Anita Cornwell, groundbreaking Black lesbian feminist writer, has died at 99
Cornwell was the first Black woman writer to publicly identify as a lesbian in print at a time when doing so was nothing short of radical.
Anita Cornwell, 99, the Philadelphia writer who authored the first published collection of essays by an out Black lesbian, has died, her literary executor, Briona Simone Jones, said.
Ms. Cornwell was the first Black female writer to publicly identify as a lesbian in print, Jones said, contributing to The Ladder, a lesbian publication, and Negro Digest in the 1950s and later publishing her groundbreaking essay collection, Black Lesbian in White America, in 1983. In those days, when people could be fired for the suspicion they were gay, choosing to write about her lesbian identity as an unmarried, Black, working-class woman, was nothing short of radical.
“We tend to underestimate how brave and daring and audacious it was to be out unapologetically as a lesbian in the 1970s, in the 1980s,” said Julie R. Enszer, editor of Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian literary and arts journal that is republishing Ms. Cornwell’s work. “To put your face on the cover of a book that says ‘lesbian’ was extraordinarily courageous and meaningful to so many people.”
Ms. Cornwell died May 27, at Wesley Enhanced Living Center at Stapeley in Germantown, “surrounded by the compassionate women who cared for her,” Jones said.
A native of Greenwood, S.C., Ms. Cornwell moved to the Philadelphia area when she was a teenager and attended Temple University to study journalism. She was a prolific writer of essays, poetry, fiction, and journalism, though most of her work was never published.
Ms. Cornwell was unsparing in her critiques of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and the Jim Crow South, exploring ideas of intersectionality and misogynoir decades before such terms were coined. She conducted interviews and corresponded with other prominent Black lesbian writers: Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Barbara Smith. And grief, yearning, and heartbreak coursed through her writing.
“Perhaps if I had not been so badly scarred from having been born black, poor, and female in the Deep South at a time when all blacks were invisible … I might have been more enterprising,” she wrote in the essay “Three for the Price of One: Notes from a Gay, Black Feminist.” “Perhaps if I hadn’t had to cope with all those battles, fears, phobias, and anxieties continually raging within me, I might have gone to live in Greenwich Village or Paris or Los Angeles or any place except conservative Philadelphia.”
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Though she was well-known within lesbian feminist circles, her work was not widely accessible during the decades she wrote.
“Her work was rendered invisible because she was a Black lesbian,” Jones said. “Like that’s it, you know? Full stop.”
Her papers, which are being archived at William Way LGBT Community Center’s John J. Wilcox Archives, are filled with rejection letters from publishing houses telling Ms. Cornwell her writing did not fit into the image they were seeking to build, said Ainsley Wynn Eakins, the archivist processing Ms. Cornwell’s papers.
“The world just wasn’t ready for her yet,” Eakins said.
She struggled to survive financially, saying in a 1993 interview with historian Marc Stein that she chose apartments in West and North Philadelphia based not on community or neighborhood preferences but on what she could afford.
Ms. Cornwell organized with the women’s movement (”the only movement that I saw that might include me,” she told Stein) in Philadelphia and helped found the local chapter of Radicalesbians — a group formed in response to the male-dominated Gay Liberation Front — in 1971. She helped raise money for women in need, writing a mutual aid newsletter called “Funds for Our Sisters,” said Wit López, who studied Ms. Cornwell’s papers as part of a fellowship with Chronicling Resistance.
“The Philadelphia Gas Works vs. the Elderly Poor,” reads one entry, where Ms. Cornwell encourages readers to send money for an 80-year-old woman who lived alone and whose gas was shut off.
Ms. Cornwell was not an academic housed at a university, nor was she considered a public intellectual akin to Lorraine Hansberry.
And yet, Jones said, “we” — Black intellectuals — “follow in her particular lineage, whether we know it or not.”
Ms. Cornwell is survived by her chosen family.
An online memorial will be hosted by Jones and Sinister Wisdom on Thursday, Sept, 21 at 7 p.m. Donations in Ms. Cornwell’s memory can be made on Sinister Wisdom. An in-person memorial will be held at William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia on Saturday, Sept. 30, at 2 p.m.