[This is Dr.
Hettie Williams’ third excellent Guest
Post, tying her with Dr.
Emily Lauer for the lead in the clubhouse. All you other Guest Posters,
past and potential, take inspiration!]
Out of Our Silence
Black Writers Confronting the Stigma of
Homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s
“He has to
be remembered for helping to lead us out of our silence...”
—Essex Hemphill on Joseph Beam
Photo by y
y on Unsplash
“When Essex came over to finish
the book, he stayed at my house and got himself a job and an apartment….Essex
wanted to finish the book because he loved Joe…one of the things Joe wanted was
for gay people to be gay people,” stated Dorothy Beam, mother of African
American writer Joseph F. Beam, in a 2007 interview.
Joseph Beam, journalist, writer, literary critic, and civil rights activist
advanced a multidimensional praxis of politics that encompassed Black gay
identity making, community building, wellness, and social justice. In doing so,
he built upon a tradition of activism first shaped by the work of civil rights
activists such as Bayard Rustin and writers such as James Baldwin and Audre
Lorde.
In
the early 1980s, a core group of Black intellectuals waged a serious assault on
the stigma of homosexuality in African American society while, eventually, also
confronting the AIDS epidemic. These intellectuals did this by relying upon
Black feminism as their primary epistemological framework. Focusing on writers
James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Joseph F. Beam, this essay provides a
historical analysis of how African American intellectuals confronted the stigma
of homosexuality and the AIDS crisis through their writings and public
intellectualismfrom the
Civil Rights era through the 1980s. Here public intellectual is defined as one
who speaks to a broad public, typically through the written word, beyond the
confines of academia, ideally, with the public good in mind. During the AIDS
crisis of the 1980s, this public intellectualism among members of the LGBTQ
community often involved an activist dimension and ethics of care that meant
writers helping writers find work, outlets for one another’s work, with LGBTQ
themes, and, at times, providing one another with food and shelter.
James Baldwin; Attribution: R. L. Oliver,
Los Angeles Times, CC BY-SA 4.0
James
Baldwin ultimately espoused a gender-queer politics within an intersectional
framework that was largely pragmatic in essence when compared to other writers
at the height of the AIDS crisis. Baldwin’s concerns about LGBTQ rights were in
many instances secondary to his concerns about Black equality as expressed in
his civil rights activism and public intellectualism. Here I am
primarily making a delineation between Baldwin’s literary Black queerness, as
juxtaposed with his public intellectualism, and his activism as a civil rights
advocate. His social justice activities never completely encompassed his queer
politics. He did not audaciously immerse himself in LGBTQ+ activism and
community in the ways that other queer writers and activists did though these
subjects were clearly central in his writings. This was not the case for
writers such as Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam who actively operationalized their
queer blackness beyond the utility of literary convention to advance a praxis
of politics that encompassed community building and social justice work through
the height of the AIDS crisis. Baldwin and Lorde were interlocutors who often
discussed with one another the major issues confronting Black Americans.
Audre
Lorde, poet, essayist, writer, and activist, advanced a queer praxis in her
writings and social justice work. Subjects such as racism, sexism, illness,
self-care, motherhood, and feminism feature prominently in her work through the
1980s as she became a more prominently recognized literary voice. In the 1980s,
Audre Lorde was a central figure among a group of writers who shaped the rise
of Black lesbian literature. These writings include essays, poems, and novels
by women such as Ann Allan Shockley, Cheryl Clark, and Barbara Smith. This
genre of literature emphasized an intersectional approach to understanding
Black women’s experiences by focusing on racism, sexism, and homophobia as
overlapping social systems of power and privilege. Lorde’s work paralleled the
intersectional framework that defined Baldwin’s writings as they both emerged
from the same tradition of Black women’s intellectualism. Lorde, at this time,
became a well-known essayist and outspoken supporter of LGBTQ rights amid the
rising AIDS crisis.
