Queer Sources from Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community, 1870s-2020s, by Moira Armstrong

This exhibit follows up on the recent book Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2024), which covers themes, figures, and events from the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. Each section of the exhibit focuses on a different chapter, presenting an overview of the chapter's argument and two primary sources used to provide insight into Newark queer life.

Let’s Talk about Sex, Baby!: Queer and Trans Black Women and the Politics of Sex Talk in the Archive, by Dominique Rocker

“The Stroll: A Way of Life or Lifestyle,” La’Raine June 2006, 9. Courtesy Angela Raine.

Queer Newark Oral History Project interview with Angela Raine, October 20, 2016.

In Chapter 8, “Let’s Talk about Sex, Baby!: Queer and Trans Black Women and the Politics of Sex Talk in the Archive,” Dominique Rocker points out that while gay men have discussed their sex lives in depth in their interviews with the Queer Newark Oral History Project, Black women are not as open about sex, due to the racist and sexist stigma associated with their sexuality. She also, however, highlights examples of openness about sex in the interviews and in La’Raine, the first New Jersey magazine published by a Black trans woman, Angela Raine.

Rocker points to La’Raine as an example of openness about sex in historical archives. One of its articles, “The Stroll: A Way of Life or Lifestyle,” is based on an interview with a trans sex worker, demonstrating the magazine’s overlap of discussions about sex, health, and queerness, and its willingness to discuss taboo topics.

Full copies of La’Raine are also available for purchase from publisher Angela Raine at angelaraine@aol.com.

Rocker also includes a quotation from Raine, discussing sex through euphemism, interspersed with laughter, indicating possible discomfort with the topic despite the anecdote’s relevance to her life.