This is a story. When I say “story,” I don’t mean for you to think “easy.” Stories are anything but easy. When I say story, I mean an event in which I try to hold some of the complex shimmering strands of a constellative, epistemological space long enough to share them with you. When I say “story,” I mean “theory . . .”
—Malea Powell, “Stories Take Place: A Performance in One Act,”
2012 CCCC Chair’s Address
This too is a story—for this study flows from life stories by Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people to theorize the myriad ways individuals have learned and employed literacy in their quests to build a life on their own terms and, more specifically, toward the goals of self- and communal love, healing, care, and other modes of survival. As I investigate the voices, faces, and places that inform this book, I am drawn over and over again to scenes of literacy within my life story that are crucial to narrativizing my life experience as a Black, queer, feminist, cisgender man who is a learner, teacher, scholar, artist, activist, and advocate; scenes that, when read alongside my later analysis, dovetail back to the themes of identity formation and affirmation, literacy concealment, ancestorship, and others explored in the chapters that follow.
I
My story. It was 1986. I was seven years old. My mother worked at the post office, and, having three children to take care of on her own, she worked as many evening hours as she could possibly get her supervisor to approve to generate more income. This meant that I hardly had any time to see my mother at all in the afternoon and evenings—she was never home when I returned from school. Occasionally, my big brother Avery would serve as our caretaker, but usually it was my mother’s sister, Aunt Lorry, who helped us with homework and cooked dinner so that my mother had less to do when she came home. In essence, my mother and Aunt Lorry raised my two brothers, three female children of their brother, and me in one household; my family, like me, was always Black and queer. My mother, being the only source of income besides public assistance, didn’t have much time for extracurricular activities with me or my siblings. However, I’ll never forget that she always took the time to read to and with me. One book in particular featured the characters Bert and Ernie from the television program Sesame Street. I remember first that I loved the illustrations in the book and also the very animated way my mother would read the characters’ lines. I mimicked the way she characterized their voices, and when she asked me to read aloud, I repeated back the story just as she had read it to me.
While I was able to recall the story word for word and scene-by-scene, my mother, teachers, and other relatives did not know that I could not actually read the book. I had made it to second grade without anyone ever finding out that I could not read. My recitation of the Bert and Ernie book was not a demonstration of my reading skills. My ability to recall the words was built around my supreme memorization skills (skills I still possess). By looking at the actual illustrations and listening to my mother’s voice, I had memorized the book completely from cover to cover and could recite it on command. One day my mother received a phone call while we were reading the book. She continued her telephone conversation as I went on reciting the book from memory; however, while on the phone she never turned any of the pages. She noticed that the words I was reciting and pretending to follow with my index finger were not the words that appeared on the actual page. A look of worry and confusion came across her face. As she realized what was happening, that I was only reciting from memory, her eyes began to well with tears.
The very next day my mother went to meet with my teacher, Ms. Drew.1 When she attempted to engage Ms. Drew in a discussion about solutions to improving my reading abilities, my teacher became increasingly defensive throughout the conversation. At one point she suggested that my mother allow for my father to take on more hours at work so that she could focus on helping me read. My mother responded by telling her that there was no father and that she worked every minute she could to provide for my siblings and me. Ms. Drew’s response was simply, “Well, Ms. Pritchard, these are difficult choices, in difficult times.”
Though a sacrifice for her as a single parent, my mother made sure that my reading and writing improved quickly, and that it was not just skill related, but culturally centered and purposeful. One of the difficult decisions she made was to ask that I be placed back into a first-grade class the following school year so that I had a chance to learn all the things I hadn’t the previous year. She also wanted me to be in the company of students at my skill level and not just passed along to the next grade. Though as a teen I had some self-esteem issues about having been “left back” and being a year behind students in my age cohort, I cannot dispute that my mother made the best decision she could have with the options she had available to assist me in catching up on the lost learning time.
