 A report recently released by the Center for Disease Control estimated that giving the current diagnosis rates, half of all black gay men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime. In a February 2016 article published in the LGBT-themed newspaper Georgia Voice, black gay journalist Darian Aaron noted that these statistics were stirring outright controversy and rejection among black gay men. Johnny Kornegay, director of digital strategy and stakeholder engagement at the Counter-Narrative Project, an activist group committed to foregrounding the narratives of black gay men as a vehicle for social change, understood this statistic as a call to action. Quote, stigma, spiritual violence, racism, criminalization, homophobia, economic distress, lack of access to healthcare and lack of comprehensive sex education all contribute to the vulnerability of HIV acquisition for black gay men. Undoing hundreds of years of structural disenfranchisement can't be solved with pills or ads to get tested. Black gay men's rejection of these statistics is significant because it lays bare the structural forces that continue to define black gay life through narratives of illness and death and their use of narrative forms to remake their social realities continues a black gay activist tradition that emerged in the early era of the AIDS epidemic. This talk explores how black gay men have used literary and cultural forms to address the structural violence that is marked and continues to mark their bodies for illness and premature death. The presentation 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 asks how structural violence, racism, classism, homophobia, and AIDS and responses to its 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 late 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Oh, I'm going to press this. From the late 1970s to the mid-90s, black gay men produced a rich body of cultural work, poetry, fiction, literary journals, and anthologies, magazines, newspapers, performance and visual art to narrate their experiences with and everyday struggles against racism, homophobia, and HIV AIDS. The manuscript discusses this cultural movement which emerged in the early era of the AIDS pandemic in the U.S. and focuses on activities in Washington, D.C. and New York City. As center, this renaissance of black gay cultural production within contemporary debates in black and queer studies that privilege social and corporeal death as the dominant interpretive framework for analyzing black gay social life. It demonstrates how black trauma rooted in slavery and its afterlife and queer trauma rooted in homophobia, transphobia, and AIDS converged during this historical moment to doubly mark the black gay body as a site of social and corporeal death, thereby figuring black gay personhood as an impossible mode of being. Many prominent black gay writers of this period succumb to AIDS-related illnesses lending to readings of black gay social life in the early era of AIDS is wholly determined by death. While acknowledging that the black gay body was a site of loss during this period, I turn to this body of black gay literature and culture as evidence for reimagining black gay personhood as a site of being and becoming. I argue that black gay literature and culture produced in the early era of AIDS both insist upon the fact of black gay social life lived amidst widespread violence and represents black gay men's collective political longings for futures beyond the forces of anti-blackness and anti-queerness. Pushing against anti-relational and pessimistic strains of black cultural theory and queer theory, the manuscript locates black queer optimism in the black gay literary and cultural imagination. Orlando Patterson first introduced the term social death in his influential 1982 study, Slavery and Social Death, a comparative study. For Patterson, the social death of slavery is comprised of three basic elements, total powerlessness, NATO alienation or the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations and generalized dishonor. This last element being in a direct effect of the previous two. Patterson offers a model of what social death and slavery looked like in the past and Sadiah Hartman describes how it persists in the present. She foregrounds the incomplete project of freedom and the afterlife of slavery which is witnessed in the quote, skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration and impoverishment of contemporary black people. I seek to relocate the lies and deaths of a generation of black gay activists and writers from AIDS within the longer history of anti-blackness that animates slavery's afterlife, even as I dis-identify with contemporary theories of anti-blackness that would erase gay male cultural particularity and black gay political visions for community and futurity. Hartman suggests that scholars practice narrative constraint in their interpretations of slavery's archive and notes that the intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death, social and corporeal and to reckon with the precariousness, precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance. I turn to Hartman because her orientation away from historical recovery and toward narrative restraint is governed by her interest in quote, illuminating the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead to write our now as it is interrupted by this past. The deaths of a generation of black gay men from AIDS and