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Abstract
This article examines the representations of black homosexuality during the 1970s in Ebony and Jet, America’s most popular black periodicals. As two of the most important “indigenous information sources” available to black communities during this period, Ebony and Jet played a critical role in shaping broader public perceptions and anxieties over black respectability, queer identity, and homosexual desire. Through the contributions of predominantly heterosexual and male “experts” such as Alvin Poussaint and Winston Moore, these magazines helped to reinforce pervasive fears regarding the potential “threat” posed by homosexuality to black families and black communities, and contributed to a broader policing of nonheteronormative desire within black urban spaces. However, many of the magazines’ readers offered a more progressive vision of homosexuality and its relationship to the black community, and attempted to redefine the public boundaries of black respectability. Through addressing the complex intersections of race, respectability and physical space, this article provides a fresh insight into the spatialization of black sexual and gender minorities within black popular print culture, and the highly contested “geographies of black gender and sexual marginality.”
Notes
By the mid-1970s Ebony and Jet held a combined monthly paid circulation in excess of 3.5 million and an estimated pass-on readership approaching 18 million. A 1979 readership survey by an independent market research company suggested that Ebony and Jet carried a market penetration of 43% among black women and 39% among black men, compared to 22% and 7% for market competitors such as Essence and Black Enterprise. “Statement of Ownership,” Jet, October 7, 1976, 18; “Statement of Ownership,” Ebony, December 1976, 25; “Backstage.” Ebony, June 1980, 30.
“Publishers Statement,” Ebony, August 1983, 33. Italics in original.
Marlon Bailey and Rashad Shabazz, “Gender and Sexual Geographies of Blackness: Anti-Black Heterotopias,” Gender, Place and Culture 21 (2014): 316.
Clint Wilson, Whither the Black Press? (Xlibris LLC, 2014), 159.
“Backstage.” Ebony, November 1945, 2; Adam Green, Selling the Race: Community, Culture, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 130–31; Armistead Scott Pride and Clint C. Wilson, A History of the Black Press (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1997), preface.
John H. Johnson with Lerone Bennett, Jr., Succeeding Against the Odds (New York: Amistad, 1989), 157–59; Maren Stange, “Photographs Taken in Everyday Life: Ebony’s Photojournalistic Discourse,” in The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, edited by Todd Vogel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 208.
Johnson Publishing also introduced Copper Romance and Tan Confessions during the early 1950s. Jonathan Scott Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 63; Roland Wolseley, The Black Press, U.S.A. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990), 145.
Toni King, “Who’s That Lady? Ebony Magazine and Black Professional Women,” in Disco Divas: Woman and Popular Culture in the 1970s, edited by Sherrie Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 89.
Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom, 64–65; Meyer, “Strange Love,” 629.
Green, Selling the Race, 132.
Noliwe Rooks, Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture that Made Them (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 134.
Ben Burns, Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 101; E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: The Free Press, 1957), 178–79.
John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Tracy Morgan, “Pages of Whiteness: Race, Physique Magazines, and the Emergence of Public Gay Culture,” in Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Anthology, edited by Brett Beenym and Mickey Eliason (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 283.
Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 19–20.
Gregory Conerly, “Swishing and Swaggering: Homosexuality in Black Magazines During the 1950s,” in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, edited by Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2001), 384–94; Allen Drexel, “Before Paris Burned: Race, Class and Homosexuality on the Chicago South Side, 1935–1960,” in Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, edited by Genny Beemyn (New York: Routledge, 1997), 119–44; Leisa Meyer, “Strange Love: Searching for Sexual Subjectivities in Black Print Popular Culture during the 1950s,” Feminist Studies, 38 (2012), 625–57; Thaddeus Russell, “The Color of Discipline: Civil Rights and Black Sexuality,” American Quarterly 60 (2008), 101–28; Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout, 18–19.