My mother began to read to me not just from Bert and Ernie books but also from a pamphlet about African American history called Black Facts, a popular publication among many Black people. I couldn’t understand all the words, or even the historical significance, but I remembered feeling special and having moments of clarity. I think those were also moments of clarity for my mother. She would often raise her eyebrows when we’d get to certain facts, saying she didn’t know about that either, and smile. I learned things like Madame C. J. Walker was one of the first American women to become a self-made multimillionaire; that Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee University, a Black college in Alabama; that George Washington Carver created about 145 different products from the peanut; and Rosa Parks was the “mother of the civil rights movement,” made famous by her refusal to give in to prejudice aboard a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. As my mother read to me, reading became much more of a routine, and I found it easier to do. Somehow learning about all those people taught me a little bit more about myself, but it also confused me when I looked around for those images elsewhere. I was even more confused about why those things didn’t come up in my school lessons, and I found that, as one of a small group of students being bused from Corona, Queens, to a predominately White school in Rego Park, consideration for the experiences of the Black and Latinx2 students newly arriving to the school did not appear to concern my teachers. Even at home I would look through my grandfather’s newspapers and books and wonder why there weren’t any of the pictures or names in them that I had learned from Black Facts.
II
Another story. January 1988. I was in third grade. My family had recently moved to another side of Corona’s major thoroughfare, Northern Boulevard, which meant that I, my brother Travis, and my cousins all went to a new school closer to home. No more Rego Park. My class was learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and preparing for Black History month. My teacher, Ms. Lowell, began to talk about Dr. King’s “I Had a Dream” speech, stating that Dr. King saw all types of people—regardless of how they looked, talked, or behaved—living together in harmony. She asked us, “Where do you see Dr. King’s dream?” Everyone’s hand went up, and she called on us one at a time. Some students saw King’s dream at their churches, in their neighborhoods, even in their families. I thought about where Dr. King’s dream was for me and wanted to say it was at the school, but I knew that it wasn’t true just by looking at how few people in the room looked like me. So, I thought about my neighborhood, my church, and realized that they didn’t look a lot like the speech either. My neighborhood was pretty much all Black and brown people and, for the first time, that seemed odd. Not only did everyone look like me, but everyone lived like me too. My family struggled financially and we often had very little money to do anything extracurricular. We also lived in a neighborhood of broken-down houses and unclean streets with seemingly little hope of receiving any city resources toward improvement. No, Corona did not look like Dr. King’s speech at all. There was not a diversity of people and it did not sound like much of a dream, at least in comparison to the experiences my classmates described back at Rego Park, or even at my new school. But I also loved home, and I felt more comfortable there than in school despite the fact that school had comparably better material conditions and literacy resources for me. In this moment I was, as Paulo Freire might say, reading the word and the world.
III
A different story. 1992. Ms. Kelly’s “Rites of Passage” class was among the most popular among students at Wright Elementary School, an African culture immersion school located next door to a public housing project, and was required of all sixth-grade students. Being able to attend Ms. Kelly’s class was in itself the end result of a rite of passage: the journey that brought you to the final year at Wright. I had attended Wright since 1989 when my family moved from Corona to South Jamaica. The purpose of “Rites of Passage” was to introduce students to Black culture through film, literature, history, lectures, and workshops. The course was named after traditional African cultural rites of passage, which mandate that every young male and female in a village must go through a period of learning and testing of culture, manhood, and womanhood before they can be considered an adult. The class met once per week. Males and females were separated as a part of Ms. Kelly’s pedagogy and the rites of passage she followed, meeting with her at different times during the week. This philosophy was very African and Black culture–centered and traditional in terms of gender and sex, as men and women were seen as having different roles in the community. Rites of passage reinforced binary gender focusing on what males and females needed to know and learn separately. The distinctions drawn through binary gender were especially discussed in terms of labor, family, and leadership roles within a community. This understanding of gender shaped my own notions at the time of what it meant to be a Black man and Black boy. Though the course was helpful in terms of my early development of race consciousness, the ideas here would later be a source of struggle for me as I discovered the limitations and boundaries these lessons placed on what constituted manhood, women’s roles, gender diversity, and, ultimately, sexuality. I didn’t yet know exactly what it meant to be “queer” or how to express a gender that is nonconforming, but I did feel displaced by the expectations and definitions of what it meant to be a Black man or Black boy—I just couldn’t articulate it. Despite this, Ms. Kelly’s class remains one of the most successful educational experiences I ever had. I also credit this pedagogy with helping me to develop not only a sense of pride in myself and in community but also in empowerment and excellence. The paradox of this truth—that this literacy environment was one that was both liberating and constraining—is one that would continue to emerge at other points in my life and runs parallel to many of the experiences that sixty Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people I interviewed for the purposes of this book shared with me about their own literacy learning and identity formation and affirmation.
