History and Its Kind: The Charge of the Other in Black Gay Men's Literatures

Brandon S Callender

This dissertation, “History and Its Kind: The Charge of the Other in Black Gay Men’s Literatures,” examines understudied queer relational forms, arguing that black gay genealogies arise from non-identitarian forms of being in common. The project is organized around overlooked experiences of what I call “kind-ness,” a term that intermingles erotic acts of affirmation with eccentric feelings of like-ness and belonging. I derive this formulation from Melvin Dixon’s poem, “Blood Positive,” which stages an intergenerational dialogue between the dead and the living: “We did nothing but worship our kind / When you love as we did you will know / there is no life but this / and history will not be kind.” The challenge to “love as we did” offers an immersive yet open-ended expression of concern, and also of reading. Reading for a minor category of the embrace – that is, a romance, a fetish, a hunger – scrambles our original categories of belonging and calls forth new intimate publics. In chapters on Melvin Dixon, James Baldwin, and Samuel Delany, I analyze representations of affiliative practices that remain minor in that they have rarely themselves become the site of political organizing or identitarian formation. Whether in a fetish for waste and fingernails (as in Delany’s work), or in an erotics of sibling and daddy play (as in Baldwin’s, Delany’s, and certain aspects of Dixon’s), these authors exhibit an intense focus on relational forms that allows me to locate historically contingent strategies of survival that affirm black queer life. I show how this body of literature negotiates stylistic and attitudinal shifts brought about by various social movements across the late twentieth century, and, in so doing, alters our sense of black and gay belonging. Reading for such minor forms of kind-ness, I argue, allows us to experience black gay genealogies otherwise.