“Female Impersonators Hold Costume Balls,” Ebony, March 1952, 63; “The Truth About … Female Impersonators,” Jet, 2 October 1952, 28; “Female Impersonators,” Ebony, March 1953, 64; “Male or Female?” Jet, 13 December 1951, 34; “2500 Impersonators Frolic,” Jet, 10 December 1953, 16.
Russell, “The Color of Discipline,” 106–07.
Drexel, “Before Paris Burned,” 121.
Ling and Monteith, eds., Gender in the Civil Rights Movement; Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Hutton, The Early Black Press in America, 1827–1860; Jackson, Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press; Jordan, Black Newspapers and America’s War For Democracy, 1914–1920.
Fredrick Harris, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics, 103; Sarah Jackson, Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press, 55.
Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 5–6.
Conerly, “Swishing and Swaggering,” 387.
Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
“Are Homosexuals Becoming Respectable?” Jet, April 15, 1954, 26.
Russell, “The Color of Discipline,” 106; Adam Clayton Powell, “Sex in the Church,” Ebony, November 1951, 34.
Conerly, “Swishing and Swaggering,” 385.
Meyer, “Strange Love,” 650.
“Is There Hope For Homosexuals?” Jet, August 7, 1952, 26.
Russell, “The Color of Discipline,” 121; Victoria Vantoch, The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 89.
Mumford, Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 3–4; Russell, “The Color of Discipline,” 115.
Michael Long, Martin Luther King, Jr., Homosexuality and the Early Gay Rights Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 39.
Mumford, Not Straight, Not White, 25.
Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 150.
Long, Martin Luther King, Jr., 42.
Martin Summers, “This Immoral Practice: The Prehistory of Homophobia in Black Nationalist Thought,” in Gender Nonconformity, Race, and Sexuality: Charting the Connections, edited by Toni Lester (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 21.
Summers, “This Immoral Practice,” 22; E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 53.
Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 202–03; Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 110.
Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 111; Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 123.
Mumford, Not Straight, Not White, 58.
Poussaint is perhaps best known to the current generation of scholars as the co-author of Bill Cosby’s 2007 text Come on People, which formalized many of the incendiary comments regarding poor black people and black youth made by Cosby at a commemorative address marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 2004. Cathy Cohen, “Black Sexuality, Indigenous Moral Panics, and Respectability,” in Moral Panics, Sexual Panics: Fear and the Fight over Sexual Rights, edited by Gilbert Herdt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 104–06; Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007).
Poussaint had attended Columbia before enrolling at Cornell Medical College, where he was the only African American on the course. “Speaking of People.” Ebony, October 1964, 6; Alvin Poussaint, “How the ‘White Problem’ Spawned BLACK POWER,” Ebony, August 1967, 88.
“Words of the Week.” Jet, June 6, 1968, 30.
Poussaint, “How the White Problem Spawned Black Power,” Ebony, August 1967, 88; National Visionary Leadership Project, “Alvin Poussaint: Controversial Articles Written By Me,” YouTube, 22 March 2010, 0:35.
Poussaint, “A Psychiatrist Looks At Black Power,” Ebony, March 1969, 142; “A Dialogue on Separatism,” Ebony, August 1970, 62; Poussaint, “An Honest Look At Black Gays And Lesbians,” Ebony, September 1990, 124.
Long, Martin Luther King, Jr., 40; Mumford, “Untangling Pathology: The Moynihan Report and Homosexual Damage, 1965–1975,” Journal of Policy History 24 (2012): 67.
Poussaint, “The Confessions of Nat Turner and the Dilemma of William Styron,” in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, edited by John Henrik Clarke (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 17–22.
Michael Bibler, “As if Set Free into Another Land: Homosexuality, Rebellion and Community in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner,” in Perversion and the Social Relation, edited by Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Zizek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 160.
Poussaint, “Blacks and the Sexual Revolution,” Ebony, October 1971, 113.
Poussaint, “How to Tell the Difference Between Sex and Love,” Ebony, July 1972, 31.
