Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of semen. "Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. "Women are not taken seriously as arbiters of history, nor are poets." - from essay "Knowing the Danger and Going There Anyway" It won the Teddy Award for Best feature film at the Berlin International Film Festival, and eventually drew direct criticism from Representative Peter Hoekstra, then chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, for the NEA's funding of projects that "a majority of Americans would find offensive". Watermelon Woman was the first feature film by a black lesbian and was made on a budget of $300,000, financed by a $31,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a fundraiser, and donations from friends of Dunye. In 1996, Cheryl Clarke had a cameo role (as "June Walker", a play on the names of June Jordan and Alice Walker) in Watermelon Woman, the groundbreaking feature film by filmmaker Cheryl Dunye about a young black lesbian working a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about a Black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical "mammy" roles relegated to Black actresses during the time period. She is currently on the graduate faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies.
Since 1992, Cheryl Clarke has been the Director of the Office of Diverse Community Affairs and LGBT Concerns and has specific responsibility for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning student life at Rutgers University, New Brunswick campus. From 1981 through 1990, she was an editor for Conditions, the ground-breaking and extremely important feminist magazine of writings by women with an emphasis on writing by lesbians.Ĭlarke continues to read her poetry and speak at venues throughout the U.S.
She read her poetry through the 1970s in New York, and her first book of poetry was published in 1983. from Howard University) but completed her accession to academia at Rutgers with her M.A., M.S.W., and Ph.D. Her essays and prose have repeatedly, persistently cleared paths or built on the trail-blazing of others.īorn in 1947 in Washington, DC, she began her education there (receiving a B.A. Her poetry tends toward story-telling and blends sexuality with cultural and political analysis.
Jersey City, New Jersey photo by Robert Giard )Ĭheryl Clarke is a Black lesbian-feminist poet and essayist whose work has done worlds to assert the voice of Black lesbians both in feminism and in Black arts/politics.
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