Stories of Antiracist Gay/Lesbian Gender Alliance: Articulating Intersectional Solidarity in the 1980s

Abstract

This article shows how in the early 1980s, Black and White Men Together (BWMT), an interracial group of antiracist gay men, constructed relations of connection with antiracist feminist lesbians of color. My analysis details how BWMT engaged in storytelling through newsletters, reporting their creation of relations of connection with Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbians and constructing these relations as a multidimensional gender alliance involving important processes of creating networks of reciprocal solidarity, forging political alignment, and creating intentional spaces of camaraderie to sustain intersectional solidarity. This research substantively expands our understanding of U.S. LGBTQ+ intersectional movement(s) activism with the concept of multidimensional gender alliance and analytically expands our understandings of intersectional solidarity.

Plain Language Summary

Stories of Solidarity between Antiracist Gay Men and Feminist Lesbians of Color

Often sociological research about social movements, including the U.S. LGBTQ+ movement, has focused on white mainstream organizations. Much of that research characterizes the organizing of gay men and lesbians as done separately. In this article, I offer an example of a group of antiracist gay men who created relations of connection to feminist lesbians of color. This research advances understanding of early intersectional movements and strategies used to create and maintain unique forms of solidarity.

This article extends our understandings of gender, intersectionality, and social movement(s) ¹ by illustrating how a group of gay men reported creating relations of connection with feminist lesbians of color, and through their storytelling articulated these relations as a multidimensional gender alliance fostering intersectional solidarity. In what follows, I discuss research about the storytelling of one chapter of Black and White Men Together (BWMT), an interracial group of antiracist gay men, as they began their work in the early 1980s. I show how they wrote and shared stories of how they connected with Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbians, and, in so doing, constructed relations of multidimensional gender alliance characterized by creating networks of reciprocity, forging political alignment and intentionally fostering spaces of social camaraderie. ² I discuss how this research substantively expands our understanding of U.S. LGBTQ+ intersectional movement(s) activism by contributing an understanding of multidimensional gender alliance relevant to the early 1980s movement(s) moment, and how it analytically expands our understandings of intersectional solidarity.

Intersectional Movement Connections and Solidarity

Feminist lesbian-of-color thinkers in the late 1970s and early 1980s detailed a distinctive vision of intersectional politics (B. Roth 2017), re-envisioning a politics of separation and singularity. For example, the 1981 collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, like other such writings, theorized intersectional politics of connection. As Moraga (1981, 30) highlighted when she wrote “I can’t afford to be afraid of you, nor you of me. If it takes head on collisions, let’s do it: this polite timidity is killing us,” these were calls for engaging in radical relatedness instead of division. As she stated, “lesbianism is supposed to be about connection” (Moraga 1981, xvi). Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde (1981, 99) asserted that “interdependency between women” was an important mechanism of freedom. Furthermore, lesbian feminist Meryl Woo (1981, 142) wrote that being a “Yellow feminist,” as she identified, did “not mean ‘separatism,’ either by cutting myself off from non-Asians or men.” Indeed, the Combahee River Collective (1981, 213) envisioned a politics of connection in contrast to a lesbian separatism: “Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.” These examples name a politics of connection and one that might take different forms—cross-racial connections among women and also connections to men of color.

In the ensuing four-plus decades since these writings, many activists and movements have worked to realize different forms of such politics, building from the praxis of intersectional social movements and through the analytical lens that Crenshaw (1991) coined as “intersectionality” (Montoya 2021). As well, developing from foundational scholarship by feminists of color, intersectional movement research has focused on how various activist groups have worked across difference to strive for a “coalitional politics of anti-subordination” (Carastathis 2016, 95; Cole 2008). Researchers often write of coalition as a “model for intersectionality” (Cole 2008) or simply write of coalitions as “movement intersectionality” (Roberts and Jesudason 2013). B. Roth (2017, 15) explains that “oppositional communities are coalitions, with members who may share commonality on one axis of oppression, but who may have different statuses, different proximities, and different interests vis-à-vis established power.” Evans and Lépinard (2020, 8) summarize the literature on intersectional coalitions as delineating various factors that “foster coalitions” or, if they do not succeed, “encourage separatism.” The research attends not only to processes of coalition building, but also to the challenges thereof—a tension identified as likely in cautionary statements of early feminists of color such as Bernice Johnson Reagon (1983), who named coalition work as uncomfortable and difficult. To date, scholars have richly documented how intersectional tensions play out in many forms of women’s activism (Hurwitz 2021; McCammon et al. 2017).

