Stonewall Riots Research Articles

From the Streets to the Altar

From the Streets to the Altar Jeffery Sugarman (bio) Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America Nathaniel Frank Harvard University Press www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737228 456 Pages; Print, $35.00 Nathaniel Frank's Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America follows upon an earlier book, Unfriendly Fire (2009), examining the US military's ban on homosexuals, and confirms his place as an historian of great discernment. Awakening, highly detailed but immediately accessible, is written to a broad audience–straight as well as gay, with or without previous knowledge of, or engagement in, the gay rights movement; specialist readers–academic or activist–with interests in law and legal theory, civil rights and feminism; gay rights and conservatism in America. It's to Frank's great credit that Awakening manages its specialist task while reading from start to finish as a gripping story. Frank goes to great ends to fairly incorporate the widest range of views and myriad, illuminating stories of individual contributors, frequently from outside "the movement," many of whom will not be known to most readers. The result is a dizzying, uplifting jigsaw of events that reveals how, beginning in the 1960's, a drive for greater dignity and acceptance for homosexuals led to the radical conception, and eventual establishment, of "marriage equality" in America. This extraordinary transformation is vividly illustrated by two pre-Stonewall essays (the first among many fascinating historical details and artifacts found throughout): one written in 1953 and the other ten years later, for ONE, "the first enduring gay-themed magazine published in the United States." The earlier essay opposed the idea of homosexual marriage, "a prospect the author considered horrifying: that social acceptance of homosexuality would lead to homosexual marriage." And significantly, as Frank points out, the essayist's belief "that marriage would stifle the freedoms that gay people enjoyed anticipated the sentiments of gay liberationist thought that would flower in the 1970s." The later essay, however, expressed a very different view, and its author "readily identified himself as 'married' to another man" reflecting, Frank says, "how common it was, even in the mid-twentieth century, for same-sex partners to identify themselves–and live–as married couples, albeit without official recognition of their union." This commentator "maintained that social acceptance and 'marriage' would be mutually reinforcing," and "'that when society finally accepts homophiles as a valid minority with minority rights, it is going first of all to accept the married homophiles.'" For some readers, these conflicting views within the gay community, especially in the early years of the gay-rights movement, will come as a surprise. For myself, a gay (and now married) man whose life very much tracks the chronology of the book, such well-articulated positions by those uncomfortable with marriage was refreshing, and essential to the story. Frank recounts that this was a view held quite strongly among lesbians, some of whom thought same-sex marriage was "'an attempt to mimic the worst of mainstream society'" when they sought to expand family rights, and options, beyond marriage. As articulated by Paula Ettelbrick, a lesbian feminist and lawyer, the problem was "'not so much that lesbian and gay couples cannot marry. Rather . . . the legal and social benefits and privileges constructed for families are available only to those families joined by marriage or biology."' [End Page 39] These tensions were often played out in a little-known group called the "Litigators' Roundtable," comprised of attorneys "animated by the 1969 Stonewall riots against police harassment," it served over many years as an invaluable arena to mediate conflicting priorities and develop effective political and legal strategy. The history of the Roundtable, as told by Frank, is central to marriage equality: "Roundtable lawyers, with their unprecedented level of focus, coordination, and strategic prowess, would ultimately play the most influential role in obtaining marriage equality, [though] almost none began their work fighting for it. Indeed, only a very few embraced marriage early on . . . viewing other priorities as paramount." These passages give a clear impression of how significant Frank, himself an LGBTQ strategist and director of Columbia Law School's...

Forbidden Colors

Forbidden Colors

Envisioning Queer Liberation: The Performance of Communal Visibility in Doric Wilson’s Street Theater

Doric Wilson’s 1982 comedy Street Theater is one of the most enduring plays to emerge from the gay theatre movement, and this article argues for its significance as a pioneering work that represents the Stonewall Riots and the theatre itself as sites for the creation of queer community. Building on Jill Dolan’s theorization of the utopian performative and communitas, I examine how Wilson combined the ethos of off-off-Broadway and the activism of the gay liberation movement to create theatre by, for, about, and near LGBT people. With archival research supporting dramaturgical analysis of the play, the article demonstrates how Street Theater perpetuated the mission of Wilson’s ground-breaking theatre company, TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), gained acclaim for a production staged in a gay leather bar, became a staple of the “purple circuit,” and continues to promote the re-enactment of queer communal visibility.

Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics

Timothy Stewart-Winter has written an important political history of the growth of the lesbian and gay rights movement in Chicago, one that fills a notable gap in a literature that has focused primarily on the movements in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Beyond this geographic gap, Stewart-Winter also argues against the common pre/post-Stonewall narrative that pervades much of the development literature on the movement. As he states, the “book instead emphasizes the continuities between the 1960s and 1970s, as activists from both generations focused on challenging policy brutality, entrapment, and street harassment, as well as raids on gay bars” (p. 5). This was a more practical politics that was born of the power of the Richard Daley machine and its obsession with removing the city of “deviates” as a way to please the working-class white Daley base. Indeed, the author notes that the Stonewall riots “barely registered” (p. 86) with Chicago activists. This history contributes to the rethinking of the role of Stonewall and more radical politics in the early 1970s.

Moved by the Spirit: Theological Literatures of LGBT Advocacy

ABSTRACTDebate over the question of how to effectively acknowledge and advocate for the presence of LGBT people as legitimate members of religious denominations and a population entitled to ministry has generated a substantial body of monographic literature within the field of theology. The earliest works were published during the era of the homophile movement in the 1960s prior to the Stonewall riot in 1969 that marks the beginning of the contemporary gay and lesbian civil rights movement. The subsequent decades have witnessed an expansion and diversification of this genre with the emergence of specific liturgies and ceremonies addressing significant LGBT life events, autobiographies and biographies of openly lesbian and gay clergy, and writings confronting issues of ethnicity and activism.

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

Valid Ethics Versus Probable Histories

Valid Ethics Versus Probable Histories Gavin Miller (bio) Keywords DSM, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, nosology, counterfactual historiography Tamara Kayali Browne's proposal for an Ethics Review Panel (hereafter, "the panel") for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) conceives of a state-sponsored panel of academic experts—philosophers, sociologists, and bioethicists—dealing in a reflective, systematic, and standardized manner with the "value judgements" that are an "integral and unavoidable part of psychiatric nosology" (Browne, 2017, p. 189). The panel would consider existing and new diagnostic categories, and issue authoritative vetoes and/or modifications as appropriate. Browne asserts that, "it should not be necessary to have protests and political activism, such as that involved in removing homosexuality from the DSM, in order for the status quo to be reassessed" (Browne, 2017, p. 192). The panel, in other words, is intended to do via expert deliberation what has been done previously via the apparently lesser methods of "protests and political activism." My criticism of Browne's article concerns its historiographic argumentation. To exemplify the panel's work, she offers a counterfactual history of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). The selection of PMDD—rather than, say, homosexuality—is unhelpful to her case, and her narrative of a counterfactual deliberation on PMDD does not sufficiently distinguish, nor defend, its historical probability. Browne lists three areas that the panel of philosophers, sociologists, and bioethicists would respectively address: value judgements, societal consequences, and harm–benefit analysis (Browne, 2017, p. 193). She concretely illustrates these debates in her account of a hypothetical panel discussion of PMDD. The diagnosis is a DSM-5 category that Browne believes should be discontinued, and that she argues would have been vetoed by the panel, had it existed: "it is most likely that a panel of philosophers, sociologists and bioethicists would have rejected the proposal to list PMDD as a diagnosis in DSM-5" (Browne, 2017, p. 196). Note the counterfactual conditional: An important, concrete element in Browne's case for the panel is the inference that, had the panel existed, it would have rejected PMDD for valid reasons. Although I concur with analysis that regards counterfactual reasoning as essential, although often implicit, to historiography (e.g., Bunzl, 2004), I believe that there are at least two problems in Browne's argument by counterfactual history. The first problem is the selection of PMDD. It is not explained why PMDD should be particularly useful for her historical argument. This is a significant omission because the history of homosexuality in DSM, and a corresponding counterfactual history, would seem a better-informed alternative. There is a growing body of material that refers specifically to homosexuality in DSM (e.g., [End Page 219] Bayer, 1981, Drescher & Merlino, 2007), beyond the brief intraprofessional historiography that Browne cites (Zachar & Kendler, 2012), and an indefinitely large hinterland of social and cultural histories of gay rights and activism. In particular, a discussion of homosexuality would have allowed Browne to identify what functions of "protests and political activism" could have been taken on by the panel. Because there is, for instance, no well-known equivalent of the Stonewall riots for PMDD, Browne's counterfactual history leaves unclear precisely what the panel would be taking over from the political and public spheres. The suspicion, therefore, arises that Browne's choice of PMDD stacks the deck in her favor: Because no substantive actual (i.e., non-counterfactual) history of PMDD is provided by Browne, one cannot readily discern, for instance, whether the panel's deliberations are an unlikely or improper substitute for "protests and political activism." Moreover, Browne's selection of a currently contentious diagnostic category poses a problem to readers who disagree with her conclusions on PMDD's validity. Those who have come (as they see it rationally) to a different (e.g., biomedical) conclusion about PMDD are confronted with a counterfactual history in which the panel comes to precisely the wrong conclusion. If they accept Browne's counterfactual historiography, but reject her nosology, then they will oppose her proposal. Choosing an uncontentious invalid category such as homosexuality would have circumvented this obstacle. The second problem is that Browne's discussion of the panel's hypothetical deliberations simultaneously...

Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights

Reforming Sodom describes how liberal Protestantism in mid-twentieth-century America tried to contribute to a therapeutic perspective on same sex-behavior and identity. However, while some liberal Protestant clergy provided support for early gay activism, a larger (and ironic) consequence of their efforts was to aid the antigay discourse of the emerging conservative evangelical religious movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Central to Heather R. White's account is the mid-1940s revision of the King James's English Bible into the more modern Revised Standard Version (rsv). While the older version contained nouns referring to men who were “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind,” the rsv replaced such ambiguous language with the term homosexual. It was the first time that the word appeared in a modern English Bible. This new openness revealed both the efforts by some liberal Protestant clergy to become influential allies and advocates of the emerging gay-identity movement and how some gay activists looked to religion as inspiration for their activism. She examines how the 1969 Stonewall Riots and their subsequent commemoration had elements of religious ritual.

Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence by Christina B. Hanhardt

Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, Christina B. Hanhardt. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xii, 358 pp. $25.95 US (paper). Residents of the West Village in New York City held a Take Back Our Streets rally in May 2002, near the location of riots that broke out in June 1969 after police raided the Stonewall Inn bar. In the intervening thirty-three years, however, the terms of political struggle had become markedly different. Rather than sexual outcasts fighting back against police abuse, the 2002 gathering featured privileged (mainly white) gay, lesbian, and straight homeowners calling for police to step up enforcement of quality-of-life laws. And whereas the leaders of the Stonewall riots were sex workers and transgender people, many of them people of colour, the 2002 leaders singled out queer youth of colour and trans women of colour as the sources of their problems. The very association between the West Village and LGBT residential concentration provided political cover for the 2002 rally organizers, protecting them from accusations of discrimination. American Studies scholar Christina Hanhardt's complex and rewarding new book examines the multiple ironies of this turn of events. When did LGBT neighbourhood organizing campaigns shift from safe street patrols, which sought to protect LGBT people from anti-gay violence, to appeals to the police to enforce curfews that targeted queer youth of colour? The answer, she finds, lies with the LGBT rights movement's claims to neighbourhood--space--as a physical location for identity formation and political action. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Castro in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City became centres of LGBT residence and social life. Residential patterns, cultural and social institutions, and commercial establishments defined these areas as neighbourhoods; association with a gay neighbourhood became intrinsic to gay and lesbian sexual identities. Gay neighbourhood-based identities also became markers of whiteness. Focusing on neighbourhood responses to violence, Hanhardt argues that by mooring a dominant understanding of sexual identity to place, the promotion and protection of gay neighborhoods have reinforced the race and class stratification of postwar urban space (9). The book's five chapters move chronologically, each focused on neighbourhood-based LGBT activism. A three-way tension pervades Hanhardt's case studies: liberal attempts to marshal government resources for economic opportunity; neoliberal plans to police personal conduct; and radical-left movements that celebrated alternative modes of free expression and community organizing. …

LGBT Psychiatric Leaders Reflect on Landmark Supreme Court Ruling

LGBT Psychiatric Leaders Reflect on Landmark Supreme Court Ruling

Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum (review)

