Abstract
The late Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee (1972–2017) was a minister, activist, actor/singer, composer, and spoken word artist. His essays, songs, poetry, plays, and sermons reflect his “Blackpentecostal” and Southern Baptist upbringing as well as his embrace of liberation theology, womanism, and Black feminist thought. This article analyzes his only published collection of poems, Don’t!, as a profound repertoire and theological manifesto with the aid of his autobiographical writings, performances, and eponymous archive housed at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives. Don’t! contests patriarchal, cisgender-sexist constructions of masculinity by paying homage to Black grandmothers, mothers, femmes, and cisgender (or “nontrans”) “sister friends.” This article argues that Don’t! is a declaration of his woman-centered theorization of transmasculinity and his queer/trans Christology, which should be brought into conversation with texts in the womanist canon. The article further contends that Don’t! enriches the Black trans Christian archive and disrupts the “whitewashed” master narratives of LGBTQ experience.
The late Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee (1972–2017) was a minister, activist, actor/singer, and spoken word artist. He composed essays, songs, poetry, plays, and sermons that advocate for the rights of LGBTQ people and teem with detailed evidence of his coalitional “tranifesting” approach to agitating for social change. His writings testify to his desire to reach a wide audience without centering cisheteronormative concerns or compromising his radical call for transformative justice. He came out as trans at the age of forty, and his autobiographical works reflect a transmasculine spirituality indebted to liberation theology, womanism, and Black feminist thought. Writing of his gender identity, Makalani-MaHee described “transitioning from a black feminist dyke (from a lesbian separatist age) to Black transman (who is still a feminist).”1 He consistently acknowledged the inspiration he derived from Black women in particular.
Makalani-MaHee published only one collection of poems, Don’t!, in 2015. In what follows, I analyze Don’t! as a theological manifesto, with the aid of his writings, performances, and the repository of his papers housed in the Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Archive at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives. Makalani-MaHee died on November 20, 2017—the date of the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance—at the age of forty-five, after suffering a heart attack earlier that month.2 Although it is a slender volume, Don’t! contains a wealth of images and anecdotes taken from its author’s all-too-brief life. Don’t! is not a memoir in verse, however; it is more akin to Pauline epistolary sermons that were preached before being disseminated as letters to diverse publics. Makalani-MaHee performed these poems in nominally secular gatherings as part of his ministry, remixing them as the spirit moved him in the context of performance and pulling from a well-stocked “homiletical toolbox” amassed in the course of his pastoral labor.3 I contend that Don’t! is a declaration of his woman-centered theorization of transmasculinity and his queer/trans Christology that should be brought into conversation with texts that have earned a place in the womanist canon.
In the emerging scholarship on trans religious practice, transmasculine Black Christians are yet to be accorded a place that is commensurate with their prominence in leadership roles within Protestant denominations. Makalani-MaHee’s poetry allows us to examine the way that autobiographical texts produced by Black transgender Christians have reappropriated Biblical tropes to lay claim to a legacy of religious commitment. But Don’t! also assists us in identifying the writings authored by Black women that have appealed to some men experiencing “the trans*-ness of Blackness” and “the Blackness of trans*-ness”—in the words of Black feminist critical theorist Marquis Bey—as a mode of religious transcendence.4Don’t! pays homage to Black grandmothers, femmes, Makalani-MaHee’s own mother, and cisgender (or “nontrans”) “sister friends,” documenting the effects of misogynoir on their everyday lives.5 As one point of departure for my analysis, then, I take up the exhortation to #CiteBlackWomen, a hashtag that grew out of the corresponding movement founded by anthropologist Christen A. Smith in 2017 and supported today by a collective of Black women in academia and the arts.6 While Makalani-MaHee seldom pinpointed specific intellectual influences, it is necessary to recognize the Black women who inspired his thought and praxis.
With only nineteen poems, Don’t! may seem to be too modest a literary contribution to merit sustained discussion.7 But the book represents a profound repertoire, in the sense of the term elaborated by performance studies scholar Diana Taylor:8 Makalani-MaHee was described as a “poetic powerhouse” throughout a theatrical career that spanned two decades.9 Although we are not privy to the ephemeral sensations, emotions, and affective responses that accompanied his live performances—apart from what might be gleaned from the few videos of them that now circulate online—the eager demand for his onstage appearances suggests the magnitude of his charisma and historical significance. His archival papers contain several drafts of the poems included in Don’t!, indicating that he continually revised them to meet or exceed his audiences’ expectations, cognizant of his role in “transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next.”10
I spent my formative preteen and teenage years in South Florida, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, geographically close to where Makalani-MaHee would later conduct his ministry. It is doubtful that his message ever reached the Cuban family members among whom I was raised or the Black and Latine LGBTQ students at the Roman Catholic parochial schools that I attended, but there is no telling the extent of his impact. I was largely unaware of it before my viewing of his papers at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives in August 2018.11 During that visit, my access to these and other personal effects—such as the black four-cornered bishop’s hat, or biretta, that formed part of his vestment wardrobe—was only one privilege among many that I, as a cisgender scholar, was subsequently accorded. For example, M. Paz Galupo writes that “as a cisgender researcher studying transgender experience and identity, I enjoy the privilege of others perceiving me and my research as ‘objective.’”12 As a cis academic, the objectivity (and therefore the validity) of my project has—by and large—been taken for granted. Yet my own desire to compile a politically “usable archive”13 of transgender religious experience is not easily separated from prejudices, problematic assumptions, and what disability and gender studies theorist Alexandre Baril calls “the cisgender ‘will to knowledge’”; Baril explains that “the cis-temic power structure devalues, delegitimizes, denigrates, discriminates against, and is violent toward trans* identities.”14 This power structure undergirds the attribution of objectivity to cisgender scholars and acts to legitimate their findings before they have published even a page of research.
