Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  Amid this heightened antihomosexual repression, gay men nonetheless produced a number of gay-themed works challenging sexual convention with forthright depictions of homosexuality. The publication of Foreman Brown’s novel Better Angel (1933) and The Young and the Evil (1933) by coauthors Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler indicated a shift in the willingness of male authors to publish openly homosexual fiction, which Christopher Isherwood expanded further with Goodbye to Berlin (1939), an autobiographical rendering of gay life in Weimar Germany that later was released in a single volume along with The Last of Mr. Norris (1935) and Sally Bowles (1937) as The Berlin Stories (1975). Among black writers, however, Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932), written at the onset of the Depression, became the last openly homosexual novel by a gay African American until Owen Dodson’s Boy at the Window (1951) was published twenty years later. Although Thurman was not the only black gay or bisexual author published during that period, he was in fact alone in incorporating explicitly homosexual content into African American gay writing. The bisexual Jamaican-born novelist Claude McKay, whose Home to Harlem (1929) was the first commercially successful novel by a black author, for example, never acknowledged his own homosexuality in print. Even his memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937), avoids mention of sexual identity. Langston Hughes’s two autobiographies, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder As I Wander (1956), are also noteworthy for their silence on the topic of sexual orientation. Perhaps understandably, the combination of a Depression-era economy (unemployment in Harlem had reached fifty percent), along with daily realities of racial and sexual oppression, made overt references to black gayness especially unattractive, if not outright dangerous, to black gay and bisexual authors of the period.

  By comparison, African American heterosexuals like Richard Wright gained early fame during the post–Harlem Renaissance years with autobiographically based works that inspired the pioneering careers of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and other influential writers of the following decade. Wright’s landmark first novel, the politically defiant Native Son (1940), sold more than two hundred thousand copies in one month, showcasing African American fiction for mainstream readers who previously had limited their race-based reading to nineteenth-century slave narratives. Actor and singer Paul Robeson, who starred in the stage adaptation of Wright’s third book, Black Boy (1945), remarked of Native Son, “Wright portrays the Negro as he was and is,—courageous, and forever struggling to better his condition; the Negro descended from Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and countless others who fought that Americans of African blood should also be free and (in the words of Lincoln), ‘enjoy their constitutional rights.’” 57 Like Robeson, Wright was a black Communist Party member who applied Marxist teachings popular among radical-left circles to American race relations. “I owe my literary development to the Communist Party and its influence, which has shaped my thoughts and creative goals,” Wright commented in 1938 at the time his short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, was published. “It gave me my first full bodied vision of Negro life in America.” 58 Yet unlike Wright, who renounced his party membership in 1942, Robeson deepened his political commitment until his death, incurring enmity from the same civil rights establishment that had barred homosexuals for equally disruptive racial identities. The NACP’s Walter White, for example, attacked Robeson with language that might as easily describe the prevailing attitude among African Americans of the 1940s toward lesbians and gay men, remarking in the national black press, “Robeson is a bewildered man who is more to be pitied than damned.”59 Additionally, Robeson’s “highly charged erotic life,” in the words of biographer Martin Duberman, became a source of exploitation for white conservatives eager to discredit this outspoken critic of American colonialism as a “moral transgressor.”60

  Following the entry of the United States into World War II, government surveillance of sexual transgressors was widespread and advanced. Whereas lesbians and gay men had been policed before, never had homosexuals been sought out from the general population as a matter of military policy. From 1941 to 1945 approximately nine thousand soldiers and sailors suspected of being gay were discharged from military service through the Armed Forces’ newly instituted psychiatric screening process. Nevertheless, units such as the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) attracted and retained large numbers of lesbians, with some experts placing the number of lesbians in the military at eighty percent of the overall population of women serving in the war.61 As Lillian Faderman commented,

  For those who already identified themselves as lesbians, military service, with its opportunities to meet other women and to engage in work and adventure that were ordinarily denied them, was especially appealing. For many others who had not identified themselves as lesbians before the war, the all female environment of the women’s branches of the armed forces, offering as it did the novel emotional excitement of working with competent, independent women, made lesbianism an attractive option.62

  Even among civilians, the women’s labor force grew from 12 million workers in 1941 to 19 million in 1945. Moreover, wartime labor shortages brought about by the transfer of more than 12 million men overseas necessitated in some instances that positions previously filled exclusively by white males were filled temporarily by women, including black women, whose numbers in the workforce suddenly tripled.63 The war’s end, however, not only brought a halt to the demand for “womanpower” but also instigated a cultural push for women to return to conventional gender roles familiar in prewar civilian life. Chief among these expectations was that women should embrace the traditional domestic identities of wife, mother, and homemaker. “After the war, when the surviving men returned to their jobs and homes that the women needed to make for them so that the country could return to ‘normalcy,’” Faderman wrote, “love between women and female independence were suddenly nothing but manifestations of illness, and a woman who dared to proclaim herself a lesbian was considered a borderline psychotic.”64

