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ОглавлениеSince 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 to be whipped, but Sweat was required to do “public penance for his offence at James city church in the time of divine service.”7
The 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 of faith to support social justice for LGBTIQ people.30
b. Reclaiming Black Lesbian Voices
The second thematic strand in queer Black theologies relates to reclaiming of Black lesbian voices in womanist theologies—that is, theologies by and for African American women.
A foundational work in this area is another essay in the 1993 Cone and Wilmore volume entitled “Who Are We for Each Other?: Sexism, Sexuality and Womanist Theology.” The essay was written by Renée L. Hill, a “self-identified lesbian” and doctoral student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.31 In contrast to Farajajé’s essay (which focuses primarily on gay and bisexual men), Hill focuses on Black lesbians and their exclusion from womanist theological reflection.
Despite the fact that womanist theology was founded by Black women in response to the failure of Black liberation and white feminist theologies to address Black women’s experiences, Hill argues that the “lesbian voice is silenced in Christian womanist theology.”32 For Hill, womanist theologies must confront and critique the homophobia and heterosexism within African American communities and listen to Black lesbian voices.
The debate about the inclusivity of womanist theologies with respect to issues of lesbianism and bisexuality has continued in the two decades since the publication of Hill’s essay. In 2006, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion published an important roundtable discussion, “Must I Be Womanist?”33 Among other things, the roundtable addressed whether Black feminism was more open and accepting than womanism with respect to issues of Black women’s sexuality.
In that roundtable, a number of Black women theologians and ethicists responded to an essay by Monica A. Coleman, a professor at Claremont School of Theology,34 that critiqued the “heteronormativity” of womanist theology and its failure to take seriously Alice Walker’s definition of a womanist as one who “loves other women sexually and/or nonsexually.”35 At least two of the respondents in the roundtable—Irene Monroe and Traci C. West, a professor at Drew University Theological School—agreed with Coleman’s position.36
Also in 2006, Traci West published her book Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter. In that book, West dedicated an entire chapter to Black Christian leaders who challenge heterosexism in church and society.37 And in 2008, Monica Coleman published her book, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology, which also contained a section about GSN Ministries, an LGBTIQ-affirming ministry in Atlanta, Georgia, that has challenged homophobia in the Black Church.38
In 2009, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal, Canada, there was a groundbreaking panel on the intersections of lesbianism and womanist theologies called “Hidden and Invisible in Plain Sight: Queer and Lesbian in the Black Church and Community.”39 Five papers from lesbian womanist scholars Malu Fairley, Pamela Lightsey, Raedorah Stewart, Elonda Clay, and Thelathia “Nikki” Young were presented at the panel. The panel was jointly sponsored by the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group and the Lesbian-Feminist Issues and Religion Group.40 The panel was chaired by professor Joan M. Martin of the Episcopal Divinity School,41 and Renée Hill served as the respondent.
Finally, in 2011, Emilie M. Townes, a lesbian womanist ethicist and the Academic Dean and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivered the 2011 Gilberto Castañeda Lecture at Chicago Theological Seminary.42 The lecture, entitled “The Dancing Mind: Queer Black Bodies in Academy and Church,” critiqued the silences in the Black academy and church about LGBTIQ African Americans in general and Black lesbians in particular. Townes writes: “I am bone weary pissed at the way black folk continue to be pathologized, fetishized, hypersexualized, demonized and the fact that we are now getting comfortable with doing it to ourselves / and to make matters worse, religious institutions like churches and seminaries are often of little help in calling us to account on this.”43
The conversation with respect to womanist theologies and Black lesbians continues with a new generation of lesbian womanist theologians. Thelathia “Nikki” Young, a participant on the 2009 AAR panel and the Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion at Bucknell University, has published a number of works on queer Black theology and ethics.44 Young is the co-chair of the queer ethics group of the Society of Christian Ethics, and she is working on a book manuscript entitled Imagining New Relationships: Black Queers and Family Values.
c. Challenging Black Liberation Theologies
The third thematic strand relates to challenges by LGBTIQ Black theologians to the traditional Black liberation theology paradigm of the 1960s and 1970s. In that paradigm, African Americans—like the ancient Israelites—are liberated by God from the slavery of white racism through an Exodus moment.
