So I’ll jump! Unburying the prisoner correspondence of Joseph Beam

Abstract

This article revisits the unpublished letters of In the Life editor and black gay community organizer Joseph Beam. The seven-year correspondence between Beam and his prisoner penpal Kenyatta Ombaka Baki, demonstrates the intimacies that can be sustained through textual exchange. I return to the archival remediation of these letters to argue that queer friendship can serve as a tool for prison abolition in challenging the isolating function of prisons. Such friendships are created not through face-to-face connections but through textual production. In complicating the boundaries between inside and outside, queer and straight, lovers and friends, old and new media, these letters offer alternative forms of kinship and connection towards imagining futures without prisons. The materiality of this archive can be remediated further through digital media to continue to undermine the functioning of prisons.

Notes

1. The archive as a site of permanence and stability lends such documents, especially written records, a form of credibility, as Diana Taylor (2003) argues, ‘the archival, from the beginning, sustains power’ (2003, 19). Taylor offers a model of reading performance repertoires alongside archives to challenge the permanence of materiality, favoring ephemeral, changing readings over the idea that an archive can hold static meaning (2003, 19). Performance, Taylor explains, can offer a critique of the archive by calling attention to ‘how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied’ (2003, 19).

2. Ann Cvetkovich (2003) outlines the process of reading the archive as one that is not merely passive but rather generative, creating a new archive in the process of revisitation (8).

3. Because, as Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (2009) argue, remediation offers ‘an active engagement with the past, as performative rather than as reproductive’ (2), recalling ‘dead’ (Erll 2011, 5) media can challenge normative ways of narrating history (Erll and Rigney 2009, 5). As Bolter and Grusin (1999) observe in their seminal volume on remediation, ‘because all mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of reforming reality as well’ (56).

4. José Esteban Muñoz (1999, 2009) identifies the queer possibilities for returning to archives and repurposing them ‘as powerful and seductive sites of self-creation’ (1999, 4).

5. Eichhorn understands the project of looking back as a process of speculating on new possibilities for the future. She argues how

it is important to consider the political efficacy of being in time differently, that is, being temporally dispersed across different eras and generations. Indeed, this is precisely why the archival turn in contemporary feminism is as much about shoring up a younger generation’s legacy and honoring elders as it is about imagining and working to build possible world in the present and for the future. (2013, x)

6. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2008) also calls for a more speculative approach to material archives in her queer reading of the middle passage. Tinsley draws on ‘literary texts as a queer, unconventional, and imaginative archive of the black Atlantic’ (2008, 193). In re-centering queer feeling as part of archival practice, Tinsley argues for drawing on water metaphors to feel and experience the materiality of queer desire within an approach to historical records (2008, 212).

7. What can be gained from attempting to return to unknowable pasts, Hartman reveals, is to better understand the ‘sense of incompleteness’ (2008, 14) and the ‘recognition that some part of the self is missing as a consequence of this engagement’ (2008, 14).

8. In conversation with Ben-Moshe et al. (2015) traces the existence of prisons to the ongoing impact of slavery. Mitchell argues,

I’m thinking, for example, of Roderick A. Ferguson’s genealogy (in Aberations in Black) of the postslavery production of the black family in the United States through the punitive regulation and policing of black sexuality. Abolitionist thought and praxis often takes for granted that the abolition of slavery was incomplete, and […] found a new life in various forms of criminalization. (2015, 270)

9. In conversation with Ben-Moshe et al. (2015) argues for this abolitionist strategy of using friendships to counter narratives of criminality that justify incarceration (2015, 281). Gossett traces how

the figure of the criminal so central to neoliberal carceral culture is one that the public is urged to turn away from in disgust, fear, and hatred – fear, disgust, and loathing of blackness, of the poor, of gender-nonconformity, (dis)ability, and queerness. Yet queer and/or trans abolitionist critical theory provides us with a counterdiscourse. (2014, 280, 281)

Gossett thus also commends prisoner penpal projects that

support incarcerated queer and/or trans people, and call for forms of accountability that do not rely on the forms of violence, abjection, dehumanization, and inhumanity so fetishized and lionized within neoliberal carceral culture and instrumentalized in prisons throughout the allegedly ‘post-racial’ – though actually antiblack – neoliberal capitalist carceral United States’. (2014, 281)

For a discussion of contemporary abolitionist penpal projects, see also my 2015 chapter (Fink 2015) about my involvement in Montreal’s Prisoner Correspondence Project, which depicts the building of friendships and connections between inside and outside penpals as a strategy for decarceration and queer anti-assimilation. I was working on the collective of Montreal’s Prisoner Correspondence Project when I found these letters in Beam’s archives on a then-unrelated research visit. I was struck by their connection to a current wave of queer/trans abolitionist prisoner penpal programs including but not limited to Black and Pink (Boston), Bent Bars (London), TGI Justice Project (SF Bay Area), and PASAN (Toronto).

