During the late 1980s, Beam wrote as if time were leaking, when to be Black and gay was to live inside a series of narrowing spaces:  within a country that congratulated itself on progress while perfecting new forms of racial abandonment; within Black communal spaces that guarded masculinity like a border; within gay worlds that mistook whiteness for universality.

When writer Joseph Beam published In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology with Alyson Publications in 1986, he helped usher in a new era of Black lesbian and gay publishing. This moment marked the rise of journals, magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, and zines created in the United States and the Caribbean. After Joe passed away just two years later, that work didn’t slow down. In fact, it expanded.