Queer Black Voices & The Body
Explore the contributions and impact of Black queer voices to LGBTQIA+ activism and cultural production
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
By Katherine Ann Cheairs
“Did you hear Harriet, the trembling trepidation in my voice (trembling which even now in remembering threatens to repossess me)? And didn’t you, like the good shepherd that you have always been, didn’t you come - and take my hand?"
Excerpt from Letters to the Dead: Dear Harriet written by Marlon T. Riggs and published in Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS, Other Countries Volume II (1993)
Marlon Riggs, the late writer and filmmaker is addressing his letter to the liberationist freedom fighter Harriet Tubman as not just an ancestral or historical figure but an activating principle witnessing his own life. The letter, featured in Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS, appeared in the second anthology of poems, essays, letters, art work and photography published by the Other Countries collective.
Inspired by the work of James Baldwin, the Other Countries collective is a non-profit organization founded in New York City emerging from a group of gay black writers who met at The Center in the mid-1980s to nurture and support the development and literary presence of gay black men. It is still an active organization today.
B. Michael Hunter and Colin Robinson were board directors of the collective and participating writers included notable writers like Essex Hemphill, Craig G. Harris, Assotto Saint, Donald W. Woods, Joseph Beam, Sapphire, Cary Alan Johnson, and Samuel R. Delaney to name a few.
The archival image of the meeting date and time for the Other Countries collective and the striking photo of Essex Hemphill, Craig G. Harris and Assotto Saint from The Center Voice newsletter in 1987 and 1989 respectively capture a moment to think about the stories, camaraderie, joy and kinship within the collective and ways that generative energy mapped on to other happenings at The Center, such as the In Our Own Write series that the article discusses.
The late 1980s through the 1990s were a brutal time of loss for Black queer communities devastated by the AIDS epidemic. Hemphill, Harris, Saint, Beam and Riggs were all lost to AIDS as were many others. The cultural production of this time was prolific as these writers constructed an expansive lens of queer Black love, intimacy and desire that also disrupted fixed notions of Blackness and identity. While queer Black writers and artists responded to the AIDS crisis from a place of necessity, activism and remembrance there is a simultaneous declaration to imagine the Black body and sensuality beyond the gaze of coloniality; to be fully embodied as a praxis unto itself. The artwork speaks to the scope of Black queerness and the continued legacy and impact of Other Countries.
Black death
Black life
Black hands
Black heart
Black breath
Black tears
Black laughter
Black sorrow
Black joy
Black mother
Black father
Black sister
Black brother
Black universe
Black Earth
Black holes
Black quantum
Black prayers
Black fears
Black love
Black spirit
Black stars
Black all
Black (2020) by Katherine Cheairs
