Darius Bost

When I began my book project on Black gay male literary and cultural production in the early era of AIDS in the United States—from its appearance in 1981 to the 1996 invention of protease inhibitors that shifted its designation from incurable to a manageable chronic illness—I discussed with my mentors how I felt that the mandates of queer studies put restraints on my project. The field of queer studies has sought to unsettle identity categories, question the outcomes of political visibility, and challenge the liberalism of the gay rights movement. Though my work critiques Black, gay, and Black gay liberalism, concerns about Black gay men’s investments in identity and visibility loomed largely. Yet I continued to pursue the project because I knew that the works of Black gay writers and activists such as Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, and Joseph Beam, among others, had been formative to Black queer studies, if only as a means of critique. I also wanted to look closely at what E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson had called the “interanimation” of Black and queer studies and to reflect on the stakes of this coupling. I was curious whether the suturing of these two fields had foreclosed what Roderick Ferguson has called “prior critical and sexual universes” or if this burgeoning theoretical horizon had created new possibilities for thought about Black lesbian and gay cultural production.

To examine these critical stakes, I aimed to “enflesh” Black and queer theory—to think about how these theories came together in the lives of Black gay men in the early era of AIDS, knowing that the queer antisocial thesis had emerged in response to the AIDS pandemic and that dominant strains of Black cultural theory viewed community building and political orientations toward the future as a ruse born out of the logics of white supremacy. I wondered what would happen if I placed a Black gay male cultural and political movement in response to HIV/AIDS at the center of Black, queer, and Black queer theory. And given that these men organized their work under the rubric of Black gay and not Black queer, what did it mean to do Black gay studies after the rise of Black queer theory? I drew inspiration from the work of literary scholar Jaime Harker, who has been critical of queer theory’s move away from canonizing gay and lesbian writers. Harker argues that such exclusions omit consideration of these writers’ formal and aesthetic choices and fail to consider how gay and lesbian writing might shift our perspectives on the literary-historical periods. This critique applies to the field of African American studies, as well. I saw as one flashpoint Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin’s damning queer critique of Hemphill’s 1991 edited volume Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, in which he argues that the anthology failed to justify the need for a specifically Black gay male discourse. 

In this essay, I further pursue this line of inquiry by reflecting on a moment that might mark the critical shift from Black lesbian and gay studies to Black queer studies: the year 2000, then called the millennium. I aim to tell a more complex story about this moment, one less interested in identifying the millennium as marking a theoretical shift than as a placeholder for rethinking the before of Black lesbian and gay studies and the after of Black queer studies as interanimating, rather than successive, temporalities. In their introduction to the 2000 “Plum Nelly” special of the Black diaspora literary and cultural studies journal Callaloo, a landmark volume in the field of Black queer studies, to which I will return, Jennifer DeVere Brody and Dwight A. McBride identified the field’s formation as a push for more cultural specificity in both the questions being formulated and the conclusions being reached at the margins of American society. Yet they included Isaac Julien, Cheryl Dunye, Marlon Riggs, and Essex Hemphill under the rubric of Black queer cultural producers. The range of experiences, questions, and conclusions among this short list of artists invites a reconsideration of Black lesbian and gay studies to examine better how it has shaped and might remake the future of Black queer studies.

Based on my survey of the field, I have determined that Black lesbian and gay studies explore a range of bodies, identities, practices, and desires. However, this essay questions whether the linear progress narrative that attended the Black queer turn in the millennium narrowed Black lesbian and gay studies’ efforts toward broad inclusion and foreclosed the field’s ongoing potential as a horizon of theoretical and political possibility. By re-examining the millennium as a moment of interanimation between Black gay and lesbian and Black queer studies, I show how the past persists in the present and propose how this temporal multiplicity might be mobilized in the service of a more just future. In what follows, I examine some motivations and reservations that attended this momentous shift from Black lesbian and gay to Black queer studies. Then I turn to a close reading of a June 2019 letter written by Black nonbinary poet Danez Smith to Essex Hemphill that might better illustrate my thinking.

Based on my analysis of some of the formative texts and conference proceedings germane to Black queer studies, I have identified some of the key motives for conjoining Black and queer. One obvious motivation for Black queer studies’ formation was to address the marginalization of race in queer studies and the relegation of non-normative genders and sexualities to the margins of Black studies. Based on my reading of the late Vincent Woodard’s review of the 2000 Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in April 2000), other driving impulses emerge. 

