For the third instalment in our LGBT+ History Month series is poet and civil rights pioneer Audre Lorde. 

There are many activists who have marched before us, using their voices and platform to amplify and support Equal Rights Movements across the world. One of those voices is Audre Lorde – self-described as ‘black, warrior, lesbian, mother, poet’, Audre was an integral part of shaping feminist, womanist and lesbian culture throughout the twentieth century.

Audre was born in 1934 in Harlem, New York, to two immigrant parents. At the age of four,  she learned to talk, read, and write. She wrote her first poem aged 13 and by the time she graduated high school, had already been published in Seventeen Magazine. While in college, Lorde came out as a lesbian (about 15 years before the Stonewall Riots) and was very active within gay culture in and around Greenwich Village. As an author, she wrote about intersectionality between gender identity, sexual orientation and race. Raising your voice against oppression and about radical self-visibility for any population facing discrimination or marginalisation.

Audre graduated from Hunter College and went on to further education at Columbia University, getting a master’s degree in library science in 1961. At this time she worked as a public librarian in Mount Vernon, New York. 

She went on to have two children with her husband, Edwin Rollins before they divorced in 1970. In 1972, Audre met her long-time partner, Frances Clayton. It was around this time that she also began teaching as writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College, contributing to critical race studies, feminist and queer theory intertwined with her own personal experience. These encounters with teaching as well as her place as a black lesbian woman in white academia went on to shape her life and work. Audre led workshops with her students, many who were eager to discuss the civil rights issues of that time. Through interactions with her students, she reaffirmed her desire not only to live out her ‘crazy queer’ identity, but also to devote herself to being a poet.

Audre focused on using her art to discuss not just the differences between groups of women but between conflicting individuals too. She stated “I am defined as other in every group I’m part of. The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression.” 

Describing herself as part of the continuum of women and a concert of voices within herself. Audre’s conception of the many layers to her selfhood is replicated throughout the multi-genres of her work. Her refusal to be placed in a particular category, whether social or literary, was a characteristic of the determination she held to come across as an individual rather than a stereotype which existed around black, gay women at the time.

In 1984, Audre started a visiting professorship in West Berlin at the Free University of Berlin. During her time in Germany, She became an influential part of the growing ‘Afro-German’ movement, creating the phrase with a group of fellow black women activists in Berlin. Instead of fighting systemic issues through violence, Audre believed language was a powerful form of resistance and encouraged the women of Germany to speak up as their form of fighting back. Her impact on Germany reached more than just Afro-German women; Audre helped increase awareness of intersectionality across racial and ethnic lines.

Audre and fellow writers Cherríe Moraga and Barbara Smith went on to found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was dedicated to furthering the writings of black feminists. Audre also became increasingly concerned over the treatment of black women in South Africa under apartheid. She created Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa and remained an active voice on behalf of these women throughout the remainder of her life. Audre addressed her concerns to not only the United States but the world, encouraging a celebration of the differences that society instead used as tools of isolation. As Allison Kimmich wrote “Throughout all of Audre Lorde’s writing, both nonfiction and fiction, a single theme surfaces repeatedly. The black lesbian feminist poet activist reminds her readers that they ignore differences among people at their peril … Instead, Lorde suggests, differences in race or class must serve as a ‘reason for celebration and growth.’”

Concerned with modern society’s tendency to put people into groups, Audre fought the marginalisation of such categories as “lesbian” and “black woman.” She was central to many liberation movements and activist circles, including second-wave feminism, civil rights and black cultural movements, as well as struggles for LGBTQ equality. In particular, Lorde’s poetry is known for the power of its call for social and racial justice, as well as its depictions of queer experience and sexuality. 

Audre Lorde is a feminist and LGBTQ+ hero whose life’s work inspired courage, visibility, and the confrontation of injustices. In a time where society was significantly less accepting of the LGBTQ+ community, Audre was unapologetic about who she was. Through her art she left behind work that will stand the test of time, becoming an artefact of herself and all she went through.

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” – Audre Lorde

Further reading and viewing on Audre Lorde

• Sister Outsider (Book)
• The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (Book)
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Book)
• The Cancer Journals (Book)
• The Black Unicorn: Poems (Book) 
• Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 (Documentary)
• A Litany For Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde (Documentary)
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