Concurrently, a broad black feminist effort was under way to make all liberation movements more responsive to the experiences and needs of black women, including black lesbians. Their arguments for inclusiveness were directed not only at black antiracism; they targeted feminism as well, pushing feminists to articulate a conception of women’s equality that was more all-encompassing in terms of race, sexual orientation, and class. The purpose was to make feminism more responsive to all women— not only middle- and upper-class white heterosexuals. To this end, Alice Walker coined the term “womanism,” introducing it in the preface to In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). Her aim was to racialize not only feminism but the very notion of womanhood itself:
I don’t choose womanism because it’s “better” than feminism…. Since womanism means black feminism, this would be a nonsensical distinction. I choose it because I prefer the sound, the feel, the fit of it; because I cherish the spirit of the women (like Sojourner) the word calls to mind, and because I share the old ethnic habit of offering society a new word when the old word it is using fails to describe behavior and change that only a new word can help it more fully see.12
Walker later applied the womanist concept more broadly to include feminists of color, as well as women who love women, in both sexual and nonsexual senses. Indeed, her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple (1982) as well as The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) have become womanist classics for their politicized representations of female sexuality, and for the inclusion of bisexuality and lesbianism.
Conflicts about class, race, and sexual orientation had also become evident in the emerging women’s publishing movement of the 1970s. Historically, mainstream publishing outlets had not, for the most part, been interested in—or perhaps even aware of—works by feminists, and more particularly lesbian feminists. In response to this, women began founding their own book publishing companies, including Diana Press (1972), Daughters Inc. (1972), Naiad Press (1973), New Victoria (1976), Persephone (1976), Seal Press (1976), and Spinster’s Ink (1978). The nascent feminist publishing industry became the site for some of the debates that were taking place within feminism more broadly. Women of color, for example, argued that the work published by feminist presses oversimplified gender in ways that denied, discounted, or ignored important differences of race, class, and culture. They pointed to the fact that many of the women’s presses had a mediocre record with respect to bringing out books by and about women of color.
Of course, exceptions were to be found. This newly emerging publishing world—which subsequently would include Cleis Press (1980), Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (1981), Aunt Lute (1982), Sister Vision (1985), and Firebrand Books (1986)—brought out groundbreaking works by women of color, especially lesbians of color. Spinster’s Ink, for example, published Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals (1980), her first major work of prose. Two years later The Feminist Press published All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men but Some of Us Are Brave (1982), in which editors Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith asserted that antiracist efforts on behalf of African Americans focus on black men while feminist efforts on behalf of women focus on white women. Naiad Press published a number of influential works, including Ann Allen Shockley’s short story collection The Black and White of It (1980), J. R. Roberts’s indispensable Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography (1981), and Anita Cornwell’s Black Lesbian in White America (1983). Still, little work was being published by women’s presses reflecting the concerns and experiences of lesbians of color. This helps to explain why a significant amount of black lesbian literature during this time appeared in such theme-specific publications as Azalea, Dyke, GPN News, Black/out: The Magazine of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, Outweek, Conditions, Gay Black Female, off our backs, and Ache: The Bay Area’s Journal for Black Lesbians.
In a similar situation, African American–owned presses published few works by and about black women. An established black book-publishing industry had been promoting the writings of African American men since the early 1970s. These presses were responsible for black classics such as Robert B. Hill’s The Strengths of Black Families (1972), Dr. Alvin Poussaint’s Why Blacks Kill Blacks (1972), Chanceller Williams’s The Destruction of Black Civilization (1974), and Haki R. Madhubati’s Enemies: The Clash of Races (1978). Yet African American publishers seldom brought out books that spoke from a black feministperspective. Like their white feminist and mainstream counterparts, the black presses marginalized black feminism specifically and black women generally. This began to change in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The exclusion of black women’s literature from within and without the African American and feminist publishing movements provided the impetus for the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Created in 1981 by Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and others, the press aimed to give voice to women of color. This publishing criterion, according to Smith, was explicitly and unapologetically ideological. Works were chosen not because the author was a woman of color, but more crucially because her book “consciously examines from a positive and original perspective the specific situations and issues that women of color face.”13 This led to Kitchen Table’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983), first published by Persephone Press in 1981, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). These books enlarged the terms on which liberation movements were being carried out, leading to Kitchen Table’s “Grassroots Freedom Organizing Series,” which went on to publish Lorde’s I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities (1985) and Angela Davis’s Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1987).
