Bearing Witness to Interconnected Oppressions
In the introduction to The Very Inside, editor Sharon Lim-Hing noted, “On the day I first had the idea to start this anthology…. It was the summer of 1990 in Somerville, Massachusetts, whose streets I walked in a fearful, defiant anticipation of clusters of teenagers wielding the word ‘Chink.’”[1] These opening lines foreground the volume’s function of bearing witness and mapping the complex terrains of oppressions faced by queer Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Born of Chinese descent in Jamaica before migrating to the United States in her adolescence, Lim-Hing considered in this introduction the “triple oppression” experienced by her community in terms of race but also sexuality and gender. She outlined how the stereotypes of meekness were leveraged against Asian women, how bisexual women were an afterthought for inclusion in queer communities and literary projects, and how Asian women’s presence as tokens helped to “provide diversity for white-dominated anthologies.”[2]
Will Roscoe similarly started his introduction to Living the Spirit (1988) by noting that “Gay American Indians face double oppression—both racism and homophobia.” For examples, Roscoe, although not Native American himself, catalogued a series of injustices that Native American gay men and women faced in their communities: gay parents facing long court battles over custody on the basis of their sexuality, exclusion from spiritual ceremonies, racist harassment off of reservations, AIDS programs and funding failing to reach native peoples, internalized shame inherited through the homophobic attitudes of tribal elders.[3] Roscoe emphasized that queer Native Americans were subject to discrimination and harassment based on their race as well as their sexuality, amplifying their suffering despite a documented array of “alternative gender roles” observed across 135 tribes. Roscoe included these roles in an appendix at the end of the volume as a testament to a history of colonizing cultures erasing sexual otherness. Queer ethnoracial anthology projects collected writings that foregrounded the challenges of living at the intersections of multiple identities while also naming the forces that resulted in oppressions stemming from patriarchy or colonialism.
In the 2000s and 2010s, Jamie Berrout and Thomas Glave brought attention to how these oppressions extended to the publishing industry. In their introductions to Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color (2017) and Our Caribbean, the editors noted the devaluation by the publishing industry of trans-of-color fiction and gay and lesbian literature of the Caribbean diaspora. Essentially these stories were not seen as worth telling because, mainstream publishers believed, there was no audience for their work and no profit to be made. Glave recounted one conversation with a potential publisher who claimed that Our Caribbean’s value was a miniscule “slice of a slice” of the market. It was therefore deemed unworthy of investment and publication because so few people would be interested in literature that was both Caribbean and queer.[4] Berrout turned to crowdfunding and avenues of self-publishing to make Nameless Women a reality.[5] Implicit in these introductions were arguments for their existence as artistic works as well as the importance of cataloguing the oppressions, stereotypes, and failures encountered by LGBTQ+ writers of color.
As James Earl Hardy wrote in his preface to the 2008 edition of In the Life, these collections responded to “the urgent call of Beam and others to bear witness and continue telling stories.”[6] Queer ethnoracial anthologies also framed the responsibility of bearing witness as serving a historical function to preserve histories and narratives before they disappeared. A significant component of bearing witness in the 1980s and 1990s related to the HIV/AIDS crisis, which disproportionately affected Black and Brown queer men. This theme made up a significant component of the queer literary landscape, with a dozen or so volumes collecting work by Black gay men specifically. In Freedom in this Village (2004), for instance, E. Lynn Harris collected twenty-five years of writings and declared that “preserving and documenting our literary heritage is of crucial importance to black gay men.”[7] The book, he stated, was dedicated to the memory of those lost to HIV/AIDS, including Beam, “as well as to the promise of a bold, new black gay literary future to come.”[8] Harris suggested that a key legacy of these anthologies when they were written was that they cataloged the oppressions and hopes experienced in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Queer ethnoracial anthologies were texts where social harms were catalogued and represented in literature, establishing them as important documents for understanding oppression and sites haunted by traumas ranging from incidents of racism and homophobia to the immense losses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
[1] Lim-Hing, “Introduction.”
[2] Lim-Hing, “Introduction.”
[3] Will Roscoe, ed., Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 2–3.
[4] Thomas Glave, ed., Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 4.
[5] Ellyn Peña, Jamie Berrout, and Venus Selenite, eds., Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color, 1st ed. (Anaheim, CA: Trans Women Writers Collective, 2017), 15.
[6] Beam, In the Life, xi.
[7] E. Lynn Harris, ed., Freedom in This Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, 1979 to the Present (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), xvi.
[8] Harris, Freedom in This Village, xvi.