Salir a La Luz Cómo Lesbianas de Color: Coming Out Colored

Maya Chumu. Emiliana Carera, translation.

Seattle: Tsunami Press, 1980. Saddle stapled in photo-illustrated wraps. 57 pp. Text in English and Spanish. 5 ½ x 8 ½ in. Inscribed on title page in Spanish.

A superb primary source document, and a lesser-known example of writing about being a lesbian of color - this copy inscribed to Brigada Victoria Mercado in Nicaragua, a lesbian and gay group organizing against US intervention in Latin America.

Coming Out Colored, released by a small group of anti-racist, anti-capitalist lesbian separatists, was also early in a wave of lesbian coming out stories published through out the 1980s. Chumu argues that the construction of race and gender caused lesbians of color to be marginalized in communities of color due to their sexuality, in the queer community because of gender, and tokenized within the lesbian community because of race, and seeks to redefine “coming out colored.”

The next year, the more widely studied anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, would be released and is credited with bringing many of these arguments about race, class, gender, and sexuality into academia.

Very good; wear to wraps.