Gloria Naylor and a Fan Discuss The Women of Brewster Place
By Mary C. Foltz, Associate Professor of English, Lehigh University
July 26, 2021
When The Women of Brewster Place was published in 1982, the characters Theresa and Lorraine offered strong representation of Black lesbians and the challenges that they face within larger Black communities. With the additional publications of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Audre Lorde’s ZAMI: A New Spelling of My Name, 1982 was an important year for the representation of Black lesbian and queer characters. As shows like Pose, Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Orange is the New Black, and Glee have become 21st-century sensations, it may be difficult to remember how powerful it was to encounter representations of lesbian desire in earlier decades, when readers were hungry for queer love, kinship, and community that challenged hegemonic narratives about “perverse,” “sinful” desires leading to loneliness, hellfire, and death. While queer and trans youth today can access works about LGBTQ people on Netflix, Prime Video, and YouTube, queer feminist youth of my generation prior to the internet and streaming services flocked to women’s bookstores to encounter novels that explored our communities. When screen adaptations of The Women of Brewster Place (1989) and The Color Purple (1985) were released they set the stage for today’s mainstream LGBTQ televisual and filmic explosion. To this point, Ann-Derrick Gaillott states, “The Women of Brewster Place cracked open the door for queer TV” of today, especially for representations of Black queer characters. And for Black lesbians and other queer women in the 1980s, Naylor’s and Walker’s books and their adaptations proved groundbreaking and life-affirming.
The Gloria Naylor Archive contains correspondence from the period directly following the publication of her first novel between Naylor and a number of prominent Black lesbian feminist thinkers and writers that support this point. Gloria I. Joseph, Cheryl Clarke, and Alexis De Veaux responded to the release of the The Women of Brewster Place with notes of congratulations. Naylor also received a letter from a representative of Audre Lorde, which requested that she write a “favorable comment” about ZAMI: A New Spelling of My Name. So, too, Black feminist literary criticism from the period, like Barbara Smith’s “The Truth That Never Hurts: Black Lesbians in Fiction in the 1980s” addresses Naylor’s work; although Smith is critical of Naylor’s plot concerning Theresa and Lorraine, she nevertheless positions the novel as an important work of the decade. In addition to responses from prominent figures, Naylor’s lesbian characters inspired letters from fans, which she collected throughout the years, along with her responses. In what follows, I discuss an epistolary exchange between a fan and Naylor that shows not only one reader’s response to her first novel, but also Naylor’s own reflections upon how she crafted her lesbian characters. Letters like these are valuable ways that students, teachers, and scholars can better understand her authorial intentions and readers’ reception in the 1980s. Throughout this piece, I will refer to the author of the letter to Naylor as a “fan” or “reader” as I have not been able to find the correspondent and request her permission to use her name in this piece.
On Oct. 30, 1982, a reader that I assume to be a Black lesbian, or at the very least a strong ally to Black lesbian communities, put pen to paper to work through her responses to Naylor’s first novel, released in June of the same year. Although dated in October, the epistle seems to have been written in early November as a response to the reader’s encounter with an article by Naylor released in Essence magazine titled “A Message to Winston” (Nov. 1982), which focuses on friendships between Black women and Black gay men. With this piece in mind, the reader asks what Naylor has “to say about homosexuality?” And she wonders if Naylor’s article and novel are “an introduction to the ‘gay world’ from a ‘straight mind’” and thus if her work does a disservice to the “large black-women-identified women’s group in this country that have and will read your materials and want to see ‘positive,’ non-stereotypical portrayals of themselves.” The reader wants to celebrate Naylor’s focus on Black women, acknowledge her inclusion of lesbian characters, and appraise how they are depicted. Vacillating between praise and strong critique, the reader offers a glimpse into the kinds of conversations that occurred between Black lesbian and queer women readers outside of institutions of higher education as they discussed The Women of Brewster Place.
