ABSTRACT
This opinion piece originally appeared in Gay Community News on April 20, 1985. Joseph Beam at that time was a writer and the editor of the first collection of black gay male literature, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986), founding editor of the newspaper Black/Out, and a contributing editor to the magazine Blacklight. He died of AIDS on December 27, 1988, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday, in Philadelphia.
