My Schomburg Experience (Redefined)
Steven G. Fullwood, archivist, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, shares another one of his favorite items from the Schomburg collection:
Letter from Joseph Beam to Sasha Alyson, March 28, 1984 (Joseph Beam Papers).
“Beam was the editor of In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, the first collection of its kind containing essays, poems, interviews and short stories by black gay men. Beam wrote a letter to Alyson, publisher of Alyson Publications, to inquire about the possibility of publishing ‘a book of collected writings by Black gay men.’ In 1979, Beam worked at Giovanni’s Room, a gay bookstore in Philadelphia who knew about the scarcity of writings by black gay men. He knew of writers such as James Baldwin and Samuel Delany, and periodicals produced by Blackheart, a black gay writers’ collective, but little else. I read In the Life as a 20-year old in Ohio and had no idea that one day I’d discover the letter that essentially started it all.”
Join Steven on a guided tour of the Romare Bearden exhibition at the Schomburg on October 5, 2011. For more information, please click here.
