What are you doing a year from now? Kicking back and reminiscing about what a great time you had down in Austin at Fire & Ink III: Cotillion, that’s what!
Just ask Priscilla Hale, Director of Organizational Development at allgo. She’s waitin’ for you!
If you needed another reminder of what Fire & Ink is all about and why the festival is a can’t-miss event for writers, readers, literature and art lovers East and West, North and South, Kuma2.net is serving it up.
Republished today at Kuma2.net’s Spirit Space was Rev. Irene Monroe’s moving essay on the first Fire & Ink Festival, For Black Gays, Writing is Power.
The exclusion we experience from publishing houses and the literary world due to homophobia and/or racism, at best, departmentalizes our works as either black or queer; thus erasing the LGBT of African descent literary canon, and, at worst, rendering us invisible and muting our voice.
In a statement by Barbara Smith and Joseph Beam in March 1988 at the Second National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College, in Brooklyn N.Y., they said, “In spite of efforts to ghettoize and exclude us, we are part of a long and proud Black Lesbian and Gay literary tradition. The Harlem Renaissance could not have occurred if it had not been for its Black and Gay participants, among them: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, and R. Bruce Nugent.”
And Nugent was the only self-declared gay man in the bunch. “Harlem was very much like the village. People did what they wanted to do with whom they wanted to do it.”
The name of this conference, “Fire and Ink,” is a spin-off from the literary magazine FIRE!! that was published by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. For these gay writers, as for our present-day LGBT writers of African descent, their sexuality was as central to their work as their race. However, the sexual politics espoused in their opuses were censored, and consequently only one issue of FIRE!! made it to print. The reading out or weeding out of the queer experience in the Harlem Renaissance was due to patrons who would not support openly gay writers or due to relatives in charge of their estates who weeded out any implied references or overt pronouncements about their sexual behavior or sexual orientation.
Being both of African descent and queer creates a distinctive epistemology that shapes not only our identity but it also shapes our distinctive interpretative lens we zoom on the world about politics, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, arts, music.
Our method of identifying and “languaging” our way of identifying as both of African descent and queer is evident in the terms we use like “in the life” — an identifier, a code, that derives from the Harlem Renaissance. Another is the term “same-gender loving” that became popular in our queer lexicon in the 1990’s. Both terms are indeed a radical pronouncement for LGBT people of African descent, because they are statements about openly engaging in sexual behavior, mannerism and lifestyle outside of the accepted norm, and about naming it in the face of virulent homophobia in the black community that could very well cost them their careers if not their lives.