Mumford, “Untangling Pathology,” 68.
Poussaint, “Sex and the Black Male,” Ebony, August 1972, 118.
Devon Carbado, Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader, 4.
Kristal Zook, “A Manifesto of Sorts for a Black Feminist Movement,” New York Times, 12 November 1995, F86.
Jacquelyne Jackson, “Where Are The Black Men?” Ebony, March 1972, 99–100.
Robert Staples, “Has the Sexual Revolution Bypassed Blacks?” Ebony, April 1974, 112.
“Jail Warden Hailed for Reform Move,” Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1968, 7.
Melanie Newport, “When a Psychologist Was in Charge of Jail,” The Marshall Project, May 21, 2015; “Charges Against Chicago Youth Gang,” Jet, July11, 1968, 46.
Hans J. Massaquoi, “The Warden Who Reformed the ‘World’s Worst Jail,‘” Ebony, July 1969, 64; “Homosexuality Plagues Blacks in Nation’s Prisons,” Jet, December 28, 1972, 48.
“Reformer of ‘World’s Worst Jail’ Gets Promotion,” Jet, August 27, 1970, 13; “B.B King Sends Huge Throng at Cook County Jail,” Jet, October 1, 1970, 58; Moore, “My Cure For Prison Riots: End Prison Racism,” Ebony, December 1971, 84; “Moore Meets New Mates,” Jet, April 26, 1973, 54.
Vernon Jarrett, “Dunk the Darkie Returns to Town,” Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1975, 6; “What Undercut Winston Moore,” Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1975, 2; “Black Corrections Chief in Fight for his Job,” Jet, August 28, 1975, 56; “Chicago Prisons Head Gets Six Months to ‘Shape Up.’” Jet, September 4, 1975, 26.
“How to End Sex Problems in Our Prisons,” 83.
Ponchitta Pierce, “Marriage and the Educated Black Woman,” Ebony, August 1973, 164.
Amiri Baraka, “Black (Art) Drama is the Same as Black Life,” Ebony, February 1971, 74.
“Beauty Clinic: Introducing Ron Marable,” Ebony, December 1972, 35; Amiri Baraka to Eunice Johnson cc. John Johnson, 7 March 1973, Box 15, Hoyt Fuller Papers, Atlanta University Center.
Meyer, “Strange Love,” 650.
Chester Higgins, “Ex-Con Dancer Finds Savior in Black Moses,” Ebony, May 1972, 133.
“New York Pastor Joins Two Women in ‘Holy Union,’” Jet, May 13, 1971, 17; “Women Want To Wed.” Jet, October 28, 1971, 7.
James Stephens, Jr., “Two Women Plan To Be Married; File Suit; Make It Federal Case.” Jet, November 4, 1971, 20.
“Women Soldiers Marry; Get Honorable Discharge,” Jet, March 15, 1973, 30; “Law Bans Wedding of Ohio Lesbians,” Jet, February 22, 1975, 24; “A Visit With the World’s Most Unusual Family.” Jet, April 5, 1979, 46.
“A Visit With the World’s Most Unusual Family,” 46.
“Law Bans Wedding of Ohio Lesbians,” 24; Staples, “Has the Sexual Revolution Bypassed Blacks?” 112.
Mumford, Not Straight, Not White, 92; Charles I. Nero, “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 401.
“Backstage,” Ebony, January 1946, 1; “Backstage,” Ebony, May 1952, 14; “Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, November 1947, 4.
“Backstage,” Ebony, May 1963, 22.
“Backstage,” Ebony, January 1975, 21.
“Publisher Tells Why He Switched to Super Jet,” Jet, October 1, 1970, 3.
