Black Gay Man: Essays

VII Living as a Lesbian

VII Living as a Lesbian In 1985 Barbara Smith came like a fresh wind to Chapel Hill. She brought with her a vision of home unlike anything I had imagined . Home held out promises of redemption and nurturance, acceptance and love. Home was populated with brothers and sisters so unlike my own “natural” family in their politics, their progressiveness , their passion. At home we would recreate ourselves and our world, fashion a new mode of being, map a way for living in which the vision of the black freedom struggle would be realized in the daily interaction of black lesbians and gays. In coming home, I told myself, I would finally be able to articulate that which I had known all along, the centrality of the black woman, the black faggot, the so-called black underclass, and especially the black lesbian to the project of redeeming America. Armed with strong doses of Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Cheryl Clarke, and Donna Kate Rushin, I felt, for a brief moment in my life, as if I 153 knew in which direction to place my feet, saw clearly the road before us. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.1 My sister had been in early life the quintessential daddy’s girl. To him she was “his heart,” the proof of his own self-worth, his princess to be protected from boys, men, and the great unfriendly world. It seemed to all of us that only a moment had passed before her long hair, fancy dresses, and sassy little-girl style gave way to cigarettes, a Jheri curl, unquestioned prowess on the basketball court, and then eventually to her first woman lover, Rose. News of the passionate love affair between seventeen-year-old bulldaggers hit my family like the news of death or war. After months of histrionics and therapy, my parents packed first my sister and then me off to live with our aunt in Brooklyn for a boring summer of softball and Coney Island. When we returned, our parents announced their divorce, or, rather, our mother announced that she would be leaving our father. My sister’s lesbianism had by all indications been cured. She started a tempestuous relationship with Darryl, another impressive basketball player and the father of her child. She suffered through years of drug and alcohol abuse and raised her son, in working poverty, always stuck in the shadow of my parents’ smugly secure comfortableness and my own unquenchable thirst for success. She pushed forward, however unfruitfully, into the mystique of heterosexual acceptability until unexpectedly Rose, LIVING AS A LESBIAN 154 her ex-high school lover, suddenly reappeared, moved in, and began receiving well-chosen gifts from my parents during the holidays. Afraid, jealous, or stuck in some foaming funk I learned from her in the circumstances of her loneliness, I push away from my lover. This hotness, this coldness still in her aging she tricks me.2 My students and I have been discussing Audre Lorde’s Zami in a monstrously large Harlem building with few windows. We keep the door to the classroom open to save ourselves from roasting inside the six-inch-thick cement walls. I present the text to them like a scarce and delicious morsel. They snatch it up, hungrily consuming what they like, leaving the rest to scavengers. “I’m not a lesbian, still I can relate.” “I’m Caribbean and these Caribbean writers just get under my skin.” “Was she abused as a child?” “Was she afraid of black people?” “I didn’t read the whole book, but. . . .” Audre Lorde, Audre: Poet, Mother, Sister, Lesbian, Warrior, Cancer Survivor, was for them—and for me—just the third assignment in a fourteen-week syllabus, sandwiched in between a collection of Lower East Side writers and Alfred Kazin’s Walker in the City. They liked her, they said. I talked about her being the poet laureate of New York, one of the great prophets of multiculturalism and the concept of overlapping identities. They blinked back at me and argued among themselves about whether lesbians could walk the streets of Harlem holding hands. LIVING AS A LESBIAN...