of Malcolm's sex life not to aid in his disfigurement but aid in illuminating the realities of his life and, by extension, our own (Simmons and Riggs 135-136). Again, my reading of Malcolm X's collaboration with Alex Haley attempts to avoid speculating about the so-called 'realities' of his life; nonetheless, the questions I am raising about homoerotic energies and anxieties at the root of that collaboration might helpfully resonate with this important dialogue between black gay men. Ultimately, Jonathan Dollimore is right when he says that both avowals and disavowals of homosexual experience and identity point toward the cultural centrality of queerness. In such 'was he or wasn't he?' debates, he argues, which confidently declare either the absence of homosexuality or its (repressed) presence, plausible argument proceeds inseparably from questionable disavowal, inheriting the history of homosexuality's paradoxical, incoherent construction. Put another way, the disavowals are now as much a part of homosexuality's actual absence as well as of its presence, overt or repressed (Dollimore 31). Indeed, the paradoxical responses to biographical assertions of Malcolm X's homosexuality, together with a queer reading of his collaborative autobiography's creation, shed light on important issues of African-American masculinity and gay African-American identity.
Feminist responses to the sexism and misogyny woven through the autobiography, too, would be enhanced through a consideration of the homosocial nature of its creation. No responsible reading of this text can ignore its preoccupation with women: their rightful place, their essential flaws and especially their capacities for erotic treachery. Indeed, for all Malcolm X's speechifying about aggressive opposition to white racist violence, the sole physically violent act recorded in his autobiography is perpetrated against a friend's girlfriend (Malcolm X 118). As Sedgwick points out, readings of male homosocial desire do not equate misogyny with homosexuality, but in teasing out the ways in which men bond through exchange and patriarchal oppression of women-- often dispelling or sublimating homoerotic energies in the process--antihomophobic and feminist projects might helpfully overlap (Sedgwick 20).
The collaborative text is chock full of Malcolm X's patriarchal views and characterizations of women, and as the Epilogue relates, Haley makes another productive pyschoanalytic intervention to open his subject up on the topic: It was through a clue from one of the scribblings that finally I cast a bait that Malcolm took. "Woman who cries all the time is only because she knows she can get away with it," he had scribbled. I somehow raised the subject of women. Suddenly, between sips of coffee and further scribbling and doodling, he vented his criticisms and skepticisms of women. "You never can fully trust any woman," he said. "I've got the only one I ever met whom I would trust seventy-five per cent. I've told her that," he said. "I've told her like I tell you I've seen too many men destroyed by their wives, or their women…" (Haley 1999 396). This--and Haley's other successful penetration of Malcolm's wall with the query about his mother--deepens the collaborative intensity, the homosocial bonding, between teller and writer; ultimately, a life gets textualized which embodies such a 'macho' exchange of opinions about and experience with women. [5]
Moreover, one detail of the Alex-Malcolm relationship, absent from the Epilogue but published in a reminiscence by Haley in 1992, offers itself up for an analysis of homosocial trafficking of women as theorized by Rubin and Sedgwick: And I remember a late afternoon when we happened to be interviewing in a Philadelphia hotel room. A pretty lady volunteer telephoned, then visited, bringing only half of some important typing she was doing for Malcolm and saying that he should pick up the rest at her apartment later. It was obvious to us both: she had eyes for Malcolm. He fretted and stewed and finally asked me to take a taxi and make the pickup. When I returned to my room, the phone was ringing, with Malcolm demanding, "What else did you do, because anything you did wrong was in my name." I told him that as mad as that woman had been when I turned up, there was no way anybody could have damaged his name with her (Haley 1992 246). Again, like the female characterizations and embodiments in his autobiographical text, Haley's anecdote speaks to how women circulate through and help dispel anxieties around homosocial collaboration; Malcolm's concern about his scribe's erotic conduct with a woman--a woman who desired him--can be seen as a metaphor for his frettings and stewings about the text being written in his name.
The homosocial bond between Alex and Malcolm had an economic dimension, as well; at the time of the assassination, the writer was in the process of arranging an advance for Malcolm from the publisher to help him relocate his family into a new home. At some point after Malcolm's death, Haley relates in his later reminiscence, he signed over half of his royalties to 'Sister Betty' to support her and Malcolm's daughters (Haley 1992 249). Haley not only attempts to fix the welter of Malcolm's experience, opinion and vision into a text palatable to subject, publisher and reading public, but to provide--as a result of those efforts--for a household left financially vulnerable by its head's overextensions, then destitute by his death.
