Color treatments

“We are what we write; we become what we read.”

So begins the first-of-its-kind Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books, which lists nearly 700 titles in varying genres. Compiled by copublishers Steven G. Fullwood and Lisa C. Moore, as well as writer-librarian Reginald Harris (whose soulful intro opens the book with that sentence above), the new bibliography covers a wide scope of topics and time periods from within black gay history and culture.

WRITE ON Lisa C. Moore and Steven G.
Fullwood looked to their own bookshelves
for Carry the Word.

Photo: Donald Andrew Agarrat

“We pretty much included the universe,” says Fullwood, an archivist for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where he founded its Black Gay and Lesbian Archive. “I got tired of people telling me, ‘I want to read black LGBT same-gender-loving books, but I don’t know any of the titles.’ This is an answer to that.” Fullwood’s own three-year-old Vintage Entity Press joined with Moore’s Washington, D.C.–based RedBone Press to publish Carry the Word, and proceeds from its sale will directly benefit Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ writers of African descent (currently headed by Fullwood and Moore). Their hope is that the bibliography will be helpful to individuals and book providers alike.

“Literature has always been at the basis of shaping a person’s identity, and we have this idea that it’ll be valuable for people just coming out,” says Moore, who founded RedBone a decade ago to publish titles of black gay interest. “We also hope it will be used by book clubs, librarians, academics and bookstores. We envisioned it as a resource.”

It’s certainly a far-reaching one: There’s ’80s feminism (Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology), ’90s hip-hop love novels (B-Boy Blues by James Earl Hardy), classic memoirs (Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name) and brand-new identity essays (Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, edited by Essex Hemphill). There are pop-culture tell-alls by folks from RuPaul to André Leon Talley. And scattered among the lists of titles are probing interviews, conducted by either Fullwood or Moore, with some of the many authors—including poet Samiya Bashir, essayist Thomas Glave, and New York writers Cheryl Boyce Taylor and Tim’m T. West.

The collection comes at an opportune time in queer history, as more and more black gay books are being released, both because of a surge in self-publishing and because of the growth of black queer studies, Moore explains. In addition, says Fullwood, “We’re seeing more black-gay conferences and Black Gay Prides.” Every major American city now has a Black Gay Pride, including NYC, which hosted its fifth annual Pride in the City just this month. “I think it’s a wonderful thing,” he says, “because people need to celebrate themselves.”

Compiling the bibliography took several years, as the editors combed through personal resources—writer friends, publishers’ catalogs, the Llambda Book Report, Fire and Ink, Amazon.com and, of course, their own bookshelves. That allowed the editors time to ruminate on their own most influential coming-out books—including, for Moore, the classic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa), and, for Fullwood, Does Your Mama Know? An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories, edited by Moore and the first title published by RedBone.

“But I think I really started with lots of [James] Baldwin and [Lorraine] Hansberry,” Fullwood adds. “I remember that Go Tell It on the Mountain had elements in it that finally allowed me to exhale. It was like, Oh, I’m okay.”

Once Carry the Word was compiled, it was time to settle on its name—and its subtitle, which uses the oft-controversial-in-black-circles term LGBTQ. “We debated for quite a while about it,” Fullwood says. “I respect SGL [same-gender-loving] because gay doesn’t do it for a lot of people who believe the term came out of a white sensibility. I respect queer, questioning, non-gender-conforming and all the rest.” Still, anything but the readily identifiable LGBTQ, they decided, could cause confusion and defeat their purpose. “Part of what we’re trying to do is get librarians, booksellers and archivists interested in black gay literature,” Fullwood says. “We’re trying to storm all the doors at one time.”

Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books (Vintage Entity Press and RedBone Press, $10) is available only through vepress.com.