Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis

"That is a book that I chose because it takes us to black gay history, and brings up the question of intersectionality between anti-racist struggles and anti-homophobic struggles. In terms of approach, this book really looks at individuals, important organizers and activists. So Bayard Rustin plays an important role, and James Baldwin in the early period. Also maybe less well known people like Grant-Michael Fitzgerald in the 1970s and ’80s. So it looks at those individuals and their biographies, building on very detailed archival research, looking at their personal papers and trying to reconstruct the biographies, sometimes in slightly redundant detail. But I think the book does definitely manage to come up with a very sophisticated view of black gay activism, and black gay activists, between what often has been described as the homophobia of civil rights activism… There was this kind of exclusion of homosexuals from the black civil rights movement. Bayard Rustin suffered from that and was never really able to disclose his same-sex desire while being a very prominent Civil Rights activist. So on the one hand, there was this exclusion within the black community, and on the other side, also ongoing racism within the gay community. It was a long struggle from the 1970s, to move beyond the predominance of whiteness in the gay liberation movement. Black gay men are described here as being caught in that double bind, and the book describes how they tried to deal with that situation. In the beginning there was a lot of secrecy and hiding. And then there’s an ever-growing element of visibility, outness and a self-defined voice. “There was this exclusion within the black community, and on the other side, also ongoing racism within the gay community” I think Joseph Beam, a poet and cultural activist of the 1980s, is really interesting in that respect. He edited gay magazines and the black gay poetry anthology In the Life . He was in close contact with black lesbian feminists, people like Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith. This was an important moment that opened up new possibilities and new self-fashionings for black gay men. And here you can also see that one of the things these activists really struggled against was related to masculinity. On the one hand, there is this strong virile masculinity that Black Power was developing and performing. On the other side you have a white gay objectifying gaze that almost does the same thing, that imagines black gay bodies as hyper-virile sex machines with big penises. And people like Joseph Beam tried to forge a completely different view of black gay masculinity as sensitive as well, as possibly also feminine, and as complex and looking for community and sociability. And these are the kinds of struggles that are described in this book. I’ll just add one more thing, because I think it’s also a fascinating aspect of this story, the role of religion. It’s not that religion didn’t play a role in Euro-American gay and lesbian movements. But I think it’s particularly important in a black gay context. And there are two chapters here on activism within the Catholic Church and within a Pentecostal setting, where it becomes clear that a sense of unity and sociability in a black gay context also necessitated forging a space within a religious setting for black gay identities and visibilities. And that is something this book describes in a lot of revealing detail."