Black Lesbians: Visible, Not Pariahs

Careful observers of US culture and scholarship will note that the year 2011 was a propitious year for black lesbians. Dee Rees's film Pariah (2011), about the coming of age and coming out of a seventeenyear-old African American lesbian in Brooklyn, opened to critical acclaim and received multiple awards. In her highly autobiographical film, Rees paints a picture of a claustrophobic, hostile, and homophobic family that the lead character, Alike, must navigate away from in order to survive. Lest viewers unfamiliar with the reality of black lesbian life are tempted to generalize from this film, we have Mignon Moore's book to offer a crucial intervention.

In Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women, Moore offers an extensive analysis of black lesbians who are partners, parents, grandparents often matter-of-factly and openly gay in their work, neighborhoods, families, and religious communities. The book is organized into six substantive (and numbered) chapters, including (1) "Coming into the Life: Entrance into Gay Sexuality for Black Women," (2) "Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities," (3) "Marginalized Social Identities: Self-Understandings and Group Membership," (4) "Lesbian Motherhood and Discourses of Respectability," (5) "Family Life and Gendered Relations between Women," and (6) "Openly Gay Families and the Negotiations of Black Community and Religious Life." In addition, there is an introduction, a conclusion, and several methodological appendixes. Moore's central insight is to simultaneously offer a corrective to three separate, if somewhat overlapping, fields of research: on lesbian identity, gay and lesbian family formation, and black family life—all of which have ignored the "invisible families" who are her subjects. It seems remarkable that some twenty years after the black feminist observation that "all the women are white" and "all the Blacks are men," and the rise of queer studies, that such a corrective is still necessary, but it is. Moore's analysis here extends intersectionality by adopting an intracategorical approach, that is, exploring race, class, and gender within a single group, here black lesbians.

To explore this culture, Moore follows one hundred black American and West Indian women, mostly in New York, over three years. To be eligible for the study, women needed to be in a committed relationship with another woman, forming a family, and at least one person in the relationship had to identify as black. Moore gathered survey data, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and participant observation to inform her analysis. She notes a central methodological difficulty: "There are populations that traditional methods of data gathering will not capture, and the Black lesbian community is one such group. Public advertisements, notices, flyers at lesbian nightclubs, or postings at LGBT community centers largely go unnoticed or unanswered by gay populations of color . . . [and most researchers] are not successful in recruiting a significant number of non-Whites in their samples" (15). Despite her admission that at the beginning of her fieldwork she was not familiar with black lesbian communities in New York, Moore deftly overcomes this barrier by recruiting from a variety of black social spaces, including house parties, backyard barbecues, and, in her initial field experience, a card game. As she reveals in further detail in appendix A, Moore cleverly devised a physical setting to enhance her fieldwork. In collaboration with three other (unnamed) people, Moore designed a series of social events for lesbians of color, called "Persuasion: A Monday Night Lounge Party for Women," that featured a DJ and charged a nominal fee to cover promotional costs. The events continued over eighteen months, and Moore writes that these were critical to her fieldwork because they "allowed me to have regular, sustained contact with the community. Every week some of my patrons were part of the one hundred women who completed the survey so I could observe not only my study participants, but their friends and other women in the study" (232). Moore's innovative approach to data collection here is a significant contribution to understanding how to conduct research with populations that lack geographic...