Even among historians, the focus at times has been on finding and recognizing the queer heroes. LGBTQ history is often ignored or misrepresented in pop culture. That’s the idea behind the new podcast Bad Gays from writers Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey. I see them as very courageous.LGBTQ Pride Month is a time to celebrate the queer people in history who have fought for equal rights.īut how should we talk about influential queer figures who don’t fit that narrative? Isolation was also a common theme in many of these individuals’ lives, and it’s one reason Mumford was impressed by their stories and what they sought to accomplish. The focus on faith was not something he expected to find, but also not surprising given the centrality of the church in the black community and black history, and in the context of some oral histories, he said. “Faith happened to be very important for the people that I discovered,” he said, and seeking acceptance in their churches was a key part of many of their stories. Others include Joseph Beam, a Philadelphia writer and activist who sought to build a black gay community and give black gay men their own voice Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald, who worked unsuccessfully for the inclusion of gays and lesbians in the Catholic Church and James Tinney, a prominent expert on black Pentecostalism at Howard University, who was almost denied tenure and excommunicated from his church after coming out, and would go on to found his own church.įitzgerald and Tinney are important for Mumford’s history because religion is one of the major themes of the book. As Mumford notes, they were by far the most famous gay men in America in the 1960s.
Two of those are the prominent writer James Baldwin and the civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin, who was a key figure behind such events as the March on Washington in 1963. Much of Mumford’s book is built around key individuals – black gay men who worked to change attitudes and institutions. “Gay men are perceived only as white, and it’s very hard to get people to recognize queer people of color in terms of what they're like, and how they're different,” he said. Even today, black men are almost nonexistent in gay publications and in popular culture. Other challenges arose within the gay community, where black gay men were often portrayed in a hypersexualized way that was very dehumanizing, Mumford said. “One of the things you see in response is this defense of the normality of the black family … but of course, that normality says we do not have homosexuals in our families,” he said. In the same way, the 1965 Moynihan Report and the concerns it raised about “pathologies” in the black family also worked against those who were gay, Mumford said. “In this definition and redefinition of blackness, this black pride moment, to be gay was to not be black,” he said. With the rise of black power in the late 1960s, however, they sought to throw off that restraint and reclaim their masculinity and sexuality, Mumford said.īut black gay men were not part of that picture. Black men therefore often lived in fear and restrained their sexuality as a result. Historical racism, notions of black masculinity, concerns raised about the black family, and the “politics of respectability” that African-Americans often employed in response have all played a part, he said.įear of interracial sex, for instance, had been central to white resistance to integration and often the cause of black lynchings in the South prior to the civil rights movement. At the intersection of race and homosexuality, their challenges have been unique. “Black gay men have not led lives that are like white gay lives or that are like black straight lives,” Mumford said. The result is “Not Straight, Not White,” being published this month, and the title helps frame the story.