Black Gay Literature

Five o’clock in the morning and sober, I started surfing the net in between going back and forth on a4a and manhunt. I wanted to see if there was a list out there of black gay writers. I remember I put one together about four years ago that was when I was with my ex, the bastard’s name will not be mentioned. I put together such an extensive list of the published and unpublished, I called it the library. I’m so pissed that I deleted all my files off his computer and website. I can get really angry sometimes. I need to work on that. I guess I can put the list back together which will take so much fucking time that if I’m not drinking seems ridiculous because I mean who cares. I care. I fucking care. And I like to think that there is some black punk out there who wants to know his history. I always forget the lesbians. I really need to read more lesbians books. I mean women are great writers and story telling by nature. I wonder why men get more credit than women writers. HMMMMM.

Anyways, I woke up this morning thinking about what it meant to be a black gay writer. What it meant to be a writer of color and gay. I stand on the heels of people like Countee Cullen, Hughes, Baldwin, Hempphill. Lourde, so I should take my writing more serious. I think what it means to be a black gay writer is for me to tell my story. The story I know and connect it to the world. It’s for me to love my life and what a fucking life it has been. To be a writer is so many things, first I’m human, then I’m black, then I’m a male and then I’m gay. Lastly, I’m also fucking broke and curse a lot. But the stories I tell are just now beginning to make sense to me. I’m part of it. That feels to be part of something. I mean I ain’t getting no fucking check, but at least I’m part of it. I want to be part of it. I need to be part of it. I should put that list together and put my names in BOLD to remember my family.

I found this article on the internet and thought I share it:

African-American gay male tradition in literature--though it has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention--consists of a substantial body of texts, spans a period of eight decades, and includes some of the most gifted writers of the twentieth-century. It is a rich and vibrant tradition; its vitality emerges at least in part from the complexities of the black gay lives that it articulates and affirms. It is an intensely political tradition that offers relentless and simultaneous challenges to black as well as white
homophobia, to straight as well as
queer racism.
Yet its concerns extend far beyond social protest to engage a wide variety of issues that range from quintessentially African-American themes to universally human ones. Begun on a modest scale by a pioneering coterie of writers in Harlem during the 1920s, the gay male tradition in African-American literature was vastly strengthened by James Baldwin during the 1950s and 1960s. And since the mid-1980s, a host of talented artists have emerged to generate a veritable renaissance in black gay writing.
The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, celebrated as a most significant event in the African-American intellectual tradition, was also a crucial moment in gay literary history. Many of its central protagonists--such as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent--were either gay or bisexual.
Locke, a professor at Howard University and one of the most distinguished scholars of the era, was an older gay man who became a mentor to many of the Harlem-based young male artists of the day. His intellectual presence and personal friendship--coupled with the fact that Nugent, Cullen, McKay, and others were at least peripherally involved in the then thriving gay and lesbian community of Harlem--perhaps encouraged them to explore, though discreetly, the subject of homosexuality in their works.
Richard Bruce Nugent's "Sadhji," a short story included in Locke's The New Negro (1925), is arguably the first gay text published by an African-American male. But it is his thinly disguised autobiographical narrative titled "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" (1926) that remains the most defiantly explicit gay text produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Unapologetic in its rhapsodic celebration of male beauty, it first appeared in Fire!!--an avant-garde journal published by the Harlem literati with the explicit intention of shocking the conservative black bourgeois readership. Nugent, unperturbed by the notoriety that his text earned him, continued to engage gay themes in many of his subsequent works.
Some of the other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, however, were more cautious than Nugent. Novelists such as Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay, both of whom were bisexual, introduced gay themes in their works though neither treated the subject with Nugent's exceptional candor.
Thurman's first novel, Blacker the Berry (1929), a poignant exploration of the psychology of the oppressed, has an unsympathetic bisexual male character. His second novel, Infants of the Spring (1933), a hilarious satire on the Harlem Renaissance and its major figures, has an important bisexual male character, and the friendship between two other male characters in the novel has obvious homoerotic qualities.
Similar homoerotic male bonding is a feature of McKay's Banjo (1929). And his Home to Harlem (1928), a sensational portrayal of Harlem life in the Jazz Age, has a minor black male character.
Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen tend to be even more cautious. Hughes, in fact, appears to have taken extraordinary measures to conceal his bisexuality; perceptive (gay) readers, however, may easily sense the
homoerotic undertones in poems such as "Young Sailor" and "Cafe: 3 A.M." as well as in the elaborate sexual silences that mark his major autobiographical works such as The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956).
Like Hughes, Cullen too prefers to reveal his gay self only through coded language, as in poems such as "The Black Christ," "Tableau," "Every Lover," and "Song in Spite of Myself," among others.
