Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes found it hard to live his life openly while acting as the de facto representative of the black community to white America. |
Each February, school children across America learn about African-American civil rights leaders, politicians, inventors, judges, business owners and many other black movers and shakers throughout history. The stories they rarely hear, however, are those of African-Americans who were also lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Just as black activists have long contended that gay history has a “blackout” on LGBT/same-gender-loving (SGL) people of color, Black History Month observances often likewise fail to honor the heroes of the black LGBT community.
Black History Month originated with the studies of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, a son of former slaves who spent many of his teenage years working in Kentucky coal mines. At age 20, Woodson entered high school, working his way to a Ph.D. from Harvard. As he continued in academia, he became more concerned at the lack of black faces in the history texts of his time.
In 1915, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History). One year later the widely respected Journal of Negro History began circulation. After a decade of work with the Association and Journal, Woodson chose the second week of February to celebrate Negro History Week. From there, the rest of the story is, well, history.
For the next 75 years, black contributions to the national and international communities would gain more recognition in the world of academia. From colleges and universities to grammar schools and high schools, students in the U.S. began to learn of the great African-American visionaries, entrepreneurs, inventers and religious and social leaders who had helped to shape us into the nation we are today.
One factor to remain consistent through those decades, however, was mainstream America’s ignorance of black LGBT/SGL history. But now, as black LGBT/SGL people are finding more of their own voice in the primarily white gay media and political circles in the U.S., the focus on black LGBT/SGL history is becoming clearer and sharper.
In Lee’s ‘For the Love of Harlem,’ Countee Cullen is depicted as being in a secretive, sometimes violent relationship with legendary poet Langston Hughes. |
In Charlotte, members of the Carolinas Black Pride Movement (CBPM) perform annually the musical “For the Love of Harlem,” written and directed by Jermaine Nakia Lee, a founding member and current president of CBPM. The musical, a combination of comedy, poetry, dance and period music, profiles the lives of some of the brightest artistic visionaries in the Harlem Renaissance. Figures like Bessie Smith, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes are given real human faces. Their struggles — particularly those of Hughes — between public recognition and devotion to being true to one’s self tells a story many people have never heard.
In 1920s America, Hughes found it difficult to be true to himself while being the de facto representative of black people to white America.
“One of the greatest ironies in the life of the people’s poet was his own understandable silence regarding the oppression of gays,” writes the Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture. “As a gay man, Hughes lived that secret life silently in the confines of a very narrow, but well-constructed closet — one that still shelters him today.”
In “For the Love of Harlem,” Hughes is depicted as being in a highly secretive, sometimes violent relationship with his contemporary, poet Countee Cullen. Although most never directly address the legendary poet’s sexual orientation, Hughes’ biographers, according to the Encyclopedia, do little to hide it, providing “ample evidence … to indicate that Hughes was gay, especially his close alliances with such gay men as Alain Locke, Noël Sullivan, Richard Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman.”
The Encyclopedia adds, “That Hughes managed his closet so closely is testimony to the oppression he endured.”
Bayard Rustin was the victim of anti-gay oppression from both Civil Rights and government leaders. |
Although the absence of black LGBT/SGL people in gay history is clear, what is even more glaring is the lack of attention given them for their contributions during the formative years that led to what would become, in 1969, the modern era of the gay rights movement.
John D’Emilio, a gay historian and former professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, points out that early white gay leaders like Harry Hay of the Mattachine Society were ahead of the curve with regard to racial equality.
“The founders [of the Mattachine Society] also brought to their planning meetings a concern for ideology that grew out of their leftist politics,” D’Emilio writes in “Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University.” “The worldview of [the Mattachine’s] adherents rested on an analysis of society that saw injustice as rooted in the social structure.”
In 1948, and again in 1950, Hay penned the Mattachine’s action plans that observed, “We must with perseverance and self-discipline work collectively … for the first-class citizenship participation of Minorities everywhere, including ourselves.”
So, if early gay leaders were so open to liberation for all people, including civil rights for African-Americans, who are the black LGBT/SGL leaders of Hay’s time? Where did they make a difference? What did they do?
In 1950, around the same time as the formation of the Mattachine movement and other pre-Stonewall organizations, Merton Bird, a black gay man, and Dorr Legg, a white gay man, worked together to form a group that could address both racism and homophobia. Knights of the Clock, based in Los Angeles, brought inter-racial gay and lesbian couples, their families and friends together into one singular support network. The organization was able to provide the support and the impetus for change that wasn’t even available at that time for many gay couples of just one race.
