Introduction
Oscar Armstrong Kenney climbing into a Waco UPF-7 training plane, c. 1942. He likely sent this photograph to Bernard Perlin from Tuskegee. Courtesy of the Bernard Perlin Archives.
He was beautiful, young, Black, a dandy—and also an aviator. Who was he, this subject of snapshots found while cleaning out the studio of the late gay artist Bernard Perlin in 2014?
As the curator for Perlin’s artistic estate and archives, I was long intrigued by this mystery. One of the photographs bore only the briefest inscription: “Oscar, 1940.”
After a decade of dead ends, the breakthrough happened during a routine archival sorting, when I came across a faded pamphlet for one of Perlin's earliest gallery exhibitions. Tucked inside the text was the missing piece: Oscar's last name, Kenney. From there, the mystery began to unravel, ultimately revealing an astounding, long-silenced narrative of Black queer life within military history.
Oscar Kenney, the stunning subject of those photographs, was a Tuskegee Airman.
During World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen became the first African American pilots in the United States Armed Forces. Their outstanding combat record, which shattered stereotypes about the abilities of Black soldiers, helped lead to the postwar desegregation of the American military.
For Airman Oscar Kenney, however, it must have been bittersweet to find himself back in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1942. His father, Dr. John A. Kenney, had been the pioneering director of the Tuskegee Institute’s hospital for many years, until his family fled northward after the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on their lawn.
Now back in the Jim Crow South—his liberal life and studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music interrupted by World War II—Oscar was inducted as a cadet into this now-storied, all-Black unit. Following a grueling year of training, he was commissioned a lieutenant, but was killed just weeks later in a plane crash.
These were among the few facts I could uncover about Oscar’s short life once I had identified him. Through a website for a historical novel about Dr. Kenney written by Oscar’s late niece, Linda Kenney Miller, I connected with her daughter, Lisa Aikens.
Reaching out to a family with archival findings about a long-lost relative requires deep sensitivity. Because I was navigating Black and queer histories, I worried about the ethics of introducing an unexpected narrative, or inadvertently “outing” Oscar across generations. I approached our first conversation carefully, focusing only on the photographs from Perlin’s studio and his possible Newark connection with Oscar.
To my relief, Lisa offered her own hunch about how the two men may have been connected. She recalled her mother mentioning that there had been talk within the family about Oscar maybe being gay. While the family remembered him as a Tuskegee Airman, they knew little else about his brief adult life.[1] But Lisa shared an extraordinary private elegy written by Dr. Kenney for his son, which reads, in part:
Did you give up your fight, dear Oscar?
Was it too hard living a different kind of life,
loving those you do not dare, cannot share?
Yes, life can be cruelly unfair –
Too many wars to fight on land and in the air.[2]
What was it like to be queer and a Tuskegee Airman? I have found astonishing answers in raw recordings of interviews conducted by historian Allan Bérubé and filmmaker Arthur Dong with Dr. C. Bruce Lee, a Tuskegee veteran.[3] Lee describes a furtive yet robust queer subculture within the Tuskegee training program and the doubly discriminatory strictures of being a gay Black man both on and off base in the segregated South. He also discusses his devastation after his secret boyfriend—a fellow aviator he identifies as “Kenny”—was killed in a training accident.
Was this Oscar?
Notes
[1] Lisa Aikens, email to author, February 19, 2025.
[2] John A. Kenney, “Oscar Is Gone,” privately printed poem, 1943, Kenney Family Archives, Atlanta, digital file shared with the author.
[3] Only a small portion of Allan Bérubé’s 1980 interview with Dr. C. Bruce Lee was quoted in Bérubé’s book, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, 20th anniversary ed. (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), which identified Lee by the pseudonym “William Johnson.” Lee was later recorded in 1993 interviews by filmmaker Arthur Dong and a research assistant during development of the book’s documentary film adaptation, Coming Out Under Fire, directed by Arthur Dong (1994; DeepFocus Productions, 2003), DVD. I utilized the GLBT Historical Society’s transcript of the Bérubé interview and personally transcribed the raw audio of the 1993 recordings, both of which are housed at the GLBT Historical Society archives in San Francisco. For a broader structural analysis of these dynamics, see Khary Oronde Polk, “Queering Tuskegee: Segregated Homosexuality and Racialized Homophobia from World War II to the Lavender Scare” (paper presentation, American Historical Association, 2023).