Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”
Would you consider it non-violent civil disobedience for an LGBTQ person to donate blood? (especially if going into it they knew they were STD-free and just wanted to help save some lives?)
by Anonymous
yes.
I grew up on the coast of England in the 70s. My dad is white, from Cornwall, and my mom is black, from Zimbabwe. Even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people. But nature had it’s wicked way and brown babies were born. But from about the age of 5, I was aware that I didn’t fit. I was the black, atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly, and my self was rooting around for definition trying to plug in. Because the self likes to fit, to see itself replicated, to belong. That confirms its existence and its importance. … But my skin color wasn’t right. My hair wasn’t right. My history wasn’t right. My self, became defined by Otherness, which meant that in that social world I didn’t really exist. And I was Other before being anything else, even before being a girl. I was a noticeable nobody.”
Thandie Newton (Ted Talks: “Embracing otherness, embracing myself”)
(Source: bridgetvonhammersmark, via mooseknucklessss)
Hollywood has proven that it literally would rather make another big budget film about black maids [The Help] than about real black women, much less queer black women. What a feeling then to see Alike’s [Pariah] projected face looking out into a packed movie theater while Audre Lorde looks on and whispers ‘because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself – a Black woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing yours?’
Saeed Jones, “Watching Pariah With Audre Lorde”
As an act of vengeance, I want to take what could be mine from Hollywood, put myself in the picture as it were… Wish-fulfillment, you may say, as I wrest the homo-subtext from its cosy heterocomplacent form and make it the major discourse. Maybe so, but then reading against the grain began as a wish for inclusion by marginalized, under- represented people and ended up as a strategy essential for our survival.
Smyth, C. (1995). “The Transgressive Sexual Subject.” In P. Burston & C. Richardson (Eds.), A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture (pp. 123-143). London: Routledge.
The shadow of repression has concealed the Black Lesbian in literature in direct proportion to her invisibility in American society. Women of color, as a whole, have long been perceived as the least valuable component in our social and economic system—the group with the least economic power and the smallest political influence. Not surprisingly, we are the least visible group not only in the fine arts, but also in the popular media where the message conveyed about the Lesbian of color is that she does not even exist, let alone use soap, drive cars, drink Coke, go on vacations, or do much of anything else.
Jewelle Gomez, “A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women”, reprinted in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology [Ed. Barbara Smith], (1983;2000), (p. 110)
(Source: agradschoolbreakup, via droppingthefbomb)
by Zanele Muholi
This paper is both a textual and a visual analysis of the making/mapping/preserving of radical black lesbian visual history in post-Apartheid South Africa. Using my own works of photography, I explore how visual activism can be employed by socially, culturally and economically marginalized women as a site of resistance to not only return the gaze of our colonizers, but to develop what bell hooks has called a ‘critical gaze’ into heteropatriarchal constructions of black women‘s bodies and their sexualities. With thematic projects evoked by women‘s own experiences, I partly address the epidemic of hate crimes that has escalated in the past few years, claiming many black lesbian lives in the townships. I argue that queerphobia and hate crimes have further silenced and sanctioned our voices. I reflect on such issues through my previous works entitled Only Half the Picture (2003-2005) and ongoing visual explorations like the Being series (2007), Faces & Phases (2007) and Massa & Mina(h) (2008). I also explore how I have moved from being a lesbian and human rights activist to becoming a visual activist and artist, tracing how my work has developed. Much of this is about reflecting on my work over the past 6 years, and taking stock of the many complexities of being both an insider and an outsider.