The words “Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave” appear over the entry to Ms. Kelly’s classroom and in the main hall as one entered Wright, just above the entrance to the auditorium. It peppered all of Ms. Kelly’s lectures and classroom discussions. Ms. Kelly taught us about responsibility, revolution, honesty, and compassion—lessons coming through the history of Black people throughout the diaspora. We watched films such as Roots, The Autobiography of Ms. Jane Pittman, The Color Purple, and Ethnic Notions. Marlon Riggs, who directed Ethnic Notions, would later be reintroduced to me in a way, this time as a Black gay male ancestor. I was first introduced to his work only to know about and discuss issues of racial and ethnic stereotyping of Black folks, not the complex discussions around a more diverse sense of Black identity or the critical racialized gender and sexuality commentary for which he was also well known in his films Black Is/Black Ain’t and Tongues Untied, which I would not learn of until graduate school. Ethnic Notions was a documentary about the stereotypes of African Americans in books, films, cartoons, and popular culture. I learned the names of these stereotypical figures: mammies, jezebels, sapphires, uncle toms, Black brutes, savages, and coons. This was an important lesson in my continued process of decoding, becoming visually literate. Ethnic Notions heightened my senses to issues of mainstream misrepresentations of Black people. I recall being very angry at this point in my life because I knew of many television shows and books that still represented Black people this way. I brought it up in class one day, and Ms. Kelly told me to write about it in the journal we were required to keep.
IV
I was fourteen years old when I first learned that there were African American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender writers and literature. I did not discover this in school. By then I had dropped out of eighth grade at my new junior high just a fifteen-minute walk from Wright Elementary and made my local branch of the New York Public Library my classroom. On numerous occasions a librarian questioned if I was old enough to be at the library during school hours. Ms. Sinclair, the head librarian, would always come to my defense. “Leave him be,” she’d say. “There’s a lot worse things besides reading a child could be doing in these streets if they were skipping school.” Once, after Ms. Sinclair intervened on my behalf, she said, “Eric, why don’t you go to school? Does your mama know about this?” Standing there, mouth agape, I had so much I wanted to say but couldn’t offer a single word. “You could be out there doing worse, though I am a little concerned about you reading them funny people’s books and magazines all day,” she said, referring to the gay and lesbian literature and magazines I read. She told me, “You’re gonna have to finish school someday. So whatever you are running from, you better stop letting it rule you.”
What was I running away from? School had ceased to be a place where learning was possible. Though I did not yet identify as gay, I had long since known and been treated differently than my peers whose parents made comments about how “sweet . . . funny acting . . . Kitty Pritchard’s middle son was.” Comments from parents gave way to being teased and beaten up at school multiple times. I stopped going to school to save myself the pain of fighting my way through a curriculum that held no meaning for me and to spare myself the beatings I would get throughout the day. Put simply, I was both bored and battered.
The library became my sanctuary and classroom for two consecutive years, and I would only go to school when the truant officers would threaten to take me and my brother away from my mother or there was a citywide test (which I would always ace because I didn’t want to get left back again). At the library I remember reading all types of Black queer and Black feminist literary culture: the poems and poetry of Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Asha Bandele; the novels of James Baldwin; and national news stories about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and gender nonconforming people. I spent the most time with street literature like the novels of Donald Goines, a favorite of my mother—replete with tales of the illicit economies of drug dealers, pimps, sex workers, and other gender and sexual deviants—as well as the contemporary black gay fiction by authors James Earl Hardy and E. Lynn Harris. In Hardy’s and Harris’s work I saw for the first time Black same-gender loving and Black gay men depicted as happy, passionate about life, successful, in love with one another, desiring one another, and some openly doing so. These writers and their works were at the center of the pedagogy of empowerment and self-making I created for myself. My self-made curriculum, while focused on novels, poetry, and plays, also included activities such as research, writing, memorization, and reading the world to locate evidence in real life of what I saw in those books. I would learn the names of musical artists like Sylvester and Luther Vandross and others so popular among Black gay men and try to locate their music so I had better context for the moments when they were mentioned in what I read. I kept many journals with notes from my readings and research, I would go home and type my own stories in response to what I read that day, and I began to write poetry, short stories, and plays of my own. I would remember passages of the books and share them with friends. And in time the whispers about queer people in my neighborhood being sweet, sissies, dykes, bulldaggers, or fruity were almost completely silenced by the increased volume of a more affirming view of the lives of those same individuals, who I suddenly saw as more fully human than what had been modeled in the reductive descriptions of them because of assumptions about their sexuality, gender, and other aspects of their sense of self.
