Selected by Hernan Diaz
I am an American by choice. I moved to New York, in 1999, because I wanted to live in English and be in close contact with the literary canon that I had learned to love at the libraries and secondhand bookstores of Buenos Aires. The first American novel I read in the original, laboriously and with the aid of a violently abridged Oxford Dictionary with navy leatherette covers, was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” The second was “The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. Same dictionary, yet this time it seemed insufficient, not because words were missing but because it could never account for the syntactic vertigo that I felt on every page. Being a teen-ager, I xeroxed a portrait of my new top-hatted hero, put it in a cheap plastic frame, and had it preside over my IKEA desk.
In addition to offering a new architectural approach to sentence building, James taught me that the distance between people is often what connects them, that silence is an activity, that truth and ambiguity are not at odds, and that observation has a way of affecting whatever is being observed. But the lesson of the master wasn’t only a literary one. He also showed me how to be an American while being an outsider. Of course, James spent a great part of his life abroad, and toward the end of his life became a British citizen. Yet this didn’t prevent him from obsessively thinking about the United States and what defined its ethos, tone, and literature. As someone who has lived on several continents, I found James’s eccentric and dislocated experience of his national identity immensely appealing. And, after almost thirty years here, I believe this obliqueness captures something fundamental about our country, where most of us, at some point in our family history, either as immigrants or emigrants, longed to be someplace else.
Selected by Tara Westover
When I was a child, I lived in an ordered universe. Whatever happened—injury, illness, flood, or drought—felt preordained, part of God’s grand scheme. It’s a relief to grow up like this, held in the palm of some incomprehensible power. Even death is not a real loss, if you believe in the hereafter.
When I was twenty, I lost my faith and the world shifted, became capricious and disordered, and, worst of all, indifferent. I remember those early months, seeing the world in this new way, as quietly hellish. Suddenly, there was no comfort to be found in tragedy. I’d lost my certainty that all would be made right, and the result was a spiritual sickness.
A year later, I discovered the work of Elaine Pagels, one of America’s foremost scholars of religion. Pagels wanted to understand the history of belief: how beliefs come about and what purpose they serve in our lives. I didn’t know it then, but Pagels was intimately familiar with tragedy. Her son was born with a rare disease. The doctors said that he would not live long. Pagels had to raise her son, caring for him as an infant, a toddler, a small child, knowing that he would never reach adolescence. He died when he was six. Soon after, Pagels’s husband was killed in a climbing accident. Pagels wrote about these losses in a memoir titled “Why Religion?” I’d long admired Pagels’s scholarly work, but this is the book that taught me how to live in the world as it is: imperfect, bizarre, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind. What I learned from Elaine Pagels is that to have something is to lose it. We die because we live.
Selected by David Simon
Behold the bureaucrat. Endlessly mocked, constantly parodied, and vaguely resented, the mandarins in American civic life have no real allies or admirers. To the extent that their fellow-citizens refer to them at all, our government functionaries are perceived not as active agents of change but as inert, self-protecting obstructions. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” Ronald Reagan once declaimed in a moment of pitch-perfect cynicism.
Enough. Ask me for my favorite American and I’ll summon an image of our greatest bureaucrat: a matronly thirty-one-year-old white woman crossing New York’s Washington Square after having tea, hearing sirens wail, and looking up to see young Jewish and Italian girls, fresh immigrants mostly, jumping from the upper floors of a burning building, betrayed by an employer who locked stair doors so that they couldn’t take work breaks.
Witnessing the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in 1911, would transform Frances Perkins into the central architect of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Before she was done—and after twelve years as the country’s Secretary of Labor and the first female Cabinet member—she had quietly and competently done more than any other soul to insure safety and dignity for American laborers, to humanize the treatment of immigrants, and to eliminate child labor. As a capstone, she also planned and shepherded the legislation that created Social Security.
Frances Perkins was, by temperament, cool and aloof, even a bit boring. But she was from the American government, our government, and, by God, she did help.
