In honor of Black History Month, Georgia Equality was fortunate to interview historian Dr. Ashley Coleman Taylor. Dr. Coleman Taylor has worked on the oral history project, Atlanta as Black Queer Space, for several years.
The interview is conducted by Kermit Thomas, state outreach manager, denoted by “K,” and Dr. Coleman Taylor, “A,” and it explores race, space, identity, the ever-changing politics of the south, and more.
K: Could you introduce yourself and the project you’re working on?
A: I’m Ashley Coleman Taylor and I am an Atlanta native; my family has been in Atlanta since the 1970s. I am a professor of Religious Studies and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. My work is primarily about Black embodiment, Black gender, sexuality, and Africana religions. My work is situated in Puerto Rico and also Atlanta.
K: Can you tell us a little about your work in Puerto Rico and Atlanta?
A: Yeah, so in the Puerto Rico work, I look at religion as a tool of white supremacy, so I look at how it’s impacted Black and Indigenous embodiment in Puerto Rico. I particularly focus on Black women and how they use their bodies as tools of resistance; to resist racism, sexism, classism, and coloniality. My Atlanta work is an oral history project with Black LGBTQ elders, so I look at how they have used their bodies as tools in the fight for social justice as activists over decades.
K: That’s amazing. What struck your interest in doing that type of work?
A: Both projects kind of derive from who I am as a person, as a scholar, as a writer, as a scholar activist. So, I do have family history in Puerto Rico; my great grandmother was a Black Puerto Rican woman, hence my inspiration to write about Black Puerto Rican women. And then I am Black and gay and from Atlanta, so that of course inspired this work in Atlanta.
I’ll also add, I kind of inherited this project. It wasn’t initially my idea, but I am carrying forward the work of a good friend, Charles Stephens, who was starting to do some of this… but that is what continues to inspire me is my own history. Again, my family has been in Atlanta since the ‘70s; I consider myself a daughter of the city. My grandfather worked at Grady for decades as an OBGYN, my great uncle worked at what used to be Georgia Baptist– now the recently closed Atlanta Medical Center, my father was a city attorney in Atlanta in the ‘90s under Mayor Maynard Jackson. And I, of course, was born and raised and educated in Atlanta Public Schools and also married to an Atlanta native. So this is why my work emerges from my own histories and ancestries.
K: I love it. You said something that stood out to me, particularly about the Atlanta-based project that it’s an oral history project. Is there a reason why you chose to do an oral history project versus something written?
A: Yeah, humans are storytellers. We learn through stories, particularly people of African descent; our stories, our legacies, we inherit them through stories and through narrative. And narrative is one of the most powerful ways to educate, to tell people about oneself, to tell the history of a people, and to communicate the origins of a group of people. So, that’s one part. And the other part is that there are so many existing narratives about Blackness, about transness, about gayness, that are developed without our voices being in it. So it’s important for people to be able to tell their own stories.
K: That’s amazing and it kind of leads into our next question, because the project is Atlanta as a Black Queer Space. Recently and throughout history, there have been all these political challenges to LGBTQ spaces and Black spaces, specifically with education. How do you think projects like your’s– where there’s a specific focus on the history of queer folks and the history of Black folks– how do you think those kinds of projects can help combat that? Because in Atlanta, we don’t always see those histories as together; but how can a project like your’s that looks at those intersections help combat those political agendas?
A: Yeah, so I think there’s a few things going on here. One of them is that these stories are being written whether our voices are in them or not, and they have always been written whether our voices were in them or not. I collect early magazines–Jet Magazines, Ebony Magazines, I have a few Sepia’s and a few Hue’s– that depict Black queer and trans stories, so of course they weren’t called that at the time and the language is different, but it’s very clear that these are what those stories are. And oftentimes, they didn’t include their voices; it was just people writing about them. So, what we have to remember is that Black history and Black trans history and Black queer history are not separate. Black queer history and Black trans history is Black history. Even though people try to separate them out from the Black community, they’re still part of the same story and the same history.
Another thing is, I teach a class on Intro to LGBT Studies. What I always teach my students in that class every time I teach it is an article called “The Invention of Heterosexuality.” So, the term “heterosexual” did not exist until the term “homosexual” existed. It came out of the process of needing to etymologically differentiate between homosex and heterosex. So this article starts in the Victorian era and talks about the notion of “true men” and “true women” and what that meant. So sex is for procreation and any sex outside of that was considered a sin. So it goes from that era and through the 1980’s. But if you look at history, every time there are steps forward taken by a marginalized group, you have people of the majority group trying to take things back to ‘how things were in the past.’ We saw that with “Make America Great Again,” as if there’s a place to go back to. We had that in the 1920’s with the emergence of the ‘new sexuality’ and women being freer, showing more skin, there was a movement of people who wanted to go back. We’re seeing the exact same thing now; the advancements we’ve had in gender, sexuality, race, and at the intersections of all of these movements, we have, of course as it is in every generation, people–Conservatives– wanting to go back to how things were before.
So, there’s a few things at play here. One is that we can’t separate Black history from Black queer and trans history. Also that with every advancement, there is a group that tries to take us backwards, and that our stories have oftentimes been left out of these dominant narratives.
