Table of Contents

Queering African American History

Anthology, Memoirs, and Selected Primary Sources

  • Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time.  New York:  Vintage, 1993.

------I Am Not Your Negro.  New York:  Vintage, 2017.

  • Beam, Joseph, ed. In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. New York: Alyson, 1986.
  • Delaney, Samuel R. The Color of Light in Water:  Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965.  New York:  Plume, 1989.
  • Estes, Steve. Ask and Tell:  Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out.  (Chapel Hill:  UNC, 2007).
  • Hall, Joel. “Growing Up Black and Gay.” In The Gay Liberation Book, edited by Len Richmond and Gary Noguera, 51–56. San Francisco: Ramparts, 1973.
  • Harris, E. Lynn, ed. Freedom in this Village:  Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing.  New York:  Carroll and Graff, 2005.
  • Hemphill, Essex. Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men. Washington, D.C.: Redbone Press, 1991, 2007.
  • Johnson, E. Patrick. No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  • Jones, Alethia and Virginia Eubanks. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around:  Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith.  Albany, NY:  SUNY Press, 2014
  • Jones, Jennifer Dominique. “Finding Home: Black Queer Historical Scholarship in the United States, Part I.” History Compass 17, no. 5 (April 2019). DOI: https://doi-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/10.1111/hic3.12532.

----- “Finding Home: Black Queer Historical Scholarship in the United States, Part II.” History Compass 17, no. 5 (April 2019). DOI: https://doi-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/10.1111/hic3.12533.

  • Jordan, June. Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan. New York: Basic/Civitas Books, 2002.
  • Kenan, Randall and James Baldwin. The Cross of Redemption:  Uncollected Writings.  New York:  Vintage, 2011.
  • Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Penguin Random House, 2007.

------Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. New York: Crossing Press, 1982.

  • McKinley, Catherine and Delaney, L. Joyce. Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing. New York: Penguin Random House, 1995.
  • Moore, Darnell L. No Ashes in the Fire:  Coming of Age Black and Free in America.   New York:  Bold Type, 2019.
  • Smith, Barbara. The Truth That Never Hurts:  Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom.  New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2000.
  • Stanford, Adrian. Black and Queer. Boston: Good Gay Poets Press, 1977.
  • Wirth, Thomas. Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.


    Queer Theory/Feminist Approaches to Black LGBTQ History
  • Abdur Rahman, Aliyyah. Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
  • “Anderson, Moji and Eric C. Macleod. “Introduction,” in Beyond Homophobia:  Centring LGBTQ Experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean.  Kingston, Jamaica:  University of West Indies Press, 2020.
  • Carruthers, Charlene A. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.
  • Chen, Mel Y. Animacies:  Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect.  Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2012.
  • Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens:  The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”  GLQ:  A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 3 (January 1997):  437-65.
  • Constantine-Simms, Delroy. The Greatest Taboo:  Homosexuality in Black Communities.  New York: Alyson, 2001.
  • Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
  • Glave, Thomas. Words to Our Now:  Imagination and Dissent.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
  • Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
  • Keeling, Kara.  Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press, 2019.
  • Kunzel, Regina.  “The Power of Queer History,” American Historical Review, 123 (December 2018):  1560–1582.
  • Mercer, Kobena.  Welcome to the Jungle:  New Positions in Black Cultural Studies.  New York:  Routledge, 1994.
  • Moraga, Cherre, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds.  This Bridge Called My Back:  Writings By Radical Women of Color.  New York:  Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983.
  • Mumford, Kevin J.  “Introduction to the Special Issue on LGBT Themes,” Journal of African American History, 104 (Spring 2019):  171-175.

-----“Homosex Changes:  Race, Cultural Geography, and the Emergence of the Gay.”  In Locating American Studies:  The Evolution of a Discipline, ed. Lucy Maddox.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.  

  • Muñoz, José Esteban.  The Sense of Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

-----Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

-----Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.  Minneapolis:  1999.

  • Reid—Pharr, Robert F. Black Gay Man:  Essays.  New York:  New York University Press, 2001.
  • Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake:  On Blackness and Being.  Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2016.
  • Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet.  Berkeley:  University of CA, 1990.

-----Gary in Your Pocket:  Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher.  Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1996.


Free Blacks, Slavery/Emancipation, the South

  • Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives.” African American Review 40, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 223-237. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4003371.
  • Dillon, Stephen. Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
  • Foster, Thomas A. Rethinking Rufus:  Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men.  Athens, GA:  University of Georgia Press, 2019.
  • Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
  • Lewis, Christopher S. “Conjure Women, Root Men, and Normative Visions of Freedom in Antebellum Slave Narratives.” Arizona Quarterly 74, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 113-141. DOI: 1353/arq.2018.0011.
  • Lindsay, Treva B. and Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom.” In Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 12, no. 2 (2014): 169-195.
  • Mann, Regis. “‘Forever Perverse, Queer, Askew’: Notes on Slavery and Resistance in African American Studies.” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 1 (Feb. 2015). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875814001935
  • Saillant, John. “The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic, 1790-1820. In Long Before Stonewall:  Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster.  New York:  New York University, 2007.
  • Stalling, L.H. A Dirty South Manifesto:  Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2020.
  • Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2014.


