Finding My Path, In the Life
From the AWP 2026 Session “Forty Years of Joseph Beam’s In the Life”
Nearly four decades ago, and after four years into an extended search, as a young Black gay man trying to find something, anything, that reflected my life, my experience, myself, I happened upon a miraculous book whose cover alone suggested it would prove a godsend. That volume, which I spotted on the shelves of the Glad Day Bookstore in Boston, was Joseph Beam’s In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, and the front cover image, featuring two fly brothers drawn by Deryl Mackie, and its back cover photo of a very beautiful, dark brown man, Joseph Beam himself, along with a description of the book’s contents and Beam’s rationale for producing the book, were akin to me finding the most precious and life-giving essence I had long dreamt of. In fact, that back cover précis pointed out that Beam “began collecting this material after years of frustration with gay literature that had no message for--and little mention of--Black gay men.”
My frustration, so akin to Beam’s, had spanned my high school and college years; at home as a ninth grader, I had surreptitiously read my mother’s copies of James Baldwin’s 1953 debut and masterpiece, Go Tell It On the Mountain, which featured a young Black gay protagonist, John—we shared a first name, and I felt as if he were writing to and about me!—grappling with the push-and-pull between his nascent queer sexuality and the insistent vocation and hold of the church, which I too felt. I also had read my mother's copy of Baldwin’s 1979 novel Just Above My Head, still one of my favorites of his novels, which featured a loving relationship between two young Black men, including a scene of passionate sex, and these two books in particular profoundly shaped my sense of what was possible in terms of literature and Black gay relationships and life. Yet I saw none of this in my everyday life; the Black gay community in my hometown and college town, particularly Black creative and intellectual communities, remained invisible. Once I got to college, I wondered even more whether there were other Black gay, bi and queer male writers, and Black gay, bi and queer male community or communities somewhere out there, and searched, in the various libraries on campus, nearby bookstores, everywhere (save the bars and clubs, which I was carded from entering). But I came up empty every time in terms of a Black gay or LGBTQ literary tradition, genealogy and archive that might precede and follow from Baldwin, who remained a ballast. I should state one important fact here: there was a tradition right in front of me, one I saw yet could not really see because I did not have the right lens or perspective to view it, one that I had not connected to my quest, and that tradition was the Harlem Renaissance, with its plethora of Black gay and bisexual male writers, some of whom, like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Richard-Bruce Nugent, and Eric Walrond, I was already familiar with, but in whose work I had missed the queer clues and keys. Additionally, on campus and in Boston I started to discover other Black gay people and a sense of community, but I still was not finding a Black gay literary community or tradition. My trips to Boston and its premier gay bookstore were yielding instead an introduction to a rich, parallel White literary tradition from which I learned a great deal, but few of the books (or films, etc.) offered anything like a reflection of who I was or what I hoped to see in print.
“My trips to Boston and its premier gay bookstore were yielding instead an introduction to a rich, parallel White literary tradition from which I learned a great deal, but few of the books (or films, etc.) offered anything like a reflection of who I was or what I hoped to see in print.”
And then, miraculously, there was Beam’s anthology. My senior year, a year after it was published, I happened upon a copy in the Glad Day, and the book became a talisman. I think I read it from cover to cover roughly ten times not long after purchasing it, soaking up Beam’s words and those of so many in the collection, some of whom I would come to meet and witness in their greatness in a just a few years--Melvin Dixon, Craig G. Harris, Philip Robinson, Samuel R. Delany Jr., Assotto Saint, Bernard Branner (later Djola Bernard Branner, of the POMO Afro Homos), and Reginald Shepherd, among others. Others, like Donald Woods, I would have the still-to-me incredible fortune to read with, on a hot summer afternoon in the East Village, in the years before his passing. And then there was the writer who, with Beam and Delany, stood out most for me, the legendary Essex Hemphill. I would have the incalculable fortune just a few years later not only of hearing him performing his work live and conducting an interview with him in the Dark Room Collective House on Inman Street in Cambridge, but also of having him edit my work for Brother to Brother, the Black gay anthology he and Joseph Beam co-edited that followed In the Life, and, several years after that, not long before his homegoing, of reading with him as well. At the time in 1987 when I came across In the Life, however, I had heard and knew of none of these writers; each was a revelation, and their collective presence in those pages, as a Black gay literary and intellectual community and communing, was a revelation as well. Each of the anthology’s sections—Stepping Out, Cut Off from Among their People, Creating Community, Brother/father/lover/son, Speaking for Ourselves, and Stepping Into Tomorrow…--and the work in each, Beam’s introduction, the poems, the stories, the essays, blazed like a lighthouse beacon guiding me forward through straits, away from the shoals, toward the writer and person I might eventually become. Beam had placed a treasure on that bookshelf before me. I not only read these writers but studied their work, and it opened spaces of possibility for me, allowing me to see and dialogue with that tradition I had long sought, to imagine what Black gay writing in the present—then the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the AIDS pandemic raged—and into the future was and might become.
Flyer for “Forty Years of Joseph Beam’s In the Life” Presented at AWP 2026
Beam’s anthology, as I noted, not only became a talisman for me but worked like one: all of a sudden, I began to come across more Black gay/LGBTQ writers from the past and present. In the Glad Day Bookstore, I now saw, or better yet, now was able to see, books by Delany, Melvin Dixon and Assotto Saint, as well as Pat Parker and Audre Lorde, the Black queer Pyramid Periodical literary and arts journal, on the shelves. Not long thereafter, the Black gay Other Countries Collective, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year like In the Life (and like two other vital, ongoing Black SGL/gay/queer organizations, GMAD [Gay Men of African Descent] and Adodi), came to Cambridge to read, as did Essex, Philip Robinson, and others at the Dark Room, and it was as if Beam’s In the Life was coming to life. As he wrote in his introduction, “Together we are making history.” That history now felt real and tangible, and I felt empowered to begin writing, penning poems and stories, that centered Black gay life, Black queer lives, and basing this artmaking, as Beam and so many of his contributors had, a deep sense of love for Black gay men, Black LGBTQ people, and Black and queer people more broadly. Beam’s critical acuity, his activism, and his striving for connection and community had a profound effect on me, and it remains one of my regrets that I did not have the opportunity to thank him or James Baldwin in person for the indelible gifts they gave me before they left our earthly plane.
Now, some forty years later, I still look back with utmost thanks and admiration for this collection. It is part of my DNA, as a writer and person. It answered a call I put out to the universe, and it still speaks to me today. Everything I have published, whether it seems obvious or not, bears its influence and imprint, and it is my hope that though the difficult era in which Joseph Beam and its contributors produced the work in it, an era I lived through myself, is quite different and distinct from our current one, In the Life will continue to resonate as we Black gay men, Black LGBTQ people, strive to see ourselves, define ourselves, fight for our rights and equality in this society and across the globe, and create and sustain a loving and beloved community. In Beam and all the writers in the collection, I heard a diversity of voices and styles that nevertheless sang tunes that I longed for and needed to hear, allowing me to sing myself and others into being. I saw creative models, path blazers, truth tellers who were willing to put their lives and dreams on the page, with enough talent and skill and militancy and fierceness for the gods, leaving a literary legacy to stand the test of time.
“Now, some forty years later, I still look back with utmost thanks and admiration for [In the Life]. It is part of my DNA, as a writer and person. It answered a call I put out to the universe, and it still speaks to me today. ”
In Beam’s efforts in particular, I saw a vision and generosity that still inspires me today. One example of this was my collaboration with the Black queer scholar and theorist Robert F. Reid-Pharr, my exact contemporary and someone else whose life Beam’s gifts deeply affected and shaped, in editing a collection of poems by Essex Hemphill, Love Is a Dangerous Word, which appeared last year. Just as Essex had served as my editor for Brother to Brother, about which I have written elsewhere, so was I now able to pay it forward and offer my thanks to him in the form of a selection of most of his finest poetic work. Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems is a tribute not only to Essex’s literary artistry and mastery, but to the broader legacy Joseph Beam and he bequeathed all Black gay writers, all Black LGBTQ writers and artists, who follow them. I will end by quoting from Essex’s remarkable poem in honor of Joseph Beam, “When My Brother Fell,” from Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems, because it resonates with all I have tried to convey here, but as only Essex can and could:
“There was no one lonelier
Than you, Joseph.
Perhaps you wanted love
so desperately and pleaded
with God for the only mercy
that could be spared.
Perhaps God knew you couldn’t be given
more than publish love
in this lifetime.
When I stand
on the front lines now
cussing the lack of truth,
the absence of willful change
and strategic coalitions,
I realize sewing quilts
will not bring you back
nor save us.
It’s too soon
to make monuments
for all we are losing,
for the lack of truth
as to why we are dying,
who wants us dead,
what purpose does it serve?
When my brother fell
I picked up his weapons
I didn’t question
Whether I could aim
Or be as precise as he.
A needle and thread
were not among
his things
I found.”
To the memory of those we have lost, and to their legacy always, and thank you for the opportunity to share these remarks.
Copyright © John Keene, 2026. All rights reserved.