Selected by John McPhee
Nessmuk is my all-time favorite American, at least for the moment. You can learn more about him at the Adirondack Experience, a museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. Like Twain or Le Carré, Nessmuk was a pen name. His other one was George Washington Sears. He was from south-central Massachusetts, and he had a canoe that weighed ten and a half pounds. At nine feet, it was half the length of most canoes. In homage to a character in Dickens’s “Martin Chuzzlewit,” Nessmuk named it Sairy Gamp. In 1883, he paddled the Sairy Gamp from Old Forge to Paul Smith’s and back, two hundred and sixty-six miles on Adirondack lakes, ponds, and rivers, rolling out his duffel wherever darkness overtook him. The St. Regis lakes. Upper Saranac Lake. The Raquette River. Raquette Lake. The eight lakes of the Fulton Chain. He recounted these travels in the magazine Forest and Stream, and, in 1884, published “Woodcraft,” a foundational text of American forest camping. Nearly a century later, I could not help referring to “Woodcraft” in these pages in a four-part piece on Alaska, one of which was included in the issue of July 4, 1977. In the second of those installments, I said that Nessmuk’s journalism contained “so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.” Nearly a century before the modern environmental movement, Nessmuk was fairly shouting contempt for a society full of “petty, narrow greed.”
Selected by Carl Phillips
I was teaching at a small boarding school in 1984 when Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” appeared. A mania quickly took hold of the students, partly reflected in how they tried to adapt the school uniform to include such Madonna trademarks as fingerless gloves, large hair bows, bustiers as outerwear, and tulle skirts. As faculty, I was to report any infractions of a dress code that, honestly, I found ridiculous. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t, I explained to the headmaster. My time was short there.
From the start, Madonna advocated for freedom of expression, especially queer and sexual expression, at a time when media was silent on these topics. She spoke fearlessly about AIDS and, just as important, about queer joy and freedom, for which many people considered AIDS a form of punishment. Married to my best friend from college—a woman—I had no clear idea of my own queerness. Madonna’s music and her public example were irresistible, made me start questioning everything; I began writing the poems that would eventually out me when I didn’t seem able to come out myself.
Just as important to me has been Madonna’s indifference to societal expectations around art-making and what’s appropriate. Like any artist, she has ambition, but the largest part of that still seems an ambition to make the art she must make, for herself. Her work redefined American life at the time; maybe more accurately, it awakened a country that had all but fallen asleep, embodying a freedom the nation had forgotten was its founding purpose. My first book and Madonna’s “Erotica” came out within a week of each other, in 1992. I hope we’ll keep travelling together a good while longer.
Selected by Nell Irvin Painter
If, in most any era, you had asked for my favorite American, I would have shot up my hand to volunteer Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), the twentieth century’s Father of Negro History, with “Negro” asserted proudly and proudly capitalized. In 1912, Woodson, a Harvard Ph.D. freshly in hand, was thrust into a world of anti-Reconstruction backlash, when racial insult was a normal part of so much formal knowledge. In response, Woodson, who also worked as a schoolteacher in Washington, D.C., created the institutions of Negro History Week, The Journal of Negro History, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. “Life” alongside “history”—Woodson understood the importance of Black culture, the ways in which the creative life and the past were deeply enmeshed. His handiwork lives on. The Journal of Negro History endures as The Journal of African American History, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History will hold its hundred-and-eleventh annual conference this September, in Norfolk, Virginia.
Today, Woodson’s institutions confront a President who insults Black Americans as “low I.Q.,” and who—in his support for Confederate symbols, his campaign to distort and simplify school curricula—wants to purge Blackness from the public sphere. Yet 2026 is no 1912, no matter how vigorously MAGA would have it so. Today’s America has been shaped by Black studies, the grandchild of Carter G. Woodson. His interdisciplinary foresight inspired one of the most popular museums in the United States, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And his legacy has armed a legion of Americans with the intellectual confidence to know who they are.
Selected by Jenny Odell
Eloise Butler was an early-twentieth-century botanist who established the country’s first botanical garden for native plants. Born on a farm in Maine, and instructed in local flora by an aunt, Butler availed herself of science classes at the University of Minnesota and went on to become a renowned phycologist. In 1907, she and local science teachers petitioned the Minneapolis Park Board for space to establish the Wild Botanic Garden. She eventually planted seven hundred and ten native species there, keeping detailed records of their success rates and flowering schedules, and pioneering methods for propagating species that were notoriously temperamental. Unlike traditional botanical gardens, which favored showy European species, Butler’s wildflower plot aimed to show plants growing “according to their own sweet will,” in community with other plants and in various ecological conditions. In short, she gave us a new form of attention to a particular place. The native-plant restoration project I volunteer with every week is directly indebted to Butler’s eye for what grew closer to home.
