The first time my mother asked me if I was a lesbian was in reference to my best friend. We had been tethered since we were ten and loved long in ways that, perhaps, suggested a rainbow. Something like sisters. Before we left our hometown, we buried diaries together in the ceiling tiles of our middle school bathroom. This, our identical impulse to be found, to be remembered. In Fragment 147, Sappho promises: “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time.” Even in another time, it was clear to my mother that there was something queer about the way I loved, and was loved, and all she could call it was lesbian, my second baptism, my second name.
This conflation and connection between Black girls (gender expansive), friendship, and queerness became my fixation. Not only was I enamored with my femme friends and the intimate inner workings of our friendships, but I was also curious about what made our connections so distinct—something that felt languageless until confronted by language. In my teenage years, I obsessed over figments of queer Black femme friendships: a famous series of photographs of the superstar Aaliyah and her best friend Kidada Jones; the relationships represented on the popular 2000s TV show Girlfriends (and the consistent references to queerness); the frenemy-ship between Monica and Sidra in Love and Basketball (2001). To this day, I get giddy about things like Meg the Stallion’s bisexual anthem “Best Friend” and the recently released film One of Them Days starring Keke Palmer and SZA.
When I watched Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1996) for the first time in undergrad, I was enthralled by how the opening scene of a straight wedding was visually pierced by the presence of two Black lesbian best friends, Cheryl (played by Dunye) and Tamara. It automatically ruptured the meanings and manifestations of love; that love, too, was two dykes working together, fumbling in a funnily frustrating way that only friends can. While the film focuses on Cheryl’s quest to recover the fictional life story of a Black lesbian actress from the 1940s, Tamara and Cheryl’s dynamic friendship filled a gap for me and for the whole of cinema.
As I worked on my debut poetry collection Dead Girl Cameo (One World), I was fascinated by how many of the artists and poets I studied had notable friendships that transversed and transgressed traditional platonic formations. They had loved other girls in ways that felt familiar to me and celebrated other women in ways that countered the capitalistic warfare of the music and publishing industry. The original girl’s girls. Some were lucky to live their lives as openly queer people (though certainly not without social and material consequence) and their living has been instructive for me. Some were speculated sapphic throughout their careers and posthumously. Always, there was a sense of knowing between us; a cosmic queerness that traverses time and space.
Here are the books about queer Black friendship that I revisit again and again.
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Sula by Toni Morrison
Sula was the first Toni Morrison novel I ever read, so it’s no wonder my poetic preoccupations revolve around Black girls and their friendships. How deeply impacted and instructed I feel by the intimate relationship cultivated between Nel Wright and Sula Peace during their youthful girlhoods in 1922, and how compelled I feel by Barbara Smith’s argument that Sula “works as a lesbian novel” in her 1970 essay “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism.” There is an inherent queerness (both socially and erotically) between Sula and Nel, which only Morrison can make palpable through her magical prose. Sula, “in whose presence [Nel forever] felt clever, gentle, and a little raunchy.” Yes, all the key ingredients to a queer Black friendship, indeed.
Good Dress by Brittany Rogers
“Everybody here Black and in love” Brittany Rogers writes at the center of her poem “Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink.” The penultimate piece in her audacious and brilliant debut Good Dress, “Throwback Night” anchors one of the collection’s central theses on the beauty and balm of intimate friendships. In this poem, after a summer sunset, two Black girl best friends delight in one another’s laughter and love as they spin around a skating rink, embodying a freedom and light only they can reflect to one another. In another poem, the same Love tends to her postpartum, parting and oiling her scalp. There Rogers asks, “What has a lover seen that you have not?” Throughout Good Dress, Rogers explores the way Black girls queer the meaning and the doing of friendship, transgressing rigid heteronormative notions of these kinds of connections.
Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker (1974-1989) edited by Julie R. Enszer
It seems that whenever a friend of mine is reading or rereading Sister Love, they reach out to me, sometimes to share a passage, sometimes just to share a passing thought. This almost always compels me to return to this collection of letters between these two prolific Black lesbian feminist poets, who quip and quirk and question and quest with one another for love and for life throughout their beautiful friendship. A gift to those of us who delight in gossip, poetry, and all things related to Black lesbian literature.
A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston by Robyn Crawford
The perfect merge of memoir, music history, and the magnanimity of queer Black friendships, Robyn Crawford’s A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston is a treasure for fans like me. Overcoming her personal and professional hesitancies to share their story, Crawford addresses the expansiveness of hers and Houston’s relationship with vulnerability and care, reanimating a decades-long connection that consumed the tabloids with curiosities about Whitney’s sexuality. Crawford delivers a tender ode to her ever-lasting and intimate friendship with one of the world’s brightest, most accomplished superstars in this memoir that makes me cry while singing along with some of Robyn’s favorite recounted Whitney performances.
Homie by Danez Smith
What else can I say about a collection of poems called Homie (though truly titled my nig, per the note at the top of the book), written by Danez Smith who always expertly interweaves Blackness, queerness, and the intimacy and power of friendship in an ever-catastrophic world? Ashia Ajani describes Homie as “a love letter to Black queer friendship,” and I couldn’t agree more—Homie is complete with all the complexities that come with intentional queer Black kinship, including intimacy, illness, beauty, grief, delight, violence, joy, and deep love.
Bonus: Pose
While Pose is not a book, this 3-season television drama series is a stunning visual and historical representation of queer Black femme friendships in 1980s/1990s New York City. A constant rewatch for me, I couldn’t complete this list without shouting out this show!
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Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Song in Poems by m. mick powell is available from One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.