GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

On June 19, 1979, two hundred Black women boarded buses from their homes to the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. Coiffed, pressed hair protruded from netted, veiled hats. They wore their best black dresses, buttoned to the top. They carried white carnations. Only rarely did their stoic expressions break, except to remind each other that they had to maintain their silence, the elders silently shushing the youngers. Was this a gesture of queer political intimacy? Was this a queer political event? Perhaps. It was for love, literally and figuratively.

It was a protest funeral for Mrs. Eulia Love,¹ and as such, it was indeed a choreography of radical queer potential of the sort that Cathy Cohen (1997) urges us toward in her transformative essay "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens." On January 3, 1979, Love was gardening in her front yard on Orchard Avenue in South LA. Gardening was therapeutic, as she suffered from what family members described as acute depression. She was impatient with city bureaucracy, having only just received the social security she was due after her husband's death several months before, and by that time the bills had accumulated. As she did her gardening that January morning, she was approached by an employee of the Southern California Gas Company, who informed her that he was there to shut her gas off for nonpayment (Board of Police Commissioners 1979: 4). She attempted to explain that she could now pay the $22.09, the minimum amount due to maintain her gas service. Yet according to some reports, when he insisted that he had to stop service, she hit his arm with the shovel she had been using. She returned inside and told her daughter Sheila that she "was trying to pay them, talk to them, and they just rolled up the window" (Mitchell and Shuit 1979). The gas employee left, and Mrs. Love went to the Boys Market down the street to pay her bill; the market attendant informed her that they only accepted payment for bills that were current, and since her account was past due she could not pay her bill there directly. So she purchased a money order for $22.09 intending to pay the bill that day (ibid.).

In the meantime, the gas employee had filed a police report describing Mrs. Love as "foaming at the mouth." Later that afternoon, armed with this description, two different SOCAL gas company employees, William Jones and Robert Aubry, went back to Love's house to await a police escort to execute the gas shutoff. Mrs. Love, unaware that the police were on their way, resumed her gardening, trimming [End Page 178] the branches of a tree on her lawn with a knife. Shocked when two police officers showed up at her house, she began pacing and yelling that she could make her minimum payment, showing them the money order for $22.09. The police drew their guns and demanded that she drop the knife that was still in her hand (Board of Police Commissioners 1979: 1–8).

Eulia Love turned to go into her house, and the police advanced toward her. Love turned around, still holding the knife, as she faced Officer Hopson crouched, with a gun outstretched in both hands, and Officer O'Callaghan with a gun in his right hand and a baton in his left. She was surrounded. As she started to lower the knife, O'Callaghan knocked it from her hand with the baton. She picked it up again as if she was going to throw it, perhaps to protect herself, or perhaps to toss it far away from her in demonstration of her retreat. O'Callaghan and Hopson then each fired six rounds of bullets, inflicting eight bullet wounds. Hopson walked over to Love, rolled her dead body over, and placed handcuffs on her wrists. She was pronounced dead one minute later, at 4:26 p.m. (ibid.: 7–9). Police Chief Daryl Gates determined that O'Callaghan and Hopson's actions were "in policy" and that no disciplinary action would be taken (Farr 1979). In June, when the LA Police Commission published an extensive investigative report about the shooting, organizers planned the silent gathering. Young Black girls from Audubon Junior High School sent letters to Tom Bradley, Los Angeles's Black mayor. One student, Margo Willis (n.d.), ended her letter with a series of questions including: "What will it be like when I grow up? Will I get shot for not paying a bill on time? What will it be like after my generation?"

Might Margo Willis's questions inform queer politics? Eulia Love's placement on the hetero side of the queer-hetero divide that Cohen obliterates for its erasure of raced and classed subjectivities in "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens" surely accounts for the fact that police murders of black subjects, particularly Black women, have been cast out of the purview of mainstream queer protest.²

What do we make of the two hundred women who came to demand accountability decked out in their funeral best? In a sartorial drama and choreography of political mourning can we conceive of the silent protest as a register of the non-normative? Is it possible that the production of carnations and netting and heels and hats and silence in the absurd space of the headquarters of Love's murderers was not an appeal for protection through respectability but instead a dramatization of the nonnormativity of black un/gender? Police Chief Gates was enjoying a rather normal dinner at home when he heard the news of Love's shooting, the sort of dinner that Love would never again have with her daughters, severed as her claims to [End Page 179] normative motherhood, domesticity, and privacy were by her abrupt removal from the earth. Although he never saw her, to Gates (1992: 197), Love was "frightening to behold, 175 pounds, snarling, screaming invective…. This was hardly the poor widow portrayed in the Herald, but an out-of-control woman with a history of mental problems, who was threatening to kill anybody who came near her." Excised from the category of poor widow, with its connotations of normative sexuality and femininity, Love was a threat in life and in death to the LAPD's reputation: Gates bemoaned that upon hearing of the shooting, "the community had already convicted the officers. Next would come the lynching" (ibid.: 198–99). Love's murder rests alongside lynching in a different way: as an index of the continuing centrality of black sexual counternormativity in the production of gendered racial capitalism.

