Dagmawi Woubshet – The Calendar of Loss

I cherish my copy of Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill’s 1991 anthology, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. It is a soaring, sensual and at times heartbreaking collection of the writings, plays, poetry and speeches of some of the Black gay men we lost during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. I cherish it because it has affirmed my unequivocal spiritual lineage to the Black gay men who came before me – and because it offers such piercing first-person insight into how Black gay lived and loved. As I’ve learned from Dagmawi Woubshet, Brother to Brother is also an effervescent and enlivening demonstration of grief as a public and political act.

In The Calendar of Loss, Dagmawi illuminates how AIDS mourning challenges how we have come to think about loss and grief, insisting that the bereaved can confront death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice. We explore how political funerals during the AIDS crisis honoured those who died — and would die — by exposing and confronting governmental neglect, what we can learn from those whom Dagmawi names “disprized mourners” about how we utilise our rage in our present moment; and the ways queer Black men maintained a fierce erotic intimacy that would animate their legacies long after their deaths.

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About Dagmawi Woubshet

Dagmawi Woubshet is a scholar of African American literature and art at the University of Pennsylvania, working at the intersections of African American, LGBTQ and African studies. The Calendar of Loss has transformed how I engage with the art and writing of those we lost during the AIDS crisis and I'm excited for his second book, Here Be Saints: James Baldwin’s Late-Style.

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