Audre Lorde would have been 77 this week, and hers is a voice that we would so benefit from hearing these days.
Lorde was a child of Depression-era New York, of Harlem specifically. Like James Baldwin, she came of age in a community that gave pride of place to emerging African-American voices and she began writing poetry when she was a young teen. In the early 1950s, she was a student at Hunter College High School, one of the city's premier public schools, and from there she attended Hunter College itself, an all-women's school.
In those years, as Lorde became increasingly estranged from her family, she discovered the lesbian and gay scene of Greenwich Village. One of her favorite hang-outs was a lesbian club called The Bagatelle, a place she described as "fast and crowded," and "a good place for cruising." Full of "good-looking young women," Lorde wrote that she was always too intimidated to get out onto the "postage-stamp dance floor for a slow intimate fish." Somehow, she felt, "Every other woman in the Bag, it seemed, had a right to be there except us; we were pretenders, only appearing to be cool and hip and tough like all gay-girls were supposed to be."
Lorde overcame her fears, eventually, and began to speak out. As such, she is remembered as much for her poetry as for her prose writing -- much of it autobiographical, much of it polemical. Among the steady challenges she made was her call for white middle-class feminists to recognize and acknowledge and even appreciate the diversity of women around them. White feminists ignored how racial differences created real divides within some imagined unified womanhood. And so too, sexuality. Lorde insisted that she be seen as a "black lesbian mother warrior poet" -- all of these many facets, viewed somehow as contradictory, and yet embodied in her single self.
A few months ago, Urvashi Vaid delivered the annual Kessler Lecture for CLAGS, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY. In it, she denounced the way mainstream LGBT activism has failed to address racial and economic differences within their communities. Twenty years after Lorde's death, and forty years after she began speaking up, her message still resonates.
