Cover of Evidence of Being
Evidence of Being The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence
by Darius Bost
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Cloth: 978-0-226-58979-4 | Paper: 978-0-226-58982-4 | Electronic: 978-0-226-58996-1
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226589961.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC’s gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed to emerge. Darius Bost’s account of the media, poetry, and performance of this time and place reveals a stunning confluence of activism and the arts. In Washington and New York during the 1980s and ’90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread views that marked them as unworthy of grief. They created art that enriched and reimagined their lives in the face of pain and neglect, while at the same time forging a path toward bold new modes of existence. At once a corrective to the predominantly white male accounts of the AIDS crisis and an openhearted depiction of the possibilities of black gay life, Evidence of Being above all insists on the primacy of community over loneliness, and hope over despair.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Darius Bost is assistant professor of ethnic studies in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah.
 

REVIEWS

“Evidence of Being critically and brilliantly moves away from claims about the anti-relational and pessimistic natures of blackness and queerness, doing so with historical attentiveness and theoretical sophistication. There is no book that provides a more comprehensive history of black gay male activism and cultural production in the seventies and eighties than this one.”
— Roderick Ferguson, author of Aberrations in Black

“Evidence of Being conjures up late twentieth-century African American struggles for recognition in a society that barely noticed the calamity of the AIDS crisis. Bost assembles an impressive array of original writings and revealing documents that illuminate defiant figures negotiating overlapping structures of prejudice. His book is a black gay interpretive turning point: as readable as it is teachable, as original as it is indispensable.”
— Kevin Mumford, author Not Straight, Not White

“Evidence of Being is both a compelling and informative study and an emotionally moving ritual that beckons present and future black fugitive subjects to remember the importance of the literary arts in surviving and thriving against the perils of anti-black and anti-gay violence, politics, and culture. Bost eloquently answers Melvin Dixon’s call to remember ‘with broad vision’ the empowering force of black gay being and cultural imagination.”
— L. H. Stallings, author of Funk the Erotic

“Recommended. . . Bost analyzes a renaissance of writing that sparked in these years [1978-1995] a second Harlem Renaissance, although one whose contributors were more openly gay. . . . They wrote to find a way to be, to survive, in the present and the future, if only as literary archive. Bost argues the power of cultural production that sustained “black gay men amid the ubiquitous forms of violence that targeted them.””
— Choice

“Moving, theoretically rich, and original. . . . Evidence of Being is an important book that should impact the contours of Black and Queer Studies. Bost’s recuperation of the history of black gay cultural expression opens new lines of inquiry for scholars concerned with black sexuality, loss, history, and memory.”
— Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies

“Darius Bost’s Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence is a somber and beautiful engagement with the art and activism of black gay men in the latter decades of the twentieth century...a theoretically sophisticated and intellectually rigorous work that signals Bost’s arrival as a major voice in black literary and cultural studies, ethnic studies, and queer studies.“
— Ashvin R. Kini, Journal of African American History

"An exemplary work of cultural studies research, Bodies of Evidence is a dynamic piece of scholarship and a resource for understanding an often marginalized segment of gay history. Although Evidence of Being rigorously engages with contemporary threads in queer studies, it remains accessible to audiences interested in this history of male cultural production and activism. Bost manages to offer alternatives to antirelational and theory-centric turns in queer studies, providing a grounded discussion illustrating the marginalization experienced by gay black artists in the form of state violence, antiblackness, and homophobia while cata-loguing their artistic and activist strategies responding to these forces."
— QED

"Darius Bost’s Evidence of Being is an impressive and deeply moving examination of Black gay artistic expression in Washington, D.C., and New York City from the 1970s through the early 1990s that he christens the Black gay renaissance. This era essentially marks the years of the AIDS crisis, although the timing is understood to be somewhat coincidental to the social and political organizing that reached critical mass in D.C. and Baltimore in 1978 with the formation of the National Coalition of Black Gays. With this juncture, Bost combines historical research with close reading of published as well as archived works, focusing on the most recognizable artists of this movement: Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Melvin Dixon."
— African American Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226589961.003.0001
[structural violence;racism;capitalism;homophibia;AIDS;black;African American;cultural production;Washington, D. C.;New York City]
Evidence of Being explores how black gay men have created selves and communities amidst the ubiquitous forces of anti-gay and anti-black violence that targeted them. It also examines how structural violence—racism, capitalism, homophobia, and AIDS—and responses to it shaped black gay identity and community formation, as well as black gay aesthetics and cultural production. It does so by exploring the renaissance of black gay cultural production in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, focusing in particular on cultural formations in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Though the forces of anti-black and anti-gay violence converged at the site of the black gay body during this historical moment to mark black gay personhood as a site of double cremation, this convergence of anti-black and anti-gay violence also created the conditions of possibility for a black gay cultural renaissance.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226589961.003.0002
[black gay media;serial murder;violence;social value;Washington, D.C.]
This chapter examines the magazine's representations of a string of unsolved murders targeting same-sex-desiring and gender non-conforming black bodies in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s and early 1980s.It then explores these serial murders as an alternative historical site for examining the problem of value as a raced, class, gendered, sexualized, and spatialized term.Through close readings of a poem and performance that responded to these murders, it shows how black gay artists imagined alternative to normative conceptions of value.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226589961.003.0003
[emotion;Essex Hemphill;Joseph Beam;Washington, D.C.;HIV/AIDS]
This chapter explores diverse constructions of loneliness in the work of Essex Hemphill, especially in his elegies to his contemporary, black gay writer and activist, Joseph Beam. It theorizes loneliness as a traumatic structure of feeling and as an expression of black gay men’s collective political desires in the 1980s and 1990s. By positing loneliness in relation to black gay men's collective and political longings for richer subjective and social lives, the chapter reads Hemphill’s work as an alternative to recent anti-social and pessimistic strains of black and queer theory.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226589961.003.0004
[Other Countries Collective;HIV/AIDS;New York City;mourning]
This chapter focuses on the history and cultural production of Other Countries Collective, an NYC-based writers’ group. It argues that the devastating impact of AIDS in black gay communities in New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s produced a historically and culturally specific form of mourning that was animated by a desire for collectivity and self-determination. It theorizes black gay mourning as a political emotion that contests the erasure of AIDS from public discourse.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226589961.003.0005
[emotion;diary;HIV/AIDS;Melvin Dixon]
This chapter examines the diaries of Melvin Dixon, which he kept diaries from 1965 until 1991. Together, they comprise one of the most extensive accounts of black gay social life in the post-Stonewall era.It challenges dominant theorizations of the AIDS diary by positioning Dixon’s struggles against AIDS within a history of anti-gay and anti-black violence that was indexed in his diaries since the 1970s. Centering emotions of uncertainty and self-doubt, the chapter shows how the diary operated as a mode of self-making for Dixon in the context of the persisting negativities of post-Stonewall life.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226589961.003.0006
[Daniel Garrett;Joseph Beam;HIV/AIDS;ethics;photography]
This epilogue revisits some of the book’s major arguments by analyzing a photograph taken by black gay activist Joseph Beam, alongside a poem that Other Countries co-founder Daniel Garrett wrote in response to the photograph. It considers the ethical stakes of bearing witness to the 1980s and 1990s as a renaissance of black gay culture rather than focusing solely on the communal trauma and loss associated with the early era of the AIDS epidemic.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2018. Page maintained by BiblioVault.