A black man with short hair stares up thoughtfully. His hand rests on his face. He wears a sweater and a thick metal bracelet.
''even blindfolded/i would find my way/to you/around this evergreen/cemetery"
Though often a forgotten name, Assotto Saint was a trailblazer in the 1980s and early ‘90s who heavily contributed to increasing the visibility of contemporary Black queerness in literature and theater. In addition to writing his own poetry and plays about the Black Gay experience, Saint founded his own theater exclusively devoted to performances about Black Gay men, and also served as a mentor to an entire generation of up-and-coming Black Gay writers as publisher and editor to several Black Gay anthologies. Saint also became one of the first Black activists to publicly disclose his HIV status, ensuring that others like him would have a face and name to feel less alone with their struggle. Between his prolific work and active presence within his community, Saint was a central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts movement at the time, carving out a space for those voices often being left behind. According to Saint, “I deal with Black Gay issues because my art right now is an answer back. It’s a reaction.”
Assotto Saint was born Yves Francois Lubin on October 2nd, 1957 in Les Cayes, Haiti. Raised there by his nurse anesthetist mother, Marie Lubin, Assotto would not go on to meet his father until much later, when he was already an adult. After Assotto’s grandmother passed away when he was eight years old, his mother moved to Geneva, Switzerland, leaving him to move in with an aunt. Marie eventually moved to New York City, and Saint would soon visit her there in 1970 on what became a life-changing trip for him.
During this visit, Saint found himself walking with his mother in Coney Island, where he would come across, in what was likely a first time for him, men dressed in high heels and feminine clothing. His mother would assure him that this was not an uncommon sight in the United States, where people were freer to express themselves than in religious Haiti. Saint was scheduled to return to Haiti later that week, but after this experience, he begged his mother to stay, despite her warning him about the difficulties he would face living in New York.
Thus, Assotto stayed in the U.S., graduated from Jamaica High School in Queens in 1974, and enrolled in a pre-med program at Queens College. It was also around this time that Saint learned from his mother some troubling information: his father had asked her to abort Saint after the unwed couple discovered they were expecting. Though shaken, Saint continued to study medicine but began to further explore his childhood interest in the performative aspects of Haitian Catholic Mass as well as his excitement that had stemmed from participating in high school theater. Soon thereafter, he dropped out of college to pursue his passion for theater and dance.
That same year, Saint began to perform as a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company but stopped in 1980 due to an injury that would prevent him from further being able to perform. Meanwhile, Saint continued to grow his interest in theater and music, adding poetry and fiction writing to his repertoire. It is around this time that he took on his new name, Assotto Saint. “Assotto”, was named after a ceremonial drum used in Haitian voodoo rituals, and “Saint”, after the Haitian revolutionary leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture.
In November of 1980, Saint met and fell in love with Jan Homgren, a Swedish-born composer and musician, with whom he began collaborating on a number of theatrical and musical projects. Together, the duo founded a theatre company called Metamorphosis Theatre, which Saint used as a venue devoted to showcasing the Black Gay experience. The duo also collaborated by forming an electric pop band called Xotika. As Xotika, Saint and Holmgren released the whacky and transgressive dance track called “Forever Gay”, with lyrics such as: “Living my life my way/Living from day-to-day/No matter what you say/I’m gonna stay forever/Forever gay”. The song was later released on a compilation CD, Feeding The Flame: Songs By Men To End AIDS.
It is with Metamorphosis Theatre, though, that Saint truly became a pioneer, as he used the company to write, produce and perform many theater pieces specifically about Gay Black life, a thing that had not really been done before. These pieces included works like Risin’ To The Love We Need, New Love Song, Nuclear Lovers, and Black Fag. Holmgren, Saint’s partner, wrote and performed many of the songs that would be included in these performances. For Risin’ To The Love We Need, Saint soon won his first award: second prize from the Jane Chambers Award for Gay and Lesbian Playwriting in 1980.
Saint became a U.S. citizen in 1986, and shortly thereafter penned an autobiographical piece called, The Impossible Black Homosexual (OR Fifty Ways To Become One), wherein he wrote that “on the day he naturalized as an American citizen [he] sat naked on the current president’s picture and after he was finished called the performance ‘Bushsh*t’.” During this time, Saint continued to explore writing in different mediums and published a poetry anthology in 1986 called, In The Life: A Black Gay Anthology. Saint also went on to establish his own publishing company, which he called Galiens Press (a compression of the words ‘Gay’ and ‘Aliens’) and used as a platform to publish work exclusively by Black Gay poets.
