As a poet and playwright, whose themes are mainly inspired by the gay black community, I am often told that I will always have a “limited” readership and audience. This implies that my writings perhaps will never enjoy broad commercial success. As though such success should be the primary gauge of an artist’s works. Although I do want my writings to be published, staged, bought, read, discussed, and remembered, the perennial question that challenges me is not will my audience always be limited, but rather am I limiting myself?
When I started to write thirteen years ago, I felt a need to present the gay black experience, as I, an “openly” gay black man, lived it. And as others, meaning a non-gay and non-black readership and audience, seldom had the chance to acquaint themselves with it, except for the writings of Richard Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes, and Samuel R. Delany. Their works always left me in a high spirit, deepening my appreciation of the past, but needing much more, especially in the field of nonfiction.
Right from the start, my writings, especially my plays (Risin’ to the Love We Need, Black Fag, and New Love Song), became what I call a necessary theater. I was cognizant of the wants and needs of our emerging community; my writings needed to serve its visibility and empowerment. Most revolutions—be they political, social, spiritual, or economic—are usually complemented by one in literature. The Civil Rights Movement counted on numerous literary voices, from Maya Angelou to Bobby Seale, to fuel outrage and inspire justice, while Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem led the feminist cause.
Along with a few other writers, most notably the members of the Blackheart Collective (whose founder, Isaac Jackson, was a ground-breaker in openly gay black publishing by putting out four issues of The Blackheart Collective Journal), and the late Philip Blackwell (writer of numerous plays, such as Two Heads, A Lover’s Play, City Men, which was successfully produced), I not only committed myself toward an affirmation of the gay black community, but also toward the liberation of an audience from its own misconceptions of gay black life.
Occasionally I have been asked if I seriously expect non-gay blacks to identify with my writings. This infuriates me. It reminds me of the degree of my dehumanization, the extent of my oppression, and ultimately my invalidation as a gay black man.
Why should I not hope that any audience could identify with all these abstract yet very tangible things, which characterize my humanity. After all, I have had to identify with countless non-gay black characters. My pursuit of happiness is not unlike that of most human beings who, enthralled by the sensation of being alive, hunger for financial stability, thirst for spiritual fulfillment, and crave for love and respect through “family” and community.
As gay black poets and playwrights, we are persons of the roads still looking for the other side of the rainbow. The best answer to the question of who we are resides in our experiences; from whence our strongest writings are derived. Old myths explode as new ones of our own molding take their place, in turn recreating us.
While we map out this new wilderness of our experiences, we must also bear witness. Like archaeologists, we have to file those reports in the form of our finely crafted poems and plays, which we must then make available to the world. It is our duty to share the writings with others, not just file them away in our computers or in our desk drawers. Our writings should very much be a public process that reflects private passions.
Yes, this telling of us will bring the pain of rejection. Too often, as gay black men, our lives have been so painful that we do not last beyond the pain. We can take all sorts of mental pills for the hurt, but painful feelings are destroyed once we start to pinpoint them, analyze them, and write about them. Dodging these emotions or being frightened by them gets us nowhere. Any learning process involves fear. We overcome fear when it ceases to hamper our ability to tell the truth, something writers have to vigilantly, even violently, guard.
We must fight our numerous detractors, who will try to block our visions as well as the world’s visions of us. Nor can we cover our own eyes from the glaring sunlight and pretend that it is night.
When we sacrifice our authenticity as gay black writers “to pass” in order to secure a book contract from a major publishing house (nowadays, most of the large companies are actively seeking out gay authors), when we sell out our dreams, thereby causing our art to mask our true feelings, when we inhabit a world of lies, which turn us into frauds in our own language and ideas, we resign ourselves to the status quo of this unsettling world we live in.
We must become whistle-blowers. We must become muthafuckhas with messages and a mission. We must become powerful enough to stand tall and not fall, thrive and not just survive. A tremendous amount of common sense, arrogance, and defiance will get us through.
America is a capitalist society. Let us save, beg, and borrow money to keep building our autonomous publications and other cultural institutions. Let us make sure that these institutions outlast us and do not become self-serving. Let us live beyond the here and now by nurturing each other and supporting one another’s works.
Although we should not let the “white” gay and the “straight” black literary publications and theater institutions off the hook for tokenizing, not publishing our writings, or not producing our plays, we cannot make grievances the primary focus of our writings or of our lives. So much of gay and black art depicts its heroes as victims, in a realm of reverie or on the roads to calvary, constantly at the mercy of others. Puzzling over our predicaments and commitments, we can be skeptical, but never comfortable in the cynical blame game.
Nor can we take the high road behind our writings and evade our social responsibility as human beings to dirty our hands and feet when we need to publicly pick and kick shit out of our way. This especially applies to the handful of us who have proudly and productively assumed either the “gay black writer” or “black gay writer” label and benefited from our tokenization and overpresentation. The promise of a new world order lives not just in our words, but in our actions.
We should not just try to internalize our oppression through our writings, but externalize it by fighting bigotry tooth and nail, no matter what form it takes. Whether it’s in confronting AIDS, apartheid, dictatorships, homophobia, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and silence that’s foisted upon us or that we force upon ourselves. Our destiny must always be confronted with our conscience.
In this current health crisis, many of us gay black writers are dying much sooner than we anticipated. The numbers are already overwhelming. Thirteen contributors to the anthology The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets, which I edited and published in November 1991, have so far died. Among these dead are such notables as Melvin Dixon, David Frechette, Roy Gonsalves, Craig G. Harris, and Donald Woods. Over half of the contributors to the same volume are people with AIDS (PWAs), such as myself, or have tested HIV-positive. The same ratio applies to previous gay black anthologies such as In the Life (Alyson Publications, 1986), edited by Joseph Beam, who died of AIDS in 1988, and Brother to Brother (Alyson Publications, 1991), edited by Essex Hemphill, who is open about his seropositive status. Five of the fifteen editors of the first volume of Other Countries: Black Gay Voices, which was published in 1988, have since died of AIDS. Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS, recently published by the Other Countries collective, lists in the bio section almost one half of its contributors as dead or living with/dying of AIDS. Its chief editor, B. Michael Hunter, is seropositive, as is Rodney Dildy, the editor and publisher of The Pyramid Periodical, one of our three gay black literary journals. The HIV’s death toll in our community keeps beating its drum with no abatement in sight.
We must strive before it is too late to realize this creative wish: that the writings of our experiences serve as testaments to those who passed along this way, testimonies to our times, and legacies to future generations. These works should offer our readers and audience inspiration, consolation, and hope in the advent of a new millennium. Our words indeed do triumph over silence, despair, and death.
As our strength is constantly being tested, the only time to play it safe is inside our coffins. Even then, when we are disfigured by the horrors of HIV, we should morally and legally leave instructions for our life-partners, families, and friends not to close the damn caskets, not to hide or deny the real cause of our deaths, not to falsely rewrite our history in our obituaries. So what if people are uncomfortable!
I don’t ever want to show anyone my physical and psychological wounds and scars without telling them what caused me to hurt, what it will take to heal me, and what collectively and responsibly should be done to prevent similar injuries from ever happening again—to me or to others.
In these dire times, I’d much rather engage myself reading works that are didactic and political instead of precious and arty stuff, where there’s a lack of passion, integrity of feelings, sense of commitment beyond the self; but this constant romanticization of inertia, unfulfilling sex, along with the usual indulgence in alcohol and substance abuse because mother/father were not loving enough. Tired shit!
To the original question: Am I limiting myself? I answer emphatically, “No.” Through poetry and playwriting I go to the limits of my being to forever discover the essence of rebirth within. I explore the world and how it closes in on itself with its prejudices. My poems and plays are weapons and blessings that I use to liberate myself, to validate our realities as gay black men, and to elucidate the human struggle. What better place to celebrate this movement than on the page and on the stage.
This essay is part of “Déjà Vu: A Folio on Assotto Saint.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the May 2023 issue. All poems and essays in the portfolio are from Sacred Spells: Collected Works by Assotto Saint (Nightboat Books, 2023). Reprinted with permission of Nightboat Books.
Assotto Saint, born Yves Francois Lubin, was a Haitian-born American writer, performer, publisher, and AIDS activist. He contributed heavily to increasing the visibility of contemporary Black queerness in the cultural arts movement of the 1980s and early 1990s.
In his work, Saint drew on his Haitian heritage through music, incantations, and radical politics to weave together a tapestry of literature...