ABSTRACT
Focussing on two collections by black British queer poets, Labi Siffre’s Nigger (1993) and Dean Atta’s I am Nobody’s Nigger (2013), this chapter describes how their work thematises an inextricable connection between sex and style to express an uninhibited blackness and queerness. Refusing shame, blame, and secrecy, the poets and the personas they create delight in real and virtual sexual experiences and simultaneously offer a critique of racism, sexism, and misogyny within hetero- and homosexual relationships. This chapter argues that, although they are separated by two decades and marked by varied generational experiences, Siffre’s and Atta’s works present a poetics of intersectionality that keeps alive the potentiality of queerness as a politics of inclusion.
