“We Must Document Ourselves Now”

A long-overdue analysis of how Black lesbians have asserted their lived experience through creative practice, pushing back against heteropatriarchal systems that deny them visibility.

“Allen offers a galvanizing exploration of Black lesbian creatives, which exists between conventional scholarship and a more personal hybrid of theory and narrative. “We Must Document Ourselves Now” takes seriously its titular imperative drawn from Barbara and Beverly Smith’s 1978 admonition, challenging the systemic devaluation and misrepresentations of Black lesbians and their cultural legacies.” —Jaime Cantrell, coeditor of Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories

“We Must Document Ourselves Now” examines the essential but oft-ignored importance of Black lesbian literature and film in queer literary and film histories, arguing that Black lesbian cultural texts reflect creators’ lived experiences and resist the heteropatriarchal systems that deny Black lesbians visibility in popular culture. Stephanie Andrea Allen contends that these texts have three goals: to lay bare the experiences of Black lesbians in a raced, gendered, classed, and homophobic society; to challenge the notion that claiming Black lesbian identity is marginal or forbidden; and to take care of Black lesbians by bearing witness to their experiences through creative practice.

Insisting that Black feminist creative practice is an integral form of self and community care, Allen weaves analysis of cultural output spanning key sociocultural moments from 1974 to 2020 with interviews with Black lesbian cultural workers. “We Must Document Ourselves Now” examines the Black Arts / Black Power movement, the “boom” in lesbian and gay publishing, the so-called golden era of Black film, and twenty-first-century visual media to demonstrate how representations of Black lesbians, or lack thereof, were vital to constructing a cultural canon that focused on illuminating Black lesbian experiences in the United States.

Stephanie Andrea Allen is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her research centers Black lesbian cultural histories and Black feminisms through various expressions, including literature, film, and other print and visual media.

Contents

Preface

Introduction         A “Non-Entity in Imagination as well as Reality”: Looking for Black Lesbians
Chapter 1         “Writin’ Is Fightin’”: Black Lesbian Literary Beginnings
Chapter 2         The Right to Represent: Black Lesbians, White Lesbian Studies, and Truth-Telling from the Margins
Chapter 3         After the Boom, or Feminism Killed the Lesbian Bookseller
Chapter 4         She Be Dykin’: Black Lesbian Film and the Limits of Self-Representation
Chapter 5         Alexander King Films and OpenTV: A Mini Case Study
Conclusion         The Precarity of Black Lesbian and Queer Publishing and Visual Media-Making

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index