AFRICAN AMERICAN LESBIAN AND GAY HISTORY
In 1979 Judith Schwarz of the Lesbian Herstory Archives sent out a questionnaire on issues in lesbian history to women working in this just-developing field. Among the twenty-four women who responded were Blanche Wiesen Cook, Lisa Duggan, Estelle Freedman, Joan Nestle, Adrienne Rich, Carol Smith-Rosenberg, and myself. Our responses were published in the women’s studies journal Frontiers, in an issue devoted entirely to lesbian history.
In response to the question “How can our work be inclusive of the total lesbian experience in history, particularly given the barriers that race, class, age, and homophobia raise in many societies?” I answered as follows:
I wanted to say something about the ways that racial and economic oppression will affect trying to do research on Black lesbian history. . . . I feel there is a gold mine of facts to find out, but the problem is that there are so few Black lesbians to do this. . . . The women who have the training and the credentials to do this kind of research don’t even have feminist politics, let alone lesbian politics. . . . Many women who have the politics don’t have the academic credentials, training, or material resources that would permit them to do the kind of research needed. Right now I can only think of one other Black woman besides myself who has all the resources at her disposal, and who is actively reporting on Black lesbian material she is discovering in her work: Gloria T. Hull. It’s depressing, but I’m living for the day when it will change.1
Fifteen years later, as I research a book on the history of African American lesbians and gays, my earlier comments make my involvement in this project seem inevitable. My writing, teaching, activism, and work as a publisher have always embodied the commitment to challenge invisibility, to make a place for those of us who are unseen and unheard. Despite the building of a Black lesbian and gay political movement since the 1970s and the simultaneous flowering of Black lesbian and gay art, Black lesbians and gays are still largely missing from the historical record.
The history of African American lesbians and gays currently exists in fragments, in scattered documents, in fiction, poetry, and blues lyrics, in hearsay, and in innuendo. Ideally, what I would like to create is a chronological narrative that traces evidence of same-gender sexual and emotional connections between people of African descent in this country for as many centuries back as possible. Realistically, because of how relatively little work has been done in this field, the finished work will undoubtedly be thematically focused rather than a comprehensive chronicle of the last four hundred years of homosexual, homoemotional, and homosocial experiences in African American life. My more achievable goal is to arrive at an accurate and useful analytical and theoretical framework for understanding the meaning of Black lesbian and gay life in the United States.
Such a framework has not been developed and applied to Black lesbian and gay experience by previous researchers, the majority of whom have been European Americans, whose primary focus has not been African American subject matter. The complex scope of Black lesbian and gay history has yet to be defined by Black lesbian and gay scholars, and it has also not been written by persons who are expert in African American studies. Until now Black lesbian and gay history has largely been written in juxtaposition to the history of white lesbians and gays and has been presented in works in which the history of white gays or lesbians constitutes the dominant narrative. The fascinating examples of Black lesbian and gay life that other historians have discovered are quite useful and suggestive, but the interpretative context in which this information exists as a part of a white dominant meta-narrative leaves many questions unanswered. The most alarming omissions result from insufficient or nonexistent attention to the pervasive impact of racism and white supremacy upon the lives of all African Americans regardless of sexual orientation, and upon the attitudes and actions of whites as well.
Most of what has been written about Black lesbians and gays has attempted to understand them in relationship to other gays who are of course white. Even when a serious attempt is made to understand Black gay experience within the Black experience as a whole, analytical errors still surface. My project is to understand Black lesbian and gay life in the context of both Black history and gay history. The major questions I want to answer which have not been previously addressed are 1. How did Black lesbians and gays view their own existences within Black communities during various historical eras? And 2. How did other members of Black communities view them? In short, what has the existence of African American homosexuality meant to Black people of various sexual orientations over time?
