Rainbow Theology. Patrick S. Cheng
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earliest known documentation of a same-gender-loving African American dates back to the seventeenth century. Jan Creoli, a “negro,” was convicted of sodomy in court proceedings dated June 25, 1646, from New Netherland Colony (that is, Manhattan Island). The court described the act as a “crime being condemned of God … as an abomination” and cited Genesis as well as Leviticus. Creoli was sentenced to be “choked to death” and then “burnt to ashes.”8
Not much is known about consensual same-gender-loving relationships among African American slaves, but there is evidence that such relationships did occur among working-class African Americans in the nineteenth century. For example, two African American women—Rebecca Primus, a teacher, and Addie Brown, a servant—lived in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1860s and had an “intense, deeply passionate relationship.”9
The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s attracted many same-gender-loving African Americans because of the neighborhood’s “combination of license and sexual ambiguity.”10 Some of these individuals included the poet Langston Hughes, the singer Bessie Smith, and the playwright Wallace Thurman. This tradition of prominent LGBTIQ African American writers continued during the twentieth century with writers such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker.11
A number of same-gender-loving African Americans were involved with the civil rights and other justice movements. These included Bayard Rustin, who was a close adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite having been arrested on a “morals charge” for having sex with two men in a car, Rustin was involved with the Montgomery bus boycott and served as the chief organizer of the March on Washington.12 Other same-gender-loving African American leaders included Pauli Murray, the first African American woman who was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church and a co-founder of the National Organization of Women.13
There were also same-gender-loving African Americans at the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, which many consider to be the beginning of the contemporary LGBTIQ rights movement. Miss Marsha P. Johnson, a well-known “black queen” and sex worker, climbed to the top of a lamppost and “dropped a bag with something heavy in it” on a police squad car below and shattered its windshield.14
Since the 1970s, a number of LGBTIQ Black writers have reflected openly about their experiences of race and sexuality. In 1977, the Black lesbian writer Barbara Smith published an important essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” that examined the interconnections of race, gender, and sexuality. In 1978, Audre Lorde published her influential essay “Uses of the Erotic,” and in 1979 the Combahee River Collective, a self-described Black feminist collective in Boston, published “A Black Feminist Statement.”15
In recent years, works such as Keith Boykin’s One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America16 and the anthology The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities17 have continued the conversation on race, sexuality, and spirituality in the African American community.
2. Genealogy of Queer Black Theologies
For at least two decades, queer Black theologians have been writing about the experiences of LGBTIQ African Americans from a theological perspective. To date, however, there has not been a systematic review of such writings. This chapter seeks to remedy this gap by articulating a genealogy of queer Black theologies from the early 1990s to today.
Specifically, this chapter will examine these writings through three thematic strands: (1) Black Church exclusion; (2) reclaiming Black lesbian voices; and (3) challenging Black liberation theologies. It should be noted that these themes are not intended to be mutually exclusive. Rather, they are ways of organizing the various writings into similar topics. It is my hope that these thematic strands will encourage additional discussions about not just the underlying theological works, but also about the thematic strands themselves.
a. Black Church Exclusion
The first thematic strand relates to the exclusion of LGBTIQ African Americans from the Black Church. According to Irene Monroe, the Black lesbian minister and theologian, the Black Church “muffles our queer spirituality by applauding us in its choir pews on the one hand, yet excoriating us from its pulpits on the other.” She continues with a sharp critique of heterosexism and homophobia in the Black Church: “Our connections and contributions to the larger black religious cosmos are desecrated every time homophobic pronouncements go unchecked in these holy places of worship.”18
One of the earliest works relating to LGBTIQ African Americans and the Black Church appeared in 1993 in the second volume of James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore’s Black Theology: A Documentary History.19 That essay, “Breaking Silence: Toward an In-the-Life Theology,” was by Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé, an “avowed gay-identified, bisexual Black theologian” who was then a professor at Howard University Divinity School.20
In that essay, Farajajé argues for an “in-the-life” theology that would liberate Black theologies from the “strictures of homophobia/biphobia” as well as the “power and privilege” of heterosexism.21 He critiques the Black Church for its “suffocating silence” with respect to homosexualities and bisexualities, as well as the HIV/AIDS pandemic.22 Farajajé urges the Black Church to “move beyond the heritage of Euro-Protestantism.” According to him, that heritage, with its binary “either-or view of the world,” is “quite literally killing us.”23
The Farajajé essay was followed in 1999 by the publication of Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective by Kelly Brown Douglas. Douglas, an Episcopal priest and straight Black ally of the LGBTIQ community, was teaching at the time at Howard University Divinity School. In her book, Douglas makes the connections between white racism and Black homophobia. She argues that homophobia is a “sin and betrayal of black faith” because it has alienated LGBTIQ Black people from God and has prevented the Black Church from affirming the full humanity of such individuals.24
In 2001, Gary David Comstock, a white gay man and ally of the Black community, published A Whosoever Church: Welcoming Lesbians and Gay Men into African American Congregations. That book was a collection of interviews with twenty African American religious leaders who spoke out against homophobia. These leaders included LGBTIQ Black ministers such as Irene Monroe, Renée L. Hill, and Emilie M. Townes, as well as straight Black allies such as Jacquelyn Grant, James A. Forbes, James H. Cone, and Kelly Brown Douglas.25
A key moment in the development of queer Black theologies occurred in 2006, when Horace Griffin published Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches.26 Griffin’s book was the first book-length work on this topic that was written by an openly-gay Black theologian. Griffin, an Episcopal priest who was teaching at the time at General Theological Seminary in New York City, argues that a “true black liberation theology” would lead heterosexual Black church leaders to affirm “all loving sexual relationships and commitments as reflecting God’s purpose in creation.”27 By doing so, such pastors can offer “healing to lives that are broken by homophobia” and help African Americans to “love our bodies and sexuality as God’s gift to us.”28
In 2010, M. Shawn Copeland, a professor of theology at Boston College, published a radically inclusive Roman Catholic ecclesiology that speaks to LGBTIQ African Americans. In her book, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, Copeland argues that the body of Christ—and the “flesh of his Church”—takes us “all in as we are with all our different body marks,” whether in our “red, brown, yellow, white, and black bodies” and in our “homosexual and heterosexual bodies.”29
One organization that seeks the “full inclusion” of LGBTIQ Black people in communities of faith though scholarship (and other means) is the African American Roundtable (AART) at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion. Founded in 2000, AART also seeks to mobilize African American communities