their abandonment by the state and society, white gay communities and black straight communities during the 70s, 80s and 90s figures black gay social life between the zones of social and corporeal death. If Hartman is correct in her premise that our approach to the archives of the dead should be to write our now as it is interrupted by this past then we must be concerned about how our approaches to this very near history interrupts our historical present. Since society continues to see black gay men as existing between the zones of social and corporeal death as the CDC statistic mentioned above confirms black gay men continue to understand their own bodies and desires as a burden to black and queer freedom as that which must be vanished from historical existence and memory. Embracing loss and objection in black and queer studies colludes with the epistemological and structural violence that doubly marks the black gay body for social and corporeal death. I'm gonna get used to this. So this presentation is a part of my forthcoming book Evidence of Being the Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. The book demonstrates how black gay men I think I moved forward too far, yeah, okay. The book demonstrates how black gay men use literary and cultural forms to address trauma and violence in their community, build connections among black gay men, engage in political mobilization and assert more complex narratives of racial gender and sexual selfhood. It pushes against interpretations of the early era of AIDS as solely determined by loss. And the book demonstrates how the literature and culture produced during this renaissance points to historical trauma and loss while also archiving black gay men's collective political longings for better life, health and sociality for futures of black gay men. It challenges current methodological approaches to the study of literatures and cultures of AIDS by centering the experiences of black gay men whose multiple forms of exclusion from white gay communities, heterosexual black communities and from the nation state require a broader analytic framework that sees AIDS as just one component within a complex system of racist and homophobic violence. This project is divided into four case study chapters and conclusion. The chapters are broken down into two sections, one on Washington D.C. and the other on New York City. Individual chapters focus on Washington-based magazine Blacklight and performance group SINKE, the works of deep sea-based poet, essayist and activist Essex Hemphill and his contemporary Philadelphia-based writer Joseph Beam, the history and cultural production of NYC-based writers group, other countries collective and the diaries of NYC-based creative writer and scholar Melvin Dixon. And for the remainder of the presentation I'd like to highlight some of the research from my case study chapters. So, I begin my D.C. section with an exploration of Blacklight which ran from 1979 to 1985 and was founded by Howard University student and local activist Sydney Brinkley. Brinkley had been active on his campus at Howard University and chartering the development of the Lambda Student Alliance for Black gay and lesbian students. Brinkley also became active in leadership in the emerging Black gay politics in Washington D.C., which began with the development of the D.C. Coalition of Black Gays in 1978. Blacklight developed out of these local and national Black gay political movements, especially political critiques of the racism of white gay publications and the heterosexism of Black media. Blacklight not only documents this local movement, but with central tulits to its mobilization. Today, I want to focus on how the magazine operated as a form of racial and sexual knowledge production regarding the threat of violence against Black gay men in Washington D.C. in the late 70s and early 80s. In September 1981, the Washington Post reported on a series of murders of eight gay men who frequented a popular downtown gay strip on New York Avenue between 12th and 13th streets and had been found, stabbed, beaten, or shot to death in their homes, apartments, or cars within the last year, according to D.C. police. The writer of the story seemed unfamiliar with gay men's ongoing struggles against violence and cited claims by gay activists that eight gay men had been killed over an 11-month period in August 1978. The article marked a shift in the state's attention to murders targeting gay men, though the early murders were treated as ordinary homicides and distributed individually among detectives. In 1981, the police formed a special task force of homicide detectives to investigate the murders as gay related. In a story about this task force, the Post interviewed Black gay activist Ray Melrose who led a local Black lesbian and gay activist group called the D.C. Coalition of Black Gays, which later became the D.C. Coalition of Black Lesbian and Gays, which had set up a committee to investigate the murders. Melrose estimated that the murder toll was closer to 12 than the eight that the police reported. He also expressed concern that the killings were representative of the homophobic violence against the city's increasingly visible gay community, especially Black gays, noting that eight of the murder victims were Black. In the September 1981 issue of Black Light, the first society gossip column appeared. Titled under Grace's hat, the column was written by a socialite who used the pseudonym Grace