In the opening of the letter, she proclaims that the book is “excellent” in part because the “words run off the page, as if, they were verses of poetry.” Another reason for the success of the novel in the fan’s estimation is that it “gave much insight/information and revelation on/about Black women’s culture” through “beautiful” portrayals “of the women on Brewster Place and how they took care of/supported/loved each other.” Despite this high praise, the reader notes a contrast between how the majority of women in the novel are depicted and Naylor’s description of “the two” lesbian characters, “the only ones who were not accepted on Brewster Place.” The reader goes on to exclaim that she “could never understand your portrayal of [Black lesbian characters].” Then, she provides an astute account of her discomfort with the novel. She writes,
Let me explain, you wrote of your straight characters with a tenderness and maturity with words that floated through one’s mind like a sweet summer’s breeze. But when you talked about [the lesbians] you wrote of them, as if, they were filled with misunderstanding, escapism and immaturity. You created two people/characters/lovers who could not even talk to one another. One’s relief is talking to a drunk, the janitor… And the story ends in the worse (sic) way possible. Rape and death. Then we never know what happens after that.
Here, the reader takes Naylor to task for creating isolated lesbian characters who lack a broader community and, to her mind, seem less developed—more immature—than other characters. She is particularly angered by Lorraine’s friendship with Ben as she argues that it elides vibrant Black lesbian support networks to which Lorraine could have turned. Even as Naylor’s novel clearly is a sympathetic rendering of lesbians, the reader feels an absence of connectivity to lesbian and queer community, which she felt would have made for a richer narrative.
Further, she chastises Naylor for repeating narratives of sexual violence against lesbians that focus on the trauma of queer life, a topic that Barbara Smith will explore in her aforementioned essay. Like literary critic Anna Smith, this fan longs for novels that show “there is more to Black lesbian life than rape, madness, and self-hatred” (2001, 144). Finally, she criticizes the rape of a Black lesbian as the scene that releases straight women into action, especially as Lorraine falls out of the narrative. In her estimation, Naylor’s portrayal of queer death merely enlightens the straight characters and thus has little to offer lesbian readers.
Naylor replied with a six-page letter about her lesbian characters in which she addresses many of her readers’ points. She begins by defending her characterization of Lorraine and Theresa as she did not want to “defile or idealize that lifestyle,” but instead to present “homosexuality … with the same problems and ambivalences of heterosexuality because it does, after all, involve human beings.” She later notes that she wanted Lorraine and Theresa’s relationship to exude problems, as does every other relationship on Brewster Place. She writes, “What I did not do—and quite consciously—was to paint their relationship as more ideal or devoid of problems than any relationship that existed for the other women on Brewster Place.” Naylor, then, invites her reader to look again at her novel and to see that each character struggles in “ambivalent” or “pain[ful] relationships, including romantic and familial relationships but also friendships.” For Naylor, the reader’s critique of her characterization stems from a desire for an idealized representation of lesbian love in novel form, which causes her to misconstrue the intent behind the characterization.
Naylor also addresses how she sought to counter homophobic representations of lesbians. She writes to the fan,
The Women of Brester Place (sic) is a microcosm of the Black female experience in America. And I knew in all good conscience that I could not propose to write such a book and not include women whose sexual preference varied from the “norm” in this society. So yes, I was consciously aware of the “large black woman-identified-woman’s group” in this country. And I set out to consciously obliterate practically every stereotype that exists about them: 1) lesbians are readily identifiable by their rough, male attire and mannerisms 2) they live in “butch” and “fem” relationships 3) they are forced into that lifestyle bcause they are sexually frigid and/or too ugly to get a man and too mean to keep him 4) they are sexually perverted and a dangerous influence for young children 5) they have been raped by and/or hate their fathers and subsequently, all men.
Many of the stereotypes that Naylor mentions here are familiar critiques of societal fantasies about queer women. Interestingly, she eschews gender diversity within lesbian communities when she states that she refused to indulge in depicting women who wear “male attire” or exhibit “male mannerisms”; denying the centrality of butch and femme gender identities for some members of lesbian communities, she states explicitly that she chose to avoid such depictions. In Naylor’s attempt to side-step what she deems societal misconceptions, she reveals a desire to erase gender diversity and to affirm normative femininity of lesbians. While her fan does not explicitly describe her gender expression, it is fruitful to think about how butch or femme readers might have responded to receiving a letter like this one in which their identities are seen as mere stereotypes.
Naylor follows up her defense of her characterization of Lorraine and Theresa by contextualizing it in the novel as a whole. She argues that her aim was to show how lesbians share experiences of oppression with straight Black women and thus to critique how lesbians too frequently are shunned from Black sisterhood necessary for confronting sexism, racism, and classism. She writes,
“unlike the other women on Brewster, who could turn to each other for support in their domestic problems, Lorraine has no such avenue. She is not really viewed as really being a woman by the neighborhood but part of a threatening force—’The Two’[.] So she turns to Ben for nurturing and understanding that was missing in her home.”
