“Big Luther” discourse: cultural longing and the signification of Luther Vandross in African American popular culture

ABSTRACT

With a catalog that stretches from the 1960s into the early 2000s, Luther Vandross is highly esteemed internationally and across multiple generations of music fans. For many, he is essential to the soundtrack of their emotional lives. His stylings are such a large part of the Black cultural imaginary in the United States that, since the 1980s, Vandross has been figured in literature, film, Hip Hop lyrics, and television shows to convey romantic sentiments or a seductive mood in heterosexual and queer contexts. But in some cases, he is admonished and fat shamed, and held up as a symbol of the ways in which “good health” eludes the African American community statistically. I want to linger in that ambivalence and highlight the various shades of meaning that have been attached to Vandross’ fat (and sometimes slim) body in narratives produced for mass culture and smaller targeted audiences. To that end, I take up “Big Luther” discourse as an analytical framework to examine artistic and communal articulations that weaponize “care” and “concern” for Vandross, including the 1996 film The Nutty Professor, a 2006 episode of the animated sitcom The Boondocks, and Divabetic, a diabetes awareness organization that his mother was involved in establishing after Vandross died in 2005.

KEYWORDS:

• Luther Vandross
• African American health
• anti-fatness in popular culture

It’s a calling, this hunger

to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself, so I

practice; the pitch has to be right to sing the hunger

of other lovers, a take on a take, a rendition no one has heard

before, with this voice I wed the lives of others.

– Tommye Blount, from “The Hunger of Luther Vandross”

When Blount (2020) puns the word “hunger” in his poem to characterize the professional ambition of the late R&B/Soul artist Luther Vandross (1951–2005), he joins a long line of African American cultural producers who figure the singer in their art for various rhetorical and creative ends. Vandross is a musical icon, a multi-hyphenate agent in R&B music with an award-winning catalog that stretches from the 1970s into the early 2000s, and his lyrics narrate a spectrum of emotional experiences, including romantic enticement, sidepiece blues, loneliness, and childhood nostalgia. As a consequence of his prominence and regard in the culture, the Vandross aesthetic has taken on a representational life of its own. Examples abound of the various points of connection audiences make with his musical performance and celebrity persona. Since the 1980s, rappers have used Vandross allusions to indicate their popularity, such as EPMD’s “I’m Housin’” (1988); or, to signal their smoothness of style, as in Big Daddy Kane’s “Groove With It” (1991); and also to describe a seductive environment, as in Kanye West’s “Slow Jamz” (2005). In popular fiction, one of the ways he is figured is to signal the emotional interiority of Black middle-class heterosexual women, as occurs most famously in the work of bestselling novelist Terry McMillan, whose “confessional literature” (Brooks 2003, p. 37) also translated to box office success with film and television adaptations, including Waiting to Exhale (1995) and Disappearing Acts (2000). Another aspect of his representational life is informed by the fact that Vandross presented a soft masculinity or “sissy comportment,” to borrow a turn of phrase from Ross (2022, p. 11). His comportment led to much speculation in the media about a secret gay identity, but Vandross refused to address the subject of his sexuality. Rather than feel rejected by this refusal, some LGBTQ listeners regarded his silence as the opening of an inclusive space of possibility, and they cultivated queer interpretative practices of his music and interviews (King, 2000). These notions are reflected in fiction whereby authors use Vandross allusions in their titles to signal stories of Black queer interiority, romance, and kinship. Popular examples include two novels in James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues series (Hardy 1997, 2005), and If This World Were Mine by ten-time New York Times bestseller E. Lynn Harris (1998).

As for poetry, Blount’s Fantasia for the Man in Blue (2020) communes with the work of prominent Black American writers Terrance Hayes (2007) and Jericho Brown (2008), who also incorporate Vandross into their renderings. However, Fantasia’s distinguishing feature is how it reminds readers that the highly celebrated voice, the one that “wed[s] the lives of others” (Blount 108), undeniably possesses a body. Three poems in the collection feature a Vandross persona, but the speaker in “The Hunger of Luther Vandross” (which opens this article) provides the most prominent description of the singer’s real-life physicality as a metaphor for his drive and talent:

A gift, this first instrument of hunger;

this tenor. I can feel in my body, all 300 pounds of me.

