Evidence of Being: Urban Black Gay Men's Literature

ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: EVIDENCE OF BEING: URBAN BLACK GAY MEN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1978-1995 Darius Bost, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor Christina B. Hanhardt Department of American Studies Professor Psyche Williams-Forson Department of American Studies This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of black gay men’s literary and cultural production and activism emerging at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, focusing in particular on cultural formations in Washington, DC, and New York City. Through an exploration of the work of black gay male writers and activists from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, this study argues that recognizing the centrality of trauma and violence in black communities means accounting for its debilitating effects, alongside its productivity in areas such as cultural and aesthetic production, identity- formation, community building, and political mobilization. Though black gay men’s identities were heavily under siege during this historical moment, the project shows how they used literary and cultural forms such as poetry, performance, novels, magazines, anthologies, and journals to imagine richer subjective and social lives. This project makes three key interventions in the existing scholarship in African American studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, and Trauma Studies 1) the project recovers a marginalized period in U.S. histories of race and sexuality, in particular the renaissance of black gay literary and cultural production and activism from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s 2) the project examines how black gay men have used literary and cultural production to assert more complex narratives of racial, gender, and sexual selfhood 3) the project explores how historical trauma has functioned as both a violently coercive, as well as a culturally and politically productive force in black gay lives. The project focuses on cultural movement activities in two cities, Washington, DC, and New York City, to offer a more broad, comparative perspective on urban black gay subcultural life. The first section on Washington, DC, explores the work of DC- based writer and activist Essex Hemphill, and the black LGBT-themed magazine, Blacklight. The second section on New York City looks at black gay writer’s group, Other Countries Collective, and writer and scholar Melvin Dixon’s novel, Vanishing Rooms. The study includes individual black gay voices, positioning these voices alongside larger structural transformations taking place in cities during this moment. It also foreground the efforts of self and social transformation that emerged through black gay collectivities. Evidence of Being: Urban Black Gay Men’s Literature and Culture, 1978-1995 By Darius Bost Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Advisory Committee: Associate Professor Christina B. Hanhardt, Co-Chair Associate Professor Psyche Williams-Forson, Co-Chair Associate Professor Elsa Barkley Brown Assistant Professor Keguro Macharia Associate Professor Michelle V. Rowley Professor Nancy L. Struna © Copyright by Darius Bost 2014 ii To My late grandparents, John I. and Flowree Joseph iii Acknowledgements I want to begin by thanking my committee members: Dr. Christina B. Hanhardt, Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, Dr. Michelle V. Rowley, Dr. Keguro Macharia, Dr. Nancy L. Struna, and Dr. Elsa Barkley Brown. Thank you Dr. Hanhardt for your mentorship, for believing in this project, and for affirming me as a scholar. Your teaching and advising changed the trajectory of my research, and you continue to inspire me to develop my work to its fullest potential. I enjoyed getting to know you as a person at our U Street coffee shop meetings, and I look forward to many more. Dr. Williams-Forson, thank you for being an advocate, for the many phone conversations, and for helping me to remember why I write. You have modeled what it means to be an engaged scholar. Dr. Macharia, you have been a careful and generous reader, a great mentor, and you believed in the project from the beginning. Your close engagement with my work has been transformative to the project. Thank you! Dr. Rowley, you are one of the best teachers I’ve ever had! Your teaching was foundational to this project. You somehow had answers to my questions, though they were not fully formed, and you created a classroom environment where I felt safe to ask them. Dr. Struna, thank you for being a supporter from my entrance into the program up until now, as I am about to graduate. As my program advisor and my first instructor in sexuality studies, you were the first person to tell me to situate my work within the scholarly discourse about “the black family.” Thank you for your hard work on behalf of the department and for all of your support. Dr. Barkley Brown, I was very honored that you graciously accepted my invitation to join the committee as I neared the end of the project. Thank you for being a careful reader, and for your helpful feedback. I greatly admire your work. I am also thankful for various other supporters of my work. Thank you to the faculty of the department of Women’s studies, where I received a graduate certificate. Thanks to the New York Public Library for their support of this project through the Martin Duberman Visiting Scholars program. I am also grateful to the Provost’s office at the University of Pennsylvania for their support of this project through the Penn Predoctoral Fellowship, and to the departments of Africana studies and English for hosting me while I completed this project. Thank you especially to my faculty mentors Drs. Heather Love and Herman Beavers. I am also grateful to my wonderful colleagues in Africana studies: Garry Bertholf, Alden Young, Grace Saunders Johnson, Clemmie Harris, and Nichole Carelock. Thank you for making the department of Africana studies feel like home. I look forward to all of your future accomplishments. I would be remiss without thanking the members of the S.P.A.C.E. writer’s collective, who are dear friends and fellow fugitives on this journey through the academy. Thank you to: Angelique Nixon, Marlon Moore, LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Marlo David, Treva Lindsey, Rachel Robinson, Sophia Buggs, Nicky Banton, and Kevin Dada. All I can say to this wonderful network of scholar-friends is thank you for providing a space of retreat and belonging. iv A special thank you also goes to my dear colleagues and friends at the University of Maryland, especially: Michelé Prince, Jennie Chaplin, Jarah Moesch, Terrance Wooten, Paul Saiedi, Melissa Rogers, Cristina Perez, Jessica Walker, Lara Torsky, Jessica Vooris, Doug Ishii, Betsy Yuen, Stephanie Stevenson, Tiffany King, Gabriel Peoples, Maria Vargas, T’sey-Haye Preaster, Renina Jarmon, and many more. Thank you for the conversations in the graduate student lounge, over drinks, over dinners, during parties and gatherings, and during the many free car rides I received. In sum, thank you for being a friend! I have to thank my amazing group of friends, who keep me sane: Eddie Perry, Clifton Williams, Jermaine Bozier, Marvin Mabini, and Chantis Parks. The phone calls and group texts, listserv discourse, the crazy nights out and the house parties, the group vacations and family gatherings have all meant the world to me. Eddie Perry and Anthony Long have provided me with a home away from home in the DMV. Big shout- out to my good girlfriends, near and far: Jerri Fuller, Arnita Wofford, and Valerie Smith. Jerri Fuller, my Saturday night dance partner and Sunday morning prayer partner, I will miss you so much! I would not have made it through this if it were not for each and every one of you! I love y’all! And last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my mom, Martha Johnson, and my brother, Justin Moody, for loving me. Thanks to my aunts and uncles and cousins, who have been patient, not fully knowing what I was doing, or why it was taking so long, but have remained proud, nonetheless! I am finally out of school, ya’ll. Thanks for the love and support over these many, many years. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction: On Black Gay Being……………………………………………1 Chapter 2: Mediating In/visibility: Blacklight and Black Gay Culture and Politics in Washington, DC………………………………………………………………………….28 Chapter 3: Loneliness: Black Queer Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill………….77 Chapter 4: Post-Mortem Politics: Other Countries Collective and Black Queer Mourning………………………………………………………………………………..117 Chapter 5: Geographies of the Self: Reading Racial Injury Through the Queer Urban Landscape in Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms……………………………………….155 Chapter 6: Conclusion: New Hope? “Post-AIDS” Black Gay Subjectivity in an Ongoing Epidemic of Violence……………………………………………………………...…...194 1 Chapter 1: On Black Gay Being In the introduction to his 1991 edited volume, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, black gay poet, essayist, and activist Essex Hemphill describes his search for a black gay literary heritage. Situating his work within a black gay literary tradition was important to him, but he saw as the ultimate goals of his quest “affirmation, reflection, and identity” and “the necessary historical reference for [his] desires,”[his emphasis].1 Hemphill sought after an archive of black gay men’s writing because it was critical to his identity formation. He notes that the search at times proved futile, due to “long-standing constructions of fear, denial, invisibility, and racism,” but he continued to look “for evidence of things not seen, black gay experiences on record, evidence of ‘being’ to contradict the pervasive invisibility of black gay men.”2 Through the use of quotation marks, Hemphill sets ‘being’ apart as a key term, suggesting that the term means more than mere biological existence, gesturing more toward the embodied subjectivities of black gay men.

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