Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  Hook’s suggestion, with which many black feminists agree, was that The Feminine Mystique was written for white, middle- and upper-class heterosexual women.

  In her influential essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1977), Barbara Smith called for a truly inclusive black feminist movement, citing the “near nonexistence” of black lesbian writing and the struggles of African American women authors in general. For Smith, then, there existed a nexus between the literary production of black lesbian work and the political goals of black feminism: “A viable, autonomous Black feminist movement in this country would open up the space needed for the exploration of Black women’s lives and the creation of consciously Black woman-identified art.”39 This, Smith reasoned, is precisely what white feminism managed to achieve for white women’s literature. Thus, while white women’s experiences—including, to some extent, the experiences of white lesbians—were appearing in literature with increasing visibility during the 1970s, the experiences of black women, and especially black lesbians, were largely invisible and untold. “I finally want to express how much easier both my waking and sleeping hours would be if there were one book in existence that would tell me something specific about my life,” Smith concluded. “One book based in Black feminist and Black lesbian experience, fiction or nonfiction. Just one work to reflect the reality that I and the Black women whom I love are trying to create.”40

  The modern lesbian, gay, and bisexual liberation movement began with a street rebellion against police harassment at the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City in 1969. Street chaos quickly turned to organizing, as gay people attempted to build a movement from the outburst. Leading the postriot talks was the Mattachine Society, an important political player in the so-called “homophile movement.” Formed in 1950 as a predominantly white male, middle-class organization, Mattachine challenged the popular interpretation of homosexuality as a mental illness, insisting instead that lesbians and gay men are a legitimate minority group:

  The Mattachine Society holds it possible and desirable that a highly ethical homosexual culture emerge, as a result of its work, paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow minorities… the Negro, Mexican, and Jewish Peoples. The Society believes homosexuals can lead well-adjusted lives once ignorance, and prejudice, against them is successfully combated, and once homosexuals themselves feel they have a dignified and useful role to play in society.41

  Under the leadership of Harry Hay, the club drew on aspects of radical left politics to battle police entrapment and other forms of persecution directed at gay men.

  Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was founded in 1955 as the first lesbian organization in the United States. Although DOB shared the Mattachine’s purpose of “improving the image” of homosexuals—and in fact attempted to work cooperatively with the Society—some male Mattachine members viewed DOB as a separatist and politically divisive organization. Many members of DOB, by contrast, believed that Mattachine had made no meaningful effort to understand the nexus between gender and sexual orientation for women. As DOB cofounder Del Martin demanded to know from an assembly of Mattachine members, “What do you men know about Lesbians?”42

  Few African Americans were visible within the early homophile movement; fewer still held positions of leadership. Ernestine Eckstein, who served as a DOB chapter vice president, was one of the few African Americans lesbians in DOB. Speaking in “Interview with Ernestine,” an article published in the June 1966 issue of The Ladder, a DOB publication, she commented, “I feel the homophile movement is more open to Negroes than, say, a lot of churches…. Unfortunately, I find there are very few Negroes in the homophile movement. I keep looking for them, but they’re not there. Why not?” Eckstein herself provided a partial answer: “Negroes are not now at the stage where they can begin to explore.”43

  Prior to entering both Mattachine and DOB in 1963, Eckstein, a former activist with the NACP and CORE, had never heard the word homosexual, much less identified her sexual attraction to women as lesbianism . She was the only African American to participate in the historic 1965 Washington, D.C., protest in which lesbian and gay demonstrators carried placards outside the White House calling for an end to federal employment discrimination. Asked whether she had found correlations between the homophile movement and the black civil rights struggle, Eckstein replied,

  There’s only a very rough parallel. Generally, NACP is the most conservative of all civil rights groups. And some homophile groups are the same, with the same sort of predisposition to take things easy, not to push too fast, not stick their necks out too far…. I think in the homophile movement, some segments will have to be so vocal and so progressive, until they eventually push the ultra-conservative segments into a more progressive line of thinking and action.44

  Sharing Eckstein’s isolation from other African American lesbians was Audre Lorde, whose Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) chronicled her experiences in New York’s lesbian enclaves during the 1950s. Writing in retrospect, Lorde offered a complicated analysis of intraracial tensions among black lesbians of the period that spoke to the dangers of being both black and openly homosexual in the Cold War years. “Sometimes we’d pass Black women on Eighth Street—the invisible but visible sisters…and our glances might cross, but we never looked into each other’s eyes,” Lorde recalls. “We acknowledged our kinship by passing in silence, looking the other way. Still, we were always on the lookout…for the telltale flick of the eye, that certain otherwise prohibited openness of expression, that definiteness of voice which would suggest, I think she’s gay.”45 The few identifiably homosexual black women whom Lorde encountered in Greenwich Village shared little by way of community, seeming instead to understand that their rarity enhanced their value in lesbian circles. If the 1950s was an especially lonely time for black lesbians, the isolation toughened those strong enough to withstand the intense cultural repression. “In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single sub-society—Black or gay—I felt I didn’t have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look ‘nice.’ To be liked. To be loved. To be approved,” Lorde wrote. “What I didn’t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.”46