How might we evaluate the queer politics of such a funeral? Of a Black woman's life valued at approximately $22.09? Of the questions raised by young Margo Willis? Of the absurd bureaucracy of capitalism that made it impossible for Love to pay her bill even when she had the money? Of the time and frustration imposed on the economically precarious through errands and money orders and long lines and wait times and administrative refusals to accept payment that rendered young daughters orphans?

"Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens" not only altered queer studies and Black studies by providing new theoretical grounds from which to think about such questions of gender, sexuality, race, and political economy but also offered new political terrain on which to take action. Specifically, Cohen (1997: 441) focuses on the disjuncture, "evident in queer politics, between an articulated commitment to promoting an understanding of sexuality that rejects the idea of static, monolithic, abounded categories on the one hand, and political practices structured around binary conceptions of sexuality and power on the other hand." She contends that the radical potential of queer politics is limited by activists who evoke a "single-oppression framework" (ibid.). Cohen teaches us that the production of white queer subjectivity has, in mainstream configurations, relied, at least in part, on the disavowal of Black female precarity and violation. We are forced to reckon with the proximity between the state's production of racial heteronormativity through violence and homonormative productions of subjectivity through erasure. The funeral protest exposes the intersection of impossibility and possibility—of the impossibility of redress and resurrection, and the possibility of Black life produced by collective insistence on alternative terms of political and economic order and alternative modes of sociality. It was a rejection of the state's ruse of criminalization; this is significant for queer politics if we are to understand the [End Page 180] stakes of radical recuperations of the term queer, a term that came into early political discourse precisely as a project of antiblack criminalization.

As early as the 1890s, in southern newspaper accounts, queer was used widely to refer to excessive bodies. In these discourses, all the queers were Black and all Blacks were criminal. In 1897, for example, there were at least forty-three articles published in Atlanta newspapers, especially the Atlanta Constitution, reviling Black life as queer, and this queerness was almost always demonstrated through criminality.³ These stories invariably took place in the city's municipal court with sensational headlines describing Black bodies as excessive and delinquent. This is all the more significant because queer was not an adjective used to describe a range of nouns. Besides criminalized Black people, journalists only used queer to describe strange objects and animals found in the city in a regular column called "Queer Things in Georgia." Queer was defined by uncontrollable Black bodies that could only be interpreted and governed through policing and incarceration. The criminalizing discourse of queerness produced a white supremacist subjectivity that excised blackness from the category of the human. "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens" exposes a problematic recuperation of "queer" as a political terminology that rejects sexual subordination with inadequate regard for the role of racial and economic terrorization in the production of gender and sexual normativity. As Cohen (1997: 451) argued, "queer politics and much of queer theory seem in fact to be static in the understanding of race, class, and gender and their roles in how heteronormativity regulates sexual behavior and identities." Queer politics, then, was problematic in its propensity to "collapse our understanding of power into a single continuum of evaluation" (ibid.: 452; emphasis added).

A radically queer, complex evaluation of life and politics might organize around the racial and gendered economies of $22.09. The march for Eulia Love offers a glimpse into the possibility for social movement formation that centers lives effaced under the weight of multiple axes of oppression; these effacements are legitimized under the broad political rubric of another term of order that Cohen has so powerfully illuminated in her radical oeuvre: deviance. It is Cohen's evaluation that propels us toward the formation of political analyses and organizing platforms that recognize the stakes of queer assessment. Eulia Love, Michelle Cusseaux, Eleanor Bumpurs, and Korryn Gaines, to name only a few Black women whose deaths at the hands of police were justified by discourses that depicted them as criminally insane, that portrayed their bodies as excessive and uncontrollable, reflect a long historical continuity; though they were not called queer by the police who shot them, their murders reflect the work of policing and terrorization that the term queer was meant to accomplish at least as far back as the late nineteenth century; [End Page 181] like Cohen's formative work, the gathering for Eulia Love offers a reminder of the queer potential of Black feminist evaluation to challenge political economies of death and dispossession.