Unlike the archivally energized protagonist of Black lesbian director Cheryl Dunye’s groundbreaking 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, I do not share the gendered/sexual or racial/ethnic and class identity of the historical subject brought to the fore here. The biases that accompany me to the library table and computer screen as a cisgender woman sit alongside those I carry as a white-passing Latine ethnographer trained as a historian (not as a theologian). What animates the present work is a conviction that the “queer futurity” toward which Makalani-MaHee reached is a “horizon”—a perspective and a prospect—worth fighting for.15 It is receding now not only as the result of reactionary demagoguery, epitomized by the 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” bill passed by Florida legislators that sought to criminalize any mention of LGBTQ people in public school classrooms from kindergarten to third grade (and aimed to silence those of us who identify with one or more of the letters in this acronym).16 As online links to news stories evaporate into the digital ether and increasingly get locked behind paywalls, figures such as Makalani-MaHee are in danger of fading from public consciousness.17 I seek here to refresh our collective memory of Makalani-MaHee’s contributions, as well as add to a flourishing body of research on transmasculine, Afro-Diasporic, and queer African American religiosities.18
Blackpentecostal” Beginnings
Makalani-MaHee was born in 1972 to an African American mother (MaHee) and Afro-Trinidadian father (Makalani). He was raised in the heavily Black and (Afro-)Latine Bronx, at a time when it was becoming infamous as “the most impoverished”19 borough of New York City, “an international symbol of urban decay” and government disinvestment in which 80 percent of housing was destroyed by fire between 1970 and 1980.20 He attended “the sprawling inner-city” Julia Richman-Talent Unlimited High School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, “located in a high-rent neighborhood and once a prestigious school,” where he distinguished himself as a performer and benefited from mentors such as award-winning actress Ella Joyce.21 At the age of eighteen, he moved to Atlanta, where he was active as a theater instructor and lecturer at Georgia State University, Agnes Scott College, Spelman College, and Morehouse College.22
In Atlanta, Makalani-MaHee took up the position of Gay and Lesbian Liaison to then-mayor Bill Campbell and Atlanta City Council President Marvin Arrington. He attended seminary and established the Redefined Faith Worship Center (formerly the Redefined Faith Unity Fellowship Church), the first Black LGBT-welcoming and affirming place of worship in the southeastern United States.23 This position made him the youngest commissioned pastor in the history of the progressive Unity Fellowship Church.24 Sociologist Angelique Harris writes, “Unity is unique in that it was founded not just as a Black Church denomination, but as a social movement with the expressed purpose of responding to the impact that AIDS was having on both the physical and spiritual well-being of Blacks, and in particular, Black members of the LGBT community.”25 Unity was founded in 1982 by the late Carl Bean, a gospel and Motown singer best known for the 1977 gay liberation anthem “I Was Born This Way.”26
In 1997, Makalani-MaHee moved to Miami.27 In 1998, he founded his second church, the Fellowship Tabernacle, “the first place of worship in the tradition of the Black Church for the lesbigaytrans, as well as other liberated thinkers, in the city of Miami and South Florida.”28 His congregation was “a veritable rainbow of humanity: straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender from all races, denominations, and ethnicities.”29 In short order, he launched Black Gay Pride SF (South Florida); BLACKOUT Weekend, South Florida’s first African American LGBTQ film festival; and Concerned Clergy, “an organization dedicated to the social-spiritual support of the lesbigaytrans communities and their allies.”30 He created a network called the International Fellowship of Independent Churches (IFOIC) for which he served as the presiding prelate; its motto was “Affirming of all of Mother/Father God’s children.”31
In 2004, the Miami Herald wrote of Makalani-MaHee teaching “a seminar series entitled “Holy Homos: Deconstructing Homosexuality and the Bible” at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Fort Lauderdale.”32 A 2006 Sun-Sentinel article described him as pastor of “the Great Congregation” at the same site, now known as the Pride Center at Equality Park. In 2009, Makalani-MaHee became pastor of New Hope First Community Church in Boynton Beach and his business cards for this office show him smiling broadly in a white clerical collar and biretta (fig. 1).33 He also became the initial presiding bishop with United Christian Ministries.34 On one of the earliest versions of his personal website, Makalani-MaHee was proud to note that the latter made him—since he had yet to transition—“the first known openly lesbian consecrated Bishop with apostolic succession.”35 He worked with the Democratic Executive Committee and was employed by the PRIDE Center as a data entry specialist, and by the Broward County Department of Health as coordinator of the transgender program. His presentations championing legal protections for transgender people before numerous government commissions can still be seen on YouTube.
Makalani-MaHee had grown up in a “Black Nationalist” and Black Pentecostal home with pronounced Southern Baptist influences.36 He told the Sun-Sentinel in 2000 that “the word of God reached [him] even in the womb. [His] mother was a church organist and, even as a small child, [he] hoped to become a soul-shaking preacher.”37 In a 2004 interview with the Miami Herald, he said, “People always expected me to go into the ministry, and I was groomed to do so.” He “had his first church solo at the age of 4,”38 perhaps accompanied by his “Evangelist/Minister of Music” mother.39 By all accounts, he became virtuosic in what religious studies scholar and theorist Ashon T. Crawley has analyzed as “the choreosonic performance of Blackpentecostal aesthetics.”40 Despite Makalani-MaHee’s talent and early vocational stirrings, he became disaffected with the church after coming out as a lesbian at sixteen: “A scandal erupted . . . [as] the news echoed throughout the tightly knit religious community. MaHee’s mother . . . told her daughter she was ‘living a sin’ and ‘would go to hell.’”41 As a result, Makalani-MaHee said, “I hoped my sexuality would change to what I was told was normal . . . . When I realized nothing was changing, I stopped going to church. I thought this fundamentalist God was going to get tired of me sitting in the front row. The ceiling was going to open up and lightning was going to strike me dead.”42
Makalani-MaHee then started “experimenting with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Wicca.”43 His multireligious trajectory resembles that of many trans Christians, such as theologian Jonathon Thunderword. In his first book, Thunderword recounts anecdotes about the same seeking that Makalani-MaHee undertook to find a house of worship that felt like home.44 No records of the “unchurched” period of Makalani-MaHee’s life exist, but his writings imply that he returned to his religious roots out of a sense of duty to preach the gospel of inclusion to other minoritized people. He also wanted to preserve his connection to the church as a lifelong labor of love and symbol of Black “sincerity.”45 In the poem “BLACK,” Makalani-MaHee proclaims, “I AM BLACK / Black as smackin’ on storefront church / fried chicken dinners with a chaser of / fruit punch Kool-Aid out of plastic / garbage cans.”46 It is telling that he bolsters his claim to authenticity here by citing a meal of the “Gospel bird” and Kool-Aid—“the official soul food drink”—in the same breath as storefront edifices, the quintessential location for Black southern-style Pentecostal and Holiness congregations in US cities.47 For Makalani-MaHee, the Black Church was one of the key “flavors” in African American culture and a crucial source of physical and spiritual nourishment.
Makalani-MaHee came out twice: first as a lesbian, then, in 2012, as trans. The lack of acceptance from some Black Church folks grieved him, making the poem “BLACK” a lament for unrequited love: “And I wear the title black trans / screaming I AM HERE! . . . ‘O black folks give me one more / chance; won’t you please let me back / in your heart?’ . . . / And although pulpit magistrates banish / me to the island of lepers I / remember your capacity to love.”48 Despite his heartache, Makalani-MaHee’s response to his ministerial calling and commission conformed to Blackpentecostal predecent. In honing his prophetic voice, Makalani-MaHee built sermons from journal entries, riffing off of autobiographical insights to sharpen his theological points. Undated notes for one sermon or future publication read, “War Wounds / You are who you are because of your wounds. / Don’t Hide them, Celebrate Them. / Jesus ability to trust in sharin [sic] his wounds (after Judas).”49 Here he alludes to the Biblical verses John 20:24–29, Jesus’s exposure of his wounds to his doubting apostle Thomas in the wake of Judas’s betrayal. It would not strain the imagination to consider that Makalani-MaHee might have also been referring to the scars sometimes caused by gender confirmation surgery and recasting them through a “transgender hermeneutics” as badges of courage.50
The Biblical tropes and iconography that Makalani-MaHee reappropriated derived almost exclusively from (in the New Testament) Matthew 25, Luke 4, and Mary’s Magnificat and (in the Old Testament) the Hebrew prophets and the story of Exodus. In a handwritten memo dated April 1998, Makalani-MaHee appears to draft the lyrics for a song: “You Ought Lift God Up / Because God’s Kept you Safe Because God’s Kept you Blessed . . . Because God Gives You Grace / To help you to Run This Race / You ought to Praise the Lord.”51 The final lines hearken back to 1 Corinthians 9:24–27, Galatians 5:7, 2 Timothy 4:7, and Hebrews 12:1–3, among other verses that reference the early Christian topos of the male martyr as an athlete whose body is sacrificed in the pursuit of God’s glory (instead of earthly accolades). Although jotted down long before his transition, we can interpret these lines as queering the topos by suggesting that God’s earthly protection empowers the most vulnerable—“lesbigaytrans” people among them—to vie for their own place in heaven.
Makalani-MaHee’s preaching modeled an embodied engagement with scripture. His business cards for Fellowship Tabernacle, IFOIC, read, “Come and Worship where you can be ‘In the Spirit, In the Life’ And in the Black Church tradition!”52 “In the life” is an idiom “coined in the 1920s by the African American lesbian and gay communities,”53 and Makalani-MaHee appears to have relished the notion that his church would be equally infused with the Holy Ghost, Blackpentecostal tradition, and “lesbigaytrans” celebration. He also incorporated Afro-Caribbean touches into his liturgical and secular public performances, as when he played a conga drum while singing the hymn “Come by Here, Lord” (“Kumbaya”),54 often identified as an “African folk song”55 but more likely “an African American spiritual which originated somewhere in the American south, and then traveled all over the world.”56 He could not stay away from the church too long even when—as in 2010—he confessed to feeling “burnt out with ministering” and prioritized “keeping occupied” in nonliturgical endeavors.57 What brought him back was the opportunity to rejoice and be glad through music and movement in beloved community, as a means of affirming his divinity and that of other Black people. As Crawley observes, “What joyful noise, what Blackpentecostal aesthetic practice is, is the reckless abandonment, an escape and secretion into the flesh, a choreosonics that decidedly pronounces the sacredness of the black flesh.”58
Sister Friends” and [Fore]mothers
In 2002, Makalani-MaHee debuted Sistah from the Hood: A Black Dyke’s Coming Out Story at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Fort Lauderdale. This “one woman show” was based on his “experiences growing up in the Pentecostal Black Church and projects of the Bronx and coming out as a lesbian in those environments.” Makalani-MaHee said, “If I had to pin it down, it would be elements of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf meets Stomp.”59 The former work is playwright and poet Ntozake Shange’s landmark “choreopoem” and “sacramental drama,”60 and this allusion offers some insight into the now-canonical Black feminist works that influenced Makalani-MaHee artistically. Among the words one can imagine resonating with Makalani-MaHee are Shange’s oft-quoted lines, “i found god in myself / & i loved her / i loved her fiercely,” which “becomes a song of joy” as the “ladies” on stage repeat it over and over again.61 Makalani-MaHee’s reference to the boisterously crowd-pleasing musical of the STOMP dance troupe not only indicates that “Sistah from the Hood” contained a dance component but also his hope that it would appeal to an audience less familiar with the classic works—like Shange’s—that gave his play meaning.
In a 2008 post written for the Bilerico Project, once the largest LGBTQ group blog on the internet, Makalani-MaHee revealed that he was motivated by the desire to bring visibility to Black lesbians who would be termed “studs” or “masc[uline]-of-center”: “After I finally came to accept that I was a same-gender loving womyn and after suffering from a lack of images of strong, healthy, same-gender loving womyn of Afrikan descent, I made a promise to myself . . . that if I had anything to say about it, the next generation of little black tomboys would not suffer from a lack of images they could relate to—because if you don’t see yourself, you’re not quite sure you exist.”62 In 2012, Makalani-MaHee said he was working on an autobiography, Busting Hell Wide Open, that grew out of “Sistah from the Hood” but dealt more directly with the fact that “I had become everything that I was told was an abomination” in the Black Church.63 Makalani-MaHee explained the title as follows:
They had a saying in the Pentecostal church, they said, you know, if you . . . were more than a sinner, they would look at you and go, “Oh, not only are you going to hell, but you gonna bust hell wide open.” And I began, and I began to think about that, and I began to think about actually embracing the concept of flexing hell wide open because what actually happens is that you come to understand that, that what you thought was the truth—it’s not actually the truth. The things that scared you, you embrace, and you bust the mythology of hellfire and damnation. You bust that wide open.64
He passed away before he could complete that book, but Don’t! communicates the same message.
Don’t! was first made available in 2015, two years before his untimely passing, through an Amazon-owned print-on-demand service, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. The book arrived on the literary scene to little fanfare, and Makalani-MaHee does not seem to have prioritized publicizing it. Don’t! nevertheless vibrates with urgency, taking on anti-Black state violence (including police brutality), questions of citizenship, interethnic solidarity, and the dynamics of appropriation, as in the poems “Submerged” (“Submerged in what does not appreciate,/ but loves to imitate”)65 and “Don’t” (“There are queer, [n-word], bitches who do / not want to be co-opted”).66Don’t! also pushes back against inaccurate assumptions about LGBTQ people’s religiosity, especially the notion that they have to become secular to liberate themselves from cisgender-normative, antigay, and patriarchal ideologies. In 2008, Makalani-MaHee had written, “Although the LGBT community has learned a lot of lessons and taken a lot of tips from the advances of the civil rights movement, this is one lesson we have yet to utilize. We not only do not utilize people of the Christian faith on our behalf but we push LGBT Christians to the back of the closet (pun intended).”67Don’t! shouts that the closet has been propped open as wide as hell—or wide as the tomb of the resurrection.
Indeed, Don’t! inaugurates a new covenant between Makalani-MaHee and his Black, trans, and Christian audience: to tell stories in which they could see themselves reflected, so their existence could be validated. A case in point: for many years, Makalani-MaHee was playfully known as “the Bish,” a contraction of “bishop” and homonym for “bitch,” used as a term of endearment since the early 1970s among gay men and femme speakers of African American Vernacular English.68 Makalani-MaHee writes in Don’t!’s title poem, “When womyn sister friends call each / other bitch they know that they’re a / womyn ‘Being In Total Control (of) / Herself.’”69 For much of his adult life, the face he showed the world was that of a butch lesbian comfortable in “her” skin, yet he harbored a great admiration for Black femmes and cisgender men unafraid of being deemed effeminate. Socializing with lesbians had been pivotal for the evolution of his sexual identity; after coming out, he had briefly attempted to reenter the closet but reconciled himself to his attraction to women after “try[ing] to understand why people believed [lesbians] were ‘sinful, [wrathful], God-hating, bra-burning women.’”70
While conceding the allure of hegemonic heteronormative figures (such as that of the cowboy), Don’t! contests patriarchal, cisgender-sexist constructions of masculinity. “Ode to the Projects,” “Grandma’s Poem,” and “Strong” feature maternal figures that can be viewed as paying homage to his own mother, Barbara.71 Their relationship was not always harmonious. In an October 2010 essay, Makalani-MaHee spoke of bitter arguments: “I have had a number of debates with my mother, wherein I have tried to get her to understand not only the homophobic, but also the racist, classicist [sic], and anti-choice, anti-woman agenda of the Christian right . . . . My mother has literally said to me, ‘Thank God someone is bold enough to try and stop you guys.’”72 He chafed at her rejection and internalized misogyny but ultimately judged her to have been a praiseworthy parent. He publicly performed songs dedicated to her73 and reminisced about his upbringing in the statement he released upon his transition: “I have often said that being born female-bodied, raised in a single-parent household in an environment that lacked strong male representation but was rich in strong female role models, probably saved my life. Because of the tenacity of the womyn while growing up, I knew I could carve my own path which leads me to a fuller understanding of myself.”74 In Don’t!, he takes refuge in recollections of the grandmother who helped raise him, especially her “forgiving heart” and “mouth that kept the/integrity of [her] promises made.”75
The book also makes room for other “foremothers” from whom he derived a sense of purpose and potency.76 “Strong” begins, “When I feel empty inside and like a / motherless child; I will think of Mother / Sojourner Truth the childless Mother.”77 He goes on to say, “When I feel the vision God has given / me for my life in service to others is / too big, too great, too grand, I will / remember Mother Mary Mc-Leod / Bethune.”78 Makalani-MaHee invokes Rosa Parks (along with Martin Luther King Jr.) as ancestral entities whose bravery had fortified him: “My ancestors backs are my bridge.”79 This sense of indebtedness to the Black women who went before him perhaps accounts for his consistent spelling of women as “womyn” to contest the privileging of cisgender men in definitions of women’s experience. In a poem dedicated to writer and performance artist Peggy Shaw, “Earning My Leather Motorcycle Jacket,” Makalani-MaHee states, “I am an extension of dyke’s dreams / into the future while they are my / bridges to our past,” and, “We have been the town criers, / truth exposers / black triangle wearers / and those ‘y’ womyn / (because we took the ‘man’ out of / wo-man).”80Womyn seems to have been in earliest use in lesbian separatist spaces and—although some of these circles are now bastions of trans-exclusionary radical feminism—Makalani-MaHee never repudiated them.81
If Jesus Were Alive Today”
Tracing social and religious lines of influence in Don’t! is sometimes difficult, but Makalani-MaHee’s intellectual genealogy is most evident in “Trans, Pierced, and Tattooed.” He can be seen reciting this poem in a video uploaded to YouTube on November 22, 2017, by Afro-Latina artist, activist, and cultural programmer Niki Lopez.82 The video begins with Lopez summoning “the Bishop” to center stage at an art exhibition. After finding his footing in front of a mostly seated crowd, he waves away the microphone held out to him with a firm “Nah!” and launches into a powerful a cappella rendition of the gospel song “Oh Lord, I Want You to Help Me,” rich with melodic vocalizing and runs. The black baseball cap and black T-shirt he wears set off the large silver cross on his chest hanging from a silver chain around his neck. His silhouette glints with reflections from his metallic eyeglasses, his silver chain bracelets, the rings on his fingers, and the studs in his ear, tongue, and bottom lip.
