When people think of Black LGBT history, they tend to start and finish with Stonewall. It was vital to LGBT liberation, but in dealing with the history of the Black LGBT community, we need to go back further to the 1920s, hrough the civil rights movement, the AIDS epidemic and up to today.
THE STONEWALL REBELLION
The Stonewall Rebellion is arguably the most significant event in LGBT history. Out of it came what we now know as Pride and most significantly, the Gay Liberation Front, which was instrumental in bringing gay rights to the attention of the mainstream media. The details of what actually happened that night are unclear. Many sources cite Marsha P Johnson, an African American drag queen, as throwing the first brick. She herself said when interviewed that she did not arrive until hours later, others will cite Sylvia Rivera, a Latinx drag queen. Johnson and Rivera probably didn’t ‘throw the first brick’, but they were exceptional people who founded STAR, an organisation that provided support and housing to homeless LGBT youth in Manhattan, which is considered groundbreaking in the LGBT liberation movement. The most reliable accounts say the Stonewall Rebellion broke out when a butch lesbian was dragged out of the Stonewall Inn in handcuffs, escaping multiple times and fighting four police officers. Many of these say this was Stormé Delaverie, born in New Orleans to an African-American mother and a white father in 1920. She was a singer, bouncer, and bodyguard known as ‘the Rosa Parks of the gay community’. She was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and worked as a volunteer street patrol worker for decades until her death in 2014. While the details are hazy, like most of LGBT history, what is notable is the prominent role that LGBT people of colour played in the fight for the rights of the LGBT community.
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
Stonewall was pivotal, but LGBT people did exist before then, notably in Harlem in the 1920s. The Harlem Renaissance was a social and cultural movement characterised by the explosion of Black culture centred around Harlem, New York. During the Harlem renaissance, a subculture of LGBT African-American artists emerged, including people like Langston Hughes, Mabel Hampton, Alain Locke and Bessie Smith. This was also the start of drag ball culture, as we know it today. Throughout the 1920s to the 1940s, LGBT people enjoyed a period of relative openness, but by the 1950s, America was on a campaign to restore traditional gender values, and the transgressive nature of the LGBTQ community went against this. McCarthyism played a significant role in policing the identities of LGBT people at this time; this drove many Black LGBT spaces in places like Harlem out of existence by the time of the Civil Rights Movement.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
While LGBTQ people have made a significant contribution to the Civil Rights Movement, they have not always had an easy time. Today, two of the three women who founded Black Lives Matter (Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors) are LGBT. However, Bayard Rustin was a gay, Black man who spent decades fighting for racial equality, gay rights and workers rights, before his death in 1987, while on a humanitarian mission to Haiti. He was key to organising the March on Washington, strategised for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, helmed a project under AFL-CIO to integrate former all-white unions, helped King organise the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, testified on behalf of New York State’s Gay Rights Bill in 1986, and is generally credited with persuading civil rights leaders to embrace non-violence.
Despite his work as an activist, he faced homophobia within the civil rights movement. The middle-class religious leadership of the Civil Rights Movement promoted a form of respectability politics that demanded that the individual meet a certain standard of respectability (i.e. heteronormativity) to be seen as deserving of full citizenship. This led to the public condemnation of LGBT people, only accepting it so long as it was underground. This caused problems for Rustin and the Civil rights movement. His homosexuality was well known and was used to attack the movement by the opposition. Despite his influence and work, he slipped out of the public consciousness after the Civil Rights Movement.
Today, Black LGBT people are some of the most vulnerable in society. The intersection of race, gender and sexuality makes them one of the most marginalised groups. During the AIDs epidemic, Black people were disproportionally affected and continue to be today. Moreover, Black trans and gender non-conforming individuals face massive risks of violence. At least 32 trans people have been murdered in 2020 in the US for being trans, the majority of whom were Black or Latinx. However, due to misgendering, the number is likely much higher. LGBT people of colour face discrimination and violence, and their identities within the LGBT community are often marginalised and their struggles ignored.
The struggles of Black Lives Matter and Pride are deeply interlinked. Pride and the Gay Liberation Front were created by Black people within the LGBT community and many of what are considered the staples of LGBT culture come from the drag balls of the Harlem Renaissance. LGBT people have also been significant contributors to the civil rights movement, individuals like Bayard Rustin helped plan the March on Washington and today two of the three founders of Black Lives Matter are LGBT women. So this Black history month, we should remember the exceptional contributions Black people have made to the LGBT community, and to their right to live as they want.