Butler was one of several key women in the history of environmental restoration who took advantage of the fact that botany was not entirely restricted to men—though this also meant that it was denigrated as a feminine pastime. Compared to a laboratory, the “field” of botany was relatively open. In “Wild by Design,” Laura J. Martin notes that, on one expedition for a particular species, Butler and her sister, a naturalist, dug a hole under a chicken-wire fence, hiked up their skirts, and “ ‘trudged through the wet grass some three miles across the country,’ to emerge ‘dusty and triumphant!’ ” One of the few extant photos of Butler, a self-described “bog trotter,” shows her in the garb of her time—a full skirt and a big hat—balancing atop a large fallen tree in the thick of a bog, where she would collect her plants. In a time with precious few pathways open to women, Butler neither married nor had children, and she stewarded the Wild Botanic Garden until she died, in 1933. When I visited a few years back, her legacy was still blooming.
Selected by Marilynne Robinson
Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-95) came from the unprosperous side of a prominent family. This must be said, since otherwise his name might be used to neutralize his example. He was a central figure in the American abolitionist movement. He evaded the fame and much of the influence that seemed to flow to him naturally. In those days, there were divinity-school students from Yale, Andover, and Amherst preaching abolition and establishing schools throughout the frontier. Weld, who had done farmwork in exchange for his education at the Oneida Institute, in New York, was the acknowledged genius among them, the great orator and organizer.
All these young men deserve endless gratitude for choosing and persisting in this rough, perilous, and holy life. They are usually forgotten, even at the colleges they founded. Where they are remembered, they have not escaped the cynicism that presumptively discredits or trivializes admirable figures and moments in our history. Still, what an enviable thing to toil in a righteous cause, and to act with such certainty that humane education fosters freedom. Their colleges accepted Black and female students before the Civil War.
Weld travelled by water to Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, which was across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state. Other students followed him there. He converted almost all of them to abolitionism, and they set up schools for the free Black population of the city and assisted fugitives with their escape. Cincinnati had a history of violence against its Black minority, and the Seminary thought it prudent to forbid student activism. Students left the seminary en masse and continued with their schools and their aid to fugitives. The philanthropist and abolitionist Arthur Tappan came upon Oberlin, then just rising from a swamp, brought the Lane Rebels there, and in doing so created a great center of abolitionist influence, under the quiet, unofficial leadership of Theodore Dwight Weld. He was a man who never became wealthy, who never sought power in any conventional form, who repeatedly suffered mob violence for speaking the truth. I hope something of his spirit abides with us still.
Selected by Siddhartha Mukherjee
I tried to meet Barbara McClintock once, but I was told that she was out on a walk, and had left strict instructions not to be interrupted. It felt like a brushoff—but it was quite the opposite. A walk, for McClintock, was a scientific communion. It meant meandering through the corn fields in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, examining the plants as if she were conversing with her closest, most intimate friends.
McClintock was (and still is) the only woman to win a solo Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She did so by answering a question that had puzzled every biologist: Why do the kernels of some corns have different colors? If every kernel inherits the same genes, why would such variation exist?
McClintock’s research revealed that genes are not static elements trapped within chromosomes. Rather, in an organism’s cells, genes can move around—“jump”—from one chromosome to the next. Even whole chromosomes can break and reattach to each other. Think of nature as dynamic, McClintock taught biologists. Develop a feeling for an organism.
I think of McClintock each time I treat cancer patients, whose bodies often contain broken chromosomes that goad malignant cells to divide. I think of her when I devise a treatment plan that is personalized. And I think of her when I use immunotherapy—immune cells sent to battle cancer cells, a strategy crucially dependent on imagining the disease in its entirety. McClintock’s colleagues, obsessed with scientific reductionism, scoffed at her near-spiritual dedication to understanding organismal biology in its fullness and complexity. But McClintock—secular, skeptical, profoundly unorthodox—wasn’t seeking the holy. She wanted us to understand nature, wholly.
Selected by Ted Chiang
What is the ideal that America should aspire to? I think the person who best articulated an answer is the philosopher John Rawls. Rawls enlisted in the Army during the Second World War, but what he saw as a soldier caused him to lose both the Episcopalian faith of his youth and his confidence in the military. After he returned, he devoted himself to thinking about what justice means at the institutional and individual levels. He eventually concluded that when visualizing the society we want we should assume that we don’t know what place we’ll occupy in it. Rawls described this as sitting behind a “veil of ignorance”; it removed self-interest from the process of designing a society.
