🏳️‍🌈🏺Audre Lord (Harlem legacy)

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde named herself a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”—intersectional before it was a term. She took the dignity Baldwin carved out for himself and transformed it into a battle cry—insisting that difference was not a weakness but a weapon, that silence was complicity, and that queer voices carried the power to reshape the world.

Born in Harlem to Caribbean immigrant parents, Lorde grew out of the soil of the Harlem Renaissance and Baldwin and Rustin’s example, but her activism was fiery like no others. She declared anger a resource, eroticism a tool, and poetry a panacea against injustice.

In 1984 she published Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches that became a sacred text for Black, feminist, queer, and liberation struggles everywhere. She fought capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and queerphobia as one multi-headed beast, and reminded us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Today, her warrior ethos echoes in movements confronting state violence, racism, complacency, and immigrant detention. She proved that art and activism are inseparable—and that queerness in-and-of-itself is a radical stance against fascism.

From Baldwin to Lorde to today’s 50501 protesters, our legacy is unbroken. And this Labor Day, if she was still with us, I know where she would be:

shouting at the top of her lungs at the Monroe Park protest at 4:30. “Your silence will not protect you” “Despair is a tool of our enemies”