agency is hiatus in iterability (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter 220) transformation is only real when you share it (Assotto Saint, Sacred Life 261) In Why I Write, poet and playwright Assotto Saint notes that most revolutions - be they political, social, spiritual, or economic - are usually complemented by one in (3). Such literary revolutions should be considered complementary in strong sense, not as colorful accessories that serve only as window-dressing for more substantial rearrangement of forms of government and social relations, recastings of ligature between human and divine, or revision of cash nexus and modes of production and distribution. Rather, literature as a public process that reflects private passions (4) acts as primary locus for reworking social categories, for rearticulating whole terrain of values and parties involved. Under traditional mimetic models, either map (literature) or (real economic or social practices) precedes other. Vulgar Marxist criticism would view map as at best distorted representation of preexisting or at worst as guiltily complicit in perpetuation of that territory's unjust geography of oppression. On other hand, aesthetes of Wilde or Mallarme variety would turn mimeticism on its head, privileging artistic articulation as preexisting real. What Saint points us toward is strong sense of complementary: literature as social force, without which revolution would remain incomplete, if not impossible. Under this model, map and are drawn and constructed simultaneously; map is projected onto territory, which only becomes visible as the territory as it stands in support of phantasmatic projection of particular social cartography. The revolution in which Saint's works participate involves reexamination of place of gay black male in U.S. society, and complementary literary revolution began in earnest in 1980s, especially with publication in 1986 of Joseph Beam's anthology/n Life.(1) Beam frankly announced awareness that he and other contributors were making history (16), and he understood project as both archival and revolutionary. Underscoring necessity of putting gay black writing into print and anticipating well-known ACT UP equation Silence = Death, Beam would argue that transmitting our stories by word of mouth does not possess archival permanence. Survival is visibility (15). In an often quoted slogan, Beam announced social importance of anthology's potential cultural work: men loving Black men is revolutionary act of eighties (240). This is publishing revolution that has continued into '90s, and Assotto Saint has placed specifically stamp on it in three anthologies he has edited or conceived: The Road Before Us (1991), Here to Dare (1992), and Milking Black Bull (1995). I would like to examine Saint's work as poetic-editorial engagement with social transformations currently occurring in gay black existence. While poetry's density naturally offers complex interpretive possibilities for didactic and political socio-aesthetic intervention that Saint's work makes (Saint, Why I Write 7), this complexity is heightened by fact that Saint did not limit poetic work to producing poetry himself. In addition to poetry he himself wrote, he was instrumental in selection and publication of poetry by other writers. Saint's work with Other Countries (the New York gay black writer's collective) and as editor of above anthologies dispersed own agency among scores of writers, rendering an account of his work problematic, since it must also consider editorship. At same time, Saint's editorship offers possibility of using him as common denominator in discussing work of various authors in anthologies. …