It is at this focal point of Assotto’s creative output that in 1987 both he and Holmgren were diagnosed as HIV positive. Not to be deterred, Saint continued furiously to produce work, and threw himself deeply into AIDS activism. Saint published more poetry in his own chapbook, Triple Trouble (1987) and the anthology Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time (1988). He participated in the Black Gay writer’s collective Other Countries and became an editor for the poetry anthology Other Countries: Black Gay Voices in 1988. Via Galiens Press, he published more Black poetry anthologies, including The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (1991) and Here To Dare: A Collection Of Ten Gay Black Poets (1992), as well his own solo collections, Stations (1989) and Wishing For Wings (1994). Through all this, Saint served as an influential mentor to many emerging LGBT African American writers at the time, including the likes of Samuel Delaney, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon.
At the turn of the new decade, Saint’s profuse accomplishments were just beginning to garner the recognition and accolades they were due. In 1990, Saint was awarded a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and received the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum’s James Baldwin Award. In 1992, Saint won a Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Poetry Category, for editing The Road Before Us, and was nominated again in 1993, for Here To Dare.
All the while, Saint and Holmgren continued to cope with their HIV statuses. Saint became one of the first African American activists to publicly disclose his HIV status, and in 1993 appeared in Marlon T. Riggs’ film No Regrets (Non, Je Regrette Rien), a 38-minute documentary on five Black Gay men who had tested HIV-positive. On March 29th, 1993, Jan Holmgren, Saint’s lover, cofounder, collaborator and partner of fourteen years, at last succumbed to his disease, completely devastating the already-ill Saint. As a reaction to his lover’s passing, Saint wrote a three-part prose piece entitled, No More Metaphors, in which he elucidated that no words would amount to conveying his despair over Holmgren’s death. This same sorrowful sentiment would also be interwoven throughout the poems in Saint’s collection, Wishing For Wings, which he worked on through the rest of the year into 1994 and would unknowingly serve as the culmination of his life’s work.
Saint himself succumbed a year later to AIDS on June 29th, 1994, at the age of 36, and was buried alongside Holmgren at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York. Prior to his demise, Saint had requested that in protest of the indifference that America had shown to those dying of AIDS, an American flag be burned at his funeral and its ashes scattered on his grave.
Though Saint himself had passed, his contributions continued to live on, and he was nominated for yet another Lambda Literary Award for Wishing For Wings in 1995. In 1996, a posthumous book entitled, Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays and Plays of Assotto Saint was published and subsequently nominated in the Lambda Gay Biography or Autobiography award category. Many of his remaining personal papers, letters, and writings were donated to and are now held by the New York Public Library at the Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture, made available for future generations to come.
Despite his short career and many accomplishments, Saint and his work nevertheless attracted little attention outside of the Black Gay community. What little attention he did achieve often focused on the political aspects of his work, with many non-black and/or heteronormative critics portraying him as troubling, angry, or both. But to be misunderstood or underappreciated is often what happens when someone becomes the first or one of the first to do something and push for change, and that is certainly what Saint was aiming to accomplish. Whether via his theatrical and multimedia productions or as the writer, editor, and publisher of multiple literary works and anthologies, Assotto Saint helped put queerness on the map within the black literary community and should thus be remembered as a central and revolutionary literary figure of his time. In an essay of his called, Why I Write, Assotto stressed that his primary goal was always to make black queer voices fully part of American life, and this he certainly did. And for that, he was and will always be a Saint.
[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]
Braziel, Jana Evans. Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora. Indiana University Press, 2008.
Brownworth, Victoria. “Remembering Assotto Saint: A Fierce and Fatal Vision.” Lambda Literary. (2014, June 19). https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2014/06/remembering-assotto-saint-a-fierce-and-fatal-vision/
Durban-Albrecht, Erin. “The Legacy of Assotto Saint: Tracing Transnational History from the Gay Haitian Diaspora.” Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol 19. No.1. Center for Black Studies Research, 2013.
Maglott, Stephen A. “Assotto Saint.” The Ubuntu Biography Project. (2017, October 2). https://ubuntubiographyproject.com/2017/10/02/assotto-saint/
Moore, Patrick. Beyond Shame: Reclaiming The Abandoned History Of Radical Gay Sexuality. Beacon Press, 2004.
Prono, Luca. “Saint, Assotto (1957-1994).” GLBTQ Archives. (2011). http://www.glbtqarchive.com/literature/saint_assotto_L.pdf
Smith, Charles Michael. “From Haiti To New York: An Interview With Assotto Saint”. New York Native. (1984). http://urbanbookmaven.blogspot.com/2013/01/hed-tk_23.html
Steward, Douglas. “Saint’s Progeny: Assotto Saint, Gay Black Poets, and Poetic Agency in the Field of the Queer Symbolic.” African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 3. Indiana State University, 1999.
About the Author
Find more of Marc Zinaman’s writing via his newsletter on women in hip-hop, ladyrap.substack.com