The Gay Slave

I feel....of course there were.

 

Yea, the thought has also crossed my mind before. I assume it was just another struggle to add to the list. An internal one of course, since I highly doubt many of them were acting on them and getting it poppin 'round back' late at night..

 

See above

 

This is a topic that I always wondered about. If same gender loving partially, male slaves, existed cause Female sexual fluidity is more acceptable than males. .I know they prob did but because of the terrorizing situation the ancestors were under and lack of proof its hard to find. All the examples of black slave same sex include white folk abusing us

There is evidence of "gay" whites that existed under this time but they were free. I think Toni Morrison's book A Mercy has two white gay male characters in it. The book is based on early America. Maybe this would help in your character development.

 

I can't fully remember but I feel like there was a paragraph about this in a James Baldwin book I read. It was within a conversation the protagonist was having with his son.

 

Not much written narrative on slave to slave SGL that i know of, but it’s an established fact that both sexes of black slaves were sexually abused by masters, women obviously being the overwhelming majority. Usually the truth leaked out not in the official historical record (as Napoleon said, history gets written by the victors) but tawdry civil rights era books (“Mandingo”) and films (“Goodbye Uncle Tom”) that didn’t shy away from the issue even if polite society didn’t want to discuss it



You also have to remember taboo issues prior to the 20th Century were written in the most elliptical and obtuse way in western literature. Those who got the underlying meaning of a text got it, those who didn’t just kept on reading (like the many dirty jokes in Shakespeare plays or fart jokes in Johnathan Swift’s writings). I recall some vague language in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography that alludes to his possibly being raped or molested by a pedophile slavemaster. Also, with the influence of white Christianity, any pre-slavery African beliefs about sexuality, including African acceptance of SGL relationships in traditional belief systems (which existed despite hotep denials) were probably heavily repressed by slave and slavemaster alike.

@Jai you might want to do research on the subject as I don’t think it’s ever been seriously covered from a scholarly perspective. You might be able to get funding for such an endeavor!

 

Look at Professor @Rico in here educating the youth. I see you.

 

Check out the book Boy Wives and Female Husbands online....kinda answers these questions and we have discussed this book multiple times over the years.

 

I'm gonna check it out. Maybe it's just me but I don't recall ever hearing this mentioned.

 

I thought @Jai was looking specifically at issues involving American antebellum slavery, which is a pretty empty (or silent) record academically. That’s why I figured he could pioneer some research. You’re right about pre-slavery cultures. There’s a substantive record out there on pre-slavery same gender relationships in Africa, Asia, and indigenous Americans (“Indians”). Christianity and Islam particularly have fucked up the black and brown mind on history and traditional beliefs. Most of what what we get is through the eyes of European or Muslim writers who documented in a way that was written as “look at what these savages were doing until we came and cleaned them up.” (Religion: the universal colonizer force)

https://splinternews.com/the-surprising-history-of-gay-marriage-in-the-navajo-na-1793845543

On the other hand, you have to account for the fact that homosexuality is/was also used to slander strong, black figures under a white supremacist paradigm (e.g. was Shaka Zulu gay or just painted that way by white revisionists angry at his military successes; FBI COINTELPRO and MLK). And finally, instances where records, artifacts, and histories were outright wiped out, hidden, or destroyed to cover up inconvenient truths

Erotic Ceramics Reveal Dirty Little Secret

P.S.: Unabridged PDF complete copy of book cited by @OckyDub :
http://www.arcados.ch/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/MURRAY-ROSCOE-BOY-WIVES-FEMALE-HUSBANDS-98.pdf