Chapter 2

2. “Because of Their Fearlessness, I Felt Empowered”

Ancestors, Fictive Kin, and Elders

It is our duty to write for our freedom. It is our duty to pen. We must love and support one another’s stories. We have nothing to lose but our erasure.1

—Marvin K. White, Facebook, October 8, 2015

In 1987, at age eighteen, Stephanie Flowers came out to herself during her first semester as a student at an Ivy League university. One of the challenges she faced was that there were no visible queer or queer of color spaces on her campus, so she had no access to or awareness of Black lesbian history, culture, and politics. She thought of this as an especially detrimental form of historical erasure that affected her personal and intellectual development. Flowers came out as a lesbian into a community of White lesbian feminists, an experience she described as rewarding yet difficult because she learned “to be an activist around queer issues and . . . around race issues in the Queer Community. . . . But at the same time, it was born out of painful encounters with people.” Although she encountered much racism within those circles, Stephanie was able to use activist tools to transform the LGBTQ and feminist space into one cognizant of racial diversity and racism. Flowers’s introduction to Black lesbian feminist writers was key to this work. Searching for materials to support her goal, she discovered Pat Parker’s poetry collection Movement in Black (1978) and Audre Lorde’s “biomythography”² Zami (1982):

A friend gave me an Audre Lorde book and I was like amazed. You know, I’d never heard another human being articulate things that were so deep and meaningful that I felt that she was also feeling and willing to put down on a page and someone who also identified as a Black lesbian, and political, and “Out,” and taking risks, and describing that fear of standing up for yourself and acknowledging that you feel bad and you do it anyway . . . I feel like she gave me courage to do a lot of things. Pat Parker also. Just reading about risks that they’re willing to take in their lives you know and there was always a sense of that understanding that you were never meant to survive so trying to protect yourself in some way by living in whatever closet is not going to help you survive. [emphasis mine]

I emphasize Flowers’s statement about the “fear of standing up for yourself . . . and doing it anyway” for a few reasons. One is to continue highlighting danger and fear, as discussed in the previous chapter, as a reoccurring experience of research participants. Also, Flowers’s comment about pushing through fear toward the courage expressed in “standing up for yourself” is a reminder that restorative literacies are never without risk, a fact that is easily lost if we only see such literacy performances as tools in simple stories of resilience. Further, and most significant for the discussion to follow, Flowers says that the courage she received came from Black lesbian ancestors, poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker. Audre Lorde, for example, is paraphrased in Flowers’s comments when she says “understanding that you were never meant to survive” (emphasis mine), the italicized portion being a direct quote from Lorde’s famous poem “A Litany for Survival.” The writing and lives of these ancestors are instructing Flowers and others not only on the risks of speaking truth to power but also about the personal rewards of taking courage as well. Engaging these Black lesbian ancestors through texts changed Flowers’s life. As we see in her case, historical rootedness is a key ingredient in the work of self- and communal love, as it is vital to Black LGBTQ identity construction, affirmation, and overall sense of self.

Here I investigate the recursive practice of historical erasure as another iteration of literacy normativity because it is a use of literacy that wounds individuals and communities, and, thus, historical erasure is an act of violence. Through historical erasure institutions and individuals use print and other tools to construct historical narratives that exclude Black queer life and contributions. Such uses of literacy draw from and engender normative race, gender, and sexual politics and other normativities that have a negative impact on Black LGBTQ people and other nonnormative racial, gender, and sexual subjects. These normative politics grow from racist and heteropatriarchal hegemony, creating contexts in which Black LGBTQ people are vulnerable to a multitude of violences, including the violence of literacy performances (occurring on and off the page), that erase Black LGBTQ life and culture both historically and contemporarily.

Although many acknowledge historical erasure, none have examined these actions through a lens centered on literacy in everyday life, let alone Black LGBTQ lives. Given the role of reading, writing, and other print in making history and unearthing the past, an analysis of historical erasure by way of literacy is long overdue. I contend that historical erasure depends upon the use of print and other literacy performances and rhetorical practices in order to be successful. Written histories, archives, and other print sources that erase or omit Black LGBTQ people are some examples. Literacy is also implicated in historical erasure in that it can also occur through oral and other nonprint texts. Historical erasure of Black LGBTQ history is literacy normativity because such erasures suppress the life, history, culture, and contributions of those positioned outside normativity on the basis of racialized gender and sexuality. The result of this historical erasure is the documenting and maintenance of histories of those who adhere or are sufficiently socialized into normativity. Thus, once again, we see the intersections of literacy normativity and race, gender, and sexual normativity. A primary effect of historical erasure—one that further demonstrates the intersections of this form of literacy normativity with nonnormative racialized genders and sexualities—is the impact it has on one’s personal and communal identity formation and affirmation. Historical rootedness is a key ingredient in one’s identity construction, affirmation, and overall sense of self. The erasure of Black LGBTQ history—the omission, occlusion, or ignoring of Black LGBTQ people, their contributions, and lived experiences—means that this ingredient is missing. Because of this erasure, many Black LGBTQ people exhibit a yearning for their history, a historical yearning resonant with Victor Villanueva’s description of “the need to reclaim a memory, memory of an identity in formation, constant reformation, the need to reclaim memory of an identity as formed through the generations . . . the need to reclaim and retain the memory of the imperial lords, those who have forcibly changed the identities of people of color through colonization.”3 What Villanueva points to is the necessity of thinking of the ways identities and language are formed and reformed across generations and exist as a historical continuum. I take historical erasure as acts of oppression in that they interrupt or close off the possibility of accessing and making use of the historical continuum of one’s identity and literacies. Through this approach I reclaim historical erasure as a generative site for the theorization of an array of literacy practices, as literacy is prevalent in the act of erasure itself and in the various interventions my research participants pursue in the construction of historical rootedness. Further, Villanueva’s focus on narrative is critical because it is the genre by which most descendants discover ancestors and are affirmed, mandated, and challenged. These narratives are encoded in books, personal documents, oral histories, talk, and other “texts,” and themselves become the model for the uses of writing and other literacies by descendants. For example, my analysis shows that it is through writing that many Black queer ancestors model for research participants the importance of telling their own stories as an intervention into historical erasure, a challenge that some of the research participants take up as evidenced in their own uses of writing to leave roots that may inspire and make life better for the next generation of Black LGBTQ people. This writing might include coming-out stories, creative nonfiction, and so on. Thus, research participants mimic the ways ancestors were trailblazers for later generations.

Central to restorative literacies, here are three figures I use to categorize and analyze the nexus of language, identity, history, and culture at its heart: ancestors, fictive kin, and elders. Ancestors refer to the dead whom research participants identified as inspirational for Black and LGBTQ people. Fictive kin are fictional characters in cultural productions to whom research participants described connections that were familial, influential, and lasting. Elders are living people that research participants regarded as wiser than themselves by virtue of being older in age or experience. Through these figures and an array of literacy practices employed for intervention, research participants persist in fashioning Black queer lives as they create and preserve historical links, share cultural traditions with others, and engender Black queer identity formation and affirmation. These literacy practices rely heavily on what I observe as a kind of tenacious reading—evident in meaningful, regular, and persistent efforts to achieve historical rootedness through a determined, deep reading of a variety of texts on and off the page—writing and other literacy performances. There are overlapping meanings and functions within these definitions. For instance, ancestors were often elders and are believed to possess wisdom for many of the same reasons that they possess experience and longer life. Ancestors and elders can both be fictive kin because many of the persons named as ancestors and elders have no blood relation to research participants.

Examining the role of ancestors, elders, and fictive kin in Black LGBTQ literacies reveals literacy practices that would otherwise be invisible and, as shown in chapter 1, help us to reconsider what we understand about literacy in ways that allow us to see beyond what exists. We can also better understand how these literacy practices help maintain cultural and intellectual heritage. College classrooms, community organizations, homes, and social clubs provide the primary locations where research participants described discovering ancestors, meeting elders, and being introduced to the cultural productions in which they encounter fictive kin. This emphasis on the “where” provides insight into specific formal or informal institutional spaces that are implicated in the meanings individuals give to historical erasures and where they receive the literacy tools in which to redress this literacy normativity.

In addition to Stephanie Flowers’s story, I wish to note that the matter of ancestor/elders/fictive kinships, historical erasures, and interventions through literacy performances has roots among Black queer writers and artists. For example, two years before Flowers’s life-changing moment reading Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, Joseph Beam published the first of his many writings concerned with similar questions about Black queers, history, and cultural traditions. The editor of Black/out, a news and literary magazine published by the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (NCBLG),⁵ Beam devoted multiple issues to exploring questions about Black queer history. Beam 6 sought to assert the role of Black gays and lesbians in critical historical events, to excavate a lineage of Black gay and lesbian forebears for his generation to follow, and to establish the role that racial, gender, and sexual politics played in the construction of historical narratives affecting who’s in and who’s out in Black and queer histories.

In the first lines of a 1985 Au Courant column titled, “Black History Month: Act Like You Know,” Beam offers an aphorism: “History—the knowledge of, the teaching of, the writing of, and access to—is inherently political.” To illustrate, Beam narrates an incident from his childhood when his World History teacher, “Mr. Auld,” covered the history of every other continent but skipped the chapter on Africa, effectively omitting it from the curriculum. This incident made the young Beam feel “embarrassed, hurt and angry, but ultimately silent and fearful.” Beam uses this incident as a reference point for other acts of historical erasure, specifically those erasing Black LGBTQ people from history. He writes that “to endure with any safety, I must be a historian, librarian and archaeologist, digging up and dusting off the fragments of Black history and Black gay history.”⁷ Beam’s emphasis on safety is crucial. It indicates that to be erased from history is more than to be overlooked; it is to be in profound danger, to risk metaphorical, if not physical death. He highlights the mandates to survive this danger. His description of digging up and dusting off fragments embodies the unearthing and reconstruction of Black queer history. Overall, Flowers’s and Beam’s anecdotes show the challenges of historical erasure to be intergenerational; my theorization of the presence of ancestors, fictive kin, and elders in restorative literacies demonstrates ways that people navigate this problem through tactics that are intergenerational and span texts as well.

Keep My Name in Your Mouth: Ancestorship and Literacy in Theory and Practice

In Black English vernacular, when someone says, “Keep my name out your mouth,” usually you’re in trouble. The phrase means stop talking about me or my life, and it definitely implies consequences. In discussing relationships between ancestors and my research participants, I take the inverse, “Keep my name in your mouth,” because in those relationships the inverse was true—research participants felt called by ancestors to keep talking to, with, or about them.

Honoring ancestors is a feature of the traditions of many African and African Diasporic peoples. Numerous scholars “corroborate the existence of ancestor veneration among enslaved Africans.”8 This is especially true of slave religious and spiritual practices such as the ring shout, which continues today throughout the African Diaspora, as well as rituals like performing libations, the ceremonial pouring of water or other drinks to show respect for ancestors and other divinities.⁹ Nancy J. Fairley says that ancestors are believed to have “a vested authority and interest in the social and physical conditions of their kin.”¹⁰ Thus, a part of honoring ancestors is appealing to them in the afterlife for their wisdom and counsel. In my research, ancestors refer to the dead whom research participants identified as helpful, inspirational, or guides for Black and LGBTQ people.

My examination of ancestorship and literacy builds on discussions of the power and presence of ancestors in people’s writing lives, a topic that writers in composition and rhetoric and literary studies have explored. Discussions of ancestorship and literacy have deep roots among literacy and composition studies. Jacqueline Jones Royster has often noted the ways that intellectual heritage matters in our positions as researchers, teachers, and learners. Reflecting on her work with primarily African American female students in Spelman College’s writing program, Royster writes that like her students learning about the intellectual heritage of their Black women foremothers, scholars’ “pursuit of intellectual authority can be informed and sanctioned by their conscious and specific awareness of the historical conditions and circumstances of others like themselves.” For Royster’s students, discovering their intellectual and cultural connections to ancestors—Black women essayists and orators in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—helped the students “to fashion for themselves their own authority to speak, to write, to learn, and to produce when they can determine, not just the resonance of their own lives with others, but also the dissonance.”¹¹ Here Royster describes the students’ mandate to use literacy and rhetoric to continue the work of their ancestors who used the essay to seek social change for black women, but she acknowledges that the students must seek change according to the conditions of their present. My focus on Black LGBTQ people, a group that has not received any significant attention within literacy, composition, or rhetorical studies, provides initial insight into not only the intellectual heritage from which Black LGBTQ people draw, but also the ways in which their literacies shape and are shaped by Black queer ancestors.

Similar to Royster, Malea Powell eloquently describes the impact of her own ancestors on the mandates she feels to write and contribute to the field, detailing the way “ghost stories” are “rooted in other knowledges, other ways of being and becoming that frequently go unheard and unsaid.” Powell “think[s] a lot about what ghost stories can teach us, how in telling them [she] might both honor the knowledge that isn’t honored in universities and do so in a way that interweaves these stories with more recognizable academic theorizing as well.”12 Powell emphasizes the function of literacy in producing ancestorship that exposes the exclusion of what Toni Morrison has called “discredited knowledges,”¹³ and she highlights the usefulness of such exposure to recovering these marginalized epistemologies and ontologies from economies of knowledge that overlook them. My focus affirms the practice of literacy mobilized to produce ancestorship while also pointing toward the necessity of understanding this theory and praxis from the specific positionalities that various groups have to history and its unique effects on conceptions of and access to ancestorship, as well as the historical, political, and cultural contexts in which those groups experience and employ literacies. My analysis of ancestorship centers on the meanings Black LGBTQ people give to their literacies and how they employ them on their own terms. Doing so, I posit the ways scholars might further investigate the uses of literacy in the pervasiveness of historical erasure and also the production of ancestorship for a diversity of other individuals and groups, each providing some additional insight that may resonate for the future of literacy and composition theory and pedagogy.

Toni Morrision observes the connections between writing and ancestorship in an essay examining the ancestors’ presence in African American literature and the writing process of Black authors. Morrison writes that ancestors figure so heavily into each person’s writing process that “it seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of an ancestor.” Of Black literature, she says,

There is always an ancestor there. And these ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom . . . this timelessness was there, this person who represented this ancestor . . . it was the absence of an ancestor that was frightening, that was threatening, and caused much damage and disarray in the work itself. [emphasis mine]14

Morrison theorizes ancestorship in terms of narrative and character in African American literature. My intervention departs from her observations by analyzing the function of literacy in constructing the ancestors from the perspective of readers and writers. Still, Morrison’s characterization displays the reverence with which ancestors are regarded. Likewise, her use of “timeless” in this description is significant: it indicates how ancestors’ voices echo across generational lines and between the living and the dead. What I find most important about Morrison’s observations is when she discusses the ancestor’s absence in writing: there are, as she describes it, consequences to this absence that affect the writer but also the writing they produce. This point speaks back to my argument about historical erasure in that it demonstrates what is at stake and the negative implications of living without historical rootedness. Morrison’s comments then affirm why it is so important to take seriously the role of ancestors in people’s everyday lives, but especially in the writing lives of African diasporic people. This is further shown in Morrison’s essay when she writes, “When you kill the ancestor you kill yourself. . . . Nice things don’t always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection.”¹⁵ This statement puts a fine point on my argument about the significance of historical rootedness to people and their literacies, and particularly within Black LGBTQ literacies.

Discussions of historical erasure and queer ancestry have also emerged. For example, an entire issue of White Crane: Gay Wisdom and Culture, a quarterly magazine about LGBT culture, politics, and spirituality, focuses on queer ancestorship. The issue’s editors, Dan Vera and Bo Young, called their editor’s note “Forebears” to signal the issue’s focus on queer ancestry. Vera states that the discussion is important because

we take our cues from history. Our understanding of the present is based on our understanding of what has come before. The lavender past has been erased and even though the situation has gotten better, that erasure is still very much in play. That unknowing is still the experience of the grand majority of Gay people who grow up in places where the history’s been scrubbed.

Vera suggests several causes of this erasure, including the deliberate omission of queer history from accepted heteronormative and gender-normative historical narratives and the challenges of recovering or uncovering records of queer ancestors whose “lives were murky, their longings hidden, or the record of their loving destroyed by themselves, or their family or estates.”16 What I find most intriguing are the links that Vera and Young make about how knowing or not knowing our forebears affects our sense of self in the present. Their discussion of erasure and recovery further highlights my claim that literacy is implicated in these activities. Through research participants’ comments I see implicitly that connection to ancestors and historical rootedness are linked to our epistemologies, ways of being, and generating values, each of which are brought to bear on one’s literacy practices.

Four Patterns of Ancestorship Developed through Literacy

My analysis of ancestorship in Black LGBTQ literacies reveals four patterns of literacy in constructing and engaging with ancestors. These patterns exemplify how research participants use reading, writing, and other literacy activities to navigate historical erasure: (1) literacy used to create, discover, and affirm relationships to ancestors; (2) ancestors model the multiplicity of identities as a category of rhetorical analysis; (3) descendants’ identity formation/affirmation affected by ancestor’s writing and lives; (4) descendants receive cross-generational mandates to become ancestors through literacy. Showing a range of literacy practices and rhetorical moves that characterize the discursive relations between ancestors and descendants, the analysis to follow demonstrates the ways Black LGBTQ people use literacy to form relations with ancestors to address historical erasures and reveal their implications for restorative literacies. The patterns also help to explicate the cross-generational interplay of literacy with identity, history, and quests for social change in the lives of Black queer ancestors and descendants.

Some research participants named as ancestors people with whom they shared Black queer identity, while others did not require a shared identity to identify someone as an ancestor. Establishing this connection to ancestors often occurred through, again, tenacious reading, a phrase I use to characterize the vigor and depth with which people read a text against the popular interpretation or normative views. In the case of ancestors, those texts include widely circulated background information, including biographical details such as government records, memoirs, and news reports. Through tenacious reading, research participants accumulated enough information to sufficiently satisfy whatever requirements they applied for one to be named an ancestor when much historical evidence had been erased.

The most frequently cited ancestors among my participants are those who were published writers, for reading and writing are a primary means by which individuals form intimate ties across space, time, and circumstance. Memoirs, speeches, poems, and other personal writing were especially prevalent as texts through which research participants developed rootedness. Timothy Barnett writes, “‘Personal’ writing can provide an important entry into an analysis of social forces . . . personal writing can help students understand personal lives as linked to and reflective of social and political norms.”17 This is an argument that holds in the case of my research participants who draw upon the personal writing of ancestors to understand society’s perceptions of Black queerness within the social and political norms across time. Participants are also using personal writing to amplify the social and political critiques in ancestors’ writing that are ignored, to construct their own understandings of Black queerness that is unique to their own times, affirm their connection to Black queer culture and community, and affirm the usefulness of their own experiences as a foundation to formulate their own critiques and interventions into contemporary social and political issues. Published writing and archival documentation are among the default teaching tools and acceptable forms of documentation within schools, particularly within higher education; thus, it is not surprising that access to historical records contributed to decisions about whom many considered an ancestor. Many Black LGBTQ people frequently rely on reading and writing to suture the gaps left by historical erasure, cementing the influence of published writers and others whose work has been documented in news reports, archival collections, and other public records. Those cited most by research participants were: poet Audre Lorde; activist, orator, and writer Bayard Rustin (lead organizer of the 1963 March on Washington); writer James Baldwin; poet Pat Parker; writer and activist Joseph Beam; poet and essayist Essex Hemphill; and writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent. Each of these individuals addressed, in various forms (memoirs, poems, short stories, speeches, and editorials), the particularities of being both Black and LGBTQ. Further, I would be remiss if I did not again note that the use of “traditional” texts (e.g., books, speeches) acquired through normalized literacy systems and institutions (e.g., schools, libraries) again show the paradox of literacy; participants critique literacy normativity, and often enact restorative literacies to subvert that normativity through literacy tools and institutions that are understood to be traditional or the norm themselves.

Pattern 1: Literacy Used to Create, Discover, and Affirm Relationships to Ancestors

Critical imagination, writes Jacqueline Jones Royster, is “the ability to see the possibility of certain experiences even if we cannot know the specificity of them. . . . [It is] a term for a commitment to making connections and seeing possibility.”18 Stephanie Flowers’s use of critical imagination illuminates other links between literacy and ancestry, such as the role of “creation” in forming, discovering, and affirming relationships to ancestors. In this, the first and most dominant of the four patterns of ancestorship developed through literacy, research participants employ a range of reading practices to create, discover, and affirm ancestors amid suppression of Black queer life and culture. By “creating” ancestors, I refer to the centrality of rhetorical invention in participants’ relation to ancestors. For some participants, the historical erasure of ancestors has meant having to create from nothing a narrative genealogy for their forebears wherein they relate to them. For others, creation comes into play by naming individuals as ancestors despite the lack of clear relevance to participants or of confirmed biographical details or shared investments. Participants used the words “discovering,” “locating,” and “identifying” interchangeably to reference their selection of or stumbling on ancestors through an already visible and predetermined group of Black queer ancestors. I argue that even location and identification of ancestors contains an element of creation because assigning meanings to the ancestors’ identities—their life experiences, their writings, the historical moment, their connectivity—is already a practice of creation.

Flowers, who is a Black lesbian, was born in a small economically and racially diverse city on the East Coast and currently resides in a large city in the South. Flowers easily recalls episodes where she was introduced to the lives and works of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker through a Black lesbian college friend. This, again, points to the centrality of an intersection between Black queer literacies and Ann Ruggles Gere’s theorization of literacy’s extracurriculum,19 as demonstrated in the role of school social networks outside of the classroom in providing the texts and contexts to create connections to Flowers’s Black lesbian foremothers. Flowers’s relationship to an educational institution provided such social networks; however, Flowers’s experience also points to the failure of these same institutions because the materials were not available in her own courses.

Flowers describes the link to her literacies, saying that “reading was the only way I accessed [Parker and Lorde],” as she might otherwise not have encountered them. This detail highlights the authoritativeness of Black queer print culture in Flowers’s ability to draw from the legacy of struggle of Black lesbian ancestors to name and act on her own challenges. The authoritativeness that print possesses also speaks to the paradoxical role that literacy normativity holds for Flowers and many other research participants who are working with print texts to fashion a life on their own terms despite ample reasons not to trust it. In their recollection, literacy normativity is palpable and powerfully effecting their lives, but the authoritativeness of those texts, they see, does not have to remain with literacy normativity; it can be harnessed for different ends that literacy normativity resists. So these research participants dance with literacy normativity to get the benefit of claiming the authoritativeness of print texts for themselves, and then employ it toward restorative literacies.

