Rainbow Theology. Patrick S. Cheng

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СКАЧАТЬ are actually deeply interrelated and ultimately cannot be separated from each other. See chapter seven below; see also Ian Barnard, Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Linwood J. Lewis, “Sexuality, Race, and Ethnicity,” in McAnulty and Burnette, Sex and Sexuality, Volume 1, 229–64; Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

      29 See Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace, xviii.

      30 I recognize that these racial and ethnic categories can serve to marginalize the experiences of mixed-heritage and multiracial people. As Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé has noted, such categories require such people to “have to make the choice to identify with only one group as opposed to being able to define ourselves as we choose, acknowledging our place within the people-of-color communities.” See Elias Farajaje-Jones, “Loving ‘Queer’: We’re All a Big Mix of Possibilities of Desire Just Waiting to Happen,” In the Family 6, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 17. It is my hope that the discussion of rainbow theology in Part II of this book will ultimately transcend these socially-constructed categories and honor the experiences of mixed-heritage and multiracial people.

Chapter 2

       Queer Black Theologies

      Since at least the early 1990s, queer Black1 theologians have written about the ways in which they have wrestled with issues of race, sexuality, and spirituality. Specifically, LGBTIQ African Americans are caught between the heterosexism and homophobia of the Black Church on the one hand, and the racism of white queer religious communities on the other. As Irene Monroe, an African American lesbian minister and theologian, has written: “The task has always been to develop a theological language that speaks truth to our unique spirituality.” According to Monroe, “Housing our spirituality in both religious cultures—white queer, and black—has been one of tenuous residency, that of spiritual wanderers and resident aliens.”2

      This chapter will examine key writings from LGBTIQ Black theologians. It will focus on three main themes that have emerged in these writings: (1) Black Church exclusion; (2) reclaiming Black lesbian voices; and (3) challenging Black liberation theologies. This chapter will serve as a roadmap of the terrain, but it will not attempt to cover everything that has been written on queer Black theology during the last two decades. Rather, it will focus on key texts and provide additional study resources at the end of the chapter. Also, the discussion in this chapter will focus on self-identified LGBTIQ Black theologians. Allies such as Kelly Brown Douglas—and her highly influential text Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective3—will be cited, but the main focus will be on the voices of queer Black people.

       1. Historical Background

      Before turning to the writings of LGBTIQ Black theologians, we begin with a brief survey of the hidden history of queer African Americans. Although a number of works on LGBTIQ history have been written in recent years,4 no historical text to date has focused primarily on the history of queer people of color in North America. As such, a comprehensive history of same-gender-loving and gender-variant African Americans has yet to be written. What is discussed in this chapter, therefore, is collected from a variety of different sources.

      African Americans have been in North America since at least 1619, when a colonial resident of Virginia recorded the sale of “twenty Negars” by a Dutch trader.5 The horrific slave trade from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth centuries resulted in nearly 10 million persons being “kidnapped out of Africa, all but about 350,000 of them for sale in the Americas.”6

      As early as 1630, a colonial court in Virginia wrote about the intersections of race, sexuality, and religion. In that year, a white man, Hugh Davis, was sentenced to be whipped as a result of his “defiling his body in lying with a [female] negro.” This, according to the court, resulted in the “dishonor of God and the shame of Christianity.” A decade later, another white man, Robert Sweat, was convicted for impregnating an unnamed “negro woman servant” who belonged to a military officer. The woman was sentenced to be whipped, but Sweat was required to do “public penance for his offence at James city church in the time of divine service.”7

      The earliest known documentation of a same-gender-loving African American dates back to the seventeenth century. Jan Creoli, a “negro,” was convicted of sodomy in court proceedings dated June 25, 1646, from New Netherland Colony (that is, Manhattan Island). The court described the act as a “crime being condemned of God … as an abomination” and cited Genesis as well as Leviticus. Creoli was sentenced to be “choked to death” and then “burnt to ashes.”8

      Not much is known about consensual same-gender-loving relationships among African American slaves, but there is evidence that such relationships did occur among working-class African Americans in the nineteenth century. For example, two African American women—Rebecca Primus, a teacher, and Addie Brown, a servant—lived in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1860s and had an “intense, deeply passionate relationship.”9

      The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s attracted many same-gender-loving African Americans because of the neighborhood’s “combination of license and sexual ambiguity.”10 Some of these individuals included the poet Langston Hughes, the singer Bessie Smith, and the playwright Wallace Thurman. This tradition of prominent LGBTIQ African American writers continued during the twentieth century with writers such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker.11

      A number of same-gender-loving African Americans were involved with the civil rights and other justice movements. These included Bayard Rustin, who was a close adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite having been arrested on a “morals charge” for having sex with two men in a car, Rustin was involved with the Montgomery bus boycott and served as the chief organizer of the March on Washington.12 Other same-gender-loving African American leaders included Pauli Murray, the first African American woman who was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church and a co-founder of the National Organization of Women.13

      There were also same-gender-loving African Americans at the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, which many consider to be the beginning of the contemporary LGBTIQ rights movement. Miss Marsha P. Johnson, a well-known “black queen” and sex worker, climbed to the top of a lamppost and “dropped a bag with something heavy in it” on a police squad car below and shattered its windshield.14

      Since the 1970s, a number of LGBTIQ Black writers have reflected openly about their experiences of race and sexuality. In 1977, the Black lesbian writer Barbara Smith published an important essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” that examined the interconnections of race, gender, and sexuality. In 1978, Audre Lorde published her influential essay “Uses of the Erotic,” and in 1979 the Combahee River Collective, a self-described Black feminist collective in Boston, published “A Black Feminist Statement.”15

      In recent years, works such as Keith Boykin’s One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America16 and the anthology The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities17 have continued the conversation on race, sexuality, and spirituality in the African American community.

       2. Genealogy of Queer Black Theologies

      For at least two decades, queer Black theologians have been writing about the experiences of LGBTIQ African Americans from a СКАЧАТЬ