Black Queer History

Queering Black Masculinity Onstage: The Drag of Lillyn Brown”, Idroma Montgomery 

This paper will explore the interwar career of Lillyn Brown, a black entertainer and male impersonator from Harlem. There will be a brief overview of Lillyn’s upbringing as a child performer in Victorian Atlanta, and how her childhood in an affluent black area influenced her drag for her entire career. The contradictions of Lillyn’s life will also be examined, including the mutability and continual shifting of her mixed racial heritage, the importance of minstrelsy in her development as a black performer, as well as how she navigated class and gender through a racialised lens on and off stage. 

Idroma Montgomery (she/they) is a PhD Gender and Sexuality student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis explores the lives, movements, and queer possibilities of black women in interwar Harlem and London.


“What is Black Trans/Queer British History? Reading Lesbians Talk in 1990s Britain”, Sue Lemos

Both Zachary I. Nataf’s Lesbians Talk: Transgender Politics (1995) and Valerie Mason-John’s and Ann Khambatta’s Lesbians Talk: Making Black Waves (1993) contended with separatist politics, namely lesbian separatism. This methodological focus on two pamphlets responds to a limited archive on Black trans social and political life in late twentieth century Britain. Drawing on Black Trans/Queer Studies, this paper explores writing history beyond fixed notions of identity. This frames Black Trans/Queer British History as an intellectual project that is not only concerned with establishing Black trans-queer presence. More broadly, it analyses the co-construction and historical contingencies of gender, sexuality, race and class. The pamphlets challenged the bioessentialism of the radical/revolutionary feminist position. Nataf described transgender and the ‘postmodern lesbian’ as fluid political categories. Some Black lesbians and lesbians of colour argued that they must always retain contact with the men in their communities to fight racism. On the other hand, ‘politically’ Black lesbian separatism offered an alternative politics of lesbian separatism.

Sue Lemos is an ESRC funded PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Using oral history and archival sources, their work seeks to illuminate the autonomous political and community organising of queer-trans Black people and people of colour in late twentieth century Britain. Their previous research on the London Black Lesbian and Gay Centre in the 1980s and 1990s was awarded the Warwick History MA Dissertation Prize and the Institute of Historical Research Olivette Otele Prize. Prior to their PhD studies, they volunteered for the Young Historians Project and the Haringey Vanguard.

- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.