Blaqueer[Blacker]Stories
Blaqueer[Blacker]Stories
This Black History Month, I'm thinking about omitted Black queer histories and how uncovering and learning from them can lead to revolutionary Black action. And healing.
Please note: In this write-up, I am speaking primarily from the point of view of a Black Same-Gender-Loving man to (mostly) the specifics of being a Black Same-Gender-Loving (SGL) man living under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. There is so much more to be said about how these circumstances change or differ for people who identify in other ways, and I look forward to reading and sharing their perspectives to broaden the conversation. Thank you.
“Silence kills the soul; it diminishes its possibilities to rise and fly and explore. Silence withers what makes you human. The soul shrinks, until it’s nothing.”
— Marlon Riggs
Sometimes, it hurts to remember. But it is far more dangerous to forget.
Everywhere in the United States (except Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Tennessee), February, the shortest damn month of the year, is regarded as “Black History Month.” However, Black history—which, for me, is timeless and encompasses the past, present, and future— is something that I observe 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
During this month, Americans are meant to fake-knowledge (as opposed to acknowledge) and cele-hate (instead of celebrate) something that is often treated as separate from American history—which is to say, separate from white history. Black history is treated as a mostly irrelevant offshoot of the main thing. More accurately, it is regarded as a terrifying, implicating area of study that forces a vain and, therefore, cruel people to confront the malicious actions, deeds, legacies, and pathologies they would much rather cover up.
This is why the American educational complex treats Black history as an elective and not as a requirement, and why the party of strategic and pathological liars view it as something that can be legislated out of schools to protect white people’s feelings, and not as something that can give schools an honest purpose. But the truth is that history—which James Baldwin said was largely the invention of the Devil—makes absolutely no sense without Black history. The power brokers would have it no other way though since nonsense helps to disguise their treachery.
The distortion or erasure of history is how kings and kingmakers attempt to control the marginalized. By preventing us from learning the truth about ourselves—and themselves—they succeed at keeping us scattered, confused, and defeated; unable to recognize the factors that contribute to our impoverished circumstances. Purposely and purposefully misinformed and uninformed, we take our sadness out on each other rather than on the architects of it. And the blight passed on is called generational trauma.
Today, I want to make a small push against that by highlighting a few historical figures intentionally buried under the onslaught of the American propaganda posing as history (or maybe all history is propaganda and it is time we started uncovering newstories).
So many of us Black Same Gender Loving (SGL) and Gender Nonconforming (GNC) folks owe a tremendous debt to the courageous William Dorsey Swann. It is thanks to the intelligence and tenacity of Channing Gerard Joseph, author of the forthcoming biography, House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens — and Changed the World, that we even know that Swann existed.
Swann was “an American LGBT activist in a time where leadership in the movement was uncommon. Born into slavery, Swann was the first person in the United States to lead a queer resistance group and the first known person to self-identify as a ‘queen of drag.’” (Wikipedia) Every indication seems to point to Swann using he/him pronouns to self-describe, though some contemporary writers have used she/her pronouns when referring to Swann.
Swann is an incredibly important figure for me because it was my curiosity about the existence of Black SGL/GNC people during particular pre-modern historical moments that led me to writing The Prophets.
Back in 2005-2006, when I first had the idea of writing what was then called Sing Hannibal! Bear Witness! and would eventually become The Prophets, I did so because I had not seen any representations of Black SGL men in time periods prior to the Harlem Renaissance (specifically during antebellum slavery) in any of the literature that I had read. At the time, the earliest reference to Black male homosexuality/bisexuality that I could find in Black literature was in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929).
I did, however, encounter explicit references to same-sex sexual assault in pre-Harlem Renaissance time periods in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861) and other narratives from enslaved Ancestors, as well as in Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987). But to be clear: any sexual contact between an enslaved person and members of the owner class is inherently sexual assault despite American attempts at romanticization (see Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, for example).
I was highly disturbed by the fact that the only lens that same-sex relations was being examined through was that of violence/rape culture—as though same-sex desire and congress could only ever be broken, predatory, or sinister constitutions. The disquiet led me to a very specific question, beyond the imaginations of some others:
What about love?
I started writing without access to any literary precedent or confirmation. Years later, I would discover that while rare, these testimonies did, in fact, exist—even if in staged form.
While I was giving a reading at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 2021, an audience member shared with me that there was a play that pondered the same question regarding Black SGL love during antebellum slavery. In 1995, award-winning playwright Robert O’Hara wrote Insurrection: Holding History, about a gay African-American man named Ron and his 189-year-old(!) grandfather TJ, who unwittingly travel back in time to the Nat Turner rebellion, where an enslaved man falls in love with Ron.
Additionally, in 2018, while I was still in the draft stages of The Prophets, another award-winning playwright, Donja R. Love, released Sugar in Our Wounds, a story about James and Henry, two enslaved men who fall in love.
