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.”  

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.