This doesn’t mean a society where everyone is paid exactly the same. It’s to everyone’s benefit to have neurosurgeons be paid more than janitors. What the veil of ignorance insures is that the floor isn’t too low; you wouldn’t create a country that exploits a certain group if you knew that you might be part of that group. By eliminating your class and your ethnicity, your natural talents and weaknesses, from consideration, the veil reminds you that those traits are beyond your control, making fairness an incentive.
The United States likes to think of itself as the land of opportunity, but, in reality, those opportunities are often “for me but not for thee.” Rawls didn’t offer a blueprint for a perfect society, but he wasn’t trying to have the final word; he was trying to set the ground rules for a productive conversation. Whenever I contemplate the direction the country should move in, I think of him as pointing the way.
Selected by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Like many young Latinas, I grew up hearing from adults that if I was going to have any shot at being taken seriously in the world I had to lose the hoop earrings, dress more conservatively, and never wear the color red. This was apparently true even at the highest levels! I was around twenty years old and at an Ivy League college when I learned that the Obama Administration had advised Sonia Sotomayor to wear a neutral nail for her confirmation hearings. The path to respectability seemed clear: a college diploma and a modest blouse. Cardi B showed me a different way.
Belcalis Almánzar was raised in the Bronx, by a Trinidadian mother and a Dominican father. Her journey took her from the projects and the stripper pole to hip-hop superstardom, as she became the first woman to win a Grammy in the historically manopolized category of Best Rap Album. It’s a story that could only have happened in America, and this woman—who told David Letterman how much she hates J. Edgar Hoover while wearing six-inch nails—could only have been from New York.
Cardi reminds me of a very specific kind of New York City daughter: child of immigrants, multilingual, moving through worlds as different as reality TV and high fashion and tax policy, unbothered by the muchness of everything she is. All of us determined to help retire our parents. The stakes feel impossibly high, so taking risks with your life—like becoming a writer, or exotic dancing, or rapping—might seem insane when the smart thing to do is keep your head down, work hard, and blend in. But insanity is a condition of the American Dream, which immigrants’ children are known to take literally, and to the bank. Seeing Cardi B succeed without sanding down her edges gives me great hope—yes, hope!—that the gap between what America is and what it can be is not fatal or final at all.
Selected by James Gray
Ten-year-old me got lucky: no school. It was “Brooklyn-Queens Day,” and I was able to convince my mother to take me to Polk’s Hobbies, near the Empire State Building. Before going back to Queens, we stopped at a coffee shop famous for its turkey sandwiches. As we sat, my mother spotted a man seated alone at the counter. “Oh, my God,” she said, way too loudly. “That’s Tennessee Williams!” I turned to stare. He had heard her, of course, but didn’t look. He just let out the slightest smile and went back to his coffee.
Later, she had me watch the film version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” when it came on television. That guy from the coffee shop wrote it a long time ago, she told me. I had no idea what the movie meant, but it stayed in my head for days. Why was everyone so vicious to poor, noble Blanche? She suffered, suffered terribly, at the hands of those who knew from their own experience what heartbreak meant. And, even if I couldn’t truly understand the film, I knew what it felt like to be on both ends of such cruelty.
As I got older, Tennessee Williams began to mean more and more. For him, love was the one essential in a world perpetually on fire. A “burning building,” he had called this life, and compassion was his remedy for its violent and mercurial ways. He believed in love fully. It was our salvation. He died four years after our brief encounter at that coffee shop, about nine miles away from my back yard. When teen-age me heard, the news barely registered, but now I look back and tears well in my eyes.
Selected by ZZ Packer
Stagecoach Mary, the gun-toting, whiskey-slugging, six-foot-tall former slave, combined the gravitas of Sojourner Truth, the grit of Harriet Tubman, and the insouciant swagger of every good-guy outlaw we’ve seen in Westerns, spaghetti Westerns, neo-Westerns, and—increasingly, thank goodness—Black Westerns. In the wake of the Civil War, Stagecoach Mary delivered mail by horse-drawn stagecoach near Cascade, Montana. This was a business adventure tantamount to endangering one’s life, since it meant braving wild winters, scorching summers, vigilantes, thieves, and—for an African American woman whom whites of the day had no qualms about calling “Nigger Mary” or “Black Mary”—people who may simply have viewed her as an affront to their sensibilities.