Recall the earlier story about Stephanie Flowers, in which Flowers says that Parker and Lorde’s courageousness in refusing to be anything other than themselves taught her that she might as well do the same. Both women, she said, taught her that she was “never meant to survive” so she might as well be herself, again a direct quote from Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival.” This anecdote is then also an example of literacy helping to invoke the ancestor in the descendant’s consciousness in a dialogue, or call and response. Geneva Smitherman defines call and response as “spontaneous verbal and non-verbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker’s statements (‘calls’) are punctuated by expressions (‘responses’) from the listener.” Smitherman says call and response “seeks to synthesize speakers and listeners in a unified movement.”20 This description is consistent with many rituals of ancestor-honoring among people of African descent. For example, in one practice of ancestor-honoring, individuals begin with an invocation inviting ancestor helping spirits into their environment; then express gratitude to the ancestors by sharing a poem, religious or spiritual text, song, or other item the ancestor enjoyed in life; next talk with the ancestors about struggles one may have or ask for help with particular matters; and finally sit quietly in meditation to hear instructions from the ancestors about how one might proceed. This ritual reflects call and response, as ancestors and descendants in such an interaction are speaking and listening to one another. In my analysis of research participants’ life stories, I too have discovered that ancestor and descendant serve in the position of speaker and listener, respectively, creating the feeling of a dialogue across generations. This is especially seen in cross-generational uses of literacy to derive the community-building benefits of call and response: an expression of shared knowledge and purpose.

Recalling the presence of ancestors, research participants often depended as much on the imagined life as they did on biographical information or published writing. Such application of critical imagination is a literacy practice in itself, as it requires research participants to read the historical times and social world in which the ancestor lived as a way to form plausible details for a background that has been erased, then formulate a story through which they as a descendant are connected to those ancestors. For Flowers, a sense of shared identities and the mirroring of her oppression with Lorde and Parker authorize her relationship to these ancestors. Further, Flowers authorizes this relationship through the meaning she gives to details about their lives from reading their writings. From that discernment, Flowers is at work creating a sense of self that is connected to Parker and Lorde. No, Flowers does not know Parker or Lorde personally, but her ability to critically imagine strengthens her connection to them and also strengthens the formation of her own identity and the story of the self that she links to the narrative she creates about them.

Pattern 2: Ancestors Model the Multiplicity of Identities as a Category of Rhetorical Analysis

The lives and writing of ancestors model for descendants how and why to use multiplicity of identities as a lens for rhetorical analysis. Perhaps more fascinating is the stimulation of literacy processes in the discovery and application of this lens, which engenders new ways of reading the social environments as well as new ways of thinking about the self. Here we see how ancestors’ writing provides a model or tool by which research participants could understand their lived experiences as Black LGBTQ people and the social world around them. Ancestors’ writings and lives gave rise to the ways research participants could contextualize the social environment in which their identities were formed, including the desires, pain, connection, and isolation so prevalent in ancestors’ writings and lives. In some ways, a consideration of these details always has to occur alongside, if not before, a thoughtful understanding or formation of an articulated identity. Discussing the ways literacy for social change effects the self, Gwen Gorzelsky notes that some literacies are “promoting individual self-revisions” which “can potentially contribute to social change.”21 “Multiplicity,” a word I borrow from Michael Hames-Garcia,²² is one such way of reading the social and political experience that enhances the possibility of social change, which in this analysis is achieving rootedness. Elsewhere I use the phrase “multiplicity of identities” in reference to an idea of identities and oppressions as praxis, meaning both theory and practice, which recovers concepts of intersectionality that have been overlooked. Through multiplicity of identities, we see an analysis of identity as multiple, simultaneous, and intersectional alongside an analysis of oppression, discrimination, and social inequalities, which are also viewed as multiple, co-constitutive, and intersecting.²³ Looking at both scholarly and day-to-day life, we can see the ways that the multiplicity of identities is actualized as practice. For example, the Combahee River Collective, a 1970s Black feminist organization, described identities and oppressions as being on different paths that sometimes intersect and overlap and at other times are synthesized or blended.²⁴ My conception of multiplicity of identities seeks to unite the original work of Combahee and the subsequent work on multiplicity offered by Hames-Garcia.25 Through it we can explore multiple oppressions and identities in ways that do not elide the specificity of difference but that acknowledge the intertwining of these oppressions and identities along multiple axes of power and unearned privilege.

Phylicia Craig is a Black lesbian who was born in 1970 in the Midwest and now resides in a small East Coast city. Craig describes learning about the role of Black gay and lesbian activists who participated in and lived through the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement, particularly Bayard Rustin and Audre Lorde, provided her with insight into how homogenous ideas of Blackness silence Black queer contributions to history. These individuals modeled for Craig the need to disrupt historical erasure by applying a multiplicity of identities.

While she was enrolled in a college civil rights history course called “History of African American Leadership,” Craig noticed the absence of works by women in the list of course readings. In the course syllabus, however, there was a footnote containing referrals for optional readings about Black women. Included on that list was the name Bayard Rustin, which Craig did not recognize. Craig thought it odd that Rustin, a man, was even listed since the document said all works on the list were histories about Black women, and so she sought to learn as much about him as she could. Craig discovered Rustin’s role as lead organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a moment in civil rights history that was covered extensively in the course. Given Rustin’s pivotal role in the civil rights movement, Craig was very confused as to why he was not more heavily featured in the class, and she was doubly confused about why Rustin, a man, was excluded from course readings and discussions and relegated to the optional reading footnote when every other individual to be excluded in this way was female. Pursuing this information through additional readings, Craig later learned that Rustin was gay. She believed that in the class Rustin “had only not been talked about because he was gay,” which piqued her curiosity about the exclusion of Black LGBTQ individuals from history. She became determined to disrupt the historical erasures and the silencing of Rustin’s story as a result of his gay identity.²⁶

Reading works by or about Rustin and Lorde introduced Craig to the concept of a multiplicity of identities as a lens of intersectional analysis. She would later apply this lens to challenge historical frameworks and narratives that erase Black LGBTQ subjectivities by separating race from analyses of sexuality. A text Craig found especially instructive in this regard was Audre Lorde’s speech “Learning from the 60s,” published in Lorde’s important collection titled Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. In the speech Lorde says, “The 60s for me was a time of promise and excitement, but the 60s was also a time of isolation and frustration from within.” Among the challenges was the societal resistance to her identity and personhood. Lorde writes, “As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be.” The confluence of race, gender, and sexual identity contributed to Lorde’s sense of isolation and frustration with the 1960s civil rights and women’s rights movements, and this same confluence threatened to silence Lorde and others at that moment in history and in the later historiography of it. Lorde writes, “That is how I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

Refusing to deny any part of her identity, Lorde challenged the prejudice of monolithic identity by articulating a vision of radical intersectionality built on a central premise: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”27 Lorde’s comments illustrate a multiplicity of identities by resisting monolithic notions of Blackness that ignore diversity for the sake of flat ideas of unification. Additionally, in resisting monolithic notions of Blackness in history, Lorde’s comments employ multiplicity of identities as a rhetorical tool in which to expose the practice of historical erasure that is a side effect of this limited and limiting view.

Lorde’s modeling of multiplicity of identities in the setting of the 1960s provided Phylicia Craig with the framework to articulate how Rustin and other Black LGBTQ people were erased from that period in history. Craig credits Rustin’s and Lorde’s work in modeling multiplicity of identities when describing her own restorative literacies:

Bayard Rustin and Audre Lorde. They brought the intersections and I didn’t feel like they were checking stuff at the door when they were doing their work or what they wrote about. . . . So, whereas in a lot of other circumstances it was either coming from the Black lens or it was only coming from the women’s lens, or maybe from the LGBT lens, there was no intersections. . . . It made me feel whole, it made me feel complete, and I appreciate how they were able to articulate that, whereas I think I understood—I had those feelings, but I didn’t know how to articulate it until I could see how they did. And it doesn’t mean I have to read everything that they’ve read or they’ve written or wrote or did, but I felt like it gave me like, it really affirmed my existence. . . . They used writing as a way to deal with oppression and to confront it and I was very intrigued by that.

Craig’s comments indicate how ancestors provided her with language to posit a different historiography of the civil rights movement than the one in the syllabus, one in which the model of multiplicity of identities is applied to expose historical erasure and reconstruct narratives in which Black LGBTQ people are visible. She emphasizes reading as a rhetorical practice: ancestors’ writing not only articulates shared identities but also gives rise to a language or way of reading the larger world and the oppressions contained therein. What this affirms is that historical erasure is not merely an issue of identity formation but the result of real oppressive forces in action that individuals encounter in which they must discern (or read) the available means to shape their sense of the larger world in which historical erasure takes place.

Print culture is important not just because it models the multiplicity of identities but also showcases individual intervention to descendants like Craig. In the college class where she discovered Rustin, she proposed to write a paper about him, to use his story to speculate on what else from that period an application of multiplicity of identities might reveal about the history of civil rights in the United States that was being excluded. In this regard, Craig’s connection to her ancestor models an application of multiplicity of identities in her own writing and analysis of history, culture, and politics. Craig was determined “to convince [the professor] that this was going to be a good project for me to work on because I needed to know more about this man.” When she was given permission to complete the project, Craig explained that “writing that paper was like giving me new life—it was like pumping new blood in my veins.” Craig’s description perfectly represents restorative literacies, where pumping new blood in her veins could metaphorically describe a process of detoxification, renewal, or making something afresh. Rustin’s and Lorde’s life stories fostered Craig’s restorative literacies, allowing her to use her own reading and writing to push back against historical erasure.

Pattern 3: Descendants’ Identity Formation/Affirmation Is Affected by Ancestors’ Writing and Lives

Whereas pattern 2 emphasizes the ways ancestors’ writing and lives inspired research participants to apply multiplicity of identities as a category of analysis, pattern 3 shows the function of these writings in the formation and affirmation of research participants’ identities. One such individual, Michael Adkins, encounters his ancestors at a crossroads in his identity development as a Black gay man. Adkins was born in 1983 in a small town in the Southwest but now lives in the Southeast. He recalls that before and during his college career he had little opportunity to “read very many Black writers . . . let alone Black gay writers.” During his junior year in college, an English professor assigned some of James Baldwin’s work. Adkins describes reading Baldwin as having a “significant” impact on his identity. He said,

I grew up and didn’t have any problems being Black, but it always kind of annoyed me being “Other” defined as a Black kid. . . . Being gay it’s like damn that’s certainly another “Other” defining moment. I just very rarely saw the two [being Black and gay] intersect. . . . Coming out I was like, oh my God, I hope I’m not the only Black gay man on the Planet.

Baldwin’s sexuality or gender expression was not the reason for his inclusion in the readings for the course, nor did the class discussion address it. Nevertheless, Adkins was intrigued by the themes of masculinity and homosexuality in the author’s writing, so he followed up by paying close attention to them in his extracurricular reading and looking up more information about Baldwin and his work. Adkins said “learning about and reading Baldwin was very normalizing.”