According to Woodard, Wahneema Lubiano saw Black queer theory as rejecting disciplinary paradigms and formations that marginalize theory and rely on empirical evidence. Indeed, as the late great José Esteban Muñoz pointed out some years earlier, and as Phillip Brian Harper noted in his conference keynote, queer people of color archives are often ephemeral and, as such, are frequently dismissed as lacking sufficient evidentiary authority. Relatedly, Lubiano championed Black queer theorizing, and theorizing more broadly, as a practice where freedom might be pursued through epistemological and pedagogical pleasure, in contrast to the project of Black studies born out of struggle and measured against its utility. Lubiano believed that assessing Black knowledge production based on its utility and conclusions might foreclose the pleasure and eroticism accompanying the pursuit of knowledge. 

Brody and McBride’s “Plum Nelly” special issue, circulated at the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference, sought to distinguish Black queer studies from a master narrative of Black studies that marginalized, denied, and disavowed Black feminist and LGBTQ intellectual and cultural contributions. They were concerned with who could speak for African America and with the kinds of issues foreclosed—namely coming out, class, violence, and gender formations—when representative race men and women left out the gender and sexual nonconforming individuals. They viewed Black queer studies as a site of transdisciplinary critique that could benefit African American and queer studies. But they mainly focused on the heteronormativity and hypermasculinity of African American studies, noting that the racial exclusions of queer studies had been well-documented.

In their introduction to the 2005 Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, Henderson and Johnson presented more reasons for conjoining these two bodies of knowledge. First, they saw the field’s formation as a possibility for coalition building that might create a space of inquiry between them that would sabotage neither and enable both. Adding to Lubiano’s point about rigid disciplinary boundaries, they believed that forming Black queer studies would make disciplinary boundaries more porous and encourage boundary crossings. Therefore, Henderson and Johnson sought to enlist Black studies’ strategies, methodologies, and insights into the service of queer studies and vice-versa. For them, the possibility of coalition building was not limited to intellectual production but extended to the liberatory goals at the heart of each field, both of which had foundations in social movements. And finally, to honor its foundations in post-structuralist thought, Henderson and Johnson shared the concerns of Brody and McBride in seeking a generational shift that might account for the complexity of identities under late capitalism.

Though there were many documented reasons for organizing the range of perspectives included in these formative volumes under the rubric of Black queer studies, there was no clear consensus about the merits of such a theoretical shift. Henderson and Johnson identified tensions embedded in the conjunction of these two terms, as Blackness risked reinstalling boundaries around queerness, with its aims of broad inclusion. In contrast, queer studies’ aims of speaking to and on behalf of sexual dissidents risked marginalizing or erasing other identity markers—a point Cathy Cohen had made forcefully almost a decade earlier. Most of the dissent about this shift revolved around the figure of the lesbian, and less so, gay men’s hesitancies about deploying the term. Indeed, in her forward to Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, Sharon P. Holland expressed anxiety about whether the interanimation of Black and queer studies would obfuscate the presence of lesbians in the movements foundational to these fields and discount the historical specificity of women’s struggles. In organizing itself against identity politics, Holland questioned whether queer studies would discount Black feminist genealogies that had already unsettled identity categories like “woman.”

According to Woodard, Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference panelists M. Jacqui Alexander and Cathy Cohen, both of whom had helped plan the Black Nations/Queer Nations? conference five years earlier also commented on the conference’s overall inattention to the contributions and theoretical labor of radical Black lesbian feminists. It cautioned against any theoretical platform that did not have a complex gender analysis or take into account Black women’s experiences. Legal scholar Devon W. Carbado, who also presented at the conference, focused on how anti-discriminatory law did not account for the Black lesbian lawyer and her efforts to negotiate her identity within a predominantly white work community. He noted how the particularity of Black lesbian experiences and struggles register as a queer concept to a white hegemonic entity. Their concerns about the place of Black lesbian experiences and the theoretical and political contributions of Black lesbian feminists remind us that the term “lesbian” signals not only an inhabitable identity but also names a refusal of gender and sexual hierarchies. As such, the lesbian’s appearance at the advent of a millennium of Black queer theorizing functioned as an internal rupture to modern regimes that would view the conference as marking a progressive shift from retrograde Black lesbian and gay studies to more sophisticated Black queer studies.