Writer and activist Keith Boykin is among some of the many African-American LGBT voices garnering national attention. |
“The Black gays and lesbians in the group not only faced the additional burden of racism, they were also part of an oppressed nationality with its own culture(s),” writes Leslie Feinberg, a journalist with The Workers World. “Some of the racism directed at them also spilled over as discrimination and violence against their white loved ones — something not experienced by whites who partnered with whites.”
Even Hughes would figure prominently in the continued post-Harlem, pre-Stonewall movement toward gay equality. Feinberg explains that while Hay and the Mattachine Society struggled to forge a cultural identity for gays and lesbians, Hughes was publishing “Montage of a Dream Deferred.” That collection of poetry included “Café 3 a.m.,” which described a police raid on a gay bar.
One line in Hughes’ poem reads, “Detectives from the vice squad/with weary sadistic eyes/spotting fairies.” These near prophetic words from Hughes foreshadowed the June 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn. Sadly, Hughes died in May 1967, almost two full years before that historic moment. He never lived to see the society he challenged for racial equality accept him or his LGBT/SGL brothers and sisters.
Among pre-Stonewall LGBT African-Americans, there is one individual who perhaps more than any other stands out from the crowd. That figure is civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin.
Despite being one of the chief architects of the 1963 March on Washington and one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s closest aides, Rustin was never given the respect owed to him. In fact, like many other gay individuals in the equality movements of the 1950s and 1960s, he was, at times, expected to subjugate his own self-truth and dignity for “the good of the movement.”
In 1960, Rustin was forced to resign from participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., an African-American congressman who threatened to bring up in the U.S. House of Representatives his prior morals charge and his openly gay status.
Later, as Rustin and King planned their historic march on the capital, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina went on the offensive to discredit them both. He publicly labeled Rustin a “communist, draft-dodger and homosexual” and, even worse, circulated an FBI photograph showing Rustin speaking to King while the latter is bathing. The implication being that the men were intimately involved.
The pair vehemently denied the assertion, but it wasn’t enough to stop movement leaders from stripping Rustin of any public role in the event he toiled over and that would instantly make King an international hero.
The overarching issues of the Black Power movement dominated African-American discourse and activism in the 1970s. By the 1980s, however, black LGBT/SGL people were expressing themselves publicly more than ever before, both within the larger LGBT community and in their own black communities.
Joseph Beam, a writer and editor of the first collection of black gay male literature, “In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology” (1986), wrote an inspiring article in the Gay Community News on April 20, 1985.
“Black men loving Black men,” Beam said, “is the revolutionary act of the Eighties.”
As the founding editor of the newspaper Black/Out and a contributing writer to the magazine Backlight, Beam was well versed in the myriad issues affecting the lives of those in queer African-American communities.
He made the argument that because black men are so divided in and by the world around them, loving each other in committed relationships equated to a “call to action” and “acknowledgment of responsibility.”
“It is no accident that 100 applicants apply for 10 jobs, or that loan programs for higher education are being defunded, or that Black youth perceive the Armed Forces as viable employment,” he observed. “We are not meant to be together. If one is fortunate enough to locate a crumb from the table draped in white linen, he scurries away to savor it — alone.”
Beam came to an untimely death from AIDS in 1988.
In 2006, an African-American activist claimed that homosexuality was “totally unacceptable to most people of African descent” and that “in the struggle for black people’s rights, black people are the focus themselves and the primary benefit, and in the Gay struggle whites are the primary beneficiaries and blacks are on the bottom.”
Thankfully, today’s black LGBT/SGL leaders like Keith Boykin, Pam Spaulding, Mandy Carter, Jasmyne Cannick and many more, working with organizations like the National Black Justice Coalition, Southerners on New Ground and others, are doing their best to combat both the sad truths and the patent falsehoods in those statements.
As the entire community continues to move forward, and as more awareness is brought to the vibrancy and depth of LGBT/SGL history in the African-American community, the words of that activist will become but a memory.
The pre-Stonewall leaders longed for the day when all minorities — gay and straight, black and white — were treated with the full measure of their human dignity and worth. Remembering our black LGBT/SGL heroes and legends clearly moves us forward on that journey. |
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