Publisher Lisa C. Moore lists most influential Black lesbian writers

I wouldn’t be the editor — or the person — I am today if I hadn’t read the work of these extraordinary women.

 --Lisa C. Moore, publisher, Redbone Press

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The Black Lesbian Writers You Need To Be Reading
by Lisa C. Moore, Buzzfeed LGBT, July 28, 2015

Silence will not protect you.

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking. 

― Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," Sister Outsider

Pamela Sneed at Dixon Place's HOT! Festival

Black lesbian poet Pamela Sneed begins her monologue, America Ain't Ready, beneath the projection of a famous photo portrait of Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde. You know the one: Lorde slightly lowering the professorial, thin-rimmed glasses from her eyes, her Black Mona Lisa smile pleasant enough until you realize that she's likely about to say something America Ain't Ready for.

Pamela Sneed in "America Ain't Ready" (photo by Lisa Guido)

Lorde's revered presence hovers over Sneed throughout this marathon performance, inspiring, instigating, protecting. And Sneed needs that strength right now because, as we learn, she's performing through a world of pain. Not emotional pain--which also could be the case, of course--but physical pain from complex, enormously costly dental problems. She is an artist without health insurance in an America that ain't ready for universal single payer health care any more than it's ready to compensate artists for the intense, dedicated and crucial work that they do.

Sneed begins by reminding us that Lorde insisted that "poetry is not a luxury." It's a necessity. She invites us to imagine a world without all of the arts and artists. Her itemization of our potential losses is staggering. Here, at Dixon Place, through strain and rage, she preaches to the choir, and you want to send her to Capitol Hill to put the fear of God in those supposedly God-fearing Republicans (and some Democrats, too). She's the woman for the job. And, while we're talking job--damn it--if you ever ask Sneed, or any artist, to do a job, be sure to pay her for it. 

America Ain't Ready, adapted from a book-length epic poem, diagnoses perhaps a few too many things that ail this society. However, Sneed's performance, as real as it can get, sears its way into your consciousness. Her aim: To wake up as many people as possible before it is too late to achieve the America in which she still believes. We all have work to do.

Hot! Festival 2011--Dixon Place's 20th Annual NYC Celebration of Queer Culture--continues through August 6 with a mix of "theater, dance, music, burlesques, performance art and homoeroticism for the whole family." Find out more and make ticket reservations here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map and directions)