Who Really Has Your Back? Queerness and the Black Community: Background information when reading Nobody's Magic

Who Really Has Your Back? Queerness and the Black Community

This article relates to Nobody's Magic

In Nobody's Magic, a novel about three different black women with albinism who are on journeys of self-discovery, the social circles readers become privy to serve to normalize some of the characters' queerness. There are multiple queer moments throughout the novel; in Suzette's story, a character named Drina struggles with telling Suzette that she's gay. When Suzette asks Drina why she didn't tell her earlier, Drina simply replies, "I didn't really think you wanted to know." Drina never expounds on this reasoning nor is she expected to. But as a black, queer woman having grown up in the south, I could project my own experience onto the question of why. Living within my black community compounded fears of being honest. I believe that fear was due to some of the black hostility I experienced, whether towards me or others, regarding queerness. I witnessed this hostility in entertainment, and I saw the very real consequences of that entertainment manifest in how some people in my community reacted to queer folk.

In a 2017 New York Times article, "Transgender African-Americans' Open Wound: 'We're Considered a Joke,'" John Eligon spotlights the prevalence of transphobia in some popular black entertainment media outlets. Eligon also provides first-hand accounts from black trans women who feel unprotected by the communities that surround them. The impetus of this conversation is not only the physical and emotional violence these women often face, but also the casual way hosts and their guests normalize transphobic violence on the popular black radio show The Breakfast Club. On this show, a black comedian, Lil Duval, joked that if he discovered a woman was transgender after a sexual encounter, he would want to kill her.

The Breakfast Club, featuring Gen X-aged celebrities Charlamagne tha God, DJ Envy and Angela Yee, reaches over 90 radio markets across the United States as of 2022. The influential grasp this show has on some people in the black community stretches far. I heard it on the radio in the car growing up, half-dozing on the way to school, sandwiched between old school R&B throwback hours and The Steve Harvey Morning Show, as expected and daily as the lukewarm smell of cafeteria maple syrup. My anecdotal evidence is not all there is to prove the radio show's influence, however. In January 2020, The Breakfast Club was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding News/Information (Series or Special) category. In an article for the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Battaglio states that over eight million listeners were tuning into the show a month as of July 2020, half of those individuals identifying as black. This only speaks to the radio outreach and not other methods of dissemination like social media posts and YouTube snippets.

This is the backdrop against which I want to position anti-queer rhetoric as a threat to black, queer individuals, where even though this rhetoric may be presented as a "joke," it expresses the idea that death is a reasonable consequence for existing. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest LGBTQIA+ human rights organization in the United States, 2021 saw the highest number of violent fatalities against transgender and gender non-conforming people, the majority of these deaths being those of black transgender women.

Being black does not mean being anti-queer. Being a black Gen X person also does not equate to being anti-queer. Though in some instances it seems black communities push back on nontraditional states of existence — like being queer or trans or both — this does not always manifest in an inherently hateful repulsion.

In Birdsong's novel, Suzette's friend Drina is a cis gay woman, and black hostility toward lesbian women is not uncommon. When I came out to my family, I felt threatened by my Gen X parents' lack of initial acceptance of my queerness. I understand now that their reaction was not homophobia, but an impulse to protect me, driven by fear — fear of how my black community generally addresses queerness, with vitriol and violence, and trivialized with crass humor. My parents didn't want me to be susceptible to that as a black woman in the south.

Being queer and black can often feel isolating. Black American communities, generally speaking, have Christian ideals of solidarity and dark histories of needing to support each other as a means of survival. These ideals would seem to lend themselves to supporting their queer loved ones. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. But when black support does include queer support, something beautiful happens.

David J. Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, states, "As long as there have been Black people, there have been Black LGBTQ and same-gender-loving people," emphasizing that blackness is not a monolith, and queerness presents itself in us, too. We should choose to accept that. We should choose love. The organization includes a Black Transgender Advisory Council, which advocates for the unique needs of the black transgender community, including policy agendas and tactics to strengthen black families.

There are more outlets accessible to the general public, too. Taylor Alxndr (they/she) is the co-founder and executive director of Southern Fried Queer Pride, an "Atlanta-based non-profit organization empowering Black queer…comunities in the South through the arts." They give "direct access to social, human, and financial capital to communities who have been systematically denied these resources" while also building a community that asserts it is the birthright of queer black people to exist and thrive in their hometowns.

My family eventually fully accepted me for my sexuality. Like Drina, I was eventually loved openly, and the people closest to me understood how empowering it felt to not only accept myself but to be accepted by a community I desperately wanted to love me for who I am. How the black community reacts to queerness, like any community's reaction, is a gamble, and part of the reason for that is ignorance. Once we fully recognize people for who they are, no one has to be afraid of living their truth.

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to Nobody's Magic. It originally ran in March 2022 and has been updated for the January 2023 paperback edition. Go to magazine.