Before looking at some examples of how Black lesbian and gay experience has been approached and avoided, I would like to explain my decision to research the history of both men and women. Because I see this as a definitional project, it seemed impossible to understand fully the history of one gender without understanding the history of the other. The kinds of questions I want to explore cannot be accurately addressed by looking at Black lesbian or Black gay experience in isolation. In the future I hope that other researchers will focus with much more clarity on the specific histories of Black lesbians, gays, bisexuals, or transgendered people because of my attempt to create a more general framework. For example, we might see separate studies concerning Black lesbian participation in Black women’s clubs and sororities; Black gay men’s impact upon gospel and other sacred music; Black women who passed as men; or drag performance in African and African American culture.
My own experience as a Black lesbian during the past two decades indicates that Black lesbians and gay men are linked by our shared racial identity and political status in ways that white lesbians and gays are not. These links between us are sociological, cultural, historical, and emotional and I think it is crucial to explore this new terrain together.
The amount of published historical research which focuses specifically upon African American lesbians and gays is minimal, particularly when compared to the growing body of lesbian and gay research as a whole. In the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City University of New York’s first Directory of Lesbian and Gay Studies, for 1994–1995, which lists six hundred scholars, five individuals list an interest in Black lesbian and gay historical topics and seven more mention interest in researching African American subject matter in other disciplines.2 It has always been obvious to me that the difficult, often hostile working conditions that Black academics face as a result of racism in white institutions would make their involvement in explicitly lesbian and gay research an even higher risk activity than it is for European American scholars. There are several courageous younger Black academics, however, some still in graduate school, who are beginning to work in this area.
I value the efforts of the handful of white historians who have made the attempt to include material concerning people of color in their work. Jonathan Ned Katz’s groundbreaking documentary collections, Gay American History, first published in 1976, and the Gay/Lesbian Almanac, published in 1983, are models to this day of racial, ethnic, gender, and class inclusivity. Elizabeth Kennedy’s and Madeline Davis’s Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, which is based upon oral histories, also demonstrates a conscious commitment to racial and class diversity. The New York Public Library’s 1994 exhibition “Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall,” curated by Mimi Bowling, Molly McGarry, and Fred Wasserman, displayed a level of racial and gender diversity that is rare in cultural productions organized by European American gays and lesbians.
Other scholars have uncovered valuable evidence of Black lesbian and gay existence before Stonewall, especially during the 1920s in Harlem. The analyses of this information, however, sometimes overlook important meanings, advance inaccurate interpretations, or fail to place Black lesbian and gay experience into the context of Black American life. The most distorting error is either to ignore or give inadequate weight to the realities of racism, segregation, and white supremacy as they shape African American lesbian and gay people’s existences.
Jazz Age Harlem, for example, is now recognized as the site of a vibrant Black gay cultural and social life which rivaled that of Greenwich Village. Yet there is insufficient discussion of exactly how racial segregation shaped the growth of this so-called Black lesbian and gay community. Since a large proportion of New York’s Black population lived in Harlem during the 1920s, as a result of citywide housing discrimination, the gay community that arose there was obviously shaped by quite different forces than more intentional white enclaves in other parts of Manhattan. This geographic apartheid raises questions about whether the Harlem Black community’s seemingly greater tolerance for visible homosexuals was evidence of more accepting attitudes about sexuality and difference or was merely a structural accommodation to the reality of segregation which forced all types of Black people to live together in one location. Perhaps it was a subtle combination of both.
We also know very little about Black lesbian and gay existence in other cities during this period. Was the manifestation of Black lesbian and gay life in Harlem and the way in which it was viewed by heterosexual African Americans an exceptional case or might parallels be drawn to what was going on in other urban centers?
Another set of assertions that needs to be investigated concerns Harlem’s class composition. The issue of class identity in the Black community is exceedingly complex, often confusing, and cannot be evaluated by using measures identical to those used for whites. Racial oppression has a profoundly negative impact upon African Americans’ economic opportunities, their class and social status. To this day the average income levels of African Americans remain at or near the bottom of the U.S. scale and a tiny percentage of Blacks are in fact wealthy or upper class. When various attitudes about homosexuality are attributed to members of Harlem’s upper or middle classes, there needs to be much more specific explanation of who comprised these strata and also what their numbers were relative to the population of Harlem as a whole.