One critique leveled by LGBTIQ Black theologians against the traditional Black liberation theology paradigm is that it does not go far enough with respect to sexuality issues. This point is made by a number of essays in the 2004 anthology Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic.45 Irene Monroe—the African American lesbian ordained minister—contributed an essay to that anthology entitled “When and Where I Enter, Then the Whole Race Enters with Me: Que(e)rying Exodus.”46 In that essay, Monroe writes: “The Exodus narrative calls us all to come out of whatever bondage enslaves us. For African Americans, our bodies and sexualities are in as much need for freedom as our skin color is.”47
Horace Griffin—the gay Black seminary professor—made a similar point in his anthology contribution, “Toward a True Black Liberation Theology: Affirming Homoeroticism, Black Gay Christians, and Their Love Relationships.”48 In that essay, Griffin argues that African Americans must “engage seriously and critically the relationship between Christianity and homosexuality” in the same “faithful way” in which they have offered a “critical engagement” of Christianity and race in traditional Black liberation theologies.49
Some queer Black religious studies scholars have gone even further than Monroe and Griffin in their critique of the traditional Black liberation theology paradigm. In 2010, Roger A. Sneed, an openly-gay Black professor of religion at Furman University, published his book Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism.50 This book is significant not only because it is the second book-length theological treatment of LGBTIQ African Americans by a gay Black person, but also because it critiques Black liberation theology for its failure to address adequately the complexities of queer Black lives.
Sneed argues that the focus of Black liberationist paradigms on homophobia and white supremacy leads to an “essentializing” and “binary” notion of race that ignores the culpability of straight African Americans with respect to homophobic discourse.51 Instead, Sneed proposes an “ethics of openness” and an affirmation of human flourishing as an alternative to the traditional liberation model.52 For Sneed, the traditional liberation model of the oppressor vs. the oppressed requires gay Black men to be victims and does not recognize the complexity—including the joys—of the gay Black male experience.
Sneed uses a number of nontraditional sources in constructing his ethics, including queer Black literature and online personal ads. One such source is his use of Black gay men’s writing. Specifically, Sneed cites the anthology Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction,53 and he draws upon the works of Langston Hughes, Samuel R. Delany, Essex Hemphill, and E. Lynn Harris.54 Sneed argues that Black queer literature not only serves to “retrieve black queer experience from the periphery of black existence,” but also to “destabilize stable, steady readings of black identity.”55 Sneed’s turn to literature makes sense in light of his critique of Black liberation and womanist theologies for their failure to adequately portray the complexity and fullness of the Black gay experience.
Another source used by Sneed is that of personal ads and internet profiles on gay hookup websites such as BGCLive.com. Sneed demonstrates that such ads and profiles are “snapshots” of how Black gay men use the internet “as a form of identity construction” in the “gay marketplace of desire.”56 For Sneed, these are examples of the diverse ways in which Black gay masculinities are performed. The divine is found in the totality of Black gay life. In sum, Sneed’s work breaks from the traditional models that have largely defined the theological conversation about LGBTIQ African Americans to date.57
Other critiques of the traditional Black theology paradigm involve expanding the notion of Black religiosity beyond that of Christianity. In his essay “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African American Gay Community,” E. Patrick Johnson writes about finding the sacred in secular places like the nightclub as well as practices such as “house/club music, vogueing, dragging, snapping.” According to Johnson, gay Black men “create new ways of understanding the linking of body and soul or sexuality and spirituality.” By connecting sexuality with spirituality, such men transform a “supposedly solely secular, solely sexual, wholly sinful, utterly perverse club” into a spiritual space in which “the identities of African American, homosexual, and Christian no longer compete.”58
Finally, a number of LGBTIQ African American theologians have written about the importance of reclaiming non-Christian faith traditions. For example, Renée Hill writes in her essay “Disrupted/Disruptive Movements: Black Theology and Black Power 1969/1999” that “Black Christian theologies cannot afford not to be in dialogue with other religious traditions.”59 She argues that Black theology must recognize the history of “Christian dominance” in relation with other faith traditions and be open in terms of learning from other traditions, including “African-derived traditional religions” such as Santeria, Akan, Yoruba, and Vodun.60 Similarly, Monica Coleman in her 2006 roundtable essay argues that Black female religious scholars should be able to identify themselves not just as Christians, but also as “Muslim, pagan, new-thought, Buddhist, and Ifa.”61
3. Conclusion
In sum, LGBTIQ theologians of color have been writing about the queer Black experience since at least the early 1990s. These writings can be organized into three thematic strands of (1) Black Church exclusion, (2) reclaiming Black lesbian voices, and (3) challenging Black liberation theologies. Additional work still needs to be done, however, with respect to developing these writings in a systematic manner. Queer Black theologies also need to address transgender and intersex issues within the African American community. As the recent report “Injustice at Every Turn” shows, Black transgender people face “particularly devastating levels of discrimination,” including high rates of poverty, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, and attempted suicide.62 Nevertheless, queer Black theologies provide an important perspective that is largely missing in mainstream queer theological reflection.
