Black Queer Studies Left Out Again | Opinion

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last year famously questioned, "Who would say that's an important part of Black history—queer theory?" Shortly thereafter, the College Board released its response with a new AP Black Studies framework that mirrored his contention, removing Black queer and trans people from the curriculum, among many other topics such as intersectionality and critical race theory.

This past December, the College Board brought back some of the original ideas that were being considered for inclusion in a newly revised AP Black Studies curriculum, but stopped short of including Black queer and trans studies. Once again, the College Board has buckled to political pressure, erasing an essential part of Black history and culture.

Black queer and trans innovators and provocateurs have long helped define African American culture. To leave them out of the story is to not tell the full history of the Black American experience. With Black History Month upon us, it's time to call out these politically motivated moves and make a change.

The framework released by the College Board in December claims to want to teach students that Black people are not a monolith by examining the "interplay of distinct categories of identity" that make up Black communities across the diaspora. They even profess to want to highlight the "resistance and resilience" of Black people. But in erasing queer and trans people from Black history, the College Board has done a serious disservice to all students by taking away a crucial dimension of Black life that allowed people to "resist oppression and assert agency."

For example, in the 1920s, popular Harlem nightclub singer Gladys Bentley proudly proclaimed that she had married a woman in a civil ceremony. This scandal was just one of the unapologetic public displays of her relationships with women. She quickly made her name as a bold, deep-voiced singer who delighted mostly women audience members with her signature men's top-hat and tails and raunchy lyrics. Bentley has become an important example of sexuality and gender transgression as essential to Black understanding of the textures of the early 20th century.

There are many places where Black queer and trans lives could demonstrate the power of living fully despite oppression. The framework rightly has a unit on the cultural and artistic contributions of Black artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century.

Importantly, the Harlem Renaissance was also a rich time for Black writers, performers, and thinkers who crossed gender boundaries and defied heterosexual norms. Here is a perfect opportunity to teach students about Gladys Bentley and other intellectuals, artists, and writers, such as writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, writer Richard Bruce Nugent, and literary critic Alain Locke, who helped shape the literary aesthetics of the era.

To be fair, the College Board axed many topics that would point toward contemporary models of Black freedom and justice, including making the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the reparations debate optional-only. But the College Board seemed to go out of its way to exclude Black queer voices. Many major thinkers such as James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, and Audre Lorde are missing altogether.

The one clear Black queer lesson that survived the shakeup of the College Board was the Combahee River Collective Statement. Written by Black feminists in 1977, many of whom were openly identified as lesbians, Combahee is a foundational text of Black feminist thought that speaks about the importance of recognizing class, race, gender, and sexuality as necessary for moving toward freedom for Black people. As Combahee makes clear in the language of the time, Black queer and trans people offer an additional, vital blueprint for Black resistance.

Many founders of the Black Lives Matter movement were Black queer women who took inspiration from Black queer and trans mentors and ancestors on how to speak back to power. As Black queer BLM co-founder, Aliza Garza has stated, the work of taking "lessons from our elders," including Black queer elders like Angela Davis and Bayard Rustin, is part of how Black resistance movements are formed and sustained. If the College Board was actually interested in allowing students to learn about past and present major Black social movements and resistance to oppression, as they imply in the curriculum goals, then these voices would be front and center, not buried under political rhetoric.

Bringing Black queer and trans studies into the curriculum enhances the richness of the scholarship on Black life and honors the history of Black resistance. The College Board and institutions of higher learning in general should not buckle to political pressure to erase what Black people have fought so hard for—a say in how our own history is taught.

Matt Richardson is an associate professor in the department of feminist studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. His books are The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution (Ohio State University Press, 2013), Black Canvas: A Campus Haunting (Transgress Press, 2022), and Angels of Mercy, Light, and Fog (Forthcoming from Transgress Press, 2024)

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.