Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah: a Historical Analysis Of

Home , Abomination (Bible), Beyond the Down Low, Chicken (gay slang), Dallas Austin, Kelvin Thomas, Rejoined

Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah: A Historical Analysis of

the Mythology of Black Homophobia

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Lance E. Poston

December 2018

This dissertation titled

Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah: A Historical Analysis of

the Mythology of Black Homophobia

LANCE E. POSTON

has been approved for

the Department of History

and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Katherine Jellison

Professor of History

Joseph Shields

Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

POSTON, LANCE E., PH.D., December 2018, History

Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah: A Historical Analysis of the Mythology of Black

Homophobia

Director of Dissertation: Katherine Jellison

This dissertation challenges the widespread myth that black Americans make up the most homophobic communities in the United States. After outlining the myth and illustrating that many Americans of all backgrounds had subscribed to this belief by the early 1990s, the project challenges the narrative of black homophobia by highlighting black urban neighborhoods in the first half of the twentieth century that permitted and even occasionally celebrated open displays of queerness. By the 1960s, however, the black communities that had hosted overt queerness were no longer recognizable, as the public balls, private parties, and other spaces where same-sex contacts took place were driven underground. This shift resulted from the rise of the black Civil Rights Movement, whose middle-class leadership – often comprised of ministers from the black church – rigorously promoted the respectability of the race. This politics of respectability included the demand by religious and activist leaders that all members of the black community meet the outward expectations of an upstanding, heteronormative citizen. This shift is grounded in the deep history of mainline black Christian denominations as sites of resistance against slavery and white supremacy, institutions that presumed individual respectability was prerequisite for the struggle for full citizenship. Over time, this led to publicly preaching homophobic sermons even while tolerating private queerness in the 4 pews and choirs. This dynamic of Sexual Plausible Deniability, where queerness was tolerated as long as it went unnamed, gave rise to the so-called Down Low phenomenon—referring to black men who have sex with other men without adopting a gay identity—that gained public notoriety during the worst years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The final chapter explores the oral histories of black queer men who describe their experiences after the Civil Rights Movement, illuminating that queer expressions in black spaces continued to exist but the pre-1950s potential for open conversations about queerness was gone. This lack of community dialogue fueled the widespread perception that black communities are the most homophobic sites in the US and exacerbated the HIV crisis in particular.

DEDICATION

This project is dedicated to my wonderful husband, Seth, who supported me through six years of research and writing. 6

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project is the culmination of years of research and writing. I began working on Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah in 2012 as a full-time Ph.D. candidate, before moving south to take a post as a university administrator in 2015. This professional transition complicated my initial completion timeline and created a seemingly endless list of new competing priorities. I was able to manage those priorities and finish this project with love, support, and investment from Seth Hall, Katherine Jellison, Julie White, Steve

Estes, Eli Capilouto, Bill Swinford, Sonja Feist-Price, and Ian Lekus. I am also thankful for the help of archivists at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the Virginia

Theological Seminary and for the hospitality and openness of the men who shared their stories with me as part of this work. Thank you all. 7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....3 Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………5 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..6 List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………… 8 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..9 Chapter 1: The Paradox of Jackie Robinson and Jason Collins………………………….20 Chapter 2: Before the Civil Rights Movement…………………………………………..41 Chapter 3: Acceptability at All Costs……………………………………………………70 Chapter 4: Chokehold of the Collar…………………………………………………….104 Chapter 5: Midnight Riders and Abominations………………………………………...138 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...182 References………………………………………………………………………………189 8

LIST OF FIGURES Page

Figure 1: Civil Rights Activists, Greensboro, North Carolina, February 1960..…...…....74 Figure 2: First Black US Senator and US Representatives, 1870-1871………...……...115 Figure 3: Protesting Memphis Sanitation Workers, March 1968………...... ……...185 9

INTRODUCTION

Painting with broad strokes, are black communities and black institutions the most homophobic spaces in the United States? Or, when compared to their white counterparts, are African American spaces significantly more homophobic overall? This set of questions drove the original conception and subsequent evolution of Deconstructing

Sodom and Gomorrah: A Historical Analysis of the Mythology of Black Homophobia.

The initial seed for this project was planted while working in 2008 as a volunteer for the first Barack Obama presidential campaign canvassing upstate South Carolina neighborhoods. As I walked from door to door, carrying literature about a junior US

Senator from Illinois who had not yet won the Democratic primary, I pondered the instructions that we had been given at the start of our first day of work. Out of all of the orientation information that we had been provided, one tactical suggestion jolted me, replaying in my mind for days afterward. This bit of information, professed by an aging white minister to a group of mostly white college students, was to make our appeal for voter support personal, but also to avoid talking about sexuality or LGBT issues in any way, especially with black voters.

The words of this self-avowed, social-justice-oriented white minister who had spent some of his earlier days organizing for black civil rights in the Carolinas were hard for me to process. Although the minister was not implying that all blacks held anti-gay sentiments, he clearly believed that black communities were much more homophobic than the mainline white Protestant communities he had lived and worked in for many decades. I left my volunteer experience on a high for having contributed to what I saw as 10 a possibility for real national political change and a step forward in the history of black

Americans. Yet I also left with many questions. How valid were the minister’s comments? After all, he had a reputation as a progressive religious leader in the state and had been a part of several Civil Rights era campaigns. On the other hand, his advice seemed profoundly insensitive. Perhaps his comments were even racist? Why did his warning focus specifically on black communities? As I well knew from personal experience, most white communities in the South were not known for their queer inclusivity. Was it really true that blacks in the US were much more likely to be homophobic than white Americans? Or were these assertions about pervasive homophobia in black communities simply a myth?

These questions continued to resurface over the next three years—as I came out as a gay man living in largely white spaces but with many connections to black communities through marriage and the academy—and ultimately, they formed the basis of my dissertation research. When I transitioned to my first professional job as the

University of Kentucky’s inaugural Director of LGBT Resources in 2015, I continued to encounter situations where highly educated individuals espoused the belief that black communities have always been and continue to be the most homophobic places in the country. One of these most significant interactions took place when, in 2016, an openly black queer colleague proclaimed that while she appreciated my interest in understanding homophobia in black communities, my overall assertions were off-base. To her, black communities had always been and would continue to be bastions of homophobia unrivaled by any other racialized communities in the US. I was frequently reminded of 11 her comments when working to engage black queer students and employees on campus who rarely interfaced with our advocacy and community building projects. While I do not discount the very real lived experiences that led this colleague to believe that black

Americans were more homophobic than other racial groups, or, at least, more homophobic than their white counterparts, a historical analysis of black communities over the past century tells a different story.1

As the dissertation title suggests and this colleague often asserted, religion played a key role in the development of the mythology of black homophobia. Sodom and

Gomorrah are the biblical cities that the god of the Old Testament supposedly destroyed after an attempt by men of the city to capture and rape two male-bodied angels who were visiting. The implications of this story have been used for centuries to justify homophobia and anti-queer actions in Christian churches and more broadly in regions steeped in

Christian traditions in the US and around the globe.2 Additional biblical passages used to justify homophobia in these same places were referenced in many of the archives and oral histories that play a role in this project. Most often, verses in Leviticus and Romans were used to reinforce a belief that a man should not “lie with a man as with a woman”

1 As the situation with this colleague illustrates, the myth of pervasive homophobia in black communities has been so widely believed in recent decades that it has been internalized by many African Americans and become self-perpetuating. 2 This destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah is detailed in the Book of Genesis (19:1-25). It is important to note that some theologians in the recent past have interpreted this portion of Genesis to refer to the cities being destroyed because their inhabitants transgressed the important Old Testament standards of hospitality rather than because of attempted sodomy and homosexual activity. One example of this reinterpretation is Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng, “What Was the Real Sin of Sodom,” Huffington Post, June 20, 2010, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-patrick-s-cheng-phd/what-was-the-real-sin-of_b_543996.html, accessed August 13, 2018. 12 because it is an “abomination.”3 These verses were often cited in conversations I had related to this project, especially in listening to the queer black individuals whose oral histories are incorporated into the final chapter. While these passages have been used by

Christian groups of all races to marginalize queer individuals and stifle conversations about inclusion, they clearly operate in unique ways in black churches and communities, necessitating a process of deconstruction to understand whether the myth of black homophobia is, in fact, accurate and fair.

Ultimately, this project’s five chapters explore and challenge the assertion that black communities have been and continue to be the most homophobic places in the country. Chapter One frames the modern myth of black homophobia and creates a point from which to analyze claims about the nature of black spheres and black queerness.

Beginning with a comparison of the legacies of professional black athletes who shattered barriers in their sports, the chapter compares Jackie Robinson’s crossing race barriers in baseball to Jason Collins’s crossing queer barriers in basketball. While the two athletes were from different generations and lived in very different times, once Collins came out as gay, significant numbers of commentators compared their two stories as a way of highlighting how they expected blacks would respond to Collins negatively because of his sexuality. As seen through this juxtaposition and other examples, beginning in the

1990s, the mainstream media promoted the notion that while black sports fans across the country heralded Jackie Robinson as a positive change agent, they believed Collins was

3 Lev. 18:22. 13 an embarrassment to the race because of his queerness. In those commentaries, most claims were rooted in a belief that pervasive homophobia existed in black communities.

Additionally, Chapter One frames the myth of black homophobia through the lens of commentary on Barack Obama’s support of same-sex marriage and the national struggle to legalize marriage equality. Talking heads and journalists posited that Obama must have pulled back from supporting marriage equality sometime between his 1996 election to the Illinois state Senate and his 2008 US presidential campaign because he was afraid of the support he would lose from black voters—even as the first viable black candidate in history for the nation’s highest office—if he openly supported same-sex marriage equality. Beyond the supposed issues faced by Obama when it came to black voters and queer causes, black voters were blamed for several other significant setbacks for LGBT communities, most notably the passage of Proposition 8 in California in 2008.

This chapter winds down by juxtaposing the racial discourse surrounding Prop 8 with that around Question 6 in Maryland four years later, when voters narrowly approved marriage equality at the ballot box.

After clearly articulating that the myth of black homophobia was alive and thriving by the 2000s, Chapter Two challenges this myth by highlighting the fact that in the first half of the twentieth century, black urban communities sustained—or at least allowed—open queerness from New York to Chicago to New Orleans. These trends were also evident when examining black cultural productions that were consumed by black

Americans in both the North and the South, in urban and rural areas, during the first half of the century. The most significant of these cultural productions were the blues and jazz 14 music scenes from the 1910s to the 1940s—scenes defined by the singers who themselves often lived very queer lives and wove queer themes into their songs. While this flourishing happened in black areas prior to the 1950s, postwar white communities worked feverishly to identify and eradicate queerness in their midst, as the Lavender

Scare and other intensely anti-queer white campaigns demonstrated. This juxtaposition certainly challenged the notion that black communities were more homophobic than their white counterparts at the time, destabilizing the myth of black homophobia and begging the question of how the narrative came to exist in the first place.

Building on the historical examples of queerness being tolerated or even flourishing in black communities prior to the 1950s, Chapter Three explores reasons that this myth came to exist, be widely consumed, and largely believed by Americans by the end of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, the open queerness in black communities began to close, and by the beginning of the 1960s, it was nearly unrecognizable.

Although there were certainly many contributing factors to this disintegration of public displays of queerness, the most significant catalyst for the decrease in visibility was directly tied to the rise of the black middle-class-led Civil Rights Movement in the same period. This movement that accelerated after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v.

Board decision and continued through Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968 placed socially conservative black clergy as the spokespersons and unrivaled leaders of black organizing.4 In this role, clergy-activists advanced a politics of respectability that

4 Although there were other organizations associated with the Civil Rights Movement—including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers—this dissertation specifically focuses on the classic middle-class led movement from 1954 to 1968. 15 framed upstanding black citizens as worthy of first-class rights. The chapter also explores how this obsession with respectability in black communities created the unique phenomenon of Sexual Plausible Deniability that allowed for queer behavior in private circles but punished undeniably public queer displays for political reasons.5 In summary, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was a major factor in driving queer displays in black neighborhoods underground, as black queer leaders and lay people had to provide

Sexual Plausible Deniability to their racial communities and the politics of acceptability dominated the strategies of the black middle-class-led movement.

Understanding that conservative black clergy began playing even more significant roles in their communities as nearly unrivaled mouthpieces for the Civil Rights

Movement, Chapter Four investigates the history of mainline black Christian denominations and the congregations that these black ministers led. This historiographical overview provides perspective on why black churches grew to be such integral parts of their parishioners’ lives and why they were subsequently the hubs for activism in the 1950s and 1960s. This exploration delves into the founding of several denominations to understand how these institutions became places that very publicly espoused homophobic positions from pulpits while still preserving room for queerness to exist just beneath the surface of conversations in the pews and choir lofts.

Finally, Chapter Five explores one of the most significant long-term impacts of the rise of black mainline denominations and their conservative ministers from the 1950s

5 Sexual Plausible Deniability is an original concept developed by Lance Poston and presented for the first time in this dissertation. 16 onward. While these ministers played key roles in developing crucial community services and activist dialogues, their more prominent leadership came at a cost. They did not completely extinguish the unique pre-1950 toleration for queerness in black communities, but they were absolutely central to driving queerness underground and thus fueling the expansion of Sexual Plausible Deniability. Queer expressions by black people in black places continued to exist, often in very visible or widely understood ways within black circles, but the potential for open conversations about queerness and queer acts evaporated. Through exploring archival materials and oral histories, this final chapter tracks the continued promotion of the politics of black respectability to the rise of a pervasive phenomenon of Sexual Plausible Deniability and, from there, to the emergence of a distinct culture of the Down Low. In short, this culture of “living on the Down Low” entails black men who have sex with men but who do not openly acknowledge their actions and may not connect them with a queer identity. Due to the secretive nature of these sexual patterns, the Down Low would have been very difficult for community members and researchers to discover had it not been for the outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the

1980s and 1990s. In the end, the virus that brought these patterns into the light is yet another of the most significant lasting negative consequences of Sexual Plausible

Deniability, as HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths remain disproportionately high in

US black communities.

As the chapter outline suggests, this project focuses specifically on the experiences of black cisgender queer men in the United States. Women’s voices are only integrated at points where they provide helpful context for the overall exploration of 17 black spaces or historical moments and how non-heteronormative black men navigated them. Limiting the scope in this way was a very intentional choice to curtail the research and narrative to a manageable size as well as a recognition that the particular social constructions and other forces that impact black men’s lives do so in unique ways in relation to masculinity and understandings of what it means to be an acceptable and upstanding black man. Said another way, there are certainly many unique and rich experiences of other black queer communities—including of black lesbian and transgender individuals—but their experiences are different enough to warrant separate explorations of the unique issues and celebrations woven through their histories.

In terms of the evidence for this dissertation, significant portions of

Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah were informed by the groundbreaking work of scholar E. Patrick Johnson, portions of which were published in his 2008 book, Sweet

Tea: Black Gay Men of the South.6 In combination with the men I interviewed specifically for this dissertation project, dozens of Johnson’s early 2000s interviews of black queer men directly influenced the major developments and arguments in this dissertation. Many of their voices are quoted in the final pages, giving intimate examples of the impact of Sexual Plausible Deniability. Sadly, in the decade following the last oral history that Johnson completed, no large oral history of black queer men in the US has been created. Addressing deficits in both the historiographies of black Americans and

6 E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South: An Oral History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011, rev. ed.) 18 queer Americans, the following pages explore a rich intersection of queerness and blackness in America that spans more than a century.

It is important to note that, according to the myth of black homophobia, the sources used in this project should not exist. And yet, they do exist. The individual oral histories that are so crucial to uncovering this historical narrative are dynamic and diverse yet significantly similar when discussing queer experiences in black churches, black neighborhoods, and Down Low scenes. These sources would not exist if they had not been intentionally created by scholars—including the extensive archive created by

Johnson and the more modest additions unique to this dissertation—and freely shared by courageous black men who often risked a great deal by being open about their experiences and networks. To continue the necessary diversification of American historical narratives—especially through the use of intersectional lenses that complicate status quo, one-dimensional understandings of our pasts and the people who made them—we must work harder to identify, create, and preserve often-overlooked stories that have been and continue to be important pieces of the American Experience.

Similarly, this project involved reinterpreting existing archival sources in new ways, often reading against the grain of documents that were preserved so that future generations could understand something altogether different about their past. This alternative reading meant looking for patterns in archival material from the 1940s to the

2000s housed in carefully curated collections from Virginia to California. It also meant listening carefully to silences: noticing the pause in the voice of an oral history interviewee or the scribbles in the corner of a newspaper clipping. 19

As I worked to create new sources of historical knowledge and focused on reading against the grain of existing collections, I was often reminded of advice historian

John Howard gave me in my earliest stages of research. Howard noted that since queer lives have existed in all times and places, queer histories have as well. However, we must be willing to ask queer questions and employ queer means to understand those parts of our pasts and inform our futures. Using queer means, Deconstructing Sodom and

Gomorrah explores individual and community experiences that are torn between multiple social, political, and historical worlds. Not integrated into established black history narratives and on the margins of queer history narratives, black male queerness appears largely absent in the story of the United States and its past. Perhaps worse, this seeming absence supports an unfair and untrue narrative about black communities while limiting language available to talk about social and public health issues that disproportionately impact African Americans. Hopefully, through challenging widespread myths and exploring deeply engrained taboos, we can begin to understand the past in new ways that create greater respect and inclusion for queer individuals in the future.

CHAPTER 1: THE PARADOX OF JACKIE ROBINSON AND JASON COLLINS:

IDENTIFYING THE MODERN MYTH OF BLACK HOMOPHOBIA

As he walked onto Ebbets Field and took his place at first base on April 15, 1947,

Jackie Robinson represented a great deal more than simply the newest Brooklyn Dodgers recruit. When he signed with the Dodgers weeks earlier, Robinson broke the color line in

Major League Baseball, ending the segregation in the professional sport that stretched back almost to the Civil War. Certainly not all Brooklyn fans were pleased that the team’s management had broken the decades-old divide that separated white and black players, relegating the latter to the Negro Leagues. In addition, some major league teams, most notably the St. Louis Cardinals, threatened to go on strike in response to Robinson breaking the barrier and the integration that he represented. While few white players ultimately followed through on their threats to boycott, and many white Dodgers fans remained loyal supporters of the team in spite of racial issues, Robinson’s most steadfast fan base drew from black communities in New York and around the country. In fact, as he took the field on that spring day, over half of the 27,000 fans in attendance were black.

For African Americans, Robinson’s skill and perseverance made him a symbol of pride.

He embodied the aspirations of his race that would be fully realized in the coming era of upheaval, as black Americans refused to accept their second-class citizenship any longer.

Both literally and figuratively, Robinson was a game-changer.7

Sixty-six springs later, Americans watched another sports first unfold. Rather than crowding into a stadium in Brooklyn, enthusiasts around the country gathered around

7 Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 158-187. 21 newsstands, mailboxes, and computers to read the May 6, 2013 edition of Sports

Illustrated.8 Much like the center of attention on the baseball diamond decades earlier, the focal point of the magazine’s cover was a lean and muscular black man with an important story to tell. Jason Collins, a professional basketball center who eventually played for the Brooklyn Nets at the Barclays Center, just two miles from the former site of Ebbets Field, captured the nation’s attention by publicly coming out of the closet in the pages of SI.9 Similar to Robinson shattering baseball’s color line, Collins broke sexuality barriers by becoming one of the very first male athletes in a US professional sport to come out as homosexual during his active playing career.10 Soon after the cover story announcement, activists, journalists, and social commentators began drawing connections between Collins coming out as the first openly gay NBA player and Robinson taking the field as the first black major league baseball player in the twentieth century. Some commentators went as far as to call Collins “the New Jackie Robinson.”11 Regardless of

8 Christian Stone, “Jason Collins,” Sports Illustrated, May 6, 2013, https://www.si.com/vault/2013/05/06/106319488/jason-collins, accessed April 5, 2018. 9 Although Collins played for the Washington Wizards in 2013, he joined the Brooklyn Nets in 2014. 10 Collins was one of the first male professional athletes to publicly come out as gay, and was part of an even smaller number of black athletes to do so at the time. A partial list of other professional athletes in the US who came out prior to 2013 would feature tennis legends Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova; Greg Louganis, a four-time Olympic gold medalist in diving; soccer player Robbie Rogers; baseball player Glenn Burke; football players Dave Kopay and Ray McDonald; and numerous women’s basketball players, including openly lesbian and bisexual African American stars such as Sheryl Swoopes, Seimone Augustus, and Brittney Griner. Burke came out to teammates and team owners during his career, but not to the broader public, while Kopay, McDonald, and a few other NFL players came out after retirement. Rogers, a former member of the US men’s national team, came out publicly a few months before Collins while playing for the Los Angeles Galaxy. 11 The most popular news piece discussing comparisons between Collins and Robinson was Gail Shister’s piece in Phillymag published on April 30, 2013, one day after digital copies of the Sports Illustrated story became public. Shister, “Jason Collins Isn’t the Gay Jackie Robinson,” Phillymag, April 30, 2013, https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/04/30/jason-collins-gay-nba-jackie-robinson/, accessed April 5, 2018. 22 comparisons between Robinson’s all-star talent and Collins’ far more modest professional career, both of these athletes broke historic ground in US sports.

To be sure, Robinson’s identity as a straight black man meant that he was not condemned by fellow African Americans for transgressing heteronormative standards.

However, when significant media coverage of Jason Collins in 2013 portrayed the two athletes as comparable leaders in terms of breaking boundaries, it also painted twenty- first century black communities as only being committed to a particular model of civil rights advocacy. In essence, the mainstream media promoted the idea that while black sports fans and community leaders heralded Jackie Robinson in 1947 as a positive political agent for change, in 2013, they saw Collins as an embarrassment or a traitor to their race. Painting with broad strokes, reporters and social critics alike believed that

Jason Collins would receive the worst reception from individuals of his own race because, as the popular mainstream US perception had developed over the previous twenty years, blacks were thought to be the most broadly homophobic demographic in the country.

Writing for the ESPN-affiliated blog Grantland the same month that the Collins piece appeared in Sports Illustrated, Charles Pierce noted that “Homophobia in the black community—indeed, even among the leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1960s— was some of the most virulent and stubborn of all, and there are still some who resent the equation of the gay rights movement with their struggle.”12 Outside of proclaiming that

12 Charles P. Pierce, “The Decision,” Grantland, April 30, 2013, http://grantland.com/features/jason- collins-comes-out/, accessed April 6, 2018. 23 most if not all blacks in the United States were presently and had been historically the most adamant gay-haters in the country, some commentators were concerned with

Collins’s reception and safety in the NBA. Gail Shister, a lesbian sportswriter from

Philadelphia, explained that what made “the NBA unique is that almost 80 percent of the players are black, and black men are notorious homophobes when it comes to one of their own.”13 It is significant that both Pierce—a nationally renowned, politically progressive writer on sports and national politics—and Shister—a lesbian sports journalist—bought into a narrative of black homophobia. In an especially convoluted web of revelations and accusations, the decades-old belief that black communities were the most intolerant toward sexual minorities reemerged on the national stage.

Writing in response to hastily published pieces like Pierce’s Grantland article,

Maya Francis of Philadelphia Magazine commented that one of the main social byproducts of Collins coming out was that “suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about how homophobic black people are. All of us.”14 Such articles in mainstream media outlets reinforced the fact that many people in the United States from different racial and class backgrounds believed that black Americans were overwhelmingly intolerant of homosexuality. Beyond pointing out the general absurdity of these claims, some writers began to offer reasons that a general myth of black homophobia persists. In a piece for

Salon on April 29, 2013, black military veteran and LGBT activist Rob Smith reflected

13 Shister, “Jason Collins Isn’t the Gay Jackie Robinson.” 14 Maya K. Francis, “Myths About Homophobia and the Black Community,” Philadelphia Magazine, May 6, 2013, https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/05/06/myths-homophobia-black-community, accessed April 25, 2018. 24 on his experiences as a gay black man in order to shine light on how these broad assumptions about black communities took root. His article began by praising Collins for publicly coming out about his sexuality because, growing up, Smith lacked any black gay role models in sports, on television, or elsewhere in the public eye. In contrast, popular depictions of healthy gay men focused on youthful white individuals, causing him to feel isolated. Even as depictions of white gays in popular culture multiplied in the late 2000s and early 2010s with productions like The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Glee, and Modern

Family, depictions of black queerness in the same media were nearly nonexistent.

Perhaps, according to Smith, this lack of black queer images was connected to popular perceptions that blacks were the most homophobic group in the US. He did acknowledge being told to “man up,” not to cry or show emotion as a black male youth, and he recalled hearing a black pastor preach about the “punks and sissies” at fault for the world’s woes.

Smith concluded, “being black and gay is tricky business.”15 Combined with the socially conservative nature of mainline black Protestant churches, Smith believed that hyper- masculinity in black communities led to a situation where black gay men often lived in shame and secrecy.

Throwing its hat into the ring, National Public Radio ran a story on May 2, 2013 that attempted to summarize recent articles addressing Collins and the myth of black homophobia. The story posited that statistics about black loyalty to the Democratic

Party—the same party whose socially progressive ideals have aligned it with LGBT

15 Rob Smith, “Jason Collins: Black—and gay—like me,” Salon, April 29, 2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/jason_collins_black_and_gay_like_me/, accessed April 6, 2018. 25 causes since the late 1990s—made a bold statement. The article pointed out that since the

New Deal, black voters have consistently and overwhelmingly voted for Democratic candidates and causes, and argued that if black communities were as truly and pervasively homophobic as some believed, this trend would not have been easily possible.16 Ultimately, the NPR article concluded that, at the very least, “the numbers paint a far messier picture than the trope” of virulent black homophobia.17

The tension between black voting patterns demonstrating overwhelming support for the Democratic Party and an entrenched narrative of pervasive black homophobia factored into media reactions to President Barack Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality in 2012, the year before Collins came out publicly. In short, although Obama supported legalizing same-sex marriage as far back as 1996, when he was a candidate seeking election to the Illinois Senate, he pulled back public support while running for the US Senate in 2004 and for President in 2008. In fact, during his first presidential election campaign, Obama articulated little support for the legalization of same-sex marriage, offering civil unions as a viable alternative. Some political commentators

16 Put more simply: black voters have remained fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party, even as it has increasingly embraced LGBT causes over the past several decades. It is worth noting that some of the staunchest long-term straight allies of the US LGBT movement have been members of the Congressional Black Caucuses on national and state levels. For example, see Kenneth Sherrill, “Affidavit of Kenneth Sherrill: On Gay People as a Politically Powerless Group,” in Marc Wolinsky and Kenneth Sherrill, eds., Gays and the Military: Joseph Steffan versus the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 100. 17 Gene Demby, “Crunching The Numbers on Blacks’ Views on Gays,” NPR, Code Switch, May 2, 2013, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/05/02/180548388/crunch-the-numbers-on-blacks-views-on- gays, accessed April 20, 2018. Also see Adam Serwer’s article in Mother Jones, which points out similar issues with unwavering black support for the Democratic Party juxtaposed with myths of pervasive homophobia, while also systematically dismantling Charlie Pierce’s Grantland essay. Serwer, “Don’t Use Jason Collins As an Excuse to Blame Homophobia on Black People,” Mother Jones, May 1, 2013, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/jason-collins-charles-pierce-civil-rights-black- homophobia/, accessed April 20, 2018. 26 believed his shift away from advocating marriage equality was a tactic to reposition himself as a more electable candidate on a national stage. Going further, some critics believed that one of the biggest reasons that Obama pulled back on his support for marriage equality was to appease leaders in black communities who would be less likely to support his eventual presidential candidacy—regardless of his status as the first viable black candidate for the nation’s highest office—if he publicly endorsed this right for same-sex couples.18

The various reasons that Obama’s views on same-sex marriage changed between

1996 and 2004 may never be fully known—including whether concerns over potential black reactions played any significant factor. But his evolution certainly represented a reaction to the national political environment, and his changing stance could be interpreted as reflecting an overall national shift from opposition to marriage equality in the 1990s and early 2000s to increased support by the 2010s. On May 9, 2012, however,

Obama unequivocally reversed his public position on marriage equality in an interview with Robin Roberts on ABC’s Good Morning America. During this conversation with

Roberts—who later came out to the nation as a black lesbian—Obama fully endorsed same-sex marriage by noting, “I’ve concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”19

18 A significant portion of the January 14, 2009 edition of the Windy City Times, a Chicago LGBT newspaper, was devoted to exploring Obama’s transition from supporting legal same-sex marriage in the mid-1990s to endorsing civil unions as an acceptable alternative. Obama articulated this shift between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s in multiple public appearances, including in a November 2008 MTV interview where he stated that marriage should be “between a man and a woman.” 19 “Transcript: Robin Roberts ABC News Interview with President Obama,” ABC News, May 9, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/transcript-robin-roberts-abc-news-interview-president- obama/story?id=16316043, accessed April 20, 2018. 27

The President spoke from a personal perspective without offering any policy recommendations to legalize same-sex marriage in the majority of states that did not yet recognize these marriages. But his statement was heralded as a huge victory by many

LGBT activists and progressive strategists alike. On the other hand, while many left- leaning Americans and political pundits saw Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage as groundbreaking, others worried that the President’s words would repel black voters in the upcoming election, costing him a second term.

Even before the interview aired, as word spread of Obama’s upcoming endorsement of same-sex marriage, journalists and social critics wondered if Obama had overplayed his hand with black Americans. Reflecting the myth of black homophobia,

Time published an op-ed, “Will Black Voters Punish Obama for His Support of Gay

Rights?” on the same day that Roberts interviewed Obama. The headline of the piece—an essay by Touré, a guest columnist who often writes about black politics and culture— seemed to pose an open question. But the text offered a rather definite opinion that

Obama had “thrown political caution to the wind,” and while he might “be on the right side of history…[he was] on the wrong side of a crucial voting bloc.”20 In the end,

Obama won a second term with over 51 percent of the popular vote. Over 93 percent of blacks that voted in the 2012 election cast their ballots for Obama, reflecting almost the exact same black voter support he received in 2008. Although media coverage and commentator hubbub opined that Obama had substantially risked black votes by

20 Touré, “Will Black Voters Punish Obama for His Support of Gay Rights?,” Time, May 9, 2012, http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/09/will-black-voters-punish-obama-for-his-support-of-gay-rights/, accessed April 20, 2018. 28 endorsing same-sex marriage, the final election numbers unequivocally dispelled those notions.21

Taking for granted the myth of black homophobia, political strategists and critics claimed that left-leaning political candidates could only hurt their reputations and electability in black communities by endorsing LGBT rights in general or same-sex marriage specifically. Parallel to the fear that many felt about Obama potentially losing black support after backing same-sex marriage, many white Americans blamed black communities for resisting and often actively organizing against marriage equality in many different states. The belief in the power of black anti-gay voting blocs was nowhere more evident than in discussions about the passage of Proposition 8, which reversed the state Supreme Court decision that allowed same-sex marriages to take place in

California.22 Although the passage of this homophobic 2008 ballot initiative was organized and funded overwhelmingly by predominately white religious groups in the

US—mainly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Catholic Church—

21 “Election 2012: President Poll Data: 2012 Results/Change from 2008,” New York Times, updated November 29, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2012/results/president/exit-polls.html, accessed July 19, 2018; Federal Election Commission, “Federal Elections 2012: Election Results for the U.S. President, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives,” July 2013, https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.pdf, accessed July 19, 2018. 22 In addition to blaming black anti-gay voting blocs for the passage of Proposition 8, Latino voters in the state have been the focus of similar attention. Although this project does not explore the intersections of sexuality and race or ethnicity in the context of Latino communities, some studies have shown similar religious patterns among young queer Latinos and African Americans that could have implications for further analysis of Proposition 8. For more information on these intersections, refer to Ilan Meyer’s “Religious Affiliation, Internalized Homophobia, and Mental Health in Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals.” 29 the media placed a great deal of the blame for the passage of this repressive legislation on black Californians.23

Indeed, some pundits attributed the passage of Proposition 8 and the repeal of marriage equality to high black voter turnout, spurred by the prospect of electing the first black President. For a November 13, 2008 piece in Slate, William Saletan argued that a

“surge of black turnout, inspired by Barack Obama, didn’t help liberals in the Proposition

8 fight. In fact, it was a big reason why they lost. The gay marriage problem is becoming a black problem.”24 Targeting black communities as one of the main sources of voters who voted for Proposition 8, Saletan further claimed that, according to exit polls, “Whites and Asian-Americans, comprising 69 percent of California’s electorate, opposed

Proposition 8 by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent. Latinos favored it, 53-47. But blacks turned out in historically high numbers—10 percent of the electorate—and 70 percent of them voted for Proposition 8.”

Although this and many similar articles posited blacks as one of the largest roadblocks to the attainment of civil rights for queer Californians, they were hardly alone in incorrectly blaming blacks for resisting the recognition of same-sex marriage across

23 For examples of the money and time that the Mormon and Catholic Churches devoted to Proposition 8, see Jesse McKinley and Kirk Johnson, “Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage,” New York Times, November 14, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.html, accessed July 19, 2018; Maura Dolan, “Prop. 8 Challengers Highlight Religion’s Role in Campaign,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/21/local/la-me-prop8-trial21-2010jan21, accessed July 19, 2018. It is important to note that polling data used in this paragraph and throughout the dissertation provide snapshots of positions on political and social issues at specific points in time. While these polls can be very useful in illustrating particular points, they can be problematic or skewed due to limits in scope and sample size. 24 William Saletan, “Original Skin: Blacks, Gays, and Immutability,” Slate, November 13, 2008, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2008/11/original_skin.html, accessed April 25, 2018. 30 the country. In fact, in a rush to publish stories that fit already established narratives about pervasive black homophobia, these commentators and analysts produced pieces that confirmed their own biases. In the months following the passage of Proposition 8, analysts began to fight the notion that black communities were to blame for the ending of same-sex marriages in California. They reexamined voting and polling data, ultimately finding that generational and religious divides were more to blame for its passage than any specific racial group. Even though much of the statistical evidence underlying this generational analysis seemed quite sound, the data received little coverage as compared to discussions portraying blacks as homophobic.25

On a similar note, there has been no shortage of national surveys that have fueled the notion of pervasive black homophobia in recent years. In 2003, Gregory Lewis of

Georgia State University combined several recent studies of black communities to develop an often-cited article published in Public Opinion Quarterly. After synthesizing several prominent polls, Lewis concluded that “blacks are substantially more religious than whites, more likely to be fundamentalist Protestants, and more likely to believe in a

God who sends misfortunes as punishments.” In the end, he calculated that “blacks are 11 percent more likely than whites to condemn homosexual relations as ‘always wrong’ and

14 percent more likely to see them warranting ‘God’s punishment.’”26 Building on this broad generalization that blacks were more socially and religiously conservative than

25 Nate Silver, “Prop 8 Myths,” FiveThirtyEight, November 11, 2008, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/prop-8-myths/, accessed April 27, 2018. 26 Gregory Lewis, “Black-White Differences in Attitudes Toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights,” Public Opinion Quarterly 67, 1 (March 2003), 63-66. 31 their white counterparts, thereby making them more homophobic, other studies have continued to provide data that seemingly support the myth of black homophobia. In both

2003 and 2006, national Pew surveys found that approximately 32 percent of whites and

Latinos believed that homosexuality was innate and decided at birth, 15 percent said it was caused by upbringing, and 40 percent said it was a lifestyle preference. The same surveys found that only 15 percent of blacks believed that homosexuality was innate and

58 percent believed that it was a lifestyle preference. Furthermore, Pew found that nearly

60 percent of blacks believed that a person’s homosexuality could be changed while fewer than half of whites polled held that opinion.27

Additionally, reports from the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC)—a black

LGBT advocacy organization—published between 2005 and 2012 indicated that while marriage equality and other LGBT-related causes were winning greater support in white and Latino communities, blacks were holding firm in their homophobia. First, the reports cited President George Bush’s re-election in 2004 as a sign that black communities could be mobilized in support of anti-gay policies by crediting opposition to marriage equality for the huge increase in numbers of black Midwesterners voting for Republicans.28

Additionally, the NBJC cited surveys “showing that 65% of African-Americans are opposed to marriage equality compared to 53% of Whites…and are…less than half as

27 The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “Republicans Unified, Democrats Split on Gay Marriage,” November 18, 2003, http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/legacy-pdf/197.pdf, accessed July 19, 2018. For longer trends on same-sex marriage by religious affiliation and race between 2001 and 2017 see http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ 28 See, for example, C. Nicole Mason, “At the Crossroads: African-American Attitudes, Perceptions, and Beliefs Toward Marriage Equality: A Report by the National Black Justice Coalition in Partnership with Freedom to Marry,” (Washington, DC: Mason Consulting Group, 2009). 32 likely to support marriage equality and legal recognition of same-sex civil unions as

Whites.” Perhaps the most damning indictment of black communities as the most homophobic population in the US lay in the NBJC’s statistics that indicated that while other racial groups were becoming more tolerant or accepting of LGBT individuals and their rights—especially when comparing younger and older members of the same community—twenty percent more black youth than white still believe that homosexuality was always wrong.29

While many of the surveys referenced in the preceding paragraphs seem to support the myth of pervasive homophobia in black communities, there were flaws in the interpretation of the statistics that call those assertions into question. Asserting that these surveys proved race was the most significant category of difference among Americans when looking at positions on marriage equality ignored the more significant generational and religious divides that were evident in many of their data sets. For example, Pew data showed that, when analyzing attitudes about same-sex marriage by religious affiliation between 2001 and 2017, support for equality was significantly lower in white evangelical

Protestant communities than in black Protestant communities. While the specific difference in support between white evangelical and black Protestant communities changed from year to year, black Protestants were at least eight percentage points—and as much as twenty percentage points—more supportive than white evangelicals.30 One explanation for overlooking this significant comparison is that media sources often ran

29 Saletan, “Original Skin.” 30 These statistics came from the “Attitudes on same-sex marriage by religious affiliation” section of http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ 33 with stories that reflected an incomplete analysis of these polls in a rush to adhere to the preconceived black homophobia narrative.

Nearly 3000 miles across the country and four years after Proposition 8 battles in

California, the NBJC dove deeply into a similar campaign to preserve marriage equality in Maryland. In February 2012, the Maryland General Assembly passed the Civil

Marriage Protection Act (CMPA) establishing “that Maryland’s civil marriage laws allow gay and lesbian couples to obtain a civil marriage license.”31 Governor Martin O’Malley signed that law into effect the following month. However, opponents of same-sex marriage quickly launched a petition campaign to put the new law to a vote, hopeful that the citizens of Maryland would repeal it. After gathering more than enough signatures to put the referendum on the November ballot, campaigns to both preserve and defeat the

CMPA—which was listed as ballot Question 6—went into full swing.

This struggle to preserve marriage equality in Maryland caught national attention.

Using language similar to that of supporters of Proposition 8 in California, many politicians and news outlets focused on black communities as crucial roadblocks to

LGBT rights in the state. The commentary framing black Marylanders as homophobic garnered enough national attention that noted filmmaker Yoruba Richen began filming a documentary investigating the impact of race on Question 6. With significant funding from the Ford Foundation, Richen’s The New Black followed NBJC’s executive director,

31 Sabrina Tavernise, “In Maryland, House Passes Bill to Let Gays Wed,” New York Times, February 17, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/maryland-house-approves-gay-marriage-measure.html, accessed July 20, 2018; Allen McDuffee, “Maryland Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage,” Washington Post, November 7, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2012/11/07/maryland- legalizes-same-sex-marriage, accessed July 20, 2018. 34

Sharon Lettman-Hicks, and other leading activists in the Maryland initiative battle, in order to shed more critical light on how blacks participated on both sides of the campaign.

For Lettman-Hicks and other black pro-equality activists, marriage equality in general was “the unfinished business of black people being free.”32 On the other hand, opponents of same-sex marriage, many of whom were organized through the anti-LGBT

Maryland Marriage Alliance, dedicated a great deal of resources to organizing in black neighborhoods and corralling homophobic black ministers to act as spokespersons for their cause. In fact, Derek McCoy, the executive director of the Maryland Marriage

Alliance, was a prominent black minister in the state, and many of the Alliance’s most visible campaign signs depicted images of black heterosexual families. This focus on heterosexual black families as the most ideal and respectable way to organize black life was reminiscent of restrictive discourses about black families from a half-century earlier.

These earlier discussions of respectability and the black family will be explored in depth in a later chapter. However, without a doubt, the opinions and votes of black Marylanders were seen as crucial by both sides in this debate.

Beyond media posturing about the homophobic nature of black Marylanders and the battle for black votes on the ground, Maryland represented a comprehensive cross- section of black life in the US. A former slave-holding state that remained in the Union during the Civil War, and sitting adjacent to the global hub that is the nation’s capital,

32 Quoted in The New Black, directed by Yourba Richen ([San Francisco]: California Newsreel, 2013), DVD. 35

Maryland has a substantial black population that is primarily centered in the city of

Baltimore and in the sprawling Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Both of these black population centers sit between the state’s rural Eastern Shore and the Appalachians in the west. Maryland thus reflects a dynamic mix of Southern and Northern, of urban, suburban, and rural that defies simplistic characterization. Likewise, Maryland’s black communities represent the diversity of black America, with both stereotypical poor and working-class black neighborhoods in Baltimore and also some of the richest black communities in the US located in the DC suburb of Prince George’s County. If blacks truly made up the most homophobic demographic group in the country, one would certainly expect them to oppose Question 6 overwhelmingly. After months of campaigning, Maryland voters made their voices heard on November 6, 2012.

In the end, Maryland voters passed the ballot measure, finalizing the legality of same-sex marriage in the state.33 In comparison to the passage of Proposition 8 in

California, Question 6 in Maryland directly called into question the myth of pervasive black homophobia. While blacks were lambasted as the voting bloc that purportedly pushed Proposition 8 to victory, they only made up about 6 percent of California’s population. On the other hand, in Maryland, a state where a majority of voters endorsed the right to marry for same-sex couples, blacks made up roughly 30 percent of the state’s

33 Black voters in Maryland turned out in significant numbers in the 2012 election, not only passing the ballot measure but re-electing Barack Obama with over 97% of the black vote. “America’s Choice 2012: Election Center: President: Maryland: Exit Polls, December 10, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/state/MD/president/, accessed July 21, 2018. 36 population.34 Furthermore, in exit polls conducted by the Associated Press, it appeared that black Marylanders only narrowly voted against same-sex marriage.35 The same polls showed that differences in generational voting patterns were far greater—mirroring the pattern that revisionists in California identified as the actual deciding factor in the passage of Proposition 8. Over two-thirds of Marylanders over the age of 65 voted against equality.36 If, in the words of Sharon Lettman-Hicks, the Question 6 vote was

“one of the first ballot initiatives in the country where black people [could] make a significant impact on the outcome of the election,” then black communities came off as something very different than fundamentally homophobic.37

In reviewing Richen’s documentary for The Village Voice, Ernest Hardy offered an important insight into the myths of homophobia in black communities after watching footage of two black LGBT activists campaigning for Question 6. The positive interactions between the activists and a group of black urban youth struck Hardy as

a moment of unforced loveliness that encapsulates how homophobia plays out in the African-American community—and upends the outsider perception of that community as a hotbed of intolerance. Often the first

34 United States Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census 2010: Maryland: 2010: Population and Housing Unit Counts, July 2012, https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/cph-2-22.pdf, accessed July 21, 2018. 35 While black Marylanders only narrowly voted against same-sex marriage statewide, the two largest black population centers in the state, Baltimore City and Prince George’s County, narrowly voted for marriage equality. “America’s Choice 2012: Election Center: Ballot Measure: Maryland: Maryland Question 6: Allow Same-Sex Marriage, November 8, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/state/MD/ballot/01, accessed July 21, 2018. 36 “Exit Polls: Maryland Voters Who Backed Obama also Favored Same-Sex Marriage,” November 7, 2012; accessed on May 1, 2015; on the headline, also see Walter Olson, “Why Many GOPers Quietly Backed Maryland Question 6,” Huffington Post, November 9, 2012, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/walter-olson/maryland-gay-marriage_b_2094675.html, accessed August 25, 2018. 37 The New Black; also see interview with Lettman-Hicks: Anslem Samuel Rocque, “National Conference Supports Black LGBT,” Jet, September 19, 2012, https://www.jetmag.com/news/national-conference- supports-black-lgbt/, accessed May 3, 2018. 37

and loudest to speak out on gay issues are those with the least enlightened attitudes. But they’re not representative of the whole. More progressive voices—too often rendered invisible by mainstream media—jostle right alongside them. 38

Despite popular perceptions, the Maryland vote indicated that the black community was neither a monolithically homophobic space nor more homophobic than any other race- based group in the US.

Driving home the diversity of opinions in black communities and further complicating the myth of black homophobia, the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) endorsed same-sex marriage in the same year that voters legalized it in Maryland. Shortly after President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, the board of the NAACP passed a resolution stating that the group

“opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the

Constitutional rights of our LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law.”39 Announcing the NAACP’s position, CEO Ben Jealous

(a future Democratic Party nominee in 2018 for Governor of Maryland) noted that the narrative of blacks as more homophobic than members of other racial groups in the US was overhyped. Responding to the NAACP statement, Reverend Dennis Wiley penned an

38 Ernest Hardy, “The New Black and Other Docs Ask, ‘Why Has Black Been Made the Face of Homophobia?’” The Village Voice, July 17, 2013, https://www.villagevoice.com/2013/07/17/the-new- black-and-other-docs-ask-why-has-black-been-made-the-face-of-homophobia/, accessed May 3, 2018. 39 Donovan Slack, “NAACP Backs Gay Marriage,” Politico, May 19, 2012, https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico44/2012/05/naacp-backs-gay-marriage-123964, accessed May 3, 2018. 38 article in the Washington Post that emphasized how all Americans are “products of a culture saturated with anti-gay rhetoric, bigotry, and discrimination,” and that it was inaccurate and unfair to heap the largest amount of blame for national homophobia on black communities.40

It is important to note that many commentators credited President Obama’s statement in support of marriage equality as a major turning point for blacks in the US, prompting major reflection in black communities that contributed to rapid and large-scale shifts. Although it defies credulity that one statement could overcome the deeply entrenched homophobia in black communities that the myth of black homophobia is premised upon, it is far more plausible that Obama’s leadership at this juncture signaled an important moment for African Americans to take a stand against this injustice even though their communities had traditionally shied away from public conversations about sexuality. Furthermore, it also makes sense that Obama’s statement provided yet another significant nudge from a trusted source for black voters who were already seeing key statements in support of marriage equality from the NAACP, the Congressional Black

Caucus, and other important black-led groups. Without a doubt, however, black voters themselves played a crucial role in the outcome of the Maryland election, which in turn marked an important step in the national march toward marriage equality.41

40 Rev. Dennis Wiley, “Same-sex Marriage Support Shows Diversity in African-American Religious Community,” Washington Post, May 16, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/same-sex-marriage- support-shows-diversity-in-african-american-religious-community/2012/05/16/gIQA7v6QUU_story.html, accessed May 3, 2018. 41 For examples of commentators who credited Obama’s statement in support of marriage equality with moving black Maryland voters in the same direction, see David Weigel, “Maryland: A 36-Point Black Surge of Support for Gay Marriage,” Slate, May 24, 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/05/24/maryland_a_36_point_black_surge_of_support_for_gay_m 39

In summary, the modern myth of black homophobia was clearly alive and thriving in the early twenty-first century. Taking root in the late 1990s, the culturally constructed belief that blacks constitute the most homophobic racial group in the United States was taken for granted and repeatedly professed in major news outlets and publications.

Although examples of widespread belief in the myth of black homophobia abound in the last two decades, the four major recent events described above highlight the deeply entrenched nature of this myth. Media coverage of black reactions to California’s

Proposition 8, Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, Maryland’s Question 6, and

Jason Collins’s front-page coming-out story in Sports Illustrated largely presented as self-evident the notion that black communities were only interested in supporting a particular race-based idea of civil rights. Blacks supported Jackie Robinson as a trailblazer and cultural icon, but they supposedly had no tolerance for Jason Collins as another leader for civil rights.

Comparing the marriage equality ballot measures in California and Maryland, it was clear that black voters were targeted by campaigns on both sides of the issues as crucial voting blocs. When Proposition 8 passed in California in 2008, blacks were widely blamed as the reason that marriage equality was repealed there. Using sketchy data, commentators confirmed their biases in support of the myth of black homophobia by declaring that black Californians were the swing voters who caused the proposition to

arriage.html, accessed July 21, 2018; Rebecca Berg, “In Maryland, Gay Marriage Seeks a ‘Yes’ at the Polls,” New York Times, August 25, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/us/in-maryland-gay- marriage-seeks-a-yes-at-the-polls.html, accessed July 21, 2018; and Rod McCullom, “Maryland Voters Approve Same Sex Marriage Law,” November 7, 2012, Ebony, https://www.ebony.com/news- views/maryland-voters-approve-same-sex-marriage-128, accessed July 21, 2018. 40 pass, even though blacks constituted little more than five percent of the state’s population. Four years later in Maryland, when a similar ballot initiative was proposed to decide the fate of marriage equality in a state where blacks constituted a percentage of the population that was six times greater than in California, equality prevailed.

Exploring the rhetoric and political issues that have been used to demonize black communities as the most homophobic places in the country makes clear why many

Americans believe in the myth that US blacks pervasively hate gays. Said another way, this chapter shows that the myth of black homophobia remains active in the minds of many Americans. On the other hand, black voting patterns often call into question the accuracy of that myth. The remaining chapters in this work offer a historical lens through which one can explain how, when, and why the myth of black homophobia first developed and how it then came to be taken for granted by millions of Americans of all races. Exploring queer toleration in many black communities before the 1950s and understanding the impact that the rise of the middle-class-led Civil Rights Movement had on these places is a prime starting point for understanding the nation’s black population as something other than pervasively homophobic. Extending this historical inquiry to examine the nature and role of black mainline Protestant denominations in the everyday lives of their parishioners and reimagining the ways in which we understand positive expressions of non-heteronormative sexuality—in relation to specific types of theoretical and geographic space—provides new ways to understand queerness in black communities and in the broader multiracial national experience. 41

CHAPTER 2: BEFORE THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT:

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES AND ARGUMENTS FOR

BLACK QUEER TOLERATION BEFORE THE 1950s

From the basketball court to the ballot box, the first chapter pointed out several nationally significant stories that, taken at face value, seemed to reinforce the image of blacks as the most adamant gay-haters in the land. After deeper inspection, however, it was evident that these intersections of race and sexuality were not so clearly defined. In this newfound messiness, black communities can be understood as much more tolerant or even accepting places than popularly believed. At the very least, re-examining the modern myth of black homophobia highlights the fact that, painting with broad strokes, black communities were not measurably more homophobic than their white counterparts.

The presumptions supporting this myth become even weaker when considering the nature of many black communities and cultural productions before the 1950s. After identifying the modern myth of black homophobia in the first chapter, the following pages present the argument that far from being more homophobic than white society, some black communities were at one time much more publicly tolerant than white America. In fact, in many ways, black America could be considered the birthplace of contemporary queer culture. From New York to New Orleans and many places in between, black communities were much more open to queer individuals prior to the 1950s.

Perhaps the prime example of the openness of black communities to non- heteronormative performances of sexuality before the 1950s could be found in Harlem. In

1919, the same year that Jackie Robinson was born in a farmhouse in rural Georgia, the 42 streets of the nation’s most prominent black neighborhood were far from oppressive to queer individuals and expressions. In fact, for much of the time between the turn of the last century and the Second World War, Harlem was arguably the most tolerant space in the country for many expressions that were considered degenerate or subversive by white mainstream culture.

Beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the new century, Harlem developed into a center for black life in the United States. Able to find relatively inexpensive housing in a transitioning neighborhood, many blacks from both the North and South migrated to Harlem just as a real estate crash and changing political landscape made renting space in this section of Upper Manhattan a possibility. By 1920, more than three quarters of the city’s black population lived in Harlem, creating a center for black families, churches, and businesses whose importance reached far beyond the natural border of the Hudson River.42

As Harlem grew into the massive and nationally significant black neighborhood that it became by the 1920s, it enveloped and incorporated a variety of queer or otherwise marginal sexual cultures that had involved black New Yorkers since the 1880s and 1890s.

As historian Kevin Mumford pointed out in his study of New York sex districts from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the earliest examples of socially labeled queer acts often involved interracial encounters. With the birth of sexology as a scientific discipline in the last half of the nineteenth century, the quasi-scientists who devoted their

42 Information on the development of Harlem and black demographics in the 1920s came from George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 245. 43 lives to studying sexual practices and behaviors began to identify and label same-sex attractions and actions. As their profession grew, sexologists began labeling individuals who were attracted to members of their own sex as suffering from gender inversion.

While this act of pathologizing same-sex behaviors created the foundation for later group identities that would shape the culture and politics of gay and lesbian movements in the next century, it also created a record of late-nineteenth century same-sex encounters.43

Ultimately, in studying these records from the 1880s and 1890s, Mumford found that most documented same-sex encounters took place in marginal vice districts that were overwhelmingly black. Additionally, his evidence demonstrated the interplay of race and gender roles in these encounters. In the majority of these encounters, race substituted for gender difference between the participants, often placing black men in the female role.

As Mumford noted,

it should not be surprising…that people forced into the margins…easily assimilated certain concepts and idioms derived from the culture of miscegenation. As inverts hosted black/white dances and attended interracial invert cafes, the fundamental opposition between “races” historically central to “miscegenation” rituals probably enhanced the pleasurable opposition between gender roles.

Ultimately, according to the earliest records in New York, these interracial same-sex and gender-bending actions took place in or near black neighborhoods with some frequency.44

43 Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Knopf, 2014), passim; Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds., Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 44 Kevin Mumford Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in New York and Chicago in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 74-77, quote from 77. 44

The demonstrated frequency of same-sex encounters in black neighborhoods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is admittedly thin. But even so, the record clearly shows that the toleration of queerness in black New York had solidified by the early 1920s. What had begun as invert clubs in interracial, marginal neighborhoods at the end of the nineteenth century quickly turned a couple decades later into thriving hotspots for same-sex interaction in areas with overwhelmingly black populations. At the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, New York was a national, even global epicenter of the new edgy and rambunctious culture that characterized the decade. Rebelling against their parents’ proclaimed Victorian morals, many younger adults in the 1920s sought to rewrite many of the nation’s sexual codes by raising their hem lines, turning up their music, and experimenting with one another in new ways.

Albeit still on the fringes of US society, many sexual inverts and “fairies” also found new communities and spaces for queer encounters during the decade. In New

York, the majority of this queer male activity developed in the overwhelmingly white

Greenwich Village and the predominantly black Harlem. As historian George Chauncey pointed out in his voluminous study of queer male New York, while Greenwich Village gained the reputation as the city’s most degenerate gay neighborhood to outsiders, “many gay men themselves regarded Harlem as the most exciting center of gay life.”45 As accounts from newspapers, popular literature, and police records show, gay life was alive and well in Harlem during the decade. For both black and white visitors and residents of

New York, Harlem was a “homosexual mecca” that continued to blur racial lines in

45 Chauncey, Gay New York, 227. 45 public and offered several types of queer scenes that were much more easily accessible than anywhere else in the country. Ultimately, comparing Harlem and Greenwich

Village, Chauncey noted that many blacks in Harlem “built an extensive gay world in their own community, which in many respects surpassed the Village’s in scope, visibility, and boldness. The Village’s most flamboyant homosexual wore long hair; Harlem’s wore long dresses.”46

Understanding that it would be a mistake to consider Harlem of the 1920s a completely open and accepting queer utopia, the communities and social spaces that developed in the neighborhood certainly represented a great deal more toleration and openness to queerness than most white communities offered at the time. In fact, queer individuals and expressions inhabited numerous types of spaces that constituted multiple edgy sexual scenes in Harlem. The first of these queer Harlem scenes was made up of popular parties held frequently across the neighborhood. Originating in post- emancipation Southern black communities, one of the most prominent queer gathering places in Harlem was the “rent” party. These regular events were named after the primary organizing idea behind holding the gatherings: to allow the hosts to earn enough money to pay their rent. Blacks brought this tradition of celebratory fundraisers from the South to Northern ghettos.

Harlemites regularly threw rent parties that ranged from smaller, intimate gatherings to enormous fests, offering music and a space to dance and drink for a small admission fee. While many types of individuals patronized these events, there was an

46 Chauncey, Gay New York, 244. 46 understanding in many homes that queerness was tolerated and to be expected. In fact, the most popular performers at these events were blues and jazz singers whose lyrics were saturated with queer sexual imagery, a trend discussed in detail later in this chapter.

Beyond the musical selections, this understanding of queer toleration at rent parties was so prevalent that it was often mentioned in local newspaper articles and contemporary fictional literature.47 These primary sources paint clear pictures of drunken revelry with queer individuals scattered throughout the crowd, searching for companions or engaging in non-heteronormative physical exchanges throughout the evening. It is also significant to reinforce that these parties were held in the homes of black Harlemites, situating queerness in the most intimate black locations of the time.

Harlem’s second queer scene took raucousness and unapologetic displays of sexuality to entirely different levels. These parties were often referred to as “buffet flats,” because they happened in private apartments where blacks would often rent rooms for the night, given that many legitimate hotels only served white patrons. Many of these apartments also developed wilder reputations as places where one could go to gamble and meet prostitutes. Some of the most infamous establishments influenced their collective naming by offering “a variety of sexual pleasures cafeteria-style.” These buffet flats catered to many different types of clientele, including queer individuals of many sorts.

47 On rent parties and their Southern roots, see Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 320-321; also see Mumford, Interzones. Local newspaper examples include multiple stories from Harlem’s New York Age in the 1920s; literary examples include Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926) and Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1932). 47

Not all buffet flat patrons attended to search for a sexual partner; many would come simply to watch others copulate. As one participant remembered about one of her favorite haunts, “they had a faggot there that was so great that people used to come there just to watch him make love to another man. He was that great.”48

Spilling out of private homes and apartments and into public spaces, Harlem’s third queer scene developed in the black-owned speakeasies throughout the neighborhood. Although not all speakeasies allowed for the visibility of queer preferences, a significant number of these Prohibition-era establishments were widely known as places where gender bending and same-sex liaisons took place on a regular basis. The central icons of speakeasy queerness were the impersonators who used the spaces both for social gatherings and as places of employment as entertainers. One of the most famous impersonator entertainers was Gladys Bentley, “a 250-pound, masculine, dark-skinned lesbian, who performed all night long in a white tuxedo and top hat [and who was] celebrated for inventing obscene lyrics to popular contemporary melodies.”

Patrons from many different professional backgrounds and social classes—including intellectuals like Langston Hughes—embraced these speakeasies and their colorful impersonators as stimulating and enjoyable places located at the core of their social activities and broader communities.49

A final example of a queer Harlem scene was the costume ball. These balls were held frequently throughout Harlem and were publicly advertised through print media,

48 Garber, “A Spectacle in Color,” 322-323. 49 Garber, “A Spectacle in Color,” 324-325. 48 radio, and word of mouth. These events incorporated female and male impersonators who dressed in lavish clothing and performed for crowds of hundreds or even thousands of individuals. The balls frequently involved competition with prizes for the most liked impersonator and were often connected to a philanthropic cause that received proceeds from the event. The very public nature of these costume balls and their frequent connections to charity provided one of the safest types of spaces for queer expressions.

One of the most popular annual Harlem balls was the Hamilton Lodge Ball, an event that drew more than six thousand audience members in some years. Founded in 1849 and held annually through the 1940s, the Hamilton Lodge Ball was commonly referred to as “the

Faggots Ball” and drew a mixed-race group of entertainers and audience members.50

While many queer individuals were clearly visible during this event, many different types of people attended each year. Attendees included “celebrities, avante garde writers, society matrons, prostitutes, and whole families who sometimes brought their suppers.”

Clearly, beyond being one of the most publicly queer events of its time, the Hamilton

Lodge Ball and other similar costume balls were among the most racially and socially integrated places as well.51

Furthermore, if someone was not lucky enough to be able to attend the Hamilton

Lodge Ball, that person could easily learn about its colorful displays and queer parades

50 It is important to note that Harlem in 1849—the first year that the Hamilton Lodge ball was founded— would not yet have been a majority black neighborhood. The shift of the area to have overwhelmingly black residents began in the 1890s as the result of migrations of black individuals from the South and North to large urban centers, transforming Harlem into a national center of black life by the 1920s. Furthermore, a modern understanding of queerness or same-sex attraction did not yet exist in 1849 and, therefore, one assumes that the character of the Hamilton Lodge Ball changed significantly over the next century. 51 Chauncey, Gay New York, 257-267 (quote from p. 258); Garber, “A Spectacle in Color,” 325-327. 49 through extensive coverage in the black popular press. Beginning in the 1920s, New

York papers like the Amsterdam News and New York Age often printed prominent lengthy stories with photographs detailing the ball.52 Publication of such stories indicates that black New Yorkers were curious about queerness and perhaps even embraced it. And events similar to the Hamilton Lodge Ball occurred in other cities around the country.

The popularity of costume balls in cities with a large black population was clearly evident in the widespread coverage that the nation’s major black newspapers and magazines gave to these events.

One of the major publications that presented stories reflecting the broad appeal of costume balls was Jet. Founded in 1951, this news and culture magazine was consumed by thousands of black US Americans around the country for decades. It was so popular that entertainer Redd Foxx comedically referred to Jet as the “Negro Bible.”53 This central and very significant black cultural production was filled with sexual edginess and queer depictions. From the very beginning of its publication, Jet promoted news and cultural pieces that would have made the editor of a parallel mainstream white publication blush. For example, the cover story in the second edition of the magazine on

November 8, 1951 was entitled “Where People Make Love,” and it focused on the types of places young blacks went for “heavy petting” and other sexual acts. At a basic level, this coverage of sex and sexuality was much more open than white publications of the

52 Chauncey, Gay New York, 258. 53 Robert E. Johnson, “Backstage,” Ebony, Vol. 46, no. 5 (March 1991), 14. 50 early 1950s and demonstrated the broader cultural norms that differed between black and white communities.54

Moving beyond the mostly hetero-focused pieces like “Where People Make

Love,” Jet also promoted dozens of stories that illustrated queerness in black communities. For example, the magazine’s third edition, published on November 15,

1951, featured a two-page story titled “Gay Affair Names Queen,” which detailed a

Chicago costume ball with a lengthy narrative and an array of photographs.55

Furthermore, the strong focus on costume balls and related queerness that was clearly depicted in the earliest editions of Jet continued throughout the early and mid-1950s. In fact, stories related to cross-dressing or other queer representations appeared in print nearly fifty times between the magazine’s first edition in 1951 and the end of 1954.56

Also, these Jet stories were not only limited to events in one region of the country, further demonstrating that public queer spaces were prevalent in black communities across the country from the 1920s through the 1950s. While Harlem certainly accounted for a significant number of the balls covered, parallel events in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati,

Columbus, Detroit, Houston, New Orleans, and Washington, DC also received

54 Jet, Vol. 1, no. 2 (Nov. 8, 1951), cover. 55 “Gay Affair Names Queen,” Jet, Vol. 1, no. 3 (Nov. 15, 1951), 63-64. 56 Examples of other Jet’s queer stories and drag ball coverage between 1951 and 1955 include November 22, 1951; December 13, 1951; February 14, 1952; July 10, 1952; October 2, 1952; November 13, 1952; November 27, 1952; December 11, 1952; January 1, 1953; February 12, 1953; May 28, 1953; June 18, 1953; June 25, 1953; July 9, 1953; July 16, 1953; July 30, 1953; August 6, 1953; August 20, 1953; September 17, 1953; November 12, 1953; November 19, 1953; December 10, 1953; December 24, 1953; April 15, 1954; April 29, 1954; May 13, 1954; August 5, 1954; August 12, 1954; September 23, 1954; November 11, 1954; November 18, 1954; December 9, 1954; March 24, 1955; and October 27, 1955. 51 attention.57 With its coverage reaching urban locations across the country, Jet disseminated queer information to an overwhelmingly black readership clearly interested in updates on costume balls and queer relationships unique to black communities. Similar extensive coverage in mainstream white publications of the 1950s such as Time or Life was nonexistent.

The coverage of multiracial costume performances in Chicago in the November

13, 1952 issue illustrated Jet’s reporting of black queerness outside of New York. This particular article provided a profile of several prominent female impersonators in the

Windy City under the title “Female Impersonators Cavort.” This and related articles provided a colorful narrative and corresponding photographs of multiracial drag performances in black Chicago neighborhoods. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, most of these queer public displays in the city centered in Bronzeville, one of the most vibrant black neighborhoods in the Midwest. Beginning in the 1930s, this neighborhood was the center of the “Pansy Craze” in Chicago – a period of significant growth for the “pansy parlors” across the city that hosted many interracial female impersonator performances and served a significant queer clientele. Some of the most popular of these establishments included the Annex Buffet on South State Street and the Cabin Inn on Cottage Grove

Avenue, both in the heart of black neighborhoods. For several decades, these parlors were centers for the city’s queer life, hosting regular events and annual performances such as

57 Examples include Chicago on March 24, 1955; Washington, DC on May 28, 1953; Cincinnati on July 30, 1953; Boston on July 9, 1953; New Orleans on July 9, 1953; Detroit on November 12, 1953; Houston on September 17, 1953; and Columbus on July 16, 1953. 52

Finnie’s Ball—Chicago’s answer to Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball. Here, Chicagoans of different races openly shared and celebrated queer culture.58

Similarly, Jet stories like the April 29, 1954 feature on Pittsburgh drag balls and impersonators documented shared openness and festiveness in the Steel City’s black communities. Historian Laura Grantmyre chronicled a black community ethos in

Pittsburgh from the 1920s to the 1960s that allowed female impersonators and other queer individuals to integrate into many predominately black social scenes. In the Hill

District, one of the city’s most prominent black neighborhoods during the twentieth century, a community attitude of a “live and let live” reigned and spanned across “ethnic, class, sexual, and racial lines [and thus facilitated] female impersonators’ social integration.”59 Admittedly, not all individuals who lived in or visited the Hill fully embraced the female impersonators who headlined in many of the neighborhood’s most popular bars. But Grantmyre found many instances where community members created close personal relationships with their gender-bending queer neighbors and drove home the fact that “people usually marginalized by respectable society were simply viewed as part of the neighborhood.”60

58 St. Sukie de la Croix, Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 143-154; additional information on the emergence and making of queer culture in early twentieth-century Bronzeville can be found in Tristan Cabello, “Queer Bronzeville: Race, Homosexuality, and Culture in Black Chicago, 1935-1985” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2011) and Cabello, “Queer Bronzeville: The History of African American Gays and Lesbians on Chicago’s South Side,” OutHistory.org, http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/queer-bronzeville, 2008, accessed August 10, 2018. 59 Laura Grantmyre, “‘They Lived Their Life and They Didn’t Bother Anybody’: African American Female Impersonators in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 1920-1960,” American Quarterly, v. 63, no. 4 (Dec. 2011), 983- 1011; quote, p. 1005. 60 Grantmyre, “They Lived Their Life,” 990. 53

These queer individuals and the predominately black spaces they inhabited also attracted spectators from beyond nearby black neighborhoods, further illustrating the important place black communities played in creating room for queer expressions for black and white individuals alike. Outside of performing for interracial audiences in Hill

District bars, female impersonators were also featured prominently in community parades, street scenes, as patrons and stylists in black hair salons, and even in black church spaces. Grantmyre pointed out multiple examples of female impersonators who sang in Hill District church choirs dressed in women’s clothing. Understanding the black church as one of the most respectable institutions in black community life since the Civil

War, the queer performances around their altars in neighborhoods like the Hill showed the integration of queer tolerance in both working-class black bars and respectable middle-class black institutions.61

While examples from Chicago and Pittsburgh show that black queer toleration existed in often overlooked ways in northern black neighborhoods, this zeitgeist of toleration and queer integration was present as well in the US South. Deep in the heart of segregated black New Orleans, the Dew Drop Inn served both as a hub for black business transactions and a consistently queer entertainment scene. Heralded as the “Swankiest

Night Spot in the South,” the Dew Drop Inn stood as a black cultural institution in New

Orleans from the 1940s through the 1960s. Following similar patterns in New York,

Chicago, and Pittsburgh, the Inn was a center for regular entertainment led by female impersonators. Weekly performances and special events drew the region’s female

61 Grantmyre, “They Lived Their Life,” 998. 54 impersonators and queens to the Inn’s stage to present in front of integrated audiences.

For most of those performances, the space was dominated by Patsy Vidalia, a black female impersonator who served as the Inn’s longtime mistress of ceremonies. Although

Vidalia oversaw thousands of shows over the course of decades at the Inn, she was most remembered for her role in the annual Gay Halloween Ball that attracted queer performers from across the South for a show that was very similar to New York’s

Hamilton Lodge Ball or Chicago’s Finnie’s Ball.

As much as the Dew Drop Inn was known for queer figures like Vidalia and the entertainment she oversaw, it was equally well known by the city’s black residents as a center for community and business life. The Inn’s complex included a barbershop, restaurant, and hotel that served as important places for black services and interaction at a time when blacks were legally required to use different facilities than did whites. In total, the combination of the Inn’s three-decade reputation for queer performances and its place as a community hub for black New Orleans further illustrates black queer toleration or even integration during the first half of the twentieth century.62

62 Archival information on the Dew Drop Inn is scarce but multiple news and informational pieces have been published in the last few years drawing on oral histories. These pieces include David Kunian, “Dew Drop Inn,” in knowlouisiana.org: Encyclopedia of Louisiana, David Johnson, ed. (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010–present), March 28, 2013, http://www.knowlouisiana.org/entry/dew-drop-inn, accessed August 10, 2018; Robert Offner, “The Dew Drop Inn: Past, Present and Future,” Beat Magazine, December 1, 2012, http://www.offbeat.com/articles/the-dew-drop-inn-past-present-future/, accessed August 10, 2018; John Burnett, “As New Orleans Recovers, Will The Dew Drop Inn Swing Again,” NPR: Morning Edition, August 24, 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/08/24/434209433/will-the-dew-drop-inn- swing-again-attempts-to-revive-new-orleans-hot-spot, accessed August 10, 2018. The establishment is also the subject of the 1970 song, “Drew Drop Inn,” by Little Richard – himself a topic of queer black fascination and tolerance. 55

As with most power dynamics in the Cold War US South, queer cultures and spaces in the region were dominated by white men, and scholars have noted the lack of black gay men or lesbians in public leadership roles. However, the female impersonator scene across the South was much more integrated than other settings in the region, and drag shows and bar life promoted strong queer voices of color across the former

Confederacy. While the Dew Drop Inn was likely the most popular black queer location of its kind in the South, it certainly did not stand alone. Similar places existed in Georgia,

South Carolina, and Tennessee. Well-known Southern black female impersonators performed in the 1960s at prominent bars, including the Patio Lounge in Greenville,

South Carolina, the Manhattan Club in Columbia, South Carolina, and the Marquitte in

Atlanta, Georgia. Commenting on a longtime female impersonator who performed at the

Marquitte but was also integrated into many other parts of the Atlanta black community, one patron noted that he knew “one black church here in…[Atlanta]…where a drag queen is very prominent. He wears full drag to church and is respected for his piety and good works.”63 Ultimately, although the stories of these black female impersonators across the South are not preserved in great detail at historical archives or via public history markers, the regularity and prominence of their lived experiences in Southern cities and towns certainly mirrors the black queer places in larger Northern and

Midwestern cities. Furthermore, they were not necessarily relegated to the margins of

63 On South Carolina and Georgia, see James T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001); quote from p. 292. Similar scenes in Tennessee are briefly mentioned in Daneel Buring’s Lesbian and Gay Memphis: Building Communities Behind the Magnolia Curtain (New York: Garland Pub., 1997). 56 black society of the time, and many even maintained positions of prominence in their communities.

On the other hand, mainstream white America was far less open to queer expressions during the same period. In fact, in the decades directly following World War

II, mainstream white communities were characterized by a strong distrust of individuals who did not conform to the stereotypical (and implicitly white) role of a respectable and loyal citizen. This hysteria against the “other” was most clearly highlighted in the political and cultural battles of the Cold War era that pitted the democratic values of

Americans against the communist worldview of Soviets. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing well into the 1950s, the Red Scare was a period characterized by a pervasive fear that communists and other Soviet sympathizers had infiltrated the federal government, posing a monumental risk to US national security. Although American anticommunism dates back to the nineteenth century, fear of the Soviet Union and potential internal subversion by a communist “fifth column” intensified as the recent wartime allies clashed repeatedly after 1945. President Harry Truman institutionalized this distrust in 1947 with his signing of Executive Order 9835. Essentially, this order mandated political and ideological loyalty from all employees in the federal government and created a framework through which suspected communists could be identified and dismissed. This order was justified as necessary for national stability, declaring that the 57

“maximum protection must be afforded the United States against infiltration of disloyal persons into the ranks of its employees.”64

Over the course of the next decade and a half, Executive Order 9835 and the political hysteria it represented mushroomed into political and social attacks against individuals who were identified as transgressing white mainstream norms for any number of reasons. Throughout this period, hundreds of US government employees were targeted as suspected communists, fired from their jobs, and labeled as social misfits and pariahs.

This process ruined many former government employees’ lives and has since been referred to as a modern US witch-hunt or inquisition.65

Beyond President Truman and his 1947 executive order, the most significant figure in the creation of the Red Scare was Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from

Wisconsin. McCarthy, elected to the US Senate in 1946, held deeply held anticommunist sentiments that he funneled into stoking the fears of Americans about subversive and dangerous communists living in their midst. The senator stepped onto the national stage with a February 1950 speech in West Virginia where he claimed that the State

Department employed over two hundred known communists. This and subsequent speeches further exacerbated the political climate, as an increasing number of

64 Executive Order 9835, issued March 21, 1947 (General Records of the U.S. Government, RG 11), excerpted in Robert Justin Goldstein, “Prelude to McCarthyism: The Making of a Blacklist,” National Archives and Records Administration, Prologue Magazine, Vol. 38, no. 3 (Fall 2006), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/fall/agloso.html, accessed August 10, 2018. Quote from EO 9835, p.1. 65 Several notable oral histories of individuals involved in the Red Scare—either as individuals targeting others or being targeted—are collected in Griffin Fariello, Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995). 58 investigations sought to ferret out federal employees who did not match the stereotypical

US ideal of a white, straight, loyal citizen.

Giving his name to the era of McCarthyism, the senator came to represent the maelstrom of cultural battles in the early 1950s. While the primary stated focus of

McCarthy’s slander and inquiries were suspected communists, his detrimental impact on

US society and political culture also included intense scrutiny of US Americans involved in the Civil Rights Movement. As Jeff Woods pointed out in Black Struggle, Red Scare:

Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, many white mainstream leaders connected the Southern racial unrest of the period to communism as a way to discredit activists committed to racial justice. Referred to as the “red and black” connection, this expansion of the witch-hunt for communists in the US was driven by fabricated narratives about black activists as communist sympathizers. Although Woods showed that many Southerners did not believe these connections were true, they were a helpful tool for misinformation campaigns, providing legitimacy for attacks against civil rights activists and their demonstrations.66

Similarly, the Red Scare functioned in white mainstream US culture to further marginalize queer citizens. Building on a history of identifying and marginalizing gay and lesbian service members during World War II, the language of disloyalty and anti-

Americanism saturated the 1950s and 1960s as primary tools for marginalizing queer

66 Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anticommunism in the South, 1948-1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). 59 individuals who were government employees, civilian and military alike.67 Historian

David Johnson thoroughly documented this connection between red-baiting and gay- baiting in The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the

Federal Government. Although the central stated targets of government purges based on disloyalty and perceived security risks were communists, it was particularly difficult to pinpoint particular individuals based on political ideology. However, it was much easier for Senator McCarthy and other leaders of the Red Scare to identify particular types of non-heteronormative sexual behaviors and gender styles, providing the basis for many queer individuals—especially gay men, who were disproportionately employed in the federal workforce in Washington, DC—to be scapegoated during the government purges.

Although no information existed at the time to support claims that gay men posed security risks as federal employees, both politicians and the mass media portrayed them as dangerous because it was widely believed that Soviet agents could easily blackmail gay men into turning over government secrets, or else face having their queerness revealed. Although Johnson argued that queer individuals were targeted because they could be visibly identified much more easily than could communists, he also showed that the attacks against them were more deeply rooted in longstanding mainstream white disdain of queer displays and experiences. In the end, Johnson argued that the Lavender

67 Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: The Free Press, 1990) detailed the experiences of thousands of gay men and lesbians serving in the military between 1941 and 1945 who were labeled as mentally unstable, disgraced, and discharged on account of their sexual orientation. Bérubé’s work along with Margot Canaday’s The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009) shows the codification of homophobia—the making of an exclusionary and implicitly white, straight state—by the early years of the Cold War. 60

Scare witch-hunts played a significant role in creating a new queer consciousness in cities like Washington, DC, which gave rise to some of the first national organizations fighting for gay rights.68

Another of the most public displays of homophobia from white mainstream society in the period was a 1964 Life exposé on “Homosexuality in America.” This centerfold magazine piece purported to explore the “shadows” of America in “the gay world, which is actually a sad and often sordid world.” With a stated two-fold purpose of highlighting the “locale and habits” of same-gender-loving men and exploring various pathologies that scientists used to understand homosexuality, the article painted dark and depressing images of gay men as sick, predatory, and immoral. Further, it stoked fears about homosexual men lurking in plain sight ready to take advantage of men and boys because “for every obvious homosexual, there [were] probably nine nearly impossible to detect. This social disorder, which society tries to suppress, has forced itself in to the public eye because it does present a problem—and parents especially are concerned.”

From New York to Miami and Los Angeles, police raids on gay bars and cruising areas were framed as valiant attempts to curtail a growing psychological and social sickness.

68 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). While Johnson explored the Lavender Scare at the national level and in terms of the impact on Washington, DC’s gay community, similar state and local efforts sought to ferret out gays in workplaces and educational institutions. One of the most significant examples of state-level gay-baiting was Florida’s Johns Committee, which existed from 1956 to 1965. Under the direction of state Senator Charley Johns, the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee imagined communist subversion, homosexual perversion, and civil rights activism as intertwined threats to the Sunshine State. As the committee failed to show that Moscow was behind local civil rights organizing, the Johns Committee turned more and more of its attention, especially after 1961, to eradicating homosexuals from Florida public colleges and universities. See Stacy Braukman, Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). 61

Commenting on this, a Los Angeles policeman noted that “we’re barely touching the surface of the problem, the pervert is no longer as secretive as he was. He’s aggressive and his aggressiveness is getting worse.” Summing up the article’s hostile portrayal of gay life, the authors noted that while some gay individuals and groups launched legal challenges to police raids and firings, “no legal procedures are likely to change society’s basic repugnance to homosexuality as an immoral and disruptive force that should somehow be removed.”69

The difference between the homophobia at the heart of Life’s story and Jet’s ongoing coverage of costume balls and other spaces of queer toleration is quite literally illustrated by the photographic juxtaposition of the “shadows” inhabited by white gay men and the ebullient, flashy performances of black female impersonators. Moreover, beyond the stark contrast between Cold War black and white print cultures, the vibrant queer expressions in black neighborhoods stand as further evidence of the racial divide regarding queer toleration. The beginning of this chapter described those more tolerant black spaces in Harlem’s social scenes and the circles of female impersonators in black communities and establishments from New York to Chicago and New Orleans. As queer political and social groups began to grow in size and visibility to mainstream white US culture in the 1960s, it should be noted that “there already existed largely integrated within the African American community an established and visible tradition of

69 Paul Welch, “Homosexuality in America: The ‘Gay’ World Takes to the City Streets,” Life, June 26, 1964, 66-88; quotes, 66 and 74. 62 homosexuality.”70 Indeed, modern scholars and media largely overlooked these vibrant queer spaces that had existed for decades in black communities.

For mainstream white society, the queer expressions and toleration in black communities was part and parcel of the broader perceived threat to social order that racial integration posed to the dominant culture. To many mouthpieces of white mainstream society, the “open display of homosexuality in the cities seemed to be but another symptom (and proof) of the breakdown of social order brought on by white America’s impending loss of cultural control over black America,” argues literary critic Marlon

Ross.71 This prominence of queer toleration in black communities prior to the 1960s provides an alternative theory to the initial development of a queer consciousness in the

US. Scholars from John D’Emilio and Allen Bérubé to David Johnson root pre-Stonewall

US gay activism in the mass mobilizations of World War II and the witch-hunts of the

Lavender Scare—white-dominated experiences that helped create the first queer groups and organizing strategies in the country.72

An alternate creation narrative locates the important foundational sites for US queer consciousness inside black communities during the first half of the twentieth century. This second narrative asserts that because black communities had long been seen as the safest place to engage in queer encounters and presentation “without the stigma

70 Marlon B. Ross, “Some Glances at the Black Fag: Race, Same-Sex Desire, and Cultural Belonging,” reprinted in Winston Napier, ed., African American Literary Theory: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 498. 71 Ross, “Some Glances at the Black Fag,” 499. 72 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire; Johnson, The Lavender Scare. 63 and judgment of middle-class white society,” as Marlon Ross posits, they were actually the initial incubators for queer US activism. In short, this argument about the emergence of US queer activism notes that for these earliest pre-Stonewall activists, “the more significant influence may have been the actual experience of how an outcast status could enable greater group solidarity and greater freedom within the group, a phenomenon that white gays experienced second-hand when visiting the homosexual networks of the black community.”73

Beyond black queer scenes that often centered around well-known female impersonators and bars, other examples of black queer toleration before the 1950s and

1960s go directly to the heart of black life in the US from the last days of slavery to the end of Jim Crow and beyond: the black church. As unlikely as it seems, another queer- related place that hundreds of thousands of blacks in the US engaged before the 1960s was the church. Two of the most popular black ministers in the nation from the 1930s to the 1950s were both queer in significant ways. James Francis Jones—a.k.a. Prophet

Jones—was the minister of an enormous Pentecostal congregation in Detroit. During his tenure as minister, the size of his church membership mushroomed, and he started a very well-received nationally syndicated radio broadcast of his sermons that ultimately gained him many followers in the South. Life even labeled him “the most prosperous evangelical” in the United States. Outside of his notoriety as the nation’s most popular black minister, he was also known as a queer eccentric who dressed in flashy and colorful clothes and even had a longtime male companion. Throughout his career, Jones was

73 Ross, “Some Glances at the Black Fag,” 501. 64 rumored to be homosexual, and media coverage sometimes focused on the fact that he was “unmarried; lived with his mother, ‘Lady Catherine,’ and had furnished his home in excellent taste…worthy of an interior decorator.”74 Even though Jones was labeled as queer in many ways, his supporters remained “tolerant, even accepting, of his alternative lifestyle [and showered] him with riches.”75 Ultimately, while Jones maintained a significant following in black communities until his death, he came under direct attack by white mainstream media in 1956 after an arrest related to same-sex intimacy, which caused much of his widespread coverage in white mainstream circles to shift in clearly negative directions or cease altogether.

Similarly, Charles Manuel Grace—popularly known as Sweet Daddy Grace—was also a well-known black Pentecostal Minister from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Although he started out as minister of a modest church in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the 1920s, thirty years later, he had built a religious empire that included over three hundred churches from the South to New York and New England. Similar to Jones,

Grace wore flashy clothes and jewelry and presided over sexually charged services that included pelvic pulsing and other dance moves and often turned into large drunken celebrations. Scholar Thaddeus Russell paints a picture of Grace wearing “shoulder- length hair splayed across the collar of his gold and purple coats, which often framed chartreuse vests and floral-print ties [and sporting] a massive diamond ring [with] five-

74 Tim Retzloff, “‘Seer or Queer’: Postwar Fascination with Detroit’s Prophet Jones,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 8, no. 3 (2002): 271-296; quote, 277. 75 Retzloff, “Seer or Queer,” 288. 65 inch long fingernails.”76 Clearly, the popularity of Jones and Grace reinforces the acceptance of queer themes in black communities before the 1960s and further complicates the myth that black communities have always been more homophobic than their white counterparts.

A final piece of evidence essential to establishing the open nature of black communities before the 1950s is found in the world of black blues and jazz performance.

While blues and jazz songs were consumed by millions of Americans of all races in the first half of the twentieth century, the genres are directly rooted in black communities. In comparing songs from these genres to other types of music available before the 1950s, it is clear that blues and jazz songs tend to be much more sexually charged in their melodies and lyrics. Examples of sexually focused and queer-themed songs include Ma Rainey’s

1926 hit, “Sissy Blues,” which chronicled a woman finding her man “in a sissy’s arms.”

These lyrics reference and reinforce the queer themes that were very visible in many black communities before the 1960s, and could be heard just as easily echoing through the late night air in a black-owned Harlem bar as on a radio in a Southern black family’s home:

I came in last night I’m going home tonight, I won’t no more

“Hello, Central, it’s ‘bout to run me wild Can I get that number, or will I have to wait a while?”

I dreamed last night I was far from harm Woke up and found my man in a sissy’s arms

76 Thaddeus Russell, “The Color of Discipline: Black Sexuality and Civil Rights,” American Quarterly, Vol. 60, no. 1 (March 2008): 101-128; quote, 111. 66

“Hello, Central, it’s ‘bout to run me wild Can I get that number, or will I have to wait a while?”

Some are young, some are old My man says sissy’s got good jelly roll

My man got a sissy, his name is Miss Kate He shook that thing like jelly on a plate

"Hello, Central, it’s ‘bout to run me wild Can I get that number, or will I have to wait a while?"

Now all the people ask me why I’m all alone A sissy shook that thing and took my man from me77

Clearly, in these lyrics that were heard around the country, Rainey was hitting some highly sexualized and queer notes. Although not all of her listeners would have had a personal interaction with a space like the one she sings about, few would have been shocked by the narrative, and many would have been able to identify this discourse as part of their current or historical community culture. Ultimately, as Angela Davis argues, the lyrics to this song and others like it can be understood as “defining the content of the blues form [and pointing] the way toward a consideration of the historical politics of black sexuality.”78 This politics is deeply rooted in the black working-class culture that reigned supreme in many black communities across the country before the rise of the middle-class-led Civil Rights Movement. With the rise of that movement, however, cultural conversations about queer gender expression or sexuality were pushed under the

77 “Sissy Man Blues: The History of a Song,” Queer Music Heritage, [Feb. 2004], http://www.queermusicheritage.com/feb2004smb.html, accessed August 11, 2018. 78 Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), xvii. 67 rug because of the middle-class understanding that “race must always take precedence, and that race is gendered as [heteronormative] male.”79

Of course, these queer themes were not only expressed by the Mother of the

Blues, Ma Rainey. Similar themes can be found in popular songs sung by Bessie Smith and many other blues performers who were the biggest musical stars in the black communities of their time. One of Rainey’s most prolific protégés, Bessie Smith was one of the most popular blues singers in the country during the 1920s and early 1930s, earning herself the nickname “Empress of the Blues.” She was one of Columbia Records’ highest-grossing black artists during her lifetime and frequently performed with other star musicians like Louis Armstrong. In her personal life, Smith was married to a man, but she also embraced queerness throughout her adult life. As early as the mid-1920s, Smith sustained intimate relationships with women. Her biographer, Chris Albertson, noted that she sustained sexual relationships with women who performed with her or with whom she simply came in contact while she was on the road. Smith’s lyrics clearly expressed her bisexual leanings. For example, in her 1930s hit “The Boy in the Boat,” Smith highlighted queer themes:

When you see two women walking hand in hand, Just look ‘em over and try to understand: They’ll go to those parties—have the lights down low— Only those parties where women can go. You think I’m lying—Just ask Tack Ann— Took many a broad from many a man…80

79 Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, xix. 80 Quoted in “Obscure Queer Blues,” Queer Music Heritage, [Nov. 2014], http://www.queermusicheritage.com/nov2014s.html, accessed August 11, 2018. 68

Consumed by thousands of Americans—many of whom were black—these lyrics clearly articulated an openly queer culture that affirmed women loving women. Jazz journalist and producer Chris Albertson comments that Smith’s blues lyrics indicated “that

Lesbianism was not an unmentionable subject on those Columbia recordings designed for sale to Black people” and sold under the umbrella of “race records.”81 Without a doubt,

Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were musical icons idolized by throngs of black Americans.

Their rhythmic tunes were consumed in thousands of black communities across the country during the first half of the twentieth century, making their voices and queer lyrics some of the most easily recognized cultural productions in some of the most tolerant spaces for queer expressions.

In short, even a cursory exploration of the blues and jazz scene before World War

II highlights the sexual openness of black blues and jazz performers, including open acknowledgments of same-sex actions and desires. Standing in opposition to the myth of black homophobia, it is clear that black urban communities sustained—or at least allowed—open queerness in black spaces prior to the 1950s. This queerness was very visible in black neighborhoods across the country, from Harlem to Bronzeville to New

Orleans. At the same time, postwar white communities were obsessed with identifying and eradicating queerness in their midst through campaigns like the Lavender Scare. This juxtaposition of black and white communities during the time is key in destabilizing the myth of black homophobia.

81 Chris Albertson, “Lesbianism and the Life of Bessie Smith,” in Jonathan Ned Katz, ed., Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Crowell, 1976), 76-82; quote from page 77. Also see Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. 69

It is also clear that queerness could thrive in black communities during the first half of the twentieth century at the same time it was highly taboo in white America because black communities were so significantly marginalized. In short, as a group living on the margins of society, black communities were allowed to experiment with and challenge dominant gender prescriptions in ways that would have been unthinkable to members of white mainstream society. In this arrangement, members of white mainstream society largely ignored the transgressions of gender expectations because they were not occurring in their midst. Only when black Americans assertively sought to join white mainstream America through the efforts of the integrationist Civil Rights

Movement did white America and black leaders begin to pay serious attention to limiting visible queer expressions. In the end, building on these historical examples of queer toleration or flourishing in pre-1950s black communities, the next chapter explores reasons why the myth of extreme black homophobia developed, was widely consumed, and largely believed by Americans less than a half century after a vibrant black queer culture had openly thrived. 70

CHAPTER 3: ACCEPTABILITY AT ALL COSTS:

BAYARD RUSTIN, AARON HENRY, AND THE GROWTH OF

A BLACK MIDDLE-CLASS-LED CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The last chapter highlighted the very visible and vibrant queer spaces that existed in predominantly black neighborhoods from the 1920s through the 1950s. These queer sites were solidly fixed in private home gatherings and public businesses alike, given voice by cultural giants like Bessie Smith on the radio and Sweet Daddy Grace from the pulpit. Without a doubt, queer life could be openly observed and engaged in during these decades in black communities much more readily than in white society.82 However, black queer visibility began to shrink in the 1950s and had seemed to disappear, at least on the surface, by the beginning of the 1960s. Although this disintegration of public displays of black queerness was certainly due to many diverse factors, this chapter argues that the central catalyst for this shift was the rise of the black middle-class-led Civil Rights

Movement during the 1950s. The rise of this movement positioned socially conservative clergy from mainline black denominations as unrivaled patriarchs of black activism who cared most about framing the movement and its activists as respectable citizens worthy of first-class rights.

Ultimately, this preoccupation with respectability in black communities led to the rise of a unique phenomenon of Sexual Plausible Deniability in those same communities.

That is, as a result of these political ideologies and strategies, a phenomenon of Sexual

82 Several scholars have highlighted the underground nature of queer life in the United States before the 1960s including George Chauncey in Gay New York (New York: BasicBooks, 1994) and Stuart Timmons in The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1990). 71

Plausible Deniability emerged, one centered upon a new sexual ethos that remained largely tolerant of queer behavior in private circles but that punished public displays of non-heteronormativity for political reasons. In this new landscape, queer behavior alone was not enough to completely marginalize a black queer person. Instead, much more important to black communities discerning whether to embrace or tolerate queer actions was how an individual accused of queer sexual encounters or sexualities responded to those accusations publicly. If he publicly denied the sexual encounter or at least the queer nature of the encounter, the individual could much more easily continue to navigate black society unscathed. Similarly, if the person in question was a black community leader, he could much more easily maintain power and prominence in black institutions by denying his actions. Unlike the very visible queer public displays in black communities detailed in the last chapter, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement created the need for black queer leaders and lay people to provide Sexual Plausible Deniability to their communities— creating a narrative that allowed their neighbors to discount queer accusations—as the politics of acceptability became the primary organizing cultural value in the black middle-class-led movement.

This chapter will explore this shift, detailing black middle-class leaders’ obsession with respectability in the 1950s and 1960s and grounding their motivations in a much longer history of resisting negative stereotypes of black men. After highlighting major historical motivators for these developments, the chapter discusses two case studies that highlight the rise of Sexual Plausible Deniability. First, it explores differing engagement with and reactions from black communities to Alfred Kinsey’s reports on 72 human sexual behavior. Notably, one of these reports was published before the rise of the modern Civil Rights Movement and the other just a few years later as the movement was taking shape. The second set of case studies focuses on two queer leaders in the Civil

Rights Movement who lived, loved, and led during the transitional decade of the 1950s:

Bayard Rustin and Aaron Henry. Rustin, a civil rights and pacifist organizer for decades, was the architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and mentor to

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while Henry was the longtime president of the

Mississippi NAACP and chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Both of these individuals were prominent national figures in black organizing and activism, and both engaged in sexual practices with other men. However, the ways in which they handled public revelation of their non-normative sexualities greatly influenced the degree to which they each remained accepted in black communities and their ability to retain ongoing leadership positions in the movement. Exploring their comparable, publicly documented sexual encounters with other men, along with their very different responses to those disclosures, illustrates the rise of Sexual Plausible Deniability in black communities.

First, although black leaders imposed standards of respectability in their own communities, ideas of what was and was not considered respectable were constructed by the larger, white-dominated culture of Cold War America. The stringent dress codes that black activists followed from the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott to King’s last march in Memphis in 1968 are examples of the great lengths that movement leaders went to ensure that their activists fulfilled the respectability requirements of white society. 73

Protesters at all of these events were expected to wear ties and jackets or dresses, ultimately expressing their common humanity with white citizens by donning their

Sunday best. These efforts to portray physical conformity with white Americans were likewise tied to similar Cold War ideas that stressed the importance of traditional gender roles and the nuclear family structure, all couched in moralistic language. At least on the surface, moral respectability for whites in Cold War America centered on “taboos against premarital intercourse, homosexuality, and other forms of nonprocreative sex,” explains historian Elaine Tyler May.83

83 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 116. 74

Figure 1: An example of how the politics of respectability influenced Civil Rights Movement activists’ dress. February 1, 1960 photograph of four activists leaving the Woolworth sit-in. Photo from the Greensboro News and Record.

Working to ensure that movement activists specifically, and black communities more generally, conformed to the expectations of white Cold War culture, black civil rights leaders reinforced the idea that “in order to gain acceptance as full citizens [blacks needed to] adopt the cultural norms of what they believe[d] to be the idealized American citizen—productivity, selflessness, responsibility, sexual restraint, and the restraint of homosexuality in particular,” writes Thaddeus Russell. In essence, to gain the rights they 75 were fighting for, blacks needed to adopt the core moral and social values of middle-class white Americans to be seen as worthy of receiving full citizenship.84

These notions were further supported by Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark 1944 study,

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. This 1,500-page report—authored by the Swedish Nobel-laureate economist and funded by the Carnegie

Foundation—sought to pinpoint the major roadblocks preventing blacks from attaining full citizenship from Reconstruction era to the 1940s. Representing a more broadly held belief the era, one of the study’s main themes was that blacks could never reach equal status with whites unless they completely assimilated into white culture. At the core of this assimilation was education. Myrdal asserted that, “the trend toward a rising educational level of the Negro population is of tremendous importance for the power relations [in the United States]. Education means an assimilation of white American culture. It decreases the dissimilarity of the Negroes from other Americans.” The economist went further to note that in the northern US cities where blacks had been educated in formally recognized institutions built on white traditions, “the educated

Negro [had], in one important respect, become equal to the better class of whites.”85

These prevailing attitudes were held by many whites sympathetic to the social, economic, and political plight of blacks in the US in the pre-civil rights era, and they certainly played a central role in fostering the narrative of conformity to white middle-class

84 Russell, “The Color of Discipline,” 101. 85 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944), especially 1-26; quotes, Vol. II, 879-880. 76 standards for the new generation of black leaders that would begin controlling the movement a decade later.

This new generation of black leaders included Martin Luther King, Jr., who believed that “the attainment of full citizenship for African Americans required the creation of a heteronormative black culture,” argues Thaddeus Russell.86 This policing of sexual behavior was particularly ironic for King, who was often unfaithful to his wife, yet remained the most central and most recognizable figure in the Civil Rights Movement until his death in 1968. This irony highlights the fact that many in the movement and in black communities would tolerate some amount of discreet heterosexual infidelity while almost universally rejecting public displays of homosexuality. Russell further highlights

King’s disconnect by noting that privately, he “demonstrated no hostility toward homosexuality, nor did he live according to the codes of heterosexual propriety…yet, in his public life, King launched a comprehensive attack on black queerness.”87 Again, this dynamic was the product of King’s belief that black Americans had to present as respectable in the eyes of white Americans if they hoped to reach full first-class citizenship—a sentiment shared by many other leaders of the mainstream Civil Rights

Movement.

Beyond seeking the approval and support of white society, movement leaders also sought to overcome widespread stereotypes of black sexuality. The most pernicious of these stereotypes framed black men’s sex drives as uncontrollable and animalistic. As the

86 Russell, “The Color of Discipline,” 114-116. 87 Russell, “The Color of Discipline,” 117. 77 fifth chapter will discuss at length, this stereotype fueled the “black rapist” myth that framed black men as wild sexual beings who could not abide by normative, civilized, heterosexual expectations of relationships and could not control their overwhelming innate drive to be with and penetrate white women. Although this myth developed in the

US before emancipation, it still carried significant cultural weight in the 1950s. For example, on June 1, 1957 the New York Amsterdam News, one of the oldest black newspapers in the country, published a story that focused on entertainer Harry

Belafonte’s change in relationship. The article highlighted that Belafonte “sacked” his first wife, who was black, for a white bride. The article went on to point out that these developments were a significant point of gossip and chatter in black and white circles around the country because “the attraction a colored man has for a white woman is potent.” Although there were no sexually violent descriptions in the article, this statement was certainly the product of the older myth of the black rapist that was used to frame black men as uncontrollable animals who were out to attack helpless white women. The black author of the article pushed back against any notion that Belafonte did anything wrong in marrying a white woman, including highlighting a colorful history of unfair perspectives on interracial sex and relationships. The writer noted that, “everybody knows that the white man and the colored woman have been engaging in [sexual] activities for hundreds of years. From President Thomas Jefferson on down. And this mess is still going on…but everybody gets all shook up the minute a colored man and a white woman start to do a little pioneering. This is unfair!”88

88 Dan Burley, “Harry Belafonte: Takes Two To Tango!,” New York Amsterdam News, June 1, 1957, 3. 78

Depictions of the mythical black rapist, generated in the brutality of slavery and emancipation, were central to the history informing this article on Belafonte’s relationships. In Black Sexual Politics, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins notes that the

“innocent or respectable Black male image is considered to be essential to Black civil rights agendas.” She further argues that, “for both women and men, Western social thought associates Blackness with an imagined uncivilized, wild sexuality and uses this association as a lynchpin of racial difference.” Such ideas about black sex drives were fundamentally produced by the history of slavery. Before they were emancipated, black men and women owned as chattel were understood through and valued for their bodies.

White slaveholders deemed black men as valuable for their physical abilities that drove agricultural and other economic engines. Similarly, black women during slavery were seen as the property of their white owners, who valued these women for their reproductive capabilities that increased the slave labor force. Enslaved women were often raped by their owners, with no avenues for recourse. Over time, this pattern of rape prompted images of black women as sexually wanton jezebels.89

After emancipation, once slaveholders could no longer physically control black bodies in the same way, they deployed narratives of black men as rapists and black women as jezebels as new tools for racial oppression and disenfranchisement. These storylines became the justification for decades of legal and extrajudicial violence, from the lynching of thousands of African Americans to the disproportionate incarceration of

89 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005), passim; quotes, 74, 27. 79 black bodies that persists to the present. The myth of the black rapist also reinforced the economic oppression of blacks for the benefit of whites: the mythology that blacks were uncivilized, unable to control their basest behaviors, helped keep them confined to the lowest-paying jobs, because they were seen as less sophisticated and valuable than whites.

Furthermore, as scholar-activist Angela Davis pointed out, the myth of the black rapist served to scare away possible white allies for black civil rights. In her analysis, it was clear that “as soon as the propagandistic cry of rape became a legitimate excuse for lynching, former white proponents of Black equality became increasingly afraid to associate themselves with Black people’s struggle for liberation.” In short, not only did these myths directly harm the social and economic wellbeing of blacks, they also hampered support for black civil rights from sympathetic whites, weakening the power of any potential or actual movement for racial justice. In many ways, the negative impact of this myth provoked a backlash from middle-class black leaders in the Civil Rights

Movement, who emphasized disproving these sexual notions through maintaining a respectable outward appearance, including public condemnations of homosexuality.90

In addition to stressing that activists should conform to white-constructed ideas of respectability as a reaction to the myth of the black rapist, civil rights leaders were also continuing a longer tradition of promoting ideal images of blacks who were respectable-

90 Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 172, 188. For information on how the myth of the black rapist was used to create and maintain laws against interracial marriage, see Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 80 looking, well-rounded intellectuals. Building on the late nineteenth-century efforts of white northerners to help lift up black communities through particular kinds of education, pioneering black educators like W.E.B. Du Bois championed the idea that black communities should cultivate opportunities for black men to engage in classic intellectual pursuits rather than only focusing on trade schools. For Du Bois, “the object of all true education [was] not to make men carpenters” but to “make carpenters men.” This comment illustrated the deep connection Du Bois understood between advancing academic pursuits in ways that white communities valued—including reading “Virgil and

Homer” and mastering “Greek and the humanities”—and growing the credibility of black manhood. Du Bois believed that increasing the number of classically trained black men would better black communities as a whole, because “human education is not simply a matter of schools; it is much more a matter of family and group life—the training of one’s home, of one’s daily companions, of one’s social class.” Ultimately, Du Bois and his contemporaries envisioned a brighter future where educated black men were seen as fully deserving and cognizant of modern manhood as it was understood in the dominant white society, allowing them to serve as leaders who could guide their race into the twentieth century.91

91 W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois, The Talented Tenth: Excerpt from the Negro Problem (New York: James Pott and Company, 1903), 11. While Du Bois was one of the most well-known individuals who promoted the politics of respectability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the same ideas were promoted at the time by other black elites, especially in black churches and the NAACP (which Du Bois co-founded. For example, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explored the role that black women played in challenging racist oppression through focusing on a politics of respectability in Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 81

Building on the historical understanding of why black middle-class leaders of the

Civil Rights Movement were obsessed with a politics of respectability—pushing their communities to project outward appearances that met the standards of white middle-class society—multiple case studies highlight how this approach affected the everyday experiences of black Americans. The first case study addresses black media coverage of

Alfred Kinsey’s reports on human sexual behavior. Over the course of the late 1940s and the 1950s, Kinsey’s reports on sexual practices and the coverage they received in black newspapers illustrate the impact that the Civil Rights Movement had on conversations about sexuality as well as provide additional insight into black communities resisting myths about black sexuality in the 1950s.

First, it was significant that Kinsey’s initial study on human sexuality published in

1948—entitled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male—drew almost no coverage from black newspapers at the time. Although this groundbreaking and controversial study was discussed at incredibly high rates in major national white newspapers in 1948 and 1949, less than one percent of the national press coverage came from black papers. For example, the most prominent black newspaper of the mid-twentieth century, the Chicago

Defender, only briefly mentioned Sexual Behavior in the Human Male four times between 1948 and 1950.92

On the other hand, Kinsey’s second study on human sexuality, which focused on women and was published in 1953, garnered a significantly larger amount of attention

92 The less than one percent statistic quoted above is based on a search of twenty archived Kinsey Institute folders that summarized press coverage of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male from around the country. 82 from black papers across the country. Major black papers—including the Pittsburgh

Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the New York Amsterdam News—ran numerous stories throughout 1953 and 1954 on the second study and its racial implications, especially in regards to longstanding myths about black sexuality. Initially, in the month following the study’s release, these papers ran stories that highlighted the lack of black women who were interviewed for the project.93 The Chicago Defender commented with surprise that, “a little notation appeared [in the study] explaining that interviews with

Negro women were not included in the final report because there were too few of them.”

The article went on to say that “there may be some scientific justification for the exclusion of Negro women, but certainly we can see no other reason for excluding them from the study.”94 In the same edition of the Chicago Defender, another article went beyond surprise that the researchers did not include black women in the study, noting that many experts “were of the opinion that a separate study of the sexual habit of Negro women would be useful.”95 Of course, this “expert” assertion was based on the premise that black women had different sexual habits than white women, possibly connecting the narrative back to the myth of black women as wanton jezebels.

An article by Marjorie McKenzie in the Pittsburgh Courier framed the Kinsey study and the mythology of black female differently. Entitled “Negro Woman Still Has

93 These articles include “Our Opinions—The Kinsey Report,” Chicago Defender, August 29, 1953, 4; “Race Myth Hit By Sex Expert” Amsterdam News, September 5, 1953, p. n/a; Marjorie McKenzie, “Pursuit of Democracy: Negro Woman Still Has Her Privacy in the Wake of Kinsey,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 5, 1953, 6. 94 “Our Opinions—The Kinsey Report” 95 Charles Johnson, “Omission of Negroes from Sex Study Arouses Scholars,” Chicago Defender, August 29, 1953, 1. 83

Her Privacy in the Wake of Kinsey,” the article noted that the omission of black women

“distorts the sample statistically, since Negro women are roughly ten percent of the total female population. It also distorts it psychologically, since American folklore and slave myth have accorded a special role to the Negro woman.” Clearly, McKenzie was calling out the issues exacerbated by leaving black women out of this study, chiefly the effect that this omission had on fueling the longstanding myth that black women had greater sexual drives than white women. In a wry and mocking tone, McKenzie went on to say that “the negro woman still has her privacy and her mystery, and everybody knows or is supposed to know what a distinct advantage a little mystery can be in the war between the sexes.” In short, this article lamented the exclusion of black women from the Kinsey study and noted that by excluding black voices, the research would effectively maintain the myth that black women and their desires were not “normal” and acceptable in the ways that white women in Cold War US culture were imagined.96

On the same day that McKenzie’s article was published in Pittsburgh, the

Chicago Defender ran a related piece entitled, “Would Dr. Kinsey Write ‘Sexual

Behavior of the Sepia Female’?,” pondering what a separate study on black women would reveal. A main difference the author proposed that Kinsey would find that “Negro women are superior sexually to their white sisters; that they have greater responsiveness and staying power; that here is no frigidity in their sex impulses, but rather heat.”97 This quote articulated many of the greatest worries of middle-class black leaders of the

96 McKenzie, “Negro Woman Still Has Her Privacy in the Wake of Kinsey.” 97 Albert Barnett, “Would Dr. Kinsey Write ‘Sexual Behavior of the Sepia Female’?” Chicago Defender, September 5, 1953, 5. 84 developing Civil Rights Movement. Seeking to understand why black women were not included in Kinsey’s study, it revealed ongoing dialogues about black women’s sexuality being significantly different from that of white women. While no woman wanted to be thought of as sexually frigid, there were even more potential negative ramifications for being understood as sexually enthusiastic. For black women especially, this second comparison referenced longstanding discursive connections between black sexuality and uncivilized and animalistic behavior.

Further exploring these concerns about black women’s voices lacking in Kinsey’s report, Ebony published a three-page story in its October 1953 issue entitled, “Some Say

Kinsey Should Use Colored Interviewers.” This article pointed out that while Kinsey used no interviews with black women in his final report, he did gather several hundred interviews with black women out of the nearly 8,000 in the entire study, and most of these interviews were with working-class blacks. This slanted perspective led Kinsey to note that “too few college educated colored women would talk, although those with grade and high school educations were very cooperative.” The article further suggested that perhaps Kinsey would have been more successful in getting black women from a range of economic classes to talk had he used black interviewers. Having an interviewer visually associated with the black community could have been crucial, because black women experienced “shyness to tell the truth about sex [as] a reaction to the stereotypes which are so common about Negroes—such as being sexually loose. They feel under pressure to show that the usual theories about them are false. They bend over backwards to give the 85 impression of restraint and inhibition in their sex lives.”98 This restraint illustrates the significant and pervasive fear of many blacks—women or men—to provide any public commentary that could reinforce animalistic and uncivilized sexual stereotypes.

Continuing these conversations in a February 1954 column, months after the second Kinsey report was published, black intellectual Joel Augustus Rogers lamented that “almost any white sociologist will tell you that Negroes are more sexually loose than white people…[that they have] a strong set instinct without corresponding self-control

[and are from] an intensely sensual and lascivious race.”99 He noted the great disservice that the Kinsey report created for black society by leaving black women’s voices out of the findings. Ultimately, to Rogers, leaving out black women made a clear and untrue statement that their sexual habits were different enough from white women that they could not be organized together in a single study. From his perspective, Kinsey’s unfortunate decision only further fueled the black sexual myths that an increasingly powerful Civil Rights Movement was battling as it sought to frame black Americans as respectable and worthy of first-class citizenship.

The shift in black community reactions to Kinsey’s first and second reports can be attributed in part to their publication dates. When the first report was released in 1948, the modern stage of the Civil Rights Movement had not yet begun. However, by the time the second report was published in 1953, the forces driving the resurgent black freedom struggle were accelerating. The period between publication dates included the 1951

98 “Some Say Kinsey Should Use Colored Interviewers,” Ebony, Vol. 8, no. 11 (Oct. 1953), 111-113. 99 Joel Augustus Rogers, “Rogers Says,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 20, 1954, 3. 86

Supreme Court decision to hear the cases challenging school segregation that would culminate in the Brown v. Board of Education, as well as the 1951 bus boycott in Baton

Rouge, Louisiana—the first black bus boycott in US history—which would provide a prototype for the protest that would catapult Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the national stage. In short, the five years between the two publication dates was a time of significant change in American race politics, pointing the way towards protest strategies that deployed the politics of respectability.

While the divergent reactions to Kinsey’s two reports highlighted the rise of a politics of respectability as the middle-class-led Civil Rights Movement was created and expanded, a second set of case studies makes clear how the growth of the phenomenon of

Sexual Plausible Deniability grew out of this obsession with projecting acceptable images of black individuals and communities. As these political ideologies intensified in the movement and in black communities more broadly, the queerness in black public spheres described in chapter two was driven underground. How one chose to deal with public conversations about his queerness would make a profound difference whether or not one could continue in prominent movement spaces during the transitional decade of the

1950s.

This gravitas of these choices is especially evident when comparing the lived experiences of Bayard Rustin and Aaron Henry. Rustin was the lead organizer of the

1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., while Henry was the longtime president of the Mississippi NAACP and chairman of the

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Both of these men were prominent national 87 figures in black organizing and activism, and both engaged in sexual practices with other men. However, the ways in which they handled revelation of their non-normative sexualities greatly influenced their acceptance in black communities and their abilities to occupy sustained movement leadership positions. Exploring their similar, publicly documented sexual encounters with other men and their markedly different responses to those public disclosures highlights the new phenomenon of Sexual Plausible Deniability that developed within black spaces over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.100

For Bayard Rustin, the realization that he was sexually attracted to men came early. In the 1940s, he developed his first-long term relationship with a younger white man, Davis Platt. Although this relationship was both illegal and socially taboo at the time, many of Rustin’s activist colleagues were very aware of his intimate relationship with Platt. In fact, AJ Muste, giant of the American radical pacifist movement and

Rustin’s closest mentor, was uneasy about the relationship but accepted it nonetheless.

Long after their relationship ended, Platt recalled, “Muste knew we were lovers. He tried to get me to desist, to leave Bayard and try to get Bayard to give it up…He tried to give me the impression that it was an unsatisfactory lifestyle that wouldn’t work. It wasn’t that it was wrong or evil, but it was not viable and if Bayard continued this way it could destroy him and hurt the movement.” From Platt’s perspective, it did not appear to bother

Muste that Rustin was queer but that he acted on it by building relationships and seeking

100 James Baldwin is another black queer man who is often included in discussions of race and sexuality in the Civil Rights Era. However, this dissertation does not explore Baldwin’s interactions with the movement because he was not, like Rustin and Henry, an organizational leader, and he lived the majority of his adult life outside of the United States. 88 other encounters that could be seen by outsiders and then used to harm Rustin’s reputation and malign the overall movement.101

Beginning with Platt and continuing through most of the rest of his life, Rustin was not shy about his queer romantic engagements or his sexuality. Some of his earliest documented struggles with government agents around his sexuality happened while serving time in prison in 1943 for evading the draft. A devout Quaker and pacifist, Rustin was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing to join a conscientious objectors labor camp because he “could not voluntarily submit to an order emanating from the Selective

Training and Service Act,” a piece of legislation that forced men into military service or other labor in ways he believed were unjust.102 While in prison, Rustin engaged in multiple sexual encounters with other incarcerated men. These queer encounters were documented by prison guards and administrators and later used to silence Rustin when he began advocating for integrating and improving prison conditions. Once prison officials publicly accused Rustin of these sexual encounters, he shrunk from his activism and assured his closest colleagues that he would no longer engage in sexual acts or relationships with men.103

While same-sex sexual encounters in prisons were not rare occurrences at the time, Rustin was exposed to a new type of manipulation from white men in positions of power that resulted from them noticing his sexual acts. As historian John D’Emilio notes,

101 John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 71. 102 D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 75. 103 D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 93-120. 89

“Rustin suddenly found himself living under intense surveillance, in close quarters, in an all-male environment. In the confined atmosphere of federal prison, the boundary between public role and private desire collapsed; the window of tolerance for his sexuality that Rustin had found outside vanished.”104 These early examples of white men in power using Rustin’s sexuality to stifle his activism would be repeated numerous times over the remainder of his career as an activist, sometimes more successfully than others.

After emerging from prison in 1946, Rustin rejoined activist efforts for racial justice and pacifism on a fulltime basis. While working as an activist and political organizer during the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, his sexuality continued to prompt difficulties. D’Emilio notes that all of Rustin’s colleagues in the 1940s and 1950s knew he was gay, yet “no one spoke about it.” In fact, stories often circulated among

Rustin’s peers of his soliciting male staffers at activist conventions or cruising parks and gay neighborhoods for interested strangers during business trips. To many, it was clear that Rustin’s “frequent [business] trips away from home were occasions for advances toward men he encountered in the course of his work.” While some of his sexual adventures went unnoticed, several publicity nightmares materialized around these actions. For example, in 1946, Rustin was arrested in a New York park for soliciting someone to commit a lewd act. Later, he was arrested for being in a park known as a popular cruising ground after curfew. The incident, however, that ultimately came back

104 D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 92. 90 to haunt Rustin and drive a wedge between him and many civil rights leaders took place in 1953.105

While on a business trip in Pasadena, California, in January 1953, Rustin solicited two white men for oral sex in the early morning hours. While Rustin was performing fellatio in the back of the men’s car, two policemen approached and arrested all three men for engaging in illegal sexual acts. Rustin had gained enough notoriety as an activist by 1953 that multiple newspapers around the country noted his arrest on their pages. For example, halfway across the country, the Chicago Daily Tribune noted that Rustin, a

“nationally known negro lecturer…was taken into custody when police found him in his parked auto with Marvin Long…and Louie Buono…both white. The three were charged with suspicion of lewd vagrancy.”106 This incident very quickly caused tension between

Rustin and his colleagues, many of whom, as D’Emilio noted, had known about Rustin’s sexuality but never spoke of it. However, the full impact of this public revelation of his homosexuality was not evident until 1960. In the shorter term, many of Rustin’s colleagues resumed the cycle of not speaking about his sexuality. A broader community of civil rights leaders was also able to overlook Rustin’s indiscretion and undeniable homosexuality, as Rustin grew more prominent in the building Civil Rights Movement in the South.107

In 1955, Rustin began a professional relationship with Martin Luther King, Jr., which included educating the young civil rights leader on the tenets of Gandhian

105 D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 108, 172. 106 “Morals Charge Jails Booster of World Peace,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 21, 1953, 2. 107 D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 191. 91 nonviolence that Rustin had learned earlier as an antiwar activist. Although King surely knew about Rustin’s sexuality and his 1953 arrest in Pasadena, and although several southern black ministers and civil rights leaders objected to Rustin’s work as a key educator and organizer in the South, King overlooked Rustin’s past and others’ objections for nearly five years. In fact, over two decades after King’s death, Rustin commented that he thought King

would have been sympathetic and would not have had [a] prejudicial view. Otherwise he would not have hired me. He never felt it necessary to discuss [my sexuality] with me. He was under such extraordinary pressure about his own sex life. J. Edgar Hoover was spreading stories, and there were very real efforts to entrap him. I think at a given point he had to reach a decision. My being gay was not a problem for Dr. King but a problem for the movement.108

Rustin’s comments are supported by the fact that Rustin and King were nearly inseparable for the last half of the 1950s, organizing many events together as well as sharing in personal triumphs and defeats.

The relationship came to an end, however, in 1960, in the wake of the posturing of Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the highly prominent New York Congressman and

Democratic Party insider from Harlem. Powell expressed his deep concern about Rustin organizing protestors outside the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Upset that Rustin was organizing these protestors without his approval, Powell demanded that

King stop Rustin’s efforts or face a fabricated story about a romantic relationship

108 Bayard Rustin, “Martin Luther King’s Views on Gay People,” in Devon Carbado and Donald Weise, eds., Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), 292-293. 92 between the two men. In Rustin’s words, “a woman who was well known in the movement had called [King] and said that Powell was going to call a press conference and implicate me and Dr. King in some sort of liaison if Dr. King did not call off the marches.” Rustin understood Powell’s threat as a power move because he thought that,

“Powell had been promised something by the Democratic Party if he could get rid of me.”109

Although King had stood by Rustin for the previous five years, this threat from

Powell was too much for the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

(SCLC) to handle. Shaken by the possibility of a story about his having a romantic relationship with Rustin, King accepted Rustin’s resignation from the SCLC in 1960 and personally distanced himself from his mentor and friend.110 Although this was certainly the most significant run-in between Powell and Rustin, they had a long history of tension and bickering. Powell was known as a trouble-maker, and had skirmished with Rustin when Powell felt that Rustin had not properly respected the congressman’s role as a liaison between the civil rights community and the Democratic Party. Powell also disliked when Rustin overshadowed him in public gatherings or civil rights circles, living up to his reputation as the “lime-light stealing congressman from Harlem.”111

As scholar Michael Long points out in Martin Luther King Jr., Homosexuality, and the Early Gay Rights Movement, Rustin’s unwillingness to hide his sexuality or deny

109 Rustin, “Time on Two Crosses: An Interview with George Chauncey, Jr.,” 1987, in Carbado and Weise, eds., Time on Two Crosses, 299-303. 110 D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 279, 44. 111 D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 240, 297-299. 93 his sexual encounters ultimately became a significant liability for him and prompted many of his close colleagues to push him away, culminating in King’s 1960’s betrayal.

Long noted that Rustin “was never morally ashamed of his desire to express—even in those shadowy zones like public parks and parked cars—his sexual feelings, which heterosexual society had indirectly created by criminalizing gay sex. For Rustin, the problem posed by the arrest was a practical one; it created the ever-looming possibility that his enemies would republicize the arrest as a way of undermining the credibility of any movement he helped to lead.”112 Ultimately, Rustin never fully rekindled his relationship with King. Outside of his damaged personal relationship with King, Rustin was pushed away from the SCLC more generally. For example, it is quite clear that

Rustin wanted to be the executive director of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. However, he was relegated to a supporting role because King and other march organizers were afraid that his very public queerness would be used to discredit and stop the event.

These fears were ultimately realized when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover supplied

Sen. Strom Thurmond from South Carolina with information about Rustin’s past and conjecture about an inappropriate relationship he had with King. As one of the most outspoken segregationists in the country and an equally ferocious critic of the march,

Thurmond understood the information as a tool he could use to undermine the event by impugning one of the key organizers. This led to Thurmond attacking Rustin from the

112 Michael G. Long, Martin Luther King, Jr., Homosexuality, and the Early Gay Rights Movement: Keeping the Dream Straight? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 77. 94

Senate floor as a moral degenerate, citing his 1953 arrest, among many accusations.

Although Rustin would not comment on the moral charges that Thurmond mentioned when a New York Times reporter asked him, he was supported by King and other leaders who coordinated to pivot the conversations from Rustin’s queer encounters to his multiple arrests as a protestor for racial justice.113 In the end, it is worth noting that King certainly took a risk by allowing Rustin into his inner circle in 1955. In hiring Rustin,

King “bucked the homophobic trend and knowingly hired a man who had never sought to hide his sexuality,” Long notes.114 However, his tolerance for this risk was ultimately overcome by the threat of very public and un-ignorable disclosures about Rustin’s sexuality that would have destroyed any remaining amount of plausible sexual deniability

King and other close colleagues could claim.

Surprisingly, even after similar arrests for queer behavior, at least one prominent black leader was able to maintain power and prominence in his community and in the

Civil Rights Movement as a whole. This prominent black gay leader was Aaron Henry, and juxtaposing his story with Rustin’s reveals divergent queer activist experiences that resulted from the different ways these two men approached Sexual Plausible Deniability.

As a pharmacist, Henry was one of only a few black professionals in Clarksdale,

Mississippi, as well as one of the city’s leading citizens from the 1950s through the end of the twentieth century. He rose to statewide celebrity after being elected president of the Mississippi NAACP in 1960. Four years later, his stature grew even greater when he

113 M.S. Handler, “Negro Rally Aide Rebuts Senator,” New York Times, August 16, 1963, 10. 114 Long, Martin Luther King, Jr., Homosexuality, and the Early Gay Rights Movement, 91. 95 was elected chairman of the newly created Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

(MFDP). The MFDP was created as a rival to Mississippi’s existing state Democratic

Party, which banned blacks from its membership. While Mississippians founded the

MFDP to create direct change in their state, the organization soon drew national attention at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and became the focus of many voting rights activists from around the country. Though the MFDP ultimately failed to secure recognition from national party officials as the state’s official Democratic Party, it created a very powerful and visible platform for the Civil Rights Movement. As chairman of the MFDP, Henry was at the helm of a formidable black activist organization that made him a national figure through televised speeches and appearances.

Although scholars now widely accept that Henry lived a queer life that included sexual and romantic relationships with other men, the first person to make this claim in a sustained way was historian John Howard. To make this assertion, Howard relied heavily on conversations with Henry’s former colleagues in Mississippi. Oral histories were an essential strategy for uncovering these truths, because Henry only ever publicly commented about his sexuality when refuting claims that he engaged in sexual acts with men. Said in another way, he only mentioned his sexuality when bolstering his black community’s claim to Sexual Plausible Deniability.115

The most important situation in which Henry refuted his queerness began on

March 3, 1962, a couple counties away from his home in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It was on this day—only two years after his election as president of the Mississippi NAACP—

115 John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 96 that he was arrested and charged with soliciting Sterling Lee Eilert, a white male hitchhiker, for sex. Early in the morning, Clarksdale police chief Ben Collins knocked on

Henry’s door and informed Henry that he had a warrant for his arrest that was signed by

Eilert. After dressing, Henry went with Collins to the local jail and, after some interrogation, Collins turned him over to police, who took him to a jail in Cleveland, the seat of the county in which the solicitation allegedly happened. After a night in

Cleveland, Henry was released to several colleagues who paid his bond. His case was later heard in a local court that convicted him of the morals charge, imposing a $500 fine and a sentence of six months in jail. Even after appealing the charges all the way to the

United States Supreme Court, Henry’s conviction was upheld.116

Upon his release, Henry claimed that the entire scenario had been fabricated by the “goddam [police chief] Ben Collins” and the “chicken shit [county attorney] Babe

Pearson,” which led to libel suits against Henry by Collins and Pearson. Henry lost the libel suit in 1963 in the Mississippi Supreme Court, because the court believed the

“evidence had showed positively that no one had framed the defendant or cooked up a plot…to have him arrested.”117 Two years later, the US Supreme Court reversed the libel case decision on a technicality, citing that the jury in the original case “might well have understood the judge’s instructions to allow recovery of damages on a showing of intent to inflict harm rather than an intent to inflict harm through falsehood.”118

116 Françoise N. Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 117 “Negro Leader Fails in Libel Case Plea,” New York Times, December 3, 1963, 36. 118 “Rights Aide Freed of Libel Payment: Court Voids $40,000 Awards Against Mississippian,” New York Times, March 30, 1965, 27. 97

While he ultimately prevailed in the libel suit, Henry’s morals charge conviction was never overturned. Until his dying day, Henry claimed that the conviction was a

“diabolical plot” aimed at “trying to destroy my effectiveness in a movement in which most of the participants at the time were men. I felt that the arrest was an attempt to prevent people, particularly the young men who were so very important to us, from participating in a movement where they might be accused of homosexuality.”119 Whether

Henry ever actually solicited Eilert for sex or not, this statement was crucial to fueling a narrative that allowed Henry’s colleagues, neighbors, and even individuals who were active in the Civil Rights Movement but had never met him to write off this situation as a setup rather than as queerness. This vehement denial-as-accusation allowed others to believe that white leaders in Mississippi were trying to set Henry up because he was such an effective organizer who challenged white power and the US status quo.

Henry later claimed in his autobiography that “it was easy to say that my being found [guilty] made no difference, because few people believed there was any truth to the matter anyway. But it made a difference to me. It didn’t matter if nobody believed the charges. My anger was over the plot.” While Henry’s comments perhaps reflected his genuine assessment and feelings about the situation, it is now clear that most of Henry’s colleagues understood his queerness at the time. Constance Curry, who assisted Henry in completing his autobiography, summarized this reality as, “we all knew it, it made no difference to us, and it had no impact on his political life nor his contributions to the

119 Aaron Henry with Constance Curry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 124. 98 freedom movement.”120 While there is little reason to disbelieve Curry’s comments, they certainly paint with too broad a stroke and are influenced by inclusive sentiments of later decades that would not have been as simply felt, understood, or articulated in the 1950s and 1960s. Surely, had Henry openly discussed his queerness following his arrest or had he even not provided an alternative narrative that supported Sexual Plausible Deniability, he would have suffered a similar fate as did Bayard Rustin.

Again, in 1973, just over a decade after his first arrest, Henry was picked up by the police in Washington, DC, after soliciting two undercover male police officers for sex. In the days that followed, Henry found himself in another sexual scandal that called his respectability into question. Ultimately, the charges were dropped, but this did not stop media coverage of the event. Although reporters prodded him about the homosexual nature of the arrest and his earlier conviction, Henry confidently responded that neither event represented a gay issue. Instead, he maintained that while he had indeed solicited men for sex, he was not the intended recipient of their services. In his version of the event, Henry was soliciting men to have sex with his female companions rather than with himself. Of course, in the end, while soliciting individuals for sex in general was not socially desirable, the implications of heterosexual encounters were far less damaging than being caught in gay situations. Again, Henry’s twists on the situation focused on providing Sexual Plausible Deniability for his colleagues and constituents.121

120 Henry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning, 128 footnote. 121 Howard, Men Like That, 158-160. 99

Along with the way he reacted to questions following these sexual scandals,

Henry was also able to promote an ethos of Sexual Plausible Deniability with the help of his loving and devoted wife, Noelle. Throughout the scandals and questions that surfaced, he was always able to return home to his publicly supportive wife, who helped him play the essential part of a respectable straight family man. Noelle “never wavered through the years as her husband’s life evolved,” even though she endured a great deal of anxiety because of him. Some of the largest issues surely stemmed from “questions about his sexuality and other aspects of his faithfulness to her,” notes political scientist Minion

K.C. Morrison.122 Although no record exists of Noelle speaking to others about her frequent loneliness, she did write her husband a letter expressing her dismay that “in the last 13 years we have had sex seven times. In the last 11 years we have had sex once,” contributing to a deeper sense of disconnect.123 This documentation of the couple’s infrequent sexual encounters contributes to the significant amount of information that frames Henry as a man with queer relationships and sexual desires for men rather than women. Regardless of how often they had sex, though, Noelle’s sustained relationship with Henry provided another publicly visible piece of his life story that supported claims of Sexual Plausible Deniability. Simply put, their relationship furthered Henry’s public heterosexual persona and gave credibility to his claims of being straight.

After Henry’s second notable run-in with law enforcement in 1973, he went on to flourish as a civil rights leader on the state and national levels. He remained president of

122 Minion K.C. Morrison, Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator (Fayetteville: University Press of Arkansas, 2015), 35. 123 Henry, The Fire Ever Burning 17, 36. 100 the Mississippi NAACP until he voluntarily retired in 1993, and he was elected to the

Mississippi House of Representatives in 1979. After moving to the capital as a state representative and throughout the 1980s, Henry lived publicly with a male companion,

Gullum Erwin. Finally, although not widely talked about, this situation confirmed the conjectures and name calling that had taken place over the previous twenty years. Henry was not, after all, heterosexual.

Again, Rustin and Henry’s widely divergent experiences and opportunities depended directly on the visibility of their queerness. While many associates of both activists knew that they did not conform to the heterosexual model of black male leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, Henry was much more adept at playing the game of social acceptability by fostering the Sexual Plausible Deniability of his homosexuality. Unlike Rustin, Henry never publicly admitted to being queer during the

1950s, 1960s, or later. On the contrary, he denied soliciting Eilert for sex in 1962 and for soliciting men for his own pleasure in 1973.

On the other hand, being true to himself, Rustin never denied his sexual orientation. In fact, Congressman Powell’s threat to fabricate a homosexual relationship between Rustin and King was especially dangerous to King and the movement because

Rustin had such an extensively documented and undisputed history of gay encounters.

Also, unlike Henry, Rustin never had an extended public relationship with a woman who could provide additional cover against accusations of “deviant” queer sexual practices. In short, Rustin’s refusal to maintain discretion about his sexuality, combined with his unwillingness to deny his sexual encounters or maintain a guise of heteronormativity, left 101 black communities with few choices but to ostracize him in order to maintain respectability in the eyes of white America. Rustin’s public commitment to himself and his queer identity was unique for his era, and his experience demonstrates the bravery it took to be openly queer before the post-Stonewall era of individual and community visibility. His life also exemplifies the great sacrifices that often had to be made for authenticity and transparency in black communities after the rise of the Civil Rights

Movement.

Finally, while Rustin and Henry certainly received different treatment by their colleagues and, subsequently different opportunities to advance and remain leaders in the

Civil Rights Movement, there were also other factors that influenced their positions and longevity as leaders. For example, Rustin spent much of his early life and initial activist years outside of the South—in Pennsylvania and New York—while Henry was a

Southerner who spent the overwhelming majority of his life in the Southern locations most important to Civil Rights Movement activism. In this way, Rustin could have been more easily viewed by fellow civil rights activists as an outsider, while it would have been difficult for anyone to view Henry as anything but a movement insider. Similarly, even before Rustin met King and other Civil Rights Movement leaders, he had an established history as a leftist organizer for antiwar and socialist causes, placing him on the far margins of political thought and black activist social circles. On the other hand,

Henry’s training and presentation as a black Southern middle-class pharmacist fit perfectly into Du Bois’s idea of a well-rounded, well-educated black leader who presented in ways acceptable to white America. With the exception of his queer sexual 102 encounters, sporadically documented by police encounters, Henry maintained a public persona that mirrored the upstanding models of black leadership promoted by a politics of respectability.

In summary, one can understand the importance of projecting public images of black civil rights activists that fit into the overall white middle-class standards of the mid- twentieth century. Comparing the experiences of the two most prominent black queer male leaders in the Civil Rights Movement—Bayard Rustin and Aaron Henry—reveals how reacting to accusations of queerness and resisting gay-baiting by white authorities could prompt significant differences in the way black communities treated sexual improprieties. Although Rustin and Henry had very similar run-ins with police and media over their sexual encounters with men, Henry was able to survive these encounters politically, while Rustin was not. This was due, in large part, to the fact that Henry never openly embraced his queerness and, instead, created counternarratives about his actions that focused on being framed by white leaders or being involved in a heterosexual rather than homosexual improprieties. Another way to understand Henry’s self-preserving actions is through the lens of Sexual Plausible Deniability. In the final chapter of this dissertation, the phenomenon of Sexual Plausible Deniability will be connected to a similar but more contemporary black sexual phenomenon, the Down Low.

Compared to the queer and sexually tolerant black spaces described in the previous chapter, black communities and the Civil Rights Movement leaders they promoted in the 1950s and 1960s looked very different. Raising a politics of acceptability as one of the most important factors in gaining full first-class citizenship, the middle- 103 class-led movement began to shift black communities away from being places that were havens for visible queerness to spaces where queerness could not be publicly shown or articulated. This shift and resulting fear were clearly evident in the reactions of major black newspapers to the 1953 Kinsey report release. The dialogues exposed in these articles highlighted a significant conversation about acceptable sexuality in black communities in the 1950s that was much less prevalent when Kinsey’s first report was produced in the 1940s. Digging deeper into the impact of the rise of the Civil Rights

Movement and subsequent lessening of public space for queer depictions and expressions, understanding the conservative roots of black mainline Christian churches is essential. These churches produced the overwhelming majority of civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s who subscribed to the vital importance of maintaining acceptable public appearances, but their historic reach and impact went much farther back in history, exponentially increasing their influence in black social, cultural, and political changes that began in the 1950s. 104

CHAPTER 4: CHOKEHOLD OF THE COLLAR: UNDERSTANDING THE

CONSERVATIVE ROOTS OF BLACK MAINLINE PROTESTANT

DENOMINATIONS AND MODERN POSITIONS ON HOMOSEXUALITY

Sections of Chapter Two focused on queer expressions from black pulpits from the 1920s through the 1950s. The two queer black ministers who stood out the most were

Rev. James Francis Jones, who pastored an enormous black Pentecostal congregation in

Detroit, and Rev. Charles Manuel Grace, who founded a small black church in Charlotte,

North Carolina in the 1920s and grew it into a religious empire over the course of thirty years. From their flamboyant dress to rumors about their same-sex sexual exploits,

“Prophet” Jones and “Sweet Daddy” Grace exuded queerness even as they led large, mainline black congregations. As prominent as the two men were in their communities, their lifestyles and personas were certainly exceptions to the rule of how black churches operated religiously and socially. As a general rule, very socially conservative church frameworks placed paramount importance on presenting their congregations, including their leaders, to the outside world as righteous and upstanding, functioning as the core organizing force behind proving blacks were deserving of full first-class citizenship. As discussed in Chapter Three, this obsession with appearing worthy enough to receive the full political and social benefits of citizenship was grounded in ideas about respectability created by the dominant white US Cold War culture.

This chapter begins by exploring the social conservatism of the black church and the long history of respectability politics in black communities. This deep history involved an intermingling of strategies used by white slaveholders to control black 105 bodies, even as blacks found opportunities for agency within religious spaces before and after emancipation. While religious practice and community were the linchpins of black life in the US, queerness was also allowed to openly exist and thrive in black spheres until the mid-twentieth century. The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement then prompted a turn in black respectability politics that closed down black sites and cultures that had existed for publicly supporting queerness. In its place, queerness was often tolerated when Sexual Plausible Deniability was employed. Ultimately, though, the onset of the HIV epidemic triggered reactions based on respectability politics and social conservatism that in turn generated the Down Low phenomenon, which will be explored in the next chapter.

Without a doubt, the longstanding socially conservative roots of mainline black

Christian denominations played a significant part in marginalizing queer expressions in black communities. Understanding a broad overview of how mainline black denominations developed and what they have meant to black Americans from the Middle

Passage to the time of Trump is essential to seeing the complicated role that these institutions played in quieting queer voices and hiding queer bodies. In short, beyond being sacrificed on the altar of Cold War respectability, black gay activists like Bayard

Rustin encountered significant obstacles in the form of black churches. Certainly, these religious forces that marginalized Rustin also affected the lives of countless other queer black individuals who grew up in church circles.

Although there were indeed some black religious groups that supported gay members or simply chose to ignore their sexuality, these groups comprised a distinct 106 minority.124 In fact, the evangelical nature of most mainline black Christian denominations in America created hyper-conservative congregations when it came to issues of social morality. These evangelical and fundamentalist black churches played a large part in reinforcing Cold War morality, but they were not merely products of post-

World War II America. Instead, black churches were—and continue to be—more socially conservative than their white mainline counterparts because of their development during the antebellum and Reconstruction eras and their roles as gatekeepers of morality and respectability in black communities.

Most slaves captured and shipped to North America during the Colonial Era were not Christian. Instead, their spiritual traditions were as diverse as the array of regions that they came from in Africa. A unifying theme for most early slave spiritual practices, though, was a direct connection to the particular geographic spaces from which they were abducted. Since they were uprooted and forced to live thousands of miles away from the geography that framed their traditional religions, a vacuum of sorts was created that necessitated the development of new types of religious practices and dialogues.125

As black religious practices first began to develop in a North American context during the colonial and early Republic eras, white masters were initially divided over whether their slaves should be Christianized. As Paul Harvey outlined in Through the

124 One of these minority black churches that supported queer black individuals and celebrated queer black lives from its inception is the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church. This affirming black denomination is discussed later in the chapter. 125 Slaves were brought to the Americas from many different African regions, many with their own distinct religious and/or spiritual traditions with concepts and practices that were often directly tied to their specific homelands. The diversity of native slave religions and their connections to geography are discussed in Albert Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3-19. 107

Storm, Through the Night, some slave owners thought it was dangerous to teach slaves about Christianity and ultimately convert them, because they could then be viewed as equals who deserved freedom. One of the main justifications for enslaving black Africans was that they were more animalistic and mentally inferior to their white counterparts. If, however, they were allowed to learn about and convert to Christianity, it put them on an equal spiritual playing field with their masters. Alternatively, other slave owners thought that they should foster Christian belief and practice among their slaves because the religion could be used a tool of social control. In short, even if the backbreaking work that slaves performed and terrible conditions that they lived in could be a catalyst for revolt, the belief in a Christian afterlife was an ultimate reward for their obedience in this life, thus both diffusing racial tensions in the present and reinforcing the racial hierarchy of the country in the long term.126

Debates over whether or not to Christianize slaves ended with the development of a uniform theological racism. Simply put, this racism centered on instances in the Bible where slavery existed and went unchallenged, providing opportunities for slave masters to justify their ownership and exploitation of blacks. For example, Ephesians Chapter 6,

Verse 5 directed slaves to “obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good

126 Paul Harvey, Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 30-48. 108 we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free.”

Similarly, Titus Chapter 2, Verse 9 proclaimed that slaves should “be submissive to their masters and…give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity.”127 Developing a narrative around these biblical pronouncements, masters argued that if slavery was allowed in the Bible, then it was also a legitimate form of human organization in eighteenth-century America. These arguments connected the institution of slavery to a type of paternalism that positioned white masters as caretakers of “less developed” blacks. As the argument went, the master-slave relationship was symbiotic and maintained the natural order of human existence. Albert Raboteau explains how slave owners argued that, “black people were inferior to whites and incapable of managing the responsibilities of free citizens…so blacks needed the discipline of slavery to control their laziness, ignorance, and immorality.”128 Clearly, through the development of theological racism and the resulting conversions of slaves, black religion was first seen by white masters as a way to control their slaves and justify their own actions. This same line of thinking was used for nearly two centuries, eventually allowing whites to draw on similar arguments for the theological racism to rationalize Jim Crow policies.129

Although from the white master’s perspective, fostering black Christianity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was ultimately seen as a form of social control,

127 Ephesians 6:5; Titus 2:9. 128 Raboteau, Canaan Land, 26. 129 Paul Harvey discusses theological racism being used to justify Jim Crow discrimination in his Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 41-45. 109 blacks crafted their own versions of Christianity in ways that helped them undermine the power of their masters. From the first formation of black Christian religious practices in

North America to the Jim Crow South, black churches served as sites for building political movements and community solidarity that could be quite subversive. Often, a process of melding happened in black religious experiences that merged aspects of traditional African spiritual and religious practices with Christian rites. These acts of cultural preservation allowed slaves to hold onto parts of their collective history that white masters tried to stamp out. Even though forming independent black-run institutions in the antebellum South was extremely difficult, many slaves worked to create their own spiritual and religious autonomy. Such conversations often took place in black communication circles, where white masters had little control, but they also happened in hushed tones in the back pews and balconies of white churches where slaves were relegated to sit. In some rare situations, slaves were allowed to create their own religious gatherings under close supervision or found time to host black religious gatherings without white knowledge.130

As mentioned earlier, these slave-organized religious gatherings often negotiated and ultimately melded Protestant Christian theology and African rites. This melding of

Christian and native African ideas and practices created a tension between the rigid doctrines and practices of organized American Christianity and the native practices that whites often viewed as hedonistic, animalistic, or primitive. For example, while slaves practiced a variety of different religions in their homelands, most shared common

130 Raboteau, Canaan Land, 3-20. 110 musical traditions as part of their spiritual practices. However, slave masters were opposed to slaves singing native African songs because it was an uncomfortable connection to slaves’ past that could be used to agitate for resistance. Working around such prohibitions, slaves took messages and figures from biblical stories and reworked them, singing them to the tunes of these traditional African songs. This blending allowed them to hold onto part of their past and preserve it for future generations without angering their masters. Also, these songs could include coded messages that would help slaves pass along information about secret meetings or other news without raising suspicion from their masters, serving yet another subversive role.131

For many slaves, the process of melding that was central to their religious experience was very important to carry on in formalized church structures. Because of this reality, many slaves and freed blacks were attracted to the less formal format of worship and ability for congregations to self-govern that the Baptist denomination provided. Similarly, the fundamentalist approach to the Bible endorsed by white Baptists and Methodists made these two denominations more popular as modes for forming black churches. As Horace Griffin, a theologian and historian of black churches, noted, since many black slaves “became Christian through the evangelical efforts of Methodists and

Baptists during the Great Awakening revivals and plantation missions, they also adopted the conservative Christian traditions and strict adherence to the Bible characteristic of

131 Frederick Douglass discussed the use of black spirituals being infused with coded messages in Chapter 2 of his 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (New York: Signet Classics, 2005). 111 these denominations.”132 Discussed later in this chapter, this history and fundamentalist traditions continued to influence the development of major black denominations after

Emancipation and beyond.

In addition to slaves being attracted to white-led Baptist and Methodist revivals in the South, many Northern black congregations engaged in extensive outreach to their enslaved brothers and sisters. These northern black churches were interested in providing spiritual salvation for slaves and expanding the number of congregations in their denominations, but they were also some of the most significant organizing spaces for anti-slavery activism. Significantly, these abolitionist campaigns in Northern black churches were some of the first places that a predominant focus on black respectability came into play as part of the dialogue about race and citizenship. These churches were

“convinced that progress for the race and escape from poverty depended upon education, temperance, thrift, and responsibility” and, therefore, preached the “importance of moral behavior and self-respect,” according to religious historian Albert Raboteau.133 Said another way, these Northern anti-slavery black churches promoting conversion both had the religious goal of saving the souls of their enslaved brethren and the political goal of framing blacks in the US as having the capacity to manage the same responsibilities as free white citizens.

Northern black religious leaders expressed their belief in a collective responsibility to raise all blacks to higher religious, social, political, and moral ground at

132 Horace Griffin, Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006), 49-50. 133 Raboteau, Canaan Land, 25. 112 the founding of the Society of Free Persons of Color in 1830. This anti-slavery organization, largely led by ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, produced a foundational document framed as an “address to the Free Persons of Colour of these United States.” This address began with basic language about citizenship found in the US Declaration of Independence, including the fact that all men “are born free and equal.” However, the address went on to demand that black men had to be responsible for the “speedy elevation of ourselves and brethren to the scale and standing of men.” Of course, this reference to “men” was developed with the social and legal standing of white men in mind. Ultimately, the foundational document lamented that blacks across the country “have not availingly appreciated every opportunity placed within [their] power…in elevating our condition to the rank of freemen.”134 To the ministers who founded the Society, a great deal of work needed to be done by blacks across the country to show that they were deserving of the full protections outlined in the US Constitution.

Sharing similar ideas about the importance of black men and women strictly following key denominational rituals and practices, black ministers in Baptist and

Methodist churches before and after emancipation were often frustrated with their parishioners. This frustration sprang from the behavior at religious gatherings and some of the superstitious perspectives that were certainly derived, at least in part, from the

134 American Society of Free Persons of Colour, “Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, for improving their condition in the United States; for purchasing lands; and for the establishment of a settlement in upper Canada, also, The Proceedings of the Convention with their Address to Free Persons of Colour in the United States,” September 20-24, 1830, reprinted in Colored Conventions: Bringing Nineteenth-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life, http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/70, accessed November 12, 2017. 113 melding of native African traditions with Protestant Christianity. As historian Paul

Harvey highlighted, during the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, black ministers often found themselves combatting ritual dances, vision- sessions, and conjuring practices that had made their way into slave religious practice from indigenous African rituals. They would quiet parishioners who shouted too loudly during services, discourage dances that were used to connect with spirits in Africa, and make sure that the congregation adhered to basic tenets of theology and practice in the denomination. Although different ministers certainly had diverse motivations for these actions, one of the most essential was, according to Harvey, “insisting that respectable worship practices would better reflect on the rising race.”135

These same black ministers were often some of the most prominent leaders in their communities because they were usually the only individuals with any significant educational training. This education sometimes included the ability to read and write but almost always meant they had superior skills and practice as communicators. Ministers also often took active roles in local and regional politics because they were “trained in the oratorical and organizational skills needed for political leadership,” Raboteau notes.136

This elevation placed them in dual roles as religious and political leaders in newly freed and growing black communities. As the most knowledgeable and connected individuals in their communities, black ministers were also channels for promoting the broader late- nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trends that exalted the importance of

135 Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 107. 136 Raboteau, Canaan Land, 69. 114

“modernization and standardization” in all facets of life. These ideas, central to an industrializing nation, further underscored conformity and homogeneity as paramount in community building and behavior, laying the groundwork for the rise of a mid-twentieth- century politics of acceptability.137

While independent black congregations were not the norm in the pre- emancipation South, the small number that existed there at the time and the greater number in the North were hotbeds of support for Republican candidates and ideologies, challenging the political beliefs of Democratic slaveholders. Highlighted earlier, some of the most outspoken abolitionists in the country were northern black ministers. Also, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, black churches across the country supported

Republican candidates for office, because they saw the party as the defender of newly freed slaves against Southern elites who sought to reintroduce white rule. Reconstruction- era Republicans also supported expanded educational opportunities for blacks, which were seen as key to improving their political, economic, and social wellbeing. Moreover, during the Reconstruction era, Republicans elected more than one thousand black men to public office, with a few reaching as high as state governorships and seats in Congress.

This further illustrates why black churches placed so much faith in the Republican Party.

The image below represents the first seven black men elected to US Congressional seats during Reconstruction. Pictured on the far left, the most prominent of these men and the

137 Harvey, Redeeming the South, 111-112. 115 first black US Senator, was Hiram Revels. Before becoming a US Senator from

Mississippi, he was a prominent African Methodist Episcopal Minister.138

Figure 2: A rendering of the first black US Senator and US Representatives between 1870 and 1871. All of these men were elected as Republicans; none of their terms lasted beyond 1879. 139

As Reconstruction grinded to a premature halt, racist whites ousted many of those

Republican candidates—both black and white—who had been supported by black

138 For more information on the connections between Republican politics and black religious institutions of the nineteenth century see Mark Noll’s God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). 139 Currier and Ives, The first colored senator and representatives—in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States. United States (New York: Currier and Ives, 1872), archived at the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98501907/, accessed August 18, 2018. 116 denominations at the beginning of the Jim Crow period. Similar to their place as havens of support for blacks before emancipation, black churches grew even more prominent in their role as all-purpose community centers during Jim Crow. Since blacks were not allowed to share many of the same facilities with whites or have access to government or other types of public services after Reconstruction, black congregations provided a great variety of support to their parishioners well into the twentieth century. Congregations continued their tradition of fostering political leaders, including later Civil Rights

Movement figures like Martin Luther King, Jr.140

Several historians, including Pete Daniel in Lost Revolutions, have argued that due to the exclusionary nature of Jim Crow segregation, blacks had to assemble and live within their own separate parallel society. This separate world encompassed shopping, entertainment, and religious expression, among many other facets of life. Not being able to hold significant positions in white society, many blacks centered their world around church communities, which provided places for religious worship, social interaction, and economic exchange. In essence, freed slaves who stayed in the South after emancipation,

Daniel explains, “were able to carve out lives with dignity in the belly of the beast” by participating in black church circles.141 This important role of church life to many blacks

140 Beginning in the 1870s and reaching a high point of activity in the early 1890s, whites in all southern states began pushing out both black and white Republicans from all levels of government. They did this first through violence—including lynching—and voter intimidation. Beginning in the late 1880s, they formalized Democratic control of southern states through legislation, creating a climate for the Democratic Party to maintain control of all southern states for the next three-quarters of a century. This disenfranchisement and political landscape shift was highlighted in Richard Valley’s The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 141 Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 24. 117 from the 1860s to the 1960s and beyond contributed to significantly higher rates of involvement in church life among blacks than whites and made black churches what

Patricia Hill Collins calls “the linchpin of African American communal life.”142

Although the centrality of black churches in the functioning of black communities and in the lives of black parishioners could be assessed in myriad ways, one of the most effective and substantial means is through understanding these institutions as the primary recipients of black philanthropy. As religious scholar and activist Rev. Reginald Glenn

Blaxton pointed out, “financial contributions to black churches, coming from relatively poor people, represent the primary form of charitable giving by African Americans.”

Blaxton continued, “anecdotal evidence suggests that black churches were the original venue for the development of minority entrepreneurial initiative and ability. Perhaps more than anything else, religious institutions owned and/or controlled by black people, against the social backdrop of chronic legal discrimination and customary racial prejudice, have nurtured and encouraged the self-respect of their parishioners.”143

In other words, blacks have invested in their religious institutions since the mid- nineteenth century, not only as a way to grow room for spiritual practice, but as the core investment in growing spaces for black business, social services, and general community life. In The Negro Church (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois assessed the importance of black churches. After presenting over two hundred pages of narrative on the centrality of black

142 Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 107. 143 Rev. Reginald Glenn Blaxton, “Jesus Wept: Black Churches and HIV,” pre-publication draft, Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 04, 05, Box 12, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives, Alexandria, Virginia. 118 churches in community development and on the rates at which black individuals gave to their specific denominations, Du Bois posited that “the Negro Church is the only social institution of the Negroes which started in the African forest and survived slavery; under the leadership of priest or medicine man, afterward of the Christian pastor, the Church preserved in itself the remnants of African life and became after emancipation the center of Negro social life. So that today the Negro population of the United States is virtually divided into church congregations which are the real units of race life.”144

Over a century later, the role of black congregations as the most basic units of race life had changed very little, particularly in terms of these institutions as the primary recipient of black financial investment. A 2012 study by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation found that while blacks did not generally view themselves as philanthropists, they actually gave away over twenty-five percent more of their incomes than did whites.

Furthermore, one of the largest benefactors of black philanthropy was black churches. In short, when compared to white families in the United States, black families were noticeably more generous in religious giving.145

144 “The Negro Church: Report of a Social Study Made Under the Direction of Atlanta University; Together with the Proceedings of the Eighth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems,” held at Atlanta University, May 26th 1903,” W.E. B. Du Bois, ed., corresponding secretary of the conference, ii, available at Documenting the American South, https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/negrochurch/menu.html, accessed August 18, 2018. 145 Data on black giving in the twenty-first century drawn from W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy By and For Communities of Color (Battle Creek, Mich.: W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 2012), https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/connections/cultures-of-giving- energizing-and-expanding-philanthropy-by-and-for-communities-of-color, accessed August 18, 2018. Additionally, an example of a study that shows black philanthropy more heavily focused on religious giving is Richard Steinberg and Mark Wilhem, “Religious and Secular Giving, by Race and Ethnicity,” in Patrick Rooney and Lois Sherman, eds., Exploring Black Philanthropy: New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), ch.6. 119

Additionally, black churches historically served as key sites for activist organizing and were the largest institutions involved in struggles for racial justice during the Civil Rights Movement. Individual congregations or collective denominations often worked together to provide ready-made groups of activists and movement leaders. For example, the most famous civil rights organizer, Martin Luther King, Jr., rose to prominence as a Baptist minister and later helped organize the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference.

The centrality of these churches in the lives of most black civil rights activists helped spread black middle-class norms of respectability throughout their communities, making black churches and their ministers the gatekeepers of respectability and morality.

In this way, while black churches were the chief vehicles for social activism and change in Cold War black communities, they were also the enforcers of heteronormative ideas and practices in these same communities. Whether or not particular members of a congregation were homophobic, mainline black churches condemned gay behavior because they were “worried about protecting the community’s image within the broader society,” Collins argues.146

From the post-emancipation era forward, the socially conservative leanings of black churches have continued in various ways. The staying power of this conservatism is especially apparent when comparing mainline black denominations against mainline white denominations in terms of how stances on same-sex marriage and other LGBT- related issues have evolved. For example, several mainline denominations with

146 Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 107. 120 predominantly white membership adopted some sort of affirming position on homosexuality by the end of the twentieth century or the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Evangelical Lutheran Church and the United Church of Christ embraced progressive stances on homosexuality in the 1990s, followed by the first ordination of an openly gay clergyman by the Episcopal Church USA in 2003 and the acceptance of openly gay ministers in the Presbyterian Church USA in 2011. None of the largest historically black denominations, however, adopted similar stances in this period.147

Similarly, national studies of US residents’ attitudes about same-sex marriage have shown significantly lower rates of acceptance in black religious communities.

Between 2001 and 2015, when the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage across the country, the Pew Research Center tracked rates of

US approval of same-sex unions each year. Comparing mainline white Protestant attitudes with those of mainline black Protestants, Pew found in 2001 that 38% of white mainline Protestants held positive attitudes as compared to 30% of mainline black

Protestants. This gap between mainline white and black Protestants continued every year thereafter, reaching the biggest divide in 2015, with 62% of mainline white Protestants supporting same-sex marriage while only 34% of mainline black Protestants sharing that opinion.148

147 The largest historically black denominations mentioned here were chosen because of size of membership nationwide; they include the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the National Baptist Convention, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Church of God in Christ. 148 Pew Research Center, “Changing Attitude on Gay Marriage: Public Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage,” http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/, accessed February 20, 2018. 121

Although no polling data on attitudes about homosexuality existed for mainline black congregations in the 1950s or 1960s, most recent studies show the prevalence of homophobia in these churches, suggesting the pervasiveness of conservative fundamentalist beliefs they held in earlier decades. For example, Chapter One highlighted a prominent 2003 Georgia State University study that synthesized several polls of black communities to conclude that “blacks are 11 percent more likely than whites to condemn homosexual relations as ‘always wrong’.” While participants in these studies were removed from the experiences of activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and

Aaron Henry by several decades, they certainly represent the fundamentalist nature of mainline black churches.149

The conflict between official stances of mainline black church and black queer or socially progressive individuals was clearly documented through the 1970s, 1980s, and

1990s. Although few internal records that illustrate this tension between religious and social experience exist within mainline black church archives, it was documented through the experiences of black ministers and activists who left their religious roots to join mainline predominantly white Christian traditions or who set out on their own to create new inclusive, black-centered religious organizations.

One of the most prominent of these black church expatriates of the late twentieth century was Rev. Walter Dennis, an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church and the second black bishop in the Diocese of New York. Ordained as an Episcopal deacon in

1956, Dennis was drawn to the denomination because of the centrality of social justice

149 Lewis, “Black-White Differences in Attitudes Toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights,” 63-66. 122 work in the diocese. From 1956 until 1960, his first official post was as the assistant to the diocesan Secretary of Negro Work, where he planned multiple conferences on racial inequality and organizing. A lifelong bachelor rumored to be gay, Dennis rose in prominence in national Episcopal circles, co-founding the denomination’s Union of

Black Episcopalians in 1968 and serving as the Bishop Suffragan of New York from

1979 until his retirement in 1998.150 Close friends with civil rights legend and Supreme

Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Dennis believed that a clear activist connection should exist between the black and gay civil rights movements.

Speaking to a group of gay rights activists on July 29, 1976, Dennis remarked that the individuals gathered in the room should realize that “churches—especially black churches—have always been in politics,” and that it was important for gay activists to continue to try to work with religious communities to incorporate their narratives into the newest age of religious civil rights discourses. Recognizing the difficulty that gay activists had in working with many black churches, Dennis encouraged that “it seems to me that the Gay community should work all the harder to get as much of the religious community support for their cause, rather than reacting to one segment of that community. In thus doing you will be fulfilling your vocation, and you will be helping the church to fulfill its.”151 Recognizing the clear tensions between black religious spaces that had been central hubs for fighting for racial equality and a newly expanded civil

150 Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights (Lexington: the University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 100-101. 151 Rev. Cannon Walter Dennis, “As the Gay Movement Comes of Age,” remarks given as an address to INTEGRITY/NYC, July 29, 1976, Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 04, 05, Box 12, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. 123 rights narrative around sexuality and gender, Dennis hoped that continued interaction between gay leaders and black religious leaders could begin to create change that supported equality in a broader sense.

While gay activism grew significantly in size and scope in the decade following

Rev. Dennis’s comments, the tension between queer activism and mainline black religious groups in the US only seemed to deepen. One way to understand this tension in the 1980s is through the lens of HIV/AIDS activism in black communities. First observed by scientists in 1981, the infections later attributed to the human immunodeficiency virus were disproportionately affecting black communities across the US from the outset of the domestic epidemic.152 Illustrating this, a 1996 study by the University of California, San

Francisco and the Harvard AIDS Institute found that blacks in the District of Columbia accounted for sixty-seven percent of infections between the mid-1980s and 1996.

However, blacks only made up about sixty percent of the population in the District and about twelve percent of the population nationwide.153

Furthermore, same-sex sexual encounters between men made up one of the largest ways in which the virus was transmitted to black individuals from the 1980s to the

2010s.154 Examining the conversation in light of these statistical realities, the lack of

152 For a key journalistic account of the unfolding of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, see Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 153 The DC population statistic referenced is based on the 2000 US Census Bureau, available at the Bureau’s American Fact Finder, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml?src=bkmk, accessed August 18, 2018. 154 UCSF, “Alive and Cumulative AIDS Cases, Reported Through June 30, 1996,” published October 1996, Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 03, Box 7, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. DC and US population data pulled from the 2000 US Census. Since the first systemic surveys of HIV/AIDS infections 124 discussion about sexuality or queerness in black religious circles was deafening. For example, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference hosted three national summits focused on “AIDS and the Black Community” in 1986 and 1987, but none of these gatherings explicitly incorporated conversations about queer sexuality and sexual practice.155 The last of these three conferences, hosted at Howard University in 1987, included no sessions related to men who have sex with men or the impact of ignoring these connections between sexual practice and HIV infections. To the contrary, in his greeting for the conference, SCLC President Rev. Joseph Lowery noted that blacks needed to refocus to “help us in the struggle to be ‘free at last’ from substance abuse, perverted priorities, sexual promiscuity and other self-destructive lifestyles…[O]ne of the most effective…in fact…THE most effective weapon against AIDS is the strengthening of family values.”156 These lightly veiled comments were certainly meant as an attack on queer sexualities and black men who have sex with men, some of whom were certainly at the conference and even more of whom were quietly active in black religious groups across the country.157

in the US, blacks have made up a disproportionate number of those infected compared to the overall population size of blacks in the country and continue to do so into the twenty-first century. For example, in 2016, blacks accounted for 44% of new HIV diagnoses across the country, although they only compromised about 12% of the overall national population. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV Surveillance Report 2016; vol. 28, November 2017, http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/library/reports/hiv- surveillance.html, accessed August 31, 2018.

155 These three SCLC conferences referenced here were held in Atlanta in May 1986 and in Savannah and Washington, DC in May 1987; Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 03, Box 7 and Series 04, 05, Box 12, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. 156 Joseph Lowery, “SCLC President’s Greeting to the conference,” found in episcopal archives image 0080 Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 03, Box 7, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. 157 The 1987 SCLC Conference at Howard University included official representatives from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the National Black Baptists, National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Church of God in Christ, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church 125

Five years later, researchers from Loyola University Chicago and DePaul sought to understand how black Baptist ministers across the country understood HIV/AIDS and dealt with it in their congregations. Their 1992 survey asserted that understanding black

Baptist ministers’ attitudes about the virus was essential to combatting the spread of the disease because “the African-American church has long been perceived as an organizing and life-sustaining institution within the African-American community.” Ultimately, the researchers believed that understanding the ministers’ perspectives could help health educators work around “considerable resistance to their health promotion efforts by the

African-American ministry.” The study randomly selected 350 names of black Baptist ministers who were asked to complete an assessment tool that measured their perceptions. Of the 350 ministers who were solicited, 92 from across the country participated. From their responses, it was clear that most ministers were aware that HIV infection was a concern in their community but did “not perceive it as being a significant threat.” The study went on to suggest that “one possible explanation for this finding is that African-American Baptist ministers are more focused on the highly visible social degradation they perceive…in their neighborhoods than the often hidden and individual effects of HIV.” Similarly, the overwhelming majority of ministers who responded

“strongly agreed” that if they “saw two people of the same sex holding hands…[they] would be disgusted.” These findings continued to highlight the disconnect that black religious communities and their leaders had in understanding, articulating, and acting on an unmistakable connection between black queer sexualities and sexual acts and the very real impact that disconnect was resulting in. This aversion to conversations about sexual 126 health that were so deeply intertwined with aspects of queerness continued to fuel the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS in black communities.158

Responding to the forces in mainline black religious institutions illustrated by the

1980s SCLC HIV/AIDS conferences and the 1992 black Baptist minister survey, students at Howard University’s Divinity School hosted a campus forum in May 1995 to break the silence of black churches about HIV/AIDS and queerness. Over 200 black students, theologians, ministers, and social workers gathered to discuss the viral epidemic in black communities and the complete silence from most mainline black churches on HIV or sexuality and sexual practice. Pernessa Seele, one of the main organizers of the forum, believed that “homophobia is the number one barrier to addressing AIDS in the black church.” Building on this assertion, Howard Divinity School Professor Kelly Brown

Douglas argued that many leaders of black churches believed that their parishioners who were living with and dying from HIV/AIDS were engaged in inappropriate behavior that led to their infection. Douglas highlighted that “wrongly or not, most people in the black community have the idea that those with AIDS are only gay…and they’re doing what they shouldn’t have been doing anyway.”159

While many attendees echoed the connections between homophobia in black religious circles and the HIV epidemic in those same places, Harvard professor Cornel

West went further to tie the lack of mobilization against HIV in black religious

158 Isaiah Crawford et al., “Attitudes of African-American Baptist Ministers Toward AIDS,” Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 20, no. 4 (Oct. 1992): 304-308. 159 Bill Broadway, “A Time to Speak of AIDS: Boisterous Howard Divinity Forum Tries to Break Silence of Black Churches,” Washington Post, May 27, 1995, B7. 127 communities to the way that blacks had been trained by dominant white cultures to understand their bodies in social and political contexts. West believed that “from the time

Africans were brought to this country, the agents of white supremacy have told black people their bodies are inferior. The effort to degrade and demonize blacks has worked consciously and unconsciously on the African American psyche, often with the intended result.” Ultimately, West declared that one of the primary reasons that the black church

“has been reluctant to deal with sexuality is that it was afraid it would shatter a facet of community because the way we view our bodies is such a delicate, difficult issue.” As

West noted, a fundamental factor in the failure of black churches to respond to

HIV/AIDS was the deep historical legacy of a politics of respectability produced by white supremacy, which has continued to reinforce the taboo nature of publicly visible conversations about “non-normative” sexualities and sexual practice into the present era.160

Along these same lines, Rev. Reginald Glenn Blaxton, a black minister in the predominantly white Episcopal Church and an HIV/AIDS activist in Washington, DC, commented on black churches’ reluctance to speak up in the struggle against HIV/AIDS.

While serving in the mid-1990s as Special Assistant for Religious Affairs to the Mayor of

Washington, Blaxton was approached by a colleague with a request that “seemed simple enough…[providing] assistance in identifying local clergy to serve on a religious community advisory panel to counsel [the local gay men’s and lesbian health clinic] on

160 Bill Broadway, “A Time to Speak of AIDS: Boisterous Howard Divinity Forum Tries to Break Silence of Black Churches,” Washington Post, May 27, 1995, B7. 128 the most effective ways of stimulating religious community involvement in the AIDS crisis.” Blaxton set out believing that this request would be a relatively easy one to fulfill, particularly since “Washington is the oldest and longest-established majority-black city in the country…with over 800 established congregations, large and small, within the city limits, the vast majority of which are predominantly African-American,” he wrote.

Approaching those black congregations as a black minister—albeit one from the white- majority Episcopal Church—Blaxton believed he would find quick allies in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Instead, what he realized was that few black clergy would answer his calls or agree to be involved in a queer-related advisory board in any way. This prodded

Blaxton to surmise that

the African-American religious tradition, despite its public image as an activist one, is demonstrably more conservative than its white evangelical counterpart. The four or five denominations most Americans would readily identify as the “black church” are steeped historically in the ethos of evangelical Protestantism…[therefore] I should not have been surprised, in retrospect, when fourteen of the fifteen clergymen that I contacted, all of whom served sizable, well-established congregations, declined to be involved in any way with the work of the clinic.

Blaxton continued to encounter lack of engagement from black churches in his DC-based

HIV/AIDS activism until the early 2000s, when he himself died of AIDS-related complications.161

161 Quotations are from a pre-publication draft of “Jesus Wept: Black Churches and HIV,” reprinted as Reginald Glenn Blaxton, “Jesus Wept: Reflection on HIV Dis-Ease and the Churches of Black Folk,” in Eric Brandt, ed., Dangerous Liaisons: Blacks, Gays, and the Struggle for Equality (New York: New Press, 1999), 102-141. Also see “Reginald Glenn Blaxton, 48, Dies,” Washington Post, March 14, 2001, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2001/03/14/reginald-glenn-blaxton-48-dies/8552a633-7dff- 4fe6-8198-b99acf483b6a/, accessed August 18, 2018. 129

Beyond a lack of critical dialogues about HIV/AIDS in mainline black religious groups, significant numbers of congregations actively incorporated and embraced anti- queer positions in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the most significant instances of multiple mainline black congregations openly collaborating around an unequivocally homophobic cause was the widespread promotion of the anti-gay propaganda film, Gay Rights,

Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda. The Traditional Values Coalition

(TVC)—a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group— produced the documentary-style propaganda film in 1993 for specific circulation within black religious circles.162 The impetus for creating the film was combatting national conversations that sought to expand applications of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to cover sexual orientation. The film began with footage from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I

Have a Dream” speech, before shifting into footage of the activists from the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Throughout the film, footage emphasized the most extreme and hyper-sexualized marchers, in order to paint queer activists writ large as perverted individuals who sought to make a mockery of the Civil Rights Movement’s work for black rights. One spokesperson for “concerned black clergy” is featured commenting that, “the highhanded attempt on the part of the gay and lesbian movement to hijack the 1964 Civil Rights Act in order to give moral credence to their immoral lifestyle is an offense to black America.” The film continued

162 The Traditional Values Coalition was founded by Rev. Lou Shelton in 1980 with a central purpose of promoting anti-gay ideologies in the United States; the designation of TVC as a hate group is found at Southern Poverty Law Center, “Traditional Values Coalition,” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting- hate/extremist-files/group/traditional-values-coalition, accessed August 18, 2018. 130 by focusing on race as an inherent characteristic of an individual, while presenting

“homosexuality” as a personal behavior choice not deserving of the same kinds of anti- discrimination protections. Over the course of 43 minutes of footage, TVC presented many so-called “homosexual myths” that were described as lies to promote queer sexualities and take away rights from black Americans.163

While the film was shown to all sorts of audiences around the country, TVC invested particular energy in “widely distributing [the film] to black Baptist churches” across the country with the goal of mobilizing socially conservative black citizens through fear and disgust to reach out to their elected officials and express their disdain for extending legal protections to homosexuals who were seeking to “hijack the black civil rights movement.”164 TVC’s founder, Lou Sheldon, travelled the country throughout the early 1990s, organizing black ministers from San Francisco to Washington, DC, to oppose the “homosexual agenda” that he claimed had “hijacked the freedom train to

Selma.” A November 1995 Washington Blade story highlighted Sheldon’s message at a forum held at Washington, DC’s predominantly black Mount Airy Baptist Church.

Speaking mostly to black clergy, Sheldon exclaimed,

[A]re we going to say that because of a person wanting to have a diversified sexual orientation that we are going to equate that with the struggles of what Martin Luther King became the great leader of?” He went on to say, “Here in the District, the homosexual community has really taken over our whole political agenda…[I]f you take any position

163 Gay Rights, Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda, VHS (Hemet, Calif.: Jeremiah Films, 1993). 164 “Anti-Gay Video Woos Black Fundamentalists,” Grapevine, Vol. 8, no. 2 (Oct. 1993), 1. Commentary highlighted in newsletter shared between Episcopal ministers in the southeastern New York and southwestern Connecticut. Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 04, 05, Box 12, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. 131

against them, they’ve got your job, where you work at. It’s not the ones that you see out here. It’s the ones with the suits on back in the offices who don’t claim to be homosexual that will cut your throat.

After raising fears that hidden homosexuals would cause blacks to lose their jobs,

Sheldon finished by highlighting the threat that they posed to black families: “[T]wo men who want to live together as a family and maybe eventually adopt a child, especially a black child—this is becoming a Mecca for white homosexual men, moving in here, setting up residence so they can adopt black children.”165

Across the country, TVC whipped up anti-gay fervor in black churches and communities. A prime example of how Sheldon and his organization effectively manipulated discourses of civil rights and black respectability was evident in Cleveland in the mid-1990s. A series of screenings of Gay Rights, Special Rights and organized meetings hosted by homophobic black Ohio ministers led to the creation of a new organization called the Black Church. Representing black ministers from Baptist,

Methodist, and Apostolic/Pentecostal churches from around Cleveland, the Black Church was created to resist the advance of gay civil rights locally, regionally, and nationally. In one of the organization’s first published documents, entitled “The Black Church Position

Statement on Homosexuality,” the group stated that it would “emphasize and promote the social and cultural views that are supported in the Bible. We shall renounce any social behaviors and/or cultural views that are contrary to biblical standards. We view homosexuality (including bisexuality, as well as gay or lesbian sexual activity) as a

165 Sue Fox, “Lou Sheldon’s Crusade,” Washington Blade, November 24, 1996, 1, 23, in Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 04, 05, Box 12, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. 132 lifestyle that is contrary to the teachings of the Bible.” As this founding statement reflects, the group’s primary purpose was to stand against any political shifts in favor of rights for queer citizens in any form. This very public stance of the Black Church drew criticism from black social justice activists in Cleveland, including queer activist Leslye

Huff, who created a group to oppose homophobia. As Huff noted, the ministers leading the Black Church “seem to have no comprehension that they are attacking their own sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, and even some of the ministers themselves. We have allowed them to walk around with the myth that the only Gay people are white.” In this statement,

Huff pointed out one of the most significant flaws in black ministerial condemnations of queer rights: these attacks were, in many instances, internal attacks on their own communities.166

The deep frustration of this realization that mainline black churches were—at the most generous interpretation—ignoring health and social factors that were killing thousands of their own members continued to plague black queer activists and ministers throughout the late 1990s. As the predominantly white United Methodist Church met for its 1996 annual meeting in April, clergy watched closely as the denomination grappled with two significant decisions that year: first, whether to pursue a merger with the three largest black Methodist denominations (African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist

Episcopal Zion, and Christian Methodist Episcopal), and second, whether to soften the

166 “The Black Church Position Statement on Homosexuality,” Call and Post, June 10, 1993, A4; “Cleveland Black Churches Organizing Anti-Gay group,” Washington Blade, Vol 4, #35 (1993), 13, Leslye Huff, “Black Ministers Declare War Against Lesbians and Gay Men,” Call and Post, July 1, 1993, A3, all in Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 04, 05, Box 12, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. 133

“incompatibility clause” that the Church had adopted in 1972 to officially declare that homosexuality was “incompatible with Christian teaching.” As Rev. Reginald Blaxton followed the conference from Washington, DC, he collected numerous news articles about the conference proceedings, ending with an April 27, 1996, Washington Post story titled “Delegates Agree to Pursue Merger, Disagree on Gays.” As the title suggests, the

United Methodists decided to move forward on merging with the three black denominations but voted against removing the “incompatibility clause” that set the church in opposition to queer expression and individuals. As he read the story, Blaxton was certainly reflecting on his failed attempt to organize black ministers to advise the DC gay and lesbian clinic only a few years earlier. This experience and others were also certainly motivators for what he did after finishing the story: He lifted his fine black pen, circled the full title, and inscribed the words “Surprising? Unsurprising” in the left-hand margin.167 In this moment, Blaxton seemed to express sadness at what he saw unfold in the United Methodist Church and connected the ultimate vote to the division he had experienced between black churches and queer life.

Not long after Blaxton clipped the United Methodist conference story from the newspaper, a black civil rights activist and minister, Reverend Imagene Stewart, began organizing to build coalitions that would bridge the disconnect between black mainline churches and queer individuals in Washington, DC. As she planned a “Fight for Our

Rights” dance at the Civil Liberties League No. 194, Stewart hoped to attract individuals

167 David E. Anderson, “Delegates Agree to Pursue Merger, Disagree on Gays”, Washington Post, April 27, 1996, B7, in Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 04, 05, Box 12, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. 134 committed to racial equality as well as those fighting for equality on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. Stewart commented that, “although the civil rights struggles of black people and women have always been [my] main focus…[I] took on homophobia several years ago after a friend was fired from his job as a church choir director because he was Gay.” She continued, “homophobia runs especially rampant within the [black] religious community. There are a lot of musically inclined Gays within the church. Many churches, when they hire men now, look at the way they walk and the way they dress to see if they are Gay. I think that’s a serious problem.” Although no records are available to indicate the success of the dance, Stewart clearly hoped that this would be a place to begin much-needed dialogues that stressed the struggles of both racial minorities and sexual minorities in the US.168

Reverend Rainey Cheeks also sought to create conversations in Washington, DC, about the intersections between queer experience on the one hand and black communities and religious practice on the other. As the founding minister of a queer-inclusive, black- focused church—Inner Light Ministries—Cheeks struggled to find a place for his congregation to meet in close proximity to members’ homes. He was prodded to create the forum when his search for a black congregation that would allow him to host meetings in its facility failed. Cheeks reflected that, “in this city, I can’t get in the door of most black churches. It is absolutely mind blowing to me that each time I need a space to hold an event, it’s the white churches that say come in.” These experiences motivated

168 Wendy Jackson, “Black Civil Rights Group Invites Gays to Dance,” Washington Blade, September 27, 1996, 10. 135

Cheeks to gather over $150,000 in funds to sponsor a full-day forum at Howard

University in June 1997 that served as yet another important opportunity to initiate conversations about sexuality and queerness in black religious circles.169

Cheeks’s personal and professional experiences with mainline black religious groups motivated him to found Inner Light Ministries as an alternative religious option for queer people of color that was centered on blackness but inclusive of diverse sexual orientations and expressions. Similar factors had earlier motivated Rev. Carl Bean to create the Unity Fellowship Church Movement. Drawing on his early life experiences as a black queer person in mainline black churches in Baltimore and Newark, Bean believed there needed to be an alternative religious space for his fellow black queer folks who could not be completely out in mainline congregations. Bean noted that growing up in the

1940s and 1950s, it was clear to him that “in the black church community, no one discussed homosexuality. Yet many people didn’t hide their gayness.”170 Although Bean recollects that he presented as effeminate and stereotypically gay without originally being ostracized in mainline black religious circles, he encountered serious resistance and was shunned by many of his church friends after he was publicly outed as a teenager. These early experiences created Bean’s passion for establishing a queer-friendly religious space, because “those of us who were both Christian and gay could no longer live under a system of hypocrisy—that is, attend a church that pretended our sexual orientation didn’t

169 Kai Wright, “Forum Seeks to Open Dialogue on Gays and the Black Church,” Washington Blade, June 1997, 14, 22, in Reginald Blaxton Papers, RG A06, Series 04, 05, Box 12, Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. 170 Archbishop Carl Bean, I Was Born This Way: A Gospel Preacher’s Journey Through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 81. 136 exist or, even worse, attend a church where it was condemned. Under that system, we had suffered deeply. We needed to be out. We needed to be open.” Bean continued to reflect on this hypocrisy by highlighting the very important contributions that many queer black men made to mainline black religious churches as musicians, noting that “many of our

[Unity Fellowship] members…had been raised Christians. They had left the church or, more accurately been thrown out of the church. In black churches, gays, although tolerated as choir members or soloists, were subjected to at least three sermons a year— one about Sodom, another about Leviticus, and a third about Romans. Each sermon used speciously literal interpretations to bash homosexuality.”171 Bean had clearly identified an important need in black mainline religious landscapes, as was evidenced by the quick expansion of his Unity Fellowship network from its initial California location in the late

1970s to more than a dozen churches in four different districts across the nation by the end of the 1990s.172

Ultimately, Cheeks and Bean founded their black queer-friendly congregations in reaction to the mainline black churches they grew up in that discouraged conversations about sexuality and punished undeniably public displays of queerness. They wanted to create religious spaces where black queer people could be their open and authentic selves and find support and community.

As the historical overview of mainline black Christian denominations presented earlier in this chapter highlighted, there was little room to be openly and unapologetically

171 Bean, Born This Way, 214-215. 172 Information on Unity Fellowship Churches across the country is available at the denomination’s website, ufcmlife.org. 137 queer in the pews and parish halls of mainline congregations. Largely connected to the unique ways in which these churches developed, mainline black denominations were places that very publicly supported homophobia from pulpits while preserving room for queerness to exist as long as it was not openly discussed. This arrangement left many black queer individuals in gray areas that allowed them to create networks and find social support in mainline black churches as long as they hid part of themselves, often in plain sight. Understanding this unique situation, the next chapter explores one of the most significant long-term impacts of the increased prominence of these mainline denominations and their conservative ministers beginning in the 1950s: the expansion of the phenomenon of Sexual Plausible Deniability and the emergence of a distinct culture of the Down Low. 138

CHAPTER 5: MIDNIGHT RIDERS AND ABOMINATIONS:

THE CREATION OF BLACK LIFE ON THE DOWN LIFE

As previously discussed, the unique ways in which mainline black denominations developed in the United States—from pre-emancipation black organizing to the impacts of Great Awakenings and the evangelical work of white Baptists and Methodists— created socially conservative institutions. These churches were particularly important centers of community life and activism for blacks in the North before and during the

Civil War and became nearly universal hubs for building black solidarity following

Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow. This prominence of mainline black congregations was augmented in new ways with the birth of the 1950s Civil Rights

Movement and its reliance on middle-class, church-affiliated leaders.

These black middle-class ministers played crucial roles in supporting the development of community services and dialogues; they were catalysts and agitators for social justice, serving in critical capacities in the boycotts, sit-ins, marches, and other activist maneuverings of the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, this progress came at a significant cost. Building on the socially conservative ideologies of their denominations, these black ministers rose to positions as gatekeepers of morality and respectability in black communities. Their insistence on maintaining public perceptions of black heteronormativity drove many queer spaces underground that had existed for decades in black communities around the country. While these ministers did not extinguish a unique kind of toleration (if not affirmation), their energy contributed to the development and thriving of the Sexual Plausible Deniability phenomenon. Queer expressions in black 139 communities continued to exist. However, the potential for open conversations about queerness and queer acts died at the hands of these ministers and the Civil Rights

Movement’s insistence on maintaining an outward politics of acceptability to garner the support of white America.

The rise of black middle-class ministers and the tactics of publicly attacking queerness and ignoring conversations about sexuality in black mainline churches created significant tension for black queer individuals who were incredibly conflicted and torn between allegiance to the religious communities—the pillars of their communities and families—and understandings of their own sexual identities and interactions. This tension clearly played a significant role in the creation of alternative black-led religious communities, including Carl Bean’s founding of the Unity Fellowship Church in

California in the 1970s and Rainey Cheeks’s founding of Inner Light Ministries in

Washington, DC, in the 1990s. The vibrant institutions that Bean, Cheeks, and other religious leaders created as alternatives to the socially conservative places they grew up in represented one response to social and cultural boundaries and taboos created by the phenomenon of Sexual Plausible Deniability.

However, for many other blacks, continuing to live as members of black mainline denominations—or at least in the social shadow of those church influences—involved adopting unique strategies for reconciling personal identity and sexual practice within the confines of their communities. While there was certainly no monolithic way that these individuals worked to reconcile their multiple identities, one strategy for many queer black men was adopting life “on the Down Low.” 140

It is important to note that simply using the slang term “Down Low”—often referred to simply as the DL—is controversial. Since the term became popularized in the early 1990s, it has been a contentious way to label sexual practices that often involve complicated conversations about race, gender, masculinity, morality, individual health, and community wellbeing. In 2005, Keith Boykin, former Clinton White House advisor and co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, sought to highlight many of the reasons that Down Low is problematic as a label and a concept. Most importantly,

Boykin pointed out that Down Low does not have a single definition. He noted that depending on where one looked to define the term, Down Low could be employed to describe someone who was in a heterosexual relationship while engaging in queer sexual acts with others. In other situations, it was used more broadly to describe any individual engaging in queer sexual acts who did not openly identify as bisexual or gay. Other definitions limited DL applicability to black individuals, while some used the term to describe individuals of any race engaged in secretive queer sexual behavior. Some definitions presented the term as something that could describe an individual of any gender, while others limited the application only to cisgender men. Finally, many definitions were framed in close relationship to the spread of HIV and other public and social health issues, while health and disease transmission were not components of other definitions. Ultimately, Boykin highlighted that the Down Low appeared to be

“everything and nothing. In fact, the down low [is] a bit like water. It has no shape, no 141 form, and no color of its own. Like water, it is flexible enough to adapt to the shape and color of any container. It can mean whatever the user wants it to mean.”173

The most troubling of all of Boykin’s assertions about the Down Low as a concept and term was that it was often a tool for problematizing or sensationalizing black bodies and framing black men as the central culprits for destroying black families through the spread of HIV to black women and children. This shortsighted blaming of black men ignored many of the social and structural issues that impact black masculinity and sexual practice, overlooking many of the negative influences that dominant white cultures have had on these situations. Relating to his personal experience growing up,

Boykin stated that he “discovered early in life that black men make easy targets to blame for many of the problems in America…There is nothing worse than being blamed for something you have not done. And that is exactly why the public discussion about black men on the down low is so dangerously wrong. Almost every time I hear talk about the down low, I remember the feeling of being blamed for something I did not do.” Boykin continued by highlighting a framework that has perpetuated many of the most problematic uses of this terminology and that shaped many of the social ills for which the

Down Low is often blamed. He noted that “the truth is, more than a generation after the so-called sexual revolution and decades after the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, we are still a nation in deep denial about sex, race, and relationship. In black America, with the all-too-willing assistance of white America, we are still afraid to hear, understand, and

173 Keith Boykin, Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 20. 142 process the truth. As a nation, we would rather talk about the Down Low than talk candidly about racism, homophobia, and AIDS, and about our collective responsibility to find solutions for these problems.”174 In the end, the valid points that Boykin raised about the term Down Low should be at the forefront of any conversation when this terminology is used. His analysis is a reminder that mainstream American culture—still held firmly in the grasp of white, middle-class, Christian normativity—often employs Down Low to continue imposing standards of acceptability, sensationalizing black bodies, and limiting black communities.175

At the same time, while it is important to understand the questions about the

Down Low that Boykin raised, one cannot ignore the unique social arrangements and sexual situations that exist in many black communities across the United States as a result of particular religious and social histories. The language that has been used to describe and discuss this uniqueness is certainly imperfect, often framed in relationship to problematic dominant white discourses, and can very easily be used to label black sexual practices as sensational, exotic, or distinctively dysfunctional. That of course is not the aim of this project.

Instead, in seeking to better understand some unique queer expressions in modern black communities, this project intentionally uses Down Low within a very carefully defined framework. Understanding that words are powerful tools for oppression or liberation, Down Low is used in this chapter to describe black men who have sex with

174 Boykin, Beyond the Down Low, 4-5.

143 men but do not openly identify as—and may not have even considered themselves to be—bisexual or queer in any other way, regardless of their relationship status with cisgender women. While this definition is ultimately used to discuss public health implications of the sexual acts it is used to describe, it is not intrinsically tied to questions about health or morality. Finally, this definition of Down Low can only be applied to black individuals, as the project is focused specifically on the uniqueness of black queer interactions. This term is not used to demonize or pathologize black bodies. Instead, using it enables an exploration of the Down Low as an outgrowth of the rise of Sexual

Plausible Deniability, highlighting the role that white America played in creating the

Down Low concept.

While the Down Low is complicated as a term because of the many different ways it has been defined and problematic assumptions that are connected with many of those definitions, it is important to use, in part, because it has been applied in so many cultural situations. What the term lacks in precision of application over the last three decades, it gains in the depth and breadth of its use and its familiarity as a general concept in both black communities and American culture as a whole.

