Using Literary Devices in Black Gay Literature

The field of Black gay literature is one of the most dynamic, diverse, and contested genres of literature in the present moment. Indeed, it is a genre that is itself a multiplicity of traditions that is opening up new possibilities. Black gay writers have at their disposal the full range of literary devices and they use them with devastating effect to express the experience of being marginalized and resisting. Black gay writers like James Baldwin, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, E. Lynn Harris, Robert Jones Jr., and Saeed Jones have a very intricate set of devices that allow them to express their experience of being Black and gay. Six of these devices are explored in this paper: the device of intersectionality as narrative form, the device of image and symbolism as coding the doubleness of the Black gay experience, the device of language and dialect as resisting and preserving the Black experience, the device of irony and satire as a weapon against the experience of oppression, the device of narrative form and process as constituting the Black gay experience, and the device of allusion and intertextuality as contextualizing the Black gay experience in a broader literary and cultural context.

Though the concept of intersectionality has often been discussed in theoretical terms in conversations about intersectionality, it can also be understood as a literary device. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term, described it as a way to talk about the ways that different systems of oppression interact to create specific patterns of discrimination. The use of this concept in Black gay writing is in the form of narratives that do not privilege one aspect of the main character’s identity over the other. In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and the essays in Here Be Dragons, for example, the struggle to reconcile racial and sexual identity happens simultaneously. The sense of struggling to keep a sense of self when one part of that self comes into conflict with the other produces the tension in these works. In Marlon James’s recent novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf, he uses a fantasy framework to describe the ways that multiple marginal identities come together to create unique vulnerabilities and strengths. All of these writers’ works employ intersectionality not as content, but as a structure. They move between different communities and ways of being, resisting linearity in favor of movement, which is a reflection of the movement of living an intersectional existence. The structure of Saeed Jones’s How We Fight For Our Lives is especially exemplary of this. Jones alternates between chapters on his experience as a Black man, as a gay man, and as a Black gay man, demonstrating that these identities cannot be separated. The embodied nature of intersectionality in Black gay writing sets it apart from the academic, intellectual mode in which intersectionality is often discussed. It is the lived experience of the struggles and joys of intersecting oppressions and liberations.

Black gay literature is also known for its symbolic imagery and language, which often works on multiple levels. Water is a common motif in Black gay literature from Baldwin’s rivers to Brand’s ocean, signifying both cleansing and danger, the mixed nature of the Black gay experience. The body is a common motif, signifying desire and danger, celebration and mourning in Hemphill’s work. The house is a motif, signifying the constraint within heteronormative structures and the possibility of creating new ones. In E. Lynn Harris’s work, clothing and fashion are signifiers of assimilation and resistance, passing and out-and-proud displays. What distinguishes Black gay symbolism is that it has to work on several registers simultaneously. The mirror, for example, is often used to signify not just the race consciousness (as W.E.B. DuBois says), but also the sexuality. In Danez Smith’s work, religion is hijacked to sanctify rather than condemn Black gay desire. Black gay literature’s symbolic landscapes are filled with borders, thresholds, and liminal spaces, places where Black gay people exist between categories. Fire is a signifier of both danger and purifying power in Baldwin’s Just Above My Head and Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied.

Language and dialect also play a central role in Black gay literature, which often features characters that must traverse different linguistic worlds and also use the narrative itself to move between Standard English, African American Vernacular English, gay slang, and other regional dialects. Black gay writers employ language that does not compartmentalize Black and gay lexicons, producing a distinct voice that confirms both traditions. The poetry of Essex Hemphill demonstrates that Black gay writers take back and reappropriate language, turning slurs into affirmations and discovering beauty in the vernacular. Language around sexuality and gender is often reclaimed and repurposed; many Black gay writers have questioned the usefulness of the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ for Black experience, with some favoring the phrase ‘ame-gender-loving’, which originated in Black communities. Silence and speech are common themes, with writers like Marlon Riggs directly addressing the danger of silence and the power of speech. The documentary Tongues Untied employs spoken word poetry, call-and-response, and other oral traditions from Black culture to speak to gay experience. More recently, writers like Robert Jones Jr. have attempted to recreate historical Black dialects to imagine queer experiences from earlier time periods, as in his novel The Prophets. What distinguishes the use of language in Black gay literature is the resistance to linguistic hierarchy that would elevate Standard English over vernacular speech, allowing Black gay writers to include the full spectrum of Black speech and the new language that emerges from gay communities.