Most intersectional coalition research tends to focus on feminist coalitions and, as Luna (2016) points out, many of those conceptualizations have focused on those among white women and women of color, as she demonstrates through her work on strategies of coalition among different groups of women of color. Furthermore, Evans and Lépinard (2020, 9) note that “coalitions . . . are, by nature, more temporary and focused on specific claims,” and perhaps instrumental toward achieving movement goals. Yet whether intersectional coalitions across race, class, gender, and sexuality are temporary, and instrumental, remains unclarified. Moreover, authors tend to use alliances and coalitions interchangeably (Ciccia and Roggeband 2021; S. Roth 2021). Some intersectional social movement scholars, however, suggest a distinction should be made. For example, Roberts and Jesudason (2013, 324) write of the importance of sustained intersectional connection as alliance and describe alliance building as “progressive . . . where trust is built through repeated contact, connection, conversation, and collective action.” Helpfully, some are using the term “intersectional solidarity” to indicate developing understandings of intersectional coalition (beyond general movement coalition), and to indicate they likely involve more unique forms and distinctive challenges of forming intersectional “relations of connection” (Ciccia and Roggeband 2021, 181; Einwohner et al. 2021). In this article, I offer a portrait of how a group of antiracist gay men created relations of connection and in sharing stories of them, constructed them as relations of multidimensional gender alliance, analytically expanding our understandings of intersectional solidarity beyond one concept of coalition enacted among women.

Intersectional social movement(s) activism often happens between, and among multiple, social movements (Montoya 2021). Two recent collections of intersectional movement research extend this understanding with a specific focus on gender (Evans and Lépinard 2020; Irvine, Lang, and Montoya 2019). Irvine, Lang, and Montoya (2019) return to the focus on gendered mobilizations as an important core area of intersectional work (e.g., by feminists of color); but they recognize the singularity implied with such a focus and thus extend it by expanding upon what is understood as gendered (e.g., including LGBTQ+ movements). In so doing, Irvine, Lang, and Montoya (2019) expand the notion of gender in much the way that S. Roth (2021) and Hurwitz and Crossley (2019) call for—by including a wider understanding of gender (beyond movements run by or for women) and not equating gender with sex (Reger 2021). Evans and Lépinard (2020) similarly take up different examples of feminist and queer intersectional social movements to explain how they confront challenges of inclusion and privilege and do not always live up to their intersectional potential. These collections attend to how “the women’s movement spilled over to the LGBT movement, and vice versa” (Rupp and Roth 2017, 679), and they also note, as Evans and Lépinard (2020, 4) explain, “that feminist and queer movements differ amongst and between themselves in terms of their approach to intersectionality and privilege.” In this article, I attend to how social movements overlap and are distinctive by also embedding my work in a body of sociological research on U.S.-based LGBTQ+ movement activism.

Unlike research on feminist intersectional coalition, there is little research that attends to the nuances of how LGBTQ+ intersectional coalitions operate. Rather, research on LGBTQ+ movement(s) stresses an account of intersectional coalition work that was attempted and faltered, especially as the U.S. movement became more mainstream and whitened (Armstrong 2002; Ferguson 2018; Ghaziani 2008). LGBTQ+ movements in the United States have repeatedly been identified by researchers as characterized by a pattern of sameness and difference (Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016). Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone (2016, 165) explain that LGBTQ+ movements in the United States are characterized by “oscillations of the movement’s collective identity between emphasizing similarities to the heterosexual mainstream and celebrating differences” or between assimilationist politics versus more liberationist approaches. Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone (2016) explain that gay liberation movements of the 1970s were “inspired by the radical ideas circulating within the broader 1960s cycle of contention” and were “part of a network of movements working against interlocking oppressions,” but that such movements were declining in the 1980s. Ghaziani’s (2008) work on the infighting involved in organizing different LGBTQ+ marches on Washington (starting in 1979) illustrates a pattern wherein the U.S. LGBTQ+ movement transitioned from being coalition-oriented, multi-issue, movement(s) to a whitened mainstream rights–based one. Ferguson (2018) too presents an account of multidimensional gay liberation coalitions battling against turns to a whitening mainstreaming movement. Although intersectional coalitions have been identified as central to U.S. LGBTQ+ movement(s), most research details the decline of such coalitions by the 1980s as a narrowed U.S. mainstream “gay rights movement” became established.

Research on LGBTQ movements also highlights how gender plays out in such movements (Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016; Van Dyke and Cress 2006). Much of this research has focused on gendered divisions, rather than connections, that characterized LGBTQ+ movement(s), especially in the early 1980s (Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016; Taylor and Whittier 1992). That said, some research demonstrates gendered cooperation in LGBTQ+ movement(s), documenting, for example, how gay men and lesbians worked together in AIDS activism (Gould 2009), and tracing the different roles that women (including transgender women) have played in LGBTQ+ movements (Rupp and Roth 2017). Much of this research explains these instances of cooperation similar to what Van Dyke and Cress (2006) suggest—that certain social threats (such as state-sponsored violence) allowed for transcending perceived gender difference in the interest of sexual solidarity. Noting the predominantly white interviewees that provided a bulk of the data for their work, Van Dyke and Cress (2006) call for a more multiracial understanding of dynamics of cooperation among lesbian and gay men. In this article, I take their comment to heart and thus consider how analyses of LGBTQ+ movement(s) can be extended with the account I offer here, of a group of antiracist Black and white gay men and Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbians who constructed relations of multidimensional gender alliance in the 1980s.

Finally, research on meaning-making in intersectional movements usually focuses on framing (Benford 1993), but recent work has also begun to pay attention to storytelling, where stories are understood as accounts “of a sequence of events in the order in which they occurred so as to make a point,” with characters, plot, assumed audiences, and a point of view and operating in a field of canonical stories (Polletta and Chen 2012). Movement stories are not fictional productions but persuasive rhetorical mechanisms for sharing meaning for movement purposes (Polletta 1998; Polletta and Chen 2012). Movement storytelling is especially prominent “in fledgling movements,” emerging before organizations are fully formed and the framing of the movement more solidified (Polletta 1998). Polletta (1998, 423) explains that storytelling captures the early moments when, for example “an activist may be trying more to make sense of what is happening around her than to mobilize participation . . .” Such early movement storytelling is narrative work activists do as they create community and make sense of the way they will do politics, thus a research focus on these narratives offers a way to analyze how activists create and share ideas of community and politics.

Methods

Here I present a focused analysis that is part of a larger narrative ethnography study of BWMT. BWMT is an interracial group of gay men that started in 1980, growing to have approximately 35 regional chapters and a national association. They sought to create a group for interracial connection and to address antiracism in the gay community. I first found out about the group at a gay pride parade in 1990 but began to do research about them in the 2000s when I noticed they had created rich archives of their work. I began my larger study looking at those archival materials with the general question: How does an interracial group of gay men in the context of U.S. movement(s) articulate their gay antiracism? To answer the question, I collected and analyzed 25 years of the New York chapter’s newsletters (starting in 1980), 36 oral history interviews that BWMT men of the National Association of BWMT designed and conducted themselves in the late 1990s as part of their “History and Legacy Project,” and documents of the organization such as flyers and press releases. These latter are social movement ephemera, and the stories of movements appear in such transient materials (Polletta 1998). Many regional BWMT chapters have archived their newsletters and chapter documents in regional archives (e.g., Boston BWMT archived its newsletters and organizational documents in the Northeastern University Archives). I accessed BWMT New York’s newsletters at Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection. These materials are not presently available online to the public, but can be accessed by visiting the archives (see BWMT n.d. in References for further detail). I also accessed organizational documents from University of Southern California’s One Archives, Atlanta History Center, and Northeastern University Archives. I worked with the current members of the National Association of BWMT to make two copies of their oral histories, one to use for my research and another to archive. ³

In this article, I discuss one aspect of my analysis, focusing on BWMT/NY newsletters in the early 1980s, and detailing their storytelling of alliance with feminist lesbians of color. I focus on New York’s newsletters because the men of BWMT stressed that chapter as distinctive, and their newsletters as widely read because they were seen as a model of antiracist political organizing. While I read the complete collection of 25 years of BWMT/NY newsletters initially, my analysis here is focused on the 1980s, especially the early 1980s, as a crucial time when they were first forming as a group and articulating their politics. This historical moment was also one characterized by a shifting political landscape (of conservative ascendance and the emergence of HIV/AIDS) and movement mainstreaming (Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016). My analysis notes how BWMT activists stressed that they tried to keep their gay antiracism work separate from their AIDS activism, so I treat them here as analytically separate.

My analysis uses Gubrium and Holstein’s (2008) approach of narrative ethnography. This article is discussing a focused analysis which is part of that larger narrative ethnography study. In narrative ethnography, analysis focuses on the internal components of stories (what they say) and how they construct particular understandings in the narrative environment in which they operate (how the storytelling is done). My research embraces an understanding that newsletters are full of short stories and that analysis should focus on short and long snippets which together weave a broader account (Charmaz 2002, 320; Thuma 2019). Accordingly, I coded their newsletter stories in terms of their internal structures, paying attention to morals, plots, and characters (Gubrium and Holstein 2008; Polletta and Chen 2012). As well, I analyzed the narrative environment of the stories by paying attention to how stories are put together and relayed to others (Gubrium and Holstein 2008).

Mindful of how such statements can be weaponized against certain researchers today, I view positionality statements as important standards expected in qualitative research (Esposito and Evans-Winters 2022). I write from a place of white and (now) middle-class privilege with distinctive gendered experiences of queerness, different from the men of this study. I am trained in feminist, queer, and intersectional scholarship and approach this research accordingly. Thus, I recognize the power I have as a researcher in interpretating their stories. Throughout the larger project, I remained in collaboration and dialogue with BWMT men still involved in the organization through in-depth email conversations about my analysis, by attendance at their national convention over five different years to receive feedback on my research, and by having current BWMT leaders review portions of my writing. In these conversations, both Black and white BWMT men offered feedback about my emerging analysis and things they wanted to emphasize as significant, such as the experience of sexual liberation and creating a space to talk about race and racism.

Findings: Storytelling Connection

There are many stories that men of BWMT in New York wrote of themselves in their detailed and lengthy newsletters. BWMT/NY characterized their newsletter as vital work done by a rotating subcommittee of approximately 6 men (3 Black and 3 white), who co-wrote a 15 to 20 page, single-spaced, newsletter each month and distributed it by snail mail to other chapters of BWMT throughout the country. BWMT/NY’s newsletter reported an early readership of 750 (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, December 1981, 2, 8, 6 [the numbers indicate volume number, issue number, and page number]), and a year later the readership had grown to 1,400 persons (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, July 1982, 3, 2, 2), a level of readership that seems to have continued for many years. The newsletters included what they called “reportage” (stories about their consciousness-raising, events, actions, speakers) and announcements and schedules of upcoming events. In what follows, I discuss my analysis of what they reported and how such storytelling constructed their group and its politics.