Hina Ashraf, “Letters to the Editor: A Resistant Genre of Unrepresented Voices,” Discourse & Communication 8 (2014): 3–21; Brian Thornton, “Subterranean Days of Rage: How Magazine Letters to the Editor in 1952 Foretold a Generation of Revolution,” American Journalism 24 (2007): 59–88; John Richardson and Bob Franklin, “Letters of Intent: Election Campaigning and Orchestrated Public Debate in Local Newspapers’ Letters to the Editor,” Political Communication 21 (2004): 459–78; Marisa Torres da Silva, “Professional Views on Letters-to-the-Editor as a Means of Audience Participation,” Participations 10 (2013): 428–31; Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Journalists and the Public: Newsroom Culture, Letters to the Editor, and Democracy; Bill Reader, Audience Feedback in the News Media.
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, “A Legitimate Beef or Raw Meat? Civility, Multiculturalism and Letters to the Editor,” The Communication Review 7 (2004): 91; Reader, Audience Feedback in the News Media, 2.
David Grey and Trevor Brown, “Letters to the Editor: Hazy Reflections of Public Opinion,” Journalism Quarterly 47 (1970): 450–56.
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, “Letters to the Editor as a Forum for Publication Deliberation: Modes of Publicity and Democratic Debate,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 303.
“Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, November 1972, 18; “Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, January 1977, 17–18.
“Readers Rap,” Jet, 16 December 1971, 4.
“Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, November 1972, 18.
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Blacks Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 306.
Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout, 2.
Dave Berkman, “Advertising in ‘Ebony’ and ‘Life’: Negro Aspirations vs. Reality,” Journalism Quarterly 40 (1963): 54.
“Ebony Circulation Report,” Box 36, Lerone Bennett Papers, Chicago State University.
Skylar Harris, “Homosexuality.” in The Jim Crow Encyclopedia, edited by Nikki Brown and Barry Stentiford (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 380.
Meeker, Contacts Desired, 16; Paul Welch, “Homosexuality in America,” Life, June 26, 1964, 66.
Mumford, Not Straight, Not White, 91.
From a peak of 13.4% in 1970, San Francisco’s black population had dropped to 6.1% in the 2010 city census. “San Francisco City and County,” Bay Area Census, http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty.htm (accessed July 31, 2016); “The African-American Exodus From San Francisco,” Forbes, May 11, 2016.
By contrast, the magazine’s circulation in Oakland was nearly 50 percent higher, despite the city being almost half as small as San Francisco in the 1970 census. “Ebony Circulation Report,” Box 36, Lerone Bennett Papers, Chicago State University.
The black population in Philadelphia in 1970 constituted 33.6% of the city’s population, a figure which had risen to 37.8% by 1990. In Chicago the black population rose from 32.7% to 39.1% during this same period, while in New York it increased from 21.1% to 28.7%. The largest increase came in Detroit, where the black population leapt from 43.7% in 1970 to 75.7% in 1990.
“Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, January 1973
“Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, February 1976, 18.
“Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, May 1973, 14.
“Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, March 1973, 13.
“Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, July 1973, 11.
“Readers Rap,” Jet, October 28, 1971, 4.
Bailey and Shabazz, “Gender and Sexual Geographies of Blackness: New Black Cartographies of Resistance and Survival,” Gender, Place and Culture 21 (2014): 449.
One letter was jointly written, meaning that there were forty-three readers represented across forty-two letters. Where readers withheld their name or only gave initials I was unable to categorize their gender.
“Backstage.” Ebony, November 1975, 25.
Stephens, “Two Women Plan To Be Married,” 20.
“AME ‘Black Paper’ Assails Homosexuals, Supports Busing,” Jet, July 8, 1976, 7; “AME Church Makes Breakthroughs for Women and Youth, But Not Gays,” Jet, June 3, 1976, 16; “Gay Rights Crusade,” Jet, July 13, 1978, 28; Ronald Kisner, “Pryor Adds Fireworks to Star-Spangled ‘Gay Night,’” Jet, October 6, 1977, 54.
Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness, 229.
Bailey and Shabazz, “Gender and Sexual Geographies of Blackness [Part 2],” 449.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
E. James West
E. James West is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 2015.