Gay black slave
To shed light on same-sex experiences of American slaves, writer Charles Clifton suggests re-reading narratives written by former slaves. For instance, in The Interesting Narrative of the Existence of Olaudah Equiano, former slave Equiano discloses that, on his passage from Africa, a light co-voyager named Queen “messed with me on board” and “became very attached to me, [saying that] he and I never should part.”[1] Equiano “grew very fond of” another white companion. On many nights they laid “in each other's bosoms.”[2]
About his fellow slaves, Frederick Douglass writes in My Bondage and My Freedom, “No band of brothers could contain been more loving.”[3] He leaves un-detailed his “long and intimate, though by no means warm, relation” with a former slave master.[4] And he alludes to the “out-of-the-way places . . . where slavery . . . can, and does, develop all its malign and shocking characteristics . . . without apprehension or fear of exposure.”[5]
Clifton observes “in these passages a familiarity with lgbtq+ relations on the part of the authors.”[6] He remarks that there are many “unchartered areas of research” within “the realm of slave sexuality.”[7] An unbiase
Texas Officials Complicit in Gang Rape and Sexual Slavery of Lgbtq+ Black Man, ACLU Charges
Roderick Johnson, a Navy veteran serving second for a non-violent crime, has been bought and sold by gangs, raped, abused, and degraded nearly every day.
In a legal complaint that reads like a nightmare scenario from the graphic HBO prison drama ""Oz,"" the ACLU detailed the story of 33-year-old Navy veteran Roderick Johnson of Marshall, Texas, who for the last 18 months has been bought and sold by gangs, raped, abused, and degraded nearly every day.
""Prison officials knew that gangs made Roderick Johnson their sex slave and did nothing to help him,"" said Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU's National Prison Project. ""Our lawsuit shows that Texas prison officials think dark men can't be victims and believe gay men always desire sex -- so they threw our client to the wolves.""
According to the ACLU complaint, Johnson appeared before the prison's all-white classification committee seven separate times asking to be placed in safe keeping from predatory prisoners. Instead of protecting Johnson, the ACLU complaint charges, the committee members taunted him and called him a ""d
Writing Gay History
Labor union activists in New York City attended the Jefferson School of Social Science, which was founded by the Communist party to educate the working class about the principles of Marxism. There, historians who had been blacklisted from the academy taught working-class adults about the history of slavery. They used evidence of slave rebellions to illustrate the power of an oppressed population to revolt against those in power. One of the students in the class, Bernard Katz, rushed home to inform his two sons, Jonathan and William, over dinner about the heroic stories of black resistance.
For the Katz family, stories about slavery offered an historical explanation for the racial injustices that were exploding on the streets outside of their abode. The history of black resistance then led the Katz family to analyze and publish books that highlighted this history. In response to the uprising in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, William Katz published Eyewitness: A Living Documentary of the African American Contribution to American History, which was an anthology of testimonies by iconic African Americans from Harriet Tubman to
Although nearly fifty-seven years hold passed since Stanley Elkins’ provocative thesis on the effects of slavery rocked the historical community, scholars are still grappling with some of the basic premises he put forth. While the effects of slaveholders’ psychological terrorism still inspire intense debates, it should prove helpful for scholars to focus on how severely the enslaved were mentally tortured. Perhaps one of slave owners’ more innovatively cruel strategies concerned the ways they sought to completely emasculate enslaved boys and men—by denying them the right to wear pants. By forcing young African American boys and men to wear dress-like shirts, the owners of flesh attempted to feminize and humiliate enslaved males on a daily basis. According to scores of interviews with the formerly enslaved, denying jet boys and young men the right to wear pants was a relatively widespread practice throughout the Dense South.
This custom certainly becomes even more interesting when slaveholders’ beliefs about slave breeding and the virility of young “bucks” is taken into consideration. Countless owners commented time and again in diaries and letters about the supposedly hi