Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  Whether playwright Lorraine Hansberry left lesbian characters out of her work from fear of ostracism or simply in the interest of appealing to the same audience that had embraced her award-winning debut play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), she nevertheless remained silent on the topic of lesbianism in her best-known dramas. She depicted female homosexuality in her unfinished play, Toussaint (1961), and she wrote about male homosexuality in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). She came out privately following her separation from her husband in 1957. Shortly after her marriage ended, she wrote two letters supporting gay liberation. “I’m glad as heck that you exist,” she told the staff of The Ladder who printed her letters anonymously. “I feel that women, without fostering any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero, indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations.” Hansberry reasoned that such outlets could create a new consciousness about discrimination against gays and lesbians: namely, “that homosexual persecution and condemnation has its roots not only in social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.”59

  Hansberry elaborated on the topic of women’s liberation in her 1957 essay “Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex.” Praising Beauvoir’s book as possibly “the most important work of this century,” she wrote, “The problem…is not that woman has strayed too far from ‘her place’ but that she has not yet attained it; that her emergence into liberty is, thus far, incomplete, even primitive.”60 For Hansberry, part of the goal of women’s liberation was to imagine what, outside of the context of patriarchy, womanhood would mean. Precisely where and how lesbianism would figure in this reimagining is unclear. There is some suggestion, however, that Hansberry considered sexual orientation, particularly vis-à- vis a person’s public celebrity, or professional identity, to be a private matter: “With regard to the writer…there are two aspects of his being: his work, which is important, and his personal life, which is really none of our business.”61

  And yet black lesbian and bisexual women of the Stonewall era made their complex identities “our business.” Specifically, these writers explored their most personal experiences in groundbreaking works that explicitly addressed the intersection of homosexual persecution and feminism—and both, significantly, from an African American perspective. Audre Lorde, for one, openly challenged conventional literary representations of lesbianism and blackness with an “outsider’s” perspective in her poetry collections The First Cities (1968), Cabels to Rage (1970), From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), The New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978), which is often considered her masterpiece. Included in the latter work, for example, is “Woman,” a candid expression of lesbian sensuality:

  I dream of a place between your breasts to build my house like a haven where I plant crops in your body an endless harvest where the commonest rock is moonstone and ebony opal giving milk to all my hungers and your night comes down upon me like nurturing rain.62

  Whether she is considering overtly political themes, as with the 1977 poem “Assata,” written for the imprisoned Black Panther Assata Shakur (“I dream of your freedom/as my victory/and the victory of all dark women”),63 or the erotic rendering of lesbian love, all of Lorde’s poetry is fundamentally protest writing. As she explained it, “[T]he question of social protest and art is inseparable for me…. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”64

  Anita Cornwell, a pioneering black lesbian journalist whose writings were first published in periodicals such as The Ladder and Negro Digest, offered a slight departure from Lorde’s observations. Writing in her foreword to Cornwell’s Black Lesbian in White America (1983), a collection of articles and autobiographic portraits from the 1960s and ’70s, author Becky Birtha explained, “Incorporated into all of her work was an acute political analysis of both racial and sexual oppressions, an analysis both radical and feminist, though the work was written long before those words were in common use together.”65 A publisher’s note even claimed that Cornwell’s voice was in fact the first raised among black lesbian feminists. Featured in this collection is “The Black Lesbian in a Malevolent Society” (1977), a noteworthy essay in which the author stated, “I find it difficult to imagine anyone more oppressed than the Black Lesbian in America. Perhaps that is why so many still cling so desperately to their niche in the closet even during these times of so-called sexual revolution.”66 Unlike Lorde, however, Cornwell expressed a degree of willingness to align herself politically with the predominantly white feminist movement over the black civil rights establishment, which she critiques as sexist. Indeed, notwithstanding the tensions she experienced as a black lesbian within a white, heterosexual feminist movement, Cornwell remained ideologically oriented toward feminism: “For anyone born poor Black and female in this white, middle-class, male-oriented society had damn sure better quickly learn the concepts of Feminism if she wants to survive.”67

  Joining the earliest “out” black women writers, if not one of the first openly lesbian poets, was Pat Parker. Speaking to the “inseparable struggles” of black lesbian feminism, Parker commented, If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, “No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome,” because I’m going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half the poets are antihomosexual, or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.68

