Rainbow Theology. Patrick S. Cheng
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Communities (Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Books, 2000).
11 Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, eds., Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
12 Qwo-Li Driskill et al., eds., Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2011).
13 See, e.g., Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, rev. ed. (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007).
14 See, e.g., Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2007).
15 See Michael Hames-García, “Queer Theory Revisited,” in Hames-García and Martínez, Gay Latino Studies, 26–27.
16 David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?,” Social Text nos. 84–85 (2005): 2.
17 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55. A new anthology of essays was published in 2012 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Omi and Winant’s work. See Daniel HoSang et al., eds., Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
18 Roger Sanjek, “The Enduring Inequalities of Race,” in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 1.
19 Ibid.
20 William Ming Liu and William R. Concepcion, “Redefining Asian American Identity and Masculinity,” in Culturally Responsive Counseling with Asian American Men, ed. William Ming Liu, Derek Kenji Iwamoto, and Mark H. Chae (New York: Routledge, 2010), 129.
21 As my Argentinian friend Hugo Córdova Quero has reminded me, the term “people of color” is used primarily in the United States. That is, former colonial subjects become “people of color” when they arrive in the United States and are classified into pre-existing racial categories.
22 Jeffrey Weeks, “The Social Construction of Sexuality,” in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, ed. Steven Seidman, Nancy Fischer, and Chet Meeks, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 19.
23 For a discussion of the term “Two-Spirit,” see chapter five below.
24 See Cheng, Radical Love, 2–8.
25 For some helpful definitions relating to issues of sexuality and gender identity, see Palmer and Haffner, “A Time to Seek,” 7–11.
26 Gordon S. Wakefield, “Spirituality,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson and John Bowden (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1983), 549.
27 Laina Y. Bay-Cheng, “The Social Construction of Sexuality: Religion, Medicine, Media, Schools, and Families,” in Sex and Sexuality, Volume 1: Sexuality Today—Trends and Controversies, ed. Richard D. McAnulty and M. Michele Burnette (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 204. Indeed, given the fluidity of categories, one queer theorist has posed the question: “Must identity movements self-destruct?” Joshua Gamson, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?: A Queer Dilemma,” in Queer Cultures, ed. Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 279.
28 Furthermore, instead of being mutually exclusive categories, such categories are actually deeply interrelated and ultimately cannot be separated from each other. See chapter seven below; see also Ian Barnard, Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Linwood J. Lewis, “Sexuality, Race, and Ethnicity,” in McAnulty and Burnette, Sex and Sexuality, Volume 1, 229–64; Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
29 See Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace, xviii.
30 I recognize that these racial and ethnic categories can serve to marginalize the experiences of mixed-heritage and multiracial people. As Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé has noted, such categories require such people to “have to make the choice to identify with only one group as opposed to being able to define ourselves as we choose, acknowledging our place within the people-of-color communities.” See Elias Farajaje-Jones, “Loving ‘Queer’: We’re All a Big Mix of Possibilities of Desire Just Waiting to Happen,” In the Family 6, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 17. It is my hope that the discussion of rainbow theology in Part II of this book will ultimately transcend these socially-constructed categories and honor the experiences of mixed-heritage and multiracial people.
Since at least the early 1990s, queer Black1 theologians have written about the ways in which they have wrestled with issues of race, sexuality, and spirituality. Specifically, LGBTIQ African Americans are caught between the heterosexism and homophobia of the Black Church on the one hand, and the racism of white queer religious communities on the other. As Irene Monroe, an African American lesbian minister and theologian, has written: “The task has always been to develop a theological language that speaks truth to our unique spirituality.” According to Monroe, “Housing our spirituality in both religious cultures—white queer, and black—has been one of tenuous residency, that of spiritual wanderers and resident aliens.”2
This chapter will examine key writings from LGBTIQ Black theologians. It will focus on three main themes that have emerged in these writings: (1) Black Church exclusion; (2) reclaiming Black lesbian voices; and (3) challenging Black liberation theologies. This chapter will serve as a roadmap of the terrain, but it will not attempt to cover everything that has been written on queer Black theology during the last two decades. Rather, it will focus on key texts and provide additional study resources at the end of the chapter. Also, the discussion in this chapter will focus on self-identified LGBTIQ Black theologians. Allies such as Kelly Brown Douglas—and her highly influential text Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective3—will be cited, but the main focus will be on the voices of queer Black people.
1. Historical Background
Before turning to the writings of LGBTIQ Black theologians, we begin with a brief survey of the hidden history of queer African Americans. Although a number of works on LGBTIQ history have been written in recent years,4 no historical text to date has focused primarily on the history of queer people of color in North America. As such, a comprehensive history of same-gender-loving and gender-variant African Americans has yet to be written. What is discussed in this chapter, therefore, is collected from a variety of different sources.
African Americans have been in North America since at least 1619, when a colonial resident of Virginia recorded the sale of “twenty Negars” by a Dutch trader.5 The horrific slave trade from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth centuries resulted in nearly 10 million persons being “kidnapped out of Africa, all but about 350,000 of them for sale in the Americas.”6
As early as 1630, a colonial court in Virginia wrote about the intersections of race, sexuality, and religion. In that year, a white man, Hugh Davis, was sentenced to be whipped as a result of his “defiling his body in lying with a [female] negro.” This, according to the court, resulted in the “dishonor of God and the shame of Christianity.” A decade later, another white man, Robert Sweat, was convicted for impregnating an unnamed “negro woman servant” who belonged to a military officer. The woman was sentenced