Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence

188 Pages·2018·1.065 MB·English

by  Darius Bost

Evidence of Being

Evidence of Being
The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance
and the Politics of Violence
DARIUS BOST
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2019 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief
quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the
University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 58979- 4 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 58982- 4 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 58996- 1 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226589961 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Names: Bost, Darius, author.
Title: Evidence of being : the black gay cultural renaissance and the politics of
violence / Darius Bost.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017662 | ISBN 9780226589794 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780226589824 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226589961 (e- book)
Subjects: LCSH: African American gay men—Washington (D.C.). | African
American gay men—New York (State)—New York. | Hemphill, Essex. | Dixon,
Melvin, 1950– 1992. | American literature—African American authors.
Classification: LCC HQ76.27.A37 B688 2018 | DDC 306.76/ 6208996073—
dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc .gov/ 2018017662
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION / On Black Gay Being / 1
ONE / The Contradictions of Grief: Violence and Value
in Blacklight Magazine / 25
TWO / Loneliness: Black Gay Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill / 46
THREE / Postmortem Politics: The Other Countries Collective
and Black Gay Mourning / 67
FOUR / “The Future Is Very Uncertain”: Black Gay Self- Making
in Melvin Dixon’s Diaries / 95
Epilogue / Afterimage / 121
Acknowledgments / 129
Appendix: Notable Individuals, Organizations, and Publications / 133
Notes / 145
Index / 171

Introduction
On Black Gay Being
I may not be there for the development of gay literary history, but I’ll be somewhere
listening for my name. . . . You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good
health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.
— Melvin Dixon
We Were (Never) Here
In 1992 in Boston, black gay writer Melvin Dixon—t hin, balding, and
dressed in a voluminous African robe— stepped to the podium at the third
annual OutWrite conference for gay and lesbian writers. He was about to
give what would be his last public speech before his death from AIDS. De-
scribed by journalist Brian Rafferty as a “queer black femme shaman,” Dixon
was well aware of how his black, gay, and disabled body might influence
the reception of his speech.1 He was, after all, addressing a primarily white
gay and lesbian audience, and testifying to the tangible and intangible ways
that AIDS had affected his life and his social world: “I come to you bear-
ing witness to a broken heart; I come to you bearing witness to a broken
body— but a witness to an unbroken spirit. Perhaps it is only to you that
such witness can be brought and its jagged edges softened a bit and made
meaningful.” Dixon’s concern regarding how his audience would receive
his speech must be contextualized within the early AIDS discourses, which
stigmatized nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality, blackness,
and poverty, and deflected attention away from the state’s failure to address a
devastating health crisis in its marginalized communities. Because he spoke
at a lesbian- and gay- themed conference, the “you” of this line suggests that
the audience’s shared experiences as sexual minorities in the age of AIDS
2 / Introduction
might positively influence their reception of his speech. But Dixon’s use of
the term perhaps suggests a reservation owing to his racial difference. He was
surely aware of how longer histories of race and sexuality have often marked
black bodies in general, and black gay male bodies in particular, as beyond
the pale of public sympathy.
Despite the risk of failure, Dixon spoke out about his experiences be-
cause of the very real threat of historical erasure. In his speech, he gave the
example of his friend and former student Greg, a black gay man who had
recently died of AIDS. Dixon noted that Greg’s siblings refused to be named
in his obituary, which was published in a prominent newspaper, because
of the shame attached to being connected with someone who had died of
the disease. At his funeral, his family refused to acknowledge his sexuality
and the cause of his death. To redress these silences, his lover and friends
held a second memorial service. Afterward, while eating a meal with Dixon
and others, Greg’s lover realized that he had left extra copies of the funeral
program in the rental car he had just returned. He went back to the rental
agency but arrived too late to retrieve them: they had already been “shred-
ded, burned, and the refuse carted away.”2 Dixon recalled this experience as
analogous to the disposability of gay lives in general and black gay men’s
lives in particular: “I was reminded of how vulnerable we are as gay men, as
black gay men, to the disposal and erasure of our lives.”3
This erasure was happening in both heterosexual black communities and
white gay communities. In the context of a white- dominated gay publish-
ing industry that mostly refused to publish the literary works of gay men of
color, Dixon feared that the disposability of black gay lives extended to black
gay expressive cultures.
As white gays become more prominent— and acceptable to mainstream
society— they project a racially exclusive image of gay reality. Few men of
color will ever be found on the covers of the Advocate or New York Native. As
white gays deny multiculturalism among gays, so too do black communities
deny multisexualism among its members. Against this double cremation, we
must leave the legacy of our writing and our perspectives on gay and straight
experiences. . . . Our voice is our weapon.4
For Dixon, writing and publishing would ensure black gay survival against
“double cremation.” He commented that although Greg’s body and funeral
programs were gone, the work he had produced as a journalist still existed.
Yet Dixon was not so naïve as to believe that immortality was inherent in
On Black Gay Being / 3
art. Rather, he asserted, “we must . . . guard against the erasure of our experi-
ences and our lives.”5 He tasked this imagined “we” with more than a nar-
row model of inclusion in mainstream gay and black historical narratives.
His use of the term double cremation suggests that he was more concerned
about the structural forces that threatened to render black gay personhood
as an impossible mode of being. Double cremation signals how the obliterat-
ing forces of antiblackness and antiqueerness doubly mark the black gay
body for social and corporeal death. The black gay body must be doubly
cremated, not only to maintain the norms of race and sexuality, but also to
maintain the fiction that these categories are bounded and discrete, not over-
lapping and intersecting. But Dixon’s plea for black gay men to “leave the
legacy of . . . our perspectives on gay and straight experiences” and his claim
that “our voice is our weapon” suggest that black gay cultural production of-
fers a way of asserting black gay personhood amid this “double cremation.”
His call for black gay men to “guard against the erasure of our experiences
and our lives” anticipates what Christina Sharpe has termed “wake work.”
She defines this term as a conscious inhabiting of the imminence and im-
manence of (social) death that marks the quotidian experiences of black
lives in an antiblack world.6 To guard against “double cremation” of black
gay lives, such “wake work” must extend to the antigay forces that collude
with antiblackness to foster the erasure of the black gay body from black
and gay memory.7
Melvin Dixon’s final speech exemplifies the contradictory effects of anti-
black and antigay violence on black gay men. He detailed how the historical
trauma of AIDS had influenced his physical health and social life: “I’ve lost
Richard. I’ve lost vision in one eye, I’ve lost the contact of people I thought
were friends, and I’ve lost the future tense from my vocabulary. I’ve lost my
libido, and I’ve lost more weight and appetite than Nutri- system would want
to claim.” Aware of the devastating impact of AIDS on gay literary communi-
ties and of his own impending demise, Dixon directly addressed the project
of gay literary historiography: “I may not be there for the development of gay
literary history, but I’ll be somewhere listening for my name. . . . You, then,
are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your
vision, to remember us.”8
The “I” in Dixon’s speech that has “lost” almost everything— the unbe-
coming “I” reduced to deteriorating black flesh— marks the unattainability
of black gay personhood in an antiblack and antigay world. But the “I” that
has lost almost everything is not the same “I” that will be “somewhere listen-
ing” for his name. Dixon’s vow “I’ll be somewhere listening for my name”