Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a novelist and a professor of black queer and feminist literature at Georgetown University. But the truth is, my connection to these books goes deeper than that. These books give me life. When I was a little girl, I spent more days than I can count scouring my mother’s small black feminist library in the basement of our home in Harlem, poring over the stories of girls like me: fat, black, queer girls who longed to see themselves written in literature and history. Now I get to create stories like these myself, and share them with others. It’s a dream job, and a powerful one. It thrills me every time.
Mecca's book list on LGBTQ+ folks of color getting free
Why did Mecca love this book?
This is the kind of book you want to savor, line by line. It’s a powerful and necessary exploration of black gay writing and life in the 1980s and 1990s.
Bost transports us to the world of important writers like Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Melvin Dixon, showing us how their writing, their living, and their loving were all intertwined. With gorgeous, poetic prose, Bost shows how violent structures like racism, classism, homophobia, and AIDS may shape aspects of our lives, but they cannot stop our living.
Evidence of Being explores how these writers used their work to create community, belonging, and survival. My favorite thing about this book is that Bost gives us a vision of what he calls “black/queer optimism,” in which shared experiences and creative expression form a basis for LGBTQ+ life far into the future.
1 author picked Evidence of Being as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC's gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed to emerge. Darius Bost's account of the media, poetry, and performance of this time and place reveals a stunning confluence of activism and the arts. In Washington and New York during the 1980s and '90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread…