Documenting a black gay and lesbian literary canon: for four years, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has been compiling an archive from underground, small press and self-published work—and the rest is history in the making

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2004 by Kai Wright

For most of the 20th century, the canon of writing by and about being black and gay in America may have seemed like scattered, uneven outbursts, whether it's the 1926 explicitly short story about cruising by Richard Bruce Nugent, "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade," of much later, the homoerotic themes in the work of novelist James Baldwin. Fifty years after Nugent's notorious story was published n Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance journal Fire!!, a group in the Los Angeles area called the Association of Black Gays published Rafiki, a hodgepodge of writings in the rail of 1976--news bites, information about events, commentary. Rafiki was the first in a series of newsletters, magazines and periodicals that, over the last three decades, has finally offered black queer writers a place to speak frankly about their lives.

Four years ago, New York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture began an effort to collect all of these underground publications, along with the burgeoning list of self- and small-press published books that make up most of the tiny but growing world of black gay publishing. "It reminds me of when black people used to save newspaper clippings just because they had black people in them" jokes Steven G. Fullwood, curator of the Schomburg Center's Black Gay and Lesbian Archives project, describing how he's been following a trail of yellowing papers stored in attics and basements around the country. "It's just us saying, 'We are here!'"

Fullwood has collected at least one issue of about 50 publications and around 150 book titles. The archive is less concerned with the handful of writers who have found commercial success. For example, he points to black lesbian and bisexual women writers like Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, whose womanist perspectives in the 1970s offered alternative narratives that both countered and completed commentary from the largely white feminist movement. Of course, lately there's been E. Lynn Harris's best selling novels featuring bisexual and gay black male characters, and Samuel Delany's science fiction tomes, which have also developed a loyal following. But instead Fullwood has focused on culling the volumes of work by black "same-gender-loving" writers that are much more lower profile.

The commercial success of novelists like E. Lynn Harris and James Earl Hardy, whose B-Boy Blues series is popular among black gay men, has no doubt opened up the publishing market. In 2002, Clies Press released an anthology of black gay fiction that continues to draw critical praise--Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction, edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, Donald Weise and Evelyn C. White. That same year, Duke University Press released Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections From the Work Richard Bruce Nugent, edited by Thomas H. Wirth.

But some of the most remarkable writing has sprung from independent settings unconnected to conventional publishing. AIDS Project Los Angles, a social service agency for people living with HIV, began last year publishing a series of slim anthologies meant to shake up the way people think about HIV prevention. With their collections of essays, poems and short stories, the journals are reminiscent of the early black gay periodicals in the Schomburg collection, but they also reveal a literary maturation. They are sharply designed and the editors have chosen complimentary pieces that, together, create a broad enough conversation to draw in those who are not personally invested in either HIV or black gay life.

Kai Wright is a contributing editor at City Limits magazine.