and who attended and described the events of D.C.'s Black queer social scene with her own unique flair and style. In her initial column, Grace provides an insider's perspective on this string of unsolved murders. Grace reported in September 1981 that Black gay and lesbian activist organizations had agreed to assist the police in solving the murders, including the lambdas from Howard University and the D.C. Coalition. Grace also suggested that the police had been neglectful in the investigation of the murders. Quote, it is also interesting to note that the police department is taking a more serious look at the problem. By suggesting that the police were now taking a more serious look, Grace hints that they had not been seriously investigated. She also advised individuals that individuals could do things to lessen the chances of becoming victims of violent crimes. Quote, however, Grace feels that there are some things we can do individually to lessen the chances of this happening to us. For example, it was reported that in one of the recent murders, one of the children picked up not one, but two pieces of trade. Trade is men who have sex with men for pleasure of money. Now, in 1981, you cannot take two pieces to your house and not know either of them, no matter how good they look. End quote. Grace was most likely referring to the murder of a black male high school teacher in August 1981 who was shot to death in his home. As reported in the blade, he had been seen four hours before near the Brass Rail Nightclub with two black men. By including herself with the use of the pronouns we and us, Grace refuses to exempt herself from such risky sexual practices. However, Grace does construct a kind of hierarchy that would label taking two pieces of trade home as excessive and irresponsible, positioning such choices within the temporal frame of 1981 due to the fact that the physical violence against gay men had been a visible and frequent occurrence since at least 1978. And I think it's important to mention historian John D'Amelio talks about that much of the sort of, the sort of victories that were made in the 1970s gay and lesbian victories were not, did not deal a final blow to heterosexism and homophobia. It just simply shifted locales. And I read the sort of murders that were happening directed towards gay men in this era as part of the sort of state-based kind of violence that the shift in the locale to the sort of state-based homophobia and heterosexism. So Grace's caution represents how cultural anxieties around intersecting forms of state power shape Black queer collective subject formation even before the AIDS epidemic. Though classing degrees of outness would be key sites of difference within DC's Black same-sex desiring community influencing which spaces and bodies when engaged for erotic fulfillment the persistent threat of violence would shape Black queer collective consciousness. Alongside political mobilization in Black gay activist communities local artists also spoke out against the threat of violence facing Black gay men in DC. DC based Black gay writer, performer and activist Essex Hempill was one of the most engaged with violence as a condition of Black gay sexual subjectivity. In a 1983 interview with the Washington Blade Hempill discusses how murder was in the forefront of his consciousness. Quote, I'm very concerned with murder particularly in the gay community. I say in the gay community because that is how I'm living and to think I have to continue to run up against the possibility of being murdered or having a bad experience that preoccupies me. End quote. Hempill envisioned his poetic voice as being rooted in a collective Black gay imagination. So he strayed from personal poems that centered healing of individual trauma stating that quote if a poem is too personal if it's something I need to write only to work it out for myself then that will disqualify it. End quote. Hempill wrote about murder in much of his poetry stressing how the threat of violence figured in the Black gay imagination. Perhaps his most well-known poem about murder is Homicide for Ronald Gibson first published in the 1984 Volume 4-4 issue of Black Light. I, you probably can't read it. I can read the poem for you if that'll be helpful. I'll wait till we get to that poem. But Hempill, Hempill takes as his epigraph The Washington Blade Crime Report published in January 8th, 1982 of the murder of 29-year-old Ronald Gibson also known as Star who was found shot to death wearing a dress in high-heeled shoes in an area frequented by drag queens who solicit sex for money. I'll read it briefly before I get into the analysis. So the poem says that grief is not a peril not like a dress, a wig or my sister's high-heeled shoes. It is darker than the man I love who in my fantasies comes for me in a silver six-cylinder chariot. I walk the waterfront curbsides and my sister's high-heeled shoes dreaming of him his name still unknown to my tongue. While I wait for my prince to come from every other man I demand pay for my kisses. I buy paint for my lips stockings for my legs my own high-heeled slippers and dresses that become me. When he comes I know I must be beautiful. I will know how to love his body standing out here on the waterfront curbsides. I have learned to please a man. He will bring me flowers. He will bring me silk and jewels. I know while I wait. I'm the only man who loves me. They call me star because I listen to dreams and wishes but grief