You’re never lonely when you’re a man, who knows hunger

like I do, as big as two men holding on so tight you would think

there is only one. There are two of me, both of us hungry

for the stage. (Blount 108)

By bringing the issue of bigness to the forefront, Blount also participates in what I term “Big Luther” discourse, a point of departure from the other literary and musical texts I have cited so far. “Big Luther” discourse is a subset of Vandross signification in which the singer’s fatness is a meaningful aspect of the representation. Not inherently fat phobic, such discourse can wade into discursive violence through anti-fat narratives and imagery that weaponize “care” and “concern” under the guise of health advocacy. In this contemporary moment, reactions to pop sensation Melissa V. Jefferson, known professionally as Lizzo, take on a similar hue.¹ But in the recent past, it was Vandross whose fat embodiment was taken up in public narratives as an object of ambivalence.

The cultural origins of “Big Luther”

My conceptualization of “Big Luther” discourse takes it cue from the Which Luther? meme that emerged in 1990s African American social gatherings. Though the term meme is commonly associated with the internet and digital culture, social scientists have studied for decades the phenomenon in which information passes in oral communication from person to person through various means of imitation, repetition, and repackaging. This mimetic praxis gradually creates a shared cultural experience that shapes the attitudes and behaviors of social groups (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007; Shifman, 2013). The Which Luther? meme is a communal articulation with roots in the fact that Vandross’ desire for normative thinness led to phases of fad dieting, weight cycling between 190 and 320 pounds, and subsequent dramatic changes in his size at several points in his career. The variations in his appearance were commonly noted in the media; so much so that it became routine for publications to comment on his size alongside his musical accomplishments.² Likewise, his fans created a playful debate that asks, Which Luther do you prefer as a singer: Big Luther or Skinny Luther? Anecdotally speaking, the posing of the question did not necessarily trigger a debate about his body size. What often followed was a lighthearted conversation about one’s taste as a music consumer. Often shortened to “Which Luther?” the question contains a challenge to its receiver to make a case for the song or album that represents the best vocal performance.

The meme’s continuity signals the lingering presence of these ideas in the cultural imaginary. It is difficult to pinpoint whether the Which Luther? meme emerged organically in folk culture or if Black American comedians planted its seeds, but I attribute the earliest onscreen expression to comedian Cedric Kyles, professionally known as Cedric the Entertainer. Around 1995, Kyles began to regularly include a joke in his standup routines, on programs such as HBO’s Def Comedy Jam and BET’s Comic View in which he complains about the domination of “aggressive” R&B music aesthetics. This segues to his punchline preference for the smooth stylings of “Big Luther, not Lil Luther,” whose singing voice he imitates. Kyles also performs the bit in Spike Lee’s The Original Kings of Comedy (2000). The joke has legs; as is the case with many African American catchphrases, jokes, and other subcultural witticisms, users of social media transplanted the discourse to cyberspace where it continues to flourish, especially on Black Twitter (Brock, 2020; Dean, 2016). [Figures 1 and 2.] Other musical performers also participate: the meme is invoked in song titles, such as “Skinny Luther” (2016) and “B.I.G. Luther Freestyle” (2018) by rappers Elucid and Westside Gunn, respectively. It also circulates in televisual media productions, as characters on the sitcom Black-Ish (Season 6,Ep3) and the film Queen and Slim have weighed in on the question of which Luther.

Figure 1. The Which Luther? meme debates whether Vandross’ voice sounds better in his fat or slender embodiment. Source: Twitter.com. Public Domain.

Figure 2. In a variation of the Which Luther? meme, participants pretend to seek clarification or context.

Source: Twitter.com. Public Domain.

Part of the humor rests on the dubious assumption that one can hear size-related vocal traits across the Vandross oeuvre. But on a subcultural level, it gestures toward the African American naming practice that I term bodynaming, a tradition that has African origins. There is a vast field of research and literature that examines the various purposes and contexts in African and African-descended cultures in which assigning multiple informal or undocumented names to an individual is the norm. It is beyond my scope here, but some findings include names that signal a rite of passage, those that pinpoint the weekday on which a person was born, and some that indicate birth order, or mark a significant change in social circumstances (Holloway and Vass, 1993; Lopez, 2015; Stuckey, 1987; Turner, 1949). Bodynaming among African Americans demonstrates what anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1934) identifies as an affinity for “illustrated” language. Which is to say, secondary designations are bestowed or taken on to provide visual specificity to a person by incorporating references to their body size, skin tone, or other physical features. This illustrated language underpins stage names taken by Black musical artists, such as Trippie Redd, Black Rob, Lil Wayne, Fat Man Scoop, and Soulja Slim.³ And this practice gets at the root of the Which Luther? humor for African Americans: it implies that the contrasts in Vandross’ big/slim embodiments are so striking that they require individual bodynames. This “inside joke,” which parades as a harmless gesture, even as it urges me to point and laugh at its target, is cultural and intellectual groundwater. The ideas it contains rain down and collect beneath the surface, then are tapped and pumped back into circulation in narratives produced for mass culture and smaller targeted audiences.

