Devon W. Carbado
Dwight A. McBride
Donald Weise
Acknowledgments
Funding for Black Like Us was provided by The Institute of American Cultures Research Grant in Ethnic Studies at University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA); UCLA School of Law; the African American Studies Center at UCLA; the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Humanities Institute; and the UIC Department of English. Editorial and research assistance was provided by Nancy Freeman, Courtney D. Johnson, Justin A. Joyce, and Darcy Thompson.
We would like to acknowledge the cooperation of Gary Lambrev and the staff of the Martin Luther King, Jr., branch of the Oakland Public Library; Jim Van Buskirk and the staff of the Main branch of the San Francisco Public Library; Karen Sundheim and the staff of the Harvey Milk/Eureka Valley branch of the San Francisco Public Library; the staff of the Hugh and Darling Law Library at UCLA; the African American Studies Media Center at UCLA; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; and University of Delaware Library Special Collections Department.
Among the enthusiastic booksellers who cheered us onward are Holly Bemiss of A Different Light Books; Tisa Bryant of Modern Times bookstore; Suzanne Corson of Boadecia’s Bookstore; Crissa Cummings of Books Inc.; Blanche Richardson of Marcus Books; and Jerry Thompson of Black Spring Books. Most of all, we wish to thank Richard Labonté, whose pioneering career as a gay bookseller not only informed the content of Black Like Us, but also brought many of the authors in this book to the attention of lesbian and gay readers for the first time.
For encouragement, support, and feedback on this project, special thanks goes to Robert L. Allen, Thomas Avena, Derrick Bell, Keith Boykin, Jennifer Brody, Elaine Brown, Paul Chamberlain, George Chauncey, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Kimberlé Crenshaw, John D’Emilio, Brian Freeman, Barbara Gittings, Thomas Glave, Jewelle Gomez, Laura Gomez, Jim Hall, James Earl Hardy, Cheryl Harris, David Hilliard, Sharon Holland, Darnell Hunt, Ellen Lafferty, Arthur Little, Regina Marler, Lisa C. Moore, Charles I. Nero, Joan Nestle, Harold Ober Associates Inc., Bill Richter, Michael Ruggiero, Stewart Shaw, Gloria Smart, Carlton Elliott Smith, Valerie Smith, Renée Swindle, Joël B. Tan, Kendall Thomas, Giovanna Tringali, Mariah Wilkins, Patricia Williams, Jacqueline Woodson, and Richard Yarborough.
We are particularly indebted to Ann Allen Shockley, an authority on African American literature and black gay and lesbian writing whose support from the start was indispensable. She generously answered questions, questioned answers, clarified points, and affirmed our choices as only a mentor could. As if one mentor were not enough, we were fortunate to have a second in the spirited Evelyn C. White, to whom we owe thanks. She brought wisdom, wit, and candor, and her camaraderie was a driving inspiration. Additionally, we wish to recognize the ever-present influence of Joseph Beam, Essex Hemphill, bell hooks, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Marlon Riggs, and Barbara Smith. These writers above all others influenced Black Like Us. Cumulatively, their scholarship, ideas, and very lives made this book possible, and the editors owe any success of the project to their formative work.
A special measure of gratitude is reserved also for Cleis Press publishers Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman. Their insights brought new dimensions to the book, and their support was steadfast and exemplary. Black Like Us is a testament to Cleis Press’s active commitment to the furtherance of black lesbian and gay literature.
Thanks also to Scott Idleman and Karen Quigg for their exquisite book design, and to Mark Woodworth for his expertise in tackling a herculean copyediting assignment.
And much appreciation goes to the dedicated sales force and brilliant marketing team at Publishers Group West—especially Elise Cannon, Karen Cross, Kymberly Miller, Mark Ouimet, and Kim Wylie— for getting this book into the hands of readers everywhere.
1900–1950
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
“…the perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement”
WRITING IN 1920, AS THE EPOCH THAT LATER CAME TO BE known as the Harlem Renaissance was gathering momentum, W. E. B. DuBois heralded a “New Negro” aesthetic. “A renaissance of American Negro literature is due,” he proclaimed; “the material about us in the strange, heart-rending race tangle is rich beyond dream and only we can tell the tale and sing the song from the heart.”1 According to DuBois, the “New Negro” would challenge racial stereotypes that had suppressed blacks for centuries. Unlike the “old Negro” associated with the antebellum South, this new generation of early-twentieth century artists would embrace literature as a source of liberation, employing ennobled representations of the African American experience to “uplift the race” from its maligned past. For DuBois, however, this “race tangle” would not be taken up by just anyone. Race matters, perhaps even the salvation of the black race itself, were the province of an elite class of blacks, an exemplary subminority of men and women steeped in culture and education—the “Talented Tenth.” DuBois firmly believed that this distinguished group—ten percent of the overall black population— would lead the coming renaissance and rescue African Americans from the racially subordinating conditions under which they lived. “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,” he remarked in his seminal essay “The Talented Tenth,” published in 1903. “The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”2
While DuBois forecast a new literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance had in fact already begun. Spanning roughly the years from the end of the First World War in 1918 to at least the mid-1930s of the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance represents a significant era of African American artistic productivity. In this respect, DuBois was prescient in foretelling the significance of this period in terms of art, culture, and politics. Still, his notion of the Talented Tenth, though not an unreasonable response to severe racial backlash following the war, deprived him of the foresight necessary to understand that a literary renaissance of such breadth would resist essentialist notions of racial uplift. For the ideological orientation of the Harlem Renaissance fundamentally challenged the idea that a privileged minority of intellectuals could, or should, represent African Americans en masse.
Nor would the black majority, particularly young people, abide by the marginalization and exclusion that DuBois’s antiracist vision invited. Excluded from the Talented Tenth were the “low-down folks,” as Langston Hughes called the remaining ninety percent of African Americans. “[A]nd they are the majority—may the Lord be praised!” Forecasting predictions of his own in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a 1926 essay, Hughes observed that “perhaps these common people will give the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.” Hughes’s thinking was that “[w]hereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear…. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our own individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.”3
The African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual fiction published during the first half of the century is in many respects a study in this conflict over how postbellum blacks might best represent their “dark-skinned selves”—both to other blacks as well as to the world at large. In the case of sexual minorities, the intraracial differences among New Negro factions on issues of race and class were further complicated by considerations of sexuality and gender, though seldom were sexual topics raised as a legitimate point of debate. Beginning in 1926 with Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” the first-known overtly homosexual work published by an African American, same-sex desire, if not thrust into the open, was at least showcased as a controversial theme for black writers to address explicitly. And while African American lesbian or bisexual authors such as Angelina Weld Grimké and Alice Dunbar-Nelson had in
fact been publishing politically engaged work since the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century, this literature was either unconcerned with homosexuality or, when same-sex subject matter was incorporated, often left unpublished, as with Grimké’s love poems and Dunbar-Nelson’s short stories. Although present-day black lesbian, gay, and bisexual fiction may have its origins in this body of fledgling literature, these early writings are not “gay-identified,” in the contemporary sense of the term. Nor would authors such as Grimké, Dunbar-Nelson, or Nugent have identified their own sexual orientation as such. Notwithstanding the fact that the Harlem Renaissance enjoys a popular reputation as a period of extreme sexual permissiveness and gay-themed artistic expression, homosexuality retained an outlaw status that few blacks embraced at the time and, given the extreme racial subordination of the period, that still fewer would have championed alongside matters of race and class. Even queer writers of overtly gay-themed work—among them Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman—took care to conceal their sexuality from the overwhelmingly disapproving public eye, employing a variety of socially acceptable covers (most notably marriages of convenience in the instances of Countee Cullen and Thurman).
But if modern sexual terminology fails to capture the sexual culture within which the Harlem Renaissance was played out, so too does the notion that the events in Harlem of the 1920s constituted a renaissance among African American artists fail to capture fully the artistic legacy of the New Negro Movement. To many observers, the renaissance dates more inclusively not from the close of the First World War but instead from the politically charged climate of the post–Civil War Reconstruction era. From its start in 1865, Reconstruction, sometimes called the “Second American Revolution,” was a period of progressive politics in which the federal government and supportive whites assisted newly emancipated blacks in an effort to build a more democratic society. Combined with the drastic social and political changes that accompanied the abolition of slavery in 1863 was the need to rebuild the war-torn South. In effect, three constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth (abolishing slavery), ratified in 1865; the Fourteenth (conferring citizenship) in 1868; and the Fifteenth (granting black males the right to vote) in 1870—along with a series of Republican-orchestrated Reconstruction Acts that placed southern states under military control to ensure the enfranchisement of African American men, proved insufficient protections against civil rights violations. Indeed, the job of Reconstruction in the South, even in its most radical moments, was never stable. Former Confederates were bitter about losing the war, and many resentful white Southerners perceived the rapid advancements that Reconstructionist programs demanded on behalf of blacks as being too much, too fast. African Americans had in fact made significant economic and political inroads. From 1870 to 1901, for example, two black men, Blanche Bruce and Hiram Revels, joined the U.S. Senate, and twenty black congressmen entered the House of Representatives. Southern whites found these and other forms of racial progress disruptive of the racial hierarchy to which they had become accustomed economically, socially, and politically. Thus, they deployed a variety of measures, including violence and terror, to reestablish total political control of the southern states and to undo black racial gains. This politics of backlash was helped by the Compromise of 1877, pursuant to which Republican legislators withdrew federal troops from the South, essentially granting the South “home rule,” while congressional Democrats conceded the deadlocked 1876 presidential election to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes.