Reviewed by: Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum Elizabeth Bush Bausum, Ann Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights. Viking, 2015 [128p] illus. with photographs ISBN 978-0-670-01679-2 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8-12 Noted author Bausum undertakes a tricky task here: to inform readers who know little or nothing of the 1969 Stonewall Riots about this landmark episode in civil rights history, while demythologizing the event for readers who regard Stonewall as the beginning of the gay rights movement. Teens unfamiliar with Stonewall get a rousing re-creation of the raid that, most improbably for the 1960s, saw bottlethrowing young rebels get the better of an undermanned police operation, hobbled by poor communication and ignorance of the turf they were sent to reclaim. For better-informed teens, Bausum sets the confrontation between police and gay bar patrons into the context of an already established movement, albeit one struggling for a broader audience and committed activists, and the general atmosphere of youth anger toward political and military authority that marked the Vietnam Era. She also reminds those readers inclined to enshrine Stonewall as a place of pilgrimage that it was, in fact, a Mafia-run dump that existed on police payoffs and unloaded watered-down, illegal liquor on gay patrons who had few alternative venues in which to meet, much less dance and socialize with some degree of freedom. After [End Page 536] the exciting play-by-play details of the sweltering night of rioting, more subdued chapters skim topics such as the AIDS epidemic and the emergence of the marriage equality issue, though readers will want to look elsewhere for more in-depth treatment of those subjects. Nonetheless, this illustrated history lifts Stonewall from its customary footnote or chapter status into the YA book-length treatment it deserves. Source notes and a bibliography are included; the bound book will contain an index. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Role of Public Relations in the Gay Rights Movement, 1950–1969

This study examines public relations strategies of the gay and lesbian rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s when most homosexuals remained deeply closeted to avoid the social stigma associated with the same-sex lifestyle. The analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of public relations strategies and focuses on activists who spearheaded these efforts to gain recognition for this social minority. As this study shows, public relations played a vital role in the early stages of the gay rights movement. It concludes that though gay and lesbian activists of the 1950s and 1960 had no formal training in PR, they made a concerted effort to influence public opinion using fundamental public relations strategies more than a decade before the Stonewall riots that marked the beginning of the modern Gay Liberation Movement.

‘Wilding' in the West Village: Queer Space, Racism and Jane Jacobs Hagiography

AbstractIn urban studies, New York's West Village is famous for two principal reasons: as the paradigmatic ideal neighborhood in Jane Jacobs' influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities and as the site of one of the 1960s' great urban uprisings, the Stonewall riot in 1969. Today––largely because of the mixed‐use urban qualities celebrated by Jacobs––the West Village is one of New York's most desirable residential areas, yet it also remains an essential part of the city's queer geography. In this article, I analyze the persistent demonization of the area's queer youth of color by local neighborhood groups to argue that Jacobs' celebrated notion of natural surveillance (or what she called ‘eyes on the street') is fundamentally unsuited for a fluid queer space like the contemporary West Village. First, I historicize the current neighborhood tensions in the context of racialized media reporting of homophobic hate crime. Second, the discourses deployed in contemporary media of ‘wild' youth terrorizing the Village are examined. Finally, with reference to the forced closure of the African American bar Chi Chiz, I illustrate how the symbolic nightlife economy remains a key target in the city's regulation of queer space.

Commentary: Lesbians should take the lead in removing the stigma that has long been associated with body weight.

There is a general assumption that lesbians weigh more than heterosexual women and that, consequently, there is a need for culturally sensitive weight loss programs for lesbians. This commentary reviews some of the confounding variables in studies on weight, weight loss, and health among lesbians. It also reviews research on lesbians and body satisfaction, and on weight and sexual attractiveness. I conclude by urging lesbians to adopt the Health at Every Size (HAES) model instead of dieting, and to assume leadership in modeling positive body acceptance for all women. Eight years after the Stonewall riots and two years after the American Psychological Association urged mental health profes- sionals to take the lead in removing the stigma that has long been associated with homosexual orientations (Conger, 1975, p. 633), Steve Morin (1977) reviewed bias in research on lesbians and gay men. He found that the majority of studies focused on determining the causes of homosexuality and attempting (unsuccessfully) to reorient homosexuals to become heterosexual. Morin stated (p. 237): First, research reflects the value systems of its investigators and the social climate within which it takes place. Most research is conducted within the institutional framework of funding, prestige, and scientific respectability. Investigators are most likely to do research that is acceptable to others and that, above all, is publishable. Nearly four decades later, paralleling the early research and unsuccessful attempts to change sexual orientation, clinicians and researchers continue to promote dieting. In this article, I will discourage lesbians to submit to the weight loss industry by reviewing studies on lesbians and weight, health, weight loss, and body satisfaction.

Looking Backward and Forward

In the wake of the Stonewall riots in June 1969, The Village Voice published a couple of pieces that provoked even more protests. In “View from the Inside,” Howard Smith described “the gay customers freshly ejected from their hangout, prancing high and jubilant in the street” and “the police had trouble keeping a dyke in a patrol car.” As the riots began, he observed, “the sound filtering in doesn’t suggest dancing faggots any more.” In “View from the Outside,” Lucian Truscott IV wrote: “Sheridan Square this weekend looked like something from a William Burroughs novel as the sudden specter of ‘gay power’ erected its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen.” In response to the protestors having been maliciously labeled “the forces of faggotry,” angry readers marched on the Voice offices. Yet, despite the inflammatory language used to report the events, the Voice was more prescient than the New York Times which simply published a brief piece after the third confrontation with police, on July 3, at the Stonewall Inn “which the police said was well known for its homesexual [sic] clientele.” The Times didn’t even publish any of the photos taken until 40 years later. Historic events are easier to see in hindsight, of course, but Stonewall has become an important touchstone in gay history and politics. Despite the description of “wrists were limp, hair was primped,” the Voice’s Truscott also foresaw that “[t]he result was a kind of liberation, as the gay brigade emerged from the bars, back rooms, and bedrooms of the Village and became street people,” and he concludes his piece warning readers: “Watch out. The liberation is underway.” As we publish the last issue in the first volume of QED, we take this moment to reflect back on the past year of this journal, as well as the rapidly changing landscape of GLBTQ politics. Forty-five years after Stonewall, we might read the )))

Spectrums of Oppression: Gender and Sexuality during the Cold War

This article reviews the scholarship on Cold War sexuality issues prior to the 1969 Stonewall riots, paying particular attention to recent books by Robert J. Corber, Michael S. Sherry, and Jennifer V. Evans. The Cold War in the West affected both the lived and the discursive realities of sexual minorities in a paradoxical way. On the one hand, anxieties about the superpower rivalry facilitated regulatory frameworks and social demarcation lines that profoundly circumscribed the agency of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender groups and individuals. On the other hand, these borders and regulatory systems often backfired, subverted their intended function, or simply produced unintended consequences. Although repression of non-normative sexual and gender identities remained a fact of life during the first two-and-a half decades of the Cold War, it does not reveal the totality of the Cold War experience. The current research on Cold War sexualities demonstrates that Cold War culture can thus be best understood as a complex system in which fissures and breaks were as salient as the demand for uniformity and control.

Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French's Colt Studio

It would seem that one of the intentions of the viewer of gay pornography would be to see the sexual engagement of the participants (and perhaps the “money shot”) with a focus upon the gymnastics and writhing of bodies that constitute the practice and representation of sexual activity within the film. However, before nudity or nakedness is presented the “characters” are dressed. Using the films and photography of Colt Studio and its founder Jim French from the period 1967–81 as a focus this article explores the ways in which the “characters” are constructed through their clothing and costuming. It will address the ways in which these “icons” of masculinity that had developed in the pre-liberation physique magazines and stag films reflected the prototypes, archetypes, and stereotypes of post-liberation gay identity and dressed appearance in the fifteen years following the Stonewall riots and gay liberation. Colt Studio was famed for its particular presentation of hypermasculine images and a “stable” of masculine actors that included Clone superstar Al Parker. This article will offer an analysis of the use of particular items of clothing and the iconic styles of leatherman, motorcycle cop, and gay clone in Colt's output of this period.

Mirrored discourse in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

In their introduction to Modern Fiction Studies’ 2006 special issue on graphic narratives, Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven direct attention to the unique powers of the genre’s layered language of text and image, calling these narratives works that are ‘in their very structure and grammar, cross-discursive’ (768). In graphic narrative, they state, the rhetorical capacities of word and image, often perceived as binary, enter into dialogue. Alison Bechdel uses this cross-discursiveness in a candid, effective and affective representation of the formative experiences captured in Fun Home. To date, however, what has been left out of the conversation on Bechdel’s work is how the affective nature of her complex relationship with her father – the anger, guilt and shame Bechdel confronts, which both create and inhibit her self-realization – so well mirrors the historical context in which this relationship occurs. I submit that by framing the narrative of her father’s and her own discovery of sexual identity as before and after the seminal historical event of the Stonewall Riots – as the chronology of their biographies dictates – and by choosing the graphic narrative as her medium, Bechdel melds the discursiveness of the late twentieth century homosexual experience with that of the graphic narrative.

