Fat. Black. Masculine. Lesbian.
Paule is fat.
Paule is a Black, light-skinned, Southern woman with a deep, slow voice and a thick Georgia accent.
As a child, she was a tomboy, a little rough around the edges, strong but soft.
Her family saw her, loved her, and let her go.
Paule is a lesbian.
I write about homophobia in the same way I write about racism. It was. It is. It’s not the story I’m trying to tell.
So often, in stories about Black people, queer people, Black queer people even, the story is about the violent homophobia they experience. I’ve read so many books and watched so many movies that have given far more time to the pain of queer Black people’s existence than any of the joy. I’m not the kind of viewer or reader who needs my history encased in a bubble – I chose the wrong profession for that – but I do crave balance. It’s one of the reasons I love Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight — there’s so much pain in that movie, but that moment when young Chiron is sitting at Juan’s table, hungry, terrified, and then finally safe always makes me cry. Or when he’s on the beach that night with Kevin — cold, terrified, and finally feeling a loving touch. It makes that moment at the end, when a grown-up Black tells Kevin that he’s never let anyone else touch him all the sadder, but also beautiful.
Life is hard, sometimes lonely, often scary, but rarely only that.
Paule was the character I knew first and fully. When I closed my eyes, I saw her in a one-room shack on a Georgia plantation, surrounded by her family and the fields. I saw her in a cheap tailored suit, sitting on a low, hard chair in a smokey speakeasy, pressing the mouthpiece of her trumpet against her dry lips, the phantom taste of her lover lingering on her tongue. I imagined her singing love songs over her lover’s hips, her lips brushing against bare skin. I imagined her lover’s fingers caressing her round stomach, spreading her big thighs, loving her as she was.
Paule is a fat, Black, light-skinned, masculine lesbian and every part of her was necessary.
For reasons that are beyond me (but that I can name), we so often tell the story of lesbians in history as if everyone was femme, everyone was skinny, everyone was white — as if women playing with their gender presentation is new, and fat people didn’t fuck, and Black women went from young girls in pigtails to old women in church hats and stockings overnight. And sometimes, for reasons that deserve far more attention, we refuse to call these women lesbians. I don’t mean the bi or pan ones, I mean the lesbians. We say sapphic or gay or queer, as if lesbian is a bad word. As if it’s okay to love women, but not okay to name it. This is a larger and longer conversation we need to have in queer communities, romance, and beyond, but it matters to me that we use the L word, that we don’t erase lesbians (and I mean cis, trans, and nonbinary lesbians). It matters to me, as a bisexual woman, that we hold dear the spaces lesbians have carved out for all of us without desecrating their safe spaces on our path to self-discovery or in our own journey of belonging. I owe a debt to the queer Black women, especially lesbians, for charting a path for me to live my life as I have.
We all do.
Even Paule’s name is an homage to a nonbinary queer person, Pauli Murray, whose life and journey has inspired me for years.
Read: Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgramage
Read: Troy R. Saxby, Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life
I know women like Paule existed because I’m an historian and also because human behavior. I know those women existed because I lived in a world they helped create. I entered my last two years of high school as a moody, pro-Black, hippie-Hotep listening to their music while reading their novels and poetry. I came of age listening to them sing songs of love, sex, heartbreak, racism, and joy, wondering which ones were about women based on the way they hit me in the gut. When looking for inspiration to write Paule, I didn’t have to search hard to find people like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, or Gladys Bentley because I’d been carrying them with me for most of my life.
A Blue Note is an offering. Hopefully this book gives back even a fraction of what the many Black lesbians, queer women, and nonbinary elders who came before gave to me.