‘Bitch out of hell’: the queer urban marronage of Assotto Saint

Abstract

This essay contributes to an emerging body of critical work on the gay Haitian-American poet, performer, and essayist Assotto Saint by reexamining his important contributions to the HIV/AIDS movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s through the lens of maroon and queer diaspora studies. Saint’s creative revolutionary movements, reflected through his poetry, essays, theater, and activism challenged entrenched state-sanctioned discrimination against queer black subjects while issuing a powerful critique of late twentieth-century American capitalism. In this way, the essay reads Saint as a transnational queer artist and activist who cultivated personal and collective freedom through the performance of subversive social practices and acts in what the author calls queer urban maroon communities. The author argues that these communities provocatively resisted the racist and heteronormative American response to the AIDS epidemic through cruising spaces and the creation of queer black artist collectives.