  Although the early homophile organizations provided a much-needed social space for gay men and lesbians, the moderate political platforms of the Mattachine Society and DOB soon fell out of step with the counterculture politics of the Stonewall generation. Stonewall politics, after all, had not emerged out of a political vacuum. The new gay liberation movement reflected the broader social movements of the time—black civil rights groups, the New Left, the antiwar movement, and feminism. Among the most vocal groups to emerge in 1969 was the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). This radical organization embraced multi-issue politics that broke with the gay civil rights agenda of pursuing equality on narrow, identity-based terms. “We are a revolutionary group of men and women, formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished,” the group proclaimed. “We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature.” 47 From the outset, GLF made it clear that while it was interested in contesting sex roles, it would also work in coalitions with groups fighting oppression based on class and race.

  Whether gays and lesbians would unite with nongay groups was a point of contention in the fledgling lesbian and gay movement. No sooner had GLF established its voice in the community than a number of disgruntled members, favoring a return to gay-centered politics, departed to start the Gay Activists Alliance (GA), a militant, direct-action organization solely dedicated to gay concerns, in December 1969. While the single-issue focus helped force politicians to address homosexual rights for the first time, this narrow approach had alienating consequences as well. Lesbians and gay men of c
olor often felt particularly marginalized within these largely white organizations, as did lesbians in general whose complaints of sexism went unaddressed. “Black women didn’t have the time for Gay Activists Alliance. We didn’t have time to sit on the fence while our people were dying,” remarked Candice Boyce. “To be a white male in America and realize your gayness and find out that you’re oppressed is a very different thing than being oppressed all your life as a woman of color.”48

  Lesbians began splitting away from gay groups to form their own organizations. Lesbian separatism thus became popular among “women-identified- women,” who believed that only by severing relations with all men, and in some instances with heterosexual women too, could lesbians transcend patriarchal oppression. Radical groups like the Furies argued that lesbianism was “the greatest threat that exists to male supremacy.” In her essay “The Shape of Things to Come,” Furies cofounder Rita Mae Brown wrote in 1972, “If women still give primary commitment and energy to the oppressors how can we build a strong movement to free ourselves?… Are Blacks supposed to disperse their communities and each live in a white home?… Only if women give their time to women, to a woman’s movement, will they be free. You do not free yourself by polishing your chains, yet that is what heterosexual women do…49.”Jill Johnston even foresaw an independent Lesbian Nation. Just as black nationalists failed to include homosexuality in their political vision, however, white lesbian separatists overlooked racial concerns. As Margaret Sloan observed, “I can’t call you my sister until you stop participating in my oppression.” 50

  By the middle-1970s African American lesbians and gay men had taken political matters into their own hands. Many fled predominantly white gay liberation and lesbian groups to address their own concerns as queer people of color. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia (Ray) Rivera, two street queens who had been involved in the Stonewall uprising, formed Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970 to address homelessness among young queers of color like themselves. Salsa Soul Sisters was founded in 1974 by the Rev. Dolores Jackson, Harriet Austin, Sonia Bailey, and Luvenia Pinson, among others. This pioneering group provided an alternative to the bar-oriented lesbian community, because “…there was no other organization that we knew of in the New York area, existing for or dealing with the serious needs of third world gay women.” Its newsletter, Third World Women’s Gay-zette, launched in 1976, was the first periodical specifically for lesbians of color. Salsa Soul Sisters later became African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change, the oldest black lesbian organization in America.51 In 1978, the National Coalition of Black Gays (NCBG) brought African American lesbian and gay issues to a national level. The NCBG (renamed the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays in 1985 to recognize lesbianism explicitly) emerged as a prominent political player during the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, in 1979, where the organization hosted the first National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference.

  Politically moderate African American activists, on the other hand, began to establish leadership positions within traditional white gay protest vehicles. Melvin Boozer, a young, up-and-coming African American politico active in Washington, D.C., circles, came out publicly after attending the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Soon he was working as a lobbyist for the National Gay Task Force, a lesbian and gay civil rights advocacy group established in 1973, and he was elected the first black president of GA. Boozer achieved historical acclaim in 1980 as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

  There, seventy-five openly lesbian and gay delegates nominated him for vice president of the United States, the first gay person ever to receive a major party nomination. Speaking to the convention, Boozer observed, “Would you ask me how I dare to compare the civil rights struggle with the struggle for lesbian and gay rights? I know what it means to be called a nigger and I know what it means to be called a faggot, and I understand the difference, in the marrow of my bones. And I can sum up that difference in one word: nothing. Bigotry is bigotry.”52 Although he predictably stepped down in deference to the Democratic Party’s nominee, Walter Mondale, Boozer’s symbolic point had been made. Race and sexual orientation issues were no longer necessarily an “either/or” question for black lesbians and gay men.

