This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month 2019.

“I dare myself to dream,” was how the writer and activist Joseph Beam kept himself brave.  As the first person to ever publish a collection of writing by and about out Black gay men, Beam had to dare himself and others to be proudly who they were in print.  This daring dreaming allowed Beam to create something that had never existed, to document the lives and literature of a community of men too many of whom would die too young from AIDS and to create precedents for generations of Black gay geniuses.

So I am offering this post on what we call Precedents Day, which is also Audre Lorde’s birthday this year.  Audre Lorde felt that Joseph Beam was a gift to her life.  And the feeling was mutual.  In fact, Joseph Beam was inspired to create his groundbreaking anthology In the Life by the work of Black feminists and feminists of color.  As he wrote in a letter to Barbara Smith, it was the work of the editors of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color that made him feel like such a work was possible and necessary and to understand the impact it could have on the Black community as a whole.  He reached out with gratitude and asked for advice from the women he thought of as his teachers in practice.  “Brother to Brother” the essay where Joseph Beam declares that “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act of the eighties,” starts with a meditation very closely modeled after Audre Lorde’s “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger.”

The love between Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam was not all words, it was also practice.  Audre Lorde sent Joseph Beam money for his first magazine Black/Out when she got her tax returns.  She sent it in a little card with a Black Unicorn on it (a not so subtle nod to her poem “The Black Unicorn” which meditates on the complexity of difference.  Beam was a Black Unicorn himself in that he believed his dreams were possible even when some of the people he considered Black gay elders discouraged him from putting the community in print.

As mentioned in the Breathing is Brilliant post in honor of Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam nurtured a vision and created a collaborative practice that allowed his dreams to live on after his death.  And his urgent victory was shaped by key decisions about institutional practice.  In 1979 Joseph Beam dropped out of a graduate program whose racism was harming his spirit and not even 10 years later in December1988 Beam died of AIDS just shy of what would have been is 34th birthday.   In the time between dropping out and rising up, Joseph Beam dedicated himself to nurturing and creating institutions to support the collective visibility, empowerment and expression of Black Gay and Lesbian community.  In addition to the work that went into the anthology In the Life, he helped revive the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and to organize their conferences.  He created Black/Out Magazine as an outlet for the coalition.  In his first introduction of Black/Out he specifically contextualizes “out” as in “out-of-the-closet” but also  “outfront,” “outspoken,” “outrageous,” “outstanding” and says “welcome home” to the “outlaws, outcasts and outsiders.”  Beam was committed to creating spaces of affirmation for those inhabitiing the multiple meanings of “out” where space outside of recognized norms and institutional support could become a sustainable trouble of alternative modes of life.  Where being outside was the deepest way to be in, as in In the Life.

Those of us who are navigating getting out  by leaving institutions that harm us and dedicating our life-energy to the coalitions we need have much to learn from the life and legacy of Joseph Beam. It is fittingly poetic that his major publication work centered on the words “out” and “in” “Black” and “Life.”  As you may have noticed by now these navigations of the ins and outs of Black life require exactly what Beam lived by, daring and dreaming.  Outside of the world as we know it, is the dream.  And in Beam’s dream, Black men loved Black men and that love had a healing impact on the entire Black community.  In Beam’s dream our words became places to live.  He had to dare himself to live those dreams and he provoked others to join him.

What do you need to get out of?  What structures support you and the excluded communities you are accountable to be more deeply in your lives?  What dream could you dare yourself to actualize this month?

Joseph Beam’s work continues to live on in the work of the Counternarrative Project founded by Charles Stephens which is organized around Beam’s mantra that Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act and B.E.A.M, the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective which poet, healer and advocate Yolo Akili named in his honor.

We offer this chant and meditation inspired by Joseph Beam towards your daring.  May your dreams enliven you.  May they even outlive you.

And of course, this is what we cultivate all the time at Brilliance Remastered if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.

And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs