Queering the Politics of Black Respectability in Plays of the Black Revolutionary Theatre

In this article, I analyze Ed Bullins's Clara’s Ole Man (1965) and Amiri Baraka's The Baptism (1964) to evince what black queer representation looked like in the hands of Black Revolutionary Theatre playwrights. I read Bullins and Baraka's one-act plays to engage in a discussion of black respectability politics from an historical perspective. I argue that movements for social change, theatrical or otherwise, if unchecked, erect a politics of respectability that limits the possibilities of collective progress toward revolutionary ends. I suggest that to trouble the potential rigidity of such politics (which can call for the inclusion of some at the expense of others), more representations of black experience should be considered and engaged with. In this article, I wanted to explore several question that arose for me early in my research on Black Queer Theatre: Are there dramatic narratives of the Black Arts Movement, and more specifically The Black Revolutionary Theatre, that include LGBTQ+ characters? If so, what are the limitations and possibilities of representations of black queerness in a 1960s black revolutionary context? To answer these questions, I critically analyze both plays using a black queer feminist theoretical lens. I identify how the plays use black queer characters to achieve the mission of the Black Revolutionary Theatre, and illustrate the ways in which this experiment merely reproduces black queer stereotypes