31 - African American and African-Diasporic Writing, Post-1930

Summary

This chapter combines black sexual minorities to the history of African American and African diasporic writing. The longing between men that presumably structures much within modern art and culture is not mediated by a female cipher. Instead, as Huey Newton suggests himself, the extreme pressure that attends African and African American subjectivity tends to obviate the need to deny the key role that the queer subject must necessarily play in the production and reproduction of culture. Following the lead of lesbian writers, black gay men began in the 1980s to produce small literary magazines that provided room for emerging artists to experiment and develop their craft. Most important of all was the anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. This ambitious work had a number of key accomplishments. The anthology helped to articulate a long tradition of black gay writing that extended from the Harlem Renaissance to the tail end of the twentieth century.