But that came only after she’d escaped slavery in Tennessee and signed on to help an Ursuline convent, whose sisters bore witness to her habit of dressing like a man and being unafraid of a duel. Born Mary Fields, she might have been lost to obscurity were it not for a 1959 Ebony article—written by Gary Cooper, the country’s avatar of rugged cowboy individualism—that catapulted her from mere Montana legend to national heroine. Fifty years ago, Elmer Eugene Wells wrote in The Negro History Bulletin, “Whether you’re watching Bonanza, The Virginian, High Chapparel, or Gunsmoke, the streets of Dodge City say, ‘we were white, we were white!’ But we were not.” The Bulletin had asked “What Can Blacks Celebrate During Bicentennial Year?” Wells began the piece by considering whether Blacks “have a moral obligation to the nation, considering the ‘progress’ made.”
I find myself, during this Semiquincentennial, asking the same question. Last month, the U.F.C. fighter Josh Hokit celebrated his victory on the South Lawn of the White House by declaring “Michelle Obama is a man,” invoking the old trope that Black women are intrinsically masculine. This endures, despite the equally entrenched Hottentot Venus trope of the hypersexualized Black female. That’s why Stagecoach Mary fascinates me: long before we accepted the idea that identities can overlap and be upended, she embodied it, claiming ownership over her own image and destiny.
Selected by Tommy Orange
Not many Americans know the name John Trudell. I’m not even sure that many Natives know it, either. Trudell was a Santee and Mexican American activist and poet, who died in 2015. There’s a documentary about him, and I’d recommend that you see it, but the director turned out to be a Pretendian, and that makes it all too messy for a simple recommendation here. Still, I suggest you look Trudell up. I got to hear him speak at a screening of the film, at the American Indian Film Festival, in 2005. I was blown away by how he saw and contextualized colonialism and Indigenous ways through the long lens of human history, making it clear that the same things have been happening in cycles throughout human time, and that white people once experienced the kind of displacement and erasure that Native people have suffered here in America. I’d seen him once before that, in Santa Cruz, reading his poetry to a set of that take-a-load-off-Fanny-style instrumental jam-band rock. Trudell was very critical of the U.S. government. Vocal and straightforward in the way that gets you a seventeen-thousand-page F.B.I. dossier. An early F.B.I. memo called Trudell “extremely eloquent therefore extremely dangerous.” He believed that his activism cost him his family: his wife and three daughters died in a mysterious house fire twenty-four hours after he led a protest outside F.B.I. headquarters. But, even after that, he kept resisting and he kept writing poetry.
On the country’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth, we are confronted by how little is left of its vital every-citizen-is-created-equal foundation, but even if there is almost nothing there should be, at the very least, something of Trudell’s spirit of resistance to an easily identifiable evil at the helm, which will ruin everything if we don’t believe we have the power to speak at every little level where we find we have a voice.
Selected by Min Jin Lee
Audre Lorde unsettled me because I knew she was right. More than any other sentence I’ve read, the one that begins her essay “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action” changed me from a quiet immigrant girl into an American writer. “I have come to believe,” Lorde wrote, “that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” It was as if I had physically crossed a red line demarcating my former self from my present one. It was O.K. to be me—foreign-born, naturalized, feminist, Presbyterian, working-class, public-school-and-Queens me. I would not have to mortify any part of myself. Lorde gave me courage.
It’s unlikely that I would have known about Lorde had I remained in Seoul, where I was born. But my family moved to the U.S. in 1976, when I was seven, and for my birthday in 1988 my friend Dionne, who I felt was the smartest person I’d met in college, gave me a copy of Lorde’s essay collection “Sister Outsider,” which had been published only a few years before.
I regret never having had a chance to meet or hear Lorde, a daughter of Harlem, New York, born to a Barbadian father and a Grenadian mother. A graduate of Hunter College High School, Hunter College, and Columbia University School of Library Service, Lorde began her professional life as a librarian and eventually established herself as a writer, publisher, and college professor. In her brief life, which ended with liver cancer, in 1992, when she was fifty-eight, she struggled on behalf of poor, marginalized women, men, and children in America and around the world. In her writings, Lorde argued that her differences from the majority made her more, not less, and she fought for inclusion and liberation for the largest possible global community. To me, Lorde fulfills the promise of America, where we can live truthfully as ourselves in our complex totality and seek freedom and justice for all.