This article extends my work (Broad 2020, 2022) analyzing BWMT/NY storytelling. In that previous work, I highlight two related points relevant to this analysis: First, the group was deliberately established as an interracial group with antiracist ideas of integration (Broad 2020). Second, the gay antiracism the group constructed aimed to be Black-gay centered and informed by Black gay consciousness. Indeed, I have (Broad 2022) encouraged us to understand the group as “akin to Black gay groups” of the era. I extend my discussion (Broad 2020, 2022) of BWMT/NY by detailing how another core set of stories that ran throughout their newsletters were accounts of working with Black “Third World,” antiracist lesbians, which they shared with storytelling that constructs them as intentionally created relations of alliance.

Storytelling Networks of Resistance and Reciprocal Solidarity

The first years of BWMT/NY’s newsletter regularly featured stories of creating sustained networks of resistance and relations of respect and cooperation—reciprocal solidarity. One set of such stories were about BWMT/NY’s networking with groups of lesbians and gay men of color, then often naming themselves as “Third World.” A sample of the groups mentioned include DARE (Dykes Against Racism Everywhere), Blackheart Collective, Harlem Metropolitan Community Church, Third-World Lesbian and Gay Alliance, and Salsa Soul Sisters. These were self-identified groups of “Third-World” lesbians and gay men seeking to address racism in the gay and lesbian community (Hobson 2016). The accounts about BWMT/NY’s work with these groups were typically short updates, serving to keep the readership informed of its antiracist work and the ties it was making with such groups. These accounts were reinforced with calendar announcements at the end of each newsletter, as well as flyers and pictures, documenting regular interactions.

Their newsletter stories also featured accounts of how BWMT/NY worked closely, in extended collaboration, with one specific lesbians-of-color group. In their first year, BWMT/NY announced a meeting called by DARE for “lesbian and gay anti-racist organizations in the city” in order to consider “joint strategy” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, December 1980, 7, 1 [not until May 1981 did they start including volume and issue numbers, so here 7 indicates the seventh newsletter ever published, and 1 is the page number]). In the next newsletter, BWMT/NY reported about the meeting, documenting the decision to collaborate with DARE on a joint strategy of “a) developing inter-organizational programming for raising consciousness in the lesbian and gay communities on racism and on the linkages between racist, lesbian/gay, and female oppressions; b) ensuring consistent lesbian/gay presence in the larger anti-racist movement” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, January 1981, 8, 1). By April of 1981, BWMT/NY was listing meetings with DARE in their calendar (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, April 1981, 12, 9). Flyers from this time period attest to these as recurring interactions. The regular reportage, narrating stories of working with DARE, charted a portrait of ongoing relations of linked antiracist resistance.

In another series of stories, BWMT/NY highlighted its work with many groups to build structured relations of antiracist gay and lesbian collaboration. An early story explains: “BWMT/NY, along with a number of other lesbian and gay Black, “Third World” and antiracist organizations, has been actively involved in the process” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, March 1981, 10, 4). A few months later, they updated readers about becoming a part of this larger group and adopting a name: “C.R.A.S.H. (Committee to end Racism, Anti-Semitism, Sexism and Heterosexism)” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, May 1981, 2, 1, 3). BWMT/NY stories show they participated in establishing this committee of various lesbian and gay groups in order to wage a long and concerted struggle against racism and other inequalities. Such a story reaffirms a narrative of BWMT/NY forming lasting relations of connection with Black and “Third-World” feminist lesbians.

In conjunction with their stories of creating group relations of solidarity, how BWMT/NY wrote about working with Black, “Third World,” and antiracist lesbians was equally important, highlighting the quality of the ties they were creating with these groups. For example, in its second year of existence, the BWMT/NY newsletter let readers know that:

The Committee for the Visibility of Other Black Woman (CVOBW) recently informed BWMT/NY of our nomination for a Hatshepsut Award. The awards, acknowledging major contributions to the Black Lesbian and gay community were made at a special awards presentation. . . . We want to express our gratitude to the sisters of CVOBW for this recognition of our work . . . (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, August 1981, 2, 4, 6)

Similar stories were common and, as this account illustrates, served as mechanisms to show appreciation between networked groups. Storytelling of such recognition and sharing it, to be read by other BWMT chapters and movement groups, not only documented the networks of resistance they were creating but also helped construct the relations being built between antiracist gay men and lesbians as respectful and reciprocal cooperation.

In sum, BWMT/NY understood, and narrated itself as becoming part of an evolving network of groups; and in sharing stories about sustained and reciprocal relations of solidarity with Black, “Third World,” and antiracist feminist lesbians, constructed a notion of antiracist cooperation among gay men and lesbians. These relations of reciprocity differ from some forms of difficult and unconformable coalition among feminists at the time (Reagon 1983) and parallel a politics of “mutual support across difference” that emerging historiography now details as characteristic of some of the gay and lesbian left in the 1970s/80s (Hobson 2016, 194).

