We Been Here: Honoring Black Queer Kentuckian Ancestors
Austen Smith is a spirit-forward visionary artist, writer, social researcher, and founder of Our Lunar Intelligence, a black-centered organization focusing on housing justice and arts/culture. Austen uses ancestral reverence and black philosophies of space/time to restore the imaginations of systemically disempowered peoples.
The PRISM storytelling series is back, and it’s Black History Month. I am very excited to reboot this storytelling series with an ancestral veneration of some notable Black Queer Kentuckians that paved the way for myself and many of the storytellers you’ll see throughout the series.
There are many ways to embody queerness. Queerness is not limited to what you wear, who you love, or the pronouns you use. My Black queer aces, aromantics, femme daddies, and butch queens are but a few testaments to the nuances within and outside of The Acronym. Being queer in sexuality and gender are only a couple of ways to embody queerness, and that embodiment is still primarily informed by race and geography. For example, being a white queer in Louisville is different from being queer in Casey County–but for Black queer folks, the racial violence experienced in both (that cannot be separated from queerphobia) is the difference between bad and worse. How one embodies queerness as a life principle is different than queerness as an aesthetic, and that difference is primarily tied to experiences with racial marginalization.
We know that to thrive in a black queer body inside of an anti-black paradigm is one of the queerest forms of human existence. We are the nuance within the nuance. Our survival mechanisms, from gender performativity to escape the shackles of enslavement to protesting as a necessary strategy toward policy change, have been publically criticized and eventually co-opted by the white-dominant mainstream LGBTQIA+ culture. The mythical fight for equality has selective hearing because Black trans folks are still most severely impacted by poverty and homelessness among the LGBTQIA+ community. What has the gay rights movement achieved if the most vulnerable queer populations, that being Black queer folks, still disproportionately experience homelessness and poverty in this country? What is Black Excellence in a nation where Black folks still make up the majority of the homeless population? How do Black, Brown, and Indigenous queer people embody queerness differently, and what wisdom do we carry as a result of that embodiment?
The Black Queer Kentucky ancestors below offer these inquiries to you through me because, although many of them are now well-known, recognizable, and revered posthumously, many of them experienced poverty, emotional and physical abuse, public humiliation, displacement, isolation, and criminalization while alive as a result of the conditions they were forced to live in. In a world that becomes aroused by the mass death of Black and Brown bodies and becomes richer the more we die–now more than ever, we need to remember ancestral veneration as a liberatory strategy. We must lock arms with our ancestors, who have become the wind, water, fire, and earth that support all of us. We need their power, and they need ours.
In this opening piece, I offer two Black queer Kentucky ancestors who have given this project power. Ibase ibae! We salute your life force.
Terri Lynn Jewell
October 4, 1954-November 26, 1995
“We do not have the numbers to be so careless with our own.” Terri Lynn Jewel, Sinister Wisdom vol. 35, 1988
Source Unknown
Terri Lynn Jewel was born in 1954 in Louisville, Kentucky. She described herself as a “black lesbian feminist poet and writer.” Terri attended the University of Louisville for two years as a biology major before transferring to Montclair State College in New Jersey, where she graduated in 1979. With a bibliography over 32 pages long, Terri was prolific in her creative brilliance. She wrote prose, letters to beloveds, essays, poetry, and cover stories about black queer women, black queer bodies, and black mental health while struggling with her own “madness” and isolation in Lansing, Michigan, where she attended Michigan State University. She belonged to the League of Lesbian Writers (Louisville, Kentucky chapter) and the Kentucky State Poetry Society. She also founded the Black Lesbian Network and the Pat Parker/James Balwin Society. In 1968 she won first prize in the 3rd annual Negro History Essay Contest, sponsored by the Louisville chapter of The Links, an elite national society by and for black women. In her time, Terri’s work appeared in over 300 publications, including Body Politic, The Black Scholar, Sojourner, Kuumba, and The African-American Review. She was the editor of The Black Woman’s Gumbo YaYa, an anthology of quotes by black women, a black women’s history calendar, Our Names are Many: The Black Woman’s Book of Days, and The Succulent Heretic, her book of poetry.
More than her litany of accomplishments, Terri Lynn Jewel was a lover of black life, including her own, and used writing to grapple with the complexities of what it means to love black life in a world that does not love black life. Over five years, she exchanged letters with her friend, poet Valerie Jean, where she openly shared about surviving child abuse, therapy, depression, coping strategies, prescribed medications, and hospital stays. In Flat-footed Truths: Telling Black Women’s Lives, Jean writes, “In her letters, Terri wrote that I had to name the hurt, to speak it. She urged me to write down the pain and send it to her. She even convinced me to go see a therapist. The sister believed in ‘getting help for yourself, in doing whatever it takes’ to get and be well. I don’t understand how she could not hear what she made me believe…It doesn’t make sense how she showed me a way to survive, and then she didn’t.”
In late November 1995, the body of Terri Jewel was found in Michigan State Park, where she often went to write. Though her death was ruled as a suicide, the details of her death are shrouded in mystery. In a post published in 2009, Alicia Banks, a close friend of Terri’s, wrote that Terri had received an increased level of death threats just before she died. Banks also asked startling questions about the case. Amongst them were why the initial report kept changing, why her body and car were not dusted for gunpowder or fingerprints, where the gun was, who it was registered under, and the angle of the gunshot wound. As a (former) black lesbian, writer, and lover of nature, the implications of these questions reminded me of my own apprehensions about being black in nature. That they even needed to be asked highlighted a global culture so steeped in misogynoir and disregard for black queer life, well-being, and well-dying that uncare is the ritual. It was not the contents of Jean’s letters or Banks’ questions that stirred me, but the uncare that leads to all manners of black grief and premature black death. She was 41 years old.
Terri’s life, work, and death opened up a chasm of grief-filled inquiries that sit in the well of my chest: Who is checking on black lesbians other than black lesbians? Who tends to the well-being of black masculine women and non-binary people? What public services and offerings specifically address the unique intersections we only occupy? Who tends to the tenders?
Michigan State University keeps the Terri L. Jewell collection at a remote storage site. This collection was donated to the university and consists of 15 boxes of material dating from 1968, when Jewell was 14, to 1996, the year after her death. The collection includes poetry manuscripts, anthology project manuscripts, reviews, notebooks, research material, interviews, photographs, letter correspondences, obituaries, and memorial programs.
Lucy Hicks Anderson
September 5, 1886- September 23, 1954
I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman…I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman. – Lucy Hicks Anderson
Picture it: a black trans woman in the early 20th century, raised as the gender she identified with, legally marrying her first husband, moving from Shelby County to California, and becoming a successful socialite, entrepreneur, philanthropist, chef, madame, and event planner. Imagine a black trans woman in the prohibition era being the first trans person in the United States to publicly defy the law and assert her right to live and marry as a black woman.
That woman was Lucy Hicks Anderson.
Lucy Hicks Anderson was born in 1886 in Waddy (Shelby County), the youngest child of Bill and Nancy Lawson, who worked for the George Waddy family. From youth, Anderson insisted that she was a girl. She named herself Lucy and wore dresses at school. At the time, the term “transgender” didn’t exist, but when her parents took her to see a doctor, they were advised to raise her as a girl. At 15, she left Kentucky and moved to Texas, where she married Clarence Hicks in 1920. She and Clarence moved to Oxnard, CA, where she worked as a domestic. In 1929, Lucy divorced Clarence and purchased a property with money she’d saved. Lucy owned and operated a brothel, serving illegal liquor during prohibition. In 1944, Lucy married Reuben Anderson, a soldier stationed on Long Island, New York.
A year later, Lucy and all her women were arrested when a client claimed to have contracted an STI from the brothel. The booking process arrest informed officials that Lucy was AMAB (assumed/assigned male at birth). She was charged with committing perjury for signing a marriage license as a woman. She was subjected to a physical and challenged authorities by insisting that she was a woman. The courts deemed Lucy’s sex as a biological male, invalidating her marriage. She was sentenced to house arrest. Soon after, Lucy was charged again, this time with fraud for receiving military checks as the wife of a soldier. She and her husband were both convicted, but Lucy was forced to wear men’s clothes for the first time in her sovereign life.
When she was released in 1950, she tried to return to her life in Oxnard but was told she’d risk persecution if she returned. Lucy was forced to leave behind her legacy: her business, community, and life– and moved to Los Angeles with her husband. Lucy Hicks Anderson died at the age of 68 in 1954 in Los Angeles. Her life is considered one of the earliest documented cases of a black trans person thriving in the United States.
These are only two of the Black Queer Kentucky Ancestors who are part of PRISM’s creative lineage. Some other notable Black Queer Kentuckians are Sweet Evening Breeze of Lexington, Kentucky, who is responsible for Lexington’s drag scene and queer tolerance. Sweet’s legacy also lives on as the spiritual and political muse behind Sweet Evening Breeze, Louisville’s first LGBTQIA+ housing organization for young adults, and the honorable bell hooks of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. hooks is the author of several sacred black feminist texts such as All About Love: New Visions, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Ain’t I A Woman, and Feminism is for Everbody. Hooks, who identified as queer, not gay, described “ queer not as being about who you are having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
May this iteration of PRISM be a space where black and brown queer Kentucky writers feel free to invent, create, speak, thrive, and LIVE.
Sources:
Jewell, Terri L. | Lesbian Poetry Archive
PDF: Valerie Jean on Terri Jewell
Alicia Banks: Honoring My Eternal Sistah
Dead Lesbian Poets: A Meditation in Six Parts — Lambda Literary
Collection: Terri L. Jewell papers | Archives and Manuscripts
Black Pasts: Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886-1954) •
TransGriot: Black Trans History: Lucy Hicks Anderson
Notable Kentucky African Americans Database (NKAA) Hicks, Lucy L.