When Makalani-MaHee stops singing and the hoots and cries of “Woo!” “Mmm!” and “Yeah Bish, go!” quiet down, he delivers “Trans, Pierced, and Tattooed” as a sermonic monologue. He paces the stage and makes eye contact with those closest to him as he speaks the opening lines:
At “alive today,” Makalani-MaHee pauses in anticipation of the cheers and laughs that will greet his next line, then spins on his heels and points at someone recording with a cell phone to announce, “He’d be a womyn, Black, and gay.” Makalani-MaHee continues,
He concludes by singing a few more bars of “Oh Lord, I Want You to Help Me,” then exits the stage and takes his seat, thanking audience members for their applause with clasped hands.
This performance of “Trans, Pierced, and Tattooed” is more barbed and direct than the published version. In Don’t!, Makalani-MaHee says not, “You killed my brother,” but, “You thought it was okay to kill my / Brother”; not, “Killed my trans sister,” but, “Thought it was okay to kill my trans sister.” In Don’t!, neither punctuation nor italics are used to mark the emphases and cadences that make the performed version so compelling, whereas at the art exhibition, Makalani-MaHee had a boundless range of physical movements, gestures, vocal intonations, and facial expressions at his disposal to get his message across. For example, at the phrase “one you refuse to choose,” he spread his arms wide in a gesture that can be read either as a confrontational “Come at me, bro!” stance or as an echo of crucifixion iconography. Both reinforced the sentiment that having “nothing to lose” only emboldens Makalani-MaHee in his pursuit of justice.
In declaring that a present-day Christ would be “a womyn, black, and gay,” Makalani-MaHee drew most obviously on the late Black liberation theologian James H. Cone, who stated in his first book, “Whether whites want to hear it or not, Christ is black, baby, with all of the features that are so detestable to white society.”87 For Cone, Jesus had to be Black because, in the United States, the most oppressed are racialized as Black. Cone wrote that everything in the Gospel, from Jesus’s nativity to his death, casts Christ as the Oppressed One of history, whose suffering is also that of others marginalized by the sociopolitical structure and dominant classes. For Cone, Jesus’s nature is always to cast his lot with “the least” of his people, and Cone was intent on drawing the analogy that to have been Jewish in the ancient world was equivalent to being Black in the modern era.88 Like Cone, Makalani-MaHee defined Jesus as Black in relation to his firsthand knowledge of God’s liberating work in the here and now.89
While Cone’s insistence on Jesus’s Blackness was shocking to many in the 1960s and 1970s, it was neither the earliest nor most radical expression of this sentiment. In 1898, Black Church organizer and missionary Henry McNeal Turner said, “We had rather be an atheist and believe in no God, or a pantheist and believe that all nature is God, than to believe in the personality of a God, and not to believe that He is a Negro.”90 And in 1968, theologian Albert Cleage published The Black Messiah, a scathing indictment of the Black Church in its complicity with white structures of power and a mandate for a new image of Jesus to capture the imagination of Black youth. Unlike Cone’s characterization of Jesus as ontologically Black, Cleage cast Jesus as biologically Black: a dark-skinned zealot fighting white Rome for the establishment of a separatist Black nation. The centerpiece of the church he founded in Detroit, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, was a painting by African American artist Glanton V. Dowdell of a Black Virgin Mary carrying a brown-complexioned infant Jesus in her arms.91
Nevertheless, Cleage would have neither cast Christ as a woman nor asserted that Christ’s mother was equal to him.92 Makalani-MaHee’s sympathies were with the first generation of womanists that embraced Alice Walker’s definition of womanism in 198393 and with Black feminist theologians who had been trained at the doctoral level by Cone. Throughout Don’t!, one hears the echoes of such now-classic texts as Delores Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (1993), JoAnne Marie Terrell’s Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African-American Experience (1998), Katie G. Cannon’s Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (1998), Jacquelyn Grant’s White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (1989), and Joan M. Martin’s More Than Chains and Toil: A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women (2000). It is likely that Makalani-MaHee studied these texts as a young pastor and integrated their insights into Don’t! in ways that the theologically attuned reader would be able to appreciate.
A case in point: while Grant did not recognize Black lesbian, bisexual, or trans women’s experience of heterosexist oppression in her first book, she nevertheless declared, “This Christ, found in the experiences of Black women, is a Black woman.”94 Grant leaned on Katie G. Cannon to develop a methodological guide for womanist theology that incorporates “annunciation and celebration,” recognizing the importance of collective remembering, naming, and joy to sustain Black women’s struggle.95 Makalani-MaHee took his cue from them in such works as “Grandma’s Poem.” Likewise, Grant, Williams, and Martin pointed out that white women’s Christology has often fixated on issues of “fulfillment” rather than “survival”96 and observed that white theologians tend to promote the “cheap grace” of reconciliation without doing the hard work of analyzing power relations.97 Makalani-MaHee was relentless in doing so, from his anticapitalist stance in “Trans, Pierced, and Tattooed” to his focus on literally surviving in “Don’t,” “Speed,” and “American” (“No longer you or me survival is now / we.”98).
For her part, Terrell demonstrated that the pressure put on people to love those who injured them places the onus on the injured parties for reconciliation. She connected this convention to a Christian ideology of martyrdom that resanctifies violence and the doctrine of nonviolence that winds up encouraging suicidal self-sacrifice, which only serves oppressors and scapegoats the disempowered.99 Terrell affirmed, with Williams, that surrogacy is a “structure of domination”100 and opposed sacrificial activity to “sacramental witness.”101 Makalani-MaHee returns repeatedly to these themes in “Don’t,” “Strong,” and “Trans, Pierced, and Tattooed.”102 Makalani-MaHee joins Terrell in refuting the idea that suffering is redemptive in “Don’t”: “Then please don’t call me queer / Because every time the word queer was / used it was used to call me unnatural, / and gave other’s [sic] the right to play / Judge, jury, and executioner with my / life.”103
Grant insisted that womanist theology is more than simply adding the adjective “female” to Black Messiah; it requires a wholesale reorientation.104 In a 1979 interview, the grassroots organizer and founder of the National Coalition of Black Gay Men and Lesbians, Billy Jones, was quoted as saying, “God made me in his own image. So when I talk of God, I’m talking about a Black, Gay god.”105 While such statements have been couched as provocations in popular reportage, they have less often been regarded as the building blocks of constructive theology. This is precisely what Makalani-MaHee offers in Don’t! His is a theological vision predicated on the acknowledgment of “the interconnectedness of oppressions,” or intersectionality, in the sense of the term pioneered by legal scholar and theorist Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, emphasizing the intersecting forms of domination that have historically ensnared Black women.106
Don’t! is the product of sophisticated theological deliberation, but can Makalani-MaHee’s theology be labeled womanist? In 2006, Monica A. Coleman asked, “Must I Be a Womanist?” in a pathbreaking article in Journal of Feminist Studies, charging second wave womanism with failing to provide sufficient material and conceptual space for Black lesbians and bisexuals, LGBTQ experience, and sexuality writ large. “Transgender[ed]” appeared only a handful of times in that year’s The Womanist Reader (edited by Layli Phillips), but womanist texts over the next decade increasingly carried statements regarding authors’ commitments to LGBTQ inclusion (even if they often excluded trans experience from substantive theological consideration). Among the trans-inclusive womanists who share the greatest affinity with Makalani-MaHee today are Pamela R. Lightsey, Pamela Ayo Yetunde, and Phillis Isabella Sheppard.107 However, “politics of womanist religious spaces”—as one anonymous reviewer of this article put it—are such that Makalani-MaHee might not readily be welcomed as a collaborator or thought partner by others. Although “transfeminism” and its permutations are accepted features of our lexicon, “transwomanism”108 and “trans/womanist”109 are yet to gain traction in the academy.
Tranifesting” the Archive
The first part of this article’s title—“Unique, Divine, Unrepeatable”—comes from the address that the Bishop delivered when he came out as trans. Shortly before Makalani-MaHee’s passing, he simplified his website, calling his bio “It’s All about the [Rhythm]” and framing his ministry as “empowering people back to themselves through all means necessary. Whether it is in the Pulpit, Boardroom, Stage or simply taking it to the streets, my goal—using the arts as spiritual soul food[—]is to affirm that we are all unique, divine [unrepeatable] creations of God worthy of every good and perfect gift.”110 With regard to his efforts on behalf of Broward’s Department of Health, for example, Makalani-MaHee asserted, “We want women, particularly trans women of color, to thrive.”111 Makalani-MaHee encouraged trans people to see themselves as “whole, perfect, & complete,” redefining trans pride as a moral-ethical imperative.112 In one undated sermon, he said, “We have been participating in a mass conspiracy, the concealment of our collective greatness.”113 This sentiment is reiterated throughout his corpus, along with his belief that the prophetic trans voice must include rendering gratitude in a spirit of joy and promise. The “queer futurity” of Cuban American theorist José Esteban Muñoz becomes an eschatological concept in Makalani-MaHee’s theology.
Another of Makalani-MaHee’s major contributions to trans Christian discourse is his defiance of the “born in the wrong body” trope that has come to dominate representations of trans experience.114 While the speech genres of trans “coming out” have garnered legitimacy for some trans people—perhaps due to their similarity to religious conversion narratives115—they have overshadowed alternative ways of articulating trans self-realization that emphasize decision and agency. Makalani-MaHee was willing to take rhetorical risks in accentuating the role of choice in his transition. In an interview, Makalani-MaHee told sociologist Arlene Stein, “I wanted to dress like the men and smell like the men. I wanted to sound like the men and treat women in the chivalrous ways I saw men treat women.” He continued, “For myself, I like the binary. I like being the provider, protector, and being married to a nurturer. And I’m a feminist.”116
These rhetorical maneuvers distinguish Makalani-MaHee from some Christian women of trans experience who have seen themselves in the righteous Biblical eunuchs of Isaiah 56:4–8 and Acts 8:26–40.117 He did not locate “trancestors” in scripture to validate his transness.118 He cast his male subjectivity, combined with his pleasure in the sensuousness of cishetero-masculine presentation, as sufficient for him to embody the masculine. In the poem “Cowboy,” he wrote, “I used to wanna be a cowboy / like every other black girl growing up in the projects . . . My 10 gallon hat my crown / My boots my masculinity.”119 As cultural theorist Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley observes, “Commonsense expectations of butchness for black queer ciswomen are not the same as commonsense expectations of heteromasculinity for black folk assigned male at birth, and black cisfemme-ininity and transfemininity resist gender conformity in different, complementary ways.”120 Makalani-MaHee knew this, and that he was becoming just a different type of target for white supremacist violence by being in the world as a Black man. He asked, “If it wasn’t absolutely imperative . . . who the hell would make this choice?”121
In the coming-out story that he published in the blog For Harriet, founded by Black feminist cultural critic Kimberly N. Foster, he credited gay men and trans women with giving him the courage to transition. He recalled visiting the Stonewall Inn in New York for the first time:
As I began to tour the inn I took special notice of the historical photographs. Images of people who did not conform to traditional roles, men not only not afraid of, but flaunting their femininity, and I Got It!
As a person who was struggling with my own gender identity, and being afraid of being perceived as a freak (which duh, [as if] being a black, female-bodied cross-dresser with a bald head, 37 piercings and 14 tattoos didn’t make me freaky already!). I was afraid that presenting my truest self, as a man, would be the one thing that people could not handle . . . the thing that would push people over the edge and away from me. But as I looked at those images on the wall of transgendered womyn who were so daring to be themselves at a point and time when it was much less safe to do so than now, I thought to myself that we would not be where we are if they hadn’t dared to be who they are.122
At that very moment, Makalani-MaHee decided to step into his transness so that he was no longer cross-dressing but honoring his gender by wearing “men’s” clothes.
As Black nonbinary scholar and activist C. Riley Snorton writes, “The connections within blackness and transness gesture to what Fanon described as the ‘real leap . . . [of ] introducing invention into existence’ that constitutes being to the degree that it exceeds it.”123 Makalani-MaHee looked often before he leapt, held back from transitioning by the fear that he would be abandoned by his family and the Black Church, which could tolerate him when he was “merely” gay. In his coming-out essay, he stated that “oppression, in all of its forms, is inter-connected and that our actual fear of change is the very link to all forms of oppression.”124 In this assertion, one hears the echoes of both Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and the “Combahee River Collective Statement” of 1977, issued by the eponymous group of Black feminist lesbian socialists that included Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, Gloria Akasha Hull, Audre Lorde, Chirlane McCray, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Helen L. Stewart. The collective wrote, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”125
Makalani-MaHee’s embellishment of this theme offers the Black trans Christian archive a vividly embodied example of “tranifesting,” as discussed by interdisciplinary Black feminist scholars Kai M. Green and Treva C. Ellison. Green and Ellison write, “To tranifest is to mobilize across the contradictions, divisions, and containment strategies produced by the state and other such large-scale organizations of power that work to limit our capacity to align ourselves across differences in ways that are necessary for social transformation.”126 Makalani-MaHee’s racial and sexual politics were coalitional to a fault, and he never failed to point out the provisionality of solidarity and contingency of identity (as in the poems “Bigger,” “We Are One,” and “If”).127 Makalani-MaHee’s inclusivity, as communicated through his performances and writings like Don’t!, stand in stark contrast to the exclusivity of mainstream gay and lesbian sites of representation, as well as non-Black trans spaces.128 He more than deserves a place in the emerging canon of “transfeminist religious studies”129 alongside the aforementioned Thunderword and such trailblazing figures as J Mase III, Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi,130 Rev. Louis “L. J.” Mitchell,131 Rev. Debra J. Hopkins,132 Rev. Yunus Coldman,133 and the late Rev. BobbieJean Baker (1964–2014).134
Although it is appropriate to question, as South Asian and sexuality studies scholar Anjeli Arondekar does, “the salvific forms archives are asked to assume,” the political, affective function of the archive should not be discounted.135 Black Canadian artist, activist, and scholar Syrus Marcus Ware writes, “By starting with QTIPOC [Queer, Transgender and Intersex People of Colour] narratives, we gain a different entry point into trans and queer collective time lines of resistance and archives, and we interrupt the way that these omissions produce a whitewashed canon.”136 Ware goes on to add,
Indeed, these archives interrupt the neoliberal insistence on the forced telling and retelling of a one-dimensional narrative by those on the margins—a telling that is obligatory . . . . Instead, these [QTIPOC] shared memories tell of a deep, intersectional knowing that can inform our understandings of our own lives today, direct our future activism, and help us build stronger communities rooted in care and justice.137
The repertoire that Makalani-MaHee’s writing and performance represents holds out the possibility of such informative direction. He himself had received it and been transformed while perusing the photographic archives of the Stonewall Inn.
The silencing of those not officially deemed worthy of remembrance by bureaucratic and academic institutions creates gaps in our knowledge that weaken LGBTQ people as a collectivity. Makalani-MaHee’s absence from our scholarly archive mirrors the attempted social and cultural erasure of Black trans folk, even as an annual prize in his name, the Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Award for Trans Equality, honors individuals judged to be exceptionally committed to this cause. There have been no reviews of Don’t! to date and it is unclear whether the book is being read beyond those who obtained it as a tribute to the author. His papers yet endure in a series of cardboard boxes that bear his name in Wilton Manors, Florida, where there is an undated piece of scrap paper on which he jotted the sentence, “The barometer has shifted, but not the struggle.”138 However the atmospheric pressures on trans people might change, “we must be willing to stand publicly and boldly,” as Makalani-MaHee urged, “when any human being is being targeted and denied their certain inalienable rights.”139
Notes
Makalani-MaHee, “Courage for Change.” The fact that lesbian separatism appealed so strongly to Makalani-MaHee throughout his life might indicate the impact of his personal relationships with non-Black women, who have historically embraced separatism to a greater extent than women of African descent.
Bey, “Trans*-ness of Blackness.” See also Richardson et al., “Between Inconceivable and Criminal,” for a conversation that theorizes Black trans feminism as a social location and disciplinary formation.
The term was coined by Black queer theorist Moya Bailey (“They Aren’t Talking about Me”).
At the time of this writing, the Cite Black Women collective includes Zakiya Carr Johnson, Jenn M. Jackson, Erica Lorraine Williams, Ashanté Reese, Daina Ramey Berry, Bianca C. Williams, Yasmiyn Irizarry, Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Alysia Mann Carey, Michaela Machicote, and Imani A. Wadud. The webpage detailing the membership of the collective and Smith’s founding of it no longer appears online but was cited in Signorella, “Toward a More Just Feminism,” and captured by archive.org on May 31, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240531211726/https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/our-collective.html.
Future commentators may also have to confront the elitism that attends the reception of spoken word poetry as “bad” or “annoying” (Craig, “Practicing Poetry,” 41).
Niki Lopez Creative, https://nikilopez.com/nikilopezpresents/ (accessed February 2, 2022).
This was shortly after their donation, during a research trip supported by a University of California, Santa Barbara, Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship. With sincere continued thanks, I would like to acknowledge here the invaluable assistance of Emery Grant, Chris Rudisill, Stephen Nonack, and Paul Fasana.
Laws and Macsata, “Expression of Support for Basic Human Decency.” Laws and Macsata single out Makalani-MaHee as an inspiration for present-day activism.
I am very grateful for the care that the copy editor took to check the links in the final draft of this article. Their queries alerted me to the fact that sometime between July 2023 and July 2024, a dozen of the URLs used to research this article—including Makalani-MaHee’s personal website, Bilerico Project blog posts, and newsletter articles—vanished. Nine of these are publicly accessible via the links provided only because they were captured by the “Wayback Machine” at archive.org.
For one recent example that engages the latter two categories, see Greene-Hayes, “Street Evangelists and Transgender Saints.”
I have not been able to determine if Makalani-MaHee attended these institutions, but it seems likely that he did not graduate from any college/university.
Bullock, “From Bronx to Bishop.” I consider the surname attached to his position at this time as a “deadname” and have not included it here, although Makalani-MaHee never renounced his pretransition past.
Makalani-MaHee also delivered guest sermons at other local congregations, such as “The Cost of Ally-ship” at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta in June 1997 (Emory University, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta records, circa 1831–2014, Box 92, Folder 25, https://archives.libraries.emory.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/568021).
