An urban cultural researcher has sent me the audio of an interview which he intends to use as the basis for a transcript. He was primarily concerned with my critiquing his interview method. The interviewer began woodenly and then loosened up as the process moved forward. He seems to have gotten into the groove and asked the necessary questions. The key to developing good interview technique is paying attention to the subject and helping them express themselves, which the interviewer is already in the process of doing.

The subject of the interview is a gay-identified black man. The objective of the interview was an attempt to chart the genesis of this man’s sexual orientation and determine if it was primarily environmental or predetermined. The subject feels that it was both.

For me, this interview provides a window on the process of maternal emasculation in the black American home. Most people do not realize that many blacks have sex before puberty, and that age 12 is considered the last year of virginity in most corners of oppressed America. Well, this kid started giving head to older boys when he was four and was trained with porno videos! As shocking as this is, it is less important than the fact that his first memory was a severe whooping with a belt by his mother at age three.

The subject seems like a non-violent person in the interview, who felt like he had been born and raised to be submissive. He describes his relationship with his mother as consisting of 2-3 month love hate cycles, and goes on to describe his intimate relationships with men as abiding by that same cycle.

He describes how “She fucked me up,” and that he was “the only man that ain’t gonna leave,” as the cornerstone of the mother-son relationship. He had good memories of his father, who was home for his first two years and committed suicide when he was four. There were two good memories of his mother, a trip to Disney World and having his room completely remodeled and stocked with diversions. Both of these good memories point up the real problem with women raising boys, that even when they try they get it wrong, the materialism over the experience of doing. Amusement parks are passive, female, outings. The bedroom is the female nest, and just when he should be camping out under the stars he is being coddled like a princess bride.

What we see here is a classic form of maternal emasculation, where, for instance, Hitler suffered a severe form of paternal emasculation—his father being a distant, aloof figure. In either case, when you have a population of emasculated men, you can expect their frustrated desire to experience empowerment to coalesce in the form of emotive group aggression, which, once competency has been achieved, will establish a psychological feeding cycle expressed in cohesive and increasingly skilled predation. While the perennial female frustration with powerlessness has often been harnessed productively through institutions as diverse as queenship and cheerleading, a society absent men to raise youths into maturity, which also forms The State itself along maternal lines, is doomed to spawn perverse attempts by psychologically rootless youths to express themselves in terms of gang-based crime and mob violence.