Clarke talks career in writing and activism

Cheryl Clarke, a celebrated writer, feminist and lesbian and civil rights activist, gave a talk titled “Living as a Lesbian in the Age of Obama” on Wednesday in Gilman Hall. The event was sponsored by the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS), and co-sponsored by the Center for Africana Studies and LGBTQ Life.

“[Clarke is] notorious for writing about lesbian rabble rousing,” Juliana Vigorito, a junior and organizer of the event, said.

During her talk, Clarke read excerpts from Living as a Lesbian, her collection of poems and essays, which concentrate on LGBT, gender and race issues.

“I don’t find [either poetry or prose] comfortable to write,” Clarke said. “They both put you on the edge, as it should be. I like poetry... but there is time for one and a time for another.”

She also talked to the audience about her experiences working in the Student Affairs office at Rutgers University. In that capacity, she had to balance her role as a member of the administration with her efforts to help student activists.

“Students are the ones who have to do the trouble,” Clarke said. “I worked with faculty and staff. We had committee meetings. Sometimes we involved students... That was my approach to helping students make trouble. But if they didn’t want to do it, or they didn’t do it, I didn’t tell them to. When you’re in the administration, that’s what you got to do. You have to toe a line.”

Clarke also discussed some of the projects that she is actively working on. She recently traveled to South Africa and plans to build connections between American and South African feminists.

“A colleague of mine from New York University wants to set up a dialogue between black feminists there [in South Africa] and black feminists here,” Clarke said. “One of the ideas is to give a conference in the Durban area and to do another smaller one in New York in 2016. So that’s what we’re trying to do — have to raise money.”

Clarke impressed her audience with her candidness, her activism and her outspokenness.

“She’s from a time when being a lesbian was a radical political act,” Vigorito said. “So before it wasn’t just something you could be and leave it at that. It was something that was radical and revolutionary, and it was really cool to see how her career spans different conceptions of that.”

Todd Shepard, a professor in the departments of history and German and Romance Languages and Literature, was the first to reach out to Clarke. The two had met at Rutgers when they were writing their dissertations. Shepard served as the moderator of the talk.

Clarke worked at Rutgers University at the New Brunswick campus in Student Affairs from 1980 to 2013, where she founded the Rutgers Office of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian/Gay Concerns in 1992. Clarke also taught at the university in the 1970s, bringing her total time at Rutgers to 41 years.

“I think she’s just a cool person to bring to campus because she’s had a career invested in campus activism,” Vigorito said.

Clarke spoke about the change in atmosphere surrounding LGBTQ issues since the start of her career.

“By the time we founded our office [in 1992], people’s attitudes were much more enlightened,” she said. “[Rutgers] had a big quality of life survey done from 1987 to 1989, which was record breaking in terms of the country; nobody had done that.”

Clarke expressed her pride in Rutgers for its student body activists and how it has become a more receptive campus to LGBTQ students since the start of her career. Rutgers students founded one of the first homosexual student groups in the country, the Homophile League, in 1969.

“Students had a long history of activism around LGBT issues at Rutgers... They were able to get far more done than I could ever do,” Clarke said. “My thing was to work with people who worked with students, worked with residential life [and] student activities. We also did bias prevention education so that LGBT students as well as other students who felt harassed because of race or gender or sexuality could receive support.”

Clarke stressed the need for potential student activists to organize in groups and the successes she had seen with this strategy at Rutgers.

“[Students] were able to develop profoundly more student organizations, because there was [only] one for so long,” Clarke said. “An LGBT student of color organization was founded, a lesbian student organization was founded, a gay men’s organization was founded. So we had at any one time four or five student organizations, [and] I think it’s important to have more than one.”

Clarke earned her bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1969. She went on to receive her master’s degree and Ph.D. in English, as well as her master’s degree in social work, from Rutgers. She has published four books of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989) and Experimental Love (1993).