is darker. It is a white dress that covers my body. It is a wig that does not rest gently on my head. In the poem, Hemphill revises the cold and perhaps misgendering prose of the crime report into poetic form. He fuses the classic classical Cinderella fairy tale made popular by Charles Peralt in the 17th century and Walt Disney in the 20th century with contemporary references. The drag queen prostitute becomes a Cinderella figure who waits on their prince to come in a silver six-cylinder chariot and wears a wig and their sister's high-heeled shoes not to go to the prince's ball but to walk the waterfront curbsides as a prostitute. The speaker of the poem demands pay for their kisses while they wait for their prince to come and many of you may have seen this poem performed in Marlon Riz's Tongues Untied if you don't remember but it was first, I like to talk about it because it is actually rooted in the death of someone in Washington, D.C. and then also became critical to the formation of what we call queer color critique in the Academy which starts with this same image of the black drag queen prostitute. So by juxtaposing the Cinderella tale against the contemporary cultural landscape of black drag queen prostitutes in Washington, D.C., Hemphill shows how racial, gender, sexual and class norms undergird the Cinderella fairytale's logics. As a poor black, gender non-conforming person, Ronald Gibson's narrative exposes the need to make one's living as proceeding and subtending the quest for romance and it further reveals this quest for romance as a means of social and economic mobility through the heterosexual marriage plot. Because of their gender non-conformity, Ronald Gibson's star is excluded from the heteropatriarchal political economy of marriage and family and street prostitution becomes their means of survival while they wait on their prince to come. Yet stars, race, gender and class locations, late location mean that they are lack the protections of domesticity and privacy that even Cinderella is afforded. Star Ronald Gibson's economic, socioeconomic location and their engagement in the pleasures and dangers of being in the life ultimately usher them to premature death. The poem opens and closes with emotions of grief that grief is and is not apparel alludes to the contradictions of mediating these crimes through LGBT and mainstream media. While the quest for media visibility is significant for creating the multiple publics around these issues, the focus on the brutal deaths and risky sexual activities of the victims can serve to face their complex identities and thus their value as lost lives worthy of public grief. This is further supported by the fact that the metaphor of grief revolves around articles of consumption. Readers might simply consume these stories through existing narratives of individual pathology amidst the structural issues that undergird this tragedy. These materials, the dress, wig and shoes are also essential to the construction of racialized genders and sexualities, especially for the racialized poor who depend on sex work for their everyday survival. Given that the subject of the poem is a black drag queen prostitute, narratives of black cultural deviance, particularly gender and sexual deviance signal why the wig does not rest easy on her or his head. By stating that grief is and is not apparel, Hemphill captures how multiply marginalized subjects, subjects produced within the contradictions of state and capital, provide a more complex framework for theorizing violence. The contradictions indicated in Hemphill's metaphor of grief imply that Ronald Gibson, Starr's murder, problematizes any easy categorizations of the identities of those subject to anti-queer or anti-black violence, rather race, class, gender and sexuality converge in the production of urban violence. Hemphill's poem reveals the racialized logics that undergird acts of anti-queer violence through his image of grief as apparel. Through the logics of the racialized gaze, Ronald Gibson stars apparel signifies their difference and marks their exclusion from normative categories of race, class, gender and sexuality Starr's failure to signify realness within a racialized engendered field of vision marks her or his apparel as a sight of death multiply mark in Ronald Gibson's body as disposable under the structures of anti-blackness and anti-queerness. However, transfiguring Starr as a protagonist of a fairytale centralizes expressions of desire, indexing how the erotic operates as a mode of expressing individual and collective longings for alternative modes of being. Himpill subverts the fairytale narrative that relies on a male saviour for privilege uh, I'm sorry that relies on a male saviour by privileging self-affirmation quote while I wait I'm the only man who loves me. Here the apparel becomes resignified as a sight of self-making and as a sight of pleasure that comes with gender subversion and fulfilling the desires of the men that Starr meets by centering Ronald Gibson Starr as a protagonist of the Cinderella fairytale Himpill does not avoid the fatal risk of being in the life but the possibility of a happy ending embedded in the fairytale indexes a trace of queer optimism in the black gay cultural imagination. So, now I want to move forward to talk a little bit about New York and talk about my research with other countries. So, other countries was founded in New York City in 1986 by black gay writer Daniel Garrett. It still