UNERASING LGBTQ HISTORY AND IDENTITIES PODCAST SEASON 9 EPISODE 2

2 Sep 2026

Published September 1st, 2026

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This podcast is funded by the New York City Council. It was developed by History UnErased and produced and edited by Dinah Mack; Kathleen Barker; and Deb Fowler.

TRANSCRIPT

Deb Fowler: Hello, and welcome to UnErasing LGBTQ History and Identities: A Podcast. I’m Deb Fowler, co-founder of History UnErased.

Audre Lorde came of age during the Jim Crow era and the Harlem Renaissance, and her life spanned some of the most significant social and political movements of the twentieth century. She was not an observer of these movements, but an active participant. At times, people who were engaged in these movements expected her to remain silent about the parts of her identity that made them uncomfortable, but she wasn’t silent. She was a Black woman, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, a lesbian, and a mother. She was also a librarian and a poet.

If you search for images of Audre Lorde, most likely the first picture you see is of her standing solidly next to a movable chalkboard with a water fountain in the background. Clearly written in chalk are the words “Women are powerful and dangerous.” Indeed - Take it away, Kathleen!

Kathleen Barker: Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in Harlem in 1934, a time when the city was undergoing enormous cultural and political change. Shaped by both the Harlem Renaissance and Great Depression, not to mention segregation, immigration, and labor politics, Lorde observed and absorbed the struggles she saw happening around her. As a young child, she connected with another trailblazer, Augusta Baker, the children’s librarian at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now Countee Cullen Branch). Baker made it her mission to collect titles with positive depictions of Black children and families, and help her colleagues do the same. She also helped a young Audre Lorde learn how to read!

As Lorde recalled later in her autobiography, Zami:

“I learned how to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children’s librarian at the old 135th Street branch library… If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read, and that that could get me through.”

Lorde started writing poetry at 12 or 13 when she couldn’t find poems that expressed how she was feeling. She believed that poetry could create language where language was missing. For her, poetry was a way of thinking. Her first professional publication was a poem called “Spring,” which appeared in Seventeen magazine in 1951, the same year she graduated from Hunter High School. Her English teacher had rejected the poem for an assignment, so she submitted it to the magazine instead!

After high school, Lorde attended Hunter College, where she found like-minded friends and colleagues interested in issues of equality and social justice. She even joined the Rosenberg defense committee. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were an American married couple who became central figures in one of the most controversial espionage cases of the Cold War. In 1950, they were arrested and accused of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Both maintained their innocence, but they were convicted in 1951 and sentenced to death. Despite international protests and appeals for clemency, the Rosenbergs were executed in June 1953. Their trial and execution became a powerful symbol of the political tensions and anti-communist fears of the McCarthy era, and their case deeply affected many activists, including the young Audre Lorde.

At the same time, Lorde was feeling unseen and unhappy. She attended poetry workshops offered by the Harlem Writers Guild, but she felt that some African American members scorned her sexuality and her unconventional perspectives on the world. Even some of her allegedly progressive friends were not so open-minded when it came to Lorde’s lesbianism. Perhaps the final straw was the death of her father from a stroke in 1953. Seeking distance from the intense political climate and anti-communist atmosphere of the McCarthy era, Lorde traveled to Mexico. There, she experienced a temporary sense of freedom and belonging among American expatriates, including other lesbians, and found that her appearance allowed her to navigate racial identity in ways that felt different from her experiences in the United States. For perhaps the first time, she felt a stronger sense of belonging and community. When she returned to New York in 1954, she brought with her a renewed sense of self.

Lorde graduated from Hunter College in 1959, and decided to follow in Augusta Baker’s footsteps. She earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University in 1961, and worked as a librarian in New York City public libraries and public schools in the 1960s. In 1962, she married Edwin Rollins, a white, gay man. Together they had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan, before divorcing in 1970.

Lorde was a prolific writer, and over time, her writings focused more and more on themes of identity, sexism, and racism, reflecting her involvement in the civil rights, antiwar, and women’s liberation movements. Her first published collections of poetry include The First Cities, in 1968, and Cables to Rage, published in 1970, which included “Martha,” a poem that explicitly acknowledged her lesbianism. In 1972, Lorde published From a Land Where Other People Live, which was nominated for a National Book Award.

Lorde's poetry is deeply political, but it rarely reads like a political speech. Instead, she writes about ordinary emotions and experiences. Readers will find poems about fear, anger, desire, memory, childhood, violence, love, sexuality, and death. And beneath those subjects is a persistent question: what happens when private experience collides with public power? One heartbreaking example is the poem "Power." The piece was inspired by the 1973 death of ten-year-old Clifford Glover, a Black child, at the hands of a white New York city police officer, Thomas Shea, in April 1973. A few months after the incident Shea was acquitted of murder by a jury. For Lorde, the verdict was not simply another news story, but another example of injustice that incited feelings of rage and grief. Lorde transformed those feelings into poetry.