Drawing on a framework of critical literature in the humanities, social sciences, and media studies, I consider a range of meanings that storytellers have attached to Vandross’ physique. First, I explore the implications of a scene in The Nutty Professor in which Vandross is linked to the failures of the 1980s diet craze. Second, I look at the arguments made around the romanticization of soul food in the animated sitcom The Boondocks. Lastly, I assess the posthumous re-contextualization of Vandross as a chronically ill person in the wellness rhetoric of the diabetes organization Divabetic, which his mother played a role in establishing. My goal is to unpack the African American cultural longings and the anxieties that swirl around notions of fatness, beauty, and health that are displaced onto Vandross.

Desirable bigness in The Nutty Professor

Although Eddie Murphy has made a career of presenting fat characters in unflattering ways, his performance in The Nutty Professor (Shadyac, 1996) registers a desire for the plump Black body. The protagonist is Sherman, a fat Black professor of chemistry who is bombarded daily with “active lifestyle” rhetoric reminiscent of the 1980s fitness craze (Andreasson and Johansson 2014), a paradigm that insists that fatness is unsightly, unacceptable, and the individual’s responsibility to address. The message is underscored for Sherman by his experiences in unaccommodating social spaces and fat-shaming interactions in the workplace. Sherman, too, believes that “obesity” requires a cure, and stakes his career on developing a scientific breakthrough that will counter the genetic and biological influences on weight gain and fat distribution that affect him and others in his situation. After the experiment wreaks chaos and ultimately fails as a permanent cure, Sherman realizes he should accept the body he has. While I appreciate Kathleen LeBesco (2005) and Katharina Mendoza’s (2009) critiques of how its visual effects and fat jokes work against the film’s moral positioning, I think The Nutty Professor succeeds at portraying the ubiquity and harmful effects of fat stigma. Also, as Kyrola (2014, p. 106) comments in The Weight of Images: Affect, Body Image and Fat in the Media, the audiovisual elements of the film strongly encourage the audience to empathize with “the intensity of Sherman’s shame and suffering” even though its fat jokes may spark their laughter.

The incorporation of “Big Luther” discourse in the film’s messaging is brief but spectacular. In the iconic dinner scene, Papa Klump, Sherman’s father, applies a Black beauty metric to critique Vandross and media mogul Oprah Winfrey (whose recent size fluctuations had garnered mainstream news coverage at the time) for sacrificing attractiveness in the quest for thinness. The scene begins with Mama Klump laying out a homecooked dinner prepared in the spirit of what Quiring (2022, p. 88) would call “exuberant eating,” meaning the culinary choices she made “prioritize pleasure, fullness, satisfaction, convenience, and community, over the strictest definitions of healthful fuel.” When Mama Klump remarks on Sherman’s choosing small portions and peeling of the chicken skin, he explains to her that he is restricting his intake of fat and calories. His father responds incredulously and blames this thinking on the influence of popular culture:

You know where that come from? Watching that damn TV! Every time you turn it on, they got somebody on there talking about ‘lose weight, get healthy, get in shape.’ Got everybody looking all anorexic, talking about that’s healthy. I know what healthy is! And tell you something else, I don’t know why everybody is trying to lose weight in the first place. Ain’t everybody supposed to be the same size! We supposed to be all different: big, small, medium, midgets. You supposed to have all of that. (author’s transcription)

As Papa Klump makes the point that body diversity is not only natural but desirable, the rhetorical choices in this diatribe touch on a list of critiques often mentioned by body-positive activists and health professionals regarding the problems with diet culture, including disordered eating and the problematic way size is equated with health status.

