About the Project

Assotto Saint was a major figure in 1880s and 1990s black gay cultural production, serving as an editor, playwright, poet, essayist, activist, playwright, and performance artist. While his published works remain, his performances have not. The oral history interviews with his creative collaborators and friends serve to reactivate the performances, while also connecting them to the present. I also include interviews with younger queer artists who are engaging with Saint’s work or otherwise creating work that speaks to the intersection of HIV/AIDS, queerness, race, and gender. Using software designed by Partner & Partners, I am annotating the interviews by summarizing sections, generating keywords, and linking them to various other resources and sites in order to make the site as interactive and interwoven with other related projects as possible.

This site, designed by Partner & Partners, is connected to and also exceeds my scholarly research on the performance work of Assotto Saint, aka Yves Lubin. It is an effort to provide materials that can be utilized by artists, community historians, and cultural workers to retrospectively document Saint's otherwise undocumented performances from the 1980s in a way that connects them to the present. I have conducted thirteen interviews so far, and collected and posted audio and video archival materials and ephemera. Aside from the oral history interviews, the material on this site has been generously shared with permission. The vast majority of ephemera has been by Saint's executor and close friend Mace Anderson. Michele Karlsberg, Sur Rodney (Sur), Gary Paul Wright (via Willie Barnes), and Jean Carlomusto have contributed audiovisual materials, and Uzi Parnes, (The Estate of) Robert Giard, and Becket Logan have contributed photographs. My deepest thanks goes to all of you.

This project is an effort to amplify Saint’s legacy at a time in which, although there is renewed interest about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the cultural production of artists of color is often overlooked. Live performance is especially hard to enter into history. Saint’s work offers a valuable record of the experience of living within a time of crisis from the perspective of being a black gay immigrant in a conservative political environment. His outspoken anger and pride, his refusal to hide any aspect of himself, and his commitment to collective transformation serves as an inspiration for our times.

Jaime Shearn Coan