In many ways, the Down Low was fueled by ideas about black masculinity that were closely tied to understandings of the black family. For many black men on the

Down Low, not wanting to be framed as “degenerates” whose presence challenged and thus weakened the fabric of black family structures was a motivator for remaining secretive. Although many examples exist of black men being blamed by white American culture for not appropriately performing the duties of husbands and fathers, one of the 144 most significant was the Moynihan Report. This highly publicized 1965 US Department of Labor report was officially titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” and explored many unique factors that put black families at higher risks for negative health, economic, and social issues. For dozens of pages, the report discussed high levels of unwed pregnancies, incarceration of youth, and unemployment among black men. The report also highlighted that one of the most significant causes for each of these three potentially catastrophic trends—described in a group as a “tangle of pathology”—was the disconnected and feminized black man.176 In summary, the report noted that, “three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American. At this point, the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without the assistance of the white world. The cycle can only be broken if these distortions are set right. In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of the family structure.”177 In the end, the report captured the attention of President Lyndon Johnson and became a key document that informed policy development connected to his War on Poverty. As shortsighted as Moynihan was in ignoring many of the ways that white America had contributed to creating these disparities, the significant amount of media attention his

176 The first person to coin the phrase “tangle of pathologies” to describe perceived issues in black communities was black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The Moynihan Report language was borrowed from Frazier’s scholarship. 177 Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” March 1965, 47. https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Moynihan%27s%20The%20Negro%20Family.pdf, accessed August 19, 2018. 145 report received directed the use of federal anti-poverty program funds, furthering the

American conversation about blackness and masculinity in stereotypical ways.178

In addition to concerns about the image of the black family, the Down Low also developed as a tool for preserving ideas of manhood in response to nineteenth- and twentieth-century mythologies about black rapists. Some of the most significant issues that many leaders in the Civil Rights Movement had to react to were widespread stereotypes about black sexuality. The most prominent of these stereotypes revolved around the supposedly uncontrollable and animalistic sex drives of black men. This

“black rapist” myth maintained that black men were incapable of settling into normal heterosexual relationships because of an unbridled drive to be with white women. For many black leaders in Cold War America and beyond, any deviation from heterosexual relationships served to reinforce ideas about the uncontrollable and uncivilized nature of black male sexual desires.

Patricia Hill Collins noted that the “innocent or respectable Black male image is considered to be essential to Black civil rights agendas.” As noted in a previous chapter,

Collins went on to argue that “for both women and men, Western social thought associates Blackness with an imagined uncivilized, wild sexuality and uses this association as a lynchpin of racial difference.” These ideas about unnatural and uncontrollable sex drives were linked in many ways to the institution of slavery. Before

178 Interpretations of the Moynihan Report and its significance have continued since the 1960s. Daniel Geary is one of the most recent historians to explore different impacts of the report in the 1960s and 1970s in Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 146 slaves were emancipated in the 1860s, black men were considered the property of white slaveholders who depended on their physical strength to propel agricultural production and make money. To justify this system of physical and economic oppression, black men were thought of in terms of strong, muscular bodies and small, insufficient brains. This perceived combination of excessive strength and low intellect laid the groundwork for the manifestation of the myth of the black rapist. In the century following emancipation, images of black men who were sexually uncontrollable and uncivilized grew into justifications for the social and political oppression of blacks in the United States.179

Following emancipation, black men were often physically punished because they were seen as sexually uncontrollable and violent. Activist and scholar Angela Davis pointed out that “of the 455 men executed between 1930 and 1967 on the basis of rape convictions, 405 of them were black.” This disproportionately high number of black men who were executed because they were believed to be rapists showed the very real fear in white America that darker-skinned males were sexually dangerous. Although no information exists to prove whether the number of black rape-related executions were inflated during this period due to the conviction of innocent black men or the propensity of officials to overlook white rapists, it is clear that images of deviant sexuality influenced the treatment of blacks in the United States.180

179 Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 74, 27. 180 Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 172, 188. For more information on lynchings of black men in the United States following emancipation reference the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative that produces an annual report on lynchings in the United States and recently opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in the Montgomery, Alabama: https://eji.org/reports. 147

It is also clear that mythology of the black rapist did not develop in any significant way until after emancipation. This timeline is important, because it highlights the mythology as a creation of white America with the goal of controlling black men’s bodies in new ways since old legal tactics used to control slaves were no longer possible.

The newness of this myth was evident in many ways as Reconstruction ground to a halt.

In 1892, activist Ida B. Wells commented on a recent editorial in a Little Rock, Arkansas black paper that detailed eight black men having been lynched in the area in only a week.

Wells proclaimed, “Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with rape! The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.”181

One year later, Frederick Douglass made a similar assessment of the development of the myth of the black rapist. Speaking in 1893, Douglass believed that whites in power—especially southerners—had not changed much since the end of the Civil War.

He noted that whites had significant reasons not to lynch black men before emancipation, because there was an economic cost to white communities. Following emancipation, however, the same economic concerns did not exist. Going further, Douglass understood that

the crime to which the Negro is now said to be so generally and specially addicted is one of which he has been heretofore seldom accused or

181 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, 1892, Project Gutenberg, EBook #14975, released February 8, 2005, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm, accessed September 1, 2018. 148

supposed to be guilty. The importance of this fact cannot be overestimated…If we may believe his accusers that this is a new development. In slaveholding times no one heard of any such crime by a Negro. During all the war, when there was the fullest and safest opportunity for such assaults, nobody ever heard of such being made by him…It is only since the Negro has become a citizen and a voter that this charge has been made…It is an effort to divest the Negro of his friends by giving him a revolting and hateful reputation.182

Circling back to Patricia Hill Collins, it is clear that concepts of black masculinity that are largely rooted in reaction to oppression from white America played significant roles in creating the Down Low. In turn, the Down Low has contributed to significantly higher rates of HIV infections and deaths from AIDS in black communities for more than three decades. Driving home this point, Collins noted that “men on the DL convey a strong sense of independence. At the same time, the Black masculine identities constructed within this subculture place Black gay and bisexual men at risk. Many DL guys search for the roughest, most masculine thugs, men who often do not use condoms.

[This] places everyone at risk. The level of denial of Black men living on the DL places their Black wives and girlfriends in harm’s way.”183 These ideas about masculinity that

Collins understood to be at the root of some of the most problematic aspects of the Down

Low were constructed over decades and centuries, but were largely developed in

182 Frederick Douglass, “Introduction,” in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, ed., The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature (1893), 11-12, in A Celebration of Women Writers, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wells/exposition/exposition.html, accessed September 1, 2018. For more information on the development of the myth of the black rapist see Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 183 Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 292. 149 response to post-emancipation mythologies about black male bodies and other forces constructed by white mainstream culture.

Exploring oral histories of black queer men—including many who could be labeled as living on the Down Low—highlights the widespread knowledge about the

Down Low as a concept and a term. In reviewing sixty oral history interviews with black men who have sex with men, all of the interviewees understood the Down Low in similar ways. This rich collection of black queer stories came from two major sources: fifty-six interviews that formed the basis of E. Patrick Johnson’s 2008 book Sweet Tea: Black Gay

Men of the South and four interviews conducted specifically for this project.184 The interviews explored the lives and experiences of men across the South, including individuals who lived in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri,

North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. The men ranged in age from 21 to

92, and their oral history interviews took place between 2004 and 2017. In every single interview, the narrator referenced the Down Low at least once, highlighting the cultural salience of the concept by the 2000s.185

184 It is significant to note that the sixty interviews referenced in this project engaged individuals who were out and open about their queerness in varying degrees. To maximize the privacy of each interviewee and facilitate the richest narrations, the names and identifying information of narrators have been significantly altered or restricted. For example, of Johnson’s 64 total interviews in Sweet Tea, eighteen of the interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms, and an additional 43 of his 64 interviews use first names only. All four of the interviews conducted specifically for this project use pseudonyms. 185 Through using oral history interviews, scholars are able to access unique records about the past not preserved in traditional archives. Oral histories are especially crucial for understanding the experiences of marginalized individuals and communities, including in black queer spaces. However, it is important to note that oral histories do have limitations and can be flawed. These limitations can include memories that are altered intentionally or unintentionally by interviewees. Alterations by interviewees may be more likely to happen when discussing deeply sensitive topics like sex and sexuality. 150

While all of interviewees defined DL in similar ways, some of their descriptions were richer and more colorful than others. For example, Quentin McDaniel, a very publicly gay 59-year-old from Lexington, Kentucky, understood the Down Low in relation to some of the men he had encountered sexually in the past: “Many of my friends today and yesterday lived that life. I believe I was often criticized because I was so out and feminine. Some did not want to hang out with me during the day because according to them I was ‘so obvious.’ Some of my friends and I would date guys who were married.

We would call them midnight riders because they would leave their wives or girlfriends late at night and come by our place to ‘party’ you know.” Similarly, Xavier Baker understood DL as describing “men who sleeps with men on the low…but they still try to pursue relationships with women.” Kelvin Thomas “understood the term to refer to

African American men that are married or in a committed heterosexual relationship that maintain secret homosexual relationships on the side.”186

Recorded approximately a decade earlier, E. Patrick Johnson’s interviewees shared similar definitions of the DL. When asked about the DL, Gerome exclaimed “oh yes, there is more of them! There is more of those that are undercover as I call it. Yeah, you find a lot of your doctors, your lawyers, your insurance mens, your car salesmens, your everyday executive that are into homosexual lifestyle but they are undercover with it…[They] like to have sexual contact with guys…[They] may be in denial about it or so

186 The three quotes in this paragraph came from interviews conducted by Lance Poston; transcript excerpts of these interviews are included in the appendix of the dissertation; Interview with Quentin McDaniel (pseud.) by Lance Poston, July 2017, Winchester, Kentucky; Interview with Xavier Baker (pseud.) by Lance Poston, February 2016, Louisville, Kentucky; Interview with Kelvin Thomas (pseud.) by Lance Poston, May 2016, Augusta, Georgia. 151 afraid to let it out.” While Gerome’s description focused largely on men with professional middle-class jobs, DC discussed men of all social and economic classes who were

“conservative with their actions. They want it but they want to keep it down. Uh they don’t want you to talk about it to people you know, they want to make it seem like it’s just one of the rare occasions [they] did that. And I know plenty of them.” Stressing the importance of secrecy in another way, Dean understood the DL as referring to “a person who has interest in the same sex but does not want people to know it and [he] may be married, may be divorced, and may even be in a relationship with the same sex but is under this pseudo title to keep anonymity.” Finally, in summarizing many definitions of the DL from other interviewees, Freddie pointed out that while the DL as a specific term had only existed since the 1990s, it was “not a new concept, they have just named it. I was telling somebody the other day, back when I was a young gay…most of the men I had were not ‘gay’ and I think society does us all a disservice with the labels. I think we are all sexual beings. I think there might be a small group that’s totally this or that but I think the larger group of people are in the gray area and in many instances sex is in the moment. Because many of the men that I had were not gay, not what were thought of as gay, many of them had wives or went on to get married. So this whole concept of the

Down Low is not new.”187 While Freddie’s assertion that the Down Low had existed as a

187 Interview with Gerome by E. Patrick Johnson, January 9, 2005, W-0050, in LGBTQ Life in the South: Sweet Tea Interviews by E. Patrick Johnson, Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [hereafter: Sweet Tea Interviews]; Interview with D.C. (pseud.) by E. Patrick Johnson, January 20, 2005, W-0045, in Sweet Tea Interviews; Interview with Dean by E. Patrick Johnson, January 11, 2005, W-0046, in Sweet Tea Interviews; Interview with Freddie by E. Patrick Johnson, October 30, 2004, in Sweet Tea Interviews. Additional examples of Johnson interviewees defining the DL include Larry J: “DL means that you are gay but you don’t want nobody to know about it”; Jaime: “DL guys, some of them are not able to deal with it 152 practice for many years before it had a concrete name, it is clear that the terminology first began to develop in music circles of the mid-1990s.

The earliest widely disseminated uses of the term Down Low were in popular music and literature of the mid-1990s. First, in 1994, the musical group TLC popularized the term Down Low through the release of their song “Creep.” From their recording sessions in Atlanta the year before the song’s release, TLC crafted music that shone a light on secretive sexual encounters between individuals who were in committed relationships, framing these encounters as being on the Down Low or creeping. One of the first verses of the song provided a concrete scenario of the Down Low that listeners around the world heard:

I love my man with all honesty but I know he’s cheatin’ on me I look him in his eyes but all he tells me is lies to keep me near I’ll never leave him though I might mess around it’s only ‘cause I need some affection oh so I creep yeah just keep it on the down low Said nobody is supposed to know So I creep yeah 188

The lyrics of this song that won the group a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance were told from the perspective of the women singers and supposedly alluded to actual former relationship situations they had been in with men who were having sexual

and still call it something, but some of them know who they are but they just still keep it under the radar so that other people don’t find out.” Johnson, Sweet Tea, 551. 188 TLC, “Creep,” from CrazySexyCool, prod. Dallas Austin. https://genius.com/Tlc-creep-lyrics. Acc. 8.19.18. LaFace Records & Arista Records. 1994. 153 connections with others. While the genders of the individuals that the narrator’s “man” is

“cheating” with were unspecified, the scenario could easily apply to a man who has sex with men. At the very least, this Billboard #1 hit song popularized the term “Down Low” in places where it had been previously unknown or not talked about.189

One year later, musician R. Kelly continued this popularization of the term to mainstream music audiences when he released “Down Low (Nobody Has to Know),” which explored a secret and forbidden heterosexual relationship between the narrator and a married woman. After describing connections he made with the married woman, the narrator proclaimed that he planned to keep their relationship “on the down low, whispering nobody has to know.” Similar to TLC’s hit, “Down Low” rose to the top of the Billboard charts soon after its release. Again, while framed in a heterosexual context, songs like this one by R. Kelly and “Creep” by TLC made the term “Down Low” a part of a popular culture vernacular, catapulting the words used to describe secretive sexual encounters in black spaces onto a national stage.190

While musicians were popularizing Down Low in a mainly heterosexual context, novelist E. Lynn Harris specifically used the term to apply to black men who had sex with men but who did not openly identify as queer. A black queer writer who was born in

Michigan and grew up in the South, Harris’s work was informed by his own experiences

189 Stacy Lambe, “Behind the Song: TLC’s ‘Creep’, VH-1 News, October 21, 2013, https://www.billboard.com/music/TLC/chart-history/hot-100, accessed September 1, 2018. http://www.vh1.com/news/51774/tlc-creep/, accessed September 1, 2018; “Chart History: Hot 100: TLC,” Billboard, https://www.billboard.com/music/TLC/chart-history/hot-100, accessed September 1, 2018. 190 R. Kelly’s “Down Low (Nobody Has to Know),” 1995, https://genius.com/R-kelly-down-low-nobody- has-to-know-lyrics, accessed August 19, 2018. Another example of a mid-1990s mainstream black artist who popularized the term “Down Low” is Brian McNight, who released “On the Down Low” in 1995. 154 and interactions as well as situations he encountered in the broader black communities in which he lived. In 1991, he self-published his first book, Invisible Life, through

Consortium Press, because he was unable to find a publisher for a book that dealt with queer sexuality and sexual encounters in black communities. As the DL became more widely known in the mid-1990s, though, Harris sold the manuscript to Anchor Books, a national publishing house owned by Doubleday. The Anchor reprint sold thousands of copies and catapulted Invisible Life to the New York Times bestseller list for several months.

The queer black themes that Harris presented in Invisible Life were significant as one of the first mainstream articulations of black queer sexual interactions being labeled as Down Low. In short, the novel focused on protagonist Raymond Tyler, a successful lawyer who struggled with his sexuality. Tyler was married to a woman and had sustained many long and significant relationships with women but also had strong attractions to and sexual encounters with men for all of his adult life. In describing his first sexual contact with a man while he was a freshman at the University of Alabama,

Tyler felt overwhelmed and torn:

What was happening? This is sinful, sexual longing. This was wrong. Everything in my head screamed no! Yet my body was saying yes. We stood in the kitchen kissing nonstop for almost an hour…On that first night, the first Friday in October, I experienced passion and sexual satisfaction that I had never in my twenty-one years dreamed possible. Until that Friday evening in October, sex with females was all that I knew. I never imagined sex with a male. Sure, I had noticed or envied guys with great bodies while playing high school football, but I never thought of it in a sexual context. I had never before given a man’s body such lofty regard. 155

How would I know that rubbing two male sexual organs together would bring such a complete feeling of ecstasy?191

The type of encounter that the Tyler detailed in this excerpt was repeated many times afterward with other men, although he was not open about these encounters with his wife or other women he was in relationships with prior to marriage. The sense of conflict that

Tyler felt during this experience also continued throughout his life, feeling torn by the secrecy with which he encountered and engaged with men in sexual situations.

Ultimately, Tyler’s story introduced the queer black Down Low concept to thousands of readers, giving a narrative framework and structure to clandestine interactions between black men.

When Harris died in 2009, his obituary pointed to the groundbreaking significance of his work in Invisible Life and other books that followed.192 The New York

Times obituary highlighted that

Mr. Harris clearly tapped a rich vein of reader interest with his racy and sometimes graphic tales of affluent, ambitious, powerful black men— athletes, businessmen, lawyers and the like—who nonetheless struggled with their attraction to both men and women. His books married the superficial glamour of jet-setting potboilers with an emotional candor that shed light on a segment of society that had received little attention: black men on the Down Low—that is, men who are publicly heterosexual but secretly have sex with men.193

191 E. Lynn Harris, Invisible Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 16-17. 192 Although Invisible Life was his most iconic book-length work about men on the Down Low, the DL was a major theme of other novels by Harris, including Any Way the Wind Blows (Anchor, 2001). 193 Bruce Weber, “E. Lynn Harris, Who Wrote of Black Gay Men’s Lives, Dies at 54,” New York Times, July 24, 2009, A16, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/books/25harris.html, accessed August 19, 2018. 156

Ultimately, Harris was heralded as one of the first and most significant mouthpieces for what life on the Down Low was like for many black men across the country. Exploring topics that are difficult to delve into because of the secrets inherent in their existence,

Harris’s works of fiction were essential for defining the term Down Low within a black queer context. His novels are thus irreplaceable windows into lives on the Down Low.

Similarly, James Earl Hardy’s writings that began in the mid-1990s provided helpful insights into life on the Down Low. Hardy, a journalist and award-winning author who has written for the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Essence, had his first big literary breakthrough in 1994. In that year, Hardy published B-Boy Blues, the first and most popular book in a longer series that stretched over twenty years. In B-Boy Blues,

Hardy’s characters shared many of the same characteristics and struggles with Harris’s characters in Invisible Life. Focusing on the Down Low, this novel chronicled the relationship of two black men who met one another in New York City: an accomplished professional man, Mitchell, and a younger man with fewer economic resources, Raheim.

Mitchell, the central protagonist, was out as a queer man while Raheim was not. In fact,

Raheim had regular relationships with women and had fathered a small child. The plotline heated up when, after falling for Raheim, Mitchell tried to get him to understand and articulate an identity as a gay man. In this encounter, Raheim had a very negative reaction and physically lashed out at Mitchell, jolting the protagonist and causing him to ponder why this violent encounter happened. Although B-Boy Blues ultimately had a happy ending, it provided great insight into the tension in black communities about 157 labeling oneself as gay or queer, highlighted by Raheim’s visceral resistance to openly understanding himself as gay.194

Literature by black queer-identified authors like Harris and Hardy provided some of the first widely available glimpses into the Down Low life in black communities. The helpful and instructive stories that these authors told clearly came out of their own experiences as black men living in black communities. However, the development of these accessible narratives begged a broader question: What was unique about the 1990s that provided language to talk about the Down Low and literature to explore it?

Although there was certainly no one single factor that led to the rise of writers like Harris and Hardy or that singlehandedly created and disseminated the language of the Down Low, new concerns about individual health and broader alarm about public health in response to the HIV epidemic were major forces behind these developments. In

Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins directly tied the existence of the Down Low to much higher rates of HIV infections in black communities. She noted that while white gay men’s advocacy led to a significant drop in HIV infection rates in white communities by the conclusion of the 1990s, the same public advocacy and education were absent in black communities. Highlighting the importance of advocacy and sexual education,

Collins believed that

largely as a result of aggressive organizing and advocacy by gay White men, the disease leveled off in [that] population. Yet a study of approximately 5,700 gay men in six major US cities reports that the rates of unawareness among Black gay men ages fifteen to twenty-nine are “staggeringly high.” Among those found to have HIV, 90 percent of

194 James Earl Hardy, B-Boy Blues: A Seriously Sexy, Fiercely Funny, Black-on-Black Love Story (Boston: Alyson Books, 1994). 158

blacks said they did not know they were infected. Given the history of AIDS activism among gay men, this lack of knowledge among black gay men is disconcerting. The emergence of a black gay male subculture in which gay and bisexual black men live on the Down Low aggravates this situation. The secretive nature of the DL subculture speaks to the linking of danger, dishonesty, and excitement.195

Juxtaposing the activism and education campaigns around HIV prevention that predominantly white gay communities had created with the development of the Down

Low in black communities, Collins highlighted a central issue at play in the much higher rate of HIV infection and virus-related deaths in black communities than in white communities. This juxtaposition, however, did not necessitate understanding black men on the Down Low as the only actors contributing to higher black HIV infection rates or support an assertion that all black men on the Down Low were HIV-positive.

The disproportionately huge devastation created by HIV in black communities in the 1980s and 1990s was undeniable.196 The virus also illuminated the existence of

Sexual Plausible Deniability and the resulting development of the Down Low in one of the most significant and highly visible ways possible. The impact of the virus in black church gospel circles during the 1990s illustrates the interrelatedness of the Down Low and HIV.

195 Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 291. 196 For example, between 1981 and 1986, the US Centers for Disease Control found that the incidence of HIV infection for African Americas was three times higher than that for whites. “Epidemiological Notes and Reports Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) Among Blacks and Hispanics—United States,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 35(42); 655-8,663-6, October 24, 1986, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000810.htm, accessed September 1, 2018. 159

One of the most prominent epicenters of black life on the Down Low that HIV made visible was in church choirs and the broader gospel music industry. In a 1998 interview, Reverend Edwin Sanders, a black minister who founded the Nashville-based

Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in 1981, discussed the impact that the virus had on choirs in Nashville. Sanders founded his church as an alternative to mainline religious groups with the goal of being intentionally inclusive. The church grew over the next four decades into a multiracial congregation that invested a large number of outreach resources in HIV testing and support programs. In describing why he founded the church,

Sanders said that in his personal and professional lives, he encountered traditional black churches and other institutions that could not “break out of the mold from which they were born.”197 He sought to create an alternative space for religious practice and social interaction that tackled many of the most pressing issues for the Nashville citizens who joined his young church. Noting that the church had an HIV education and prevention focus from the beginning, Sanders saw that other black ministers in the city gave him

“serious flack for working with needle exchange, welcoming gay folks, and working on issues” that they saw as overly progressive and publicly visible.198

While he worked to create a congregation that was open to individuals from all religious backgrounds and incorporated diverse Christian traditions, Sanders believed his church was important in particular ways for black individuals. While he saw gay people

197 Gary David Comstock, “‘Whosoever’ is Welcome Here: An Interview with Reverend Edwin C. Sanders II,” in Eric Brandt, ed., Dangerous Liaisons: Blacks, Gays, and the Struggle for Equality (New York: The New Press, 1999), 143. 198 Comstock, “‘Whosoever’ is Welcome Here,” 149. 160 of all races experiencing rejection and alienation from their churches, he found that

“African Americans more often than white gay people emphasized the importance of religion in their family, community, and history and said that most of the pain and sadness in their lives centered around the church. They claimed that being rejected by the black church was especially devastating because this institution had been, and continued to be, the only place where they could take real refuge from the racism they experienced in society.”199 Understood in relation to the history of mainline black churches recounted in the last chapter, Sanders’ comments reflected the higher stakes that black Americans faced when coming out in their communities, and more specifically, in their religious spaces. For many blacks, coming out not only meant risking rejection from a religious and spiritual home but also potentially losing a primary shelter from racism and access to broader community support. While some queer black Nashvillians found new religious and social homes in the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church, many more remained in traditional mainline black churches and either suppressed their sexual orientations and desires or lived life on the Down Low.

Sanders understood a great contradiction in mainline black churches in relation to their queer congregation members. These individuals constantly received an “unspoken message that says it’s all right for you to be here, just don’t say anything, just play your little role. You can be in the choir, you can sit on the piano bench, but don’t say you’re gay.”200 Articulated in another way, Sanders saw and understood the contradiction of the

199 Comstock, “‘Whosoever’ is Welcome Here,” 154. 200 Comstock, “‘Whosoever’ is Welcome Here,” 156. 161

Down Low in black communities: While queer identities and behaviors had to be secretive, many members of these black communities understood who was queer and made choices to overlook those identities as long as the individuals did not make them publicly visible.

When this unspoken arrangement to overlook queer identities and actions collided with the spread of HIV in black communities, it created a very visible disaster.

Discussing this collision, Sanders remembered that earlier in the 1990s, many musicians in local black churches became sick and died in short succession. At one point in

Nashville “there were six musicians who died of AIDS. In every instance it was treated with a hush. Nobody wanted to deal with the fact that all of these men were gay black men, and yet they’d been leading the music for them. It’s that contradiction where folks say yeah you’re here but don’t say anything about who you really are, don’t be honest and open about yourself.”201 Across the city, these deaths drew so much attention that many black mainline congregations were afraid that they would be labeled an “AIDS

Church” or a congregation with an “AIDS Choir.”

Several states away in Delaware, a similar situation took place. An article published in an October 1994 edition of Wilmington, Delaware’s News Journal highlighted the HIV-related deaths of dozens of black choir leaders and members in the region. Entitled “And the Choir Sings On,” this extended article explored the local and national impact that AIDS was having on black church music. To the author, it was clear that “AIDS [was] leaving an indelible mark on the black gospel music community, a

201 Comstock, “‘Whosoever’ is Welcome Here,” 157. 162 central part of the African-American worship experience. From top-ranked Billboard choirs to the piano benches of Delaware churches, HIV infection and AIDS are widely rumored, privately discussed but rarely publicly acknowledged.” Before writing this story, the author interviewed more than forty people connected with local and national black gospel circuits; all but one of these interviews were done anonymously, highlighting a “code of silence” that existed around these deaths and the Down Low. It was clear that churches did not want to engage in public conversations about HIV-related deaths because they feared the same labels as the churches in Nashville. This fear seemed as strong as a fear of “leprosy was in biblical days” as “men, mostly ages 20 to 40, [were] infected and dying in deafening silence perpetuated by their congregations…for whom they…spent the better parts of their lives performing.” Giving more specific numbers to these sad stories, the article highlighted that in 1994 in Delaware more than “twenty-six people…died from AIDS…at least four were gospel musicians.” Looking further back, it was clear that in the previous three years “at least fourteen singers and musicians [had] died between Middletown and Philadelphia, a regional circuit for gospel musicians.” 202

These stories from Tennessee and Delaware showed the impact that HIV had on black religious and music landscapes in the 1990s, exacerbated by the Down Low and rarely talked about because of black social expectations of public silence. However, it is also important to recognize the role that white mainstream media played in fueling this epidemic in black communities. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, newspapers and television news outlets across the country played a significant role in choosing the faces

202 Rhonda Graham, “And the Choir Sings On,” News Journal (Wilmington, Del.), October 23, 1994, 12. 163 and stories that would ultimately be held up as examples of the impact of the virus. In almost all cases, these outlets ultimately chose to focus the overwhelming majority of their coverage on gay white communities, which certainly contributed to harmful stigmas that framed HIV as a “gay disease” in many Americans’ minds. However, these stigmas were major motivators of early HIV/AIDS activism in predominantly white gay communities. This led to a mobilization of resources in those same places, helping to educate white gay men and reduce the spread of HIV among them. By the late 1990s, white gay communities around the country had successfully fought the disease and associated stigmas on many fronts and had effectively shifted the conversation and public health reality for themselves.203

On the other hand, the media’s focus on the white gay community meant that they ignored the impact that the virus was having on black individuals and communities. The fact that few black stories were included in the coverage—especially coverage of black queer men—supported a narrative that black communities did not need to recognize the virus as a problem that affected their lives or warranted any sort of significant education or response. Even after Magic Johnson came out as HIV-positive in 1991, the news about black experiences with HIV remained minimal.204 Political Scientist Cathy Cohen summarized this situation in The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of

203 It is also significant to note that effective retroviral drugs came out in late 1996 and were first accessible in middle-class, predominantly white communities at a much faster rate than in lower-income black communities. 204 An example of early coverage of Magic Johnson’s announcement about his HIV status is the front-page story in the New York Times: Richard W. Stevenson, “Magic Johnson Ends His Career, Saying He Has AIDS Infection,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/08/sports/basketball-magic-johnson- ends-his-career-saying-he-has-aids-infection.html, accessed September 1, 2018. 164

Black Politics, noting that “the forbidden topics regarding AIDS in black communities— homosexuality and drug use, those ‘not so innocent’ behaviors—would continue to be ignored, as the press focused on Magic Johnson, smiling sports icon, former ‘ladies man.’”205 Even once a black face was connected with the virus in a significant way, the media images of Johnson centered on his playboy persona and masculine abilities as a basketball superstar rather than serving to broaden the conversation.

Ultimately Cohen showed that “the labeling of AIDS as a gay disease in the early years of the epidemic, while instilling great stigma, discrimination, and bias, also resulted in the mobilization of the gay community, where AIDS was perceived as an issue that threatened their survival. Conversely, the absence of African Americans from images and discussion of AIDS undoubtedly support the denial of black community leaders, who viewed AIDS as a disease they did not need to own.”206 Although no one can know if increased media coverage or government-funded research on the impact of AIDS in black communities would have changed the patterns of denial and lack of response from those black community leaders, a greater focus might have supported the individuals who were trying to increase education and awareness and created a “powerful weapon to challenge the comfort of black leaders and organizations intent on denying the consequences of this disease for group members.”207 However, beyond simply ignoring the impact of the disease, black ministers, the most significant black leaders in many communities, often

205 Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 150. 206 Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness, 182. 207 Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness, 182. 165 complicated narratives about HIV, health, and belonging by regularly and openly attacking queerness from their pulpits.208

In stark contrast to an ethos of Sexual Plausible Deniability in black churches and communities, black ministers frequently attacked homosexuality as an “abomination” and a sin from their pulpits. These attacks fueled silence about HIV and its impact in black communities while promoting the Down Low among their own queer congregants. While all black ministers were certainly not homophobic, Chicago journalist Anthony Stanford noted that “as far as the Black Church’s aggressive stance is concerned, the inequitable treatment and the subjugation of black ministers is extraordinarily complex, problematic, and contradictory….[B]lack ministers contribute considerably to the phenomenon of black gay and bisexual men concealing their sexual identity and perpetuating…the Down

Low.”209 Reverend Terry Angel Mason, a black minister in Southern California who had been very active in the gospel music scene around the country, echoed Stanford’s sentiments. Reverend Mason painted a picture describing the impact of ministerial homophobia on the Down Low from his personal experience:

Imagine sitting in church for years, surrounded by hundreds of people (lonely and rejected) hearing sermon after sermon, hating who I was and what I was, on the brink of suicide and a nervous breakdown. I was convinced that God detested the most important part of who I was and I felt trapped in a condition not of my own doing and hell-bound. Even the slightest chance of being subjected to this sort of revile and mistreatment

208 It is important to note that while the next several paragraphs of this chapter focus on homophobic sermons in black churches, spreading homophobia through official messages is not an issue unique to black churches. White ministers in largely white Protestant congregations have also been mouthpieces for homophobic messages, supporting anti-LGBT denominational stances including: Southern Baptists (http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/1224/on-samesex-marriage-and-civil-rights-rhetoric) and United Methodists (http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/the-nurturing-community#human-sexuality) 209 Anthony Stanford, Homophobia in the Black Church: How Faith, Politics, and Fear Divide the Black Community (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger 2013), 78. 166

motivates black gay and bisexual men to choose a life of secrecy on the DL. Having witnessed how others have been degraded and treated like immoral deviants is more than enough for many black LGBTs to consider the risk and to opt for the protection that concealment offers.210

As Mason noted, these feelings of condemnation and isolation because of homophobia from black church leaders was a clear theme in many experiences living on the Down

Low.

