Queer Ancestor Spotlight: Audre Lorde

Queer Ancestor Spotlight
Written By White Rose Witching

Audre Geraldine Lorde was an American writer, feminist, and civil rights activist. She used her creative spirit to address the injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and disability. Given her personal identities her poems and prose also dealt largely with the exploration of black female identity. Lorde became a powerful force in the academic world with her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House.” She is also remembered for her speech at the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

Audre Lorde. Photo by Elsa Dorfman.

Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934 to Caribbean immigrant parents in New York City. She was raised Catholic and attended parochial schools. She attended Hunter College High School which was a school for intellectually gifted students and graduated in 1951. While at Hunter she published her first poem in Seventeen magazine after it was declined by her school’s journal for being inappropriate.

In 1954, Lorde spent a year as a student at the National University of Mexico. During this time she embraced her identities as both a lesbian and a poet. Following this she attended Hunter College in New York and graduated in 1959. She later graduated from Columbia University in 1961 with a master’s in library science. During this time in New York she became an active participant in the burgeoning gay culture of Greenwich Village.

In 1968 Lorde became a writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Working with young, black undergraduate students reaffirmed her desire to live out her “crazy and queer” identity and also deepened her involvement with civil rights. Beginning in 1972 she moved to Staten Island where she would live for over a decade. During this time she founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga. It was the first U.S. publisher for women of color.

In 1984, Lorde became a visiting professor in West Berlin at the Free University of Berlin. She helped coin the term “Afro-German” and became an influential part of that movement and helped start the Black movement in Germany. Her belief in the power of language as a form of resistance encouraged women in Germany to speak up, and she helped increase the awareness of intersectionality across racial and ethnic lines not just in Germany but across the globe. This work was the subject of a 2012 documentary by Dagmar Schultz, the lecturer who invited Lorde to become a visiting professor, called Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992 which became the winner of several awards including Winner of the Best Documentary Audience Award 2014 at the 15th Reelout Queer Film + Video Festival, the Gold Award for Best Documentary at the International Film Festival for Women, Social Issues, and Zero Discrimination, and the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Barcelona International LGBT Film Festival.

Lorde published Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches in 1984. This collection asserted the need of communicating the experiences of marginalized groups in order to bring visibility to their struggles in a society which seeks to ignore them. She argued that different groups of marginalized people should find common ground in their lived experiences, while respecting the differences they face, and use it as a source of strength for social change. This collection also includes what is considered her most famous essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” This essay questions the ability for change while placing the burden on marginalized groups to educate their oppressors. She argues this dynamic is a tool of oppression, keeping the oppressed occupied with the concerns of those in power. It concludes that real change cannot come through working within the systems that create oppression in the first place.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

— Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Lorde’s poetry focused on her conception of her many layers of selfhood. "I am defined as other in every group I'm part of," she declared. During the 1960’s her poetry was featured regularly in several international anthologies and US-based publications, including Langston Hughes’ 1962 New Negro Poets. Her work was also reflective of her activity in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements of the time. Despite numerous publications preceding it, her release of Coal in 1976 is considered the work that established her as an influential voice in the Black Arts Movement and introduced her to a wider audience. Her poetry became more personal as she grew older and more expressive in her sexuality. In Sister Outsider she states:

"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought... As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas."

Lorde’s personal life mirrors her journey of self-acceptance. In 1962 she married Edwin Rollins, a white, gay man. They would have two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan, but divorced in 1970. While at Tougaloo College she met Frances Clayton, a white lesbian and professor of psychology who was her romantic partner until 1989. She was briefly romantically involved with the sculptor and painter Mildred Thompson after they met at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Nigeria. They were romantically linked while Thompson lived in Washington, D.C. Her life partner was black feminist Dr. Gloria Joseph. The two lived together in St. Croix. They founded several organizations including Che Lumumba School for Truth, Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, and Doc Loc Apiary.

Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and underwent a mastectomy. Years later she found out the cancer had metastasized in her liver. Following her first diagnosis she wrote The Cancer Journals which won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award in 1981. From 1991 until her death she was the New York State Poet laureate.

Audre Lorde died of breast cancer at the age of 58 on November 17, 1992 in St. Croix. She was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea. In an African naming ceremony before her death she took the name Gamba Adisa which means “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known.” Lorde left a monumental legacy. Some examples include:

  • The Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. An organization in New York City partly named for Audre Lorde dedicated to providing medical health care to the city’s LGBT population without regard to ability to pay.

  • The Audre Lorde Project. Founded in 1994, this is a Brooklyn-based organization for LGBT people of color. This organization focuses on community organizing and radical nonviolent activism around progressive issues.

  • In June 2019 she was one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City’s Stonewall Inn, the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history.

  • The Audre Lorde Award is an annual literary award first presented in 2001 by Publishing Triangle to honor works of lesbian poetry.

White Rose Witching
Previous

Personal: Writing A Personal Code Of Ethics
Next

Personal: Reflections from the Red Dragon Feast