Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence

by Darius Bost

Evidence of Being opens on a grim Washington DC’s gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed to emerge. Darius Bost’s account of the media, poetry, and performance of this time and place reveals a stunning confluence of activism and the arts. In Washington and New York during the 1980s and ’90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread views that marked them as unworthy of grief. They created art that enriched and reimagined their lives in the face of pain and neglect, while at the same time forging a path toward bold new modes of existence. At once a corrective to the predominantly white male accounts of the AIDS crisis and an openhearted depiction of the possibilities of black gay life, Evidence of Being above all insists on the primacy of community over loneliness, and hope over despair.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, History, African American

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 21, 2018

Reviews

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bost's book looks at the work and history of a few gay black authors and poets who wrote in New York and Washington in the 1980s and 1990s. He argues that the work of these men created a Black Gay Cultural Renaissance in the face of the AIDS epidemic from the same time.

"Evidence of Being explores how black gay men have created selves and communities amid the ubiquitous forces of antigay and antilock violence that targeted them. It also examines how structural violence-racism, capitalism, homophobia, and AIDS-and responses to all it shaped black gay identity and community formation as well as black gay aesthetics and cultural production." 4

"Black gay men's political investments in collectivity and creative practice were informed by the emergence and visibility of black lesbian feminist culture and politics during the 1970s and early 1980s." 9

"Cathy Caruth argues that historical trauma poses such a crises by asking how "we in this era can have access to our own history, to a history that is in its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is not simple access." Caruth is concerned with how traumatic experiences disrupt history and memory. She argues that the psychological impact of extremely violent events produces fissures and gaps in the narratives of the the dramatized, thereby rendering certain aspects of the traumatic past as unrepresentable and unspeakable." 58

"Scholars such as Rinaldo Walcott, Robert Reid-Phaa, and Dagmawi Woubshet have credited the mass deaths associated with the AIDS epidemic with cleansing gay men of their messy desires, thereby offering them entry into modernity as liberal gay subjects." 93

"Harper argues that minority experience produces uncertainty and speculation because it "continually renders even the most routine instances of social activity and personal interaction as possible cases of invidious social distinction and discriminatory treatment." He explains how people who inhabit marginalized bodies must constantly speculate about how their very presence transforms social space." 107

"During the early years of the epidemic, blackness operated as a site of blame for the appearance of AIDS in the United States. Paul Farmer describes how US public health officials inferred that Haitian immigrants had brought the AIDS epidemic to America." 114

[Liam Arne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting! A bit tooo theoretical for me though- it was strongest to me when focusing on the human subjects and writings

[Mills College Library]

306.7662 B7471 2019