As an aside: I recently discovered that the brilliant Vincent Maurice Woodard (1971-2008) wrote about a specific way white supremacy weaponized homosexual desire during antebellum slavery. His work was published posthumously in The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture (2014). Some folks continue to unironically (and, I imagine, purposely) misinterpret the analyses of Woodard—a Black SGL scholar, mind you—and use them as a basis or justification for anti-SGL/GNC politics and (non)sensibilities.
To be clear: Woodard’s claim wasn’t that homosexuality and cannibalism are the same thing or that homosexual desire is a white supremacist construct or that homosexuality didn’t exist in Black people until slavery or that homosexuality is some kind of degraded, dirty, and villainous state of being. His argument was that slavery/capitalism/white supremacy has the ability to contaminate desire such that it becomes, literally and figuratively, indistinguishable from cannibalism—especially when it is white desire directed at a Black subject. And while Woodard chose to examine that contamination vis-à-vis homoeroticism, the scope of his scrutiny is by no means limited to just homosexual interactions.
But I digress.
The Prophets is not the first piece of literature attempting to wrestle with the aforementioned Black SGL/GNC absence. Samuel, Isaiah, Sarah, and other characters in my book are not the first to express this particular kind of tenderness. O’Hara, Love, and I are, however, linked in that we were imagining the unimaginable, uttering the unutterable, and remembering the unremembered. We didn’t have solid proof of the existence of Black SGL people, men in particular, living and loving during these times (we didn’t become aware of Swann until 2019), but something greater than us informed our spirits that there had to be. And we believed it. So we followed the calling.
I would say that somehow, in some way, we were each given messages from Swann, as well as Pierce Lafayette and Felix Hall (the first publicly known formerly enslaved Black male couple), and Mary Jones (free, Black, and the first openly GNC/trans woman on record in New York City) so that their testimonies no longer went on unwitnessed. We are, then, forever inspired by and indebted to Swann, Lafayette, Hall, and Jones for “living inside of their truths” (as Billy Porter once put it) at a time when that was unthinkable, thereby giving us, their descendants, a pathway to our own authenticity. Because their stories have been uncovered, we now know that Black SGL/GNC people have been at the forefront of the fight for progress and liberation in this country from time immemorial—in spite of how we have been regarded and treated by the larger society or even our own families and communities.
We have a long and noble lineage.
In addition to bearing witness to a love that is needlessly slandered, I also wanted to dispel a pernicious myth about it.
There is a profound hatred of the SGL/GNC states of being, particularly when they manifest in people seen as Black men and boys. That hatred (which can be internal as well as external) allows people to conflate SGL/GNC identities with every area of depravity—especially child molestation—and justify any use of violence, including murder, as a “corrective” measure. This hatred is tied very closely to patriarchy (and those who uphold it), where SGL/GNC in those who are believed to be men is seen as rejection of the “natural-born power” that resides in maleness and is, therefore, treasonous to the goals of male domination and what is deemed as the “protective and combatant responsibilities” of people with penises.
In some Black communities, SGL/GNC existence is seen as a white supremacist plot to render Black men weak, vulnerable, submissive, and subservient (as though Black SGL/GNC people are a monolith and SGL/GNC-ness itself drains both strength and skill from the body—it does not; as though strength and skill are what make men’s lives valuable/worthy—they are not). SGL/GNC identity is also thought to be a white supremacist method of Black population control and an easy way to disrupt and destroy the Black family unit (as though sterile Black people don’t exist—they do; as though Black SGL/GNC people cannot procreate—we can; as though procreative arrangements are the only ones that matter—they are not; as though the nuclear model of family is the only one that exists; it is not).
For people who believe in dehumanizing SGL/GNC people—who allow their manufactured and internalized disgust to guide them toward the forfeiting of their own humanity—people like Swann, Lafayette, Hall, and Jones are anathema and proof that slavery corrupted Black men and forced us from our “natural” cisgender heterosexuality to the “unnatural” state of SGL/GNC. To them, the idea that Swann, Lafayette, Hall, and Jones could have been born SGL/GNC or that those feelings can be innate (and not adulteration) is not just inconceivable, but also impossible.
Here, Abrahamic religions (which, ironically, most—if not all— practicing Black people were initiated into via some kind of colonial influence) play an enormous and crucial role in indoctrinating not just Black people, but all people, into accepting anti-SGL/GNC bigotry as logical, reasonable, responsible, and righteous. Most of all, these errant, often anti-human philosophies and practices are responsible for getting some Black people to erroneously but proudly believe that SGL/GNC existence is inherently anti-African/anti-Black.
Many aspects of these faiths—which is to say these politics—ensure the prospering of hardline divisions within Black communities (regarding age, belief, class, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, geography, language, sex, sexuality, and so on) about which Black people are human and which are not (while white supremacist capitalist patriarchy teaches people as a whole that no Black people are human).
Being told and believing that we are intrinsically better than someone else feels good, Morrison has said. It is a falsehood that can make misery slightly more bearable, perhaps alleviate it for a second or two, give us a chance to catch our breaths before the next inevitable blitz of oppression transpires. However, the lie also radioactive; poisonous for both the receiver and the giver. But bigots will never learn that.
All of this combined welcomes, with open arms, the sabotage necessary to assure that attempts at Black unity are doomed to result in ongoing, abject failure.