Through my self-created pedagogy and for the first time in my life I saw Black LGBTQ people depicted as brilliant thinkers, resilient people, lifelong warriors; I learned that they loved and were loved by others, that they laughed and danced and sang and painted and prayed and dreamed just like everyone else. I saw, especially in reading Hardy, that these Black LGBTQ people were not mutually exclusive of Black communities, but would be part of those communities, gay and lesbian communities, and making art completely comprised of the aesthetics of Black queer life. I created a place in which I could finally be “all of who I am in the same place.”3 I began to gather the critical intellectual tools and personal affirmation to do as Ms. Sinclair had commanded me: to wrestle from my greatest fears the power it had stolen and the life I was being denied. Literacy was, and remains, key to that journey.
V
In 2002, at twenty-three years old, I was in my first semester of graduate school. I was sitting in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “College Library” with a stack of books, searching for some substantial history that linked the Black civil rights and LGBT rights movements, but I couldn’t find any connection. The one piece of information that did pop out to me dealt with the pivotal role that transgender women of color—namely Sylvia Rivera and Marcia P. Johnson, self-described Latina and Black “street queens”—played in the Stonewall Movement that kicked off the fight for LGBTQ liberation; however, that LGBTQ history was not articulated as part of anything I learned about histories focused on the contributions of Black or other people of color. These same stories only garnered what seemed like cursory mentions as part of LGBT history as well. I read pages of essays, speeches, and book reviews, looking for the answer to how I could work toward liberation and not have to fracture myself being forced to either be Black or gay, but not both. But it seemed like such a difficult task at the time. In doing that research I learned about Bayard Rustin, and this turned my attention from looking for information in the big narratives of the historiography that existed to the stories of individual people. This practice introduced me to a range of other people in Rustin’s generation and the generation that followed who were freedom fighters working at the intersections of the Black Freedom and LGBT rights movements; people who identified with both at some point, and at other moments critiqued those movements individually and collectively, exploring the splitting of Black and LGBTQ identity and politics as a productive tension in the making of self, community, political identity, and other key matters. One of those people was Essex Hemphill.
I remember reading the book Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, an anthology edited by Hemphill. He completed it on behalf of Joseph Beam, a Black gay male writer and activist who had died of complications from AIDS before the volume was complete. Knowing that Hemphill finished the work of his brother-friend, and now ancestor was somehow more meaningful for me than the existence of a critical mass of Black queer history and literature itself because it directly informed the sense of purpose unfolding before me. Later Hemphill wrote about continuing Beam’s work in the poem “When My Brother Fell,” which he dedicated to him. Hemphill said, “When my brother fell, I picked up his weapons.”4 I imagined those weapons Hemphill picked up as being the paper and pen he used to complete Beam’s work, to act on the call he heard and chose to answer; Beam had initially taken on his work under the compulsion of the call he’d received as well.
Something resonated with me about this alliance, this continuum of Black queer family, working together for not just the causes of their race or sexuality or gender justice but also for social justice writ large. Just as I began to bring things together, expanding my antiracist work to a broader vision on gendered and sexual justice, this effort and my own personal identities as a Black queer man were affirmed by reading June Jordan, a Black bisexual writer, activist, and teacher. In the essay “A New Politics of Sexuality,” Jordan wrote that “freedom is indivisible, or it is nothing at all.”5 This was the essay that made intersectionality more tangible for me, and it also made my identity as an emerging Black gay feminist cisgender man much clearer. I read this essay in a graduate course taught by Stanlie James called “Black Feminisms,” and I felt as if the dam had broken and out flowed fresh, replenishing waters, clear of the drudge that silenced me and kept myself from myself. As the Nina Simone song goes, I knew how it felt to be free.
