● In 1997 Davis confirmed rumors that she is a lesbian, a subject about which she had long been reluctant to speak openly. In 1999 she delivered an address at Johns Hopkins University’s “Living Out Loud” program, a series of lectures, films and events presented by the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance, an undergraduate group on campus. In her speech, Davis focused on how issues of race and class affect the gay movement.
● For Davis, every facet of life is weighted with political significance. Her lesbianism, she says, is “something I’m fine with as a political statement.” She states that issues like sexuality can “enter into consciousness and become the focus of struggle” against domestic violence and AIDS. In her 1998 book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Davis asserts that female blues vocalists who sang about homosexual desire, abusive men, jealousy, lust, travel, and love were creating “a working-class Black feminism” and “a politics of resistance challenging race and gender identity.”
● Davis has never really written a scholarly or academic text. Her books, which are little more than political tracts, include: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003); Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (2001); Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (1999); The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998); The House That Race Built (1998); Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (1996); Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1992); Women, Culture, and Politics (1989); Women, Race, and Class (1981); Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974); and If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971).
● In August 2014, while Israel was engaged in a military effort to dismantle Hamas’s vast terror infrastructure in Gaza, Davis signed a statement that said:
“[W]e strongly condemn the current massacre of the Palestinians of Gaza …
“We condemn and are horrified by the current acts of Israeli brutality, while also recognizing the deeply rooted and ongoing violence that Palestinians are forced to endure on a daily basis — for example, living in ghetto-like conditions in Gaza, systematically having land confiscated, being deprived of their livelihoods, collective punishment, gender and racial violence, and ongoing expulsion and displacement from the Nakba until today.
“An extensive prison system bolsters the occupation and suppresses resistance. Over 5,000 Palestinians are locked inside Israeli prisons; more than 200 are children. There is ongoing criminalization of their political activity….
“We stand with the Palestinian community and with activists all over the world in condemning the flagrant injustices of the current Israeli massacre against the Palestinians of Gaza; the land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza; and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
● In a March 15, 2015 speech to Jewish Voice For Peace, Davis said: “I am extremely happy that Jewish Voice For Peace is emerging as one of the most important progressive organizations in the country.”