A Short History of Black Lesbian Writers

Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her

Introduction

When I first began my project (of cataloging lesbian literature), I found it much, much, much more difficult to find literature by lesbians who were not white. It’s a niche within a niche. What I’ve found is this, and it’s limited: there are a handful of published East Asian authors (eg, Qiu Miaojin), fewer Latina authors (eg, Gloria Anzaldúa), a few more Black American (eg, Audra Lorde, Alice Walker), a few from the Middle East and Africa, and I have yet to find my lesbian authors of my own ethnic background (South Asian: I’ve found a single hard-to-track-a-copy-of anthology printed in the 1990s).

I spent a lot of time over the last few weeks trying to find Black lesbian writing. In part I’m motivated by the political situation in the U.S., where racism is more obvious by the week. In part I’m motivated by the difficulty of finding writers writing about the lived experience of Black lesbianism. This essay is a resource in shedding light upon that literature that writes of that unique experience, distinctive because of intersection of gender, sexuality, and race. Footnote one includes one invaluable source I drew heavily upon: Lucy C. Moore’s buzzfeed article about Black lesbian writers. I’ve included a few additional works and authors that Moore did not her piece, and outlined its history over the twentieth century.

I used Ann Allen Shockley (b. 1927) Loving Her (1974) as the book reviewed in this piece. Loving Her was revolutionary: the first (known) Black lesbian work with a Black main character who is also a lesbian. It was a turning point; with many Black lesbian writing more openly about their lesbianism following.

The Harlem Renaissance

The earliest Black lesbian and bisexual playwrights and poets wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, the Black cultural and artistic movement of the 1920s and 1930s. If you haven’t read up on it, I’d highly recommend doing just that. Some of the bigger names were Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, and Countee Cullen. Notice how many women were included in that list? Regardless of race or perhaps because, this is remarkable for that era. It’s inspirational in that so much art, creativity, joy, and community rose less than six decades after the end of chattel- and race-based slavery, and continuing oppression. There were rent parties to cover the rent of folks who struggled to do so, women business owners who made small fortunes, drag balls and queer nightlife. In some ways, ripe for queer folks to be open about their queerness, and yet, they did not include that queerness in their writing.

There were several prominent Black lesbians in the movement. One of the earliest known to us today was Alice Dunbar Nelson (b. 1875), whose poetry spoke homoerotic tendencies¹. Angelina Weld Grimké (b. 1880) was a journalist, playwright, poet. Biracial father, second Black man to graduate from Harvard Law, her mother was midwestern white (which would make Angelina about 1/4 Black). When she was sixteen, she wrote “I know you are too young now to become my wife, but I hope, darling, that in a few years you will come to me and be my love, my wife! How my brain whirls how my pulse leaps with joy and madness when I think of these two words, 'my wife'" to her classmate Mary P. “Mamie” Burrill (b 1881). Burrill was also a playwright, and her life partner was fellow teacher Lucy Diggs Slowe. Mae Virginia Cowdrey (b 1909) was a bisexual poet who died tragically before her fortieth birthday. Lorraine Hansberry was born about 50 years after Nelson, Grimké, and Burrill, was also a lesbian playwright, but she wasn’t open about her lesbianism.

After the Renaissance, there seems to be a quietness in Black Lesbians writing. Less remembered or published in the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s, and few out/explicit Black lesbian writing during the civil rights movement. It wasn’t until the 1970s and the feminist movement that followed and took inspiration from the civil rights movement that the Black lesbian writing movement really kicked off…starting with Ann Allen Shockley.

Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her (1974)

Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her is the story of a young Black lesbian (or black Lesbian, as Shockley would write) who discovers she’s attracted to women, leaves her husband, and runs away to join her white Lesbian lover. If you chose to read this book: do not read the blurb or the back of the book, as they give away the entire plot. The book begins with Renay running away from the alcoholic husband who just sold her childhood piano and physically assaulted her the night before. She takes her young daughter, Denise. Assisting her is Terry, a wealthy (convenient!) white woman, into whose luxurious high-rise apartment Renay and Denise move.

Stylistically, the book is lacking. There’s little interiority or insight into the characters, they feel flat and predictable, thinly sketched plot points instead of fully fleshed people. The prose tells rather than shows, not chronologically, but going back and forth through time to tell of events without leading the reader gently through them. Another reason the book was forgotten is that it’s…well, read the quote I wrote out to share. It questions the Black community’s views on lesbianism in ways that are outdated, especially as the Black community has become less homophobic over time…as have most other ethnic/racial communities.

Historically and philosophically, this book is crucial. Shockley brings up so much more than just a lesbian experience in it. It’s explicit: open about the joy of lesbian sex as it about the oppression and suffering of Black folks in the United States as it is about unique experience of Black women versus Black men and the interplay between those two genders. Shockley’s observations on the intersection of class and race, and the generational wealth of white people in comparison to the economic oppression of Black people are sharp, and echo a lot of the conversations that have become a part of the zeitgeist today. She’s also masterful in describing the gentle self-consciousness on Renay’s part to the interracial relationship at the center of the novel. Through her astute observations on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality in kicking off a new genre, Shockley begins up a conversation that many Black lesbian authors continued after her.

After Ann Shockley

I read Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) in my teens; pieces of both float into my mind occasionally even years and years later. Audra Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name was published the same year. Audra Lorde has had a revival over the last decade ago, Alice Walker was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Yet, there are many other Black lesbian writers who were writing around and in the two decades after. Barbara Smith edited multiple anthologies and thought pieces on Black lesbian writing. Other anthologies include: For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women (1983) by Becky Birtha; Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing (1995), edited by Catherine McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney; does your mama know?: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories (1997) edited by Lucy C. Moore. Essayists (outside of Lorde) include Anita Cornwell (Black Lesbians in White America). Poets include Michelle Cliff (Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise), Cheryl Clarke (Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1983), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989)), Pat Parker ((Womanslaughter (1978), Movement in Black (1978) and Jonestown & other madness (1985)), Kate Rushin (The Black Backup (1993)). Dionne Brand is an essayist, poet, and novelist who wrote No Language is Neutral (1990), A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), What We All Long For (2005), and more. Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote a favorite biography on Audra Lorde, but is also a poet in her own right. M. Jacqui Alexander is a writer who writes of heterosexualization and and a student of yoga and meditation. Jewelle Gomez is a writer whose The Gilda Stories include a Black lesbian vampire as a main character, and whose fight for marriage equality was one of the cases that helped (tenuously) secure the right to same-sex marriage in the United States. Chinelo Okparanta a present a new type of writer in the pantheon of Black lesbians: she is Nigerian-American writer without the longer family history in the United States that the others on my list have. Okparanta’s 2015 debut Under the Udala Trees explores coming out, and Nigerian folktales and the country’s civil war. Also, Hafizah Augustus Geter is of half Nigerian, half Black American ancestry, The Black Period is her memoir.

Are there more? Yes, undoubtedly writers I’ve missed, and especially as my history only covers writers over the twentieth century (with Okparanta and Geter as the exceptions) and not into our current century. Yet, many of the writers and books I’ve included in this post are out of print; you’d have to hunt down their publications on ebay or whatnot. Those are the one we know of; there are likely countless others whose names are lost to history, or whose works were never published.

Photos: Audra Lorde (black and white); Ann Shockley (color)

1. Moore, Lisa C. The Black Lesbian Writers You Need To Be Reading. Buzzfeed. July 18, 2015. Accessed February 9, 2024. https://www.buzzfeed.com/redbonepress/the-black-lesbian-writers-who-made-me-who-i-am