A Suitcase Full of Vaseline, or Travels in the 1970s Gay World

A p h o t o o f A s o f t s i d e d s u i t c A s e , unzipped to reveal that it has been packed with nothing but small tubes of Vaseline, illustrated a summer 1969 feature article on travel tips for gay men in a new lifestyle magazine (fig. 1). The image appeared without a caption, suggesting the self-evidence of the visual joke that sex rather than sightseeing would be the activity on holiday. The writer advised: “It’s a wise gay guy who takes a supply of antibiotics along for sudden viruses and other ‘diseases of the throat.’” Also on the list of things to pack: “douche, needle and thread, scissors, Vaseline, K-Y, Vaseline, K-Y, Vaseline, etc.” Written prior to but published contemporaneously with the pivotal Stonewall riots, this article suggests a gay male readership hip to the innuendo of the image and the implications of the repetition on the packing checklist. but as an advice feature, it also suggested that there was still much for readers to learn about the gay lifestyle and about navigating the world of same-sex action. This travel article appeared in Queen’s Quarterly (soon to be renamed QQ), a glossy gay men’s magazine that debuted in the spring of 1969 and continued publication for a decade. QQ explored the concept of a gay lifestyle, scripting a way of life for gay men that might be seen as both homogenizing and reflecting the range of interests and issues that such a lifestyle might entail. With the cover slogan, “For Gay Guys Who Have No Hangups,” the magazine’s articles spanned sex advice, health, hygiene and grooming, food, fashion, travel, and fiction. What was largely missing from its coverage were explicit claims toward political activism or news in

The Legacy of Assotto Saint: Tracing Transnational History from the Gay Haitian Diaspora

INTRODUCTIONThis essay uses Michel-Rolph Trouillot's notion of power and the production of history as a starting point to explore the ways that Assotto Saint (1957-1994), a gay Haitian American who was once a well-known player in the Black gay and AIDS activist cultural movements in the United States, is remembered and written about in contemporary venues.1 I argue that the politics of remembrance pertaining to Saint's cultural work and activism has significant consequences for our understanding of late twentieth century social and cultural movements in the United States as well as gay Haitian history. I explore the fact that Saint's work has fallen out of popularity since his death in 1994, except in limited identitarian, mostly literary venues. The silences surrounding his work thatI describe in this essay are peculiar considering that Saint not only had important social connections with artists who are well-known today, but also, unlike artists with less access to financial resources, he left behind a huge archive of materials housed in the Black Gay and Lesbian Collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as a rich and prolific corpus of published work. By offering a re-reading of these archival materials and placing them in their socio-historical contexts, I also make a restorative gesture to commit Assotto Saint's legacy to public memory. Through investigating the life, activism, and cultural work of this self-proclaimed diva of the Haitian diaspora, this essay ultimately attempts to offer a dynamic understanding of the movements Saint took part in as well as a re-reading of the dominant narratives about Haiti and gay sexuality.I begin with a biographical sketch of Assotto Saint to highlight the connections between events in his life and major historical occurrences in Haiti and the United States. The subsequent section provides an overview of the range of his cultural work in terms of medium, genre, and theme. I also emphasize Saint's efforts as an institution builder for the Black gay cultural movement as well as the broader AIDS activist cultural movement. This overview builds a foundation that allows us to understand why Assotto Saint has not received the same kind of posthumous recognition as his contemporaries. His work has been recognized, primarily by circulating his essay Haiti: A Memory Journey in recent anthologies of Caribbean writing; this, however, has also in some ways reduced the complexity of the transnational critiques fiercely presented by this historical figure in his lifetime. In the final sections of the paper, I describe what is at stake in the practice of remembering Assotto Saint with all his complexities, thus rectifying the essentializing and silences that have surrounded his literary contributions and activism.The Life and Death of Assotto Sainti was born on all angels daybut throughout my lifei've been a bitch out of hell/don't nobody show up at my funeralto call me nice or some shit like that/save it for turncoat cocksuckerswho on their deathbedsopen their mouths wide to claim god/-Assotto Saint, Devils in AmericaAssotto Saint died of AIDS-related complications in New York City on June 29, 1994. The week of Saint's death, the city swelled with queers: drag queens, gays, lesbians, transgender people, and AIDS activists among others. Drawn by an act of celebration-the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riot in Greenwich Village-and of mourning and frustration-a decade and a half of the ongoing AIDS crisis-the gathering of queers in New York City coincided with Saint's death in the uncanny way that so many of his major life events paralleled the social and political changes of his time. The poet, playwright, performer, and activist was born in Les Cayes, Haiti as Yves Francois Lubin on October 2, 1957, the same week that the infamously repressive, US-backed dictator Francois Papa Doc Duvalier was elected president. …