Black lesbians have been incredibly important and influential to the feminist movement. The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization formed in 1974; Their 1977 statement reflects the urgency and need for intersectionality in theory, thought, and activism. Intersectionality is a rejection of the stance on lesbian separatism because race, class, and sex have connecting and simultaneous implications on experiences and existence. If you aren’t familiar with the statement, I highly encourage you to read this foundational document.
In addition to The Combahee River Collective Statement, these following texts frame our positions in a society shaped and affected by capitalism and colonialism. They move beyond compartmentalized thought, identity, and politics and, in understanding the implications of empire, move towards an individual and collective transcendence.Â
“Sister, Outsider”Â
“Sister, Outsider” is a collection of 15 essays and speeches by Audre Lorde, a self described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Lorde’s influence is immeasurable and her works offer a way to contextualize our identities and redefine our existence.Â
“Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought”Â
“Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought” edited by Briona Simone Jones is a collection of essays, poetry, and theory ranging from 1970 to 2020 that explore history, gender, time, and identity. The introduction describes this anthology as a love poem that accounts for the “tender, the sweet, the rebirth, and the radical.”Â
Jones additionally notes that Black lesbians offer models through which we can learn to transform into beings of love.Â
“Black lesbians articulate the complexity of embodying a multiplicitous self, reaching many home truths in their lives and in their writings, giving readers a glimpse into what it means to model wholeness;” Jones wrote. “A challenge against dismemberment, distortion, and absence.”
“My Lesbian Novel”Â
The narrator of “My Lesbian Novel” is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman. She is being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a lesbian romance that is in progress. The novel subverts genre and expectation, examining and reflecting on the philosophies of lesbianism, queerness, and narration in a meta way that I adore.Â
These are some texts that stretch beyond colonial boundaries and allow for transcendence and strength through connection. Reading is political and a tool for consciousness raising. Black lesbian feminism and literature are crucial to all liberation through the embrace of love and the erotic (most notably defined and explored by Audre Lorde in “Uses of the Erotic”).