Study Questions
1. Which events from the history of queer African Americans surprised you the most? Troubled you the most? What would like to learn more about in terms of queer Black history?
2. What are some key writings by queer Black theologians about the exclusion of LGBTIQ African Americans from the Black Church?
3. What are some key writings by queer Black theologians about reclaiming the voices of Black lesbians and bisexual women in womanist theologies?
4. What are some key writings by queer Black theologians that challenge the traditional liberation theology paradigm?
5. How might you use nontraditional theological sources such as literature, online personal ads, or interfaith writings to enrich your own theological reflection and work?
For Further Study
Queer Black Experience
• Anderson, “Desiring to Be Together”
• Anderson, “Deadly Silence”
• Boykin, For Colored Boys
• Boykin, One More River to Cross
• Constantine-Simms, The Greatest Taboo
Black Church Exclusion
• Anderson, “African American Church Traditions”
• Comstock, A Whosoever Church
• Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom
• Crawley, “Circum-Religious Performance”
• Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church
• Farajaje-Jones, “Breaking Silence”
• Griffin, Their Own Receive Them Not
• James and Moore, Spirited
• Monroe, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”
• Stringfellow, “Soul Work”
Reclaiming Black Lesbian Voices
• Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, 147–67
• Coleman, “Must I Be Womanist?”
• Hill, “Who Are We for Each Other?”
• Lightsey, “The Eddie Long Scandal”
• Lightsey, “Methodist Clergy Pledge to Defy Church”
• Martin, “What I Don’t Know About Britney Griner”
• Martin, “Yes, There Is a God!”
• Monroe, “Must I Be Womanist?”
• Townes, “The Dancing Mind”
• Townes, “Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology”
• Townes, “Same-Sex Marriage”
• Townes, “Washed in the Grace of God”
• West, Disruptive Christian Ethics, 141–79
• West, “Must I Be Womanist?”
• Young, “De-centering Religion as Queer Pedagogical Practice”
• Young, “Queering ‘The Human Situation’”
• Young, “‘Uses of the Erotic’ for Teaching Queer Studies”
Challenging Black Liberation Theologies
• Anderson, “The Black Church and the Curious Body of the Black Homosexual”
• Coleman, “Must I Be Womanist?”
• Garner, “A Sample Service of Holy Union”
• Griffin, “Toward a True Black Liberation Theology”
• Hill, “Disrupted/Disruptive Movements”
• Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark”
• Jojo, “Searching for Gender-Variant East African Spiritual Leaders”
• Monroe, “When and Where I Enter”
• Sneed, “Dark Matter”
• Sneed, “Like Fire Shut Up in Our Bones”
• Sneed, Representations of Homosexuality
• Strongman, “Syncretic Religion and Dissident Sexualities”
Other Resources
• Baldwin, “To Crush a Serpent”
• Beckford, “Does Jesus Have a Penis?”
• farajajé-jones, “Holy Fuck”
• Hamilton, “‘The Flames of Namugongo’”
• Kornegay, “Queering Black Homophobia”
• Moore, “Theorizing the ‘Black Body’ as a Site of Trauma”
• Schexnayder, Setting the Table, 37-38.
• West, Defending Same-Sex Marriage
1 In this book, I use the terms “Black” and “African American” interchangeably.
2 Irene Monroe, “Lifting Our Voices,” in Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity, ed. G. Winston James and Lisa C. Moore (Washington, DC: RedBone Press, 2006), xii.
3 Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999).
4 See, e.g., Robert Aldrich, ed., Gay Life and Culture: A World History (New York: Universe Publishing, 2006); Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011); Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Alyson Books, 2006).
5 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, rev. ed. (New York: Back Bay Books, 2008), 51.
6 Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 61.
7 Takaki, A Different Mirror, 54.
8 elias farajajé-jones, “Holy Fuck,” in Male Lust: Pleasure, Power, and Transformation, ed. Kerwin Kay, Jill Nagle, and Baruch Gould (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2000), 327.
9 Brett Genny Beemyn, “The Americas: From Colonial Times to the 20th Century,” in Aldrich, Gay Life and Culture, 153.
10 Miller, Out of the Past, 135.
11 See generally Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise, eds., Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction (Berkeley, CA: Cleis Press, 2002).
12 For a discussion of the relationship between Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr., see Michael G. Long, Martin Luther King Jr., Homosexuality, and the Early Gay Rights Movement: Keeping the Dream Straight? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
13 See Bronski, Queer History, 203.
14 Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1993), 67, 204.
15 Hames-García, “Queer Theory Revisited,” 26.
16 Keith Boykin, One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America (New York: Anchor Books, 1996). See also Keith Boykin, ed., For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough: Coming of Age, Coming Out, and Coming Home (New York: Magnus Books, 2012), 153–81 (“Faith Under Fire”).
17 Constantine-Simms, The Greatest Taboo, 76–121 (“Sexuality and the Black Church”).
18 Monroe, “Lifting Our Voices,” xi.
19 Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology II.
20 Farajaje-Jones, “Breaking Silence,” 139. As of January 2013, Farajajé is Provost and Professor of Cultural Studies and Islamic Studies at the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California.
21 Ibid., 141.
22 Ibid., 146.
23 Ibid., 158. Subsequent writings from Farajajé include farajajé-jones, “Holy Fuck”; and Farajaje-Jones, “Loving ‘Queer.’”
24 Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, 126. As of January 2013, Douglas is the Elizabeth Conolly Todd Distinguished Professor of Religion at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.
25 Gary David Comstock, A Whosoever Church: Welcoming Lesbians and Gay Men into African American Congregations (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).
26 Griffin, Their Own Receive Them Not. As of January 2013, Griffin is the Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.
27 Ibid., 219.
28 Ibid., 220, 223.
29 M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 83. Bryan N. Massingale, an African American Roman Catholic priest and professor at Marquette University, is also interested in the intersections between race and sexuality in Roman Catholicism. Massingale has contributed an essay to the forthcoming More Than a Monologue anthology on LGBTIQ issues and the Roman Catholic Church. See Christine Firer Hinze, J. Patrick Hornbeck, and Michael A. Norko, More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity in the Catholic Church (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, forthcoming).
30 See “African American Roundtable,” The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry, accessed January 3, 2013, http://bit.ly/Qze7FR. Roland Stringfellow is on the staff of the AART, and he has also written about the need to challenge the queerphobia in the Black church. See Stringfellow, “Soul Work.”
31 Hill, “Who Are We for Each Other?,” 345. Following her graduation from Union Theological Seminary, Hill served as an assistant professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is now an Episcopal priest who lives in New York City.
32 Ibid., 346.
33 “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?”, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22, no. 1 (Spring 2006).
34 As of January 2013, Coleman is the Associate Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religions at the Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California.
35 Monica A. Coleman, “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?”, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 86.
36 See Irene Monroe, “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?”, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 107–13; Traci C. West, “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 128–34.
37 See Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 141–79 (“Leadership: Dissenting Leaders and Heterosexism”). West has also co-authored a resource guide for congregations on talking about homosexuality, see Karen P. Oliveto, Kelly D. Turney, and Traci C. West, Talking About Homosexuality: A Congregational Resource (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2005), and edited an anthology on defending same-sex marriage, see Traci C. West, Defending Same-Sex Marriage, vol. 2 of Our Family Values: Same-Sex Marriage and Religion (Westport, CT: Greenwood-Praeger, 2006).
38 See also Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 147–67.
39 AAR 2009 Annual Meeting Online Program Book, Session A9-120, accessed January 3, 2013, http://bit.ly/LfiP8r. Prior to this panel, there was a 2008 AAR panel on “Gendered Conversations Between Black Females and Males” that was sponsored by the Men’s Studies in Religion Group, the Black Theology Group, and the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group.