In the same year, Dr. James S. Tinney established the short-lived Faith Temple Christian Church in Washington, DC (Mumford, Not Straight, Not White, 150).
He had founded a youth theater troupe, Heart Theater, in Atlanta, as well as a production company named either SilveFingers (Makalani-MaHee, “Bishop S. F. Ma-Hee”) or Silverfinger (as on his personal website, http://bishopmahee.com, captured by archive.org on March 22, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20040606092848/http://bishopmahee.com/).
Rodriguez, “All God’s Children (Except Some).” This article mistakenly identifies the church as having been founded in 1997. In some bios, this church is referred to as the Great Congregation (as in Makalani-MaHee, “Bishop S. F. Ma-Hee,” at the “Read More” link).
At the time of this writing, the organization appears to be defunct.
Makalani-MaHee, “Bishop S. F. Ma-Hee.” I have been unable to determine the exact years of his tenure at United Christian Ministries or obtain more information about this group.
Bishop MaHee’s personal website, http://bishopmahee.com/the_minister (captured by archive.org on October 15, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20041015123134/http://bishopmahee.com/the_minister).
See, for example, Thunderword, Christendom to Freedom, 7–18, 25–30, 35–40.
Makalani-MaHee, Don’t!, 8–9. For a survey of transantagonism in the types of churches frequented by Makalani-MaHee, see Garland-Tirado, “Transphobia in Black Churches,” and Wilcox, Queer Religiosities, 142–45.
Stonewall National Museum and Archives (SNMA, Fort Lauderdale), Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Archive.
Mesner, “Jokering as Queer Ministry,” 17. For theorization of transgender hermeneutics, see Córdova Quero, “This Body Trans/Forming Me”; Apostolacus, “Bible and the Transgender Christian”; Cooper, “‘This Is Who I Am’”; and Hartke, Transforming.
SNMA, Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Archive.
SNMA, Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Archive.
Shange, For Colored Girls, 63. See also Eve Lorane Brown, “For Transgender Colored Girls,” for analysis of this play in the context of Black trans women’s experience.
Makalani-MaHee, Don’t!, 28. The poem that gives his collection its title, “Don’t,” is an objection to non-Black people’s use of the n-word.
Barbara MaHee appears to have passed away in 2018.
For example, see Dickerman, “Bishop S. F.”
For a discussion of the concept of “foremothers” in literature, see Bryant, “Literary Foremother.”
Heather C. Lou writes, “Womyn is a gender-independent spelling of ‘woman/en’ that feminists and womanists adopted in 1975 as an opposition to institutionalized definitions of females according to the male-dominated societal norm” (“Womyn of Color Leadership,” 86).
Lopez, “Poet and Advocate Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Performing.” My description of Lopez is taken from the “About” section of this YouTube channel.
The published poem, “Trans, Pierced, and Tattooed,” specifies “clean-cut images of authority” (Don’t!, 19).
The published version of the poem switches these lines and “If Jesus were alive today he’d love the / folks that are / thrown away.”
A printout of this poem dated September 2003 forms part of Makalani-MaHee’s archive at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives. That version—entitled, “Pierced, Tattooed, and Cross-Dressing”—uses “cross-dressing” in place of “trans” throughout. The revisions he made register the transformation in his gender identity and understanding of trans experience more generally.
I have followed Don’t!’s lead in some aspects of my transcription—for example, the capitalization of “Saints and ‘Aints’”—but I have diverged in others so as to convey the rhythm of Makalani-MaHee’s performance.
Quoted in Redkey, Respect Black, 176.
While the Black Madonna was not raised to the level of co-Redeemer by the Shrine (as in Roman Catholic forms of Marian devotion), Shrine members did eventually incorporate features of Catholic religiosity such as saying the Rosary and Hail Mary (Thomas, “Black Madonna and the Role of Women,” 130).
See Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. For an overview of womanist ethics at what would have been a key moment in Makalani-MaHee’s intellectual formation, see Sanders, “Womanist Ethics.”
Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, 220. Grant later addressed LGBTQ concerns in an interview; see Comstock, “Rev. Dr. Jacquelyn Grant.”
Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, 36, 196–200; Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 6–20, 180–86, 202; Martin, More Than Chains and Toil, 49, 61, 86, 93–95.
Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, 191n37; Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 99, 168–76; Martin, More Than Chains and Toil, 144–45, 149–52.
Makalani-MaHee also expressed this sentiment in a blog post (“Wanda Sykes”).
Lightsey, Our Lives Matter; Yetunde, Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, U.S. Law, and Womanist Theology for Transgender Spiritual Care; and Sheppard, Tilling Sacred Grounds.
Makalani-MaHee’s personal website, http://bishopmahee.com, captured by archive.org on September 12, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170912132945/http://bishopmahee.com/.
He was married to Rajindra Narinesingh at the time of his death (Sheets, “Where Black Lives and Trans Lives Intersect”).
SNMA, Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Archive. Makalani-MaHee conveyed variations on this message via Twitter posts, which remain available at https://x.com/thebishoptweets.
SNMA, Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Archive.
Stein, Unbound, 194–95. Makalani-MaHee’s resistance to thinking in nonbinary terms notwithstanding, he would have seen important aspects of his experience reflected in Simone (Cece) Temple’s “Don’t Call Me Sis/Cis Cuz’ I’m Not Your Sister: Black Nonbinary Method and the Praxis of Nonbinary Womanism.”
Quoted in Stein, Unbound, 196.
Makalani-MaHee, “Courage for Change.” This article appears to be an expanded version of an article published the previous month in the Pride Center Voice, titled “Courage to Change: The Continued Journey of Self Discovery” (accessed July 27, 2023, at the following URL, which is no longer valid: https://www.pridecenterflorida.org/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TheVoiceDecember2011.pdf).
“Combahee River Collective Statement,” in K. Taylor, How We Get Free, 15.
For these poems, see Makalani-MaHee, Don’t!, 32–33, 34, 35. My understanding of identity as provisional and contingent in these senses derives in part from Hall, “Minimal Selves” and Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity.”
I base this assessment on research conducted over more than a dozen years at the GLBT Historical Society, Kinsey Institute, University of Miami Special Collections, and New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division in the LGBTQ Special Collections.
SNMA, Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee Archive.
