Locked In: Intimacy, Incarceration, and HIV/AIDS in the Black Gay Arts Movement During the Long 1980’s
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Daily, Richard
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 18, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Lori Ginzberg, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Hil Malatino, Outside Unit & Field Member
Cathleen Cahill, Major Field Member
Ellen Stroud, Major Field Member
Michael West, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Amy Greenberg, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Black Studies
Carceral Studies
Queer Studies
Queer of Color Critique
Affect Theory
U.S. History
HIV/AIDS
incarceration
Black Gay Men
Black Gay Artist
Joseph Beam - Abstract:
- Prison, both literal and metaphoric, was central to the Black Gay Arts Movement; a period of Black gay art production from the 1970s to the 1990s. My project, “Locked In: Intimacy, Incarceration, and HIV/AIDS in the Black Gay Arts Movement during the Long 1980s” speaks to the interlocution of Blackness, sexuality, artistic production, and the carceral system in the post-Civil Rights/Black Power era by highlighting literal and metaphoric experience of incarceration in Black gay artists’ work. Grounded in historical research, my dissertation interrogates the lived experiences of Black gay male artists and their engagement with the carceral state. Intersectional in scope, “Locked In” uses carceral studies, Black feminist theory, queer of color critique, and affect theory to plumb the depths of Black gay artists’ lives and media production. Carceral studies enables a reflection on the public versus private production of art and allows us to stretch and rethink carcerality beyond the prison walls and into larger societal structures. I use my concept, affective atmosphere of incarceration to understand a broad social phenomenon, a collective sense of incarceration that imbues the everyday lives of Black queer men which the work of Black queer artists illuminates. The inclusion of incarcerated individuals expands the geographies of the renaissance to a national picture of Black queer people’s art and lives. My project engages these national networks of intimacy among and between Black queer men across the bricks and mortar of state-sanctioned violence and imprisonment. In particular, it traces the role and legacy of Black gay writer and poet, Joseph Beam. The affective atmosphere of incarceration refers not to physical incarceration, but to the everyday experience of feeling incarcerated; of a person feeling “locked into” the ways their body experiences societal forces. In Beam’s edited volume, In the Life, the first Black gay anthology, Beam wrote specifically about an affective carcerality and developed close relationships with imprisoned artists, such as Ombaka, who influenced much of his work. Beam, however, failed to include incarcerated perspectives which this project critiques. After his death, Beam’s legacy lived on through the work of his mother, Dorothy Beam, and his friend, D.C. native, poet, and Black gay performance artist Essex Hemphill. Together, the duo produced Beam’s second edited volume Brother to Brother which, in contrast to In the Life, demonstrated a text of Black gay refusal. Brother to Brother forcefully demanded acceptance within the Black community because there was no other choice with the number of Black gay men dying from AIDS complications. Like the Harlem Renaissance, this period birthed new articulations of Black masculinity, sexuality, and understandings of the ways structural violence played out on their bodies. Black gay Documentarian Marlon Riggs was also inspired by Beam’s works and would develop a visual methodology of autoanthology. Inspired by Beam and Hemphill’s anthologies, Riggs adapted an autoanthological filmmaking method that spoke from a personal and communal perspective. Riggs’ films continued in the legacy of Beam not only in their content but the refusal of community and societal stigma. Ultimately all three artists, like many other Black gay men of their time, died from AIDS complications. “Locked In: Intimacy, Incarceration, and HIV/AIDS in the Black Gay Arts Movement during the Long 1980s” will bring new light to the lived experiences and cultural production during the era. It will complicate concepts of citizenship and freedom by demonstrating the carceral boundaries Black gay men navigated. My study will emphasize the ways race and prison literally and metaphorically intersect to produce new ways of understanding the disproportionate homelessness, incarceration, drug-dependence, economic precarity, and HIV/AIDS pandemic that has ravaged and continues to ravage Black gay communities nationally.