Black Liberals, the Cold War Straight State, and the Politics of Ambivalence

Abstract:This essay recounts how two civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League—encountered and responded to antiqueer state practices and policies during the Cold War era. It draws upon my forthcoming monograph Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality after World War II (University of North Carolina Press), which contends that the modern civil rights movement and the white supremacist backlash to it were crucial arenas in which ideas about Blackness and homosexuality (often defined as same-sex intimacy and gender dissidence) were discursively linked. In this essay, I argue that Black liberals not only encountered politicized concepts of homosexuality, but that their responses, at times, were ambivalent and responsive to a heteronormative state that increasingly criminalized and penalized queer subjects. A work of Black feminist and queer history, this article contributes to a rich interdisciplinary literature that interrogates how anti-Black violence (interpersonal and structural) occurred in gendered and sexual realms with legacies that reverberate into the twenty-first century.