Here is a Lorde reading an excerpt from “Power” in an undated clip from the Lesbian Nation show on WBAI radio:

“A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens

stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood

and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and

there are tapes to prove that. At his trial

this policeman said in his own defense

“I didn't notice the size nor nothing else

only the color”. And

there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37-year-old white man

with 13 years of police forcing

was set free

by eleven white men who said they were satisfied

justice had been done

and one Black Woman who said

“They convinced me” meaning

they had dragged her 4'10'' black Woman's frame

over the hot coals

of four centuries of white male approval

until she let go

of the first real power she ever had

and lined her own womb with cement

to make a graveyard for our children.”

KB: Historical records can tell us that a child was killed, they can tell us the name of the officer, and they can tell us what happened in court. But Lorde's poem tells us something different. It gives us access to the emotional and moral consequences of the event. Her poetry therefore becomes a kind of historical evidence. Not a replacement for newspapers, court records, or testimony, but evidence of how a particular Black woman experienced the racial politics of her time.

Lorde stood up for injustice as a part of social movements, as well as for justice within these movements. She recognized that marginalized communities can often reproduce hierarchies within their own networks. Published in 1973, the poem "Who Said It Was Simple," confronts the tensions within the women's movement. It captures a problem that Black women had faced for decades: fighting sexism without fully confronting racism.

“There are so many roots to the tree of anger

that sometimes the branches shatter

before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks

the women rally before they march

discussing the problematic girls

they hire to make them free.

An almost white counterman passes

a waiting brother to serve them first

and the ladies neither notice nor reject

the slighter pleasures of their slavery.

But I who am bound by my mirror

as well as my bed

see causes in colour

as well as sex

and sit here wondering

which me will survive

all these liberations.”

KB: The speaker is sitting in a restaurant (Nedicks), surrounded by women discussing women's liberation, but the speaker recognizes that the experiences of Black women cannot simply be folded into a universal category called "women." Lorde understood that liberation couldn't be divided so neatly. The struggles were connected because people were connected.

After the publication of First Cities in 1962, Lorde was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and she became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College, a historically Black college in Mississippi. It was there she met Frances Clayton, a professor of psychology, who would become her partner. Lorde’s work is well known for its authentic portrayal of queer sexuality and experience. Audre Lorde was not simply a writer who happened to be lesbian. Her sexuality was central to her understanding of herself, her politics, and her poetry.

In 1973, she publicly came out by reading “Love Poem,” at a public poetry reading. The work had been deleted from her third book, in part because of pronouns. Her editor at Broadside Press was worried that the use of feminine pronouns might confuse readers. At least, that was the official rationale. The work did eventually make it into her fourth book in 1974, New York Head Shop and Museum (the final book she would publish with Broadside Press).

In this excerpt, Lorde maps the topography of the earth directly onto the anatomy of a woman. Here is one short excerpt from “Love Poem.”

Jocardo Ralston as Audre Lorde:

“Speak earth and bless me with what is richest

make sky flow honey out of my hips

rigid mountains

spread over a valley

carved out by the mouth of rain.”

KB: Lorde’s writing connected sexuality to power. For a Black lesbian woman, racism and homophobia were not separate or competing political concerns, they were interconnected aspects of her lived experience. Lorde’s response was not simply to critique these exclusions, but to help create spaces where women of color could define and represent their own experiences. That commitment led to the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1981. Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Donna McBride, and Barbara Smith helped establish the press as an important publishing project devoted to work by Black feminists and other women of color. Kitchen Table emerged in response to the ways mainstream publishers and feminist organizations often overlooked or marginalized these voices. Kitchen Table published groundbreaking work by its founders and helped bring Black feminist, Latina, lesbian, and other women-of-color perspectives to a wider audience. Although its publishing activity was relatively small, Kitchen Table had a lasting influence on feminist literature, demonstrating how marginalized communities could create their own institutions when established ones failed to represent them.

For Lorde, poetry was not only a form of personal expression, it was a way to explore history, ancestry, and identity. This became especially evident as she sought to reconnect with African traditions and understand how they shaped her identity as a Black woman. In 1978, Lorde published The Black Unicorn, a collection of poems deeply influenced by her explorations of African history, spirituality, and ancestral traditions. The collection was shaped in part by a 1974 trip that Lorde took to Dahomey (now Benin), Ghana, and Togo with her children and Frances Clayton. That journey gave her a new way to think about ancestry as both a connection to the past and as a source of power and identity in the present. Throughout The Black Unicorn, Lorde draws on African mythology, women’s spirituality, motherhood, sexuality, and Black identity. The poems reclaim figures and traditions that had often been distorted or erased by colonialism, while also exploring the complicated relationship between contemporary Black women and their ancestral past. The unicorn itself becomes a powerful symbol of something rare, fierce, and difficult to contain.