Storytelling of Forging Political Alignment

Adrienne Rich (1982, 4–5), speaking at the International Convention of BWMT in 1982, stated:

I know that Black and White Men Together are concerned with the places where identities and oppressions meet, and where, divided from each other, we can feel most powerless. But these are also the places which offer the possibility for empowerment: for understanding how we contribute to each other’s oppression so that we can stop doing so—for creating, as your co-chair Charles Stewart has suggested, “the link between two oppressed minorities.” And this is difficult, demanding work. It can’t be handled by intellectualizing: it cuts too close to the bone in all of us. And besides, there are no elegant, ready-made theories of multiple oppression; we are just beginning to create our own descriptions.

Rich’s words showcase that she, as an antiracist feminist lesbian, and the gay men of BWMT were in dialogue about creating understandings of multiple oppressions. Her 1982 speech was the result of an ongoing dialogue she was having with BWMT, as portrayed in BWMT/NY newsletters. For example, at the end of a 1981 newsletter, a postscript mentions a letter to BWMT/NY from Adrienne Rich, “extending her support and encouragement” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, January 1981, 8, 2). In the next newsletter (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, January 1981, 9, 3), it is noted that a copy of her letter will be distributed to membership, because there have been “a number of requests” to see it. And then the next year, the newsletter highlights the significance of her speech at the annual convention (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, June 1982, 3, 2, 2) (Indeed, a copy of this speech was found in BWMT/NY archives.). As this brief example of Rich’s interaction with BWMT illustrates, the men of BWMT/NY narrated themselves as invested in antiracist lesbian work and engaging the political teachings of antiracist, primarily Black and “Third-World” feminist lesbians.

Engaging Black, Third-World, and Antiracist Feminist Lesbian Thinking

Importantly, heterosexism and consideration of the significance of sexual orientation are now understood as having been “added” later to U.S. intersectional feminist politics (B. Roth 2004, 12–13). By 1980, writings by lesbian feminists of color were highlighting the importance of including sexuality in such texts as Conditions (an antiracist lesbian journal), TopRanking, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and writings from the Combahee River Collective, among others (Clarke 2010). The men of BWMT/NY wrote stories of how they engaged these texts.

In detailing their efforts in political education, BWMT/NY regularly encouraged direct engagement with the writings by Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbian feminists. For example, in the fifth newsletter, BWMT/NY “strongly” recommends readings put together by lesbians about racism:

TOPRANKING has recently been compiled and published by Joan Gibbs and Sara Bennett, members of DARE (Dykes Against Racism Everywhere). The publication is very relevant to our developing understanding and analysis of racism in the gay male community and is available from . . . [address listed]. (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, September 1980, 5, 1)

Such newsletter snippets suggest to readers that BWMT/NY was developing their own intersectional understandings by relying on political writing of Black, “Third-World,” antiracist feminist lesbians.

The newsletters also mention readings by Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and Cherríe Moraga, and BWMT/NY inviting them to speak to their audiences. The following quotation from one of the earliest newsletters illustrates this work:

Audre Lorde and Frances Clayton will speak at our General Meeting . . . Audre, a prominent poet delivered the powerful keynote address at the First National Conference of Third World Lesbians and Gay Men last year in Washington . . . (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, September 1980, 5, 1)

Featuring a talk by Audre Lorde and her partner, BWMT/NY offers that listening to lesbian feminists for counsel on antiracist politics is critical. Similar announcements regularly portrayed their engagement with other “noted” lesbian feminists of color:

On Friday, February 10th, BWMT/NY will host a very special evening. Noted author Cherrie Moraga will read from her recently published book, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Paso per Sus Labios, and share her experiences as a member of the recently-founded Kitchen Table Press . . . (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, January 1984, 4, 9, 2)

Or another announcement:

Betty Powell, a Black Lesbian feminist and longtime (BWMT/NY) supporter (she spoke at our regional conference last January and is currently administrator at Kitchen Table Press) . . . will join (us) for an Educational Forum. (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, September 1985, 6, 5, 4)

Subsequent newsletters, referring to the event above, explained, “We’ve frequently found that our Lesbian sisters have led the way in addressing uncomfortable issues and prompting networking—this is not exception” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, October 1985, 6, 6, 1).

That said, they did not always get it right. A newsletter note in 1983 illustrates how BWMT/NY was sometimes called out for their oversight:

Recently a missive arrived from Barbara Smith, black Lesbian feminist author and speaker . . .Excerpts follow: “I read your suggested booklist about Black History. Although I was pleased to see concrete suggestions for educating ourselves about our heritage, I was disturbed to see that ‘all the Blacks were men.’ There are several titles I’d like to suggest which perhaps you could list in a future issue” . . .Ms. Smith’s point is well-taken. Admitting our error, we follow with her list of titles . . . (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, April 1983, 3, 12, 2)

Later that year, the newsletter featured the work of Barbara Smith and the writings of Black feminists as material from which BWMT/NY has “much to learn”:

Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, is now in the hands, hearts and minds of several BWMT/NY members. Although written primarily for black feminists and women of color, all of us—especially men who desire to learn about and have a sensitivity for issues with which women have had to deal—have much to learn from reading this book. . . (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, November 1983, 4, 7, 4)

As these examples detail, the men of BWMT/NY narrated stories about their work building relations of connection with Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbians. They understood such work as dialogue and engaged political education. These repeated accounts, shared with other BWMT chapters and movement groups, relayed how the New York chapter was taking time and spending considerable effort to align their views with antiracist lesbian feminists and as they developed their own multidimensional political literacy.