Another legal scholar and conference panelist, Keith Boykin, articulated a dual disidentification with both queer and gay, presumably around both terms’ unmarked whiteness. However, Woodard believed his disidentifications received too little attention from fellow panelists and audience members. Gay Jamaican fiction writer Thomas Glave also questioned the use of the term ‘queer,’ citing its Western capitalist specificity. In some ways, Glave’s apprehension about the application of the term to Caribbean and African continental contexts spoke to Brody and McBride’s call for scholars to map Black queer studies according to local and global geographies. The stubbornness with which Black lesbians and Black gay men asserted their presence and articulated their resistance to the turn to queer studies at and after the millennium reveals the persistence of the past in the present, thereby marking the present as a site of temporal multiplicity and creating possibilities for reckoning with the past in the service of a more just future. I view the advent of the new millennium as a moment of interanimation between the history of Black gay and lesbian studies and the present of Black queer studies, forcing the latter to reckon with the former in the service of more just Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and trans futures.

Taking this thinking into account, I turn now to a letter that exemplifies the interanimation between the Black lesbian and gay past and the Black queer present. In their June 16, 2019, letter published in the New York Times, Black queer, nonbinary poet Danez Smith contemplates what it means to reimagine a Black gay identity in an increasingly queer world. They address the letter to the late Black gay male poet, essayist, and editor Essex Hemphill, to whom Smith had written many letters over the years. The letter establishes a bond between two Black poets writing in an anti-Black, hetero, and gender-normative world; both affected by the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS on black communities—Smith living with HIV and Hemphill dead from AIDS. Yet, the letter also acknowledges their differences, constituted by a shifting AIDS landscape, the proliferation of gender and sexual identities, and the changing social positions of gender and sexual minorities under neoliberal capitalism—a complex social terrain oscillating between mainstream acceptance, ongoing marginalization, and violent exclusion.

Smith opens the letter by acknowledging their desire for Hemphill’s Black gay presence in what they call an “increasingly queer world”: “I saw you alive and sweet the other day. No, no, not you, waiting in the audience before I read at the Poetry Foundation. I wanted it to be you. He looked at me the way I hoped you would, eyes immediately anthologizing me, calling me into a room that stretched across cities and time filled with all us black, sugar-in-the-tank types.” This imagined room, which stretches across space and time, enacts an alternative imagining of Black lesbian and gay studies in an increasingly queer world, wherein all of us Black, sugar-in-the-tank types, past and present, might engage in the collective production of liberatory thought. That Hemphill’s eyes immediately anthologize Smith suggests a temporal traversal between a Black gay past indexed by Hemphill’s Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men and a Black queer present indexed by Johnson’s 2016 volume No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.

Moreover, Smith asks Hemphill whether nonbinary-identified folks existed in his lifetime: “I’m what they call ‘nonbinary,’ Essex. Did we exist by that name during your life?” Beyond the question of naming, Smith’s query compels a reckoning with the Black lesbian and gay past, and nonbinary functions as both identity and critique of past exclusions, which have left us with a transphobic present in which we, as Smith phrases it, “lose a trans sister every moon and most don’t blink.” It also intervenes in historiographical debates regarding the use of present-day descriptors to recover Black gender and sexual non-normativity in the past, as is the case with figures like Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, and Marsha P. Johnson.

This room, this imagined space and time, where two Black poets and cultural critics are bound as much by their sameness as their difference, offers an alternative site of Black study that encourages boundary crossings and coalitions across Black gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, gender nonconforming, and trans theory and activism. Meditating on the ethical stakes of contemporary Pride celebrations, as symbols of social progress and the triumphs of the liberal capitalist state, Smith writes: “I love that people love the day, and I, too, have paraded with flag and wristbands singing blue and yellow and blood red. I’ll probably spend this one inside, quiet and reading you, dreaming a new dream for a new gay day, hoping to one day shock myself out of comfort and queer dreaming and once again pick up the brick.” In an increasingly queer world, Smith paradoxically dreams of a “new gay day” where they might “pick up the brick.” In their reference to Stonewall, Smith calls forth an activist past in which a multiracial coalition of gay men, lesbians, transvestite prostitutes, male hustlers, vagrants, and unnamed others become a driving force for a more radical future. 

I’d like to conclude, then, with a provocation: If Smith’s dream of a “new gay day” tells us that the queer present is not enough, and lesbian names a refusal to accede to the terms of the present social order, then as Muñoz might put it, perhaps a lesbian and gay index—not a retrograde past, but a theoretical and political horizon that is not yet here. Thus, we might consider Smith’s turn to Black gay history after the advent of Black queer studies in the millennium as a form of reckoning with this past in the service of a more just future.