In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.

Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of Black queer politics, culture, and history in the 1980s as they emerged out of radical Black lesbian activism and writing.

DIVAn ethnography of sexual identity formation in contemporary Cuba./div

In Queer African Cinemas, Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an environment of increasing antiqueer violence, efforts to criminalize homosexuality, and other state-sanctioned homophobia. Green-Simms argues that these films not only record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience; they highlight how queer African cinematic practices contribute to imagining new hopes and possibilities. Examining globally circulating international art films as well as popular melodramas made for local audiences, Green-Simms emphasizes that in these films queer resistance—contrary to traditional narratives about resistance that center overt and heroic struggle—is often practiced from a position of vulnerability. By reading queer films alongside discussions about censorship and audiences, Green-Simms renders queer African cinema as a rich visual archive that documents the difficulty of queer existence as well as the potentials for queer life-building and survival.

Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction Anthology Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and writers whom readers may be surprised to learn were "in the life," Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration of the Depression era, from the postwar civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements, to the unabashedly complex sexual explorations of the present day, Black Like Us accomplishes a sweeping survey of 20th century literature.

In Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries—from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Roger Casement—to demonstrate how wildness provides the means to know and to be in ways that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern liberal subject. With Wild Things, Halberstam opens new possibilities for queer theory and for wild thinking more broadly.

In this special double issue of GLQ, queer theory meets critical race theory, transnationalism, and Third World feminisms in analyses of the Black queer diaspora. Contributors apply social science methodologies to theories born out of the humanities to produce innovative, humane, and expansive readings of on-the-ground social conditions around the world. The contributors to this issue draw on radical Black and women-of-color feminisms to examine the embodied experience of the Black queer diaspora. One contributor elaborates on the work of Black Atlantic scholarship to imagine a story of the Black Pacific experience and how shipboard life shapes the relationships formed during travel and migration. Ethnographic fieldwork among black queer citizens in postapartheid South Africa, read through the lens of a popular local radio show, illustrates the distinction between citizenship and belonging. In Trinidad, where men who have sex with men have faced particular hostility, the bonds of friendship and affection emerge as crucial tools of activism and survival in a community threatened by HIV/AIDS. Jafari S. Allen is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of ¡Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba, published by Duke University Press. Contributors: Vanessa Agard-Jones, Jafari S. Allen, Lydon K. Gill, Ana-Maurine Lara, Xavier Livermon, Matt Richardson, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley