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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 7, 1997)
just out ▼ fobruary 7. 1007 ▼ 10 ONTH IVtaking the W ay Heroes in the passionate adherence to their hearts and goals, three gay African Americans set beacons fo r others to follow A ng elina W G rimke ngelina Weld Grimke didn’t waste any time. When she was 16, she wrote to one girl that if she weren’t too young, she would ask the girl to be her wife. “How my brain whirls, how my pulse leaps with joy and madness when I think of those two words, ‘my wife,’ ” she wrote. After getting a degree in physical education in 1902, Grimke, whose father was the son of a white man and a black woman and whose mother was from a prominent white family, taught gym until 1907. She then became a writer and taught English. Because much of her poetry reveals her love for women, it was deemed unpublishable in her time. “ Being a black lesbian poet in America at the beginning of the twentieth century meant that one wrote (or half wrote)— in isolation,” author Gloria Hull wrote of Grimke in Color, Sex and Poetry (Indiana University Press, 1987). “It meant that when one did write to be published, she did so in shackles— chained between the real experience and convention that would not give her voice.” Honors in 1978. To date, only about a third of Grimke’s poetry Hunter spent a lot of her life in one closet or has been published. She is perhaps best known for another trying to escape the prejudices that sought a play called Rachel, the only one of her works to her because of her color, hei orientation and her be published in a book. It is about an African fame. Somehow, though, the humble caring for American woman who rejects marriage and moth others that led her to become a nurse helped her to erhood and refuses to produce children for white shine through circumstances that might have society to torment with its racism. dimmed other lives. Grimke’s poems tell her story, though. ‘Toss your gay heads, / Brown girl trees; / Toss your gay lovely heads,” she wrote in the poem “At J ames B aldw in April.” In “Rosabel” she wrote, “Winds, that breathe about, upon her, / (Since I do not dare) / 1924-1987 Whisper, twitter, breathe unto her / That 1 find her Author, civil rights activist fair.” Those lines reveal the love that was not pub ames Baldwin was a gay African American man lishable in her day and the writer that society did bom at a time when homosexuality was consid not allow to share her art with the world. ered an illness and black men and women were kept separate and unequal. He should be remem Gip Plaster is an independent journalist based in bered simply for surviving, but he was an author Fort Worth, Texas. He can be reached who secured his own place in history. on-line at gayscribe@aol.com Baldwin, who was bom at Harlem Hospital to A u n te r 1895-1984 Blues singer, nurse lberta Hunter lived much of her later life in the closet, hiding her true identity. She was a lesbian— but it was her career as a blues singer she was trying to hide. Hunter, an African American, ran away from home when she was 11. She became a successful A Jam es Baldwin singer who played Broadway and other famous venues around the world. In 1919, she met and fell in love with Lottie Tyler; their relationship lasted eld 1893-1961 Teacher, writer by Gip Plaster A lberta H child because he was small and effeminate. When he was 3, his mother married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher who was often violent and abusive to his family. At age 24, James Baldwin was scared and unhappy about the way black people were treated in this country. He had only $40 in his pocket, but he escaped to Paris, where he did much of his writ ing. His passion for issues involving race and sexu ality led him to write abundantly. He published more than 22 books of essays, fiction, poetry and drama, including Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953, Notes o f a Native Son in 1955 and Giovanni’s Room in 1956. One idea Baldwin explored in his 40-year career was that blacks should not hate whites for their racist attitudes. He called the idea of black people being victims because of white oppression a “dread, chronic disease” for which “one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or sur rendering to it.” “My life, my real life, was in danger and not from anything that other people might do but from the hatred that I carried in my own heart,” Baldwin wrote. Most gay and lesbian people know oppression in their lives in some way, and for many, the sim plest response is hatred toward the oppressor. Baldwin wrote that black people should not feel hatred toward bigoted white people; perhaps Baldwin also intended his message to apply to the lesbian and gay community about our heterosexu al oppressors. The lives of many gay men and lesbians may be in that kind of danger. for many years although both d^ted men from time to time. “Lottie had the most beautiful legs that were ever on a person,” Hunter told Frank C. Taylor, author o f Alberta: A Celebration in Blues (McGraw Hill, 1987). When Hunter decided that she had reached the top of her singing career and there was nowhere left to go, she quit. She started looking for ways to help people. In 1955, she began volunteering at a hospital and decided to take her elementary equivalency test. In 1957, she graduated as a licensed practical nurse. (The person who helped her get into nursing school adjusted Hunter’s age back 12 years just to get her in the program.) She kept her former fame a secret as much as possible so people wouldn’t treat her any differ ently. After being forced to retire from nursing because of her age (81), she returned to singing and became a frequent performer at the White House for President Carter. She was among the performers at the first-ever Kennedy Center J an unmarried 20-year-old woman, was teased as a