What it means to be black and gay

Last February, when the debate over gay marriage had reached a particularly ugly juncture, the Rev. Gregory Daniels, a prominent black minister from Chicago, announced from his pulpit: "If the KKK opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them."

On that occasion, if race had been a social club, I might have handed in my resignation.

That level of intolerance struck me as so extreme -- and so indifferent to the history of violence inflicted upon blacks by the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan -- that it literally sickened me to think that such vile rhetoric had come from the mouth of a fellow black man.

Ordinarily there is nothing that fills me with more pride than my racial identity, but like many of us who grew up in that mythic, elusive entity known as "the black church," I have been subjected to more than a few anti-gay invectives from the pulpit.

Of course, anti-gay rhetoric isn't limited to the black church. But African-Americans seem to face unique challenges in accepting homosexuals. Having suffered intolerance for so long, perhaps we've been cruelly condemned to perpetuate intolerance ourselves

It's fortunate, then, that "Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology," edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Duke University Press, $23.95, 400 pages) offers such an insightful glimpse at the strained relations between gays and straights that sometimes exists among people of color.

A collection of scholarly essays, "Black Queer Studies" is not exactly light reading. Academics often write as if their only readers are those who will decide whether or not they get tenure. And some of the more nuanced treatises about the very nature of "queer studies" and its future as a legitimate field of study were beyond my powers of comprehension.

Nevertheless, persevering readers will find insights about gay experiences that will instill a better sense of the struggles faced by African-Americans who identify themselves as "queer." From the racial segregation that can occur in gay neighborhoods to current debates about the depiction of black gays and lesbians in film, many of the essays pursue important questions about sexual and racial identity.

Chief among these are essays written by the two editors. E. Patrick Johnson's awkwardly titled " 'Quare' Studies: Or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from my Grandmother" is a gem.

Like others in the book, Johnson tries to clarify the epistemology of the word "queer," especially as it applies to African-Americans. Then he seeks to redefine the word in a way that reflects its political, sexual and intellectual connotations. If, like me, you think "nigger" is stripped of its racist, humiliating power when blacks hurl the word around with abandon, you'll appreciate how "queer" gains strength when gays and lesbians wear it as a badge of self-identification.

Mindful, however, that gays and lesbians of color sometimes feel alienated by "queer" -- because queer studies as a discipline tends to privilege the experience of whites, excluding "gays and lesbians ... who come from 'raced' communities" -- Johnson offers an alternative: "Quare."

"Quare," his aging grandmother's drawling, nuanced, Southern pronunciation of "queer," has more personal resonance for Johnson, and it connects to a broader world: He discovers that the Irish variant of "queer" is "quare," as in the Brendan Behan play "The Quare Fellow." In combining this Irish epithet for gay with his grandmother's usage of "quare," which means "slightly off-kilter," the word seems to him positively international and thoroughly inclusive: a single word that can both highlight a community's shared identity while making explicit all its wide and far-reaching differences.