When he turns to Winfrey and Vandross as examples, there are underlying questions and anxieties around the normative ideals they pursued. First, he points out that rapid weight loss makes Winfrey look unwell: “Like that Oprah Winfrey. Wasn’t nothing wrong with her, she was fine! Oprah was a fox! [She lost] all her weight, [now] her head look all big, [and her] skin hanging all off her” (Shadyac, 1996, author’s transcription). His desire for Winfrey’s plump embodiment is also signaled by the use of “fine.” In African American vernacular speech, when used to describe a feminine physique, “fine” invokes the Black ideal of thickness, an aesthetic preference for curvaceousness, voluptuousness, and shapely buttocks that has been critiqued by Elizabeth Hughes (2021), Kamille Gentles-Peart (2016), and Courtney Patterson-Faye (2016). This racialized ideal has been linked to the recent uptick in the popularity of gluteal-fat grafting surgery among feminine-presenting entertainers of various racial and ethnic groups, a procedure often referred to as the “Brazilian butt lift” (Giorgis, 2021). Regarding Vandross, Papa Klump complains the singer “used to be the Black [Luciano] Pavarotti,” but (in the slim embodiment) “looks all ashy” (Shadyac, 1996, author’s transcription). This complaint hurls the African American insult (ashiness), a catchall term for poor hygiene and “a careless lack of self-upkeep” (Plaid, 2021). Interestingly, the complaint also gestures toward the discourse in opera around body size and vocal ability. Nina Sun Eidsheim (2017) addresses this in her analysis of the controversy involving the Greek opera singer Maria Callas. When the quality of her singing declined, audiences blamed her eighty-pound weight loss, but Callas attributed the change to the aging process. Meanwhile, in popular discourse there were competing perspectives, as Callas was “admired and glamorized for her loss of weight, and for adhering to the body ideals many understood to drive that transformation”; and, at the same time, she “was judged as forfeiting her voice in favor of other desires” (Eidsheim 2017, p. 252, 264). However, Papa Klump offers no redeeming considerations for the loss of Black beauty in the quest for a white mainstream ideal. He sees only deficiency, which translates to a loss of cultural value.

What lies beneath the “Big Luther” discourse in The Nutty Professor is a sense of cultural betrayal, rejection, and loss. Through this mostly improvised scene, Eddie Murphy transmits the concern that, in the quest for white mainstream acceptance, these symbols of Black Excellence© have turned their backs on Black people. The white slender ideal devalues Black bodies; so, what does it mean when Winfrey and Vandross seem motivated by and seek approval via those standards? When they are unable to see their own essential beauty, are they rejecting the Black metric for acceptable and desirable bigness? Which is to ask, are they siding with whiteness? In the context of the film, the rejection lies in Sherman’s refusal to participate in the “exuberant eating” (Quiring, 2022) of his mother’s food, while his family members, who are all large-bodied people , do so without hesitation. His behavior signals a desire to distance himself from their culinary and beauty standards, even though their dinner table represents the only site of his social belonging. The concerns raised by this brief but important scene in The Nutty Professor dovetail into a debate in an episode of The Boondocks (2006–2014) about the role of African American foodways in their poor health outcomes as an ethnic group in U.S. health data.

(Dead) body of evidence in The Boondocks

The Boondocks, an animated television series created by cartoonist Aaron McGruder, presumes the undesirability of bigness. It contributes a “Big Luther” discourse that admonishes African Americans for romanticizing food practices inherited from southern slave culture. An important throughline in the episode in question, entitled “The Itis” (Season 1, episode 10), is its perpetuation of “obesity” rhetoric that equate fatness with moral decline and death. McGruder’s text weighs in on an intra-cultural debate that initially emerged after the cultural pride movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the construction of Black identity in those movements involved embracing the distinctive aspects of African American folkways that were stigmatized by both the white mainstream and by Black middle class respectability politics (Witt, 1999). It became prevalent at the time to refer to traditional African American food practices as the production of soul food and to treat a selection of southern dishes as ethnic symbols of the innovative survival techniques developed during slavery (Miller, 2013). As food historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach notes in an article about “the post-1964 culinary turn” toward Black Nationalism:

Proponents of “soul food” reimagined hybrid southern cooking—a product of African, European, and Native American ingredients and culinary knowledge—as a distinctly black cultural product, claiming that politically conscious African Americans should consume this cuisine alongside requisite doses of racial pride. By reframing southern cuisine as soul food, they claimed proprietary ownership of southern food culture. By transforming a regional style of eating into a racial one, African Americans living outside of the South could—if they wished—enjoy this food while still disassociating themselves from the place where white oppression had assumed its most totalizing form. (2014, para. 5)

Since then, this culinary nationalism has become the dominant cultural perspective and primary logic for maintaining these practices and retaining the recipes.

