Out, no doubt: today's black gay and lesbian poets proudly proclaim their identities and show their varying talents to an increasingly receptive public

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2004 by Reginald Harris

Recent accomplishments by openly gay, lesbian and bisexual African American poets point to a rise in profile and stature of these writers. Carl Phillips, for example, won the 2002 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the $100,000 prize for his fifth book, The Tether. And in 2003, Jamaican-born performance poet Staceyann Chin, an out lesbian, was an audience favorite among Tony Award-winning cast of Rusell Simmons's Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

For some people, the move from margin to center by "out" black poets may be surprising. But many gay and lesbian poets agree with spoken-word poet and hip-hop artist Tim's West (author of Red Dirt Revival: A Poetic Memoir in 6 Breaths, Poz' Trophy Publishing, October 2003) when he says, "Black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered poets are so prominently represented in the black poetry canon--from the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Arts Movement, to the current proliferation of spoken word poetry--that it almost makes little sense to make any distinction."

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Many important figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s were gay, lesbian or bisexual, but most writers from this time did not write about gay themes publicly. Richard Bruce Nugent was one of a handful to publish explicitly same-sex work. His short story "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" appeared in Wallace Thurman's one-issue journal Fire!! But A. B. Christa Schwarz's recent book Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, July 2003) explores how poets including Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes often "encoded" their work with gay lingo that could be picked up by readers in the know. And letters and poems written to women by poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimke, for example, were not widely circulated until scholar Gloria Hull uncovered Grimke's buried life in an essay in the 1983 anthology Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Kitchen Table/Women of Color).

Today, black gays and lesbians embrace Langston Hughes as part of their community, although biographer Arnold Rampersad and members of the Hughes family deny that he was gay. Regardless of Hughes's orientation, many openly gay poets acknowledge him as a major influence. "Hughes's work inspired me to want not only to be a poet, but also a black man in my work," says G. Winston James, author of Lyric: Poems Along a Broken Road (Grapevine Press, June 1999). "Hughes, in a sense, made me want to write my poetry on my skin so that people could read my poems and meet me--know who I really am."

GROUNDBREAKERS: AUDRE LORDE AND ESSEX HEMPHILL

The economic collapse of the Great Depression effectively ended the Harlem Renaissance. World War II, the Cold War's gay-baiting "Red Scares" and the strident homophobia of many in the Black Arts Movement kept most black gays and lesbians in the closet. From the 1940s to the late 1960s, African Americans were collectively focused behind the issue of race to gain civil rights; issues of sexuality and class often fell by the wayside, with the notable exception of the novels of James Baldwin.

Gay themes generally weren't talked about until the late 1970s. With the end of de jure racial segregation and the start of the Women's Movement and gay-rights activism, works such as Black and Queer by Adrian Stanford (1977) and Movement in Black by Pat Parker (1978) began expressing the complex relationship between race, gender and sexual orientation. Two important poets with an outsized influence during this period, both for their commanding personalities as well as elegant and uncompromising work, were Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill. Both authors appeared in the influential Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (W. W. Norton & Company, November 1996). Hemphill, who made significant poetic contributions to the films Looking for Langston (1989) and Tongues Untied (1991), is the final entry in that edition. "I was so hungry for a different take on this homosexual thing, I almost died waiting for one," Steven G. Fullwood, founder of the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive project at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, wrote in a memorial "open letter" a year after Hemphill's death in 1995. "Although I knew there was something else, I couldn't articulate it or even fully imagine what it could be. I was overwhelmed by your simple words, your testimony. As a consequence, I worked to articulate and chronicle my own pains and joys about being African American, homosexual and unapologetically funky."

THE 1980S BOOM AND THE BEGINNING OF THE AIDS EPIDEMIC

The increased visibility of gays and lesbians and the creation of gay- and women-owned independent publishing houses and bookstores helped to fuel an explosion of work in the 1980s. In some ways, the mid-1980s to the early 1990s were a second Renaissance emerging in the black gay and lesbian community, not just in Harlem but also throughout the country. Joseph Beam's groundbreaking In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (December 1986), and its companion volume Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (Alyson, December 1991), edited by Hemphill, were just two of a number of anthologies that gave many black gay and lesbian poets and writers their first exposure to the reading public. New York City's Other Countries Collective released Black Gay Voices (1988) and Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (1993). Assotto Saint founded Galiens Press, publishing his own poetry in Stations (1989) and Wishing for Wings (1994), and the work of other gay male poets in The Road Before Us: 100 Black Gay Poets (1991) and Here to Dare: 10 Black Gay Poets (1992). Like the other anthologies, Saint's anthologies mixed established poets with newcomers, including some, like Thomas Glave and Bil Wright, who would later go on to establish careers in fiction.