Nor did black women’s challenges to feminism and antiracism overlook the academy. Beginning in the 1970s, black women scholars began to study black women’s writing within the context of African American studies and women’s studies. The work of Hortense Spillers, Trudier Harris, Patricia Bell Scott, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Paula Giddings, Mary Helen Washington, Barbara Christian, bell hooks, Hazel V. Carby, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Patricia Hill Collins, and Michelle Wallace, among many others, helped to introduce a generation of readers to black women writers, as well as to create a literary canon of contemporary fiction for the writers themselves. The work of Akasha (Gloria) Hull, for example, reclaimed and repositioned Angelina Weld Grimké and Alice Dunbar-Nelson as pioneers of black lesbian literature. This type of scholarship not only exposed students to literary materials outside the canon, it also encouraged them to pursue similar projects of literary excavation. Indeed, this black woman–centered writing helped establish research facilities like the Schomberg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers and journals such as Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women.
A popular lesbian feminist political expression of the 1970s was that “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.” By the 1980s, lesbian feminists began to ask a more fundamental question about lesbian identity: What is lesbianism? A special issue of Signs, a feminist journal of women, culture, and society, framed the issue this way: “Is there somehow a transcendent lesbian identity, or only particularized identity?” Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980) answered the question by arguing for a spectrum of woman-to-woman identification that provided feminists with a basis to claim a lesbian identity that was not necessarily related to their sexual practices and preferences. Meanwhile, academic studies such as Eve Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) conceptualized sexual orientation (like gender) as a social construction. These books among others suggested that, to borrow from Simone de Beauvoir, one is born neither homosexual nor heterosexual but rather becomes one. Black women authors like June Jordan took that concept of constructed identity one step further. In “On Bisexuality and Cultural Pluralism,” a 1995 lecture
published in Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998), she remarked, “I am a cultural pluralist. And, as sexuality is a biological, psychological, and interpersonal factor of cultural experience, I am a sexual pluralist. What else could I be?”14
Jordan’s sexual pluralism belongs to a broader black queer sexual politics that was evidenced by the literature of the time. African American lesbian and bisexual fiction of the 1990s often avoided conventional representations of lesbian sexualities. Instead, the authors of these books frequently incorporated lesbian concerns into larger considerations of African American life. Novels such as Helen Elaine Lee’s The Serpent’s Gift (1994), April Sinclair’s Coffee Will Make You Black (1994), Jacqueline Woodson’s Autobiography of a Family Photo (1994), Sapphire’s Push (1996), and Shay Youngblood’s Soul Kiss (1997) do not always speak explicitly from a homosexual perspective. Rather, these works expand the traditional terrain of lesbian fiction by addressing issues such as adolescent sexuality and domestic abuse. As these and other unconventional themes began to appear more frequently in black lesbian and bisexual writing of the 1990s, authors no longer felt required to feature same-sex desire for their work to be read as a “lesbian novel.”
This redefinition of black lesbian fiction was part of a broader redefinition of lesbian writing, as Blanche McCrary Boyd’s Revolution of Little Girls (1991) and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1993) attest. Their literature reflected a trend in lesbian and gay communities, with women reclaiming bisexuality and other “nonlesbian” queer identities, such as transgenderism. “I found that the lesbian community castigates bisexual women for being different from them,” Sapphire remarked, “which is fine because I no longer call myself a lesbian.”15 Indeed, recent black lesbian fiction has sometimes been charged with being insufficiently lesbian-focused. Not only has this criticism been directed at black lesbian writing, it belongs to a wider critique of lesbian literature that is increasingly becoming more mainstream. To others, however, the fluidity of queer identity in black lesbian writing signaled an unprecedented freedom for black lesbians, in both their creative and personal lives.
Editors Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney captured this new trend toward sexual self-definition with the 1995 publication of Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, the first-ever collection of African American lesbian literature. As McKinley commented in the introduction:
Afrekete joins the dialogue of other creative and political movements… which risk essentializing both what Black female and lesbian and gay identity should be. Black lesbian writing cannot easily cling to simple notions of racial, gender, and sexual identity and the politics that overreach them. We cannot afford this any more than we can single representations of Black lesbians or a handful of generally recognized texts that portray Black lesbian lives.16
Two years after Afrekete was published, Lisa C. Moore brought out her Lambda Award–winning Does Your Mama Know?: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories, thus launching her RedBone Press.
