ABSTRACT
The contributions of black queer artists and intellectuals have been historically relegated to the margins, despite their significant presence at the forefront of African American cultural, artistic and intellectual life. Black queer artists in the twenty-first century share this attitude in their open embrace of Civil Rights and Black Power era political commitments and aesthetics, while simultaneously foregrounding queer themes and desires. Gershun Avilez's radical approach to the polarizing history of Black Nationalism is reflective of the post–Civil Rights generation’s desires to resist multicultural era critiques that sought to distance themselves from Black Nationalist rhetoric and its apparent heterosexist and homophobic tendencies. The ethics of multiculturalism during the identity debates of the 1980s–1990s were, in many respects, responsible for seemingly progressive efforts aimed at granting recognition to marginalized groups, but these efforts inadvertently required that these underrepresented constituencies perform particularized and reductive embodiments of difference.
