Whose Beloved Community? | Emory University

Whose Beloved Community?

Whose Beloved Community? | Black Civil Rights and LGBT Rights Conference | March 27-29, 2014

Special Thanks to Our Sponsors

The Arcus Foundation; The Ford Foundation; Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center; Atlanta Pride Committee; James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference; Center for Women at Emory; Office of the Provost; Center for Faculty Development and Excellence Conference Subvention Fund; Emory College of Arts and Sciences; Office of the President; Office of Community and Diversity; Hightower Fund; Rollins School of Public Health; Center for AIDS Research; Laney Graduate School; The Emory Race and Gender Lecture of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and the Department of African American Studies; Emory Alumni Association; Ali P. Crown Women in Culture and Society Endowment; Candler School of Theology; The Creative Writing Program; Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing; Emory University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; Division of Campus Life; Emory Center for Ethics; Department of History; Department of Sociology; Department of English; Department of Anthropology; Studies in Sexualities; Department of French and Italian; Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts

Photo Gallery

Rudolph P. Byrd

Conference Video Gallery

Generously supported by the Arcus Foundation and others, the Whose Beloved Community? Black Civil and LGBT Rights conference fulfilled in part the vision of the late Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Part of a multiyear investigation of the points of convergence and divergence between the black LGBT movement and the civil rights movement, the March 2014 conference brought together academics, public intellectuals, activists, and artists to focus squarely on the meaning of LGBT issues to black communities. Convening in the South, this project upsets easy assumptions about where, how, and by whom LGBT activism takes place, and recovers a history and a present that can help us chart a more inclusive future.This video gallery makes many of the conference sessions available to those who could not be present. Leslie M. Harris & Dona Yarbrough, Co-Conveners