An avenue of inquiry that I have wanted to pursue for some time is a revisionist history of the Harlem Renaissance itself. As I began to discover that more and more of the Harlem Renaissance’s leading writers were gay, bisexual or lesbian, I knew that the meaning of this pivotal epoch in Black culture needed to be seriously reevaluated. What does it mean that the major outpouring of Black literature, art, and cultural consciousness in this century prior to the Black Arts Movement of the sixties and seventies was significantly shaped by Blacks who were not heterosexuals? How would those who celebrate this period for its major intellectual and artistic achievements view it if they fully realized how much it was a queer production? The crucial impact of lesbian, bisexual, and gay artists and intellectuals upon the formation of the Renaissance has meaning and needs to be systematically explored.
Harlem has become a symbolic catchall for the discussion of pre-Stonewall Black lesbian and gay existence. Other regions of the country need to be studied and the Harlem experience itself needs to be revisited with a much stronger consciousness of the myriad economic, political, and social factors that shaped African American life during that era.
An example of a problem of interpretation occurs in George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World. This work makes a major contribution to increasing understanding of gay life in the early part of this century and Chauncey’s discussion of Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s provides significant information and insights. In one instance, however, in an effort to equalize Black and white experience, the specificity of Black experience is not taken sufficiently into account. The author describes in detail the history of Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Balls, the largest drag events to occur in New York during this era. He notes that this annual event was unique because it attracted an interracial crowd of both participants and observers at a time when racial segregation in social settings was virtually universal. Chauncey writes:
The balls became a site for the projection and inversion of racial as well as gender identities. Significantly, though, white drag queens were not prepared to reverse their racial identity. Many accounts refer to African-American queens appearing as white celebrities, but none refer to whites appearing as well-known black women. As one black observer noted, “The vogue was to develop a ‘personality’ like some outstanding woman,” but the only women he listed, Jean Harlow, Gloria Swanson, Mae West, and Greta Garbo, were white.3
Chauncey is correct to imply that white drag queens’ racism prevented them from adopting Black female personas, but my initial response to this passage was that there was in fact no comparable group of Black women to be imitated. Despite the popularity of some Black women entertainers during this period, there were no Black women who functioned as internationally recognized glamour icons. There were no Black women movie stars; no Black women worked as fashion models in white contexts. White Americans simply did not see Black women as beautiful; indeed, the racist stereotypes of our physical appearances define us as quite the opposite. The white world certainly did not confer fame upon Black women for either their physical attributes or outstanding accomplishments. Josephine Baker had to leave the United States for Paris in order to achieve stardom during this very period. Chauncey also does not explore the racial implications of Black men wanting not merely to be female for a night, but white as well.
When I discussed this passage with my colleague Mattie Richardson at Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, she pointed out that if white males had chosen to portray Black women, they very likely would have donned blackface to complete the effect. Such a racial masquerade undoubtedly would have upset Blacks in an atmosphere that Chauncey describes as already racially charged.
An example of an analytical error that affects the entire thesis of a work occurs in Tracy Morgan’s article “Pages of Whiteness: Race, Physique Magazines, and the Emergence of Gay Public Culture, 1955–1960.” Although Morgan acknowledges the negative racial climate in the United States during this period, she describes the exclusion of Black men from white physique publications as a conscious strategy that white gay men pursued in order to appear more acceptable and to help neutralize their queerness. She writes:
In thinking about race and gay community formation, it might be important to ask how patterns of white, gay racism may have been “useful,” in terms of the “wages of whiteness” thesis, in assisting white gay people to attain greater social and cultural privilege as, at least, “not black” outcasts in American culture. . . .
Summoning forth white-skin privilege as a salve and smoke screen in a quest for respectability, physique magazines were part of a larger phenomenon within mid-twentieth-century gay community formation that often sought individual, privatized solutions to group problems. . . .
