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African American LGBT Writing, 1982-1991

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African American LGBT Writing, 1982-1991 Black Shamelessness: African American LGBT Writing, 1982-1991 Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Christopher S. Lewis, M.A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2012 Dissertation Committee: Valerie Lee, Ph.D., Advisor Koritha Mitchell, Ph.D. Debra Moddelmog, Ph.D. Copyright by Christopher S. Lewis 2012 Abstract For most of the twentieth century, black writers represented African Americans as sexually proper in realist forms as a means of combating racist discourse that considers all black sexuality depraved. In the 1960s and 1970s, black literary realism became explicitly associated with the Black Arts Movement’s heteronormative politics of black authenticity and pride. During the 1980s, however, many African American writers openly identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) explored black queer experiences in a range of literary forms, including performance poetry, realist fiction, and speculative fiction. Black Shamelessness considers this range of forms, finding literary genre to be critical terrain for the exploration of black queer politics. 1980s black LGBT writers like Alice Walker, Essex Hemphill, and Assotto Saint challenged the expectations of black literature by queering the archives of black realism with realist celebrations of queer sexualities. Meanwhile, writers like Audre Lorde, Samuel Delany, and Jewelle Gomez composed non-realist texts that question the value of queer subjects being folded into black literary realism. Black Shamelessness thus finds that black LGBT writers can be categorized in part by their relationship to realism and their responses to the politics of black authenticity. While some reproduce the conventions of realism to either parody, queer, or broaden the concept of black reality, others find realism too sutured to the politics of sexual normativity to be used for a queer- positive project. Black LGBT writers of the 1980s continuously pointed to the ii relationship between sexuality and black authenticity in order to interrogate the privilege associated with words like “real” and “authentic.” Both terms can be appropriated to enforce an ideological tyranny that operates by tacitly implying the normativity—and therefore the rightness—of heterosexuality and gender propriety for African Americans. Furthermore, Black Shamelessness also argues that the major publishing industry and mainstream audiences have historically expected black writers to compose realist texts endorsing heteronormativity. Black LGBT writers’ frequent investment in independent, identity-based presses allowed them to reach specific black and/or LGBT audiences not hailed by the major publishing industry. Although the writings of Samuel R. Delany, Essex Hemphill, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker have been studied individually for their contributions to science fiction, black gay culture, and black feminism and womanism, respectively, no study before Black Shamelessness has considered the roles genre and publication venue played in shaping their articulations of black queer experience, nor has another study considered them alongside other under- studied black LGBT writers like Jewelle Gomez and Assotto Saint. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Valerie Lee, Koritha Mitchell, and Debra Moddelmog for their support, guidance, critiques, and suggestions. I would like to thank Tiffany Anderson and Alex Jenkins for allowing me to talk about this project with them on a regular basis, as well as for reading and commenting on parts of it. I would like to thank Micah McCarey for providing me with the space and support needed to complete this project. iv Vita 2003…………………………………….Lorain Admiral King High School 2006…………………………………….B.A., English, University of Cincinnati 2008…………………………………….M.A., English, The Ohio State University 2006-Present……………………………Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Publications Rev. of Whitney Davis’s Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond. The European Legacy 17.6 (2012). “Gerbilling Reconsidered: Comparing Talk of Foodways and Sexways.” Folklore Forum 39.1 (2009): n. pag. Web. 1 October 2011. <http://folkloreforum.net/2009/03/24/gerbilling-reconsidered-comparing-talk-of- foodways-and-sexways/>. Fields of Study Major Field: English Sub-Fields: African American literature, queer studies v Black Shamelessness: African American LGBT Writing, 1982-1991 Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….….ii-iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………...iv Vita……………………………………………………………………………………..…v Table of Contents………………………………………………………………...…vi-viii Introduction. Surveying the Ground of African American LGBT Writing, 1982- 1991………………………………………………………………..…..1-86 Black Sexuality and U.S. Political Rhetoric of the 1980s……………………18-29 The Politics of Respectability, Pride, and Invulnerability……………………29-36 African American Literature, Genre, and Shame…………………………….36-46 Re-Valuing Marginalized Communities and Texts in 1980s U.S. Literary Criticism……………………………………………………………...46-52 Black Queer Studies and the Critique of Canonization……………………....52-62 1980s African American LGBT Publishing………………………………….62-69 Articulating Shamelessness…………………………………………………..69-72 Notes and Bibliography………………………………………………………72-86 Chapter 1. Cultivating Black Lesbian Shamelessness: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple……………………………………………………………….87-125 Articulating Sexuality and Opposing Salvation………………………….....91-105 vi Receiving The Color Purple and Black Lesbian Shamelessness………….105-113 Conclusion: The Binds of Black Literary Realism………………………...113-115 Notes and Bibliography……………………………………………………115-125 Chapter 2. Packaging Black LGBT Life-Writing: Audre Lorde’s Zami and Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water……………………………126-187 Packaging and Publishing while Black and Queer………………………...128-137 Distributing through Major and Independent Presses……………………..137-150 Lorde’s Zami and the Critique of Realist Autobiography…………………150-166 Delany’s Legendary Celebrity in The Motion of Light in Water…………..166-177 Conclusion: Disruptive Legends…………………………………………..177-179 Notes and Bibliography……………………………………………………179-187 Chapter 3. Queering the Neo-Slave Narrative: Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories……….….188-236 The Queerness of Enslavement……………………………………………190-196 Afrofuturism and the Desire for Race: Delany’s Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand…………………………………….………………………….196-208 The (Neo-)Slave Narrative and the Vampire Novel: Gomez’s The Gilda vii Stories...............................................................................................208-223 Conclusion: Contesting the Aesthetics of Black Literary Realism………..223-225 Notes and Bibliography……………………………………………………225-236 Chapter 4. Embodying Black Gay Poetry: The Cinematic Corporeality of Essex Hemphill and Assotto Saint……………………….……………….237-286 The AIDS Crisis and the Idea of a Black Gay Burden…………………….240-247 Essex Hemphill and Black Gay Performance Poetry……………………...247-266 Assotto Saint’s Refusal to Regret………………………………………….266-278 Conclusion: Re-Narrating AIDS and the Body…………………………...278-279 Notes and Bibliography……………………………………………………279-286 Conclusion. Articulating and Circulating Shamelessness………………………...287-293 Notes and Bibliography……………………………………………………293 Comprehensive Chapter-by-Chapter Bibliography……………………………294-326 viii Introduction. Surveying the Ground of African American LGBT Writing, 1982-1991 An amazing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) African American writers published and performed work in the late twentieth century, especially between 1982 and 1991. Not since the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s had such a large group of same-sex desiring African Americans simultaneously found occasions and venues to publish and perform their writing.1 Remarkably, black LGBT writers published during a decade known in the United States for its political conservatism on issues of gender, race, and sexuality. From 1981 to 1993, Conservative leadership dominated U.S. politics with the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The racism and (hetero)sexism that circulated in national discussions of black sexuality—discussions which pathologized black families and rarely addressed black LGBT issues directly— inspired many LGBT African Americans to write about their experiences and perspectives, so as to enter their voices authoritatively into discussions of black families, black sexuality, and racism. This dissertation considers the conditions under which and the concerns with which the first movement of openly LGBT African American writers managed to emerge in literary discourse of the 1980s.2 By attending to the particularities of various publication and circulation venues of the decade—including the major literary publishing 1 industry, the major science fiction publishing industry, independent African American publishing, independent LGBT publishing, and independent black gay film—I survey a wide range of networks through which black LGBT writers surfaced in U.S. literary discourse despite the overwhelming invisibility of black LGBT concerns and issues on the mainstream political stage. By attending to black LGBT writers’ choices of form and genre—including autobiography, biomythography, the epistolary novel, performance poetry, science fiction, and the vampire novel—I
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