    Black Transgender Studies
  • Awkward-Rich, Cameron. “Thinking Black [Trans] Gender.” American Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2019): 903-914.
  • D’Emilio, John. “A Mother to Her Family: The Life of Robinn Dupree.”  In Queer Legacies:  Stories From Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives.  Chicago:  University of Chicago, 2020.
  • Ellison, Treva, Green, Kai M., Richardson, Matt, Snorton, and C. Riley. The Issue of Blackness, special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
  • Fisher, Simon D. Elin. “Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro,” Journal of African American History, 104 (Spring 2019): 176-200.
  • Hansen, Karen V. “‘No Kisses like Youres:’ An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American Women during the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Gender and History 7, no. 2 (August 1995): 153-182.
  • Horton-Stallings, LaMonda. Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
  • Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Identity Intersections

  • Clarke, Cheryl. “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983.
  • Cohen, Cathy J. Democracy Remixed:  Black Youth and the Future of American Politics.  New York:  Oxford, 2010.
    -----The Boundaries of Blackness:  AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics.  Chicago:  University of Chicago, 1999.
  • Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2008.
  • Constantine-Simms, Delroy, ed. The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities. Boston: Alyson, 2001.
  • Esparaza, Rene. “Black Bodies on Lockdown:  AIDS Moral Panic and the Criminalization of HIV in Times of White Injury,” Journal of African American History 104 (Spring 2019):  250-280.
  • Harper, Philip Brian. “Racism and Homophobia as Reflections of Their Perpetrators.” In Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price, ed, Warren J. Blumenfield, 64–65. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
  • King, J. L. On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men. New York: Broadway, 2004.
  • Lewis, Gregory B. “Black-White Differences in Attitudes toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights.” Public Opinion Quarterly 67 (Spring 2003): 59–78.
  • McBride, Dwight A. Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch:  Essays on Race and Sexuality.  New York:  New York University Press, 2005.
  • McCoy, Renee. “Ain’t I a Man: Gender Meanings among Black Men Who Have Sex with Men.” Souls 11 (July–September 2009): 338.
  • McCune, Jeffrey Q., Jr. Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
  • Moore, Mignon. Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
  • Royles, Daniel. To Make the Wounded Whole:  The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS.  Chapel Hill, NC:  UNC Press, 2020.
  • Thorpe, Roey. “The Changing Face of Lesbian Bars in Detroit, 1938-1965.”  In Creating A Place for Ourselves:  Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories.  New York:  Routledge, 1997, pp. 165-182.
  • Watkins—Hayes, Celeste. Remaking a Life:  How Women Living With HIV/AIDS Confront Equality.  Berkeley:  University of California, 2019.



    Race and Gay Rights
  • Leighton, Jared E. Freedom Indivisible: Gays and Lesbians in the African American Civil Rights Movement. Ph.D. dissertation: University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2013.
  • Mumford, Kevin J. “The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969–1982.” Journal of American History 93 (June 2011): 45–72.
  • Porter, Ronald K. “A Rainbow in Black: The Gay Politics of the Black Panther Party.” Counterpoints 367 (2012): 364-375. http://www.jstor.com/stable/42981419.
  • Quin, Kevin C. “’To Stamp Out the Oppression of All Black People’:  Ron Grayson and the Association of Black Gays, 1975-1979,” Journal of African American History, 104 (Spring 2019):  227-249.
  • Rimmerman, Craig A.; Wald, Kenneth D.; Wilcox, Clyde. The Politics of Gay Rights.  Chicago:  University of Chicago, 2000.
  • Stein, Marc. Sexual Injustice:  Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe.  Chapel Hill:  UNC Press, 2010.
  • Stewart—Winter, Timothy. Queer Clout:  Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania, 2016.

 

Diaspora

  • Allen, Jafari S. ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
  • Allen, Jafari S. Black Queer Diaspora, special issue of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
  • Ellis, Nadia. Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  • Macharia, K’eguro. Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2019.
  • Mumford, Kevin J. “Black Gay Lives Matter:  Mobilizing Sexual Identities in the Eras of Reagan and Thatcher Conservativism.  In Beyond the Politics of the Closet:  Gay Rights and the American State Since the 1970s, ed. Jonathan Bell.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania, 2020.
  • Strongman, Roberto. Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé Santería, and Vodou. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
  • Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
  • Walcott, Rinaldo. Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2016.
  • White, E. Frances. “Africa on My Mind:  Gender, Counter Discourse, and African American Nationalism.” In Journal of Women’s History, 2 (Spring 1990):  73-97.


    Urban Histories

    • Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Making of the Modern Gay World. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
    • Drexel, Allen. “Before Paris Burned:  Race, Class, and Male Homosexuality on the Chicago South Side, 1935-1960.”  In Creating a Place For Ourselves:  Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, ed. Brett Beemyn. New York:  Routledge, 1997, pp.  119-144
    • Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. & Norton Company, 2019.
    • Hawkeswood, William G. One of the Children: Gay Black Men in Harlem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
    • Heap, Chad. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
    • Mumford, Kevin J. Interzones: Black/White Vice Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Centur New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
    • Woolner, Cookie. “‘Woman Slain in Queer Love Brawl’: African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North, 1920-1929.” Journal of African American History 100, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 406-427.

     

    Religious Histories

    • Conerly, Gregory. “Queering the Black Church:  Notes from the Black Press, 1945-1960,” Journal of African American History, 104 (Spring 2019):  201-226.
    • Griffin, Horace L. Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006.
    • Sanders, Cheryl J. “Sexual Orientation and Human Rights Discourse in the African American Churches.” In Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious Discourse, edited by Saul M. Oylan and Martha C. Nussbaum. New York, 1998.

     

    Biographical Studies and Oral History

    • D’Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. New York: Free Press, 2005.
    • De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
    • Duberman, Martin. Hold Tight Gently:  Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS.  New York:  The New Press, 2014.
    • Hawkeswood, William G. and Alex W. Costley. One of the Children:  Gay Black Men in Harlem.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
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