While black lesbian and bisexual women might not have always directly depicted sex and sexuality in their writings, their works have always reflected a concern about sexual politics, including the erotic. Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978) viewed sex as a source of knowledge and self-definition. Jewelle Gomez praised sex for its relationship between pleasure, power, and politics. Kathleen E. Morris’ Speaking in Whispers: African American Lesbian Erotica (1996) and Alycee Lane’s Black Lace, a black lesbian erotica quarterly, explicitly challenged traditional representations of African American lesbian sexuality with erotic short fiction written by and for black lesbians. As Morris observed, “We found that adherence to strict roles and fear of rejection/ ridicule in confessing fantasies left us frustrated, angry, and repressed. The erotic literature [that black lesbians] read was generally vague and ‘pretty,’ the characters predominantly white, and the stories didn’t really move us.” According to Morris, black lesbian alienation from white lesbian erotica created a sense within the black lesbian community that “someone” should write “a book of erotica…that featured us as wimmin who loved being wimmin and loving wimmin….”17
If sex was an empowering source of self-awareness for lesbians, it was also a tremendous source of controversy. Throughout the 1980s, debates—or “sex wars”—around the regulation of pornography, butch/ femme role-playing, and S/M divided the movement along ideological battle lines. Antiporn feminists organized in 1976 under Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), a protest organization targeting images in the film and recording industries. In 1979, Women Against Pornography joined the movement, and by 1980 the political influence of antiporn feminists led NOW to denounce pornography and S/M as violence. In turn, “pro-sex” feminists founded the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT) in 1984 to combat these and other assaults on censorship and sexual freedom. The group sought to expand public discourse about sexuality, especially as it pertained to antiporn legislation. As FACT founding member Lisa Dugan wrote, “Rather than ask, ‘Is pornography good or bad for women?’ we would question whether any meaningful generalizations can be made about all ‘women’ and pornography, and ask how and why materials defined as ‘pornography’ are produced and used, and in what settings, and for what purposes.”18
In spite of these attempts to contextualize pornography, S/M literature remained controversial among lesbian feminists. However, pioneering works such as Pat Califia’s Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian
Sexuality (1980) and Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M (1981), edited by members of SAMOIS, a lesbian/feminist S/M organization, sought to clarify distinctions between the practice of sadomasochism and the misogynistic violence it was often mistaken for. These works challenged the cultural feminist idea that S/M and other aspects of a libertarian, lesbian sex culture reflected an internalization of patriarchal norms about sexuality, an idea that subsequently would be rearticulated in the form of “dominance theory” in Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) and Catherine MacKinon’s Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987).
An explicit racial dimension to S/M literature was added by black authors Red Jordan Arobateau and Marci Blackman. Jordan, a female-to- male transsexual, is the prolific author of a lesbian biker series that includes The Black Biker (1994), which focuses on the club’s African American members and a rival gang of white lesbians called The Aryan Avengers. His series combines, in the author’s own words, “street fights, interracial struggles, S/M, raunch.”19 Blackman’s Po Man’s Child (1999) similarly depicts transgressive lesbian sex seldom found in African American women’s fiction. Winner of the American Library Association’s award for Lesbian Fiction, the novel opens with Po, the black lesbian protagonist, suffering a serious S/M related injury when a scene with her white lover goes awry. “It’s an act, a game we play. Mary picks a spot on my body, any spot; tests how hard she can pinch or bite it, how deep she can cut it, or how long she can burn it.”20 Although writers like Jordan and Blackman are in the minority of black queer writers, the barrier-breaking nature of their fiction nevertheless affirms the reality of alternative lesbian sex.
Among gay male writers of the 1980s, the debates over sex practices were clouded by the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Working with the terminology of the time, gay novelists first addressed AIDS obliquely as “gay cancer” in books like Robert Granit’s Another Runner in the Night (1981) and Andrew Holleran’s Nights in Aruba (1983). The first published AIDS-centered novel, however, was Paul Reed’s Facing It (1984). Books like The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (1987) by Edmund White and Adam Mars Jones, Robert Ferro’s Second Son (1988), and David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed (1989) followed. Additionally, some of the most successful early works were plays, beginning with Jeff Hagedorn’s One (1983),
William A. Hoffman’s As Is (1985), and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985). As with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (
1993), these plays offer clear indications of how AIDS impacts the lives of people living with the disease, as well as the lives of those who care for them. Still, this burgeoning body of AIDS writing not only raised public awareness of the epidemic but also brought unprecedented visibility to gay male life. As Edmund White observed, “The paradox is that AIDS, which destroyed so many…has also, as a phenomenon, made homosexuality a much more familiar part of the American landscape.”21
With the exception of Samuel R. Delany, who addresses AIDS in Flight from Nevèryon (1985), the “American landscape” had yet to come to terms with AIDS and homosexuality among gay men of color, particularly African Americans. Joseph Beam’s groundbreaking In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986) consequently launched the first post-Stonewall movement of openly gay work by black men. The book brought the writings of Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, and Donald Woods to the attention of mainstream gay and lesbian readers for the first time. Among its selections is Craig G. Harris’s short story “Cut Off from Among Their People,” a piece that offers both an early representation of AIDS from a black gay perspective and a candid view on homophobia in the African American community. The publication of a companion volume, Brother to Brother: Collected Writings by Black Gay Men (1991), which Hemphill completed after Beam died of AIDS in 1988, furthered the movement with writing by David Frechette, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, and Marlon Riggs, among others.
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