Black History Month is a time to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements and courageous acts of people of African descent in the United States and around the world.This year Black History Month celebrates its 100th anniversary. Yet Black History Month has failed to fully acknowledge or celebrate the contributions of Black LGBTQ+ people.
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Just as Pride Month remains overwhelmingly white in its representation, Black History Month continues to be deeply homophobic in its omissions. Our continued erasure from the annals of Black history suggests—incorrectly—that the only shapers and movers of Black life, past and present, have been heterosexual.
Today, however, contemporary scholarship that examines the intersectionality of people’s lives has begun to challenge long-accepted historical narratives once treated as gospel. Records that were canonized as definitive truths are now being revisited and corrected for their glaring exclusions. These course corrections have given us a more expansive, honest, and complete understanding of Black history.
A powerful example is the deliberate and long-standing omission of Bayard Rustin from dominant narratives of the ‘60s Civil Rights Movement until the ‘90s. Once largely confined to Black queer subcultures and relegated to a footnote in heterosexual retellings of history, Rustin has now been rightfully restored as a central figure. We can no longer accurately discuss the historic 1963 March on Washington without naming Bayard Rustin. Inarguably one of the tallest trees in our collective forest—straight and LGBTQ+ alike—Rustin was the chief strategist and organizer of the March that propelled the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. onto the world stage.
The canon of Black history needs to expands the many notable LGBTQ+ icons who influenced future movements and artists. Here are a few.
Marsha P. Johnson (1945- 19920): Mother of our Movement
The second wave of the modern LGBTQ+ movement rests on the shoulders of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera (1951 -2002), widely honored as its trans mothers. A Black trans freedom fighter, Johnson was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She is often credited with throwing a shot glass against a mirror during the Stonewall uprising—an act remembered as “the shot glass heard around the world.” Rivera, a Latinx from New York City, reportedly threw the second.
Johnson’s middle initial, “P,” stood for “Pay It No Mind,” her defiant response to those who questioned her gender identity. She was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), an organization dedicated to supporting unhoused trans youth. “They call me a legend in my own time,” Johnson once said, “because there were so many queens gone that I’m one of the few queens left from the ’70s and the ’80s.”
Monuments honoring Marsha P. Johnson now stand in her name, including one in her hometown of Elizabeth along the Freedom Trail. Her legacy deserves recognition not only during Black History Month, but every day.
First Black Queer Movement: The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was as queer as it was Black. More than a Black cultural moment, it also functioned as one of the earliest visible Black LGBTQ+ movements of the 1920s. Rent parties, speakeasies, sex circuses and buffet flats created spaces of sexual freedom and self-expression. The renowned Savoy Ballroom and Rockland Palace hosted lavish drag balls, awarding prizes for the most dazzling costumes. Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes depicted these balls as “spectacles of color.” Historian George Chauncey, author of Gay New York, noted that during this era “perhaps nowhere were more men willing to venture out in public in drag than in Harlem.”
While we have come to know of gay and bisexual male literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance like Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent, to name a few, we know too little of the LBT and queer-friendly feminist women writers. Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and other African American feminist writers of the era used issues of sexuality and gender non-conforming identities as artistic influences in their literary works, performances and life-style.
Gladys Bentley (1907–1960): Precursor to same-sex marriage
A gifted pianist and blues singer, Gladys Bentley was among the most notorious and successful Black lesbians of the Harlem Renaissance. Cultivating a devoted LGBTQ+ following into the 1950s, Bentley became famous for performing in her signature white tuxedo and top hat. Her unapologetic gender-bending, however, came at a steep cost.
In 1931, Bentley publicly married her white girlfriend in a civil ceremony in Atlantic City. At a time when anti-miscegenation laws was the law of the land and same-sex marriage would not be federally recognized until 2015, Bentley executed a radical coup d’état against both racial and sexual prohibitions surrounding marriage.
The backlash was fierce. Under the pressures of McCarthyism, Bentley was forced to conform. The Black Church ceased its denunciations, and the Black press celebrated her “respectability.” Purportedly to have taken female hormones to cure her lesbianism, Bentley published an article in Ebony magazine declaring, “I am a woman again!” Shortly after, she married a man 16 years her junior.
Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987): Precuror to Baldwin
Before James Baldwin, there was Richard Bruce Nugent. Known simply as “Bruce,” Nugent was a writer and painter who stood in stark defiance of Black bourgeois respectability politics and the ideology of racial uplift. Unapologetically out and proudly gay, Nugent’s brashness challenged norms in both mainstream American society and within Black communities.
A vital voice of the Harlem Renaissance, Nugent produced some of the earliest American literature to depict homosexuality, bisexuality, and interracial desire in affirming ways. His 1926 short story, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,”predates Baldwin’s 1956 Giovanni’s Room by three decades. As a godfather of gay male literature, Nugent’s life and work continue to influence Black LGBTQ+ writers today, helping generations of Black queer people affirm their identities.
Many LGBTQ+ figures and nightclub-goers of the Harlem Renaissance lived in Harlem, the mecca of Black America. Others, however, resided across the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey, seeking refuge from white audiences’ voyeuristic gaze and Harlem’s rising rents.
Born into a socially prominent family in Washington, D.C., Nugent became the last living artist of the Harlem Renaissance. He spent his final years in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he became a beloved local figure—sparking renewed efforts to honor his legacy both there and in Harlem.
Homage to our ancestors and trans-cestors
As a Black LGBTQ+ community, we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and trans-cestors. Because we know the danger of a single story we showcase an array of them. Our history is canon for survival and an archive for future generations
If Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the Father of Black History, were alive today, he would be proud of the tenacity of the African American community. Our survival on American soil since 1619—through 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, and 60 years of so-called “separate but equal” rule—speaks volumes. To fully capture the canon of the Black experience, Woodson would have wanted our LGBTQ+ histories included, too.