"Joseph F. Beam "(December 30,1954-December 27,1988)

Was an African-American gay rights activists and author who worked to foster greater acceptance of gay life in the black community by relating the gay experience with the struggle for civil rights in the united states.His father Sun Bean worked as a bank security guard in Philadelphia.His

mother,Dorothy became a wage earner while still an adolescent,and attended evening classes to obtain her high school diploma.She later earned a college in elementary education and a master's degree from Temple University.She worked for more than twenty years as a teacher and guidance counselor in the Philadelphia school system.Baptised a Catholic,he studied mainly in parochial schools,including the Malvern Preparatory School, St.Thomas More High School and Franklin College, a small liberal arts college founded by American Baptists in Franklin,Indiana.An only child,Joseph boyhood was difficult and solitary;he was often the only student in his classes.Later,at Franklin College,he was influenced by the civil rights and the Black Power movements,and played an active role in the local Black Student Union.Also,as a member of the Franklin Independent Men,he helped organize several conferences on campus and was active in college journalism and radio programing.After graduating in 1976,Joseph remained in the Midwest,enrolling first in  Master's Degree program in communications and then working as a waiter in Ames,Iowa he returned to Philadelphia in 1979.Giovanni's Room in the Center District in Philadelphia was one of was one of the main bookstores and contact points for lesbians and gays in the 1970s and 1980s.Joseph,himself gay,became well acquainted with local and national gay figures and

institutions while employed there in the early 1980s.His articles and short stories began appearing around the same time in numerous gay news papers and magazines,including Au Courant,black heart,Changing Men,Philadelphia Gay News,The Advocate,New York Native,Body Politic,and Windy City Times.The Lesbian and Gay Press Association awarded Joseph a certificate for outstanding achievement by a minority journalist in 1984.The following year,he was hired as a consultant by the Gay and Lesbian Task Force of the American Friends Service Committee.Joseph the Executive Committee of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays in 1985,and became the editor of their new journal Black/Out.Joseph began preparing and collecting materials for an anthology of writings by and about black gay men in 1982.His goal was to counteract the absence of positive images of gay men of color in the media and their  exclusion from the cultural world of white gay rights activists.Inspired by the humanism of the black feminist and lesbian movement,he saw his work as part of a broad effort to correct and redefine the realty of

race,sex,class and gender in the United States.Through his writings,he sought to alleviate the alienation of black homosexuals and help create a community of their own.In the Life was published by Allyson Press in 1986;it was the first anthology of writing by gay black men. It was ignored by most African-American critics and institutions,but was greeted as a literary and cultural milestone in the gay community.Joseph was working on a sequel to In The Life at the time of his death of HIV-related disease in 1988.This work was completed Dorothy Beam and the gay poet Essex Hemphill,and published under Brother to Brother in 1991.Both books were featured in a television documentary,Tongues United,in 1991."As a writer,Joseph was more prolific,"wrote his friend Craig Harris after his death."His articles and essays were poetic,containing turned phrases and puns,metaphors in meters that made his writing musical with penetrating meaning.He took great pride in his skill and devoted time to multiple rewrites,crafting his work to create the style wich other writers of the Black genre dubbed Beameque.