Have been thinking about this a lot. Would like to open up a discussion on this subject.
No problem if this isn’t the place.
Remember when everyone thought it was okay to call Spurs fans ‘yids’?
Some of those most insistent it was can now be found on Twitter accusing lifelong anti-racism campaigner Jeremy Corbyn of being anti-semitic! 
What are your thoughts on the subject? I’m not clear what you mean by the “fetishization.” The role of black gay clubs and DJs in the development of several musical styles? Wouldn’t that just be a historical fact?
My opinion is that it most definitely exists; and that I feel embarrassed to have gone along with it, without saying anything, for as long as I did.*
Recognising the role of black gay clubs and DJs in the development of musical styles is not fetishization.
Homework: see if you can find some examples of black homosexuality being fetishized.
- Not that I’d have been allowed to say anything in that company.
Do you mean:
Terry Farley and Pete Heller calling themselves Fire Island?
Harvey calling a label Black Cock?
Those are early and relatively innocent examples, yes. Excellent work, Rodney.
Not sure about that. Fire Island certainly references essentially male homosexuality, and Black Cock appears to fetishize black bodies/sexuality, but neither strike me in these contexts as fetishizing black homosexuality.
Wouldn’t most Black Cock records have been sold to white heterosexual men?
Are Harvey and Gerry Rooney white heterosexual men?
Regardless of who buys their records, I’d suggest that the name ‘Black Cock’ is principally intended to fetishize the black male body (in accordance with a number of well established racial / cultural tropes). The fact that this name has arisen in a predominantly white heteronormative culture is relevant, but it is the black male body and black male sexuality that are being objectified in this instance rather than black homosexuality per se.
Still bad, even if correct.
But Fire Island was not a ‘black” scene. Just general purpose gayness.
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Being used in a black music context? By white heterosexual men?
If homosexuality and skin colour are being fetishized separately does that make it any better?
I’d suggest it was also intended to get a rise out of people, to be provocative. (The Black Cock label name.)
I’ve been background thinking about this topic a few days. Firstly, the linked article seems to redefine “fetishization” from the classic requirement for sexual arousal to a statement of preference. OK, language and meaning of words changes all the time and let’s not be too fuddy-duddy about it. However, I think it clear that policing individual sexual preferences has historically been a bad idea that promotes injustice with the exception of abuse, rape, extreme over-the-top violence, and other non-consensual practices. I also think that the sexual preference fantasies of many white heterosexual males towards Asian females are highly suspect. Not generally a statement of any kind of racial liberation; in fact tending towards the opposite. It is a form of objectification. What to do about that, I have no idea.
Secondly, I’ve known a fair number of black homosexuals moderately well. They are as varied a group of individuals as you could hope to find beyond the use of those two words to describe them. They may be stereotyped by people who don’t know what they’re talking about or who have some devious agenda at play, but the idea that black homosexuals are some group of super-sexualized uber-studs is a load of rubbish.
Your ‘secondly’ nails it, I think.
It seems likely that most gay black gay men don’t even like disco.
I suggest that “fetishized” is the wrong word here. Commercial exploitation of a dubious concept I can go along with. Unless it refers to a rooster.
My next point, however, was perhaps to suggest you have not understood the word fetishization as I have done.
Agreed. A more helpful term would have been ‘objectification’ , i.e. the reduction of the individual to a number of traits in the eye of the beholder.