It is possible that Grimké substituted male for female pronouns to disguise her same-sex desire and make her poetry more acceptable to editors, but she submitted few of these poems for publication. Moreover, she also kept a diary in her early twenties in which she chronicled her emotional anguish over an unnamed man who failed to return her affections. When he did not respond to her love letters, Grimké, like many of the protagonists in her fiction and drama, renounced marriage and motherhood. She foreswore loving anyone in the future except her father, for fear that a relationship with someone else would compete with her affection for him.

Sponsor Message.

The extent to which Grimké's life revolved around her father was dramatically revealed after his death in 1930. Without her father and unable to develop a close relationship with another woman or man, she became even more withdrawn. She gave up writing and stopped corresponding with her Harlem Renaissance friends.

She moved to New York City, where she apparently lived as a recluse for the remainder of her life. Grimké died on June 10, 1958 after a long illness.

Most African-American lesbian literature is as concerned with racism as it is with sexuality, causing many writers to construct Afrocentric sexual identities that affirm the power of black women.

Glbtq African Americans frequently experience racism in predominantly white glbtq communities and homophobia in heterosexual black society, but the multiple oppressions faced by black glbtq people are now being recognized.

American lesbian literature prior to Stonewall exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.

The Harlem Renaissance, an African-American literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, included several important gay and lesbian writers.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Countee Cullen, an important member of the Harlem Renaissance, has coded references to homosexuality in much of his poetry.

As midwife to the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke played a crucial role in the development of African-American literature; his homosexuality informed his plea for respect of sexual and cultural diversity.