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A compendium of queer people in the 19th and 20th centuries // Drawn and written by Michele Rosenthal

Audre  Lorde

Audre Lorde 1934to –1992

American poet, author, feminist, and self-described “warrior.” She was born to Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, was so nearsighted that she was legally blind, and began to read and write almost as soon as she could talk. As a child, she communicated through the many poems that she had memorized, and when those poems weren’t sufficient, she began writing her own. She was the first black student admitted at her gifted high school, and published a poem in Seventeen magazine when she herself was 17. In 1954, she spent a formative year in Mexico before returning to New York City to earn her master’s and work as a librarian. Lorde became involved in a number of communities where she never quite fit in. She stood out as a black woman among white feminists who didn’t want to acknowledge racism, and as a lesbian within the civil rights movement. Even in the Greenwich Village lesbian scene, she stood out for not subscribing to the ubiquitous butch-femme dichotomy. In 1962, Lorde married a white gay man and had two children. The marriage ended six years later when she met her longtime partner, Frances Clayton. Around that time she released her first book of poetry, and in 1976 she published Coal, the poetry collection that brought her to prominence. It explored her intersecting identities as a black lesbian feminist, and the injustices experienced when one was triply invisible, themes she would explore throughout her career. In 1978, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy, an experience she chronicled in her 1980 book The Cancer Journals, and which led her to advocate for the disabled community. In 1982, she wrote Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a “biomythography,” as she called it, about her youth and sexual awakening. And in 1984 she published Sister Outsider, which included her seminal essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in which she urged white feminists to confront racism and other related forms of oppression and to celebrate differences rather than tolerate them. Her insistence that her race, gender, sexuality, health, and motherhood were all unique but intertwined identities was an important contribution to what is today called intersectional feminism. She began to travel widely, and made a huge impact on the Afro-German movement in Berlin. In 1988, her relationship with Clayton had ended, and she began a new relationship with the feminist Dr. Gloria Joseph on the island of St. Croix. She became the New York State Poet Laureate in 1991, and died the following year, after a long on-and-off battle with cancer.

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