Countering Invisibility and Silence
Two significant consequences of the oppression mapped by these editors and writers were the negation of queer ethnoracial identities and silence. Several anthologies addressed this topic as authors insisted on writing themselves into existence. Evelyn Torton Beck’s Nice Jewish Girls—situated on the intersections of sexual and ethnoreligious identity—declared in its opening lines, “This book is written by people who do not exist.”[1] Beck asserted that religious law and cultural perceptions precluded the existence of Jewish lesbians. One or the other could exist, but not both; such identities could not intersect. This volume responded to that assertion with the writings of more than twenty lesbians, including Adrienne Rich, reflecting on activism/organizing, family history, and relationships between racism and antisemitism.
Other volumes made similar observations that queerness has been declared incompatible with a given culture or identity. In certain contexts, gay and lesbian sexualities were aligned with Western or white cultures, thus erasing their existence in other communities. In Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991), Carla Trujillo quoted Nancy Saporta Sternbach’s observation that being a Chicana lesbian was “to be viewed as an agent of the Anglos,” an “aberration…who has unfortunately caught [the] disease” of homosexuality.[2] To be a Chicana lesbian was to be infected and to become an impure part of one’s ethnic community, and ultimately to no longer belong to it.
Charles Rowell, in his afterword to Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent (1996), scrutinized the rhetoric of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe that asserted “homosexuality is not indigenous to Africa and is…a non-African phenomenon, which black people should avoid and reject.” Rowell explained that “you cease to remain a human being” as a queer person of African descent under this worldview.[3] He asserted that “virulent homophobia” in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States “toughened [the editors’] resolve to assemble an international anthology which would include gay voices from various parts of the Black World.”[4] With its assemblage of Black and gay literature from across the diaspora, Shade presented a counternarrative to the homophobic assertions Rowell catalogued.
Ethnoracial anthology projects including Chicana Lesbians and Shade wrote against these pathologizing and dehumanizing narratives. In assembling these volumes, anthologists like Beam looked to other marginalized writers for inspiration. As Bost argues, “The creative work of lesbian feminists of color…exemplified how literary and cultural forms could challenge structural violence, and demonstrated how everyday experience and interior life could serve as sites and sources of political struggle.”[5] Taking inspiration from lesbian of color writers like Moraga and Lorde, as well as from other anthologies as they emerged, these editor-organizers countered their erasure by writing themselves and their multi-dimensional communities into existence. Essex Hemphill framed the literature presented in his anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Gay Black Men (1991)—initially undertaken alongside Beam, who died of AIDS-related complications early in the process—as “evidence of being.”[6] Lim-Hing asserted that while The Very Inside spoke “of our many oppressions,” it more importantly illustrated the joy of lesbian/bisexual Asian Pacific Islander humanity as it catalogued “our strength, our beauty, our dynamism, and our creativity.”[7] These volumes asserted that people not only existed at the intersections of queerness and ethnocracial categories, but also thrived as they built rich artistic communities.
[1] Evelyn Torton Beck, ed., Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, 1st ed. (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1982), xiii.
[2] Carla Trujillo, ed., Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman, 1991), ix.
[3] Bruce Morrow and Charles H. Rowell, eds., Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent (New York: Avon, 1996), 336.
[4] Morrow and Rowell, Shade, 341.
[5] Bost, Evidence of Being, 9.
[6] Essex Hemphill, ed., Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, 1st ed. (Boston: Alyson, 1991), xxi.
[7] Lim-Hing, The Very Inside, “Introduction.”