Digital Filth

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I am a black feminist lesbian poet, and I identify myself as such because if there is one other black feminist lesbian poet in isolation somewhere within the reach of my voice, I want her to know she is not alone. I have been teaching the poems of Angelina Weld Grimke recently, another black lesbian poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Thanks to the work of women like Gloria Hull, Barbara Smith, Pat Bell-Scott, Erlene Stenson, and others, her work is once more becoming available to us. But it has been lost for many years to me. And I often think of her, dying alone in an apartment in New York City in 1958, while I was a young black lesbian, in isolation not too far away, and I think of what it could have meant in terms of sisterhood and survival for each one of us to have known of the other’s existence, for me to have had her words, and for her to have known I needed them. That we are not alone.

Audre Lorde, Sisterhood and Survival (via reclaimingthelesbiantag)

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3 days ago

One of the major issues in coming out for South Asians is that is does not follow the American script of the one-way Greyhound ticket out of small towns in the Midwest to New York or San Francisco. For many South Asians, coming out is really exchanging one closet for another. This time it’s just a closet large enough to accomodate the entire family. It’s as if the shame of homosexuality has suddenly become a dirty secret which the entire family must bear and hide from the world. This is especially true in the diaspora where communities are smaller and more tightly knit.

Sandip Roy, Coming out of the Almirah: South Asian Americans Struggle with Coming Out in a Gay America that Looks Nothing Like Them

An important piece for those interested in cross-cultural sensitivity and various dynamics at play within the international queer community. Especially critical is the consideration that not all coming out narratives trace the same basic social lines, meeting the same obstacles or lack thereof.

(from the essay collection: Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora, edited by Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan)

(Source: susannathinks)

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