Selected by Mary Gaitskill
Bullwinkle J. Moose (of “Rocky and His Friends,” “The Bullwinkle Show,” and “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”) is my idea of a great American. This is a quixotic choice, and my reasons for it are so ephemeral that they are practically nonexistent. But, when I was asked this question, Bullwinkle was who (or what) popped into my head. Specifically, what popped in was a snippet of dialogue between the hairy cartoon moose and his squirrel sidekick as they confronted yet another instance of villainy: “Bullwinkle, this is terrible!” “It is?” Those last two words, spoken with guileless, game uncertainty, have periodically appeared in my mind for decades, evoking something bright and primary colored—like cheap toys, cheap clothes, cheap music—that instantly evokes an American dreamworld of abundance and delight.
In his ability to create an enchanting something from nothing, Bullwinkle bears some relation to another legendary American, Harold Hill, a.k.a. the Music Man, who makes a glorious marching band out of slovenly youths and the delusional dreams of their brutally scammed parents. But, whereas Hill is basically a charming criminal, Bullwinkle is an entirely ethical force for good; he would never scam anyone. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, because he’s too . . . stupid.
Bullwinkle’s stupidity is announced in practically every episode of his shows, emphasized to the point where it comes to seem like a kind of sublime credulity (You want me to get in this mink cage and jump up and down squeaking like a mink, so the villains won’t know I’m a moose? Sure!) or existential Everyman condition that, squarely faced, may even be heroic. (“Once again,” the excited voice-over in “Moosylvania for Statehood” intones, “Bullwinkle’s incredible stupidity had saved the day!”)
Warm, fuzzy feelings for noble stupidity are an American thing, especially in politics. And they can, alas, transform into hot and hateful feelings for actual intelligence, or, indeed, for anything of exceptional quality, or, even worse, anything aspiring to be exceptional. But none of this is true of Bullwinkle! Though he matter-of-factly acknowledges his limits, Bullwinkle has aspirations! He loves knowledge and culture! In Bullwinkle’s Corner, he recites poetry, sometimes wearing a dress or a classical tunic. Donning a tux, he performs as Mr. Know-It-All, dispensing useful tips on topics such as how to avoid falling asleep on the job (Blow yourself up!) or how to disarm a bomb (Use a bobby pin!). He does magic, pulling lions and tigers out of hats. He even plays a medium, summoning the departed with “Eeny, meany, chili, beanie, the spirits are about to speak!” He’s a big dumb moose, but, though he doesn’t pronounce everything correctly, his vocabulary is excellent.
It’s the American Dream! Even if you come from nowhere, and don’t have a title or a good family or an education or anything, really, you can still recite poetry and pull stuff out of a hat. It may turn out to be the wrong hat, you might pull something out of it that will tear your head off, but that’s another story: it’s still an American Dream.
Selected by Bryan Washington
Joseph Beam was an author, editor, bookseller, and advocate. Special dude. His philosophy was built upon dismantling the castigations of society—and also, crucially, on the boon of Black queers in love. He wrote that this love was “an autonomous agenda for the eighties, which is not rooted in any particular sexual, political, or class affiliation, but in our mutual survival. The ways in which we manifest that love are as myriad as the issues we must address.” Also: “What an exciting yet fearful prospect, dreaming in the open.”
Beam was featured in Marlon Riggs’s film “Tongues Untied,” a 1989 documentary that aired on PBS and drew scathing conservative criticism for its portrayal of two men kissing. But Beam also assembled and edited “In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology.” This book was a rarity: a collection of fiction, essays, and poems written by queer Black men in the U.S. Many contributors succumbed to AIDS. In a literal race against time, Beam sculpted an indelible archive. “What we offer,” he wrote, “is our lives, our love, our visions.”
Beam died from an AIDS-related illness on December 27, 1988, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday. About a year ago, I finally watched “Tongues Untied.” A gay bar near my neighborhood in Shinjuku hosted a screening. About twenty men packed the space, leaning on shoulders and crowding the wall. The film was projected under some Christmas lights, which splayed over the liquor. Murmurs of “awesome” and “wow” and “ah” underlaid the soundtrack. Then the movie ended, and someone flicked the lights, and people wiped their faces and checked their apps and the door opened for a chilly evening breeze. ♦