“A Rough Road Home: Voices of Black LGBTs in the Academy”
For Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender scholars, the journey from objects within the discipline of African American Studies to subjects at the center of discourse has been, as our elders would say, “a rough road home.” From its inception, the discipline of African American Studies proved to be a project immersed in revelation and truth through its telling of “our” stories, history and most importantly our everyday experience. Yet, in this endeavor for liberation, empowerment, consciousness, and social change, Black LGBTs were some how erased from this project. Because it chose to exclude its own LGBT community, the discipline fell short in accomplishing its goal of empowering the larger community. The home that had been built for us in academia had become a place that had no room for our lives, our stories, our truths. It was to this end that my foremothers and forefathers before me began that proverbial “rough road home.”
I have had the privilege to count myself as both alumni and adjunct faculty in the Department of African American Studies at Temple University. While in the past the department has been adamantly against the inclusion of Black LGBTs, I have been honored to have both advocated for and taught the first course within the department that speaks to the Black LGBT experience. For the last four years, it has been my desire to emphasize the intersection of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class so that Black LGBT lives are not marginalized but viewed as a part of the overarching progress of African American Studies. That is, to make the scholarship, research, and relevance of African American Studies authentic. However, I stand on the shoulders of many activists, scholars, writers, and poets who throughout the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s challenged not only the homophobia within their Black communities but racism and bigotry within their white LGBT communities.
It was Black feminist lesbian scholars such as Cheryl Clarke, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Jewell Gomez, Donna Allegra, and Pat Parker who challenged the ideology of patriarchy and sexism as an accepted aspect of our community. It was Black gay writers, poets and activists such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, Joseph Beam, Ron Simmons, James Baldwin, and Bayard Rustin who refused to be silenced and demanded inclusion regardless of their sexuality or race. It was Hemphill who challenged African American Studies by demanding that we as gay men and lesbians be allowed to “come home” as who we truly are:
“It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Who did he love? It makes a difference. I can’t become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.”
It was this desire to give voice to their experiences that was captured in Hemphill’s declaration, “We are coming home.” It is on the backs and shoulders of these men and women that I have been allowed to teach as a Black, openly gay man in the academy. Through their making “our truths from scratch” African American studies becomes a true and holistic discipline. It is because of these African American Studies foremothers and forefathers, contemporary scholars and writers such as Keith Boykin, Dwight McBride, Cathy Cohen, Horace Griffin, Lisa Moore, etc. that we are able to find room where there was once no home. It is because of these early pioneers that I am able to say my “road isn’t so rough after all.”
Damien T. Frierson, MA, MSW
Damien Frierson is an adjunct faculty member at Temple University and former Outreach and Education Director at Equality Maryland.
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