The Future Joseph Beam Imagined
From the AWP 2026 Session “Forty Years of Joseph Beam’s In the Life”
At the beginning of his essay, “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart,” Joseph Beam quotes from Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals: “. . . what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” Beam continues from Lorde’s Sister Outsider:
I know the anger that lies inside me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be angry than to hurt. Anger is what I do best. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
Beam continues the opening of that essay in his own words:
I, too, know anger. My body contains as much anger as water. It is the material from which I have built my house: blood red bricks that cry in the rain. It is what pulls my tie and gold chains taut around my neck; fills my penny loafers and my Nikes; molds my Calvins and gray flannels to my torso. It is the face and posture I show the world. It is the way, sometimes the only way, I am granted an audience. It is sometimes the way I show affection. I am angry because of the treatment I am afforded as a Black man. That fiery anger is stoked additionally with the fuels of contempt and despisal shown me by my community because I am gay. I cannot go home as who I am.
Flyer for “Forty Years of Joseph Beam’s In the Life” Presented at AWP 2026
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. The specter of AIDS hovered over and moved through all of this like weather – unavoidable, intimate, lethal. Desire became something measured. Love arrived with a countdown. For Beam, writing was not just reflection, but a holding, a preservation – of names, of bodies, of moments of touch – before they disappeared. Indeed, we lost Beam and many of his contemporaries to the AIDS epidemic. We lost their work, their dreams, their very aspirations as AIDS burned through the very fabric of our existence. In the Life, then, is less a book and more an intervention, a gathering of voices refusing the quiet that surrounded Black gay men as we fell ill, as we died, as we were forgotten.
In his work, Beam did not ask for permission. He named love where love had been declared impossible, demanded pleasure at times in places and in ways the culture deemed shameful. He wrote tenderly of intimacy then placed those moments in historical contexts so delicate, they could scarcely be contained. The future, in Beam’s work, was not a destination so much as a risk – something imagined in brief flashes, against the impending, inevitable certainty of loss.
“My novel belongs to a time shaped by the sacrifices and labor of Beam, Hemphill, and so many others. A time shaped by the fact that some lived, that treatments arrived, that silence cracked enough for some of our stories to pass through. ”
I wrote my novel, The Fantasies of Future Things, from the other side of that risk. My novel belongs to a time shaped by the sacrifices and labor of Beam, Hemphill, and so many others. A time shaped by the fact that some lived, that treatments arrived, that silence cracked enough for some of our stories to pass through. The novel moves in the long wake of the epidemic rather than existing during its fiercest hours. Post the AIDS-epidemic, futurity is no longer unthinkable, but neither is it innocent. Fantasy becomes a method of return, a way of touching what history refused to protect. Memory is not archival but emotional, past and present fold into each other until desire itself feels like a haunting.
Read alongside Beam’s work, The Fantasies of Future Things forms a bridge, a conversation across time. Beam wrote from within an emergency, when to speak was to stay alive a moment longer. The Fantasies of Future Things listens from the afterlife of that emergency, asks what it means to want a future when so many were denied one. Between In The Life and The Fantasies of Future Things stretches a fragile continuum: not progress, exactly, but endurance. A belief that Black gay life, once named, once imagined, cannot be entirely erased.
