An archive is a collection of works that tell about the past. Think of things like papers, newspaper, and social media posts collected to tell about a topic. Archives of Black queer people tell our repressed history, and the different ways that artists incorporate it into their project shows a large display of ways to connect with history.
“Looking for Langston” is a 1989 movie directed by Black queer filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien. It was produced within the queer archival movements of the 1980s. At this time, many queer people were looking for our history and creating it in the absence of our destroyed and repressed history. “Looking for Langston”, which is free to watch on YouTube, imagines the life of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, a man who was gay in small literary circles, but not publicly. Since we know very little about his queer life, “Looking for Langston” seeks to fill in the gaps by imagining his life through the works of then-present gay and queer creators. It uses words of Black gay men like James Baldwin and Essex Hemphill to imagine Hughes’ adventures.
This is called critical fabulation. It is the act of using historical facts to imagine what the past was like. It was created by historian Saidiya Hartman to hidden parts of peoples’ lives that were seen as unfit or not important enough for the archive. This is especially important since Black queer peoples’ lives have been obscured.
Since it was set in the present, “The Watermelon Woman” shows more everyday aspects of Black queer life, namely Black lesbian life.
When it was released in 1996, it was the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian, Cheryl Dunye. In “The Watermelon Woman”, the filmmaker main character, played by Dunye, searches for an older Black female actor who is also lesbian, “The Watermelon Woman”, named Faye. Throughout her exploration, we see her life as a Black lesbian, dating women, filming, working, and hanging out with her best friend. I enjoyed the light tone of the movie, even as it provoked serious questions of history and loss.
Due to people finally funding and supporting Black queer art more, there are more explorations of Black queer history, and Black queer people have become more visible. In recent times, we are not forced to create our own history, but there is still something about it. “Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde”, the glorious 2024 book by the glorious Alexis Pauline Gumbs, does critical fabulation. Gumbs’ book is an autobiography of the Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet Audre Lorde. She uses Lorde’s life to pose questions and advice for our own. For example, Lorde and her fellow Black queer writer and friend June Jordan had a dispute over Jordan’s reaction to Adrienne Rich not supporting Palestinian justice. In her book, Gumbs uses the lessons of the cosmos, a force that Lorde listened to heavily in her life, to deliberate how sisters come back together.
Gumsb directly uses the lessons of a Black queer ancestor to both teach us about that ancestor and help us in our current lives. It is incredibly beautiful.
It shows that while we may not need to create our own history, but being in conversation with it and imagining about our history still produces beautiful possibilities.
There are also archival projects that center on people who were not famous in their lifetime. “Time Also Will Make It Interesting: Selected Journals of Red Jordan Arobateau” arrives from editor Cameron Akward-Rich this June. Red Jordan Arobateau was a prolific and passionate transmasc writer who died in 2021. Like Hughes and Lorde, he was also an activist, but unlike them, he never received celebration in his lifetime, and since he lived in San Francisco during the tech boom, he was pushed out of his town and was frequently homeless. He can be seen as a more ordinary Black queer person.
A focus on ordinary Black queer people, especially Black trans people, is especailly important in historical work.
In his book, “Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad”, writer Hil Malatino writes that in popular knowledge, trans poeple are only seen as heroes, demons, or victims. Unfortunately, this is also what I see in mainstream representaions of Black queer people who lived in the past.
Most typically I see Audre Lorde and Marsha P. Johnson portrayed as heroes with inhuman amounts of confidence for viewers to gawk at or know as required knowledge, but only so they can recall facts if asked. Not only does it follow white supremacist ideology that Black people are some type of superheroes, it removes viewers from creating confidence themselves. Ironically, framing Black queer elders as heroes work to separate them from everyday people, making them like a separate caste. So, while viewers are encouraged to learn from and embody their strength, they end up feeling like they can’t do anything like the elders because they’re just ordinary people. Additionally, the sole focus on their strength rather than their personality or work dehumanizes them more.
These “heroes” become people to live up to. It also prompts being grateful that these heroes do the work so we don’t have to do anything. This leaves all the living and ordinary activists without much needed support.
As Black queerness becomes more recognized, opportunities to share our history in meaningful ways expand too. This January, “A Black Queer History of the United States” was published by Professors C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost. The book provides a remedy to dehumanizing representations of Black queer and trans people.
Rather than just teaching readers to regurgitate facts, Snorton and Bost look at history as a living document. As something that we can continuously pull from to learn about our lives and examine our relation to history.
This method allows people to create deeper and better relationships with history. People can create their own, personalized relations to history rather than only learning a stagnant set of facts, and study history with the intention of improving their lives.
I love how all of these artists use film and literature to evoke the Black queer archive. I absolutely love all of their explorations of the Black queer archive, and I am so thankful that their work provides a method to bring it to more peoples’ attention. They are all absolute gifts.