  Beginning with the publication of Child of Myself (1971), followed by Pit Stop (1974), Womanslaughter (1978), and Jonestown and Other Madness (1985), Parker explored controversial elements of the African American lesbian experience, including internalized homophobia, racist feminists, and black male chauvinism, among other politically charged subject matter. In Movement in Black (1978), a volume of poems she wrote between 1961 and 1978, for example, she mingled race and gender with humor in “For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend” (“The first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black./ Second, you must never forget that i’m Black…And even if you really believe Blacks are better/lovers than whites—don’t tell me. I start thinking/ of charging stud fees”), while a more complicated convergent point is found in “Brother” (“Brother/i don’t want to hear/about/how my real enemy/is the system./i’m no genius,/but I do know/that system/ you hit me with/is called/your fist”).69 Commenting on the racial salience of blackness in Parker’s work, Cheryl Clarke remarked, “Pat Parker projected her blackness to its raw vernacular core—part of the freight for being a dyke. One’s blackness must never be in question when so much else is under attack and suspicion.”70

  In many respects, gay and lesbian life in midcentury America might perhaps be best characterized as a series of ongoing attacks and suspicions, which quite literally equated homosexuality with criminality and psychological disorders. During the 1950s, however, a number of influential nonfiction books had begun to help liberate gay thinking from the closet. Among the formative works that would later impact, and to some degree make possible, openly homosexual writings by black lesbian and gay men was poet Robert Duncan’s essay “The Homosexual in Society” (1944), the first instance of an American writer’s “outing” himself in explicit terms. Also helping to normalize homosexuality was the publication of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), which reported that thirty-seven percent of the men surveyed admitted to at least one postadolescent encounter with another male that led to orgasm. Debunking conventional arguments on the matter, Kinsey claimed that “persons with homosexual histories are to be found in every age group, in every social level, in every conceivable occupation, in cities and on farms, and in the most remote areas of the country.�
�71 Following Kinsey’s breakthrough was Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America (1951), the first book-length study of American homosexual politics. Although critics have remarked on the work’s self-hating tone, some of Cory’s arguments anticipate by more than twenty years the sexual liberation politics of the 1970s:

  The homosexual often feels the source of his difficulty lies in the fact that he is born into a hostile world, and this hostility is inherent, he believes, in that he lives in a heterosexual society. He is in my opinion, entirely wrong in this concept. The root of the homosexual difficulty is that he lives, not in a heterosexual world but in an anti-sexual world.72

  These and other seminal writings brought a new political consciousness to gay male fiction, and perhaps to a lesser extent to lesbian fiction as well. While male homosexuality remained a well-observed literary taboo, and African American male homosexuality even more so, the topic was no longer feared by those writers willing to risk the attendant penalties for incorporating gay concerns into their work.

  Concurrent with the release of the Kinsey findings was the publication of the first gay-themed novels of the postwar era. John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) each received widespread acclaim, even though Burns and Vidal were attacked by the press for their sexual candor. In Vidal’s case, his next five novels were “blacked out” by reviewers who refused to cover his books, until his novel Julian (1963) hit best-seller lists over a decade later. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) joined the era’s list of critically praised gay works, though the author had already addressed homosexuality in “The Preservation of Innocence” (1949), a magazine article that significantly was not reprinted in Notes of a Native Son (1955). “Let me suggest that his [the homosexual’s] present debasement and our obsession with him corresponds to the debasement of the relationship between the sexes,” Baldwin commented in the article that was published several years ahead of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). “His ambiguous and terrible position in our society reflects the ambiguities and terrors which time has deposited on that relationship…. If we are going to be natural then this [homosexuality] is part of nature; if we refuse to accept this, then we have rejected nature.”73 Another early treatment of homosexuality appeared in his short story “Outing” (1951), though he employed representations of gayness more forthrightly in later fiction such as Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), and Just Above My Head (1979). While Baldwin, like a number of other gay authors of the period, resisted labeling human sexuality with social definitions (as Baldwin explained it, “I love men but I’m not a homosexual”),74 and in spite of the fact that he also refused to call himself a black writer, Baldwin’s ground-breaking career nevertheless set a literary precedent for openly gay African American fiction.