	Whose Beloved Community? Black Civil and LGBT Rights Keynote Conversation Conference Conveners: Leslie M. Harris, Emory University Charles Stephens, Emory University Dona Yarbrough, Emory University Facilitator: Robert Reid-Pharr, City University of New York Keynote Speakers: Mandy Carter Julian Bond Alexis Pauline Gumbs
	Panel 1. Christianity at the Crossing of Selma and Stonewall: Religious Histories of Black and Queer Social Movements Moderator: Robert M. Franklin Jr. (Emory University) Salon 4/5 Protest Religion! Black Power, Gay Liberation, and New York Churches in the 1970s Heather White (New College of California) Expanding the Bounds of Community: The Life of Bill Chapman, Episcopal Priest, Civil Rights Activist, and Gay Rights Pioneer Ian Darnell (University of Illinois at Chicago) Queering Faith: Toward a Cultural History of Black, Gay, and Christian Activism Carol Lautier (George Washington University)
	Panel 2. Queer of Color Analysis in Education Moderator: Tressie McMillan Cottom (Emory University) Azalea Room Queer Youth v. the State of California: Interrogating Legal Discourses on the Rights of Queer Students of Color Rigoberto Marquez (University of California, Los Angeles) Ed Brockenbrough (University of Rochester) The Invisible Student Jamaican Self-Identified Homosexual Men Reflect on Their Formal School Experience Andrew Campbell (University of Toronto) Creating Ritual for Cultural Citizenship in Live and Cyber Space: A Conversation with Three Digital Alchemists Jillian Ford (Kennesaw State University) Bullying, Intersectionality, and Queer Youth of Color Lance T. McCready (University of Toronto)
	Panel 3. Failed Alliances? Moving Beyond Sexuality and Race in the LGBT and Civil Rights Movements Moderator: Cheryl Clarke (Rutgers University) Mountain Laurel Room Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Age of Mass Incarceration Timothy Stewart-Winter (Rutgers University) As Gays We Know Only Too Well What it is Like to Be Denied Our Civil Rights: Miami at the Intersection of Gay, Black, and Immigrant Rights, 1977¿1990 Julio Capó Jr. (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) (Re)Imagining Cuba `Sin/Without¿ Queer Discourse: Emerging Masculinities, Talentos/Talents, y Discursos Alternativos/Alternative Discourses Andrew Jolivette (San Francisco State University)
	Lunch Session: The Politics of Black Transgender and Gender Queer Justice Speakers: Kylar Broadus, senior public policy counsel for the Trans Civil Rights Project for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, board member for the National Black Justice Coalition, and founder of the Trans People of Color Coalition. Ashlee Davis, special assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the US Department of Agriculture and former Holley Law Fellow for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Tracee McDaniel, author of Transitions¿Memoirs of a Transsexual Woman and Transgender Advocate and the first transgender person to deliver the keynote speech at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration in Atlanta. Holiday Simmons, director of community education and advocacy for Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national legal organization committed to the civil rights of LGBT people and people with HIV.
	Panel 4. Identity, Spirituality, and Family in African American Responses to AIDS Moderator: Justin Smith (CDC) Salon 4/5 Visibility Is Survival: AIDS and Black Gay Men¿s Political Consciousness Dan Royles (Temple University) Previewing Effective Prevention Work among Religious African American Men Who Have Sex with Men: The Early Years of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic Duncan Teague (Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church) Families of Choice, Race, and AIDS Care Elizabeth Alice Clement (University of Utah) Hidden Histories: Faith as a Site of Black Lesbian Activism Monique Moultrie (Georgia State University)
	Panel 5. The Beloved Community in the Age of AIDS Moderator: Robert Stephenson (Emory University) Azalea Room Aesthetics of a Beloved Community L. H. Stallings (Indiana University) What I'm Told, What I Want, and What I Do: Examining Black Gay Sex, Pleasure, and Risk Marlon M. Bailey (Indiana University) Policing and Identity Violence Jonathan Berhanu (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Stemming the Tide: Black Women's AIDS Activism and the Struggle against Interlocking Oppression Celeste Watkins-Hayes (Northwestern University)
	Panel 6. From the Long Movement to the Wide Movement: Queering Histories of the Civil Rights/Black Power Era Moderator: Brett Gadsden (Emory University) Mountain Laurel Room The Charge was Homo-Sexology: The NAACP Veterans¿ Affairs Department¿s Advocacy for Discharged Veterans, 1944¿1949 Jennifer D. Jones (Princeton University) "Fighting the Fascist Faggots": The Rev. Douglas Moore and the Perversity of Black Nationalism in Post¿Civil Rights D.C. Kwame Holmes (University of Colorado, Boulder) Out and On the Outs: What the 1990s Mass Marches Tell Us About Black LGBTs Deborah Gray White (Rutgers University)
