'It was easy to come to the conclusion that Black LGBTQ people hadn’t made contributions to society' (tinykinseyscale)
I read Octavia Butler’s celebrated Afro-futurist novel Kindred for the first time in my ninth grade English class, and I loved it immediately.
By that time, I was in my junior year of college and just beginning to accept my own sexuality. I’d had a nagging feeling that I might be a lesbian since high school. But it took years for me to admit it, even to myself, because of my conservative Evangelical upbringing and the heterosexual expectations that came with it.
And for the record, that was a lot of Black history. See, I was raised in Detroit—the Blackest city in the United States—and growing up I was surrounded by Black families, Black government and Black businesses. I attended Black churches and Black schools that had Black teachers who were more than willing to incorporate some kind of Black history into every lesson they taught.
But few adults in my life were willing to talk to kids about the sexuality of our heroes. That Black gay people not only shaped history, but paved the way for a lot of their straight—and more famous—counterparts was withheld from me, and if my experience in one of the Blackest school districts in America was any indication, it was withheld from a lot of other Black children, too.
But whatever the motivation, I was left feeling that I wasn’t quite whole, and that’s another connection to Butler and her work. Kindred opens with Dana revealing without any explanation that she lost her left arm on her last trip home—it was crushed into a wall as she returned to the present. Butler later explained why she made that narrative choice in an interview, saying, “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back.
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