  Yet Baldwin was not alone among African American male authors depicting gay content in fiction of this period. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Chester Himes’s Cast the First Stone (1952) both feature openly homosexual characters. The latter work is even set in the context of a prison “love story.” Owen Dodson’s Boy at the Window (1951), however, was the first gay-themed novel published by an African American homosexual in the 1950s. The autobiographical plot concerns a nine-year-old boy’s coming to terms with his sexuality after his mother’s death. Although its gay subject matter is largely confined to cautious renderings of sexual exploration, the novel subtly depicts what Dodson’s biographer called “a stunted and guilty homosexuality.”75 It is worth noting here that in spite of the political strides of gay literature and progressive medical research of the time, much of the writing by homosexual and bisexual men could also be described aptly as “stunted” or “guilty.” Indeed, the intensely repressive social climate of the period that penalized gay sex as criminal virtually mandated guilt on the part of homosexuals. Recall that in 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that 205 State Department employees were Communist Party members, thereby launching the government-orchestrated “witch-hunts” that quickly added gays to the list of political dissidents already under attack by the authority of the government. Moreover, the controversy engendered by a public accusation of homosexuality could devastate one’s career and social standing, regardless whether one was in fact gay. For African Americans, particularly black gay men such as Dodson who were employed at leading cultural institutions like Howard University, forthright literary expressions of homosexuality were perhaps understandably “stunted.” Significantly, Boy at the Window was also the first gay-oriented novel published by a black homosexual since Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring in 1932.

  Although the 1940s were an especially dour time for African American queer writers, that period witnessed the early radicalization of white gay men’s literature with the coalescence of the “Beat” movement after the war. At the center of the predominantly gay group were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, with Neal Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Peter Orlovsky, and others forming the larger circle. Beginning with Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956), an unabashed poetic tribute to gay sex, the Beats became the center of public controversy. When Howl was seized by police on grounds of “indecency” in 1957, the book’s highly publicized obscenity trial placed the Beats on the literary map. Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) enhanced the group’s visibility. However, The Subterraneans (1958) was an openly queer novel that, like many other literary representations of homosexuality at the time, consciously avoided revealing the autobiographical origins of the book’s gay content. The works of Burroughs, by contrast, not only publicly acknowledged the writer’s own homosexuality but went so far as to depict S/M and group sex in novels like Naked Lunch (1959). If the Beats failed to transform the culture of male chauvinism often associated with them and their output, these authors nevertheless elevated the “outsider” status of gay men to unprecedented political levels of nonconformity. “In their rejection of the nuclear family, their willingness to experiment sexually, and, most importantly, their definition of these choices as social protest, the beats offered a model that allowed homosexuals to view their own lives from a different angle,” wrote John D’Emilio. Through the Beats, gay men could conceive of themselves as norm-breakers rather than degenerates, “nonconformists rather than deviates.”76

  With the political and literary breakthroughs of the 1950s and early 1960s, nonconformity assumed greater diversity in the writings of gay men of color. The black queer writer Samuel R. Delany turned to the science fiction and fantasy genre with innovative depictions of outcast protagonists who transcend conventional gender expectations. His first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), foreshadowed more complicated renderings of sexuality both in the short story “Aye, and Gomorrah…” (1967) and in the novel The Einstein Intersection (1967), which explores the ways in which “difference” is confronted by and assimilated within a dominant alien culture. Homoeroticism, however, appears explicitly in Dhalgren (1975) and continues in Tales of Nevèryon (1979). “The constant and insistent experience I have had as a black man, as a gay man, as a science fiction writer in racist, sexist, homophobic America,” Delany commented, “…colors and contours every sentence I write.”77 Socially marginalized settings also serve as the basis for the work of the gay Latino author John Rechy, whose experience as a male prostitute inspired his best-known works. City of Night (1963) concerns the sexual underworld of male prostitution, while later works such as Numbers (1967) and the nonfiction Sexual Outlaw (1977) treat promiscuity and homosexual identity even more forthrightly. Although critics have charged Rechy with an unduly harsh rendering of gay life, the author insisted that his work reflects “a realistic appraisal of the [gay] world…a very despairing, lonely world in many respects.”78

  By the late 1970s three critically acclaimed, commercially successful novels by white homosexual authors—Edmund White’s Nocturne for the Kin
g of Naples (1978), Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), and Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978)—set post-Stonewall gay literature on an unprecedented course of openness. Particular to these liberated gay novels was a new-style protagonist for whom societal marginalization was not necessarily disadvantageous but to some degree preferred. As David Bergman wrote, these stories are populated by “gay men who live in an exclusively gay neighborhood, have exclusively gay associates, spend their afternoons at the gym and their nights either at the bathhouse or dance bars, and manage somehow through marginal jobs, trust funds, or the kindness of strangers to live lives of drugs, dancing, physical beauty, and sex.”79