Gay Black People

The town I went to college at has a museum to a famous blues singer. I was actually reading an entirely separate book about lesbian history and she was named dropped as the blues scene in Harlem was known for playing with sexuality. I knew Billie Holiday was bisexual, but Gladys Bentley and Bessie Smith’s stories meant a lot. 1920s Harlem was a place that had a strange relationship with its queer patrons. Many were white queers who saw a black neighborhood as an escape from polite society. They ignored the fact that the Harlem of the 1920s was a place of rich creativity. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t room for the playful sexuality of the times, or even more lesbian culture like butch/femme dynamics of women living together.

These women were like me. Singing playfully about how about none of their friends are men because they don’t like them. I like to imagine them rolling their eyes, and being in clubs and their homes laughing and drinking. Smiling and loving other women and forgetting for just a moment that their existence is hated by so many. Their neighbors and people they even may call friends. It must have been terrifying to think of your home being raided just because you had a little too much fun and the neighbors over heard.

Nobody likes black women. They don’t see us as the people we are. We are sex objects and mothers to those who never care to ask about our day. I am under hyper scrutiny. I feel it all the time. I dress in bold colors, and never hide anything about myself. The world hates me now. It hates my friends and my family. It hates the people I see on the street smiling. The actors who worked twice as hard as their peers. There is something wrong with them. They aren’t in their place. They are other.

Why would a woman think she could live without a man?

Why would a black woman dare to allow herself to be bold enough to be seen?

Why would two black women love each other? 

How could they exist without me?

The answer is we always have. We always will. We have always made jokes about hating men, and we have always made each other happy. We have always been an open secret

I am apart of history. I am one black lesbian of many. My pictures and my existence is going to be in history. Our laughs and our songs and our jokes will live on. 

I think about Sister Love. Of Pat Parker and Audery Lorde writing about poetry and magazines they worked on. About the over a hundred footnotes of extra little details about their lives that the author had to add to let us in the conversation between friends. About dying of cancer.

Despite what mean comments on the internet say, I am beautiful and part of a history full of love and laughter. I hope every time someone sees me smile they know that I spit on those people who want to kill the community that loves me.

Sources: 

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers By Lillian Faderman

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974 - 1989 Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan Edited by Julie R. Enszer