The homophobia spewing from black pulpits was also lived out in the lives of many oral history narrators. For example, Xavier Baker, who grew up in a black Baptist church and was licensed to preach in that denomination at 16, regularly heard homophobic ramblings from the pulpit. He noted that these sermons “spoke highly against the practice of homosexuality, against the lifestyle. In church, all I heard was bashing of homosexuality. I was taught Leviticus and Romans about men ought not lay with another man, if so it was an abomination…[T]he church was not a place to talk about homosexuality in a good way. Always about hellfire and abomination.” While

Baker’s experiences were in Louisville, Kentucky, David Jackson’s experiences in a

Baptist church in Northern Virginia were very similar. Jackson remembered that the

“dynamic” church services he attended as a youth were where he “first learned about homosexuality. There was a simple teaching in the church: homosexuality was aberrant behavior from a healthy sexual relationship. It was something you shouldn’t do and something you shouldn’t talk about.”

210 Terry Angel Mason, Love Won’t Let Me Be Silent (Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, 2009), 28. 167

Also raised in black Baptist churches, Kelvin Thomas and Quentin McDaniel encountered very similar messages from their pastors and church leadership. Growing up in Texas, Thomas remembered that “I was taught in church that homosexuality was not a natural behavior. It was not pleasing to God or the way that God intended for humanity to conduct themselves, sexually or any other way. I can remember the word abomination being used to describe that lifestyle. Abomination. That was clear.” Many of these same types of messages are what ultimately drove Quentin McDaniel away from the eastern

Kentucky Baptist church in which he had been raised. Although he had “taught Sunday school for children, directed and sang in the choir and coordinated Bible school events,” he faced a spiritual reckoning when he “went to college and started to realize who [he] was.” Ultimately, McDaniel decided to leave his home church and remained largely disconnected from organized religion because he “didn’t want to hear the preacher say…[he] was going to hell.” While he created a pattern of attending church a couple times a year with his mother, he was never successful in finding “an inclusive place of worship, especially predominantly African American.”211

Many of E. Patrick Johnson’s narrators shared similar stories about black ministers and church leaders who were central promoters of homophobic messages.

However, some of these interviews shone a different light on homophobic messages and ministers, complicating a narrative about sermons targeting queerness. For example,

Roderick described that a major motivation for him no longer participating in organized

211 Interview with Xavier Baker; Interview with David Jackson; Interview with Kelvin Thomas; Interview with Quentin McDaniel. 168 religion was the homophobic and hypocritical stances he saw many black ministers taking. Roderick recalled a minister who “did some, just said some crazy shit. He talked about the DL, he talked about this and that…holding another man’s hand, all that. He trashed gay marriage. He talked about this DL thing, the sexual immorality. He said,

‘sexual immorality is destroying the black community.’ I was reading this. And I found out a week later, he himself, there’s a rumor that that preacher himself was caught with a man some years ago. And yet it happens all the time…it’s just so rampant, all these black preachers who are doing these homophobic things.”212

Several states away in Alabama, Gerome discussed a similar revelation about black ministers he had encountered delivering homophobic sermons only to discover later that they had histories of same-sex encounters. Reflecting on this, he noted, “[W]hat gets me is to hear some of these preachers who are feeding it and who might themselves be

[gay]…and the saddest part is that any minister, if he knows god, if he got one drop of knowledge about god, he would know I better not be standing here throwing no stones because what I’m doing in the dark is gonna come out. We had several preachers right here in this city, you know, all their tea came out. Their tea came out.”213 Using “tea” as slang terminology for gossip, Gerome noted that the secrets these homophobic ministers were keeping about their own queer actions ultimately came out into the public light.

212 Quoted in Johnson, Sweet Tea, 252. The full transcript of Roderick’s interview with E. Patrick Johnson was not available in the with the other interviews archived in the Southern Oral History Program Collection on LGBTQ Life in the South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. Ultimately, only 56 of 64 total interviews are a part of the Johnson collection at Wilson Library and available to the public. Per an email exchange with Johnson in June 2018, some of the missing eight interviews were destroyed after the book was published, at the request of the interviewees, while some are still in his possession with lengthy time restrictions in place before they will be released. 213 Interview with Gerome, Sweet Tea Interviews. 169

On the other hand, some interviewees discussed how their ministers had railed against homosexuality and queerness from the pulpit on a regular basis, only to respond differently in individual situations involving queer parishioners. DC recalled an instance where “one of our members was beaten and robbed by a young man. Turns out that he had been having sex with this young man. And the pastor put his arms around him and supported him in the news and everywhere. I’d have to say that, gosh, in this town, when

I kinda think about it, a lot of preachers say one thing in the pulpit and something else out of it.”214 This complicated relationship that DC experienced with a local minister epitomized some of the significant tension caused by the rise of Sexual Plausible

Deniability in black communities, demanding that black ministers take hardline positions against queerness in public while allowing room for contradictory interactions in other moments. The complicated nature of these exchanges and life on the Down Low often meant that public perception of the pulpit did not fully equate to lived reality in the pews.

Discussing many of these topics at length, one of the most frequently cited authors on the topic of the Down Low, J.L. King, shared similar feelings from his experiences as a queer black man who lived on the Down Low for many years. Beyond his personal experiences, King gained expertise as a commentator on black gay issues from his HIV prevention work in black communities. In the introduction to his New York

Times bestselling book, On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black

Men Who Sleep with Men, King described his early career success in a corporate job in

Atlanta. However, he was prodded to leave his job and begin a new career in HIV

214 Interview with D.C. in Sweet Tea Interviews. 170 education and prevention after one of his friends on the Down Low contracted HIV and asked him to help figure out what he should tell his wife who was pregnant with their daughter. Ultimately, King helped his friend craft a lie about how he had contracted HIV from a woman who was a sex worker he had engaged while travelling for business. This lie ignored the reality that he had been infected during one of many intimate interactions with his long-term Down Low lover.

Reflecting on this situation, King understood his friend’s motivations because

“the black community could accept that this brother got the virus from a woman—even a prostitute. They could never accept that he got it from a man.”215 King pinpointed that a primary motivator for his own secrecy when he lived on the Down Low, as well as a primary motivator for his friend who told his wife a lie about how he contracted HIV, was pressure from black churches and venomous homophobic messages from black ministers. From his perspective, it was clear that “many DL men want to stop their duplicitous behavior and seek help, but they don’t. They fear ridicule and isolation commonly hurled their way by those who look upon them through a spirit of condemnation rather than through a spirit of compassion. The negative name calling, the jokes, the isolation and the guilt are paralyzing. I know what it’s like to have nowhere to turn. I didn’t go to my pastor because I didn’t trust him.”216

The clear signals that King and other black men on the Down Low received from homophobic black ministers was one factor that kept them from being open about their

215 J.L. King, On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men, (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 4. 216 King, On the Down Low, 7. 171 sexualities. Said another way, these men on the Down Low were having “conditioned responses” to the ways they were treated in religious and cultural contexts. In a 1988 essay entitled “Homophobia in the Black Community,” bell hooks used “conditioned responses” to describe how black queer men had been acclimated to respond in quiet and secretive ways to their sexual urges because of the homophobic messages they have heard proclaimed in pulpits. Ironically, while these negative messages clearly affected black queer men and promoted the Down Low, hooks saw a different side of many blacks who were vocally homophobic in public. This led hooks to believe that “black communities may be perceived as more homophobic than other communities because there is a tendency for significant individuals in black communities to verbally express in an outspoken way antigay sentiments.” However, in her interactions with many homophobic individuals, including one straight black man from California, hooks found that “although he has often made jokes poking fun at gays or expressing contempt as a means of bonding in group settings, in his private life he was a central support person for a gay sister. Such contradictory behavior seems pervasive in back communities. It speaks to ambivalence about sexuality in general, about sex as a subject of conversation, and to ambivalent feeling and attitudes toward homosexuality.”217 These were the contradictions that many men on the Down Low faced: They encountered public condemnations of queerness from the same persons who allowed them greater room for negotiating sexual identity and action in private.

217 bell hooks, “Homophobia in Black Communities,” in Delroy Constantine-Simms, ed., The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (Boston: Alyson Books, 2001), 71. 172

Throughout the oral histories, all of the narrators noted that queerness was often tolerated in their communities, including in churches, as long as it was not publicly discussed. Framing this conversation, Duncan Teague did not buy the “mythology that black folks are more homophobic than anybody else. And the reason I don’t buy it is because I grew up knowing gay people whom my parents knew, and they were all in the church.” From his earliest memories, Teague recalled individuals who everyone privately knew were queer but did not engage in public conversations about their sexualities. As a gay “but not public about it” organist at a Baptist church in North Carolina, Kent echoed

Teague’s comments in describing his personal experiences. Kent believed that most of the people in his church knew he was gay because “of course, when you see the choir director…[at age]…37, near 40, and he isn’t married and he’s basically said no to every dinner invitation that has come into that church…two and two still equals four. And I think people can add. But also the church is famous for denial…it’s a shame to think that but it’s the reality of things.” A few states away in Georgia, Bob also understood that there were many gay men around him in his African Methodist Episcopal church, including the organist. Bob stated that he knew the organist and another musician at the church were attracted to and had sex with other men even though “they were married, had children, had families, had wives. People knew. Mmhmmm. They were tolerated instead of ostracized. Mmhmmm.”218

218 Interview with Duncan Teague by E. Patrick Johnson, November 1, 2004, W-0047, in Sweet Tea Interviews; Interview with Kent by E. Patrick Johnson, October 27, 2004, W-0059, in Sweet Tea Interviews; Interview with Bob by E. Patrick Johnson, May 14, 2005, W-0019, in Sweet Tea Interviews. 173

In Florida, Rich understood a similar climate in his AME church. Although he identified as gay, Rich was clear that he did not “wear my homosexuality on my sleeve.”

Instead, he carved out a space as a church leader by avoiding conversations about his sexuality, even though he believed most of his fellow parishioners were aware of it. Rich found that “even in a…Christian macho whatever environment, I think that there is a space in…churches that are not so called ‘gay churches,’ there is a space for it, I mean I do think overall that African American Christian churches are homophobic but my sense of them is that, like at this particular church, I think that 99% of people know that I and some other men are gay. I was never approached by women. In my former days I would be approached by women for dates. It was just a don’t ask, don’t tell but they knew. And

I was not forbidden to teach Sunday school. No one thought that I would be a predator with their kids. None of that.” Taking his comments a step further, Rich also understood that multiple prominent ministers in his community regularly had sex with other men and that it was widely known but not discussed. This fueled his perspective that

the churches do the don’t ask, don’t tell or they know it’s a reality. Some of them, you know, even gay pastors and ministers themselves who are same gender attracted and are doing things. I just think it’s a thing they accept the reality of it even though they preach against it in the pulpits. In some ways I think it is a hypocrisy but it has always been that way. I know that there are one or two really visibly gay. Some of the people do live the way they preach but for the most part it is just something they accept.219

As may have been the case with the ministers Rich described, multiple narrators encountered their church communities as clandestine centers for black queer life.

219 Interview with Rich (pseud.) by E. Patrick Johnson, May 4, 2005, W-0047, in Sweet Tea Interviews. 174

Narrators like Kent even understood the church as a primary site for initiating sexual

“hookups” between queer men. Kent believed that “considering that so much of our interaction as gay men is done undercover for lack of a better expression…you can’t openly be who you are without suffering some kind of penalty so, yeah, you look for those subtle signs and when you see it it’s like water for the thirst and so…beyond that structure of the church you see it and you say this is too precious to let go, not to explore.”220

For many of the narrators, queer men remained in churches and even flourished there because they had few other options for encountering one another and no other reliable institutions that provided cultural and social support. Kevin summed up this arrangement best when referring to mainline black churches as big shelters against a broader society steeped in white supremacy and racism. Kevin understood churches to be

“big shelters…with you being so involved in church…especially the Baptist church, there were some things we did not talk about and did not say” but that were widely known, including queerness. Similarly, Rich believed that many black queer men looked beyond homophobic messages and other forces that kept them from openly discussing their sexualities “because they like the church and they need the community.”221

The community that queer men found in black churches was two-fold. For many men, church provided the central place for finding one another. As Kent noted, “we are all over the church. You know they say we have that gaydar. You just know. And 9 times

220 Interview with Kent, in Sweet Tea Interviews. 221 Interview with Kevin (pseud.) by E. Patrick Johnson, July 20, 2005, W-0012, in Sweet Tea Interviews; Interview with Rich, in Sweet Tea Interviews. 175 out of ten I think you do know.” Kent and other men like him were able to use these underground signals and networks to find one another, create community, and express queerness in outwardly visible but overlooked ways. However, at times, these networks became visible and even celebrated as a central part of the church structure, although the queerness was still never named. Most importantly, many black queer men were able to carve out places for themselves as musicians and choir members in black churches across the country. Al, a leader and Sunday school teacher in his local black church, noted that he had many friends and acquaintances who were church musicians. In fact, he had

“always had this thing about choir directors and pianists,” referring to a unique sexual attraction he felt for men in those roles. Ultimately, this attraction was often played out in fruitful connections, prompting Al to say that he did not “know many…[church musicians]…who either aren’t gay or haven’t played around.”222

In thinking about why church choirs and organ benches were such popular places for queer men to inhabit in very visible ways, many of the oral history narrators turned to the opportunity for performance as a primary motivator. To Stanley, black queer men were drawn to musical roles because “in many cases, probably being gay is kind’ve like a performance. So many people are in disguise. So many people are closeted so it becomes a performance and that this is my way to perform. To direct the choir. To take over and be in charge and I really think that that’s a performance. And I do think that gay men perform and so I think that it fits.” Conflating sexuality and gender presentation, Freddie

222 Interview with Al (pseud.) by E. Patrick Johnson, undated, W-0008, in Sweet Tea Interviews; Interview with Kent, in Sweet Tea Interviews. 176 understood a similar reason that so many queer men were in black choirs: “This might sound really silly…[but]…that robe is very much like a dress. And they can carry on and shout in that sort of legitimate dress…you know they say we’re talented but I think that people in all sexual persuasions are talented and can sing. But I’ve considered that because I have observed gay men really shouting and carrying on in these robes— working the robe…and it’s like a performance. They can perform, you know. They can perform. They can be seen.” Finally, Dean, a prominent member of the choir in his Texas church for many years, found the choir a place where he could perform and release a lot of his tension that built up from having to keep his sexuality under wraps. Dean noted that he and other queer men in choirs had “a lot of these pent-up emotions…[and]…can just let go in the choir. That’s a point where it’s safest…to release all of those pent-up emotions. Whether it’s stomping, or spinning, or shouting, or fainting…it’s a safer parameter there.”223 Across these descriptions of why queer black men were such prominent members of church music circles, the opportunities choirs provided to perform and very publicly transgress rigidly gendered ideas of masculinity were front and center.

Without a doubt, rigid ideas about appropriate masculinity in black communities contributed to the existence of the Down Low and kept many men in secretive same-sex sexual patterns. These concepts of masculinity involved an intertwining of respectability and machismo that developed largely in response to myth-based stereotyping that blamed black men for many social ills. They were central in Civil Rights Movement struggles in

223 Interview with Stanley by E. Patrick Johnson, January 22, 2005, W-0034, in Sweet Tea Interviews; Interview with Freddie, in Sweet Tea Interviews; Interview with Dean, in Sweet Tea Interviews. 177 the Cold War era and continued to be prevalent into the twenty-first century. In many ways, homophobia in black communities that pushed queer expressions into secretive encounters was tied to the fact that, as Anthony Stanford argues, “the struggle for human rights against white supremacy has been disproportionately explained as the need to achieve ‘manhood’ rights.”224

Throughout the oral histories conducted specifically for this project and E. Patrick

Johnson’s oral histories, interviewees almost universally described understanding that someone was queer or gay through the language and lens of gender norms. Ultimately, for most of the interviewees, it was clear that “being gay” meant being effeminate in presentation and dress, transgressing many of the expectations of what it meant to be a man. Quentin McDaniel shared that he struggled throughout his childhood with being a

“sissy” and understood some of his childhood mannerisms as early signs pointing to his homosexuality. Quentin recounted that he “was often told to stop acting like a girl and play sports like a real guy. One of my uncles told me I should deepen my voice because it was too high and I sounded like a girl. Sounding and acting like a girl would make me a weak man.” These early anxieties about his presentation continued far into adulthood as an openly gay man. Quentin remarked that “to this day, my voice has been something that I’ve stressed over. I often find myself trying to deepen it in various situations, particularly when there are a lot of African men involved.” In very similar ways, in his memories about the earliest queer boys and men that he could identify in his community,

224 Stanford, Homophobia in the Black Church, 83. For more information on how activists used race and manhood to articulate and advance their agendas, see Steve Estes’s I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 178

David Jackson noted that one boy’s “mannerisms were always so effeminate” and that another man who lived a bit further down his childhood street “was effeminate also.”

Ultimately, David believed that “there were also several boys who attended my church who were also seen as gay because of their being effeminate.” Also, when discussing how he could tell if someone around him was gay, Kelvin Thomas described that those

“individuals were identified by their dress or their demeanor, maybe their voice. The tendencies that were perceived as those of the opposite gender.” Clearly, in the experiences of each of these men, being gay was strongly connected to presenting in a stereotypically feminized way that conflicted with the ways they understood that “real” men should act.225

Many of these same themes—connecting understandings of being gay to a feminized existence that challenged traditional images of masculinity—were also evident in Johnson’s interviews. In describing his first memories of grappling with his sexuality,

Gerome pointed to junior high school when he noticed that his “tendencies were, you know, the feminine, the way of sitting, the hands and all that was there. From probably elementary school up really. I realized when I was in the seventh grade that it was there…and I never would let the guys know. You wouldn’t know. I was in my own little world.” Gerome still had anxiety about his mannerisms and presentation into his adulthood, stemming from worries that his sexuality undermined his manliness.226

225 Interview with Quentin McDaniel; Interview with David Jackson; Interview with Kelvin Thomas.

226 Interview with Gerome, Sweet Tea Interviews. 179

The same sort of anxieties preoccupied DC who—even as he self-identified as a man who loved men—railed against “sissies” and “miss thangs” he saw as presenting in a way that conceded their manhood. DC did not like others labelling him gay because he feared that it womanized him. As he stuttered through an answer, DC was adamant that he did not

like that…that thing that says I’m gay. My thing is as simple as this, I guess kinda like don’t ask, don’t tell…but I don’t like flames and oh, miss thang girl…no, no, no. I don’t like drag queens. Being gay doesn’t mean you gotta try to be a woman. Because if you’re being like that then you’re not something that a guy who likes guys is going to want. If he wants that then he could go get a woman. And then that’s got another side to it because you have some guys who like that…there are gay people that if I knew them in public I would try to stay away from them because I don’t want to be identified with them. Not because I’m ashamed of being gay but I’m ashamed of the way they carry themselves. I think there is a way you should carry yourself you’re gay or straight. I don’t like the flamboyant…a lot of guys have told me that, “I like you for that, I can take you around my folk and they don’t know what’s going on.” And I don’t act like it’s nothing between us. I don’t look at them like I look at them when I got them here.227

In his interview, Marlon explained many of the same tensions around self- identifying as gay or a man who loves men but resisting using those labels in many situations—particularly black public spaces—because he feared being labeled as un- masculine. In working to unpack these feelings, Marlon attributed part of his hesitation with the label of gay to the fact that in his community “gay is so stigmatized with gender identity and black men want to be men for obvious historical reasons.” This comment pointed out the importance of understanding black history in the US and, more

227 Interview with D.C., in Sweet Tea Interviews. 180 specifically, how modern ideas of acceptable black masculinity and manhood developed over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.228

In conclusion, as these oral history interviews and archival documentation show, the development of rigid ideas about appropriate black masculinity and presenting respectable images of black men as deserving of first-class citizenship rights were at the core of creating a phenomenon of Sexual Plausible Deniability. In turn, this phenomenon fostered the concept of the Down Low, a unique way for black queer men to connect their sexual identities to sexual actions while preserving their reputations in light of respectability politics. The Down Low is one of the most significant long-term impacts of the rise of black mainline denominations and their conservative member institutions that were elevated beyond their already prominent positions in black culture by the black middle-class-led Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s onward.

The positive impact that these black ministers and the congregations they led had on expanding rights for blacks based on race politics is undeniable. At the same time, the negative impact that these same actors had on black queerness broadly and queer health specifically is just as unmistakable. While these ministers did not completely extinguish a unique pre-1950 toleration for queerness in black spaces, they drove queerness underground. The unfortunate legacies of this public disdain yet private tolerance for queerness in black churches and neighborhoods include the development of secretive sexual cultures that force many black queer men to lead double lives or leave the all- encompassing supports of their mainline churches and connected community resources.

228 Interview with Marlon by E. Patrick Johnson, May 7, 2005, W-0027, in Sweet Tea Interviews. 181

Additionally, as is evidenced by the centrality of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in shining a light on Down Low culture, these often visible yet rarely discussed secretive sexual cultures also created public health crises in black communities because few spaces exist to have open and honest conversations about sexual practice and related disease transmission among US blacks. These unique circumstances have contributed to higher

HIV/AIDS infection rates in black communities since the 1980s and continue to pose a significant challenge in reducing infections and containing the virus today. 182

CONCLUSION

Deconstructing the myth of black homophobia, a myth that frames black communities and black institutions as the most homophobic places in the United States, the preceding pages presented two clear and seemingly contradictory points. The myth is widely believed and deeply held by many Americans from diverse racial backgrounds while, at the same time, visible queerness in black neighborhoods and churches has existed in substantial ways since at least the early twentieth century. At a base level, this apparent paradox challenges the myth of black homophobia but leaves one wondering why Americans are so invested in the myth in the first place.

Reflecting back to my black queer colleague’s visceral reaction to this project’s central question detailed in the introduction—she considered a challenge to the myth of black homophobia as untenable because she believed that her community had always been and remained much more homophobic than its white counterpart—I continue to ponder why commitments to this myth are so strong and pervasive. Perhaps an answer to this conundrum, at least in my colleague’s case, is bound up in the fact that she chose to be visibly and vocally queer from a young age. In essence, having taken the leap to publicly proclaim her queerness to her family, neighbors, and mainline church community very early in her life, she ripped off the veil of Sexual Plausible Deniability for those around her, transgressing the norms of respectability that this project has shown to be crucial in the formation and function of modern black communities in the US.

Alternatively, perhaps her experiences as a black queer woman differ in significant ways from the experiences of the black queer men whose stories fill the pages of 183

Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah. Or maybe the uniqueness of her individual experiences—tied to specific geographies, relationships, politics, and more—culminated in an understanding that was both validated by personal experience while also challenged by the experiences of many other black queer individuals.

In a broader perspective, my colleague is hardly alone in proclaiming black communities as the most homophobic spaces in the country. As Chapter One showed, many Americans fully subscribe to the myth of black homophobia. From a comparison of differing reactions to the barrier-shattering firsts of Jackie Robinson versus Jason Collins to the dynamic blame-game around US marriage equality battles in the 2000s and 2010s, it is clear that many people have placed blame for queer political and social missteps at the doors of black homes and churches. Said another way, this chapter clearly showed that by the late 1990s, many Americans took for granted that black communities were much more homophobic than their white equivalents.

However, after showing that the myth of black homophobia was pervasive by the

2000s, the second chapter challenged this myth through exploring black urban communities in the first half of the twentieth century that sustained—or at least allowed—open displays of queerness. These black communities were not limited to one particular geographic area, as examples from New York to New Orleans illustrated. This black openness to queer actions and identities was established by examining black jazz and blues scenes from the 1910s to the 1940s. These cultural productions were defined by performers who themselves often lived openly queer lives and integrated queer themes into their work. In stark contrast to this openness in black communities of the time, by the 184 early 1950s the postwar Lavender Scare’s emergence threatened the continuing existence of open black queerness. It is clear that homophobia did not exist in all corners of black

America prior to the 1950s, and in fact black communities were much more often havens for queerness in a broader white-controlled country becoming increasingly committed to eradicating non-heteronormativity.

While many of the black places that hosted overt queerness were unrecognizable by the 1960s, Chapter Three argued that black toleration did not simply disappear.

Instead, beginning with the rise of the black middle-class-led Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, queerness in black spaces was driven underground at the expense of a new movement focused on the respectability of blacks. This movement placed socially conservative black ministers as the unrivaled mouthpieces of black communities and refocused the institutions they led as both the all-important hubs for community and activist development and the primary mechanisms for maintaining public perceptions of black morality to a broader American culture held firmly in the grasp of white society.

The rise of this politics of respectability thus influenced the development of Sexual

Plausible Deniability, creating an internal demand among blacks that all members of their community meet the outward expectations of an upstanding heteronormative citizen who was worthy of first-class citizenship rights.

We can see this politics of respectability expressed from the very first activist campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement in 1954—beginning with the Brown v. Board of

Education US Supreme Court Decision—and continuing through the Memphis Sanitation

Workers’ Strike in 1968 where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Perhaps more 185 than any other time during the Civil Rights Movement, this final campaign in Memphis highlighted the role that respectable images of black men wearing their Sunday best played in the overall push for equal rights. As the marchers’ signs reading “I Am a Man!” proclaimed to the world, ideas of acceptability were intricately connected to the belief that an assertion of black manhood—as traditionally and heteronormatively defined— was a key to racial equality.

Figure 3: An image by Memphis photographer Ernest C. Withers of sanitation workers carrying protest placards reading “I Am a Man” on March 28, 1968. Credit Ernest C. Withers, via Withers Family Trust/Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Seeking to more intricately understand how black clergy grew to hold such central roles in their communities as spokespersons for the civil rights movement and gatekeepers of heteronormativity, Chapter Four presented a broad overview of the history 186 of mainline black Christian denominations. The overview focused on why black churches grew to be centers of community life for their parishioners, ultimately becoming hubs for race-focused activism in the 1950s and 1960s. This history also highlighted why mainline black Christian churches developed into organizations that publicly espoused anti-queer messages while privately preserving room for queerness to exist amongst the ranks of choir members swaying in their robes or lay members in pews who donned their flamboyant Sunday best.

Driving home the largely untrue and unfair nature of the myth of black homophobia, the fifth chapter shared the stories of dozens of black queer men who described the nuances and intricacies of queer life in black mainline churches or, at least, in the social and cultural shadows of those all-important institutions. While this chapter certainly showed that the rise of the black middle-class-led Civil Rights Movement came at a cost to queer identities and expressions in black communities, it also pointed out examples of queer toleration from the 1950s through the 2010s made possible by the construct of Sexual Plausible Deniability. In short, queer expressions by black people in black spaces continued to exist in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, but the potential for open conversations about queerness that had existed before the 1950s was gone. With the rise of a pervasive phenomenon of Sexual

Plausible Deniability came the emergence of life on the Down Low. This Down Low culture grew out of the unique histories of black US spheres, defining the experiences of many black queer men who had sex with men but did not identify as gay, bisexual, or any other queer identity. While this exploration of the Down Low was not intrinsically tied to 187 negative moral judgements or ideas of inauthenticity, there were clear connections between the social forces that created the Down Low and the same forces that forbid conversations about sexuality and sexual health. Ultimately, this lack of conversations in black communities has been one factor that contributed to disproportionately high

HIV/AIDS-related deaths in those same populations to the present day. Looking toward the future, understanding the history that fueled the development of the Down Low is key to understanding how to begin vital conversations about the negative public health consequences stemming from systemic silence about sex and sexuality in black communities, potentially providing new insights into how best to begin conversations that could improve the individual and collective lives of black Americans.

Finally, while Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah argues that mainline black churches played a large part in marginalizing black queerness beginning in the 1950s, it also leaves room for the possibility of institutional redemption, suggesting that churches serve as vehicles for positive change in civil rights struggles for non-heteronormative individuals in similar ways as they have been for non-white individuals. As the work of ministers like DC-based Rainey Cheeks and California-based Carl Bean shows, creating religious spaces that openly embrace queer individuals can produce many positive outcomes for those individuals and their broader networks. The positive impact of inclusive religious organizations on the lived experiences of black queer individuals range throughout several of the oral histories incorporated in this project, especially in testimony from individuals who had left mainline black churches to find accepting homes in other religious institutions. These men noted that they could reclaim their spirituality in 188 spite of the religiously justified homophobia they encountered earlier in life, and their experiences stressed the potential for change in black religious circles. Additionally, the advocacy and social justice work that the Metropolitan Community Church and Unity

Fellowship Church engaged in is a larger scale example of how religion can be a force for progressive change in the modern world.

In a largely secular academy that views religion as either negative or irrelevant,

Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah posits that revisiting institutional histories and listening for the queerness just below the veneer of respectability highlights the unique past and potentially revolutionary future that still exists in these places. For example, in tackling issues like HIV/AIDS in black communities, reformed stances and renewed conversations about sexuality in black churches may very well be the most significant agents for change, especially when considering the historic centrality of black churches in the lives of their parishioners. At the very least, Deconstructing Sodom and Gomorrah debunks the pervasive narrative that black communities are the most homophobic in the

United States. After all, while homophobia certainly does exist within black communities, as it does in all subgroups of a larger US population, it is not the all- pervasive phenomenon that the myth would have one believe. 189

REFERENCES Archival Records

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Xavier Baker, pseud., interview by Lance Poston, February 2016, Louisville, Kentucky.

David Jackson, pseud., interview by Lance Poston, March 2015, South Carolina.

Quentin McDaniel, pseud., interview by Lance Poston, July 2017, Winchester, Kentucky.

Kelvin Thomas, pseud., interview by Lance Poston, May 2016, Augusta, Georgia.

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-----. Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

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Films

Gay Rights, Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda. Jeremiah Films, 1993. DVD. Citizens United for the Preservation of Civil Rights, 1993, 2009.

The New Black. Directed by Yoruba Richen. Promised Land Film, 2013. The New Black. DVD. California Newsreel, 2013.

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U.S. Federal Election Commission. Federal Elections 2012: Election Results for the U.S. President, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives. Washington, D.C.: Federal Election Commission, July 2013. Accessed July 19, 2018. https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.pdf.

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