A recurring space in my own literacy story, and in the literacy stories of many people, is the public library. Such was the subject of a series of paintings by famed artist Jacob Lawrence who used the public library as a central theme within several of his pieces, including his work 1967’s Dream Series No. 5: The Library, which appears on the cover of this book. In his illustrious career, Lawrence sought to represent the fullest expressions of African American self-definition through paintings depicting the everydayness of Black life, from workplaces and churches to grocery shopping and children playing. Lawrence’s quiet yet powerful images show the ways Black folks experience and express their humanity, the same humanity that is denied by the violence of systems of oppression and structural domination.
Outside of a handful of exceptions, including my own previously published work,6 narratives of Black LGBTQ literacy practices remain absent in literacy, composition, and rhetoric (LCR) generally as well as in work that centers on African American, Feminist, and LGBTQ literacies, composition, and rhetoric. For African American literacy, composition and rhetorical studies, this problematic is reflected in scholarship and pedagogical tools that fail to examine the diversity and complexity of Blackness and its intersectionalities. My work queers that theoretical and historical monolith. Likewise, queer theories of literacies do little to explore the uses of critical theories of racialized sexualities, despite the always already present characteristic of race in queer life and culture, and indeed the queerness of race itself and the necessity of engaging it for any adequate critique of power, privilege, and sexual, gender and LGBTQ identity that is always necessary to make possible progressive and radical interventions.
This book aims to live up to the promise of Lawrence’s portraits in documenting, rendering, and engaging with the scenes of Black literacy in everyday life and to assume and represent a diversity of Black and queer lives as peopling those scenes of literacy. Lawrence’s literacy portraits offer the raw material for imagining and engaging the possibilities of a more complex, multidimensional way of conceiving of a diversity of Black life stories within questions around Black literacy and literacy institutions.
Lawrence’s portraits of libraries were often inspired by or were direct renderings of the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, also part of the site of what is now the historic Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The 135th Street library held a special significance for Lawrence because it served as his classroom after he dropped out of high school to take on a job and financially support his family as a teen. Of equal inspiration to Lawrence’s library paintings are the patrons of the library in Harlem, who are a primary feature in his work. The representation of the patrons in his literacy portraits contain a range of Black figures, signaling attention to literacy stories of Black people and literate practices in its diverse forms.
For instance, looking at Dream Series No. 5: The Library, in which many of the figures present are gender neutral, my eyes are drawn to Lawrence’s depiction of a person reading a book and another looking on over the reader’s shoulder. The reader is frowning, eyes directed down toward the text, pupils turned up and to the side. This depiction of the eyes communicates some anxiety or frustration or perhaps serves as an indication that the person is more concerned with looking at something else rather than focusing on the book in hand. Across the table from the reader sit two other library patrons. They appear to be shrinking into a diminutive position, attempting to be unseen. This is further demonstrated by the book they are reading, which appears to be much larger than the two patrons. They lean in toward one another; one wears an expression of laughter. The two appear to be talking about something humorous, but perhaps they are feigning discretion in doing so.
The spatial context for the painting—its seemingly quotidian setting and the rendering of library patrons—gives one set of interpretations of what is happening in Lawrence’s work. The individual reading beneath the gaze of the imposing figure could be a child, one not particularly happy about having to spend time reading indoors when they could rather be at a playground. The person standing above may be a parent, determined that the child will be educated and well-read despite the child’s wish to be left alone to play. The two people across from them are laughing, perhaps at the frustration of the child or possibly at the difficulty the child is having. Their physical effort to not be seen laughing could be motivated by the requirement that the library remain a quiet space, lest they draw the ire of the stereotypical all-seeing librarian. While my reading reveals details in how the painting visualizes literacy in the everyday, I am more interested in the queerness of these details and how attention to those details invites us into a reconsideration of African American and LGBTQ literacy activities that highlight the relationship between literacy and normativity, which is a primary concern of this book.
Consider, for instance, the ways in which the imposing figure standing over the reader is symbolic of a more frequent practice of literacies being surveilled, individuals being forced to read and conform to something with regard to literacy. In the painting, what is being enforced is being made to read; in everyday life, this might also expand to uses of literacy to regulate one into a practice, behavior, way of being or identifying, or other action that is oppressive, constraining, or just simply antithetical to what one might do without that imposing figure or force. This is the hallmark of literacy and normativity explored in this book: incidents where literacy operates with the power of regulation, imposition, surveillance, and other forces that do damage or inflict harm on individuals. Continuing this reading of the painting, the two patrons sitting across from the reader and the imposing figure offer a glimpse of literacy practices engaged on one’s own terms. As they have no imposing figure standing over them, they possess something like freedom as they are not being monitored or expected to acquiesce to any particular practice in relationship to their reading. Compared to the person sitting across from them, literacy for them is protection; they have the support of the book obstructing their ability to be seen by the imposing figure standing across from them, and thus it functions as an article of distraction (or, to employ a term used in chapter 1, for the ends of literacy concealment) that allows them to have literacy their way and escape the regulatory presence of the imposing figure behind the reader just across the table from them.
I am also reminded of the life stories of many of my research participants when I view Lawrence’s painting. Their stories form the basis of the theoretical interventions offered in this book, as they recall feelings of surveillance, unsafety, and regulation in relationship to literacy, sometimes because the act of reading was seen as being abnormal due to their race, class, sexuality, or gender identities; in other cases, they feared that the LGBTQ subjects of their books might reveal them as queer and subject them to violence and ostracization; and in more cases, literacy was used to wound them.
Examining Lawrence’s painting, I think also of the queerness of the scene not only because of the gender neutrality of subjects in the painting but also given the very Blackness of the literacy scene itself. As cogently demonstrated by multiple literacy and language studies scholars, literacy is almost never assumed to be the property of African Americans, especially within historical and contemporary educational systems in the United States. Lawrence’s painting positions this scene of Black literacy in general as queer by transgressing the normative view of literacy in relation to whiteness by centering Black literate subjects in a library, a standardized literacy institution if there ever was one. Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, I am drawn to the ways in which Lawrence’s painting, in the abstract, does not provide a clear visual of the faces. Through this choice I see an invitation or opportunity to imagine most elements of the literacy story depicted in the painting, including those who may or may not have passed through the doors. And as I undertake a project whose central question asks where the Black queers are in African American and queer LCR, considering a scene that is historically situated in Harlem—one of the epicenters of Black queer life and culture in the United States—I read those abstract faces as possible Black LGBTQ patrons passing through the doors of Lawrence’s library. I would even take the train to Harlem and visit the now Schomburg and the neighboring 136th Street library branch named for poet Countee Cullen myself as a teen, though it happened decades later than the scene in Lawrence’s painting.
My desire then is to provide a framework through which literacy, composition, and rhetoric may see Black queerness generally and the theory I develop from the life stories of my research participants in particular. Intersectionality demands nothing less than to imagine a world outside of our own as a point of entry into a more just, empathetic, complex, and connected relationship to one another and also as a richer way of understanding ourselves, particularly with regard to our positional ties in the realities of power and difference. Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy responds to this invitation in its aims to engage the truth of Black queerness that always was, is, and will be in histories, theories, and pedagogies of Black and LGBTQ literacies—whether we choose to see them or not is another matter. I also respond to this invitation as a literacy researcher who recognizes the ways in which Black queer studies, with its continued commitment to a deep analysis of Black queer cultural production, needs considered attention to theories in literacy, composition, and rhetorical studies to engage more productively with that project.
My request to you, the reader, is to be open to the ways in which everyday life and its stories, particularly those in this book, present a universe of possibles—a world of concepts, subjects, and interventions that are left marginal to the normative intellectual enterprise of a discipline—that may fuel new considerations of where the Black queer may be and go in LCR studies; where LCR may be within Black Queer Studies; what the universe of possibles, with all its seemingly ineffable questions, interventions, and challenges, may mean for your own stories and ways of being and doing in theory, history, and pedagogy, every day.