Way Before the Word: Queer Organizing and Race When Beauty Still Counts

Abstract

WayBeforetheWord: Queer Organizingand Race When Beauty Still Counts BeckyThompson I began this writing ritual by stacking up books that were strewn about the house, gathering from the living room, dining room, my twenty-five-year-old chosen daughter's room, and my own never alphabetized bookshelves in my study. From these locations—the ele phant volume Chloe Plus Olivia,four centuries of lesbian literature; This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa's volume giving voice to women who knew, in the words of Moraga, they were "refugees from a world on fire"; Paula Gunn Allen's The Sacred Hoop, helping us see that the hoop that was sacred before the conquest placed women at the center, saw sexuality as fluid and generous, had no words for "rape" or "property"; Adrienne Rich's dog-eared Blood,Bread and Poetry.1 I gathered these books and others to prepare a talk, on the request of South Asian sociologist and antiracist Sadhana Bery, seeking to honor the work of Penn Reeve, one of her colleagues at the Univer sity of Massachusetts. From Sadhana I learned that Reeve is an activ ist, a labor union organizer, and a white ally to faculty of color even though that made him persona non grata among some white faculty; he was retiring after decades of being the only person on campus who taught a queer studies course. Contemplating ways that I, as a white, mostly lesbian, antiracist feminist poet and scholar, might honor his work, I tossed and turned different approaches. Eventually FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 526 Becky Thompson 527 I settled on a talk that draws on poetry to trace key moments in the LGBT movement in the United States, with particular attention to the poetry of people of color, whose work has been enormously influ ential in my writing and teaching for the last twenty-five years.2 My hope is that focusing on poetry as a plumb line might bring levity and celebration to the topic even as I also explore splits and divides in multiracial LBGT organizing. My wish to draw on poetry as flashpoints is not to analyze its craft but rather to highlight poems as moments of electricity, of resis tance, of witness; celebrations of the erotic as a life force among us. With poems I hope to go places a linear text cannot. In this way, this essay is imagistic, not definitive, a personal memoir of sorts, seeking intergenerational, multiracial conversation. On my gathering stack I added Essex Hemphill's Brother toBrother: New Writings byBlack Gay Men; Urvashi Vaid's VirtualEquality,a critique of the mainstreaming of lesbian politics; Home Girls:A BlackFeminist Anthol ogywith the section "Black Lesbians —Who Will Fight For Our Lives But Us"; and Audre Lorde's SisterOutsider,a collection of essays that reads like poetry, teaching us that silence will not protect us, that "the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house," that our work is all interwoven with the "transformation of silence into lan guage and action."3 From the room of my daughter, Crystal Rizzo, a self-identified "gender-queer, bisexual Southern Ute and African American activ ist," comes a veritable cacophony of books zooming around her mas ter's thesis, an Indigenous feminist analysis of Palestinian and Native American hip hop.4 Her books are decidedly more recent, headier, with many more words on the page than my books—the terms "inter rogate," "cross pollinate," "heteropatriarchy," and "hypermasculate" dotting the lines that used to have words like "we who believe in free dom cannot rest" and "identity politics" and "What Chou Mean We, White Girl."5 Daunting as this task is—a light touch chronicling of queer organizing and race—I realize that both "queer" and "race" are made up terms to begin with; names for "earth suits" we zip into when we enter the world, zip out of when we exit, our time in this life restricted by clothes that are way too tight.6 528 Becky Thompson But here I am, running the risk of being overwhelmed entirely by the enormity of queer studies, of its jagged, fluid...