JR as Audre Lorde:

“The black unicorn is greedy.

The black unicorn is impatient.

'The black unicorn was mistaken

for a shadow or symbol

and taken

through a cold country

where mist painted mockeries

of my fury.

It is not on her lap where the horn rests

but deep in her moonpit

growing.

The black unicorn is restless

the black unicorn is unrelenting

the black unicorn is not

free.”

KB: That exploration of ancestry and identity continued in Lorde’s prose, where she turned toward her own life as a source of historical and political insight. Rather than separating the personal from the political, Lorde used her own memories and relationships to examine the broader experiences of Black women and lesbians. A fantastic example of this approach is her 1982 book, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. She called the book a "biomythography," a combination of biography, mythology, and memory. It is an unconventional autobiography because Lorde wasn't interested in presenting her life as a simple sequence of facts. Instead, she reconstructed a life through memory, relationships, stories, and imagination. Zami traces Lorde's life and relationships while exploring themes like Black womanhood, lesbian identity, family, migration, friendship, and sexuality. The work offers readers an opportunity to study the history of queer communities without reducing that history to famous people or events.

In 1984, Lorde published Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches that became one of her most influential books. An impressive statement given her outstanding body of work! The collection includes pieces that explore ideas about race, feminism, sexuality, difference, poetry, and political organizing. The collection includes her canonical essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” which she prepared as comments for a panel session at the Second Sex Conference in New York in September 1979. In her remarks, she called on feminists to acknowledge the many differences among women and to use them as a source of power rather than one of division. She also called out the very fabric of the conference, and its lack of representation and diversity.

She closed her remarks with this powerful message:

JR as Audre Lorde: Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that Terror and Loathing of any difference that lives there. see whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

KB: Another potent essay is "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference," a paper first delivered at Amherst College in 1980. Here Lorde rejects the idea that political solidarity requires people to pretend their differences don't exist. She argues that “there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex." That sentence captures an important aspect of her thinking. Difference isn't necessarily the enemy of solidarity. Sometimes pretending differences don't exist is what prevents genuine solidarity.

In her essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde asks us to consider why speaking can be so difficult, and sometimes very dangerous. She writes about the fear of being misunderstood, rejected, or punished, but she also asks what happens when silence becomes more than a personal choice: What happens when it helps protect an oppressive system? For much of LGBTQ history, silence could be a genuine survival strategy. During the Lavender Scare, for example, being open about one’s sexuality could mean losing a job, a security clearance, or even a home and community. Lorde understood that silence could protect us, but she also recognized its costs. As she wrote, “My silences had not protected me.” When people are taught to hide parts of themselves, silence can become isolating. But when people begin finding language for experiences they have been taught to keep hidden, and begin sharing that language with others, something changes. Lorde’s point is not that everyone must speak publicly or reveal everything about themselves. Rather, she asks us to recognize the political power of finding words for what has been silenced, and of turning those words into connection, understanding, and action.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Sister Outsider is filled with Lorde’s honesty and brilliance, offering readers a powerful framework for thinking about power, silence, and solidarity.

Lorde's political work also emerged from an intensely personal experience: cancer. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977 and underwent a mastectomy. As a Black lesbian, she found her medical adventures extremely isolating. There were no publications or support groups that could help her process her experiences through the lenses of race or sexuality. In The Cancer Journals, published in 1980, she wrote about illness, medical institutions, the pressure to hide physical differences, and the experiences of women living with breast cancer. The book won the American Library Association’s Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award in 1981, and became a classic work of illness narrative. This is another moment where Lorde refused to separate the personal from the political. She challenged the expectation that women should conceal the evidence of illness. Visibility, difference, silence, power, identity, and the body: these are all connected in Lorde’s thinking. Her writing about cancer also brought her face-to-face with mortality, and her work became increasingly focused on survival as an active political and communal practice.

Audre Lorde’s activism extended well beyond the United States, reflecting her belief that struggles over race, gender, sexuality, and power were deeply interconnected across national borders.

In October 1979, Lorde participated in two groundbreaking and interconnected events that reflected the growing visibility and diversity of the LGBTQ rights movement. On October 14, the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights brought an estimated 75,000 to 125,000 people to Washington, D.C. Participants gathered to demand equal civil rights and federal legislation protecting lesbian and gay Americans from discrimination. That same weekend, from October 12 to 15, the First National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference also convened in Washington, D.C. Organized by the National Coalition of Black Gays, the conference brought together more than 500 participants. The convening centered the experiences of LGBTQ people of color, and discussions emphasized the need to address the entwined effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression.