  In the aftermath of World War II, political conservatives took advantage of the postwar gender backlash to launch an especially aggressive campaign against homosexuals. At first, this platform was manifested as an “anticommunist” agenda, whose basic function actually had less to do with dismantling American Communism than with advancing right-wing Cold War policy. Beginning with a 1950 report by the State Department that 91 people, “mostly homosexuals” (in the words of the department head), had resigned or been discharged in the process of routine security checks, and throughout the subsequent hearings in which Senator Joseph McCarthy insisted that one “flagrantly homosexual” State Department worker had been reinstated “under pressure” from an unnamed, high-ranking State Department official, gay men and lesbians were added to the list of so-called un-American conspirators.65 Shortly thereafter, the chairman of the Republican National Committee announced that “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years…. It is the talk of Washington.”66 Indeed, one Washington, D.C., vice squad officer informed Congress that 4,500 of the 5,000 known homosexuals in Washington were government employees,67 while a pair of Hearst newspaper reporters raised the number to 6,000, yet calling that “a fraction of the total of their kind in the city.” 68 It was in the context of this antigay hysteria that a Senate subcommittee was launched to investigate gay “infiltration” in the federal government, much as “red sympathizers” had been targeted by Congress with the founding of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947. The subcommittee’s research concluded, unsurprisingly, that these “clandestine relationships” and “recruiting agents” did in fact jeopardize public safety, pointing out that a homosexual has “a corrosive influence upon his fellow employees. These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices. This is especially true in the case of young and impressionable people who might come under the influence of a pervert.” As such, Repu
blican President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 added “sexual perversion” to the list of offenses for which one was banned by law from federal jobs.

  Still, this onslaught of political hostilities also functioned as a catalyst for establishing the first postwar gay protest group, Bachelors Anonymous, in 1948. “The anti-Communist witch-hunts were very much in operation; the House Un-American Activities Committee had investigated Communist ‘subversion’ in Hollywood. The purge of homosexuals from the State Department took place,” remarked gay rights pioneer and Bachelors Anonymous founder Harry Hay. “The country, it seemed to me, was beginning to move toward fascism and McCarthyism; the Jews wouldn’t be used as a scapegoat this time…. McCarthy was setting up the pattern for a new scapegoat, and it was going to be us—Gays. We had to organize, we had to move, we had to get started.”69 Bachelors Anonymous, known alternately as the International Bachelors Fraternal Order for Peace and Social Dignity, was a service organization dedicated to the defense of the “androgynous minority.”70 Prior to this period, the only instance of overt gay activism in the United States had been Henry Gerber’s short-lived Society for Human Rights in 1925. “I had always bitterly felt the injustice with which my own American society accused the homosexual of ‘immoral acts,’” Gerber wrote. “One of our greatest handicaps was the knowledge that homosexuals don’t organize. Being thoroughly cowed, they seldom get together. Most feel that as long as some homosexual acts are against the law, they should not let their names be on any organization’s mailing list any more than notorious bandits would join a thieves’ union.”71 The Society for Human Rights was disbanded when several members were charged with violating a federal law that prohibited sending obscene material through the mail. “[W]e were up against a solid wall of ignorance, hypocrisy, meanness, and corruption. The wall had won.”72 Although Bachelors Anonymous encountered similar legal prejudice, the group evolved in 1950 into the Mattachine Society, the leading homosexual political protest vehicle of the mid-twentieth century.

  Appropriately enough, it was James Baldwin who invited public discussion about the intersection of race and gender—discussions that anticipated the complexities and tensions of pursuing civil rights across specific identity categories. Writing in “Preservation of Innocence,” a 1949 essay that predates the birth of the modern civil rights movement, he spoke of the naturalness of homosexuality:

  We are forced to consider [the] tension between God and nature and are thus confronted with the nature of God because He is man’s most intense creation and it is not in the sight of nature that the homosexual is condemned, but in the sight of God. This argues a profound and dangerous failure of concept, since an incalculable number of the world’s humans are thereby condemned to something less than life; and we may not, of course, do this without limiting ourselves…. Experience, nevertheless, to say nothing of history, seems clearly to indicate that it is not possible to banish or to falsify any human need without ourselves undergoing falsification and loss.73

  In fact, however, notwithstanding Baldwin’s efforts to normalize homosexuality, lesbians and gay men remained largely banished from mainstream culture of the time, which “condemned” a significant portion of the American population to “something less than life.” What precisely this represented for black lesbian, gay, and bisexual people remained a source of contention in liberation struggles for decades to come. In the meantime, openly homosexual fiction by black lesbians and gay men, if not finding voice amid Cold War repression, found inspiration in the pioneering works of the Harlem Renaissance. The identifiably lesbian and gay African American literary movement that had begun in the 1920s was subverted by cultural watchdogs and New Negro propagandists, yet an influential literary tradition, however tenuous, had been established. If nothing else, the spirit of these literary forebears was manifested in the writings of a new generation of postwar lesbian and gay artists who began the project of reframing this “falsification and loss” with groundbreaking works. More than transforming the social, cultural, and political context within which they were written, these works would help radicalize cultural definitions of African American sexual identity over the next half century.

  ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON

  [1875–1935]

  BORN IN NEW ORLEANS TO MIDDLE-CLASS PARENTS OF MIXED racial heritage, Alice Ruth Moore possessed a gifted intellect, along with a near-white complexion, thus distinguishing herself early in color-conscious African American and Creole social circles. At age fifteen she entered Straight College, graduating with a teaching degree two years later. Following a brief period as a public school teacher, she moved north in 1896 where later she studied English literature at Cornell, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania. It was while living in New York City that she met and married Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first nationally recognized African American poet. Although Dunbar’s infidelities and alcoholism eventually led to the couple’s separation in 1902, a less publicly acknowledged problem in the relationship was his wife’s color prejudice. Being Creole herself, she had conflicted relations with dark African Americans such as her husband. Indeed, she did not self-identify as Negro, the prevailing term for African Americans of the time, preferring instead mulatto, which Dunbar-Nelson and many other light-skinned blacks argued was a class apart and above their darker-complexioned peers. Nevertheless, the author retained her estranged husband’s prestigious name, even after his death in 1906 and her subsequent marriage to newspaperman Robert Nelson in 1916.

  Dunbar-Nelson has the distinction of publishing the first collection of short stories by an African American woman—though these stories, like much of the author’s early work, were devoid of black characters. The conventionally romantic stories in The Goddess of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899) were populated with Creole and Cajun characters whom Dunbar-Nelson did not think of as “black.” Not all of her stories were conventional romances, however. She addressed gender and race explicitly in her early fiction, but these stories remained unpublished until The Collected Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson was edited by the black lesbian feminist scholar Akasha (Gloria) Hull in the 1980s.

  Although she won early attention for her short fiction, Dunbar- Nelson is remembered for her poetry. She published in prestigious African American periodicals such as the Urban League’s Opportunity; The Crisis, published by the NACP; and a number of influential anthologies, including James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry in 1931.

  Dunbar-Nelson also distinguished herself as a leader in both the early women’s suffrage movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality. Her activism belied the often genteel content of her published fiction. Dunbar-Nelson made good use of the limelight that accompanied her position as an elder writer of the Harlem Renaissance and the widow of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Putting her notoriety to use, she was an ardent public speaker and a prolific journalist on behalf of “race and sex” for the rest of her life. Indeed, her outspoken opinions led to her dismissal from a teaching position in 1920, after she attended a conference in the home of Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding. Dunbar-Nelson’s intimate, and far less socially acceptable, affairs are recorded in the diary she kept in 1921 and again from 1926 to 1931. Among the details of the author’s personal and financial struggles—as well as her ongoing devotion to Robert Nelson—are open allusions to her lesbian relationships, including relations with fellow-members in the black women’s club movement, which provided an informal social network for Dunbar-Nelson and other African American lesbian and bisexual women. She was working as a newspaper columnist and lecturer when she died from heart failure in 1935.

  From The Collected Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson comes an unpublished early story entitled “Natalie.” Characteristic of the auto­biographical Creole fiction that established the author’s early literary reputation, “Natalie” departs from convention by means of its suggestive lesbian content that passes as juvenile fiction. When read in the context of Dunbar-Nelson’s diary, however, the w
ork assumes a double meaning.

  Natalie

  [1898]

  Natalie swung herself down from the breakwater to the white sands below, and walked along on the edge of the sea, her feet leaving prints that filled with water, and were quickly effaced. She swung her brown arms in the fading sunset light, and sniffed the whiffs of salt air with keenly appreciative nostril, swinging as she trotted along with long, clean-limbed step. Natalie was happy in her little sunset world down here by the water’s edge.

  Suddenly she paused and her big black eyes widened angrily. Someone had invaded her territory and was coming towards her.

  Down here on the sands at this edge of the beach was Natalie’s own kingdom, and woe unto the trespasser who dared within its boundaries. At Mandeville, you know, there are places where the fickle Lake Ponchartrain encroaches too frequently and too violently upon the homes of men, therefore, it has to be kept back by stoutly built breakwaters, as its no less turbulent cousin, the Mississippi river is kept from swamping New Orleans across the way by levees. Then, too, there are spots here and there where the lake kisses the shores in regulation beach-like manner, or mingles with swamp and bayou over morass and tangled moss thicket. When the tide was low, one might walk on the sands below until the beachy places were found. Down here at the West End of the town, the natives called Natalie’s kingdom because of the absolute sway she exercised over those sands and marshes and little beauty spots of scenery and waves.