Citational Gestures of Listening

Importantly, BWMT/NY newsletters regularly gesture to how they were taking Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbian feminist work seriously. While the newsletters do not include direct accounts of what they specifically learned from Black, “Third World,” and antiracist lesbian feminists, other movement materials show how they return to ideas of how to address antiracism in relation to other oppressions, suggesting they took some core ideas from these texts to heart. Mostly, the impact of Black and “Third-World” feminist lesbian thinkers was evident in brief notations and quotations scattered throughout stories in BWMT/NY newsletters, such as this one:

Audre Lorde said it quite well: “You and I are citizens in a country that has taken the wrong side in every major liberation struggle in the last 40 years. I’ve got to cop to it, and you must too; whether we are black or white, male or female, gay, lesbian or straight.” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, March 1985, 5, 11, 5).

I call such short notes “citational gestures.” These are signals about the sorts of individuals and groups with whom they are doing political education, and they are offered in a way that illustrates that the men of BWMT took seriously what they have learned from their Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbian comrades.

Another way they featured the seriousness with which they took up antiracist lesbian teachings was by sometimes centrally featuring lessons from them. For example, in the foreword of a core publication produced by the national arm of BWMT, Resisting Racism: An Action Guide (Mallon 1985), Charles Stewart (a longtime Black leader) quotes Adrienne Rich’s 1982 “warning” to BWMT in detail:

If we intend to survive and hold fast to what is precious to us, love can never be merely a private zone of pleasure and intimacy, an erotic space somewhere beyond the world . . . All of us . . . who are lesbians or gay men know that our erotic choices makes us vulnerable to reprisals; and all of us who are in interracial relationships know that we are vulnerable also. Yet to say that a taboo sexuality is by and of itself political—a theme when has recurred in the rhetoric of the gay community—seems to me not to be saying enough . . . (Rich 1982)

By quoting Rich, centering her warning at the very beginning of their BWMT manual on resisting racism, they were signaling to their readers the importance of taking to heart what she was saying. Citational gestures both relayed to readers whose work to read and constructed doing so as a valued part of creating their own political literacy.

Black, “Third-World,” antiracist lesbian feminist writings were shared via collective print cultures (Clarke 2010) in the early 1980s, and BWMT/NY wrote stories of themselves as seriously engaging those scholarly works. By writing about engaging with Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbian feminist thinkers, BWMT/NY relayed to readers a model of connected political learning, such as queer Black men of the time who “aligned themselves with the critical practices of women of color feminism” (Ferguson 2004, 142). In other words, BWMT/NY stories of thinking with Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbian feminists constructed an ideal of political education premised on forging political alignment, where political alignment here is the process of reading, listening, and taking seriously the thinking of feminist lesbians of color. In an era when dominant (white) gay men and lesbians existed in separate communities with little interaction, such accounts of taking the time to align their thinking with that of antiracist feminist lesbians of color served to report how the group, by reading their work, was doing a complex politics of connection with others differently positioned. Sharing these stories in their newsletter constructed their emerging approaches to political knowledge as intersectional and aligned with feminist lesbians of color.

Storytelling of Creating Intentional Spaces of Camaraderie

BWMT/NY further developed their politics of connection by socializing and stories about doing so. BWMT/NY understood itself as a group of gay men who mixed “business with pleasure” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, July 1982, 3, 3, 2). Uniquely, as a group of gay men, BWMT/NY newsletters featured stories of members’ intentional efforts to socialize with lesbians. This was unique because the dominant gay/lesbian cultural scene was structured in terms of gender separate bars, rituals, and social groups (Armstrong 2002) and although they networked with lesbians and read their work, BWMT/NY was very much a group for gay men and for connecting as such (Broad 2020).

Early BWMT/NY stories often featured BWMT/NY’s “partnership” work with the Black lesbian organization, Salsa Soul Sisters, which detailed the ways the two groups socialized together. See for instance, their March 1982 newsletter story on such a get-together:

Together we have experienced the pleasure gained by mutual socializing after sharing in the heavy discussions that frequently dominate our activities . . . With these thoughts in mind, Salsa Soul and BWMT/NY members and friends will share an evening of discussions and ‘getting-to-know-you’s’. (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, March 1982, 2, 11, 2)

This relayed to readers that BWMT/NY not only worked closely with lesbians to do antiracist political action but also attempted to build deeper community. BWMT/NY also wrote of striving to purposely create a community with Black “Third-World” lesbians, noting the complexity of such connecting:

On Thursday April 22^nd, approximately 20 BWMT/NY members met with 80-90 members of Salsa Soul Sisters . . . a number of issues arose, e.g. : Given the nature of the often denigrating treatment of Black men by white men, why or how could a progressive Black man sleep with any white man?; Why should Salsa Soul Sisters coalition with any male-dominated group, since all men are by natural instincts and environmental circumstances sexist?. . .Generally, the issues of sexism, trust and what we have in common were questions most raised and thoughts most shared by both women and men, and provided the gist of most satisfying interchange of ideas and feelings . . . (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, April 1982, 2, 12, 1)

Despite the challenges of difference and inequality identified by the questions listed in the news story above, the author finally concludes that such get-togethers were “satisfying” exchanges. The story subsequently noted that the event described above was overwhelmingly successful.

