ABSTRACT
What does it mean that the first Hollywood film to unequivocally reject the miscegenation taboo was a Tracy and Hepburn film that would go on to become the most popular interracial text of its era, and arguably of the late twentieth century? 1 This question becomes all the more intriguing when we recognize that the film was in fact one of three tremendously influential interracial texts to appear within less than a year. Just months before the release of Hollywood’s instantly celebrated and ridiculed verdict on the subject, the Supreme Court handed down its decision, Loving v. Virginia, that rendered laws prohibiting interracial marriage unconstitutional in June of 1967. And not long after the film’s December release, Eldridge Cleaver, then Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, published a collection of boldly personal and political essays that meditate extensively on fantasies of interracial sex that had marked his experiences as a young black man; that book, Soul on Ice (March 1968), quickly became a widely discussed and debated bestseller. 2 While Guess, Loving, and Soul thus form a trio of authors, agendas, and implied audiences that could hardly be more different from one another, together they cut across a wide swath of popular culture to suggest that dominant American legacies of miscegenation were being confronted more directly than ever before. This in turn makes all the more consequential the terms and conditions under which those legacies were publicly avowed and (still) repressed. 3
