Finding Home: Black Queer Historical Scholarship in the United States Part II "Imagine," utters the narrator. " It's 1945. The War is over, you've come back, and we're fixing up our swell new place." This historical hypothetical in activist and writer Barbara Smith's short story "Home" is met with loving laughter from her lover Leila. "You're so crazy," she cried. "You can bet whoever lived here in 1945 wasn't colored or two women either." "How do you know?" the narrator retorts. "Maybe they got together when their husbands went overseas and then decided they didn't need the boys after all. My aunt was always telling me about living with this friend of hers. Garnet. During the War and how much fun they had and how she was so gorgeous." Smith's essay-with its willingness to imagine the existence of queer community in unsuspecting times/ spaces-mirrors the growing interdisciplinary black queer histories. The second part of this essay continues its survey of literature, identifying four overlapping subjects: Black "Lesbian" Histories, Histories of Gender Transgression, Black Communities, Class and Histories of Belonging and Communal/ Political Formations. Black "Lesbian" Histories 1 Histories of black women who loved women and/or transgressed gender norms have largely emerged from the field of Black Women's history (and black feminist scholarship broadly). Much of this work focuses on black women living in urban areas during the first half of the twentieth century. Karen V. Hansen's article "No Kisses Like Youres"which analyzes the erotic friendship of two black women from Hartford, Connecticut in the 1860s and 1870s-is an exception. Using rare correspondence between the two women, Hansen interrogates how the particular intersection of race, class and gender facilitated some communal tolerance of their relationship and dramatically intervenes in the extant literature on romantic friendships. 1 I placed the term "Lesbian" in quotation marks to denote the fact that many historical figures that formed erotic and/or romantic bonds with other women did not utilize this term or identity.

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