Introduction
All the protagonists are blond; all the Blacks are criminal and negligible. By mid-1983 I had grown weary of reading literature by white gay men who fell, quite easily, into three camps: the incestuous literati of Manhattan and Fire Island, the San Francisco cropped-mustache clones, and the Boston-to-Cambridge politically correct radical faggots. None of them spoke to me as a black gay man. Their words offered the reflection of a sidewalk; their characters cast ominous shadows for my footfalls. I called a personal moratorium on the writing by white gay men, and read, exclusively, work by lesbians and Black women. At the very least, their black characters were credible and I caught glimpses of my reality in their words. --Joseph Beam, In the Life [1]
Author and editor Joseph Beam opened his 1986 literary anthology In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology with this critique of the gay literary establishment of the 1980s. He expressed frustration at the exclusion of gay Black authors from publications and the misrepresentations of Black men, essentially living in the shadows of the literary world. The introduction’s subtitle announced Beam’s goal: “Leaving the Shadows Behind.” Beam detailed in this introduction the process of developing a volume of poetry, essays, and fiction that brought together the voices of more than a dozen writers to address this gap. The contributors included Samuel R. Delany, Assotto Saint, Blackberri, and Essex Hemphill.
Beam wrote in a moment when gay and lesbian bookstores focused on queer and feminist literature had been established. Philadelphia’s Giovanni’s Room (founded in 1973) and Madison’s A Room of One's Own (founded in 1975) were among the earliest. Having worked stocking shelves in Giovanni’s Room, Beam was familiar with the work of Black gay men appearing in magazines sold in the store. Blacklight and the short-lived newspaper Moja: Black and Gay featured this type of work. Beam believed that these and the handful of novels like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Just Above My Head (1979) simply were not enough in terms of Black gay literature, so he approached Alyson Publications, which concentrated on gay and lesbian books, with the idea that became In the Life.[2]
As Darius Bost chronicles in Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (2019), Beam spent three years cultivating a network of more than 100 Black gay male writers and editing their essays and poetry for In the Life, which helped launch a Black gay cultural renaissance.”[3] Following Evelyn Torton Beck’s Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (1982) and Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), it is one of the earliest collections of creative work at least partially organized at the intersections of queer and ethnoracial identities. Beam’s In the Life is rooted in a genealogy indebted to a generation of work by lesbians of color. Indeed, his introduction noted the strength, authenticity, and affirmation that Beam found in the works of lesbians of color: “I was fed by Audre Lorde’s Zami, Barbara Smith’s Home Girls, Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, Barbara Deming’s We Cannot Live Without Our Lives, June Jordan’s Civil Wars, and Michelle Cliff’s Claiming an Identity I was Taught to Despise. Their courage told me that I, too could be courageous. I, too, could not only live with what I feel, but could draw succor from it, nurture it, and make it visible.”[4]
Beam was sustained by this literature and found inspiration for In the Life in their words. He also likely found inspiration in the format of the anthology, which was prevalent in this moment. In addition to Home Girls, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, offered frameworks for centering race in a tradition of gay and lesbian anthologies dominated by white voices, including Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology (1975) and Lesbian Fiction: An Anthology (1981). Beam sought with his anthology to draw on this tradition while authentically presenting the words and experiences of a generation of gay Black men.
Many of the sentiments Beam captured in the introduction to In the Life are shared by dozens of literary anthologies, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. The early 1980s saw the start of an important phenomenon in queer literary history—anthologies organized around sexuality and ethnoracial identities. These collections centered shared experiences at the intersections of specific racial and sexual identities by collecting and publishing the creative work of queer African American, Latina/o/x, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Native American writers. Editors found themselves organizing collections like Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology (1988), edited by Will Roscoe, and Between the Lines: An Anthology by Pacific/Asian Lesbians of Santa Cruz California (1987), edited by Cristy Chung, Alison Kim, and Akemi Lemeshewksy.
This exhibit spotlights some of these anthologies and the strategies their authors and editors undertook to write against the erasure, oppression, and misrepresentation they experienced in literary worlds and in their day-to-day lives. The exhibit considers the collective efforts of these groups to establish supportive artistic networks and expand queer minority representations beyond flat and tokenist inclusion in the queer literature of the 1980s and 1990s. The anthologies bear witness to the forces of homophobia and misogyny in racial and ethnic communities as well as racism within LGBTQ+ cultures. Since 1980, dozens of collections have been published, as captured in the timeline found at the end of this exhibit.
These volumes—from Home Girls to more recent works such as Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color (2017) and This Arab is Queer (2022)—constitute acts of queer worldmaking. Through the writings collected, they capture everyday lived experiences, including rejections and loss. They also capture the possibilities of finding acceptance, home, joy, and love. Developed through processes of writing and gathering literature in community, these anthologies have produced visions for what it means and might someday mean to be Black, Brown, Native, Asian, or Pacific Islander and queer.
After encountering novels and anthologies focused primarily on white characters and writers, Beam and other artist-editors found themselves frustrated by inauthentic representation, tokenist inclusion in collections organized around sexuality or race, and a sense of the invisibility of their own experiences. In response, Beam and others looked toward the literature that most resonated with them, particularly the work of lesbians of color. However, as José Esteban Muñoz points out in his forward to the gay Latino anthology Virgins, Guerrillas & Locas: Gay Latinos Writing About Love (1999), the act of reading these works from different vantage points is an exercise in translation. There are shared senses of alienation, but the context shifts between the experiences of gay men and lesbians, between Black and Latina/o/x experiences, and so on. Ultimately, anthologies like Smith’s Home Girls inspired the production of others like In the Life.
After reading or participating in a given anthology, writers and editors would frequently develop their own anthologies, taking the format and bringing to life the richness at particular intersections of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. For example, Thomas Glave’s writing appeared in The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (1991) and Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (1993) before he later took on the editorial role for Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (2008). In her introduction to The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women (1994), Sharon Lim-Hing declared that “Asian and Pacific Islander lesbians should have their own book… apart from helping provide diversity to white-dominated anthologies.”[5] In doing so, these editors conceived the literary and social worlds they hoped might be seen by future generations of Asian/Pacific Islander lesbians, gay Black men, and others.
This exhibit outlines four strategies for worldmaking that were undertaken in the production of these anthologies. First, anthologists mapped oppression at intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. They frequently did so by relating examples of how homophobia, misogyny, and racism functioned within their communities. Second, the writers posited their creative work as a balm that addressed the invisibility that resulted from intersecting sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Through publication of their work, they asserted that queer and trans Black and Brown folks existed and had voices. Third, editors grounded their visions of just futures in elements of shared culture and language, as Moraga did in her essay “Queer Aztlán: the Re-formation of Chicano Tribe.” This essay envisioned the rebirth of a mythic homeland free of sexism and homophobia in the southwestern United States and Mexico. And finally, editors like Beam founded and expanded diverse interconnected networks of artists at intersections of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and more through the publication of calls for submissions in the gay and lesbian press, participation in queer of color artist collectives, and other activities including fundraisers, By assembling groups of writers at these intersections and publishing their anthologies, they countered the representations that frustrated Beam and inspired In the Life while forging their own literary canons, legacies, and worlds.
[1] Joseph Beam, ed., In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, 1st ed. (Boston: Alyson, 1986), xix.
[2] Beam, In the Life, xix–xx.
[3] Darius Bost, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 5–9.
[4] Beam, In the Life, xix.
[5] Sharon Lim-Hing, “Introduction,” in The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women, ed. Sharon Lim-Hing (Toronto, Ont.: Sister Vision, 1994).