	Panel 7. Odd Jobs and Odd Ends: The Queer Element in Black Literature Moderator: Mark Sanders (Emory University) Salon 4/5 Queer Speech and the Folk, Queer Speech of the Folk: Queering Pedagogies of Blackness in Du Bois¿s Souls of Black Folk Roger Reeves (University of Illinois, Chicago) Nothing So Contrary as a Poem Jericho Brown (Emory University) Feels Their Meters, Pronounces Them Queer: Ancestral (Re)Vision of the Migration Narrative in Bob Kaufman's Quare Elegies L. Lamar Wilson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) `Where You Gona Be Standing?: Spatial Logics, Civil Rights Discourse, and the Poetics of Black Lesbian Identity GerShun Avilez (Yale University)
	Panel 9. Voting Rights, Queer Rights, Human Rights: New Opportunities for Scholarship in Archives Moderator: Charles Stephens (Emory University) Mountain Laurel Room Expanding the Beloved Community through Voter Registration Courtney Chartier (Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center) Looking Back and Moving Forward: The SCLC after 1968 Sarah Quigley (Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University) Intersections in the Archive: Building LGBT and Civil Rights Archives Randy Gue (Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University)
	Panel 10. Transgressing Genders Moderator: Heath Fogg Davis (Temple University) Salon 4/5 When Transgression is OK: Black Female Masculinity and Its Incorporation Michelé Prince (University of Maryland, College Park) Bois Like Us: Contemporary Black Transmasculine Presentation and Representation Asher Ounzumba Kolieboi (Vanderbilt University) Policing Gender: Perspectives of African Transgender Women in the Feminist Movement: The 1 in 9 case Leigh Ann Van Der Merwe (S.H.E) African/Black Trans and the Centrality of Difference Abdi Osman (Artist)
	Panel 11. Blackness, Queerness, and the Politics of Pleasure Moderator: Jonelle Shields-McKinzie (Queer B.O.I.S.) Azalea Room Getting Freaky: Perversion and Promiscuity within Alternative Relationships and Sexual Modalities among People of Color Marla Renee Stewart (Georgia State University) At the Club: Washington, DC's Queer Nightlife and the Local Roots of National HIV/AIDS Activism in Black Communities Darius Bost (University of Pennsylvania) I Know A Place: Southern Black Queer Men, the Club, and Formations of Identity and Community Craig Washington (AID Atlanta)
	Panel 12. Marriage Equality Movements Moderator: Justin Smith (CDC) Mountain Laurel Room Sylvia Rhue (Producer, Homophobia in Black Hollywood¿ web campaign) Mandy Carter (Activist) The Rev. Deborah L. Johnson (Inner Light Ministries) Dennis Wiley (Covenant Baptist Church)
	Panel 13: At the Intersections: Black and LGBT Rights Moderator: Leslie Harris (Emory University) *Salon 4/5* Voter Suppression and the Challenge to Marriage Equality Efforts in the US South Aisha Moodie-Mills (Center for American Progress) We Are All the Beloved Community: The Intersection of Black LGBT Rights and Civil Rights Darlene Hudson (Atlanta Black LGBT Coalition and Bayard Rustin/Audre Lorde Breakfast) Transforming Beloved Community to a Loving Gay Community: Intersectional Claims and Community Constructions by an Anti-Racist Gay Men¿s Group in the 1980s K. L. Broad (University of Florida) Say My Name, Say My Name: Representations of Racial Identity after the Stonewall Revolution Jim Downs (Connecticut College)
	Panel 14. James Baldwin's Uneasy Alliances Moderator: Charles Stephens (Emory University) Azalea Room James Baldwin and Federico Garcia Lorca¿s Faggots: Manly Masculinity and the Modern LGBT Rights Movement Charles Nero (Bates College) James Baldwin's Female Friends and Search for Transgender Genre Magdalena Zaborowska (University of Michigan) Eluding the Sunlit Prison of "Gay Rights" Ideology, or Why James Baldwin Can Never Be a "Gay" Icon Marlon Moore (University of North Carolina, Wilmington) Tripled Life: Black Sexuality and Queer Negation Rizvana Bradley (Emory University)
	Panel 15. The Categories We Use to Make Home Are the Same Categories Used to Make Us Moderator: Jewelle Gomez (Writer and Activist) Mountain Laurel Room Black Queer Nation or Los Angeles Black (LGBT) Pride 2013 Jamal A. Batts (California State University) Black, Gay, and Here to Stay: Black Queer Place Making in Los Angeles Kai M. Green (University of Southern California) Responsiveness, Representation, and Reform: Gender and Sexual Inclusion, Racism, and the Carceral State Treva Ellison (University of Southern California)
	Panel 16. Black Power, Sexual Conservatism, and Gay Liberation: From Eldridge Cleaver to Anita Bryant, 1968¿1977 Moderator: Ian Lekus (Independent Scholar) Salon 4/5 Betwixt Baldwin, Cleaver, and Black Gay History Kevin Mumford (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) The Gay Liberation Front and the Black Panther Party Christopher Phelps (University of Nottingham) Yellow Star, Pink Triangle, and the Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Struggles Over Gay Rights Gillian Frank (Stony Brook University) Jean Genet, the Black Panthers, and Coalition Politics in the Long Sixties Lindsay Branson (Yale University) Caught Between Two Causes, Two Movements, Two Revolutions: Sexuality, Black Power, and the Emergence of Queer Black Identity Politics G. Elizabeth Sherouse (University of South Carolina)