The relative sexual reticence of the Harlem writers, however, has to be understood in the larger cultural contexts in which they lived and created art. Unlike their white peers who had the luxury of living in a society that viewed their whiteness as normative, the black artists had to confront in their daily lives as well as in their imaginative works the painfully problematic implications of their racial identity.
The issue of race, therefore, was a politically necessary and personally compelling concern for all the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Their art reflects this preoccupation. The demands of their audiences further complicated their predicament: Both black and white readers expected the writers to foreground the race-specific aspects of the African-American experience.
And the economics of the literary marketplace and the tenuousness of the black writer's position in the United States during the 1920s denied them the level of artistic freedom and personal autonomy necessary for forthright explorations of unconventional sexualities. Therefore, it is indeed remarkable that several gay and bisexual writers of the Harlem Renaissance, despite numerous daunting obstacles, managed to project discreetly into their art their private sexual concerns. The gay ambience that they helped generate did in fact succeed in providing a mildly subversive shape to the sexual and racial politics inscribed in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance.
James Baldwin
James Baldwin emerged on the American literary scene almost a generation after the collapse of the Harlem Renaissance. His entry marks a nodal point in the development of the African-American gay male literary tradition. An outsider in every sense of the term, Baldwin was poor, black, gay, and extraordinarily gifted. He launched from his marginal location an articulate and sustained attack on the dominant cultural fictions of race and sexuality.
Intellectually daring and fiercely eloquent, he became one of the most celebrated writers of his time. Although he occupies an important place in African-American as well as gay American literatures, the significance of his life and work in the specific context of the black gay male literary tradition is immeasurable. He continues to be its defining figure.
"The Preservation of Innocence" (1949), an essay that Baldwin published in Zero, a Moroccan journal, within months after his arrival in Paris, is an early signal of his personal willingness to engage the topic of homosexuality in a public forum. "Outing," a short story he published in 1951, is his first tentative attempt to approach the topic in fiction; the story is a gracefully subtle portrayal of adolescent homosexual awakening.
In his first major work of fiction, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin explores the adolescent consciousness on a more elaborate scale, and here he presents the youthful protagonist's emerging homosexual awareness as a subtle but integral part of his quest for personal identity.
By the mid-1950s Baldwin had earned his reputation as an important African-American writer; his readers and critics had come to expect in his works incisive analyses of the black experience. But in 1956 he disappointed a good many of them by publishing Giovanni's Room, a novel with an all-white cast that poignantly documented the consequences of internalized homophobia through its young protagonist's unwillingness to accept his gayness.
For a young black writer to publish such an openly gay narrative in the mid-1950s was an enormously risky endeavor: The political climate in the United States was hardly ready for such honesty, and there was a very real possibility that the publication of such a novel might permanently damage his career. That Baldwin took such a risk is a testament to his immense personal courage and artistic integrity.
He survived the controversy generated by Giovanni's Room and, in that process, earned his preeminent place in the gay American literary tradition. More important, its publication liberated Baldwin from the closet and enabled him to treat gay and bisexual themes even more vigorously and explicitly in three of his subsequent major works of fiction: Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), and Just Above My Head (1979). And through such works he helped create the necessary space for a new generation of talented young black gay writers who followed him.
Contemporary African-American Gay Male Writers
Even though Baldwin's influence on the current generation of African-American gay writers is a vital and enduring one, a number of other cultural factors have also helped nurture the new artists. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the Stonewall Riots, the predominantly white-led and often racially insensitive gay liberation movement, and the emergence of a confident black gay and lesbian middle-class gave impetus to the growth of political activism among black gay men and lesbians during the 1970s and 1980s.
The new personal and political consciousness led to the establishment of many black gay and lesbian organizations, to the publication of several specialized journals (though many were short-lived), and to the articulation of a specifically black gay and lesbian cultural agenda.
These developments inevitably affected black gay literary creativity. Initially black gay artists, rejected by straight- as well as gay-owned presses, published their works largely in black gay journals and in privately printed chapbooks. This practice still continues on a significant scale. However, given the recent phenomenon of many publishers' relative openness to gay material in general, some black gay writers, at least since the mid-1980s, have been reasonably successful in placing their manuscripts with major trade publishers and, on rare occasions, even with prestigious university presses.
Further, the growing interest of nonblack gay readers in black gay texts--as the commercial success of recent works by Essex Hemphill and Assoto Saint clearly suggests--has given additional stimulus to the production, publication, and circulation of black gay literature.
The literary styles of the post-Baldwin generation of black gay writers differ widely; they range from the innovative science fiction of Samuel Delany to the rich magic-realist narratives of Randall Kenan; from the revisionist Southern gothicism of Melvin Dixon to the campy elegance of Larry Duplechan; from the densely allusive academic poetry of Carl Phillips to the aggressive agit-prop lyrics of Essex Hemphill.