40 Since 2009, the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group has been co-chaired by Pamela Lightsey, an out Black lesbian who, as of January 2013, is an associate dean at Boston University School of Theology. For some of Lightsey’s writings, see Pamela R. Lightsey, “The Eddie Long Scandal: It Is About Anti-Homosexuality,” Religion Dispatches (September 29, 2010), accessed January 3, 2013, http://bit.ly/SRiuNQ; and Pamela R. Lightsey, “Methodist Clergy Pledge to Defy Church in Blessing LGBT Unions,” Religion Dispatches (June 11, 2011), accessed January 3, 2013, http://bit.ly/ksYH9j.
41 For some of Martin’s writings on the intersections of womanism and LGBTIQ issues, see Joan M. Martin, “Yes, There Is a God!,” 99 Brattle (May 11, 2011), accessed January 3, 2013, http://bit.ly/MnGPZF; and Joan M. Martin, “What I Don’t Know About Brittney Griner, NCAA Women’s Basketball Champion,” 99 Brattle (April 4, 2012), accessed January 3, 2013, http://bit.ly/HO9btF. Martin also has contributed an essay to the forthcoming More Than a Monologue anthology. See Hinze, Hornbeck, and Norko, More Than a Monologue.
42 Townes has since been appointed the dean of Vanderbilt University Divinity School, effective as of July 1, 2013.
43 Emilie M. Townes, “The Dancing Mind: Queer Black Bodies in Academy and Church” (2011 Gilberto Castañeda Lecture, Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, May 20, 2011). See also Emilie M. Townes, “Washed in the Grace of God,” in Violence Against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook, ed. Carol J. Adams and Marie M. Fortune (New York: Continuum, 1995), 60–70; Emilie M. Townes, “Roundtable Discussion: Same-Sex Marriage,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 20, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 100–103.
44 See, for example, Thelathia “Nikki” Young, “De-Centering Religion as Queer Pedagogical Practice,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 39, no. 4 (November 2010): 13–18; Thelathia “Nikki” Young, “Queering ‘The Human Situation,’” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 126–31; Thelathia “Nikki” Young, “‘Uses of the Erotic’ for Teaching Queer Studies,” WSQ 40, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2012): 297–301.
45 Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins, eds., Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
46 Irene Monroe, “When and Where I Enter, Then the Whole Race Enters with Me: Que(e)rying Exodus,” in Pinn and Hopkins, Loving the Body, 121–31.
47 Ibid., 130.
48 Horace Griffin, “Toward a True Black Liberation Theology: Affirming Homoeroticism, Black Gay Christians, and Their Love Relationships,” in Pinn and Hopkins, Loving the Body, 133–53.
49 Ibid., 150.
50 Sneed, Representations of Homosexuality.
51 Ibid., 176.
52 Ibid., 179–82.
53 Carbado, McBride, and Weise, Black Like Us.
54 Sneed, Representations of Homosexuality, 107–32.
55 Ibid., 111. See also Roger A. Sneed, “Like Fire Shut Up in Our Bones: Religion and Spirituality in Black Gay Men’s Literature,” Black Theology: An International Journal 6, no. 2 (2008): 241–61.
56 Sneed, Representations of Homosexuality, 167–68.
57 In a forthcoming essay, Sneed draws upon works of science fiction and music, thus continuing his use of innovative theological and ethical sources. See Roger A. Sneed, “Dark Matter: Liminality and Black Queer Bodies,” in Ain’t I a Womanist Too?: Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought, ed. Monica A. Coleman (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, forthcoming).
58 E. Patrick Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African American Gay Community,” in Constantine-Simms, The Greatest Taboo, 106.
59 Renée Leslie Hill, “Disrupted/Disruptive Movements: Black Theology and Black Power 1969/1999,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 147.
60 Ibid.
61 Coleman, “Must I Be Womanist?,” 95. For a holy union service in the tradition of Kwanzaa, see Darlene Garner, “A Sample Service of Holy Union Based on the Tradition of Kwanzaa,” in Equal Rites: Lesbian and Gay Worship, Ceremonies, and Celebrations, ed. Kittredge Cherry and Zalmon Sherwood (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 94–100.
62 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “Injustice at Every Turn: A Look at Black Respondents in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey” (September 15, 2011), accessed January 3, 2013, http://bit.ly/nLZBHX.