In the aftermath of Reconstruction’s demise the segregationist era of “Jim Crow” was born. In certain respects, Jim Crow was as bad as institutionalized slavery, and in some instances worse. Subject to much of the same repression under comparably exploitive social conditions in similarly violent circumstances, blacks were for all purposes abandoned without protection by the government. By the 1890s southern states were instituting stronger segregation laws, a situation that the Supreme Court encouraged when it upheld the legality of “separate-but-equal” segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Meanwhile, blacks were lynched with unprecedented frequency, as many as one hundred women and men a year. It is in the context of the violent antiblack politics of the 1880s that Ida B. Wells launched her famous antilynching crusade. A journalist and newspaper editor whose early articles “Our Women” and “Race Pride” reflected a political commitment to both race and gender, Wells was among the most ardent public critics not only of lynching but also of the federal government’s complicity in offering no protection to its victims. Writing in the tradition of the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Wells authored the pamphlets Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) and A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Both documents reshaped the post-Reconstruction public discourse, in part by arguing that lynchings were driven not by black men sexually assaulting white women but by white resentment over the political advancement of African Americans. “Why,” Wells asked, “is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation? What is the cause of this awful slaughter? This question is answered almost daily—always the same, shameless falsehood that ‘Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood.’” According to Wells, “This is the never-varying answer of lynchers and their apologists. All know that it is untrue.” She argued that “The cowardly lyncher revels in murder, then seeks to shield himself from public execration by claiming devotion to woman. But truth is mighty and the lynching record discloses the hypocrisy of the lyncher as well as his crime.”4
Wells’s confrontational politics differed substantially from the accommodationist beliefs of Booker T. Washington, the preeminent black civil rights leader of the late-nineteenth century whose teachings set the tone for post-Reconstruction racial discourse. Washington, a former slave and author of the best-selling autobiography Up from Slavery (1901), was the influential cofounder of the Tuskegee Institute, a vocational school created for blacks in 1881, which emphasized industrial education over academic learning. “Our greatest danger,” Washington posited in his “Atlanta Address,” a career-defining speech delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, “is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us [blacks] are to live by the productions of our hands.” He urged black Americans “to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life.” Central to his thinking was the idea that “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”
But Washington’s comments were directed not only at African Americans. Part of the ideological project of his speech was to make clear to white Americans that the “New Negro” would be driven not by a politics of resentment but by a commitment of loyalty. “As we have proved our loyalty to you [whites] in the past, nursing your children, watching by the sick bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you….” 5 For Washington, racial subordination was an unavoidable and perhaps even permanent reality of African American life. Thus his was a politics of pragmatism that encouraged blacks to strive patiently toward economic rather than racial equality. His conservatism proved popular even with progressive whites, as well as with industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who supported Washington’s program to the extent that he was useful in combating labor unions. Among blacks, however, Washington’s reputation engendered greater controversy. Wells notably resurrected the defunct Afro-American League, a black unity organization started in 1890, as the newly established Afro-American Council in 1898, in part to counter the racial politics of white accommodation.
Among Ida B. Wells’s other groundbreaking
accomplishments was the creation in 1912 of the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, believed to be the first organization of black women suffragists. During the political turmoil of the Reconstruction era, women’s suffrage had gained greater momentum with women activists than at any time since the first clear expression of women’s “right to vote” by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott at the Woman’s Rights convention in 1848. By century’s end, and in the spirit of Sojourner Truth, who had linked race and gender concerns in her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech of 1851, African American women had formed a network of clubs. The National League of Colored Women (formed in 1892) and the National Federation of Afro-American Women (1896) represented more than one hundred black women’s groups. The 1896 merger of these two national bodies resulted in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), whose motto “Lifting As We Climb” signified the organization’s concern with racial uplift and the betterment of black womanhood as a central platform.
“[S]elf-preservation demands that [black women] go among the lowly, to whom they are bound by ties of race and sex,” remarked Mary Church Terrell, cofounder and first president of the NACW. 6 Although the club movement was dominated by middle-class women such as Terrell, some of whom sought to educate the black underclass on domestic issues like housekeeping and child-care, the NACW more importantly served as a leading voice in the suffragist cause until the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920. Writing in “Woman Suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment” in 1915, Terrell emphasized that her women’s rights platform was rooted in racial solidarity: “Even if I believed that women should be denied the right of suffrage, wild horses could not drag such an admission from my pen or my lips, for this reason: precisely the same arguments used to prove that the ballot be withheld from women are advanced to prove that colored men should not be allowed to vote.” It occurred to Terrell that “The reasons for repealing the Fifteenth Amendment differ but little from the arguments advanced by those who oppose the enfranchisement of women.” Thus, she believed that it would be “inconsistent” for black people to “use their influence against granting the ballot to women, if they believed that colored men should enjoy this right which citizenship confers.” 7
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