Queering Black Internationalism: The Black Gay and Lesbian Movement in Britain, 1980-1999

My PhD seeks to excavate a history of the black LGBTQ+ movement in Britain, 1980-2000, through utilising oral history methodology to address the absences and fragments in the archive. Historians of race and sociologists have conceived of the 1980s as a period where the black movement in Britain was ruptured by the rise of identity politics and marketisation of racial justice through the 'race relations industry' (Hall, 1989; Gilroy, 2002; Wild, 2015). Starting with Stuart Hall's (2000, p.270) observation that the masculine subject of black radical politics had been 'put into question by black women and black gay men', this project challenges this narrative of fragmentation by focusing on the internationalist and coalitional politics of black LGBTQ+ activists during the period. Studies of race (McGhee, 2005; Hall et al, 2013) have characterised 1981 as a year of uprisings, epitomised by the Brixton riots, but Britain also saw the formation of the first Lesbian and Gay Black Group in London. Britain was a nexus of queer black internationalism, with the first Zami conference held in 1985 and the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre (BLGC) organising the first International Gay and Lesbian People of Colour Conference (IGLPCC) held outside of the US in 1990. This project asks, how did black LGBTQ+ activists challenge heteronormative constructs of blackness, diaspora(s) and Britishness? How did they reimagine black feminism, black internationalism, and gay liberation?

This research addresses a real lacuna in modern British studies and will bring the historiographies of black, queer and modern Britain in dialogue with one other, by deconstructing and reconfiguring narratives of post-war radical movements. I propose the concept of the queer black radical subject, reimagining Gilroy's (1993) 'Black Atlantic' to expand the remit of gender histories of black internationals and revolutionaries during the twentieth century. Through centring the diasporic consciousness and internationalist framework of the black LGBTQ+ movement in Britain, this history challenges the predominance of the US in prevailing narratives of black internationalism. This research deploys and expands the concept of black globality (Patterson and Kelley, 2000), by analysing hierarchies of gender and sexuality in the making of diaspora(s) in Britain. Instead of reproducing the temporal and geographical myopia of Black Studies in the US, or fetishizing what Stephen Tuck and Robin Kelley (2015) describe as The Other Special Relationship between black freedom movements in the US and Britain, I will examine the diasporic syncretism of black queer political cultures in late twentieth century Britain.
The purpose and impact of this history extends beyond the academy. Currently, I am conducting oral history interviews for the Lottery Heritage funded Haringey Vanguard, an archive of black LGBTQ+ histories in Haringey, North London, which will be held at Bruce Castle Museum. The oral histories I will collect in my research will build upon the work of the Haringey Vanguard, expanding the black queer oral archive in Britain. I aim to construct a 'usual' past that influences activism and public memorialisation in the present and reframes the possibilities of liberation in the future.