However, many African Americans balk at the notion that food perceived as always “excessively boiled, fried, [and] sweetened” (Miller, 2013, p. 2) should be treasured as a source of ethnic pride. Rather, this second viewpoint argues, the stigma is well earned by the diet-related diseases that affect African Americans in disproportionate numbers⁴ and the fact that its most popular dishes are calorie-dense, high fat recipes associated with the Plantation South. Folks who take the second position point to the discarded meat parts that anchor many soul food dishes, such as the intestines of pigs, as symbols of enslaved people’s debasement rather than their survivalism. There is a third viewpoint represented by the neo-soul food movement, which aims to innovate southern dishes by incorporating nourishing ingredients and alternative cooking practices while retaining links to the historical past (Nettles, 2007). And the fourth perspective, Black veganism, reformulates African American ethnic pride and resistance as the understanding of the “slave diet” as food injustice that should not be celebrated or reproduced. Black vegan politics are underpinned by intersectional liberatory movements that link human rights, animal rights, and anti-racist environmentalism (see Adewale, 2021; Aph, 2019; Gregory and McGraw, 1973).

In the episode in question, The Boondocks narrates aspects of the food debate through the Black characters’ disagreements about a new soul food eatery established in the predominantly white Maryland suburb where they reside. Robert “Grandad” Freeman, who was born and raised in Alabama, operates the restaurant and represents the view that soul food traditions should be unquestionably cherished. He designed the menu with original dishes that parody southern recipes, such as “bacon-wrapped, chicken-stuffed catfish” and “breakfast lasagna” made of sausage, waffles, and fried chicken. Another exceptional aspect of the restaurant is its unique seating arrangement: to accommodate the lethargy that is sure to follow such high-calorie meals, customers are served in beds and are allowed to linger for a post-meal nap. To highlight this uniqueness, the establishment is named “The Itis,” which is an African American slang term for this kind of energy slump and is taken from the medical suffix meaning “to swell.”

“Big Luther” discourse is introduced through the restaurant’s signature dish that, reportedly, is from Vandross’ private recipe (but Grandad is an unreliable narrator). Symbolizing the singer’s reputation for overindulgence, “The Luther” [Figure 3] is a savory mess of a hamburger that contains a beef patty layered with cheese, grilled onions, and bacon, all sandwiched between donuts.⁵ The teenaged Huey Freeman challenges his grandfather’s dish by reminding him that the singer has passed away. Since this episode aired six months after Vandross died from diabetes-related complications, the target audience is likely aware of the implications of this statement. But Grandad is not: “And what’s your point?” he retorts, dismissing the comment as a non sequitur. Huey would continue to undermine his grandfather throughout the episode by denouncing the meals (and/or the paradigm it represents) as “destructive,” and by distributing Elijah Muhammad’s (1967) plant-based cookbook How to Eat to Live to kitchen staff. As Wallach (2014) points out, Muhammad promoted a cultural nationalist philosophy that links spirituality to dietary practices in a way that suggests each transforms the other. So, in his role as the leader of the Nation of Islam, Muhammad sought to improve the physical, mental, and spiritual health of the Black nation, in part, by advocating for Islamic Halal mandates and prohibiting slavery-related foods.

Figure 3. Season 1, episode 10 (2006) of The Boondocks features The Luther hamburger. The dish symbolizes its namesake’s reputation for gluttony and the episode’s message on thefundamental unhealthiness of soul food as an African American tradition. Source: Public Domain via makeagif.com.

Therefore, Huey’s promotion of How to Eat to Live communicates a concern that the restaurant is reproducing harm that has historically plagued Black American populations. The narrative outcome supports Huey’s viewpoint through an analogy of the 1980s Crack Epidemic in which some of the clientele develop food addiction. Consequently, the customers gain high amounts of weight, lose their livelihoods, and create an unsafe environment around the restaurant by committing desperate acts of panhandling, theft, and assault, to gain access to The Luther burger. The neighborhood gains a negative reputation that results in the city’s withdrawal of services and the closing of the business.