K: Yeah, I think that’s really useful. So, I’m actually from Columbus, Georgia, and one thing we knew about Atlanta growing up was that it was where the Black people were– the Black Mecca– and that it’s where the queer folks were. I would love to know your thoughts on how Atlanta became known for these two things, but that Black queerness and that intersection is not included in the breakdown of it being a queer city and a Black city.
A: Absolutely. So, Atlanta has, for generations, been that safe haven for people who want to escape the conservative confines of smaller towns. It’s always kind of been that place for people to come to to find themselves. And the term “Black Mecca” actually appeared for the first time in print in a 1971 issue of Ebony Magazine where Phyl (Phyllis) Garland coined the term and wrote about Atlanta as a Black Mecca. Really this is because, in the 1970’s we see this burgeoning Black population– and there was also actually a pretty large Black free population during Reconstruction and post-emancipation– so Atlanta has, for a long time, been a place where Black people come to for more opportunity. We know about the Civil Rights Movement and Atlanta being this place where Black people come to find themselves, to realize their dreams, and also to build business and build a career. Under Maynard Jackson’s first term as mayor, there was a move to have Atlanta be more accepting for gay people. Mayor Jackson labeled what he called a “Gay Pride Day,” which was actually to honor the people here in the city and let people know that Atlanta was committed to this kind of progressivism. There was some conservative backlash– as there often is– and so it became “Civil Liberties Day.” So, it’s a mixture of Atlanta being a place for people to come to escape this rural conservatism and that’s been the case for generations.
A little about why I wanted to do this project and why it’s about Atlanta as Black queer place… a lot of my work looks at place and space as being primary representations of how people form their worlds. We know so much historically about Atlanta being the Civil Rights Capitol and being this place where so much happens politically for Black people, and, again, a lot of those stories get erased. There are always these parallel and embedded stories of Black queer people in those legacies as well.
K: I would love to know what, if anything, in your research has surprised you.
A: Yeah, I do want to talk a little about my own story and my relationship to this project now versus when I first started. This is a project on memory, on ancestral legacies, on place and place-making… taking up space and finding community where it might not always be easily found. But I think the most important part is that this is a project on memory. So, I started this project in 2017, collecting all these histories. I actually has a bad fall in December of 2017 and that fall impacted my memory. So my relationship to this project has changed in many ways; one because I’m realizing the importance of memory and what happens when you lose it– and I don’t want these memories to get lost– and the other part is that my capacity to do the work has changed. My available brain capacity has changed, so I have not collected these stories in a while mostly because so many other things have happened and I am not able to divide myself in the same way that I was able to before I had this accident. So, what has surprised me most is how I am reminded of the importance of memory. You know, oral histories are a messy genre; people often remember differently than things happened, which is natural. I am reminded again and again of how important memory is in a project like this.
K: I think that’s really powerful. I was actually talking the other day in terms of my relationship with learning about queer Black history and how much it’s impacted the Civil Rights Movement and where we are now, and how much of that has been excluded and erased over time, to where we only talk about cisgender, straight folks. But there are so many people who were arrested and beaten and hurt in the process of gaining equal rights.
Would you mind giving an overview of how Black queer history in Atlanta has changed over time?
A: A lot of my oral histories begin around the late 1980’s; a lot of people talked about their own organizing in the late ‘80s, and what I noticed happened a lot more then that doesn’t happen as much now is the collaborative work between organizations. I’m seeing in the histories a lot more working together and working across organizations, that I don’t see as much now. People kind of operate as more individual entities a lot more. Another thing we have to acknowledge is that you didn’t have as much protection if you were out then. So, many of these meetings, gatherings, and events happened in private because people needed a safe place to be themselves, and it wasn’t safe to be yourself in front of coworkers or in front of family in the same way. So we have to acknowledge how these private moments and secrecy helped so many people develop who they were.
Another great example about Black queer space is Second Sundays. Second Sundays were an event for Black gay men in the 1990’s where they would have these brunches on the Second Sunday of the month, with upwards of 200 Black gay men gathering. And it actually took place in what is now Ponce City Market, so we can see in real time these histories of space and place being erased and superimposed onto them is Capitalism and consumerist enterprises. That’s a perfect example, and it’s another reason why this work is important; it reminds us of what was where and the histories of these spaces in this city.
There’s actually another component of the oral history project, a digital humanities component, where– one day– there will be a website for folks to navigate the map of where these histories took place. This is still in the works, but I’m still committed to making this accessible to the public as much as possible.
K: I appreciate that so much. I’m actually giddy right now, because this is what excites me. This type of history and the reality of where we are as people, what folks have been through and come through, the spaces they have created for themselves, how they continue to thrive in the midst of all of this stuff, and then putting in the effort to not forget that.
So, where can we send people to learn more about your work?
A: The LGBTQ Archives at Georgia State University, which is a part of the GSU Special Collections Library. The archives are available in-person by appointment only, but a limited digital archive is also available online with more still to come.
K: And where should we send folks to learn more about you specifically?
A: My book isn’t out yet, but in the meantime, search “Ashley Coleman Taylor” to find some YouTube videos and podcasts where I talk about the project.
Georgia Equality is grateful to Dr. Ashley Coleman Taylor for her important research and for taking the time to share her insights with our team.