'We've Been Here All Along' by R. Richard Wagner
Black History Month is, by extension, Black LGBTQ History Month. Yet finding the narrative of Milwaukee’s Black LGBTQ history to celebrate can be a daunting and frustrating task. There is simply little to find in the archived resources we have available. The primary sources of local LGBTQ history, R. Richard Wagner’s work on the subject, the University of Wisconsin LGBT Collections and the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project website, provide only sparse and incomplete snippets of that neglected narrative.
In We’ve Been Here All Along, the first of Wagner’s two volume history of LGBTQ Wisconsin, only a dozen or so of the 414-pages are dedicated to gay African Americans. What does appear is the unfortunate story of author and lecturer Joseph Howard Lee who professed to be an educated Malian, Ibn LoBagola. While on tour in 1933 lecturing about Africa, he was arrested in Kenosha on a charge of homosexuality, resulting in a trial, conviction and a sentence served in the Waupun Correctional Institution.
Wagner also includes an account of the colorful life of Ted Pierce, an out (relatively for the period) gay man who, beginning in 1925, served as executive messenger under three Wisconsin governors. The toast of intellectual circles in the Madison-Milwaukee-Chicago triangle, Pierce networked a coterie of like-minded Black and white artists, writers and politicians. However, the story of early 20th century Milwaukee transman, Ralph Kerwineo, the subject of a play recently premièred at Inspiration Studios, receives no mention at all. In Wagner’s second volume, Coming Out, Moving Forward, there is considerable coverage of Milwaukee state representative and civil rights activist Lloyd Barbee. His pre-Stonewall era efforts in decriminalizing homosexuality and achieving LGBTQ rights in Wisconsin have been otherwise largely overshadowed by his successors who take credit for the nation’s first LGBT antidiscrimination law passed in 1982.
Out of the Archives
'Coming Out, Moving Forward' by R. Richard Wagner
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee LGBT Collections in the Golda Meier Library holds a limited range of archived material relevant to Black LGBTQ History. There are, for example, documents from the Black & White Men Together archive. Most compelling are the interviews with activist couple Brenda Coley and Sandra Jones and Lula Riems. Recorded in 2007 as part of the Oral History Interviews of the Milwaukee LGBT History Project series, they are perhaps the only such records of Milwaukee’s Black LGBTQ life in the era of the city’s post-Stonewall activism.
The conversation with Coley and Jones focuses on marriage equality (Wisconsin’s 2006 Marriage Amendment referendum had just banned same-sex marriage) and the Black LGBTQ experience. A second interview is with Lula Riems. Her story mentions the racism and discrimination she experienced and describes her coming out in a white world. Interestingly, Riems’ interview ends with a passing mention of her co-founding of the women’s group Lesbians of Color (LOC). Among other activities Riems notes, LOC members played sports, held dances and celebrated Martin Luther King Jr Day. Yet beyond Riems’ brief mention, I could find no other reference that cited the group in the UWM collection. A passing mention of LOC on a Wisconsin LGBT History Project website’s description of a Black owned bar only confirmed the organization’s existence in 1993.
Created in 2005, the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project website remains the most comprehensive resource in its coverage of local bar lore (including the drag and leather scenes as well as pageant history), organizations, and community personalities. However, it does not specifically address Black history. Its list of over 200 important individuals contains few people of color. Drawn in part from my 2016 interview with its then executive director Gerry Coon, a description of Diverse and Resilient—the city’s health and capacity building organization founded in 1995 to serve people of color—was only added in 2021.
These collective sins of omission are easy enough to explain. It’s Milwaukee, after all, and our implicit racist history, as subliminally as it may manifest itself, permeates all aspects city life, including its LGBTQ community. The reality is the curators of our history are almost exclusively white, cis-males. While their work may not be tainted by any specific motivations of exclusion, they are also not particularly conscious of inclusion.
There is also the matter of LGBTQ acceptance in the Black community itself. That has impeded activism (but also highlights the historically courageous role played by Lloyd Barbee). And, while there were many newsletters, magazines and newspapers chronicling LGBTQ life dating back to 1971, none specifically served a Black audience. More recent decades have produced high profile expressions of Milwaukee’s Black LGBTQ culture and activism. Yet many, if not most, remain nearly anonymous in the grander scheme of our historical record.
Admittedly, the subject of any history is far too broad to expect comprehensive coverage of every aspect of it by a limited contingent of formal and informal historians. Still, the narrative of Milwaukee’s Black LGBTQ experience warrants comprehensive study and an archive of its own. The rich dynamics of that history span the early political and social awakenings of the civil rights era, the impact of HIV/AIDS, the House culture, drag, transgender issues, the arts, and all the rest. There is also much to learn from it not only for the Black members of our LGBTQ community but, as importantly, if not more so, for all of us.