10. See Angela Y. Davis 2003; Kodwo Eshun (2003) draws on Afrofuturist narratives ‘not to question the reality of slavery, but to defamiliarize it through a temporal switchback’ (2003, 300), to call attention to the process of moving across past and present as necessary in narrating the embodied effects of ongoing trauma: ‘As a tool kit developed for and by Afrodiasporic intellectuals, the imperative to code, adopt, adapt, translate, misread, rework, and revision these concepts […] is likely to persist in the decades to come’ (Eshun 2003, 301).

11. Afrofuturism’s approach to ‘reforming reality’ holds power to transform reality via time, as projecting into the future relies on what Ytasha Womack characterizes as ‘a total reenvisioning of the past’ (2013, 9). As Womack observes of the forward-looking maneuver of Afrofuturist practice:

call it the power of the subconscious or the predominance of soul culture gone cyberpop, but this dance through time travel that Afrofuturists live for is as much about soul retrieval as it is about jettisoning into the far-off future, the uncharted Milky Way, or the depths of the subconscious and imagination. (2013, 2)

12. Prison abolitionists and trans theorists including Dean Spade (2011) argue that much as trans identities are ‘impossible’ and yet exist, so too can an imagined future without police or prisons. As Eshun attests of returning to the past to make real future im/possibilities, ‘successful or powerful descriptions of the future have an increasing ability to draw us towards them, to command us to make them flesh’ (2003, 291).

13. Gossett (2014) also traces the impact of ‘inside/outside organizing’ in the context of HIV activism. Gossett argues that collaborations between prisoners and outside ACT UP members including Gregory Smith and Kiyoshi Kuromiya demonstrate the links between ‘AIDS activist, black and queer liberationist and anti-prison activism’ (2014, 31). Such anti-carceral, abolitionist projects, argue Gossett, inspire the ‘imperative to organize, imagine, and ultimately, to live otherwise’ (2014, 46).

14. In their introduction to Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call (2014), Stephen Fullwood and Charles Stephens argue for the importance of countering the historicization of the 1980s as a decade whose movements were dominated by white activists. Revisiting Beam’s writing, they argue, offers opportunities to re-center the contributions of black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) as leaders of grassroots movements, including those responding to HIV. The editors argue: ‘the whitewashed history of the 80s would have us believe that we were not there, all along, right there fighting literally and figuratively for our lives. But we were. And we know better, because Joe told us’ (2014, 14).

15. This article was originally imagined as a possible contribution to Black Gay Genius, whose email account exists in Joseph Beam’s name. Though I did not complete my research in time for the CFP deadline, my inbox is frequently haunted by Beam who name pops into the chat box whenever his account goes online.

16. As E. Lynn Harris observes in his introduction to Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing (2004), the inheritance left by Beam also marks the loss of a generation of writers to AIDS, as ‘most contemporary writing has disappeared from public view with each new death’ (2004, xv).

17. It is this sense of future potential that Black Gay Genius’ editors draw on to revisit Beam’s 1987 assertion (later remediated in Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied): ‘Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act of the eighties’ (1989, 241). Fullwood and Stephens ponder, ‘We are beginning to ask questions of ourselves: What were we then? Who are we now? Essex, Marlon, and Joe. Who were these men? What does this mean? The 1980s? How do we honor that tradition? Are we still revolutionary when we love each other?’ (2014, 13). Gossett (2014) discusses the ‘queer, trans, intersectional, and AIDS activist of color genealogies’ (2014, 268) used to imagine abolitionist futures. Gossett returns to the work of Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs to assert how ‘black queer love was indeed a ‘revolutionary act,’ especially within the context of the Reagan antiblack, antiqueer epoch of AIDS […] Black self love in and as black queer love remains a ‘revolutionary act’ in the face of white settler colonial bio and necropolitics’ (2014, 286).

18. Forgetting, Robinson laments, is not an act of carelessness but one necessary for surviving loss. Robinson’s memorializing of Beam thus centers the process of forgetting:

I don’t remember Joe Beam. I put him away, with all the unmourned AIDS grief of the 1980’s and ‘90s, with all the trauma of working for black gay groups and networks, swimming at the bottom somewhere of so many daily drinks. (2014, 75)

As Erll argues in Memory in Culture (2011), ‘forgetting is the very condition for remembering’ (2011, 8), as perfect recall would render the memorial process redundant (2011, 8). This interplay between forgetting and remembering is central to the editorial project of Black Gay Genius, a collection of writing in response to Beam’s legacy, as the collection’s editors Fullwood and Stephens similarly identify that ‘we are the product and the descendants of the years too traumatic to remember and too traumatic to forget’ (2014, 13).

