“The men studied here are exceptional only to the extent that many of them are well-known as leaders within their vocations.The gender tides that they were pressured to navigate have been experienced if not so publicly, by every black man, to one extent or another. In this sense we can see our own gender resolutions and gender insecurities mirrored in their stories. In their lives perhaps we can glimpse our own sissy insurgencies and thus better grapple with those insecurities that inhabit and condition, and characterize what it means to live as black boys and men in white male supremacist society. (End of preamble)”