Brother to Brother joined a short list of lesser-known collections that had begun to highlight the newly emergent black gay literary movement. Other Countries, a collective of African American gay writers founded in 1986, published two anthologies, Other Countries: Black Gay Voices (1988) and the Lambda Award–winning Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (1993). One of the contributors to these books was Assotto Saint, who also edited the award-winning anthology The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (1991) and Here to Dare: 10 Black Gay Poets (1992), which includes G. Winston James, Marvin K. White, and others. White’s own book of poetry, Last Rights (1999), brought the tradition of black gay AIDS-inspired poetry up to date. His poem “and your names,” for example, is a role call of black gay artists who have died, such as Marlon Riggs, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Wayne Corbitt: “i still call your names/because you have all left me/moved on and/moved me/to poetry.”22 Indeed, the work of these authors have been a visionary source of inspiration to young black gay men, much as James Baldwin’s writing had been for a generation of authors coming of age during the Stonewall period.
Rounding out the collections of the period is Michael J. Smith’s Black Men/White Men: A Gay Anthology (1983), which, as the title suggests, explores the interracial component of the black gay experience. Smith, the white founder of Black and White Men Together (BWMT), a social network of gay “interracialists,” included poems, stories, essays, and interviews that purport to speak from “the Black and interracial gay experience,” even though much of the book’s content eroticizes black men from a white gay viewpoint. In spite of this shortcoming, however, Smith featured his historic profile of the first openly gay professional baseball player, Glenn Burke. The African American outfielder had came out publicly when an article, “The Double Life of a Gay Dodger,” was published in Inside Sports magazine in 1982. “I’d finally gotten to the point where it was more important to be myself than a baseball player.”23 Burke’s career began with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1972, peaking in 1977 with his participation in the World Series. His future suddenly soured in 1978, when he was traded to the Oakland A’s amid rumors that homosexuality and his close friendship with Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda’s gay son had jeopardized his position on the team. Certainly this was Burke’s impression: “Deep inside I know the Dodgers traded me because I was gay.”24 When he was dismissed from the A’s in 1980, and with no new offers to play, Burke retired from baseball. Commenting on the decision to disclose his sexual orientation, he remarked, “If I can make friends honestly, it may be a step towards gays and straight people understanding each other. Maybe they’ll say, ‘He’s all right, there’s got to be a few more all right.’”25
Themes of black/white love also began to appear in black gay novels. Larry Duplechan’s Eight Days a Week (1985) suggests that even to the extent that black men and white men desire each other, the very fact of that desire—that it is constituted in a black/white racial context—can overwhelm a relationship. Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms (1991) illustrates how racial insensitivity, or at least a lack of racial understanding, can manifest itself even in the context of a loving relationship between a black man and a white man. The author presents this dilemma in the following exchange between Jesse, a black gay dancer, and his white lover, Metro, who asks:
“But why do you always act like black people are the only ones oppressed? There are other oppressed people.”
“Like who?”
“Gays, Jews. Even poor boys from the South. Don’t you think we have some weight to bear? Don’t you think we hurt sometimes?”
“You’re white, Metro. At a distance you blend in with the crowd. Shit, they can see me coming, and in a riot they don’t stop me to ask if I’ve been to college or live in the suburbs. They start beating any black head they find.”26
Canaan Parker’s The Color of Trees (1992) and Darieck Scott’s Traitor to the Race (1995) explore racial tensions and homophobia as well. While Parker’s book suggests that gay male relationships can be constituted by a kind of race transcendence or, at least, need not be complicated by race, Scott’s novel raises a fundamental question about the politics of racial desire: whether black men’s sexual relations with white men constitute self-loathing.
Not all the debates on race and sexuality depicted in black gay fiction of this era, however, occur within the confines of an interracial gay male couple, or even in the context of the gay community. Many novels reflect a black-centered or “Afrocentric” consciousness that transcends the “gay ghetto.” In some instances, sexual identity is depicted in predominantly, and sometimes exclusively, heterosexual African American settings. Don Belton’s Almost Midnight (1986), Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989), and Bil Wright’s Sunday You Learn How to Box (2000) center gayness within the larger black population. White homosexuality, and to some degree whiteness and homosexuality across the board, is peripheral. More specifically, these gay works, though not dogmatically “Afrocentric,” call into question the notion that homosexuality is something experienced only within the white lesbian and gay community.
Black-centered fiction assumes a more self-consciously Afrocentric vision in the novels of James Earl Hardy. While his B-Boy Blues (1994), subtitled A Seriously Sexy, Fiercely Funny, Black-on-Black Love Story, embraces
gay Afrocentrism, the book also critiques misconceptions of its superiority. Mitchell, its central character, has the following to say about interracial dating:
We…are often depicted in some passionate embrace with a white man, particularly in safer-sex ads. The message is insidious, insulting, and very clear; we don’t fuck each other, we don’t love each other, and, hence, we’re better off fucking and loving a white man. No wonder so many of us believe Black men loving Black men is a revolutionary thing when it isn’t.27
B-boys, or “banjee-boys,” are given an added dimension in The Brothers of New Essex: Afro-Erotic Adventures (2000), an illustrated collection of black gay homoerotic stories by the African American graphic artist known as Belasco. The racial specificity of his work, which includes highly sexualized, all-black male settings, aims, in the artist’s own words, “to fill a void of what I felt was a lack of strong, black male images in the realm of illustrated homoerotica.” Unlike the homoerotica of white gay artists like Tom of Finland and Robert Mapplethorpe who fetishize black men, Belasco’s nudes are rendered from a black gay perspective.
The transformative aspect of black-on-black gay love is also framed memorably in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989). The documentary film’s closing title even reads, “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act.” Featuring performance, poetry, and autobiographical vignettes played against the backdrop of social prejudice, Tongues Untied affirms the diversity of black gay identity in celebratory, often sexually explicit terms: “I was blind to my brother’s beauty, and now I see my own. Deaf to the voice that believed we were worth wanting, loving each other. Now I hear. I was mute, tongue-tied, burdened by shadows and silence. Now I speak and my burden is lightened. Lifted. Free.” The candor of Tongues Untied inspired Brian Freeman, Djola Branner, and Eric Gupton to form Pomo Afro Homos (Postmodern African American Homosexuals), a performance art ensemble, which was the first gay group to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Expansion Arts Program. Their performance piece Fierce Love: Stories from Black Gay Life (1991) explored the contradictions, humor, and naturalness of African American gay male life.
If Tongues Untied inspired black gay art, it also generated conservative backlash. The film’s graphic content came under fire by right-wing observers like Patrick Buchanan, who denounced the work as “pornographic” when the film aired on Public Television in 1991. Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman (1996), which focuses on black lesbian identity, would be subject to similar debate about the funding practices of the NEA. In the meantime, Riggs continued his unabashed exploration of gay themes in film until his death from AIDS complications in 1994. His final pr
oject, Black Is, Black Ain’t (1995), is a broad examination of contemporary African American culture that calls into question strict notions of racial authenticity. As Riggs remarked, “My struggle as a black, gay man with HIV is to constantly negotiate the attempts within myself, as well as within the larger society, to deny some part of who I am. For me to have to constantly say, ‘No, I am who I am, and I am proud of that. And that includes all of the above.’”28
The dramatic challenges faced by black gay and bisexual men struggling with self-acceptance lies at the core of the novels of E. Lynn Harris, whose characters often lead double lives, concealing their sexuality from others, if not from themselves. With top-selling titles like Invisible Life (1991), Just As I Am (1994), And This Too Shall Pass (1996), and Abide with Me (1999), Harris has become the most commercially successful African American gay author since James Baldwin, opening opportunities for new queer black writers to follow. His reputation among gays, however, has not always been congratulatory. Lines such as “I sometimes prayed for a pill I could take to destroy my homosexual feelings” complicate his relationship with gay men and lesbians .29 Still, it is surprising that the enormous popularity of his ground-breaking novels went unrecognized by the national gay press until The Advocate printed an interview with the author in 1997. Explaining the indifference of the white gay mainstream toward his work, Harris suggested that perhaps it was “because I’m not interested in the politics of ‘being gay’…. To say the white gay community is racist is…well, they just wouldn’t get it. They live in their own world.”30
By the end of the 1990s, an unprecedented breadth of writing from African American gay men had established a literary tradition that mainstreamed the experiences of at least some black gays. This included memoirs like Gordon Heath’s Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate (1992), Bill T. Jones’s Last Night on Earth (1995), Alvin Ailey’s Revelations (1995), and tell-all books by drag/transgendered entertainers like RuPaul’s Lettin’ It All Hang Out (1995) and Lady Chablis’s Hiding My Candy (1996). Cultural studies such as Keith Boykin’s One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America (1996) and Robert F. Reid-Pharr’s Black Gay Man: Essays (2001) sought to bridge divides with an analysis of both homophobia in the black community and racism in the gay community. A number of biographies on long-marginalized black gay figures such as James V. Hatch’s Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson (1995), David Hadju’s Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Jervis Anderson’s Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen (1997), and David Adams Leeming’s Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney (1998) restored the truth of these men’s sex lives to the historical record.
Finally, a new wave of anthologies that feature black gay and lesbian writing in the same volume has created a wider body of queer literary work. These books present the work of new young writers, and even include white authors, heterosexual black authors, or authors whose sexual identities do not conform to the labels “lesbian” and “gay.” Among these anthologies are Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Fiction by African American Writers (1996), Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent (1996), Má-ka: Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writing by Queers of African Descent (1997), Dangerous Liaisons: Blacks, Gays, and the Struggle for Equality (1999), Fighting Words: Personal Essays by Black Gay Men (1999), and The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (2000). Black Like Us takes its place in this new inclusive literary tradition.
