The History and Power of Queer Black Friendships
Four legendary creative collaborations
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The first time I knew my words had triggered something deep in someone was when I finished a two-week summer writers workshop when I was 15. I climbed into my mother’s car, read her one of my poems, and watched her face change as she heard it. If my own flesh and blood could not wrap her head around my work, then I would have to search elsewhere for creative understanding.
As a Black teenager, I hungered for so many things, but one of the things I’m most proud that I’ve fought for over the years is the connection I’ve cultivated with other Black artists — especially queer Black artists.
So, in celebration of Black History Month, here’s a look at somewhat lesser-known, but still important, queer Black friendships.
1. James Baldwin and Eugene Worth
Last year, I wrote an essay for Catapult about Baldwin’s legacy. It began:
James Baldwin met Eugene Worth, a Black member of the Young People’s Socialist League, in December 1943, shortly after moving to Greenwich Village. The two were best friends and Black Socialists who dreamed of a better world. They battled landlords, worked jobs, were fired, and lived hungrily. Baldwin eventually became disillusioned with politics because he learned “to despise the world right back and decide that I would accomplish, in time, with patience and cunning and by becoming indestructible, what I might not, in the moment, achieve by force or persuasion.”
The two friends sat at a diner in the Village and, despite being best friends, the two bickered bitterly over their existential differences. Baldwin could hate. Worth could not.
“You’re a poet, and you don’t believe in love,” Worth said to Baldwin before laying his head on the table and crying.
There isn’t much research about Baldwin and Worth’s friendship, but an acclaimed biography on James Baldwin’s life by David A. Leeming sheds a lot of light. In the years before Baldwin’s death, Leeming and Baldwin became…