In conclusion, let me tie back in those incisive questions posed by Sanders, Rimstead, Wideman and Davies, about orality vs. textuality and the power dynamics inherent in a collaborative autobiographical enterprise. Davies quotes Ong at length on oral discourse: The world of oral utterance is typically one of discourse, in which one utterance gives rise to another, that to still another and so on. Meaning is negotiated in the discursive process…. Your actual response makes it possible for me to find out for myself and to make clear in my counter-response what my fuller meaning was or can be. Oral discourse thus commonly interprets itself as it proceeds. It negotiates meaning out of meaning (Davies 16). My reading of the collaboration--antiphonies unfolding during those many late-night interviews at Haley's home and in hotel rooms with women coming and going--arouses decidedly homosocial and homoerotic energies at the antiphonal core; I sense a productive, deeply agonistic queerness embedded in the cooperation and struggle between the charismatic, outspokenly eloquent activist with the "ingratiating boyish smile" and his Boswell (Haley 1999 420). In so doing, I imagine the conversational, story-gathering phase of their project as steeped in what Wideman terms "the sensuous environment of orality" (Wideman 103); as Malcolm opens himself up, his homosocial trust/distrust of Haley suggests points and counterpoints of desire and struggle for power over their (as Koestenbaum would say, feminine) text. I offer this reading as a (most preliminary) decentered imagining of that contrapuntal dynamic, one way to break open this collaborative text for a deeper look at the very problematics of gender and sexuality which its construction attempts to elide.
Notes [1] Sanders makes much of an exception in the text, Malcolm’s digressive history of Elijah Muhammad’s early life as relayed to him by Elijah’s mother, arguing that it reveals "the underlying assumptions governing his conceptions of autobiography", laying bare a self "in constant dynamic dialogue with its sociopolitical environment" (Sanders 452). The conclusion, while interesting, seems a bit of a stretch to me, based on one brief textual passage. [2]Indeed, Wideman rails against literary-critical response to Malcolm's autobiography which is not grounded in a linguistic space of "mourning and myth" (Wideman 102): [3] Sedgwick notes that "the diacritical opposition between the 'homosocial' and the 'homosexual' seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men" (2). That this unity of "the continuum of 'women loving women' and 'women promoting the interests of women' contrasts so sharply to the "arrangement among males" further validates her inquiry (3). [4] Arnold Rampersad attempts just that; he accepts Perry's claim at face value, going on to speculate about psychoanalytic evidence in the autobiography to an essentialized closetedness --Malcolm's dozen years of post-conversion (heterosexual) celibacy, his extremely moralistic response to Elijah Muhammad's adulteries (Rampersad 131-132).[5] Noting that Alex Haley was divorced--and remarried--in 1964, I can't help but pose an open, no doubt unanswerable, question about what of his life experience might have been communicated back to Malcolm X as fodder for their homosocial dialogue on women, wives and gender issues (Tovares)?
Baraka, Amira. "Malcolm as Ideology," in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. Ed. Joe Wood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992: 18-35. Davies, Carole Boyce. "Collaboration and the Ordering Imperative in Life Story Production," in De/colonizing The Subject: The Poetics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1992: 3-19. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Dyson, Michael Eric. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Haley, Alex. "Alex Haley Remembers," in Malcolm X: As They Knew Him. Ed. David Gallen. New York: Carrol and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1992: 243-250. --------. "Epilogue," in Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine, 1999: 390-463. Koestenbaum, Wayne. Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration. New York: Routledge, 1989. Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine, 1999. Rampersad, Arnold. "The Color Of His Eyes: Bruce Perry's Malcolm and Malcolm's Malcolm," in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. Ed. Joe Wood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992: 117-134. Rimstead, Roxanne. "Mediated Lives: Oral Histories and Cultural Memory." Essays on Canadian Writing 60 (Winter 1996): 139-165. Sanders, Mark A. "Theorizing The Collaborative Self: The Dynamics of Contour and Content in the Dictated Autobiography." New Literary History 25 (1994): 445-458. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Simmons, Ron and Marlon Riggs. "Sexuality, Television, and Death: A Black Gay Dialogue on Malcolm X," in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. Ed. Joe Wood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992: 135-154. Tovares, Raul D. "Haley, Alex." Encyclopedia of Television. undated. The Museum of Broadcast Communication. 4 March 2001. http://www.mbcnet.org/ETV/H/htmlH /haleyalex/haleyalex.htm Wideman, John Edgar. "Malcolm X: The Art of Autobiography," in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. Ed. Joe Wood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992: 101-116.
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