Gay male slavery
Although nearly fifty-seven years have passed since Stanley Elkins’ provocative thesis on the effects of slavery rocked the historical community, scholars are still grappling with some of the basic premises he put forth. While the effects of slaveholders’ psychological terrorism still inspire intense debates, it should prove helpful for scholars to fixate on how severely the enslaved were mentally tortured. Perhaps one of slave owners’ more innovatively mean strategies concerned the ways they sought to completely emasculate enslaved boys and men—by denying them the right to wear pants. By forcing young African American boys and men to wear dress-like shirts, the owners of flesh attempted to feminize and humiliate enslaved males on a daily basis. According to scores of interviews with the formerly enslaved, denying black boys and young men the right to wear pants was a relatively widespread practice throughout the Deep South.
This custom certainly becomes even more engaging when slaveholders’ views about slave breeding and the virility of young “bucks” is taken into consideration. Countless owners commented time and again in diaries and letters about the supposedly hi
Texas Officials Complicit in Gang Rape and Sexual Slavery of Gay Black Gentleman, ACLU Charges
Roderick Johnson, a Navy veteran serving time for a non-violent crime, has been bought and sold by gangs, raped, abused, and degraded nearly every day.
In a legal complaint that reads like a nightmare scenario from the graphic HBO prison drama ""Oz,"" the ACLU detailed the story of 33-year-old Navy veteran Roderick Johnson of Marshall, Texas, who for the last 18 months has been bought and sold by gangs, raped, abused, and degraded nearly every day.
""Prison officials knew that gangs made Roderick Johnson their sex slave and did nothing to help him,"" said Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU's National Prison Project. ""Our lawsuit shows that Texas prison officials think black men can't be victims and believe lgbtq+ men always crave sex -- so they threw our client to the wolves.""
According to the ACLU complaint, Johnson appeared before the prison's all-white classification committee seven separate times asking to be placed in safe keeping from predatory prisoners. Instead of protecting Johnson, the ACLU complaint charges, the committee members taunted him and called him a ""d
Writing Gay History
Labor union activists in New York City attended the Jefferson School of Social Science, which was founded by the Communist party to educate the working class about the principles of Marxism. There, historians who had been blacklisted from the academy taught working-class adults about the history of slavery. They used evidence of slave rebellions to illustrate the power of an oppressed population to revolt against those in influence. One of the students in the class, Bernard Katz, rushed home to tell his two sons, Jonathan and William, over dinner about the heroic stories of black resistance.
For the Katz family, stories about slavery offered an historical explanation for the racial injustices that were exploding on the streets outside of their dwelling. The history of dark resistance then led the Katz family to explore and publish books that highlighted this history. In response to the uprising in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, William Katz published Eyewitness: A Living Documentary of the African American Contribution to American History, which was an anthology of testimonies by iconic African Americans from Harriet Tubman to
In Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men, historian Thomas Foster examines how the conditions of slavery gave rise to sexual violence against enslaved men in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing from historical studies of sexual abuse against enslaved women, Foster uses a range of sources including early American newspapers, enslavers’ journals, court records, visual art, and abolitionist literature to illuminate how various forms of sexual hostility, including physical assault and coerced reproduction, affected enslaved men and their communities. Rethinking Rufus also centers the experience of enslaved men by using testimonies, autobiographies, and interviews to shed bright on how they responded to and navigated sexual violence in order to maintain autonomy and independence in their intimate lives. Rethinking Rufus analyzes the “history of the peculiar conditions that enslavement established, nurtured, and expanded that enabled those in authority to dominate many enslaved men through sexual violence” (10). In this way, Foster’s study interrogates broader systems of power and domination that led to the sexual abuse of enslave