They engage a variety of themes as well: from the more private concerns of identity, love, family, and relationships to the larger political issues of racist violence and homophobic repression.
Major Themes
Although it is risky to make any sweeping generalizations about this diverse body of literature, it is possible to identify at least four major themes that dominate the works of contemporary black gay male writers: the complex relationship between the individual black gay self and the larger African-American community, the devastating consequences of racism, the pain and the possibilities of interracial love, and the tragedy of AIDS.
The relationship between the individual black self and the black community--a frequent theme in African-American literature in general--surfaces insistently in the works of many contemporary black gay male writers. Since a strong and enabling sense of racial self is necessary to cope with the psychological assaults of white racism, the black gay male protagonist can rarely afford to disconnect himself completely from the black community and seek total assimilation into the predominantly white gay community.
But the black community, with its heterosexist values, is often not prepared to accommodate his sexuality unproblematically. The tension that arises from these conflicting sources of black gay identity, therefore, constitutes one of the central features of black gay literature. Joseph Beam's defiant declaration in his introduction to the ground-breaking anthology, In the Life (1986), clearly reveals the potential drama inherent in this tension: "We are coming home with our heads held up high."
Similarly, Gordon Heath's autobiographical Deep Are the Roots (1992), poignantly illustrates the narrator's determined struggle to claim his racial as well as sexual birthrights. Even when a protagonist fails in his struggle to harmonize his conflicting subjectivities--young Horace in Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits (1989), for example, commits suicide--the individual failure is also presented as a violent indictment of the community's inhumane rigidity.
Racism is another central concern in the works of virtually every contemporary black gay artist. Writers who are anthologized in Other Countries (1988), In the Life (1986), Brother to Brother (1991), The Road Before Us (1991), and Here to Dare (1992) not only challenge American racism in general but also vigorously expose the racism of white gay communities.
Some writers, such as Randall Kenan and Steven Corbin, offer broad historical perspectives on racism; others, such as Essex Hemphill, Craig Harris, and Assoto Saint, bear painfully personal testimony to racial injury. Even in the works of Larry Duplechan--someone who argues that his gay self is significantly more important to him than his racial self--there is considerable concern with racism and its maiming effects.
Despite the preoccupation with racism--or, perhaps, precisely because of it--interracial love is a recurrent theme in recent African-American gay literature. There are, of course, many writers who focus only on intraracial gay relationships and celebrate the black male body as a site of pleasure, but there are others who, with remarkable honesty, reveal their colonized sexual imaginations.
Robert Westley, for example, goes looking for "the last big-dick/White boy" ("The Pub" in Here to Dare), while Thom Beam writes a plaintive "Love Song for White Boys Who Don't Know Who I Am" (in The Road Before Us). Reginald Shepherd's "On Not Being White" (in In the Life) is an exquisitely painful statement on colonial desire, just as Essex Hemphill's "Heavy Breathing" (in Ceremonies [1992]) reveals his erotic longing for a white gay man who studiously rejects black partners. Assoto Saint's autobiographical Stations (1989) is a paean to enduring interracial love. Likewise, Canaan Parker's The Color of Trees (1992), set on the campus of an elite prep school in New England, affirms the possibility of love that transcends cultural and class differences.
But other writers sound far less sanguine about the durability of cross-racial connections. Duplechan's Eight Days in a Week (1985), for example, deals with the relationship between Johnnie Ray, who is black, and Keith, who is white. Their relationship ultimately fails: Their racial difference, which is the basis of their desire for each other, ironically proves to be too disruptive. More disturbing, Corbin's Fragments That Remain (1993) and Dixon's Vanishing Rooms (1991) suggest that a white man, even when he is very much in love with a black man, can remain fundamentally racist.
AIDS is yet another dominant concern of contemporary African-American gay writers. Without referring to AIDS by name, Delany examines in Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985) the distressing impact of the plague on the collective psyche of a frightened population. Duplechan, in Tangled Up in Blue (1989), explores the insidious effects AIDS has on individuals and on relationships by focusing on Maggie and Daniel Sullivan, a straight couple, and Crockett, their gay friend.
But even more compelling because of their emotional immediacy are the numerous testimonial narratives and poems--by writers such as David Frechette, Assoto Saint, Bobby Smith, Donald Woods, and many others--that bear witness to illness and death, mourn the loss of friends and lovers, and memorialize the many thousands gone.
Some of the most talented black gay writers of the post-Baldwin generation, including Melvin Dixon, Craig Harris, Joseph Beam, Essex Hemphill, and Assoto Saint, among others, have already died of AIDS-related illnesses. Still others are fighting personal battles against the infection. Contemporary black gay writing, therefore, reflects a mounting sense of emergency while it continues to give voice and visibility to black gay men living through these treacherous times.