In fact, their stories detail how their success later led them to intentionally create alternative social spaces with Salsa Soul Sisters. In 1984, the two groups together created a series of tea dances, which were afternoon dance get-togethers where alcohol would not be served. As the newsletter story explained, “many of us are very tired of not having a space in which we can socialize with our Lesbian sisters without being hassled” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, September 1984, 5, 5, 3). Indeed, they felt such work was so significant they asserted,

Remember, when the annals of Lesbian/gay her/history are written about the golden Sundays of 1985, you’ll have read it first right here in the BWMT/NY Information Bulletin. Along with Salsa Soul Sisters, BWMT/NY has decided to co-sponsor “The Tea.”. . .Everyone says gay men and lesbians can’t party together—different “proclivities” and all that jazz. We say they’re wrong. (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, December 1984, 5, 8, 3)

In later issues, the success and value of these teas was noted, despite the “different proclivities” of gay men and lesbians. In February 1985, the newsletter documented, “Over 140 lesbians and gay males danced and socialized together . . . Everyone said it wouldn’t work; but we proved them wrong!” (BWMT/NY Information Bulletin, February 1985, 5, 10, 6).

BWMT/NY stories of socializing with Black antiracist lesbian feminists report the scope of connection they were creating. Because movement storytelling is a process that happens during “preframing” when organizations are collectively articulating their politics and striving to share it with others, I understand such stories, when shared in newsletters, as constructing for readers a notion of intentional connection. They serve as critical signals for readers of how BWMT/NY was embracing the radical liberation approaches of feminist groups of the times. Hanhardt (2013, 150) explains:

many feminist organizations of the 1970 and 1980s . . . moved between activities often described by others as political versus social. DARE, for example, frequently paired with the lesbian group Salsa Soul Sisters in organizing potlucks, dances, films, lectures, and open discussions . . . The move between a direct action against police violence and a hot and happening dance, or picking up one’s kid at childcare, was considered more continuous and complementary than disjunctive.

BWMT/NY read Audre Lorde, had Adrienne Rich and Cherríe Moraga speak to them, were called out by Barbara Smith, protested with Dykes Against Racism Everywhere, and danced with Salsa Soul Sisters. What emerges from these various newsletter accounts is a story of constructing radical connection and movement alliance between a Black-centered interracial group of gay men and Black, “Third World,” antiracist feminist lesbians. In sharing such stories with other BWMT and gay community readers, they construct a vision of intersectional solidarity in terms of “a culture of political camaraderie” (Hobson 2016, 194).

Discussion and Conclusion

This article traces BWMT/NY stories which report how they created distinctive relations of connection with lesbian feminists of color and did storytelling, constructing these as multidimensional gender alliance fostering intersectional solidarity. The building of these relations of connection and the construction of such notions of alliance and solidarity must be understood in the context of the politics of the time and the attendant social movement(s) milieu.

As research has demonstrated, much of the white-dominated gay and lesbian organizing of the 1970s operated “through separate networks and organizations” (Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016, 169), with little interaction between gay men and lesbians and with many lesbians organizing in terms of feminism (Van Dyke and Cress 2006). This time period has been understood as a point where gender differences were particularly salient to white lesbian and gay organizing (Van Dyke and Cress 2006). White lesbian feminists organized separately to develop feminist spaces to counter misogyny, a strategy that overlapped with the emergence of cultural feminism premised on valuing women’s difference from men (Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016; Taylor and Whittier 1992). At the start of the 1980s, then, a good deal of LGBTQ+ social movements activism was still characterized by a white gender-separated gay/lesbian organizing, with particular understandings of feminism in which gender was mostly assumed to be binary and tied to sex. Within the context of such organizing, the storytelling of BWMT/NY can be understood as a way by which the men of the group strove to create and articulate relations of connection among gay Black and white men, and with women-of-color lesbians. What I illustrate here is similar to what Van Dyke and Cress (2006) suggest was happening during the 1980s, as groups moved toward cooperation between gay men and lesbians and organizing in terms of shared sexual identities that transcended assumed gender differences. BWMT/NY’s stories of creating networked connections, seeking to forge political alignment, and building structures of friendly socializing among gay men and lesbians were reportage of how they created community and cooperation between gay men and lesbians. Yet these were more than connections between gay men and lesbians transcending presumed gender/sex difference. These stories did not efface, but rather respected differences. The newsletter accounts illustrate that they created relations of connection assuming that race and sexuality intersect, that they did not transcend gender difference, but rather had shared commitments to antiracist, gay/lesbian liberation. This article offers an understanding of cooperation between gay men and lesbians attentive to connection and multiplicity, rather than separation and singularity, and thus extends our understandings of U.S. LGBTQ+ movements as intersectional social movements (Evans and Lépinard 2020; Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016; Irvine, Lang, and Montoya 2019; Reger 2021).