exists to this day whereas before it was they met at the lesbian and gay community services center. Now it's mostly online meetings. But Garrett set out to develop a community that would be dedicated to the development, preservation and publication of black gay men's writing. The group held weekly workshops for black gay men of all levels in writing led by such prominent figures as Asado Saint and Donald Woods. The group also performed their poetry at various venues from the Schoenberg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem to Yale and Rutgers Universities. The group understood their performances as a form of AIDS activism of empowerment. In my research on other countries collective I was struck by the overwhelming representations of death and mourning. Their first volume other countries black gay voices published in 1988 was framed by the deaths of black gay figures James Baldwin Richard Bruce Nugent and Bayard Bruston who all died in 1987. But their second volume Sojourner Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS published in 1993 gives a detailed list of the names of the AIDS dead. Furthermore, the volume is fueled with imagery of death and mourning with titles such as an acropolis letters to the dead post-mortem correspondence and last rights. If you can see all the small to be a kind of a sort of visualizing the the losses of this moment. So though it might seem self evident that these men would be writing about death given that the AIDS epidemic is at its height at the time they are writing argued that this is also an aesthetic choice in political praxis. Joseph Beams 1986 edited volume in the life of black gay anthology does not even mention AIDS say for sex or comment on the risk of sexually transmitted diseases as its tempils in 1991 edited collection brother to brother new writings by black gay men includes one section on AIDS out of a total of four so thematizing an entire volume on AIDS death and mourning is aesthetically and politically significant. I argue that for other countries collective melancholia was not significant synonymous with the Freudian vision of melancholia rather the perpetual deaths of friends and love ones at the height of the AIDS epidemic coupled with black gay men's experiences of racism and homophobia in the public and private spheres produced the historically and culturally specific form of melancholic Mormon mourning animated by desire for collectivity community and empowerment through historical and cultural analyses of the group's community building efforts aesthetic production and political activism I demonstrate how melancholic mourning was productive for black gay men in the early era of AIDS for the purposes of this presentation I want to focus on my interviews with surviving members of the group so I interviewed about 25 of the men it was really wonderful experience I demonstrate and I also interviewed many of the men so this other countries comes out of a group that formed in 1980 called Blackheart Collective and one of the members of that collective Isaac Jackson is local here in San Francisco so so for I demonstrate in my interviews how black gay men's collective memories of the uprising at Donald Woods funeral and their sorrowful memories of the early era of AIDS act as forms of black queer optimism by contesting the erasure of the ongoing epidemic from public discourse and by refusing to consign to the past the associations between blackness queerness and death their collective memories act as a disruption to contemporary forms of black gay liberalism thereby producing a more interesting radical and transformative present in my archival research I read about the controversy over Essex Hempill's death in 1995 at his funeral his family stated that he had given his life over to the Lord and his friends and contemporaries from this black gay cultural movement understood this as a form of erasure this erasure would be further solidified well this is contested so we can talk about this but um there were struggles around getting his papers to the Schomburg so whereas other people have like Melvin Dixon who I've written about has 12 full boxes in the archives in the Schomburg Essex Hempill only has two half boxes and he was one of the most prominent figures in the movement and though his mother told historian Martin Doberman that she did turn them over to someone they somehow never materialized at the at the Schomburg archives um so which is why part of the reason why Doberman if you've all seen his doc his biography of Michael Callan and Essex Hempill part of it being a joint biography is because of the limited archival trace of Essex Hempill um and one of the reasons why I've chosen to focus on their literary output as a form of as a kind of archive um an artifact um so at his funeral um so these controversies greatly impacted Black gay communities who held their own memorial services for the deceased in her tribute uh to Black gay writer James Baldwin Black lesbian feminist scholar and writer Barbara Smith theorizes the significance of the funeral to Black gay and lesbian politics in this moment Smith writes about how Baldwin's blackness was performed by the many speeches and performances Tony Morrison um Henry Barakabo spoke um but that his gayness was negated Smith writes about why naming Baldwin's gay identity at the funeral matters quote not only what this news have geometrically increased the quotient of truth available from the media that day in general it also would have helped alter if only by an increment perceptions in Black communities all over the world about the meaning of homosexuality communities where those of us who survived Baldwin as Black lesbians and gay men must continue to dwell in quote Smith highlights the significance of visibility for interracial Black politics making Black bodies intelligible as sexual minorities in Black communities the distinction um between mourning and militancy was a source of political debate in gay communities during the AIDS crisis various movement factions debated whether or not public memorials were enough or if the focus should be on political mobilization scholar Douglas Krim argues however that during the height of the epidemic mourning became militancy in the context of the violence of omission and silence of families who desecrated memories of the dead the events surrounding other countries member Donald Woods's funeral attested the blurred distinctions between mourning and militancy during this moment Woods was a prominent figure in the Black cultural scene in the New York arts community more broadly in his June 1992 the obituary in the New York Times was a celebrated as the executive director of AIDS film a nonprofit company that produced education and prevention movies and as public affairs director of the Brooklyn Children's Museum the obituary lists its participation in arts against apartheid the Hettrick Martin Institute for gay and lesbian youth and the Brooklyn arts council his work was also included in Marlin Riggs's important documentary tongues untied and he was featured in Riggs's documentary No Regret which is my favorite of all the documentary sorry um and um his family listed the cause of his death as cardiac arrest not mentioning his sexuality or his struggle with AIDS after experiencing the erasure of Woods's contributions to the Black gay community at the funeral fellow other countries member Osado Saint got up and announced that Woods was out gay and dot of AIDS not a heart attack in my interview with writer Marvin K. White also local he describes this uprising as our Black gay stone wall affirming as mythic proportions in Black gay cultural memory the erasure and subsequent uprising in Donald Woods funeral held significance for many of the other survivors of other countries that I interviewed in my conversation with Alan Wright he highlights the loss of erotic possibilities as traditional Black funerial practices figure figure figuratively scrubbed Black gay men clean of their so-called deviant desires so Wright's narrative reveals how funeral services so often sanitize the lives of Black gay men who had devoted their artistry and activism to Black gay communities Howard the Black church and the Black family as cultural institutions commanded the respect of the Black gay community of Black gay community members who were significant part of Woods's life forcing them to collude with a lie again shame in silence become disciplinary forces this time perpetuating a fictive boundary between Black homosexuality and heterosexuality as well as maintaining the fiction of the Black family and the Black church is solely heterosexual institutions the predominance of cultural erasure occurring at Black gay men's funerals during the epidemic obscures how Black sexuality and Black spirituality writ large have been marked as non-heteronormative and thus unassimilable within the dominant public sphere rather than embrace the queerness of Blackness Black cultural institutions participate in the false promise of racial normativity that comes with subscribing to the state's binary gender and sexual codes G. Winston James' narrative demonstrates how the funeral operates as a site of denial silencing the complex truths of Black life by biological families and clergy as Colin Robinson describes in a follow-up interview Black funeral practices at least in certain Christian traditions are centrally concerned with getting the loved one into heaven they are about restoration however for James restoration to the Black family and to the Black church means denying the diversity of Black sexualities and genders and silencing the voices of sexually variant Black communities to which the deceased belonged these communities tell other stories about Blackness stories that if not recovered might be buried along with the dead as the example of Essex Hempills a state and Woods's obituary demonstrate the hegemony of heteronormativity in Black communities means that these are not stories to be passed on Colin Robinson reports that Woods's contributions were rendered as vague Robinson also points out how the Black funeral links Black authenticity to notions of respectability silencing Black gay cultural memory is in Robinson's formulation a form of psychic violence Robinson's narrative points to a long history of capitulatory Black politics of inclusion and respectability that have distorted memories of various genders and sexualities in Black culture his narrative also illustrates how racial normativity has depended upon the violent excision of other memories a forgetting of Black gay culture and politics and public efforts of Black LGBT people to transform the meaning of Blackness in homosexuality the space of the funeral becomes a sight of mourning for the loved ones lost to AIDS and mourning a lost history when that is critical to Black gay self-fashioning regardless of their knowledge of the second service Saint and other members of the Black gay community who rose on Saint's request refused to capitulate to the mandates of respect demanded by the family and the church at the traditional services for Woods and Saint's actions at the funeral horrified and embarrassed Woods's family I mentioned this to add that this debate is not one-sided the competing memorial claims on Woods raises questions such as to whom does the body as a repository of memory belong how do we account for Black gay men's varying degrees of belonging when determining to whom their bodies and memories belong multiply marginalized subjects become problematic to cultural memory when multiple constituencies make historical claims on them whites reference to our Black gay Stonewall attest to this point regardless of the presence of people of color at the center of the Stonewall Rebellion whites formulation points to how this history has been reappropriated so that the primary recipients of freedom are imagined as white lesbians and gays Black gay men must make claims to an alternative history of sexual freedom understood as a struggle against the erasure of their memories and histories within Black culture in this alternative history the Black family is cast as a primary site of regulation the uprising at Donald Woods is funeral also demonstrates how Black gay morning might disrupt the emergence of gay liberalism scholars such as Reinaldo Walcott Robert Afrid Farr and Doug Maui Wubshet have credited the mass deaths associated with the AIDS epidemic with cleansing gay men of their their so-called messy desires offering them entry into modernity as liberal gay subjects the militant morning at Woods is funeral I'm sorry the militant morning at Woods is funeral and the power of that uprising and Black gay cultural memory acts as a refusal of the discourses of respectability and disciplinary mechanisms of shame and silence that are necessary to the production of Black gay liberalism and here I'm thinking about Dana Luciano literary scholar who argues that the mournful body can help us resist the progress of modernity. So if if Black gay liberalism depends upon a forgetting of the queer past and the stigma and shame of AIDS and its ongoing impact on Black communities then the power of remembering our Black gay Stonewall who's open a space to those to whom narratives of stigma shame and deviance continue to clean as well as a possibility for a more radical present other countries offers a historical case study for thinking about Black gay men's collective morning as a mode of Black queer in the face of end of AIDS and not about AIDS discourses that suggest that the crisis ended in the mid 90s and that today's most pressing concerns in US politics and culture are not about AIDS Black gay men's melancholic morning of the losses of the early era of AIDS fracture such narratives of closure and part of this is my this theorization is coming from the fact that um during my interviews I would have to stop many of this happen yesterday um so I would have to continue to come back so I wanted to hold into account that morning um that still exist um and because many of these men are long-term survivors of HIV their melancholic morning attests to the fact of HIV AIDS as an ongoing sight of local and global political struggle moreover their melancholic morning acts as a refusal to the neoliberal capitalist forces that seek to distance liberal black gay subjectivity from the his from its historical intimacy of blackness queerness and death an intimacy that helped to shape a more radical vision of politics in the early era of AIDS the politicized nature of their melancholic memories allows us to imagine more radical possibilities in the midst of an increasingly liberal black gay political agenda so um in conclusion while acknowledging that the black gay loss during the 1970s 80s and 90s evidence of being turns to black gay literature and culture is evidence for reimagining this period as more than a sight of grief I show how black gay men living in these decades employed literary and cultural forms to both assert the fact of black gay social life in a moment of widespread violence and to reorient black queer politics beyond the constrained space and time of biological life and social death my focus on black queer optimism allows me to interpret 1970s 80s and 90s black gay literature and culture as embodying a set of refusals and openings to broaden our repertoire of what is thinkable about black gay social life in the late 20th century while the body of black gay literature and culture discuss here refuses to disavow the pathologies attached to blackness and queerness it yearns for modes of being outside the constrained time of biological life and social death that black gay men embody my focus on the black gay renaissance places theories of social death and conversation with literary and historical analyses of black gay social life I locate black gay being at this theoretical and historical conjuncture in the discussions debates confrontations and moments of embracing others taking care of the sick and mourning the dead black gay men contested the structural forces that converged to mark their bodies as expendable and disposable though structural violence ushered a generation of black gay men to premature death evidence of being demonstrates that the renaissance of black gay cultural production in the 70s 80s and 90s embodies their political longings for richer subjective and social logs thank you