Adkins’s anecdote describes another link between ancestry and literacy: the negotiation and affirmation of one’s identities, which is a different act than pattern 2, which focuses on using the links between ancestry and literacy to form a lens through which individuals read the larger world. This function of literacy is reflective of Min Zhan-Lu’s observations about “critical affirmation as a trope for literacy” through which we “mark writing” and, in my study, also reading “as a site for reflecting on and revising one’s sense of self, one’s relations with others, and the conditions of one’s life.”28 This practice is more intimately about research participants’ own identity formation and affirmation, which are related to but different from considering the ways they understand the larger world in which those identities are actualized. For my research participants, this critical affirmation is realized in reading an ancestor’s works, viewing photographs, or decoding an ancestor’s life in historical contexts, all of which promote access to models of restorative literacies and representations of Black queerness. As with all of humanity, these individuals are situated in multiple histories, cultures, and politics, leaving them to confront any number of dominant social forces when attempting to affirm all of their identities. Lacking immediate access to precedents for ways of being, knowing, making, and doing worsens this dilemma. Thus, ancestors illuminate paths for Black queers that historical erasure and silence have hidden or made inaccessible. Remember that neither the course nor the instructor embraced or facilitated Adkins’s engagement with his Black queer forebears and his identity affirmation. Adkins’s developing sense of self, as well as the incident of historical erasure he experienced, call forth forms of tenacious reading that make Black queerness more visible despite attempts to overlook it. This silence around Baldwin’s sexuality or themes around queerness in Adkins’s class are typical of the way that society, through literacy normativity, ignores the specific lived experiences of queer students of color and of the intersections of race, sexual, and gender identities in course curriculums and assignments. Adkins’s experiences, then, represent the numerous acts of othering that take place in classrooms every day. Such erasures are a silence around raced queerness that cut off the possibility of students like Adkins seeing some aspects of their own experience portrayed at all, and when they are portrayed, it is not in a multidimensional way but one that is prone to stereotype and pathology. The consequences are detrimental to Black queer identity formation and affirmation.

Cicely Davis, a Black bisexual woman, was born in 1977 in a large city in the South. Davis first learned of Black lesbian and gay writers Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill when she attended a reading group sponsored by a Black lesbian community organization. Davis said writings by Lorde, Hemphill, and other Black queer writers “impacted me hugely,” naming particularly Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” and Hemphill’s essay “Loyalty.” In his essay, Hemphill confronts the notion that Blackness and gayness are disconnected in an individual’s experience. He also argues against the notion that identity categories are so independent as to be disconnected in movements for justice and equality. This is an important perspective for someone like Cicely Davis, who was looking for ways to affirm the various aspects of her identity, particularly her race and bisexuality.

In “Loyalty,” Hemphill discusses the plight of Black gay men who have been made invisible in the Black community because of heteronormative notions of Black gender and sexuality, saying, “I speak for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men who live and die in the shadows of secrets, unable to speak of the love that helps them endure and contribute to their race.” These Black gay men are silenced, and “their ordinary kisses, stolen or shared behind facades of heroic achievement . . . are scrubbed away by the propaganda makers of the race . . . who would just as soon have us believe Black people can fly, rather than reveal that Black men have been longing to kiss one another, and have done so, for centuries.” Here Hemphill is himself challenging Black history and its heteronormativity, highlighting his own critique of historical erasure as it occurs through the writing of Black history and its exclusions. Hemphill argues that this heteronormativity is nothing but “futile exercises in denial.” Rather than suggest that Black queers be run out of their communities for their difference or acquiesce and conceal any aspect of their identities, Hemphill claims that they “will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home.”29 Through this refusal, Black queers move to create community and a sense of identity outside of the oppressive boundaries of single-variable notions of identity by embracing both their race and their sexuality.

While the focus of Hemphill’s “Loyalty” is Black gay men, his words model the ways anyone can embrace race and sexuality on one’s own terms. Davis applied this to her own specific circumstances as a Black bisexual woman. She spoke to the effects of Hemphill’s and Lorde’s work on the formation and affirmation of her identity:

Because of their fearlessness, I felt empowered when I read their writings, and at the same time I had a responsibility, because most of them couldn’t be as “Out” as I could be in this day and age. . . . I can’t think of any better word but just empowerment from it. Just that they were so bold and so brave to write the way that they did when they did. And, that I was able to kind of reach back because both sides of my family thought it would be important to remember where we came from. . . . And, we always have family reunions, and we’re always paying respect to the older people in the family when they’re still alive, and now that some of them are gone, it’s always been real important to me to remember my history. So, it was like, now that I can add these Black queer people to my forefathers and mothers is just like Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X and all the people I learned about growing up. And, now there’s like a whole body of queer people that were Black . . . [who] contributed to the life that I live today. [emphasis mine]

I link Davis’s discussion of feeling a responsibility to her Black queer ancestors back to my point about love as theorized in the book’s introduction. There I note that responsibility is one of the characteristics of love. I thus view Davis’s comments about responsibility within the context of the pursuit of self- and communal love as interventions into historical erasure through the work of restorative literacies. Part of what drives Davis’s interventions is this responsibility—a love—for herself, her ancestors, and others, as reflected in her commitment to forming and affirming her Black queer life as a tribute to her ancestors. Although the setting in which Davis first discovered her Black LGBTQ ancestors—a Black lesbian discussion group—already hailed Black queerness, it is important to examine how Davis’s identity was formed and affirmed by her engaging with forebears through literacy. For instance, she states that the oppression her ancestors experienced issued her a mandate to be out, to be proud, and to represent all of her identities. Davis accessed ancestors’ descriptions of oppression to form and affirm her own sense of self, and in doing so she affirmed the role of literacy in that pursuit of freedom, identity formation and affirmation, and, overall, self- and communal love. She uses the word “empowering” to describe this identity affirmation—the same word used by many other research participants when discussing the impact of ancestors on the formation of their identity.

It is also important to note that Davis first learned of Hemphill and Lorde through a community organization. This is significant because it shifts the pedagogical scene away from the classroom, inviting us to imagine—just as we imagine identities as intertwined—the pedagogical possibilities of school and out-of-school spaces in tandem instead of mutually exclusive. Community organizations could help to identify resources about Black and other queer of color subjectivities, which may prove useful to instructors wishing to incorporate these matters into the classroom. In addition, Davis and the other participants in her group were adults. This emphasizes the significance of identity in adult literacy programs. By accessing Black queer history and culture, Davis’s reading group fostered an environment where critical literacies and identity formation and affirmation were successfully intertwined for Black queer adults. These actions represent possibilities for pedagogical depth that teacher-scholars of literacy education—particularly, teachers of adults—may not have imagined.

Pattern 4: Descendants Receive Cross-Generational Mandates to Become Ancestors through Literacy

In “Learning from the 60s,” Audre Lorde writes,

Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice [Johnson] Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. . . . We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing.30

Here Lorde talks about descendants finding power in knowing that our ancestors have blazed a trail for their descendants to follow. Implicit in Lorde’s comments is the sense that, instead of honoring the ancestors simply by looking out for one’s self, one has a responsibility to leave behind tools of one’s own so that future generations may move beyond the place where they are currently standing. This sentiment of a sense of responsibility to those who follow was shared among research participants. As the following examples show, the role of literacy in hearing and acting on that responsibility is paramount.

Two powerful themes that are common across participants’ life stories are the sense of sharing a continuum of literate and rhetorical practices with ancestors and the concept of one’s own role as a future ancestor. Descendants see the uses of literacy in their own lives as mandates to be a source of power and knowledge for future generations of Black LGBTQ people, just as the ancestors’ life and works had been to them. Citing Robert Plant Armstrong, Ed Pavlic describes such cyclical relations as “syndesis,” which Armstrong uses “to account for the multidirectional relationship between ‘ancestors’ and ‘descendants’ in Yoruba ritual aesthetics.”31

Ancestors and descendants are linked through complex relations of shared and different identities; they occupy a continuum of consciousness invoked in and created by their communicative practices. Awareness can be triggered by the ancestor’s life, writings, or other symbolic representations that urge descendants to make meaning about and respond to the ancestor’s life and work. The descendants’ response to mandates from ancestors ranges from resisting present oppression and acting on their own fantasies to making life better for future generations of Black LGBTQ people, to leaving their own messages behind. I am reminded here of Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chain of speech communion,” which he offers to describe transmissions of discourse as a “refraction of utterances, each one anticipating the next.” These utterances are “rejoinder[s] in dialogue that are oriented toward the response of the other (others), toward his active responsive understanding, which can assume various forms . . . the work is a link in the chain of speech communion . . . related to other work-utterances: both those to which it responds and those that respond to it.”³²

Yolanda Moore’s experience perfectly exemplifies the cross-generational cycle between ancestors and descendants. Her account is an important departure from those of other interviewees: while many participants detail the role of literacy in inventing and engaging with ancestors, with Moore it was the ancestors, she describes, as placing particular conditions on her literacies through messages she says clearly indicate how her literacies fit along a cross-generational continuum designed to operate powerfully in the lives of Black LGBTQ people living today and those descendants who are yet born.

Moore is a Black lesbian who was born in a rural southern town in 1958 and currently resides in a large southern city. She struggled to accept that she was a lesbian and then come out to her family and friends. She cites Bayard Rustin and Audre Lorde as principal among those who helped her during that time. As a member of the very active Black LGBTQ community in her city, she learned about Rustin and Lorde at two separate annual awards programs. At one event, Moore read a program with information about Rustin, whom she claims was the first Black LGBTQ person she had ever read about. After attending an awards program for Lorde, Moore began reading everything she could find that was written by or about her or her work:

This immediately empowered me about 50,000%. I mean it was so self-affirming. . . . I mean this sister was a trailblazer. We’re talking about, you know, in the 1950s, you know, when there was much, much, much homophobia going on . . . in the 1950s, in the midst of all the racial issues that were going on and all the external stuff that she had to deal with. Certainly then there’s room for me and acceptance for who I am. So, it was really affirming for me to read about her and to understand that, you know, the struggle does continue and it’s incumbent upon me to be the best broadcaster that I can, you know. It’s kind of like an honor for me to even identify with her as an activist, as a warrior, as a mother, as a wife. She was just all that! And so it was very empowering for me.

Through her assertion that “the struggle does continue and it’s incumbent upon me to be the best broadcaster that I can,” Moore identifies the mandate that she spread the knowledge she receives so that she might also alert and empower others. She calls attention to the cyclical nature of the ancestor-descendant relationship, whereby the descendant’s responsiveness to the ancestor entails making accessible to future generations the knowledge of their heritage. Moore reflects,

The writing reminds me that those who have come before me, I have their blessings, and it’s a true testament and an honor to them that those that come after them identify so closely with their struggle. . . . I see it as part of the way I am, and that whatever struggles that I must endure, that it somehow makes it easier for the next sisters who come along, you know, that I’ve been in corporate America for a significant part of my life, so when the next young woman comes along . . . perhaps her journey won’t be as strenuous as mine was because, you know, Mr. Corporate America has seen a lesbian and understands that, you know, she’s competent; she’s capable; she’s professional, and so perhaps the next young woman won’t have to, you know, reinvent the wheel for these people. It’s kind of hard to see. The generational legacy they would need to free, untangle that, and hopefully, it will be a little bit better for the next sister who comes along that identifies in the same way that I did.