Audre Lorde; Attribution: Photo by Elsa Dorfman, CC BY-SA 3.0
In
her work, for reasons more obvious than not, Lorde aligns more succinctly with
the tradition of Black feminism later embraced by Beam with whom she maintained
a regular correspondence. Lorde was more attuned to the functioning of
patriarchal white supremacy and the erasure of Black lesbian voices in the
queer Black literary imagination. By relying assiduously on the tradition of
intersectionality developed by Black women intellectuals, Lorde wrote about
race, gender, and sexuality including about the violence and exploitation
experienced by Black women in patriarchal societies. An interrogation of
patriarchy is at the center of much of her writings. For Lorde, Black men were
a part of the patriarchy and this afforded them a certain level of male
privilege as compared to the position of Black women in western society.
In
her conversations with Baldwin, Lorde astutely points out the masculinist
nature of his protest epistemology. She reminded him in an interview published
in Essence magazine in 1984 that, “there are power differences that come
down” between Black men and women despite the common foe of racism. In
this same interview, Lorde also points to the struggle between Black men and
women over these power differences including the violence sometimes leveled
against Black women from cross-gender conflict within the Black community.
Lorde was a committed grassroots
organizer. Her activities as an activist intellectual were intersectional and
transnational. She was a part of the ground-breaking Combahee River Collective
of Black women feminists organized to criticize the shortcomings of white
feminism and amplify the concerns and needs of Black women from the mid-1970s
through the 1980s. Lorde also helped to establish the Women’s Coalition of St.
Croix in 1981 that was dedicated to assisting women who suffered sexual abuse
and SISTA (Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa), a group organized
to help Black women who were impacted by Apartheid. Beam, like Lorde,
understood that solidarity across sex/gender boundaries within Black society
meant Black survival. In Black feminism, he found a praxis of politics that
included ideas about collective work, self-care, and systems of shared support
and co-nurturing.
In
the early 1980s, Joseph Beam’s work began to appear in the leading newspapers
and magazines consumed by the LGBTQ community at the time, including Changing
Men, Blackheart, Gay Community News, Philadelphia Gay News,
and the Advocate. He won an award from the Lesbian and Gay Press
Association in 1984 for his work as a writer. While addressing the concerns
facing the gay community in his writings through the mid-1980s, Beam also
became noticeably involved in several LGBTQ associations concerned with social
equality (such as the Gay and Lesbian Task Force of the American Friends
Service Committee and the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays) while
he worked to compile an anthology of writings by Black gay men. He became the
editor of the journal Black/Out published by the National Coalition in
1985, and this put him in contact with a broad community of Black gay writers
with whom he sought to build alliances to improve social equality and
representations of African Americans in the larger LGBTQ society. In his
writings, he expressed a concern for the alienation of Black members of the
LGBTQ community and issues of social justice from an intersectional point of
view that included a discussion of race, gender, class, and sexuality more
broadly. Beam stated in the “Introduction” section of In the Life (Red
Bone Press, 1986) that he had “grown weary of reading literature of white gay
men” because none of their work “spoke” to him as a “Black gay man.”
Audre
Lorde was a friend, mentor, supporter, and patron to Joseph Beam. Lorde and
Beam maintained regular correspondence, and Beam interviewed Lorde for several
literary outlets. In one of their interviews, both expressed concerns about the
lack of visibility of writers from the LGBTQ community. “It’s not only the literary establishment
that renders us invisible” Beam noted.
“The gay and lesbian community contributes to this invisibility.”
Both agreed in this interview that the LGBTQ community needed to build their
“own institutions.” This was demonstrated with Lorde’s creation of Kitchen
Table: Women of Color Press that was developed in association with the National
Black Feminist Organization in 1980. Lorde was active in the Combahee River
Collective from 1974 through 1980 and formed the Women of Color Press with
Black feminists such as Barbara Smith in response to what they saw as the
failures of liberal white feminism. In the writings and actions of Lorde and
Beam, we see a commitment to active grassroots level community building and
shared support between members of the LGBTQ community.
[Annual
non-favorites series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?]