As a keynote speaker, Audre Lorde emphasized the importance of recognizing difference as a source of strength and understanding the ways that multiple forms of oppression intersect. Her participation in both events reflected her broader commitment to building coalitions across communities while insisting that struggles for justice could not be separated from one another.

“The question always is, what kind of a world do we want to be a part of? An affirmation at work does not stop at this March on Washington. Each of us has a responsibility to take this struggle back to her and his community and translate it into daily action. The National Conference of third world lesbians and gay men and this march today were once only visions of what could be. Now, all of us have made it our reality. Let us carry this solidarity that we are professing here today, back with us into our everyday lives tomorrow, and the day after, and next week, and next year. And let it be reflected in a struggle for a future where we can all flourish. For not one of us will ever be free until we are all free.”

She became an outspoken critic of apartheid in South Africa, challenging American institutions and activists who, in her view, were not doing enough to confront racism internationally. In a speech delivered at the University of Michigan in May 1989, called “Women, Power, and Difference,” Lorde reminded the crowd that we are living in a global society, part of an international community. She stressed that each one of us has a responsibility to use our personal power and our differences to advocate for a better world for everyone.

JR as Audre Lorde: "Power is not static…. If you do not use who you are in the service of what you say that you believe, someone else is using you. And it is always to your detriment, and my detriment and the detriment of our children."

KB: She also built relationships with Black feminists, lesbians, and other activists in Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, creating networks that connected local struggles to broader movements for liberation. She first traveled to Berlin in 1984 as a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, where she taught courses on Black women poets. But her influence quickly extended beyond the classroom. Lorde connected with a small but growing community of Black German women and her encouragement helped foster the use of a new term to describe identity: Afro-German. Her support also contributed to the development of new networks, including the first grassroots activist group for Afro-German women, founded in Berlin in 1986.

Audre Lorde died of liver cancer on November 17, 1992, at the age of 58. She spent the final years of her life living in St. Croix with her partner, Gloria Joseph, participating in local grassroots organizing, writing, and teaching.

By the time of her death, she had already become an influential figure in Black feminism, lesbian and gay politics, women's studies, literary criticism, and political activism. Her work asks a question that remains historically relevant: what happens when people who have been told that their differences make them weak decide that those differences can instead become sources of strength?

Lorde eventually described herself using a phrase that became closely associated with her: Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. Those weren't simply descriptions; they were declarations. Declarations that no single identity was sufficient. The order matters less than the insistence on the whole. She refused to treat these identities as separate compartments. Today, the word intersectionality is widely used to describe overlapping systems of identity and power. But the term was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Another Black, lesbian, warrior, poet, Pauli Murray articulated a similar concept in the 1950s when she coined the term “Jane Crow" to describe how racism and sexism operate together to disadvantage Black women. Lorde’s works reflected these ideas through poetry, essays, speeches, and autobiography, giving voice to the lived experience of occupying several marginalized identities simultaneously.

Audre Lorde spent her life insisting that the parts of ourselves and our histories that others might prefer to keep separate are often the very things we most need to understand. Perhaps that's why, more than three decades after her death, her voice still feels so immediate. Not because history has stopped changing, but because the questions she asked about identity, power, difference, solidarity, and silence have never really gone away. I leave you with this quote from Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Lorde defines anger as “a grief of distortions between peers and its object is change,” and she reminds us that “[a]nger is loaded with information and energy.” So as you leave this episode, we invite you to consider Lorde’s challenge: listen to the voices and histories that make you uncomfortable, and ask what you can do with the information and energy they offer you.

DF: Kathleen Barker is History UnErased’s program director and is a library and information specialist and public historian with 20 years of experience as a museum and library educator.

This podcast is funded by the New York City Council. It was developed by History UnErased and produced and edited by Dinah Mack, our youth equity program director and podcaster. And special thanks to our colleague Jocardo Ralston for reading some of Audre Lorde’s words. Our theme music is “1986” by BrothaD via Tribe of Noise.

We would love to hear from you! Email [email protected] and let us know where you are listening, or what history we can highlight in a future episode from where you are. That’s [email protected] - and please rate this podcast and share!

I’m Deb Fowler. Thanks for listening.

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Audio files:

"Poetry" radio program on WBAI hosted by Susan Howe, undated · Lesbian Herstory Archives AudioVisual Collections
Martha Shelley interviewing Audre Lorde on WBAI radio. Lesbian Nation, November 20, 1972
Audre Lorde speaking at the 1979 March on Washington: https://herstories.prattinfoschool.nyc/omeka/items/show/102?collection=33
Who Said It Was Simple | The Poetry Foundation