19. Susana Morris’s Close Kin and Distant Relatives (2014) imagines anti-assimilationist visions of the future as offering ‘an ethic of community support and accountability [… that] includes fluid gender roles, expansive notions of sex and sexualities […] and an emphasis on family accountability rather than policing or surveillance’ (2014, 11). This precursor to supporting gender and sexual freedom supports opposing capitalism and embracing ‘cultural practices not considered appropriately mainstream’ (2014, 8); See also the work of Tim McCaskell (2016) who also traces this process toward homonormativity and assimilation politics within the Canadian legal and cultural context.

20. In ‘Homophobia Causes AIDS! Pass it On,’ Robinson recalls Beam’s words in 2006, reflecting: ‘as Joe Beam put it back in the ’80s, long before I could grasp the largeness of what he meant, we must know that “we are worth wanting”’ (2006, 9). In making Beam’s legacy (in Erll’s words) ‘worth remembering’ (2011, 5), Robinson identifies how the process of writing about Beam in 2014 reflects ‘the challenge of remembering the age of AIDS is that so much of the work of its survivorship has been to shovel dirt upon dirt upon dirt to bury all the dead. Excavating them is a very messy thing’ (2014, 76).

21. See Farrow (2003) for a discussion of increasing police presence in queer neighbourhoods; see also the 2016–2017 work of #BlackLivesMatter Toronto in stopping the Toronto Pride Parade to call attention to the inclusion of police within the march.

22. In an interview with Sarah J. Jackson, Cathy J. Cohen reflects on the successes of queer and trans women’s leadership within the #BlackLivesMatter movement, pointing out the utility of ‘contemplate[ing] a broader structural approach [in feminist organizing] that promotes a prison abolition agenda’ (2016, 778).

23. Gray accordingly celebrates the work of Afrofuturists, digital producers, and artists including Kara Walker whose work thwarts institutional acceptance in favor of ‘expanding and extending cultural notions of blackness. These artists enthusiastically insist on the possibilities of the new technologies for imagining their black selves and their worlds differently’ (2005, 10).

24. Gray also understands a move away from visibility as an end goal as more effectively responding to these issues of ‘heightened surveillance, regulation, [and] policing’ (2005, 124). Gray thus calls for work unconcerned with visibility ‘to produce a more complicated way of seeing our collective past and imagining a different kind of future […] confronting the beauty and ugliness, reality and fantasy, the dangerous, and the repressed in all of us’ (2005, 130).

25. In her discussion of the archive, Taylor charts histories of colonial violence wherein the privileging of writing over performance created elite systems limiting access to print culture as a means of seeking colonial dominance (2003, 18). Taylor connects

the repression of indigenous embodied practice as a form of knowing as well as a system for storing and transmitting knowledge. Nonverbal practices – such as dance, ritual, and cooking, to name a few – that long served to preserve a sense of communal identity and memory, were not considered valid forms of knowledge. Many kinds of performance, deemed idolatrous by religious and civil authorities, were prohibited altogether. (2003, 18)

Taylor thus calls for ‘a radically different archive’ (2003, 51) to ‘give rise to a new sense of cultural identity’ (2003, 51).

26. Recalling In the Life (originally published in 1986 and re-released in 2008), Rinaldo Walcott (in 2005) celebrates Beam’s anthology’s impact upon the ‘making of a black queer diaspora’ (2005, 98). As Djola Branner, an original contributor to In the Life, likewise reflects in Black Gay Genius: ‘as much as Joe regarded In the Life as a work of literature, he regarded it as a tool for organizing and community building’ (2014, 51). The process of returning collectively to the archive Beam left therefore enables not only historical intervention but also the imagining of futures our continued engagement with Beam might inspire.

27. Royster reads Monáe’s ‘quare’ (2013, 191), tuxedo-clad, ‘funky, energized’ (2013, 191) body in motion as a performance of resistance to ‘the many ways the prison industrial complex infiltrates our lives by means of surveillance and the heightened fear of black bodies in motion’ (2013, 191). Such questions regarding the policing of space are also addressed by Afrofuturist novelist and theorist Kiese Laymon (2014), who asserts in an podcast interview with Brittney C. Cooper of the Crunk Feminist Collective that

we have to get better at sharing space, with the goal of manipulating time […] folks who shared space in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s in the hope of creating more healthy choices and second chances for us were ultimately time travelling […] loving and being manipulators of time for themselves and for the people coming after them. (2014)

28. Lievrouw discusses the complex interplay between face-to-face and mediated connections that necessarily exist in a digital moment (2009, 303); this research as applied to contemporary prison contexts, points to the further harms of isolating prisoners from both face-to-face contact with their communities and loved ones, while also restricting their access to digital and other mediated technologies including old media, as even print letters, still the primary and often sole correspondence in prisons, remain restricted and censored by mailroom authorities, especially in cases of queerness and/or sexual explicitness.

29. Erll, for instance, notes the capacity of the Internet as a ‘mega-archive’ (2011, 5), while simultaneously pointing to the limits of a data collection method that remains unused.