To Moore, the work of the ancestors aided her own struggle, and she is grateful to them for making her life better. She describes her continuation of their work as an honor and a duty that the ancestors have bestowed on her generation of Black LGBTQ people. For example, as an expression of that gratitude that further shows the role of literacy, Moore works as an active leader in a community writing group and book club in which she shares her own work and exposes other Black lesbian, bisexual, and queer women to the same works that influenced her writing. Here she reveals her awareness of and responsibility to her own descendants, those who may invoke her and her accomplishments just as she did with Rustin and Lorde. In doing this work, Moore has been especially able to serve as a mentor to many of the younger women who have joined the group, a relationship that helps her to inspire someone else in the ways that the ancestors have inspired her. A primary lesson she imparts to these women is that they too must pay their thanks to her in the form of connecting someone else to the ancestors and to the community. As such, Moore is acting on the continuum in both her own work and also in inspiring the next generation of Black lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in her writing and reading groups to do the same. Overall, Moore’s comments and actions exemplify putting critical imagination to use to promote the positive effects of a cross-generation continuum through reading and writing to form connections to ancestors and to the future in the face of historical erasure.

“A Friend in My Head”: Literacy, Literature, and Fictive Kinships

Ancestors were not the only figure research participants mentioned. As I examined the impact of historical erasure on research participants and the centrality of literacy in navigating such experiences, the figure of “fictive kin” also emerged as one of the dominant figures among the life-story accounts. Although “fictive kin” or “fictive kinship” is primarily used to describe relationships that include many of the functions of family relationships but are among unrelated people (for example, calling a close friend your cousin or calling one’s mother’s best friend “Aunt”), I employ it differently in this work. Fictive kinship refers to characters in books, film, theater, television, music, and other cultural productions that participants described having a connection that felt familial, influential, and lasting. Essentially, my examination of fictive kinships looks at a separate layering of restorative literacies to redress historical erasure in Black LGBTQ lives. The first layer consists of the creation of the text in which the fictive kin appears. The second layer shows what personal implications restorative literacies have for my research participants because of the connection they are able to make to fictive kin. And the third layer is what my research participants do or create to enable others to intervene into historical erasure and the absence of Black LGBTQ people in popular culture, and what possibilities this holds for future generations.

The cultural productions—books, films, visual and performing arts—that research participants use to establish fictive kinships have been created by Black LGBTQ authors, filmmakers, and artists. As research participants discuss the ways restorative literacies are enacted to disrupt historical erasure through cultural productions, it is important to note that both literature and film are traditional texts within normative literacy systems. Still, these texts, whether by intention of the artist or not, often stand in the gaps left by historical erasure, providing valuable narratives and representations of Black LGBTQ life and culture that research participants could not find elsewhere. Hence, with fictive kinships much of their work in terms of restorative literacies begins well before the time my research participants ever encounter those texts; in effect, the creators were making work that was in itself a practice of restorative literacies on behalf of Black LGBTQ people. The creation of fictive kinships then is a co-creative experience wherein the mandates of the writer and the needs of the other, each situated in a Black LGBTQ milieu, come together toward the ends of restorative literacies.

James Earl Hardy, for example, is a writer that several research participants, predominantly cisgender Black gay, bisexual, and queer men, named. What my analysis of interviews shows was not simply that his books were popular with my research participants but also that his books were a text in which a number of them formed fictive kinships. Hardy is the author of the popular B-Boy Blues novels, a series of five novels and one novella that chronicle the relationship of a Black gay couple in New York City over the course of almost twenty years. In an interview with Clik magazine, Hardy recalled the experience of writing the first novel in the series, saying, “I tell people all the time, I don’t remember writing ‘B-Boy Blues’ because it was an outer-body [sic] experience and I truly believe I had help from the ancestors.”33 Though Hardy’s comments link back to my discussion of ancestorship and Black queer literacies, as they demonstrate one dimension in the ways Black queer writers describe how ancestors connect to writing, they are just as useful for exploring fictive kinships. That is, Hardy’s comments demonstrate that the characters he creates and stories he tells come from his own historical rootedness, which then create texts that help my research participants achieve the same and subvert the harm of historical erasure.

In their search for rootedness, many research participants describe the ways literature and film offered “history in the spaces left,” to borrow a phrase from Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams.³⁴ Participants speak of feeling kinship to fictional characters in these works. These fictive kinships are key in many of the moments of affective transformation participants describe: feeling less isolated, feeling more connected to historical precedents, becoming aware of the realities and possibilities of building community with other queer Black people, feeling their identities affirmed, and encountering examples of Black queer life to emulate or reject as they fashion their own identity. A number of participants said they could safely have a bond to these fictional characters when various factors made real-life bonds with other Black LGBTQ people less accessible or impossible. Several participants remarked that not knowing any Black queer people besides themselves meant these fictive kinships were that much more pertinent. Others stated that, although they knew other Black queers were out there, geographic separation from any of the cities with a critical mass of Black LGBTQ people further cemented the importance of these imagined relations with fictional characters. A number of participants recall that the fear of being outed if they associated without LGBTQ people kept them from pursuing real friendships or other connections with LGBTQ people who could have mentored and supported them; while still others describe their rejection of those mentoring relationships because they saw the Black LGBTQ people they were aware of as being too negative to see as acquaintances, mentors, or friends.

Anthropologists use the term “fictive kinship” as a fundamental concept in describing group relations between people who have no blood relations but may share other relations that condition their lived experiences along economic, social, and cultural customs.35 Fictive kinship has also long been part of scholarship on African diasporic parlance.³⁶ I am using “fictive kinship” differently, to describe connections that my research participants feel to fictional characters in novels, films, and other cultural productions. My analysis of life stories shows that participants accept or reject relations between themselves and characters in literature or film on the basis of whether their reading of these characters is useful to their sense of individual growth. Such episodes emphasize the continued ways literacy functions in such relations. Further, although fictive kinships offer research participants a sense of community (however imagined), this invitation to community is not contingent on the requirement that participants give up their current or emerging sense of self in the interest of group solidarity. Instead, participants describe fictive kinship as a way of fashioning their lives on their own terms.

Jeremy Williams, born in 1986 in a moderately sized city in the Midwest where he still resides, emphasizes the importance of fictive kinship in his life. Williams’s interest in Black queer history grew out of his affinity for the characters in contemporary Black gay novels. However, when he searched for histories about Black queers, Williams was immediately disappointed. Like many other research participants, Williams expressed serious frustrations with the lack of information about Black queer history. A writer and dancer, Williams was particularly troubled by the fact that he never learned about Black LGBTQ people, and especially Black gay authors, in his literature or history classes in school or during Black History Month, saying,

You know, never was James Earl Hardy brought up or E. Lynn Harris or you know, even [dancer] Alvin Ailey . . . and it’s like that kind of seems weird because these are people who made a difference, who are famous, and I thought just because they were gay they weren’t brought up. You know, the first person you hear about in Black History Month is Martin Luther King . . . Rosa Parks, and how she did the whole bus thing and how Martin had a dream. It’s like, well, you know, these other people had dreams too. You know, these other people are famous; they write. How come they are not being brought up, you know?

An intersectional analysis that recognizes Blackness as not just a racial identity but also one that has intragroup diversity along the lines of sexual identity, gender identity and expression, and difference enable Williams’s critique of this omission from his educational experience. Williams’s critique not only makes literacy central when he questions the curriculum in his educational experience but also in that he notes that both Hardy and Harris are published writers, which further points to the problematic of having them omitted from school libraries and classes. This puts the spotlight on the fact that the only basis for such an omission may be their sexuality or how they discuss sexuality as a theme in their work, stating also the problematic of that omission not just from educational settings but from Black history as a whole, revealing another layer of how that historical erasure is working.

As we saw in the previous case analyses on ancestorship, the absence of these histories was a mandate for Williams to use his literacy as a way to create fictive kin in order to address these historical erasures:

Seeing that forced me to do my own research and to learn about those people [Hardy, Harris, and Ailey] on my own . . . and to go to the library or be on the internet and look those people up and pretty much, you know, give myself the knowledge of those people and realize what they did and the difference they made in the society as being gay and Black.

Williams’s identification of historical erasure becomes an opportunity for him to use reading and writing as a point for intervention through his research and reporting. Williams’s search for information on each of these figures is itself a literacy practice grounded in Black LGBTQ history, culture, and life, as it requires research skills including reading, writing, and other literacies focused on this topic to locate the information he seeks. This research enhances all of these same literacies while simultaneously employing them in the work of restorative literacies. It was reading contemporary Black gay fiction and the characters in these novels that first gave Williams a deeper interest in exploring Black queer history and culture. Among the texts Williams named were James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues (1994), 2nd Time Around (1996), If Only for One Night (1998), The Day Eazy-E Died (2002), Love the One You’re With (2003), and A House Is Not a Home (2006). He also listed E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life (1994), Just as I Am (1995), And This Too Shall Pass (1997), If This World Were Mine (1998), and Abide with Me (2000) among his favorites. Williams’s description of how the characters’ experiences affected him exemplifies the way fictive kinships with characters can provide the tools necessary to fashion a Black identity on one’s own terms.

Williams said James Earl Hardy’s first novel, B-Boy Blues, was the “first real gay book that I read and I fell in love with it.” The novel’s protagonist, Mitchell Crawford, a twentysomething Black gay writer living in New York City, quickly became one of Williams’s fictive kin:

I had compared myself to Mitchell so much. I just feel like we were the same in many ways. Who this character was, how he was acting out whom he liked, those kinds of relationships. Like, down to a T, that’s who I was and in a lot of ways I still am. When I read that book I was just like “Wow.” And I think that was the book that helped me a lot, accepting who I am and being gay—pretty much just growing up being gay.

The “many ways” Williams feels connected to Mitchell extend beyond their shared identities as Black gay men. Williams states that he was able to determine the ways Mitchell’s life reflected his own “down to a T.” For example, Williams said that he often encountered messages that attempted to depict Black communities as more homophobic, or construct gay identity as a White identity. Williams said that he assumed these ideas were all wrong just based on his own experience, but he said he had no real proof that his opinion was one that many people actually shared in real life. Reading Hardy’s novel, and being introduced to Mitchell, Williams felt affirmed and drew strength in his refusal to acquiesce to belief systems that said he had to choose his gay identity over his Black identity and race consciousness, and vice versa. Also, Hardy’s description of the gender identity and expression of Mitchell and the other Black gay male characters in the novel showed Williams that Black gay men are not a monolith when it came to masculinities, but that Black gay men’s masculinities were diverse. This was an important insight he gained through establishing a fictive kinship to Mitchell in the absence of access to any information about Black gay life, and especially Black gay men’s lives.

Williams’s feelings of fictive kinship extended to other characters in Hardy’s and Harris’ novels:

When I read a book, and you know, pretty much to me when you read a book that’s like meeting somebody new. . . . Even though it’s not a person who’s walking or who’s living, you can see, like, the face. I feel like you’re looking at them—you read about the characters. You’re meeting those characters, and these characters are pretty much telling you what’s going on in their life. So it’s like meeting a new friend. When I read books I feel like I’m meeting a whole line of friends who are telling me about something that’s going on in their life.

Although Williams’s comments show that he is aware that fictive kin are not replacements for real people, there is no doubt about the influence of these characters in his life. Williams’s comments here show how fictive kin operate as a community and impart important skills he can employ to Black LGBTQ community formation in real life. We see community formation in Williams’s comments when he describes “meeting” the characters, “seeing” their faces, and calling them “friends,” all signaling how tangible and meaningful these fictive relations are to him. For a young Black gay man with little knowledge of Black queer history and culture, the characters are an invitation to be in community with others like himself. He looks to these characters to provide insight into the Black queer experience when all else is erased. In this fashion, fictive kin open a window onto Black LGBTQ life and are, for some, the only other Black queer people they know or ever will know, however fictional.

In addition, fictive kin create moments of self-reflexivity that are beneficial to people. That research participants are encountering them through reading, screening films, or attending acts of visual and performing arts gives a helpful psychological and physical distance that provides them the space to have a break from their own realities but then allows them to return to their own lives in an informed way so they can move forward more productively. Williams’s experience highlights the important work of fictive kinships in the aftermath of historical erasures. They are, like ancestors and elders, standing in the gaps of these erasures. The characters’ lives, again however fictional, become one of the many reservoirs from which Williams and others draw knowledge of Black queer being. Williams confirms this instructive potential of these fictive kinships when he says that the characters are telling him all about themselves:

They [the characters] tell me what they’re going through, and what I do is I’ll sit there, and I’ll compare their problems to mine . . . and it makes me look at my situation with a whole different view. It makes me handle it better, and—I don’t know. When the world’s giving me too much, I like to tuck in a book and be in somebody else’s life.

Scholars in LGBTQ studies have also identified various functions of fictive kinship unique to LGBTQ people. Kath Weston and William Hawkeswood, for example, have written about the various iterations of fictive kinship in the non–blood related families that LGBTQ people form. In these relationships, LGBTQ people form familial bonds with one another that queer the normative notions of “family” and ultimately make some version of, citing Weston, the “families we choose.”37 LGBTQ people who are turned away from their biological families often come together to form families with other LGBTQ people and allies. For instance, Marlon Bailey shows that fictive family formations are a hallmark of the queer subculture referred to as “Ballroom Culture,” so central to Black and Latinx queer life in urban centers from Detroit and New York City to Los Angeles and Chicago. Ballroom consists of “intensely competitive performances” where members of the ballroom community compete for trophies in various categories.³⁸ These competitions “create a space of celebration, affirmation, critique, and reconstitution . . . in the everyday lives of [their] Black queer members.” Bailey explains that these competitions depend on structures known as “houses” in order to exist. Houses are the

kinship system of Ballroom culture. . . . Houses are led by “mothers” (butch queens, femme queens, and women) and “fathers” (butch queens and butches), who, regardless of age, sexual orientation, and social status, provide a labor of care and love with or for numerous Black queer people who have been rejected by their blood families, religious institutions, and society at large. Houses, for instance, are one of the core features of the Ballroom community, and houses serve as social, and sometimes literal, homes for its members.39

Ballroom houses and other queer iterations of fictive kinship disrupt the normative notions and formations of family. For my research participants, the fictive kinships they form are disruptive on multiple levels. The ties are not made with real people. They are also not formed with the permission of the author or director of the books and films from which they draw; my research participants’ queering of family surpasses many lines, including the temporal, physical, and locative.

Although the majority of research participants made comments similar to Williams’s, many also spoke to some of the problematic aspects of fictive kin. These experiences are crucial because they complicate and extend my analysis of fictive kinship among research participants depicted thus far. For example, some research participants describe incidents where they sought out contemporary Black and queer literature in order to feel affirmed or connected to a larger history, culture, and community, but they instead found the Black queer characters in these works to be troubling. The result is that they did not feel a sense of fictive kinship with the characters but rather a sense of disconnection from them and from the expression of Black queerness in the texts. Details from the experiences of Christopher Mallard-Scott, a research participant who was very critical of James Baldwin’s novels Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), demonstrate the usefulness of research participants resisting characters in texts as a moment of self-reflexivity that complicates fictive kinship while further showing its prevalence and impact in restorative literacies.

Born in 1984 in a moderately large city in the Midwest, Mallard-Scott currently resides in an even larger city near his birthplace. Mallard-Scott said he realized that he was bisexual in middle school. Scared of his family’s reaction, he did not come out to them until he finished college. During a high school English class, he learned that James Baldwin had sexual relationships with men and wrote about homosexuality. This encouraged him to look for Baldwin’s books, thinking that since he couldn’t talk to anyone else, perhaps books would answer many of his questions. Rather than being encouraged by the novels he read, Mallard-Scott said the characters were complete disappointments. He said, for example, that he was shocked there were no Black gay characters in Giovanni’s Room:

I criticized Baldwin very negatively because, you know, why the hell is he writing about White gay boys when he’s a Black gay man? I want to read something—I was still searching for literature that was my experience, that dealt with my life experiences or were similar to my life experiences, so I think that’s what really pissed me off about Giovanni’s Room.

He was even more upset at the character of Rufus in Another Country. Mallard-Scott was eager to read the book when he heard that the protagonist was Black and bisexual, but felt let down again by Baldwin when he read the book. First, he was outraged at the character’s suicide toward the beginning of the novel because this was, in his opinion, a stereotypical representation of Black bisexual men as emotionally distraught, hopeless, and thus not particularly inspiring. Mallard-Scott said he was even angrier when, through recollections of the book’s other characters, Rufus was depicted in such a tragic way. This depiction of Rufus, he said, brought him more fear and confusion about his identity than comfort or the insight that he was hoping to find.

While it is important to speak to the dissatisfaction of Mallard-Scott and others, we may also read such dissatisfaction as a further testament to—rather than a dismissal of—the important work of fictive kinships. In the aftermath of historical erasures, participants who seek out literature with Black queer characters demonstrate the power of these depictions in the process of restorative literacies. Moreover, although Mallard-Scott did not experience fictive kinships in the ways Williams and others have, he still benefits from engagement with the text because he has now encountered representations of Black queerness he would not like to project, which is useful information to have in the formation and affirmation of one’s own identity. These details offer additional support about the importance of self-reflexivity that is enabled by fictive kinships given the dangers of idealism of even positive experiences of characters when they become rigid norms or models that constrain people’s individual identity formation and affirmation.

Further, the dissatisfaction with representations of Black queerness left Mallard-Scott and others with a mandate to create more complex, diverse, and affirming representations of Black queerness in literature and other cultural productions. I view this dissatisfaction then as part of the impetus for Mallard-Scott’s own pursuit of a career as a novelist—many of the characters in his writings are Black gay and bisexual men. In the face of what he experienced as an erasure, or a partial erasure and missed opportunity in the case of his disappointment with the Baldwin novels, Mallard-Scott chooses to create what is not available to him. To that end, literacy is again situated at the center of these recursive interventions into historical erasure and its myriad consequences. Mallard-Scott’s writings thus function as restorative literacies in the work they do to affirm his experience, and this affirmation through restorative literacies further exhibits self-love. But also, restorative literacies are evident with respect to Mallard-Scott, who takes what he found dissatisfying about the text, uses the self-reflexivity triggered by what is essentially a failed pursuit of fictive kinship from him, and uses that to write stories that will be more affirming for others who may share his experience to find texts that better reflect their experience of being a Black bisexual or gay man.

Still, though Mallard-Scott’s experience helps establish the ways reading could be helpful to navigating historical erasure, his case also points toward the limits of reading and print within such matters. Faced with the limitations of print, some research participants create and employ nonprint reading strategies to navigate historical erasure. These nonprint reading strategies are especially visible through the relations participants have to figures I classify as elders.

Living History and Restorative Literacies

The term “elders” refers to living individuals whom research participants described as having more wisdom and knowledge than they have by virtue of age or life experience, particularly wisdom and knowledge regarding Black queer life and culture. Literacy is crucial to elders fulfilling their roles, and in this sense elders sponsor literacy. While participants’ descriptions of elders do include sharing literacy materials like books and holding literacy events, the life stories show that primarily, and most uniquely and perhaps most significantly, elders sponsor literacies off the page. Through their work, elders help fill critical gaps in history, model ways of being in the world, affect the ways one sees the world, and help one construct an affirming and rooted sense of self. Each of these roles points to a range of reading practices on and off the page that one employs in establishing connections with elders, including access to overlooked histories through the elders’ recollections, observing their everyday lives as a means of making legible overlooked or erased ways of being, and being given books, magazines, poetry, and various texts by elders. In some instances books and other texts were crucial to the events and moments, such as discussion groups, poetry readings, film screenings, and theater performances, where participants first met elders. All of these experiences forge powerful interventions through which research participants survive and thrive in the face of historical erasure through the help of elders.

Nonprint texts and forms of reading were also important to participants’ connections to or drawing knowledge from elders; observing moments in an elder’s day-to-day life is one such example. In these moments participants are reading and drawing from the elder’s life some aspect of Black queer ways of knowing and being. As such, the elder’s life is itself a text in which meaning exists, is given, and is transmitted. Importantly, given the prevalence of cisnormativity and cissexism in both lesbian/gay/bisexual and Black history resulting in the erasure of transgender people, my research has shown that Black transgender and gender-nonconforming elders emerge as especially important and are overrepresented in interviews with transgender people comparatively to cisgender research participants. Elders, like ancestors, are conduits to reading the world, but also connections to cultural productions that emerge from and represent epistemologies and ontologies of Black queerness of which research participants are informed of history that has been erased. Such activities dovetail back to what I’ve described earlier about Black LGBTQ Literacies: these activities and others represent forms of literacy that are not defined exclusively by print, though as I have stated, print is not always disappeared out of participants’ stories either. Literacy is also present when participants take the information gained through reading—metaphorically speaking—an elder’s life and applying those readings to fashion affirming Black queer subjectivities on their own terms. Such applications also sometimes result in research participants writing print texts that fill the gap of historical erasure, but in any case even the formation of a Black queer subjectivity is a kind of authoring or writing that also dovetails back to literacy.

In addition, there are also many instances where participants describe elders introducing them to Black queer cultural productions (books, films, photographs, and ephemera). These scenes, I argue, demonstrate eldership as a literacy event in which texts define the center of participants’ relationships to an elder. David Barton and Mary Hamilton define “literacy events” as “activities where literacy has a role”; there may be “a written text, or texts, central to the activity and there may be talk around the text . . . [and] observable episodes which arise from [literacy] practices and are shaped by them.”40 The acts of establishing connections to elders and learning from their lives operate as literacy events, for in such episodes research participants often employ literacy to “read” the lives of their elders and the world in which they live. The literacy activity invoked here is meaning-making through reading reality or the social world. Participants read the elders’ lives as sources of wisdom, empowerment, values, and morals, drawing on both verbal and nonverbal sources, the outgrowth of which is a sense of rootedness and identity formation and affirmation that occurs off the page. For example, the Black queer elder functions with such influence in the film Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100 (1999). Directed by Yvonne Welbon, the film documents the life of Ruth Ellis, a black lesbian born July 23, 1899, in Springfield, Illinois, who spent the greater part of her life in Detroit, where she relocated in the 1940s. The film chronicles Ellis’s life alongside critical events, including the 1908 Springfield race riots and the 1967 riots in Detroit, which began on her birthday. Between 1941 and 1971, Ellis and her partner Cecilene “Babe” Franklin opened their home as a social space for Black gays and lesbians in Detroit. Ellis and Franklin’s home was thereon affectionately known as “The Gay Spot.” The couple took action because Black gays and lesbians were unwelcome at gay bars. The couple also let queer youth, mostly young men, who had been forced out of their homes for being queer stay with them, often providing financial support for those youth attending college.