Crucially, the early 1980s were also a moment when feminist lesbians of color were calling for creating multiple relations of connection—across race among women and within race with men—as necessary for a feminist, intersectional lesbian politics (Combahee River Collective 1981; Lorde 1981; Moraga 1981; Woo 1981). Recognizing BWMT/NY as creating their political vision in this context, I understand BWMT/NY storytelling as not only reporting relations of connection but also constructing for newsletter readers an alliance between antiracist men and antiracist feminists. Even as BWMT/NY took the words of feminist lesbians of color seriously, the newsletters do not feature accounts of BWMT/NY men’s own feminist consciousness-raising or separate and independent feminist actions, per se. This is not a criticism, but is offered as an observation that the reports offered by the men in this group suggest they continued to learn, but did not engage in feminist acts independent of their coalitional partners. Even if that is the case, BWMT/NY’s storytelling of its intersectional work is critical because it comes from the very beginning of the movement, early in its formation, in its eagerness to construct a political vision for itself that was intersectional at heart, and reflected in its actions. I propose that we can understand their storytelling about engaging the feminism created by feminist lesbians of color, while also not writing of creating their own feminist consciousness and agenda, as creating relations of alliance coherent in the particular movement(s) milieu in with they operated. BWMT/NY was embedded in an imbricated and overlapping movement(s) milieu where radical liberation ethics of developing one’s own critical consciousness still resonated (Ferguson 2018; Hobson 2016; B. Roth 2004; Thuma 2019); I posit that BWMT/NY’s storytelling of multidimensional connection I discuss in this article positioned them as allied with Black, “Third-World,” antiracist feminist lesbians. In other words, we can understand BWMT/NY as constructing relations of multidimensional gender alliance.

Finally, BWMT/NY storytelling, constructing multidimensional gender connection and alliance with Black, “Third-World,” antiracist lesbian feminists, emphasized the importance of building these as sustained relations, of seeking to create enduring relations across difference. BWMT/NY stories of their work with lesbian feminists of color emphasized striving to create complex networks of reciprocity meant to last, taking the time to engage in political education to align their thinking, and doing antiracist gay and lesbian socializing to create lasting relations of camaraderie. Such storytelling reports on how they sought to maintain relations of connection and also relays to readers a shared vision of the importance of sustaining these alliances.

These articulations of sustaining relations of alliance suggest the relevance of recognizing another form of intersectional solidarity beyond short-term coalition (Ciccia and Roggeband 2021; Evans and Lépinard 2020; Irvine, Lang, and Montoya 2019; Roberts and Jesudason 2013). Indeed, emerging research suggests that the very project of sustaining such relations is a challenge many intersectional social movements confront. This returns us to a core point identified in research about intersectional social movement work: the pattern of intersectional solidarity and conflict (Einwohner et al. 2021; Hurwitz 2021; Montoya 2021). In brief, research points to intersectional tension as a constant challenge to intersectional solidarity which many movement groups confront. To paraphrase Hurwitz’s (2021) summary: Activists who use intersectional analysis to analyze social problems and develop intersectional praxis confront the challenge of creating relations of connection within the movement to prevent exclusion and marginalization. Based on her analysis of mass movements and intersectionality of the 2010s, Hurwitz asserts that activists confront an “intersectional imperative” comprising three processes (attending to the specificity of multiple forms of inequality, depicting the reality of lives of those multiply marginalized, and encouraging coalition building) necessary for maintaining intersectional solidarity (or “more inclusive movement dynamics”) (Hurwitz 2021, 13).

While the men of BWMT/NY were storytelling a form of intersectional solidarity in a different movement moment, and on a different scale, than what Hurwitz (2021) is discussing, the point is similar. To work in intersectional solidarity, processes of recognizing multiple forms of inequality and life experience and attending to those with new strategies of connection are necessary. For men of BWMT/NY, in the early 1980s, to meet an intersectional imperative of connecting based on antiracism and sexual solidarity in a movement(s) context so characterized by white dominance and separation based on assumed essential gender differences, they had to produce relations of multidimensional gender alliance. In other words, in narrating the importance of creating sustained networks, forging political alignment, and building mechanisms to foster lasting friendships, they articulated a politics that did not erase difference but acknowledged intersections, attended to multiple forms of inequality and life experience, and created lasting relations of connection in terms of the complexity of those differences.

In sum, we can understand the New York chapter of BWMT as embracing what feminist lesbians of color call a politics of multiple differences and organized relations of connection. These were stories by the New York chapter of BWMT, of creating relations of connection, and constructing them as multidimensional gender alliance, which were written into widely distributed newsletters for other BWMT chapters and a broader gay community to read, thus relaying articulations of intersectional solidarity. That said, in their oral history recordings, the men of the National Association of BWMT acknowledge how New York offered a model of political engagement and gay antiracism that not all chapters took up or achieved, so this should be read as a specific story of BWMT/NY and not necessarily all instantiations of BWMT groups.

And that brings me to a final comment about whether and how the strategies of BWMT/NY discussed in this article might be taken up by activists today who strive for intersectional praxis and to create movements that are not exclusionary and marginalizing. To reiterate, the storytelling of BWMT/NY features the construction of relations of connection that worked in that particular early 1980s moment and movement(s) milieu and does not mean that these strategies will translate to movements of today, especially mass movements of a digital era. But I do think conceptualizing gender in intersectional terms and striving to find ways to create sustained multidimensional relations of connection remain imperative to the project of solidarity in intersectional movements.