Gay maleness became synonymous with whiteness. Black, gay men became invisible—the representation of 1950s homosexuality demanded their repression.4
Although excluding Black men might have had the result of minimally enhancing white gay men’s social position, their original motivation for such exclusion was no doubt based upon unquestioning conformity to the racial status quo. Morgan does not take into account that racism, white supremacy, and segregation were universally institutionalized, accepted, and practiced by whites of all classes, genders, sexual orientations, and geographic regions. The average white person did not have to decide to exclude Black people from every aspect of their social, economic, and personal lives. U.S. society was organized to ensure that this would always be the case. The “decision” to enforce white supremacy and to reap its benefits had been made long before white gay men in urban settings began publishing physique magazines in the mid-twentieth century. By the time these men reached maturity, unless their families were highly exceptional, complete racial segregation would have been a norm, a cherished and familiar way of life. Just as their fathers did hire Blacks, their schools and churches did not admit them, and their neighborhoods refused to house them, their magazines did not publish physique photographs of Black men.
Morgan confuses the causes for racism with the resulting benefits. She writes, “Most lesbian and gay publications, to this very day, continue to draw on white-skin privilege as one of their main vestiges of respectability” (124). If racial exclusion is primarily a strategy used by a disenfranchised group, why are straight magazines equally white in their content? Her thesis inaccurately assumes that white gays have a significantly different value system about race than other whites, and that if it were not for their attempt to enhance their credibility with white heterosexuals, they would be much more racially inclusive.
I do not want to dissuade scholars from investigating and including material about people of color. Indeed, current queer studies needs to be much more racially and ethnically inclusive, but at the same time it also needs to demonstrate a thorough consciousness of the racial and class contexts in which lesbians and gays of color actually function.
African American historical research would seem to offer more avenues into Black lesbian and gay experience. The field of Black history, which has roots in the Negro History movement of the early twentieth century, offers extensive and complex documentation of African American life. The overwhelming problem, however, is that there is virtually no acknowledgment within the confines of African American history that Black lesbians and gays ever existed.
The reasons for this silence are numerous. Homophobia and heterosexism are of course the most obvious. But there is also the reality that Black history has often served extrahistorical purposes that would militate against bringing up “deviant” sexualities. In its formative years, especially, but even today, Black history’s underlying agenda frequently has been to demonstrate that African Americans are full human beings who deserve to be treated like Americans, like citizens, like men. I use “men” advisedly because until approximately twenty years ago there was little specific focus upon the history of Black women. Those who subscribe to certain strains of Afrocentric thought can be even more overtly hostile to Black lesbian and gay historical projects. The conservative agendas of some Afrocentric or Black nationalist scholarship encourage condemnation of what they define as European-inspired perversion, a conspiracy to destroy the Black family and the race. The themes of uplift, of social validation, and of prioritizing subject matter that is a “credit to the race” have burdened and sometimes biased Black historical projects. Chauncey points out that in the early part of this century “many middle-class and churchgoing African Americans grouped . . . [bulldaggers and faggots] with prostitutes, salacious entertainers, and ‘uncultured’ rural migrants as part of an undesirable and all-too-visible Black ‘lowlife’ that brought disrepute to the neighborhood and the race.”5 “Lowlife” is exactly the image I had of the lesbian lifestyle when I was growing up in the pre-Stonewall 1950s and 1960s. I am not even sure where I got this from since sexuality in general and lesbianism in particular were seldom explicitly discussed, yet this subliminal message greatly contributed to my fear of coming out.
It is difficult to imagine traditional African American historians going out of their way to explore lesbian and gay life, or to reveal evidence of it when they happen across it while researching other topics. Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Langston Hughes illustrates the opposite tendency of going out of one’s way to ignore or suppress such information. It is hard to imagine Black historians combing through court and police records (as some white lesbian and gay scholars have done) to find evidence of Black homosexuality. I have weighed the implications of utilizing these kinds of sources myself, especially in today’s political climate in which the right wing seeks to criminalize all people of color as part of their racist agenda.
