Paying My Debt to Black Lesbians

Written by Josh Rivers, Host of Busy Being Black

As a queer Black man exploring issues of identity, belonging, vulnerability and intimacy in my work, reading and studying writers who’ve demonstrated tenacity and bravery in the face of marginalisation has been crucial to my professional practice and personal development. As a queer Black man trying to survive within a racist society – and all of the attendant exhaustion it brings – encounters with writers, poets and story-tellers who have confronted the hypocrisy, contradictions and potential of the world in which we live has been central to me finding the language to speak candidly about how I experience the world. As a queer Black man trying to be a better man, diving into the QTIPOC and feminist canon has given me the tools to critically engage with my positionality and privilege in order to live meaningfully in solidarity with other marginalised people (whether better men are even possible under patriarchy and capitalism, I’m not wholly convinced). This is all a long way of saying: I couldn’t be who I’m becoming without other writers – namely, Black feminist writers.

I think often of “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens”, the 2005 essay by Black feminist and theorist Cathy J. Cohen. Her essay, which first introduced me to intersectionality, comes alive within Black Queer Studies (2005), the first comprehensive anthology of Black queer theory and which many of us, whether we know it or not, have come to understand and utilise today. As someone who grew up with the Civil Rights Movement and all it achieved looming large in my mind, her clarity and wisdom around the limits of civil rights strategy sent a lightning bolt through me: “strategies built on the possibility of incorporation and assimilation are exposed as simply expanding and making accessible the status quo for more privileged members of marginalised groups.” How prescient in our time of diversity, equity and inclusion! What stands out for me, above all her wonderful intellectual insight, is something I’ve come to hold as my North Star: our sexuality cannot be the only thing that elicits political solidarity, since many of those who identify as LGBTQ exist (and therefore think and act) among differing and conflicting class categories. If, she asks, our political solidarity as queer people lies with affluent white gay men and not working class or poor Black “heterosexual” women (whose sexuality is always “deviant” according to societal norms), is your politics really a “queer” politics? Cathy J. Cohen opened me up to a politics of solidarity, love and care beyond the insular “gay” community.

Audre Lorde, the writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist whose most well-known (and well-quoted) work, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, offers meditations and critical thinking on the ways our silence becomes a tool weaponised against us. Lorde’s work wrestles with (white) feminism and offers new ways of looking at our collective liberation by reaffirming that our power is forged in our differences – both the idiosyncrasies that make each of us unique and the larger, historical constructions that society encourages us to see in each other something dangerous. I credit Lorde with opening my eyes to how an understanding of myself is not useful if I can’t see myself in others: “We maintain a discreet distance between each other because that distance between us makes me less you, makes you less me. When I can recognise my worth, I can recognise yours.”

Someone about whom Audre Lorde wrote, and who like me is not a lesbian, is Essex Hemphill. And I include him here because his legacy, too, was informed and shaped by Black lesbians. So much of my own journey forward has been one of looking back, and Hemphill’s generous and fearless offerings on sex and desire (in particular) have taught me that I need not shy away from the erotic, even as I’m fetishised and exoticised in a culture wholly consumed with reducing Black men to mere objects. We, he maintains, have and retain agency over our bodies, and whether we “stalk in shadows” or listen to the jazz of another’s heartbeat through the night, how we engage in acts of sex, intimacy and exchange is for us to decide. Ceremonies and Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men have encouraged in me a transformative re-thinking of my body as both a tool for resistance and emotional and sexual expression. How I treat the lithe monument that is my body says everything about how I feel about myself and what I deserve.

And here, among many other places, the Black lesbian and the Black gay meet and talk and connect – across generations, space and time. Our experiences, unique as they are to each of us, offer up ways for us to ennoble the experiences of the other, to understand what it means to live and thrive and love together in a world that would “grind us to dust” (Lorde).

We speak much about the myriad ways in which the writers we (rightfully) lionise have helped us understand the language we use to build the worlds we inhabit – metaphorical and physical. But what Cohen, Lorde and Hemphill (and many others) have all helped me to do, each in a different and specific way, is keep myself tender. These storytellers, these giants, have taught me how to gently, and with a dogged determination, unpick the tangles and knots of assumptions, stereotypes and generalisations that I make about others, about myself and which people make about me. They’ve also taught me that I must show up, in spirit and in flesh, for Black lesbians, which I have committed to do forever and always.