A Salute to Black Queer Icon Reed Edwin Peggram
Hey y’all,
These past few weeks have been both frightening and exciting as we collectively attempt to assert radical, systemic change for black people in America. In this historic moment, I feel a kind of responsibility to be an activist and an educator and an empathizer and an agent of radical change all at the same time. But trying to be all these things comes at a cost.
To be completely honest with you, I am emotionally spent and recently needed to take a little break from the internet and social media for the sake of my mental and physical health. Like most of you, in the middle of trying to be “present,” I am also still just processing and grieving everything that is happening.
And I haven’t taken enough time to nurture a constant conversation with my foreign-born spouse who is white. Someone online asked to no one in particular “how are you interracial couples doing” … it’s such a good question.
The short answer is … we are slowly and gingerly working through the issues. It’s a tough situation. I am traumatized as is the rest of black America. So I am either putting on a brave face for work, feverishly putting out content for the cause, or crying with lots of alcohol and pizza … or cookies … or five guys.
In the midst of it all, there’s not much time or emotional space to also be a loving husband to someone who absolutely deserves my undivided attention and is desperately trying to be an ally.
He deserves better but I am in a constant state of disrepair. Thankfully he loves me anyway.
For lots of personal reasons (that you will soon figure out), I am inspired to dedicate today’s salute to Black Queer History to one Mr. Reed Edwin Peggram: The Gay Black Man Who Stared Down Nazis in the Name of Love!
Reed Edwin Peggram was born on July 26, 1914, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Harvey Thomas Peggram, worked variously as a shorthand teacher, a self-employed card writer, and, according to his World War I draft card, an artist. Harvey was inducted into the United States Army on November 6, 1917, and served overseas as a private in the medical unit between May 15, 1918, and September 9, 1919 . . .
In the fall of 1938, Peggram met the person who would change his life. There is no record of how Peggram met Danish scholar Gerdh Hauptmann, who was studying fine art and painting at the Sorbonne, for the same reason that there is no written record of any facet of their relationship: They were gay, in a time when few dared to write such feelings down. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that this was the definitive romantic relationship of Peggram’s life. Hauptmann taught him Danish; he taught Hauptmann English. Within a year, he would write that they were “inseparable.”“Recent European events have caused me to leave France for Denmark,” Peggram wrote in September 1939. “I hope you will also join your prayers to mine for humanity, civilization, and culture” . . .
The men left Copenhagen shortly before it was invaded by the Nazis on April 9, 1940. They fled to Paris to retrieve their luggage and made their way to Florence, Italy, where they wrongly assumed they would be safe. They spent the rest of the year stranded and broke, pleading for money from family in the U.S. who could not understand why Peggram would not just come home . . .
In Italy at the end of 1944, the Negro 92nd Infantry Division of the United States Army discovered two gaunt men who claimed they had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp. One man was thin and blonde with a "scholarly appearance." The other had brown skin, a slight build, and an erect carriage. After two years behind barbed wire, they said, they had fled the camp and gone on an incredible journey to reach the American lines: swimming in lakes, hiking through the snow-covered Apennines, and taking shelter in barns, caves, woods, and the homes of friendly partisan supporters. They claimed they dodged bullets and ate leaves to survive; they said they bore witness to the slaughter of women and babies. Their names were Reed Peggram, an African-American, and Gerdh Hauptmann, his Danish friend, and they were "ragged and near collapse from hunger and fatigue” . . .
To read the full story, please visit the original article her
Also, go ahead and check out the latest episode of “the family we choose” podcast where my best friend and I talk about race in America.
Peace and love always,
the Trendy One . . .
