Strange Brothers: The Sacred and Profane in the Black Queer Seventies

Kevin Mumford examines how black gay men in the 1970s responded to structures of race, racism, and racial formation.  Specifically, Mumford compares two vehicles for remaking identity: spiritual community and sexual radicalism.  He analyzes both the religious faith of Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald and the profane discourse of the “Flaming Black Faggot” in the gay liberation journal Fag Rag.  Fitzgerald became a member of a Philadelphia Catholic order and dissented from the sexual revolution, but advocated for gay issues on public television, in city council hearings, and other public venues.  Meanwhile, black gay radicals in Boston used their “Flaming Black Faggot” column to reconsider black masculinity through discourses of sexual expression.  Mumford’s work considers how these two modes of black gay identity continued the legacies of the 1960s while moving away from the strictures of both racial reaction and separatism.