Through these food- and fat-shaming rhetorics, McGruder’s narrative contributes a “Big Luther” discourse in which the fat Black body can only represent death – and Vandross is “twice dead” (Shackelford 2021, p. 254). His physical death, apparently self-induced, precedes the narrative but is announced at the outset. Then, he is invoked time and again as the menu centerpiece and most popular meal, and his personal recipe is depicted as a gastronomic contradiction to “eating to live.” The message audiences receive is that consuming The Luther or as Luther is eating to die. It is routine in “obesity” rhetoric to construct fatness as a sign of moral decline and a “ticking time bomb” (Shackelford 2021; Throsby 2010), but there is also an insidiousness being assigned to soul food as a category. Through the downfall of white characters, white audiences are shown soul food’s threat to their lives should they, too, fall under its spell and plunge into fatness. As Hunter Ashleigh Shackelford has shown in the essay “When You are Already Dead,” fatness is a form of social blackness:

Whiteness and specifically all non-Blackness, must be forewarned of fatness because abundance, largeness, Rubenesqueness is that of sin, of nigger, of the uncontrollable and unruly slave. Therefore, any and everyone who navigates and exists within fatness as a spectrum is by proxy experiencing the violence of anti-Blackness. (2021, p. 255)

When the suburban space is blackened by the presence and influence of this particular ethnic food, and white bodies become blackened by fatness, the city withdraws its maintenance services from the public park across the street from the establishment, and the emergency response system ignores the residents’ calls for help. According to this narrative, systemic neglect follows individual behaviors. Therefore, the restaurant’s unwholesome Black food is to blame for the neighborhood’s decline, not the anti-blackness of city agencies or the “disabilities of the color line” (Tyler, 2022). The episode traffics in moral healthism expressed as the belief that if only African Americans would take personal responsibility for their poor health outcomes through behavior modification, they could achieve wellbeing and improve their life chances. The implication is that only after choosing to be healthy will they deserve sympathy and assistance from the health care industry and government agencies when they are ill or disabled. Until then, they are already dead.

Divabetic: Luther-inspired care circle

However, not all of the “Big Luther” engagements are full of doom and gloom. This final section considers some of the approaches to care work in Divabetic, a campaign of interventionist conversations aimed at Black women in the diabetes community. As Michalko (2002, p. 13) notes, “our lives are influenced by the ways our culture represents disability.” We form our understandings of impairment and disease within our culture, and we then live our lives in and through these understandings (Michalko 2002, p. 15). The mainstream cultural message about diabetes is that it is a self-imposed condition caused by an undisciplined lifestyle. Therefore, people who live “in and through” this understanding of themselves feel judged, monitored, and blamed for their sickness, which can lead to self-sabotaging conduct, including denial, concealment, and mismanagement of self-care (Harper, Osborn, and Mayberry, 2018). Furthermore, often when a person is open about their condition, they feel controlled and infantilized by well-meaning loved ones around eating habits and lifestyle choices. So, the daily management of the disease often feels burdensome or intrusive on many levels (Shiyanbola, Ward, and Brown, 2018). What is known about Vandross’ resistant behavior suggests he was impacted by these cultural messages and negative perceptions.

While he performed the duties of a “good fatty”⁶ in public by repeating the efforts to lose weight, regularly articulating his health goals (low blood pressure and sugar levels), and discussing his regrettable downfalls (affinity for fad diets and emotional eating) in the media, Vandross was fiercely private about his daily self-care regimen, even among those in his inner circle. So much so, his mother Mary Ida Vandross was unaware of his formal diagnosis until he fell critically ill and suffered a debilitating stroke; only then was she informed that he had been living with diabetes and in treatment for it for some time (Ollison, 2006). Similarly, his personal assistant Max Szadek describes learning belatedly from physicians that the stroke was avoidable with proven interventions.⁷ And according to his business manager Carmen Romano, the singer complained of a weeklong headache in the period leading up to the stroke, but likely avoided seeing a physician because “he just didn’t want to get a lecture about [having gained weight]” (quoted in Sinclair, 2003). With this backstory and emotional baggage as its catalyzing force, the Divabetic organization maps the weight cycling, habits of concealment, and loss of Vandross’ life at age 54, onto a cautionary tale of self-neglect and inadequate support system. This investment in recontextualizing Vandross within a disease management/wellness framework is encouraging for the ways it attends to the practice of care and, yet, is also problematic for the narrow vision of womanhood and femininity it promotes.

With this tragedy as its origin story, Mary Ida Vandross and Szadek conceived of Divabetic as a campaign that tailors its message of open communication and the maintenance of a “wellness entourage” to African American women, as they represent the largest segment of Vandross fans.⁸ Topics such as sexual health, premenstrual disorders, and incontinence are covered on the organization’s slate of podcasts. For example, on the Divabetic Late Night podcast, episodes feature a rotation of speakers in a roundtable format, showcasing a cast of predominately Black and woman of color diabetes educators, medical professionals, fitness experts, and occasional guests from the food, fashion, and beauty industries. Also, musicians, singers, or actors contribute personal stories of living with diabetes and/or the role of self-care in their life, culminating in an annual “Luther Tribute” every April to celebrate his birthday. An important consistent message conveyed by Divabetic regarding weight loss is that while excess weight can increase risk of certain diseases and should be addressed in certain situations, it is more important to create lifestyle changes that incorporate beneficial eating habits, medication compliance, and routine exercise to regulate blood sugar levels and improve mental health. As recently as October 15, 2021, the podcast hosted a conversation centered on the need for a “weight-neutral approach” to diabetes management.

An example of how Vandross is incorporated into this perspective is on the occasion of the 2021 annual tribute podcast. Szadek, as his Mr. Divabetic persona, published three promotional blogs for the episode that reference the title of Vandross’ fifth studio album and most commercially successful in the UK at the time, Give Me the Reason (1986). This is significant because it was the first of six album cover images that contain the Slim Luther embodiment. The goal of the episode is described as aiming to “shed light on how doctors put overweight patients with type 2 diabetes on a path to failure by focusing on shedding pounds.” The trilogy of blogs are titled “Give Me The Reason (To Lose Weight)” (4/08/2021); “Give Me The Reason To Take A Diabetes Diagnosis Seriously” (4/15/2021); and “Give Me the Reason For Yo Yo Dieting” (08/20/2021).

Moreover, Divabetic functions at the intersection of fan culture and disability community through the maintenance of social media chapters and local clubs in major cities; the production of culturally relevant events co-organized with Black woman-led organizations⁹; and its involvement with the annual Fandross Festival, a 3-day conference-style celebration of the singer’s birthday. One prominent event series, funded by Novo Nordisk from 2006 to 2009, was the “Makeover Your Diabetes” outreach tour. Marketed as a way “to take diabetes education out of the clinical setting and into a fun and supportive environment” (Szadek, “How”), the tour retraced Vandross’ concert performance sites across the US. . This bundle approach to delivering health, beauty, and self-esteem advice offers “comfort, connection, and cheer” and is body-size inclusive, while it encourages participants to take on the Divabetic philosophy to “glam more, fear less” (“Glam More”). Unfortunately, the emphasis on “glitz and glam” signals its reliance on a particular kind of feminine aesthetic, which ultimately limits the kind of Black women that will be drawn to or be served by such programming. [Figure 4]

Figure 4. After Vandross died, his former employee Max Szadek collaborated with the Vandross Estate to establish a nonprofit diabetes awareness organization that targets Black women, as they represent the majority of the singer’s fanbase. A network of clubs was created in major cities and social media sites. Pictured are Divabetic Club Philadelphia participants at a 2016 event hosted by the American Diabetes Association. Szadek is pictured in the back left row, against the wall. Source: Divabetic.org.

All in all, Divabetic endeavors to counter traditional representations of what it means to live “in and through” (Machalko, 2002, p. 15) disability as an African American. It also expands the Vandross legacy and seeks to augment public memory of his body. Incorporating chronic disease into what is remembered about “Big Luther” might make people more compassionate and charitable to him – and themselves – in the end.

Even so, the Divabetic origin story indulges in moral healthism similar to The Boondocks. First, in her framing, Mary Ida Vandross positions herself as a hapless victim of Luther’s refusals when she decries his desire “to be grown” (Ollison, 2006) or laments his habit of withholding details about his social life when he traveled (Morales, 2003). Second, Max Szadek is a heroic figure in his remembrances of the day he discovered his boss semi-conscious on the floor within hours of the stroke occurring. And he has made it his refrain over the years and across multiple interviews to say the singer’s death could have been avoided if only Luther had as many people caring for his health as he did in the team of publicists, producers, and handlers who facilitated his music career.

All of this wishful thinking is problematic because it blames Vandross for his own death while, in reality, there is no guarantee that open lines of communication or earlier medical attention would have extended his life. Largely missing or downplayed in these discussions are critiques of larger social structures, such as the demands around beauty in the music industry (exception: Vandross’ penchant for “diva” aesthetics is an inspiration for the makeovers and the name of the organization), the financial drive to sustain the lifestyle his mother and extended family enjoy from his labors, and the ways the “historical continuum of racism” (Byrd and Clayton, 2001, p. 24) and intersecting oppressions (Tiako, 2020; Yearby, 2018) can discourage even the wealthiest Black people from trusting the U.S. medical industry.

Lastly, Divabetic reproduces the invisibility of queer disabled people that often occurs in mainstream discourse. While the Late Nite podcast did acknowledge Pride Month in 2018 and 2019, and Szadek, who is white, is open about his own gay identity, the Black bisexual, lesbian, or queer-identified diabetic is not adequately represented. It is possible that topics such as the impact of diabetes care on Black same-sex family formations or trans experience have been discussed, but I was only able to retrieve a blog entry on the death of Frankie Knuckles (4/02/2019) in the archive. In this deficiency, Divabetic practices its own kind of refusal. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that, according to his close friend Patti LaBelle, Vandross’ silence stemmed from his mother’s homophobia (Cooper, 2017).

What emerges across this study of the representational (after)life of Vandross is that his voice has created intense connections over the years, wedding the lives of fans and inspiring creatives across numerous modes of artistic expression. The circulation and repackaging of narratives about his weight cycling and medical history, however, have complicated that performer-audience relationship. What has developed is a discourse in which the performer’s body serves as a proxy for a variety of cultural longings, negotiations, and projections related to Black affective and embodied life. African American communal and individual articulations reveal a potent desire for and keen awareness of the failure to attain the “good health” status that eludes them statistically, as well as their inability to access the kind of beauty that functions as social capital in American society (Cottom, 2019). Big Luther or Skinny Luther? Perhaps it is time to change the joke and slip the yoke.

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Marlon Rachquel Moore

Marlon Rachquel Moore is a cultural critic and scholar of the African American experience who is currently exploring questions related to how we imagine and interact with the Black sick body in literature and popular culture.

Notes

1. For a scholarly account of cultural meanings attached to Lizzo, see Senyonga and Luna (2021).

2. For examples of the incorporation of body talk in legacy media early in his career, see Adler (1983); Catlin (1991).

3. Mecca Sullivan (2013) explores the gender implications in how names identifying bigness or fatness among Hip Hop artists are mainly reserved for men.

4. According to a 2019 report published by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to white populations, Black Americans are generally at higher risk for death due to heart diseases, stroke, and diabetes. “Profile: Black/African Americans.” Black/African American – The Office of Minority Health, 22 Aug. 2019, www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlid=61

5. The limited space here will not allow for elaboration, but it bears mentioning that “The Luther” burger has its own spinoff in “food porn” threaded discussions on the popular Reddit website and a dedicated Wikipedia entry.

6. The concept of the good/bad fatty in critical fat studies and fat activism is explored at length in Gibson (2022).

7. Szadek describes the culture of silence around Vandross’ health condition in the Divabetic origin story on the company’s website. The issue is also mentioned in the memoir of Kevin Owens (2014), his bandmate of more than twenty years.

8. Mary Vandross has been largely written out of the origin story on the Divabetic website, but she was integral to its establishment. See “Mary Ida Vandross, Fighting Diabetes,” National Public Radio, March 2, 2004; and “Luther Vandross’ Mother Announces Diabetes Awareness Campaign, Divabetic,” Jet Magazine, May 30, 2005, p. 10.

9. Examples of culturally relevant collaborations include: Sugga Mamas, a diabetes education program founded by Dr. Yvonne Prillerman to serve the West Philadelphia community; ArmNArm, a (now defunct) hand-dance school in Washington, DC; and Harlem, New York’s Heavenly Hat Shop, which has aesthetic roots in Black Americana Easter traditions.