Cumulatively, this body of work satisfies Essex Hemphill’s insistence that lesbian, gay, and bisexual men reclaim their voices and affirm their lives on their own terms. As Hemphill wrote: “I believe the task for the politically active, courageous black homosexual who has not chosen to be isolated is to begin to sensitize our families, friends, and communities to our concerns and to create images of ourselves in true proportions to who we are. The black community cannot afford to indulge in excluding black homosexuals or in condemning us. Nor can black homosexuals afford the exclusive, powerless indulgence of being a subculture, fearful and unwilling to defend our right to legitimate human rights and dignity.”31 Far from constituting a “powerless indulgence,” the work of the past twenty years has established a literary tradition that will render it impossible for future generations to refer to black lesbian, gay, and bisexual experience as an “invisible life.”
BECKY BIRTHA
[1948–]
BORN IN HAMPTON, VIRGINIA, TO A DIVERSE EXTENDED FAMILY that included African American, Irish, Cherokee, and Catawaba people, Becky Birtha was culturally aware at an early age. Her mother, a children’s librarian, introduced her young daughter to African American literature, while teachers encouraged her experiments as a writer. In 1968, she moved to Berkeley, where she participated in the student uprisings in People’s Park before returning to the East to continue her education at SUNY Buffalo and Vermont College, where she completed her MFA in Creative Writing in 1984.
After Birtha came out as a lesbian in 1976, her writing assumed new emotional and political dimensions. She wrote about women’s relationships, sexuality, passion, and self-acceptance in her short story collections For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women (1983) and Lovers’ Choice (1987), and in her book of poems, The Forbidden Poems (1991). The author’s work has been published in more than fifty journals and twenty anthologies, notably Women on Women, Breaking Ice, and Does Your Mama Know?: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories. Awarded the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Individual Fellowship in Literature, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize in 1988, Birtha has established her name as a respected African American lesbian figure.
“In the Life,” the closing story in Lovers’ Choice, perhaps the author’s most popular book, speaks to the lives of elderly black lesbians in unabashedly sexual, if not supernatural, terms that seem almost to transcend death.
In the Life
[1987]
Grace come to me in my sleep last night. I feel somebody presence, in the room with me, then I catch the scent of Posner’s Bergamot Pressing Oil, and that cocoa butter grease she use on her skin. I know she standing at the bedside, right over me, and then she call my name. “Pearl.”
My Christian name Pearl Irene Jenkins, but don’t nobody ever call me that no more. I been Jinx to the world for longer than I care to specify. Since my mother passed away, Grace the only one ever use my given name.
“Pearl,” she say again. “I’m just gone down to the garden awhile. I be back.”
I’m so deep asleep I have to fight my way awake, and when I do be fully woke, Grace is gone. I ease my tired bones up and drag em down the stairs, cross the kitchen in the dark, and out the back screen door onto the porch. I guess I’m half expecting Gracie to be there waiting for me, but there ain’t another soul stirring tonight. Not a sound but singing crickets, and nothing staring back at me but that old weather-beaten fence I ought to painted this summer, and still ain’t made time for. I lower myself down into the porch swing, where Grace and I have sat so many still summer nights and watched the moon rising up over Old Mister Thompson’s field.
I never had time to paint that fence back then, neither. But it didn’t matter none, cause Gracie had it all covered up with her flowers. She used to sit right here on this swing at night, when a little breeze be blowing, and say she could tell all the different flowers apart, just by they smell. The wind pick up a scent, and Gracie say, “Smell that jasmine, Pearl?” Then a breeze come up from another direction, and she turn her head like somebody calling her and say, “Now that’s my honeysuckle, now.”
It used to tickle me, cause she knowed I couldn’t tell all them flowers of hers apart when I was looking square at em in broad daylight. So how I’m gonna do it by smell in the middle of the night? I just laugh and rock the swing a little, and watch her enjoying herself in the soft moonlight.
I could never get enough of watching her. I always did t
hink that Grace Simmons was the prettiest woman north of the Mason-Dixon line. Now I’ve lived enough years to know it’s true. There’s been other women in my life besides Grace, and I guess I loved them all, one way or another, but she was something special—Gracie was something else again.
She was a dark brownskin woman—the color of fresh gingerbread hot out the oven. In fact, I used to call her that—my gingerbread girl. She had plenty enough of that pretty brownskin flesh to fill your arms up with something substantial when you hugging her, and to make a nice background for them dimples in her cheeks and other places I won’t go into detail about.
Gracie could be one elegant good looker when she set her mind to it. I’ll never forget the picture she made, that time the New Year’s Eve party was down at the Star Harbor Ballroom. That was the first year we was in The Club, and we was going to every event they had. Dressed to kill. Grace had on that white silk dress that set off her complexion so perfect, with her hair done up in all them little curls. A single strand of pearls that could have fooled anybody. Long gloves. And a little fur stole. We was serious about our partying back then! I didn’t look too bad myself, with that black velvet jacket I used to have, and the pleats in my slacks pressed so sharp you could cut yourself on em. I weighed quite a bit less than I do now, too. Right when you come in the door of the ballroom, they have a great big floor to ceiling gold frame mirror, and if I remember rightly, we didn’t get past that for quite some time.
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