Welbon juxtaposes Ellis’s early years with testimonials from women within her Detroit community, shows her receiving honors at events in the community, and depicts how Black and LGBTQ communities came together to provide care for Ellis in her old age. Several of the women commented that their relationship with Ellis had an effect on their sense of history and self. For instance, in the film Detroit resident Dr. Kofi Adoma says, “Ruth is a gift to us . . . she’s been able to share what it’s been like to experience triple oppression—being a woman, being Black, and being lesbian . . . so we can appreciate the progress made, but also remember the work that we still have to do. Ruth is a reminder of all that.” Another film interviewee, Jaye Spiro, says, “I think that the lesbian community was dying for Ruth. It was like, you know, ‘Where are our foremothers?’ ‘Has anybody been on this path before us?’ We really wanted and needed to have a connection.” A pastor at the Falls Truth Unity Fellowship Church, a black LGBTQ church, spoke to the congregation while honoring Ellis, saying, “To be able to witness life and to be able to witness history and a legend walking among us . . . [not] something you don’t have to talk about that is gone . . . but something that is here with us.” Sarah Uhle, another person interviewed in the film, says in the film that her relationship to Ellis partially results from “a hunger for our history. . . . these histories have disappeared . . . she can tell us some of it, but she represents the rest of it that we’ll never hear.”

These comments are consistent with a widely held belief among folks of African descent that the elders in a community, by virtue of lived experience, deserve the highest regard from those who are younger. An African proverb states, “It is the duty of children to wait on elders, and not the elders on children.”41 Ellis and other elders serve multiple purposes in people’s lives. In Welbon’s documentary her interviewees’ descriptions of Ellis resonate with the literacy practice among my research participants I describe as reading an elder’s life. This is a crucial detail because it highlights the role of literacy as a practice of honoring elders when they are alive or after they are dead, which is a practice that can occur independent of print texts.

Reading Elders and Fashioning the Self

Ella Mosley, a Black transgender woman, was born in 1952 and resided in a small Great Plains town until graduation from high school. She currently resides in a large city in the South. Mosley said that in school she was identified as a male, but that at home “I would go home and live my truth, which meant makeup, lingerie and being me.” She remembered identifying as a girl at age five, saying, “I always identified with the heroines in movies like Gidget, The Flying Nun, and then there was [the television show] Julia. I said, ‘Oh, I want to be a Black nurse like Diahann Carroll.’” Within Mosley’s family, “it was never an issue with me about, you know, whether I’m supposed to be accepted.” Mosley said that while she identified as a girl as a child, she had no concept of what it meant to be transgender, nor did her family. She was just simply being the girl she always was, although she speculates that her family initially read her gender identity and expression as being an effeminate gay male child and not a girl at all.

Outside of her family, Mosley recalled that there were a few instances in which neighborhood kids and sometimes their parents picked on her. Mosley said that she had already resolved to physically fight back because “I was totally taught at home that you don’t let anybody hurt you and if they’re bigger than you, then you pick something up to fight with.” Mosley said in those days she didn’t really try to resist this treatment as much: “You know coming up was basically just trying to survive it. You know, survive being ostracized, survive the name-calling, and the actions of people who did not understand.” She said her objective was to “mind my own business as much as possible.”

When “minding her own business,” Mosley passed time by reading. She enjoyed a lot of literature, naming James Baldwin’s novels as personal favorites.

I related to what he seemed to be feeling. . . . You know without it being said, I always thought of him as gay. I just always knew that he was part of the community before I actually read it in black and white that he was a part of the community because he spoke to me and my issues with my gender.

Despite Mosley’s assertion about Baldwin’s positive effect on her sense of her own gender, she lamented the lack of information she had about transgender people at that time. She especially wanted to hear more about Black and other transgender people of color, but she found nothing in her search through what little LGBTQ history and literature was available. This is unsurprising considering that transgender people in general, and transgender people of color in particular, are omitted from many histories, including those focused on queer people. One of the most glaring and criticized of these historical omissions is the erasure of transgender women of color from the history of the Stonewall rebellion, a defining moment in LGBTQ rights activism. This historical erasure is again, as with all others, an act of violence.

The Stonewall Inn is a bar in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. It was unlike many other queer spaces in that the patrons of the Stonewall were generally the “have-nots” of the queer community: people of color, the poor, drag queens, and other gender dissident people, as well as homeless youth, to name a few. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn and began arresting its patrons. Such raids were routine occurrences within the sanctioned police harassment queer people were subject to at the Stonewall and many of the other social spaces. On this night, however, the police faced a group of people who had grown tired of the harassment and began to fight back against the police. News of the raid and the rebellion spread, and although many of the initial rebels were arrested that morning, others came to the Stonewall Inn for three more days where the rebellion continued. Several grassroots organizations developed in the aftermath, including the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Despite the central role gender nonconforming people played in the “fight back,” this was not acknowledged as part of the history with rare exception.42

Mosley is very critical of the erasure of transgender women of color from histories about Stonewall, saying to me, “You’re young so you may not recall Stonewall. . . . If you recall the role we [transgender people] played, it was a rather pivotal role, and yet no one these days remembers it.” Though I was aware of this history and its erasure, we can see Mosley’s positionality as an elder in relation to me even as the researcher, as she saw herself, by virtue of her age and knowledge, to be providing me with information not only for my benefit but for her own too, since it was crucial for me to know in order to hear her story her way and to have an informed take on LGBTQ history. The consequences of this erasure are clear when we consider that, had transgender women of color like Sylvia Rivera and Marcia P. Johnson not been erased from histories, Mosley might have known of them sooner.⁴³ Both women participated in the Stonewall rebellion, but historical accounts consistently ignored their contributions for many years.⁴⁴ This continues today, as evidenced in controversies about the 2015 Roland Emmerich film Stonewall and the centering of White gay men in the story.⁴⁵ Rivera and Johnson also went on to become key figures in the queer liberation organizations and collectives that emerged as activists capitalized on the energy of the gay revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as STAR, cofounded by Rivera and Johnson.

Though James Baldwin’s novels were mentioned in Mosley’s recollection of seeing race and queerness in cultural productions, she made it clear that the most important figure in her then-developing sense of self as a Black transgender woman was another Black transgender woman in her neighborhood named Charlie. Mosley met Charlie when she was in high school. Mosley thought it peculiar that Charlie “never took a [traditionally] female name.” Charlie, she says, was “a showgirl . . . who won a few crowns.” Mosley “was particularly impressed and influenced by” Charlie and “started to emulate her and kind of run with her crew.” Charlie “was very self-assured . . . she would speak what was on her mind.” When transphobic people would try and harm her because she was transgender, Charlie would always defend herself. Even if the threats were physical, Charlie would fight back every time. Until she met Charlie, Mosley says she had felt alone and unable to fight back.

Reading Charlie’s life made legible to Mosley previously unknown Black transgender subjectivities and the world around her. Through this reading Mosley drew meaning to display a range of transgender identity making and affirmation that she did not previously consider. For example, that Mosley found it peculiar Charlie did not change her name shows such an act was inconsistent with the narrative of being a transgender or gender nonconforming person that Mosley had previously encountered. Mosley’s emphasis of this detail suggests that reading Charlie’s life revealed ways of being herself that may have come into play as she formed meanings she gave to her own life. Her reading of Charlie is more overt in her discussion of Charlie’s self-confidence. Reading Charlie’s resistance to anti-transgender violence presented Mosley with a depiction of responses to literal and figurative violence that she had not imagined she could use in her own life. Finally, reading Charlie’s life provided Mosley with a sense of community. She no longer had to suffer through “the only one” complex, as she now had an elder with a lived experience that she could emulate or draw from to make a different set of choices for her own life and root herself in this world.

Mosley met Charlie at a time when Mosley’s peers and some adults were harming her. Retreating into books, Mosley wanted to be as invisible as possible. Although she was comfortable with herself, she was always afraid of the psychological and physical violence she might experience at any time. She credited Charlie with helping her change:

One of the things that I think Charlie did for me in a way of inspiration was make me accept myself more to the point where I wasn’t as quiet when I felt insulted or removed by someone. And that had me wanting to be like that, made me kind of open up to the point where I was a little more self-assured. It started by being a little more self-assured when in Charlie’s company, but then I grew and matured to a point where I could speak my piece without being around Charlie. I think I gained some confidence in me as a person, and then as a trans person, having to deal with whatever problems might come my way from the community and in my own personal life. There was a time before [meeting] Charlie when if somebody said something derogatory to me, or called me a name when I was standing at a bus stop or on my way someplace, I would just kind of shrink and kind of just get out of the way. Get out of their sight so I could avoid them. After being around Charlie for a while I let them have it verbally! And, if I was outnumbered too badly, I would pick up a brick or stick . . . I just became a little more aggressive, I guess, after Charlie. And, in a way, that was good. I felt it was good because I didn’t have to feel afraid.

While Mosley describes that she did not have to feel afraid after this experience, I want to note that violence against transgender people is still frequent and that fighting back is its own risk and not a cure-all. For example, the activist CeCe McDonald, a Black transgender woman, was sentenced to forty-one months in prison for second-degree manslaughter after stabbing in self-defense a man who hit McDonald in the face with a glass bottle as he and his group of friends exited a bar, shouting racist and transphobic epithets at McDonald. Recognizing that her case was not proceeding well, McDonald took a plea deal rather than face twenty years in prison. Essentially then, as activists noted in the movement to free CeCe, McDonald’s crime was simply saving her own life. The racist, transphobic, and cisnormative violence against McDonald continued when she was jailed in two separate men’s prisons though she is a transgender woman, a violence that many transgender people experience at the hands of the criminal justice system and the state. In Mosley’s description of her own experiences of violence, literacy is again at work in how Mosley applies her reading of Charlie’s life in order to fashion herself. She says that Charlie inspires her to be a more “self-assured” woman in a number of ways, by gaining, among other things, confidence, strength, and resistance. Here Mosley is authoring a new self, one that projects the pride Charlie already possessed and one Mosley felt she could or had to emulate in the face of physical and psychological violence. When Mosley describes part of her resistance as “letting them have it verbally,” Mosley invokes images of using literacy to, as bell hooks might say, “talk back,”46 as opposed to her previous persistent silence. While I emphasize Mosley’s reading here, note that Mosley’s decision to talk back through writing emerges as well, and this is shown in chapter four. But with reading, Mosley’s ability to read Charlie’s life example also highlights those aspects of her history in which she recalls strategies of survival and resistance to violence that her own family members had taught her but that she did not know how to apply. Although these lessons had always been within her, seeing another Black transgender woman publicly fight back empowers Mosley to employ those lessons.

This phenomenon of reading elders and fashioning a self appears in the stories of a number of other research participants, including Steven Morgan, a Black transgender man. Morgan was born in 1985 and resides in a small city in the Midwest near where he was born and raised. Morgan recalled an elder whom he drew from in shaping himself as a transgender man. As a youth, Morgan wrestled with his sexual and gender identity, feeling that he was a lesbian. When he told his parents this, his mother immediately rejected what he was saying. His father was more supportive, but would initially only support him if Morgan’s gender expression were more normatively feminine. “The first thing [my dad] said to me was, ‘Don’t be one of those butch dykes. Just because you’re gay, and you’re a woman, does not mean you have to look or act like a man.’ So that was the message I received.” Morgan said this response from his parents made him stifle the gender expression he was most comfortable with until he reached high school.

In the ninth grade, Morgan met a Black lesbian named Brenda at a fundraiser for a community organization where he volunteered. Brenda was thirty years old. He described her gender expression as “butch.” Until that time, Morgan had never met another Black LGBTQ person and so, he says, “I was just in awe of her. . . . I just kept saying to her, ‘Wow. You’re black and you’re a lesbian.’ She just laughed. . . . I acted like a really silly kid, but I was just mesmerized.” After this interaction, Brenda gave Morgan her number and he said “sometimes I would call her and talk to her. . . . I’m sure she wanted to just kind of be a person in my life to talk to.”

In this we see how reading Brenda’s life affected Morgan’s understandings of Black queerness on many levels. First, as we saw when Mosley met Charlie, Morgan no longer had to contend with having the “the only one” complex. Simply meeting another Black queer person went a long way toward shattering this myth. Morgan’s subsequent recollections illuminate the significance that elders play as surrogates when historical erasure curtails access to ancestors. Second, reading Brenda’s life provides him with an image of a Black lesbian that challenges his father’s statement about lesbians and gender. Although Morgan now identifies as a Black transgender man, at that moment, Brenda represented to him an affirming image of a Black lesbian along a spectrum of gender that his father’s comments suppressed. Through Brenda, Morgan witnesses possibilities for exploring his gender identity and expression that did not previously exist. Speaking about the difference between Brenda’s role in his life and learning about Black LGBTQ history and culture through books, Morgan says,

The difference between reading [about black LGBTQ people] is you’ve got the story already scripted out for you. . . . [T]he story starts in the middle of whatever tragedy, whatever thing that they’re going through. . . . But to meet an actual person, to say, “How did you deal with this?” “How did you learn to do this?” “How did you learn to deal with that?” is different. It’s a big difference to have those life skills told to you based on other people’s real experiences, knowing how they got from point A to point B because, if you’re reading a novel or watching a movie, they’re going to start at the most entertaining part of the story. They’re not going to talk about how this person might have gotten here. . . . I think that’s a big difference.

Morgan’s comparison of reading lives to reading books most explicitly demonstrates the significance of literacy and the elder figure as one kind of intervention into historical erasure. Still, it is also imperative to be attentive to those instances in which reading elder’s lives and works were accomplished through or resulted in the production of print texts as well.

Connections to Elders as a (Print) Literacy Event

Research participants described scenes in which engagements with elders were mediated by the presence of writing and other texts, many of which had a profound effect on closing the critical gaps left by historical erasures. For example, participants talk about elders inviting them to book clubs, poetry readings, theater performances, and other arts events where texts focused on Black queer life and culture. These episodes also function as literacy events because they were opportunities to meet elders and other Black queer people. As with Ella Mosley’s reading of her elder Charlie’s life, research participants attending these events witness multiple ways of Black queer being, doing, and making, where they learn multiple ways to continuously develop ways to read history, identity, and culture through a lens that counteracts historical erasure. Kendall Ivins’s life story was filled with such moments.

In chapter 1, I discussed how Ivins employed hiding as a tactic of literacy concealment, and how he began “creating this whole collection of just gay info” centered around a growing collection of the Advocate, an LGBTQ magazine to which he subscribed. Ivins also watched pretty much every film or television show featuring a gay character at that time, including the ABC drama series Dynasty and the television film An Early Frost. He said, “From thirteen on it was really kind of like smooth sailing. . . . I feel really lucky.” Six years later, approximately four years after he began building his personal library of gay materials, a then nineteen-year-old college student, Ivins told his parents that he was gay. Though surprised, both his mother and father responded positively.

Going to a historically Black college in a large urban city in the South complicated Ivins’s previous knowledge of gay culture, which he has described as raceless:

College is when I started to realize that Black gay was different than gay. Or I think I just started to realize that there were some very specific nuances of being gay in the Black community versus what I was seeing in the pages of the Advocate or at the gay youth center that I was going to in high school.

What alerted Ivins to this nuance was going to college in a city with a sizable and culturally rich Black LGBTQ community population, whereas previously he had no idea that such a community even existed. He purposely sought out people who were more aware of Black gay culture than he, and he began “meeting Black gay men who were out and were artistic and writers and queens and performers. And so I started to gravitate towards them.” What Ivins found was that there were several older Black gay men and women willing to mentor him, many of whom introduced him and other young Black gay men in his community to a thriving Black queer literary and artistic culture in his city and nationally. One of these elders, a forty-year-old Black gay man named Keith, became an especially important mentor to Ivins. Keith “was almost certainly a father figure for me, and it was just those types of relationships that really again kept me down a certain path in life, which I think was really beneficial and really important.” Keith invited Ivins to poetry readings, book signings, lectures, film screenings, and theatrical performances such as plays and staged readings that addressed the lived experiences of queer people in the African diaspora. Ivins said almost all of this work was activist, addressing issues including homophobia, HIV/AIDS, police brutality, racism, misogyny, and others. For the first time, Ivins said, “I started to realize that there were Black gay men and women out there who were out, who were political, who were artistic . . . so I went through another phase of information gathering—just grabbing as much of that stuff.” These local events featured major figures from the national Black LGBTQ artistic-activist community, such as writers Essex Hemphill and Assotto Saint, filmmaker Marlon Riggs, and many notable Black queer culture workers who he was previously unfamiliar with. The presence of Keith and other elders, he says, changed his life: “It was a huge, huge turning point for me . . . because I’d never really seen particularly Black gay men be that out and political and say not only to the White gay community or just the mainstream community, but particularly to the Black community, that we’re here, and we’re a part of the Black family.”

Ivins’s relationships with elders revolved around the exchange of text from elder to participants, and the literacy events in which these exchanges occurred and the texts he received each illustrate restorative literacies. The events he attended serve as the focal points of the spaces where Keith invited Ivins: poetry readings, books signings, film screenings, and theater. Also, Ivins was exposed to Black queer ways of being through modes of literacy: reading those books, hearing those lectures, and seeing the films and performances. This connection to Black queer elders is the bridge Ivins uses to cross those critical gaps left by historical erasure of Black queers. This awareness proves useful to his own identity formation and affirmation as he fashions himself as a Black gay man with a newfound recognition of the multiple and complex intersections of his race and sexuality historically, culturally, politically, spiritually, and socially.

Further demonstrating the role of literacy, Ivins said that his introduction to and participation in the community stimulated his own interest in writing: “I really started to write my own poetry and write my own work involved in the arts, performance, and media.” In Ivins case, he would share this writing at open mics and other readings with his peers and at events facilitated by elders. Such moments can allow his writings to circulate in ways that could be affirming for other Black LGBTQ people who are present to hear it and are in search of narratives that fill the void left by historical erasure. By sharing his own writing, Ivins is positioned to inspire others to document their own stories. Similar to research participants like Yolanda Moore, who described ancestors inspiring her to use writing as a means to support future generations of descendants, Ivins indicates that elders have made him feel that he certainly wants to be an elder for another generation of young people:

I want to be able to be that type of person in someone else’s life at some point because I think it’s so important to have those kinds of people. . . . I don’t even see it as a formal mentorship thing. It’s just something—just being around people who’ve experienced, who’ve been down the path that you might be ready to go down, and having people in your life to guide you, support you, help you avoid the pitfalls. Those types of relationships; I think those are hugely important.

Ivins’s comments about mentorship make a crucial point here because he establishes that what elders do is so much more than mentoring. What makes Black queer elders different are, at the very least, the stakes involved given the violence of historical erasure and its harmful effects on people and communities. This literacy normativity is always the condition under which, in my analysis, elders and my research participants form their relationships. Relatedly, as we see with Morgan and Ivins, research participants and elders are vital to the creation and circulation of texts that challenge historical erasure not just for themselves but for the ages. Thus, while the role of elder signifies that one has comparatively more life experience and wisdom than those they support, the restorative literacies that elders enable rely on an interdependent relationship. That is, elders and those they support need one another in order to have the effect possible and necessary through such relationship. Ella Mosley, Steven Morgan, and Kendall Ivins were each able to have the relationships Ivins discusses. As a result, they were able to persist in self- and communal love, connect to others, and uncover a genealogy of Black queer life and culture, despite the violence of historical erasure that made locating this information less possible.

Many circumstances and agents pull and push on people’s lives and literacy. Literacy is central to establishing one’s links to historical precedent, allowing one to use literacy to embrace a multiplicity of identities and form and affirm those complex identities. Connections to ancestors, elders, and fictive kin enable these literacy actions for my participants, transforming the use of literacy for historical erasure into moments of critical intervention through which literacy is employed as a means of restoration of Black queer life from the violence of literacy normativity that blocks historical rootedness, community, and the possibility of developing a loving sense of self.

Ancestors are not merely ambassadors of literacy for survival and resistance; their relationship to descendants can be characterized by and can stimulate specific literacy activities out of one’s own desire for fulfillment. Again, as Toni Morrison reminds us, we must resist impulses to classify the cultural centrality of the ancestors as “discredited knowledge,” for such impulses are bound up in and amplify dismissive attitudes toward a particular community’s culturally situated knowledge. Morrison states that these instances of so-called superstition and magic must be seen as yet “another way of knowing things” that is “enhancing, not limiting.”47 If we are ready to listen, the voices of ancestors engage us in important questions about where we have been, where we are, and where we might go.

Fictive kin add another unique set of tools that research participants use to navigate historical erasure. Discussing fictive kin, research participants confirm that an interview-based examination of Black and queer fictive kinships focused on literacy is worth further examination for a number of reasons. First, it allows us to analyze how people across time receive Black queer literary and other cultural productions. The popular perception about the impact of cultural productions’ characterizations of a group of people is that a person who is a part of that group will display one of three responses to the production: affirming, controlling, or negative, if it is done poorly (i.e., stereotypically). Despite these perceptions, reception to cultural production remains a contested space in need of further inquiry for its interconnections with literacy acquisition and development. We need a more nuanced understanding of reception to Black queer cultural production through a lens centered on composition pedagogy, as well as a sustained critical dialogue on reception to discussions of cultural production in literacy, composition, and rhetoric in general. I maintain that these categorizations are a result of our taking reception for granted, so we tend to overlook the complexity of how these cultural productions affect people’s everyday lives, just as research on cultural production takes literacy for granted in its analysis.

Research participants’ comments about elders add another important layer to an analysis of historical erasure and the restorative literacies Black LGBTQ people employ to address it. Analyzing the function of elders also helps diversify our understanding of the role literacy plays in research participants’ connections to elders when they are attempting to fashion a life through the effects of historical erasure. For example, books and other texts were central to participants’ connections with elders. However, reading that occurred off the page—where research participants described reading elder’s lives as a text—demonstrates how less traditional understandings of reading are central to such events. Being attentive to literacy in all its various forms demonstrates the ways that connections between research participants and elders operate as literacy events. Collectively, relations to ancestors, elders, and fictive kin, as well as the various literacy activities connected with each, are performed in the interest of personal and social change.