An example of how an otherwise highly informative work can obscure Black lesbian history occurs in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, whose principal editor is Darlene Clark Hine. This groundbreaking two-volume, 1,500-page reference work presents an exhaustively researched picture of Black American women. It contains interpretative articles that cover historical issues and organizations as well as hundreds of biographical entries describing individual Black women. The index alone is 150 pages long; however, there are only six entries listed under “Lesbianism.” Certainly the encyclopedia includes many more women who were in fact lesbian or bisexual, but because discussion of a Black woman’s sexuality is not usually considered relevant, unless her orientation is heterosexual, contributors either omitted or suppressed this material. I found myself reading between the lines and trying to evaluate the work’s beautiful photographic images in an effort to guess which of the many women documented might be ones I should investigate further for my study. These omissions will necessitate that others do a great deal of this primary research all over again.
Another type of omission in Black Women in America occurs in entries which describe women who are known to be lesbian or bisexual, especially musicians and entertainers such as Alberta Hunter and Jackie “Moms” Mabley, but who are not identified as such. The comments in the encyclopedia on the heiress A’Lelia Walker, whose legendary salons were attended by queer luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance as well as by other lesbians and gays, illustrate how reticence about sexuality can result in an incomplete portrait of an historical figure. The author, Tiya Miles, writes:
A’Lelia Walker was not accepted by everyone in the Harlem community, however. Some begrudged the fact that she was the daughter of a washerwoman. Some also objected to her fast-paced social life and unusual style of dress, which included turbans and jewelry. Some of her contemporaries called her the “De-kink Heiress.” James Weldon Johnson’s wife, Grace Nail Johnson, who was known as the social dictator of Harlem, refused to attend Walker’s parties.6
A photograph of A’Lelia shows her not only in a turban, but in shiny, high, black leather boots with harem pants tucked inside of them, leaning back casually with one of her legs bent and her foot propped up on the bench on which she is sitting. This is neither ladylike dress nor a ladylike pose. Walker was obviously willing to challenge the gender expectations of her time.
Mabel Hampton’s description of some of A’Lelia’s “less formal” parties quoted in Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers offers other reasons for Walker’s negative reputation:
[They were] funny parties—there were men and women, straight and gay. They were kinds of orgies. Some people had clothes on, some didn’t. People would hug and kiss on pillows and do anything they wanted to do. You could watch if you wanted to. Some came to watch, some came to play. You had to be cute and well-dressed to get in.7
Probably Grace Nail Johnson and other members of the Black bourgeoisie knew about such goings-on and ostracized Walker as a result, as well as for the reasons that Miles cites.
The most painful paradoxes among the encyclopedia’s entries are those that describe my contemporaries, women who I personally know to be lesbians, but who are unwilling to publicly acknowledge the fact. This is the group that will pose one of the most significant challenges for my research. The myriad closeted contemporary figures who are artists, activists, athletes, and entertainers, both male and female, constitute what I already think of as the chapter I cannot write. But I plan to write it anyway. I have no intention of outing anyone, but want to analyze instead what it means on a variety of levels that there are so many prominent African Americans whose stories are well known in lesbian and gay circles, but whom I cannot include because they are unwilling to relinquish their heterosexual privilege and name themselves.
The fear of being rejected by and losing credibility in the Black community is undoubtedly one of the most significant disincentives to coming out, and this is particularly true of our closeted cultural and political leaders. Since I have personally experienced some of the difficult consequences of being honest about my sexual orientation, I will not say fears are groundless. However, the increase in the numbers of Black people who can now be counted as allies in movements for sexual and gender freedom is the direct result of our actively challenging oppression instead of accommodating to it. It is my hope that this historical project will play a part in enlarging the space in which people of all sexualities can live and struggle.
NOTES
1. Judith Schwarz, “Questionnaire on Issues in Lesbian History,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 4, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 5, 6.
2. Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, The CLAGS Directory of Lesbian and Gay Studies (New York: Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, The City University of New York, 1994), passim.
3. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 263.
4. Tracy Morgan, “Pages of Whiteness: Race, Physique Magazines, and the Emergence of Gay Public Culture, 1955–1960,” Found Object, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 112, 123, 124. All subsequent references to this work will be designated in the text.
5. Chauncey, Gay New York, 253.
6. Tiya Miles, “A’Lelia Walker (1885–1931),” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine et al. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1993), 1205.
7. Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991), 76.