But these dangerous anti-SGL/GNC beliefs are easily debunked by history itself (and if Black SGL/GNC people were a white supremacist plot to disrupt Black families and strip Black men of power, why, then, are there also white LGBTQIA+ people? By the standards of the bigoted “logic,” shouldn’t all white people be cisgender and heterosexual?). The states of being we now call SGL/GNC are as old as—if not older than—humankind and have been present in every ancient and contemporary society on Earth, including those on the African continent (not to mention in numerous non-human species of animal).
In The Prophets, I explore this by traveling back even further in time, and giving voice to before-time Indigenous African understandings of gender, gender identity, sex, and sexuality through the characters Kosii and Elewa, and King Akusa and her wives.
From my estimation—and from all the evidence that people have tried to hide, deny, misrepresent, or destroy—SGL/GNC-ness is as much of a regular human possibility as any other. It is white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy—individually and in various tandems—that alienate and demonize SGL/GNC identities for the purposes of ensuring that every human being exists in social arrangements that best suit the colonial, imperial, military, and monetary needs of the ruling classes. The heterosexual nuclear model of family is paramount for the perpetual production of laborers and soldiers, who are ultimately sacrificed, in one way or another, for the benefit of the robber-barons.
Black Same Gender Loving and Gender Non-Conformity have the potential to disrupt the ritual sacrifice and nuclear nightmare in truly bold and forgotten ways. This is why Joseph Beam considered Black men loving Black men a revolutionary act. However, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy also has the uncanny ability to consume resistance, digest it in its status-quo body, and shit it out in a much more complicit, buyable, hashtaggable form. This is precisely why contemporary struggles for gay rights (and for the purposes of this analysis, I would argue that gay identities are sociopolitically distinct from SGL/GNC identities along racial, aspirational, and other lines; see Dr. David J. Johns’s scholarship for a deeper evaluation of this idea) rest on two bedrocks of empire: marriage and military service.
To be treated as citizens—which is to say, as human beings—LGBTQIA+ people in the United States must agree to arrange their relationships in ways that are conducive to carrying the social and financial burdens for the creation of future laborers and soldiers (children); and voluntarily kill and/or die for the nation-state’s advancement (colonization/militarization).
Nuclear marriage and military service are also expected of Black people in general; really, they are expected of any marginalized person wishing to be considered American. Despite some advances, Black people have benefited least from these social contracts since, at base, whiteness requires Black dehumanization and subjugation in order to function, have value, and give its privileges definition.
The accusation that Black SGL/GNC people are anti-African/anti-Black by merely existing must be refuted in the face of the understanding that, in fact, the anti-SGL/GNC doctrine is a European invention. The strictly cisgender heterosexual model of relationship was constructed and made compulsory by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal commonwealth, and, additionally, given the cover of “biology” in order to seem sanctified by creation itself and, thus, “default,” “normal” and unquestionable.
One must consider that true anti-Blackness, by definition, cannot be Black SGL/GNC people living freely and committing no actual harm (despite bigoted people often inventing harm in harmless scenarios for the sake of justifying their brutality and intolerance). In this scenario, anti-Blackness can only be people concretely attempting to circumvent Black SGL/GNC people from living freely.
Despite this, there will always be people who see the Black SGL/GNC person as antithetical to Blackness and Black liberation, and will always interpret reality in a manner meant to enact genocide—whether metaphorically or literally—against us. It is exhausting having to continually justify your own existence to people who demand that you cease existing. It is so fucking exhausting that it inspires rage. And sorrow.
It is also wild how people who endeavor to make other people’s humanity debatable imagine that they don’t forfeit their own by doing so.
It is my sincerest hope that the immaturity, inhumanity, insecurity, and insincerity at the core of anti-SGL/GNC sentiment all wither away so that there can come a day when Black people of every stripe can deal with one another in affirming rather than violent ways. And believe me when I tell you: the entire world is rooting for and devoting unlimited resources to our self-destruction.
Nothing is more corrosive to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy than Black love—forthright, genuine, mutual, and reciprocated.
When I see countries like Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Botswana, and St. Kitts and Nevis making efforts to renounce their colonial legacies, I have hope. If I have faith in anything, I have faith in the power of Black love.
Let the healing come.
May your Black History Month be enlightening, if not comforting; real, if not palpable; courageous, if not charming; honest, if not kind. And, as always, may the Ancestors love and keep you.
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert
Additional Recommended Reading
“Here Be Dragons” by James Baldwin
Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome
For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss A Mother F*cker Out When Snatching An Edge Ain’t Enough by Lady Dane Figuroa Edidi
Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man by Chike Frankie Edozien
Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men edited by Essex Hemphill, conceived by Joseph Beam
All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson
She Called Me Woman: Nigeria's Queer Women Speak edited by Azeenarh Mohammed, Chitra Nagarajan, and Rafeeat Aliyu
100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell
“Gays: Guardians of the Gates: An Interview with Malidoma Somé”
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
They Called Me Queer compiled by Kim Windvogel and Kelly-Eve Koopman