In addition to other rhetorical devices, irony and satire are key in much Black gay writing. Irony, for example, can be used as a means of deconstructing the racist hypocrisy of a Christian nation founded on the denigration of Black people. James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” employs scathing irony to condemn the racism of the Christian nation that denies Baldwin himself as a gay man. Marlon Riggs’s “Ethnic Notions” employs satire to satirize stereotypes. James Baldwin also employs satire through situational irony, for example when characters hold unreasonable expectations of the Black community or the gay community, which are usually proven wrong. In many cases, Black gay writers’ irony targets respectability politics from both the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement, which have largely ignored Black gay issues. E. Lynn Harris’s novels use dramatic irony in which the reader knows the main character’s sexuality, but other characters do not. However, what is particularly interesting about irony in Black gay literature is that it is often multivalent; Black gay authors have to reconcile multiple tensions within white gay society, the Black community, and white society at large. It becomes more of a layered irony that does not rely on simple dichotomies. Satirical exaggeration of religious fervor in Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil allows the satirical and absurd nature of homophobia to be seen. Black gay writers often engage in self-criticism, reflecting internalized biases and contradictions within the Black gay community itself, creating a more self-reflective literature.

In Black gay literature, narratives of identity and self-discovery are often more complex than the traditional narratives of coming-of-age or coming-out, because Black gay people’s identity and self-discovery are not something that is discovered along a linear path. Instead, they are something that is negotiated, resisted, and reinvented. In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, it is not just a matter of discovering his sexuality, but how it intersects with his racial identity and his identity as an American. In Essex Hemphill’s work, self-discovery is not something that happens to the individual, but something that happens as a collective. The bildungsroman is often turned on its head, because instead of discovering a stable identity, the characters embrace fluidity and multiplicity. In E. Lynn Harris’s autobiography, identity is not a linear progression but a spiral, in which the narrator returns to past experiences and interprets them in a different way. Intergenerational relationships are often important, because older figures serve as role models in how they synthesize elements of identity that mainstream society believes cannot be synthesized. Memory and the recovery of memory are central techniques, as shown in Marlon Riggs’s Black Is…Black Ain’t, which uses both personal and collective memory to challenge essentialist notions of Blackness that exclude queerness. In the work of Danez Smith, fragmentation and reassembly are often used as structural techniques that mirror the process of putting together identity out of elements that are presented as opposed. What distinguishes identity narratives in Black gay literature is the political element, because identity and self-discovery are not something that is simply personal, but connected to the struggle for liberation.

Allusion and intertextuality are also employed in Black gay literature to construct dialogues with a number of literary and cultural traditions. Often, these texts simultaneously reference the Black literary tradition, the history of LGBTQ+ culture, sacred texts, and the mainstream Western canon. Baldwin’s work employs intense engagement with biblical texts, subverting traditional interpretations of those texts (in ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’, ecstasy is a coded term for homosexual desire). Hemphill references and revises the work of earlier Black poets, such as Langston Hughes, claiming a space for explicitly gay themes within the Black literary tradition. Contemporary writers like Saeed Jones reference both literary forebears and pop culture, creating multilayered texts that reflect the intersectional cultural position of Black gay men. Particularly noteworthy is the way these writers use allusion to create alternative genealogies, finding queer subtexts in earlier Black texts or racial subtexts in gay texts. Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets uses the language of both slave narratives and biblical prophecy to create a new framework for Black queer historical presence. Allusions to music, especially the blues, jazz, gospel, and house music, create a musical soundtrack to accompany these texts exploring Black gay experience. Black gay writers often rewrite canonical texts from a Black gay perspective (such as Marlon Riggs’ rewriting of Whitman’s vision of democracy or Danez Smith’s reinterpretation of religious language). What distinguishes intertextuality in Black gay literature is its recuperative and redemptive nature; these allusions do not merely demonstrate literary knowledge, but seek to expose erased histories and create new possibilities.

Black gay writers do not use literary devices as aesthetic choices; they do so because these devices are also strategies for survival. Employing intersectionality as a narrative structure allows these writers to give fuller expression to the lives of people living at the crossroads of multiple identities. Their particular images and symbols speak in more than one register, to more than one community, without losing sight of those experiences that have been pushed to the margins. Their use of language is not merely the production of something new; it is also the preservation of what has been. Through the use of irony and satire, Black gay writers draw attention to the contradictions within both the mainstream and the community. Their stories of identity and self-discovery do not fit neatly into the boxes of Blackness and queerness; instead, they envision a different kind of self, created through resistance and creation. Through allusion and intertextuality, Black gay writers both place themselves within literary traditions and change those traditions in order to accommodate their experiences. These aren’t just ways in which Black gay writers have made use of literary devices; they have changed them. They have made them more capacious and more complex, so that they can contain a greater range of human experience. The result is not only representations of Black gay life, but also new ways of understanding how identity is created, performed, and changed through language.