In this part of her response, she misses the point of her correspondent’s letter. By focusing on how the two lesbians are seen as a threat to the neighborhood, she needs to foreground their isolation. Yet, while the fan clearly supports her critique of homophobia, her larger point concerns the value of queer community, which to her mind is a great resource for Black lesbians, queer women, and their allies. Naylor goes on to note that “since Lorraine cannot go to her sisters, she goes to Ben, and in the course of seeking such comfort, she’s raped. I believe that you’re missing a vital point about her brutalization. Lorraine is not raped because she’s a lesbian—she’s raped because she is a woman.” While I might argue that the novel does suggest misogyny and homophobia both are the cause of the violence toward Lorraine, Naylor here argues that she sought to bind lesbian and straight women through a shared acknowledgment of racism, sexism, and gender violence. This is clear when she writes, “Every woman on that street dreams about that woman’s fate—because it is, in reality, their fate… And every woman … participates in this consciousness of a need to do something about their collective oppression.” Through her novel, she hoped to unite Black women in their shared experiences rather than emphasizing the specific forms of oppression that Black LGBTQ people experience. For Naylor, the denial of a shared status as women is the problem to be addressed so that a “broken network of female support” can be mended across straight, lesbian, and queer women.
Naylor’s arguments in this letter do not convince her reader. While the fan continues to praise Naylor as a writer, she reiterates the crux of her argument about the book:
“Now, when you talk about “Black Lesbians,” you have an obligation to the lesbian community, I feel, to be to be as clear and as positive as you can, because, as I have said before, you are talking about people’s lives. In my mind, they story was about two lesbians, who, because of past hurt, and not being accepted, ended up on Brewster Place. These lesbians could not communicate to each other. They were cut off from their neighbors, who had prejudice against them because they were lesbians. One turns to a man, any man, even the drunk. This short story ends in the worst way: Rape & Murder. I must ask you, does “The Two” break stereotypes? In my opinion it does not.”
For the fan, representations of the rape of Black lesbians cannot be the most effective way to build bridges between straight and queer women. She is asking why such brutalization should be the primary means through which to articulate the need to abandon homophobia. Instead, she wonders if representations of vibrant Black lesbian communities—not isolated, vulnerable, and brutalized individuals—might be a better way to counter homophobia and to honor the rich community strategies utilized by Black lesbians to support each other in the face of sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia. Indeed, the fan affirms that Black lesbian communities can serve as a model for the types of Black feminist networks that Naylor imagines in her novel through her straight characters on Brewster Place. In short, the fan is interested in how readers might learn from how lesbians survive and live rather than learning from how they suffer.
The rich conversations about representations of Black lesbians in literature in these letters reveal reader and author debating how to counter stereotypes about lesbians and how to think about Black lesbians’ connections to Black feminist political and aesthetic projects. For Naylor, an emphasis on sameness in her letter is the way to bring women together to fight oppression whereas, for the fan, Black lesbians have unique perspectives and communities whose insights into oppression should be seen as originating in different experiences from straight Black women. Additionally, the fan continues to insist that Black lesbian communities are a resource that should be centered in aesthetic renderings rather than erased or ignored. These letters from the archive model a few ways in which attention to correspondence can enrich literary analysis of the novel, particularly in reference to Naylor’s queer figures. For one, Naylor grants us a rare inside view of the political strategies that informed her literary work and her desire to unite Black lesbians and straight Black feminists in political projects that address racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Two, the letters give us historical context for her novel, showing how her novel was embedded in conversations among feminist and lesbian readers from the 1980s and the kinds of debates that were occurring around aesthetic representation of queer people. Three, the fan’s letters offer strong critiques of Naylor’s novel, especially the text’s quick dismissal of the possibility of queer subcultural spaces and communities as resources for Black LGBTQ people; as Naylor uses the rape of a Black lesbian as the catalyst for the awakening of Black straight women in the novel, the fan decries this authorial choice and calls for greater attention to Black lesbian communities, a task that Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and others take on in works published after Naylor’s debut novel.