Camping The Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective

Abstract

In attempting to grasp the relation between people of African descent and same-sexuality, the handful of historians, critics, activists, and social scientists who have touched on the subject have focused on one of two approaches. Either they have attempted to uncloset the lives of famous individuals of African descent who might be suspected of having, at some point, harbored same-sexual desire or engaged in same-sexual activity. Or they have attempted to expose the homophobia at work in the literatures of and histories on African-American life and culture. These works take on the important task of pointing out how evidence of African-American same-sexuality has been suppressed and how, when acknowledged, the admission of black homosexuality tends to be accompanied by distancing anxiety. Such sympathetic treatments of African-American homosexuality most frequently assume an identity schism--as struggle, competition, misalliance--between gayness and blackness. By proving how an individual can belong to both identities at once, they attempt to overcome the paradigm of competing black and gay identities by demonstrating an intersection, interface, or duality between them, a double consciousness not dissimilar from W.E.B. Du Bois's productive theory of a "twoness" at strife in being Negro and American. 1