  While African American lesbians and gay men made political strides, the larger gay movement of the 1970s lost political momentum. True, the community had achieved an unprecedented degree of visibility after Stonewall, and for the first time ever, large numbers of lesbians and gay men came out to publicly proclaim their identities. Even among veteran activists, however, social protest seemed to have lost its urgency. Many lesbians had withdrawn from gay civil rights organizations that they saw as male dominated, while gay men lived a separatist existence of their own, frequenting all-male bars, discos, and bathhouses.

  The movement was jolted from complacency, however, in 1977, when Anita Bryant, a born-again Christian entertainer, helped overturn a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. Bryant’s “Save Our Children” crusade, a forerunner to the right-wing “family values” campaigns of the 1980s, operated under the slogan “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit.”53 Then in 1978, California State Senator John Briggs doubled the attack on gay civil liberties with Proposition 6, known as the Briggs Initiative, which sought to outlaw homosexuals from teaching positions in the state’s public schools. Suddenly, lesbians and gay men nationwide were united against this renewed backlash of repression. As Candice Boyce of Salsa Soul Sisters remarked, “The homophobia of Anita Bryant was the homophobia of the country.”54 Proposition 6 was defeated with the help of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, whose 1977 election marked a major milestone when he became the first openly gay elected official in a metropolitan American city. The Dade County gay rights ordinance, by contrast, represented a belated victory many years later when it was narrowly reinstated in 1998.

  Nonetheless, lesbians and gay men had at last established a formidable political front against homophobia by 1980, advancing the cause for gay rights on unequivocally queer-identified terms.

  Lesbian and gay writing matured during this period as well. Beginning with the advent of pulp fiction in the 1950s, stories featuring overt lesbianism were found in mainstream outlets such as drugstores and newsstands. Although these often-lurid paperback books were frequently written by men as a voyeuristic source of arousal for other heterosexual males, pulp novels nevertheless provided lesbian readers with at least distorted visibility in midcentury fiction. “Lesbians bought these books with relish because they learned to read between the lines and get whatever nurturance they needed from them,” wrote Lillian Faderman. “Where else could one find public images of women loving women?”55 With the publication of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (1952), though, lesbian authors began to transform the pulp genre. Highsmith’s romance novel, published under the pen name Claire Morgan, challenged conventional attitudes about sexual orientation, becoming perhaps the first lesbian book to end not with the homosexual protagonist’s shame-induced suicide but instead with a hopeful future. Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out (1957), the first of the author’s five influential novels in the pre-Stonewall years, similarly broke through sexual stereotypes of the genre with thoughtful accounts of lesbian life. The emergence of gay liberation in the 1960s politicized the lesbian literary tradition more fully with the publication of Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart (1964), Isabel Miller’s A Place for Us (1967), and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1974). As Naiad Press publisher Barbara Grier remarked, “The politicizing nature of the literature, albeit exclusively fiction, can be convincingly cited as one of the catalytic agents for the women’s movement.”56

  Yet African American lesbianism was conspicuously absent from the pre-Stonewall outpouring of white lesbian fiction. Ann Allen Shockley’s novel Loving Her (1974) thus broke new ground as the first novel to feature a black lesbian protagonist. Although Shockley did not label he
r own sexual orientation, her writing nevertheless demonstrated a complex understanding of race, gender, and sexual orientation seldom found in African American literature or lesbian fiction up to the 1970s. Indeed, the only other novel published by a black woman writer with relatively explicit lesbian themes is Rosa Guy’s young adult novel Ruby (1976). Presumably, Shockley recognized that her own work was both genre transcending and creating. She observed in 1979 in her provocative essay “The Black Lesbian in American Literature” that “Until recently, there has been almost nothing written by or about the Black Lesbian in American literature—a deficiency suggesting that the Black Lesbian was a nonentity in imagination as well as reality.”57 Shockley rightly links was a nonentity in imagination as well as reality.”Shockley rightly links the historic absence of lesbian content in black women’s literature to the widespread acceptance within the black community that race is the “strongest oppression” among African Americans. Moreover, she attributes the dearth of homosexual content in the work of black women writers to the fear of being labeled homosexual. To be sure, white women were also concerned with being labeled lesbian. Yet African Americans ran the additional risk of alienating themselves from their racial community— the very community in which they sought social and political refuge from racism. Few authors would willingly take that risk. “Black women writers live in the Black community and need the closeness of family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers who share the commonality of ethnicity in order to survive in a blatantly racist society,” Shockley observed. “This need is foremost, and often supersedes the dire need for negating misconceptions and fallacies with voices of truth.”58