Today is the 29th anniversary of the death of poet, novelist, translator, and academic, Melvin Dixon.
He died of complications relating to AIDS on this day in 1992 in Stamford, Connecticut, seven months after delivering the closing plenary address at the third national OutWrite Lesbian & Gay Writers Conference in March of that year. It was an address with a message that would alter the course of what would become my writing life and later career.
Dixon's speech had left me shaken and in tears by the end, and I ordered a cassette tape of it from before leaving Boston for Toronto. I probably listened to the speech on that cassette twenty times or more in the coming years. Eventually it wore out and finally broke. I was disconsolate, finally resigning myself to the fact that his message had imprinted itself on my heart. I hoped that, sooner or later it would be transcribed and included in some collection or other.
Earlier this month, like a blessing, I found it online—the place where everything eventually winds up, where the past is just a click away. Even, apparently, Dixon's brilliant, unflinching address about loss, closure, and the duty of lesbian and gay writers to bear witness to our history and to the generation we were losing to AIDS, delivered on that snowy afternoon at the Plaza Hotel in Boston.
In March of 1992 I was twenty-nine, an under-published but determined magazine writer with a handful of half-decent mainstream credits and a single second-place journalism award under my belt. OutWrite 92 was the first writers conference I'd ever attended. I was frankly star-struck. Dorothy Allison (who I would later interview for my book Writing Below the Belt) had become a bonafide literary star with Bastard Out of Carolina, published the previous year. She delivered the opening plenary address. There were enough of my gay and lesbian literary idols in attendance to simultaneously inspire and intimidate. This was absolutely the group to which I wished to belong, and I wished it as fervently as only a wet-behind-the-ears twentysomething with no concept of how writers' communities and cliques operate could wish it.
At some point in the weekend I introduced myself to Melvin Dixon. I had loved his haunting short story "Red Leaves" in George Stambolian's anthology Men on Men 2: Best New Gay Fiction, and I was reading his second novel, Vanishing Rooms. He was soft-spoken and gracious. I told him how much I loved his work and he very kindly asked me about mine, which even then struck me as generous coming from a writer of his stature.
Indeed, Dixon's body of work included two poetry collections, Change of Territory (1983) and Love's Instrument (which would be posthumously published in 1995); two novels, Trouble the Water (1989) and the aforementioned Vanishing Rooms (1990); a textbook, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in African American Literature (1987); as well as a translation of the poems of the former Senegalese president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1991.)
The entire encounter must have taken minutes, but it left an impression. The impression it did not leave was that I was speaking to a dying man, himself recently widowed, who was maximizing every bit of his remaining energy. In his generosity and grace, he just sounded like someone I was very, very lucky to speak with, however briefly.
Nothing however could have prepared me for the closing address.
He started his speech with an a cappella rendition of the 1937 hymn "I'll Be Somewhere Listening For My Name." He joked immediately afterwards about his singing ability—perhaps as a palate cleanser to prepare us for the deadly seriousness of the message to come.
I've gone back and forth here on the notion of quoting large swaths of his words from my own transcription of his speech. While they're beautiful and powerful, I've decided against it in hopes that readers will listen to the recording (linked in several places in this post) itself. My quoting it would absolutely not do justice to Dixon's delivery.
The address opens with the issues of race and privilege, drawing—with blistering language—a connecting line between the systemic societal oppression of both gays and people of colour, while underlining the protection of privilege that white gay men enjoyed. It touched on the terrible toll of AIDS, and the cost of allowing our erasure by a 80s-era culture that was reluctant to honour our losses, and which we could only fight by bearing witness to our own stories, and by keeping them alive with our writing.
What impressed me, listening to the speech again in 2021, was the degree of generous intersectionality he was proposing. His words united those of us in the audience as a community of marginalized writers with a job to do, and with stories to tell. He embraced our commonalities as queer people without soft-pedalling our differences of class and race, and asked us to do better, but to do better together—as a unified community of storytellers with a common cause, facing common enemies: violence, loss, bigotry, and erasure
"What kind of witness will you bear?" Dixon asked. "What truth-telling are you brave enough to utter, and endure the consequences of your unpopular message? We alone are responsible for the preservation and future of our literature. If we don't buy our books, they won't get published. If we don't talk about our books, they won't get reviewed or noticed. If we don't write our books, they won't get written."
And then, the devastating closing:
"I'll be somewhere listening for my name. You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us."
Spring was many weeks off when he said that, and Melvin Dixon was dead by October—a particularly beautiful New England October, as I recall, with trees wearing what Anne Sexton had once referred to as their "sourball colours."
In the summer of 1992, I met John Preston, the author and anthologist who would become my literary mentor. He told me, "You spend all your time writing about other people. When are you going to start writing about your own life as a gay man and start telling those stories?"
It was strikingly similar to the message I'd received, intentionally or not, from Melvin Dixon's address. Preston was right—if we didn't write those stories, no one would.
In due course, Preston published my earliest autobiographical essays in beautiful hardcover anthologies from blue-chip New York publishing houses. By the time my first book, Writing Below the Belt, was published, he had died of complications from AIDS. I dedicated that book to him.
Later still, I wrote for FAB National in Canada and Hero and The Advocate in the United States. Part of the great gift of having worked for The Advocate in particular during my time there was discovering a community of journalists who cared about those stories the way I did. Again, I was taken under the wing by some of the best and most generous editors I'd ever work for
In 2000 I created and edited the first-ever gay horror anthologies, Queer Fear and Queer Fear 2, because the horror field was one in which homophobia had always flourished. I published two volumes of essays, three novels, and an interview collection. In every book, there are stories of queer people entwined with stories of the non-queer people with whom we live—hopefully honouring Melvin Dixon's directive to share "our perspective on gay and straight experience" in our writing. It was never lucrative, but it was always worth it, and it feels good to have contributed even a drop to that ocean of stories.
At a time in our history when being either queer or queer-adjacent is as commonplace as not, and when history—even ours, as LGBTQ people—can be perilously rewritten or revised with a series of keystrokes, it seems a useful moment to remember our forbears who lived and died in a time when it took the deaths of almost a million gay men from AIDS for mainstream society to even acknowledge they existed, and were part of life. It's a good moment to remember their stories, and to honour them, and to speak their names.
It's perhaps worth remembering that our seniors, or near-seniors, have a living memory of a particular queer holocaust that is almost inconceivable today. They may seem funny, or doddering, or out-of-touch, or boomerish to some observers, but those aspects are, more often than not, camouflaging an invisible version of the thousand-yard stare of old war veterans.
As Dixon said in his speech, "We are facing the loss of our entire generation."
They were facing that loss; and we, the survivors, lost titans. They're somewhere listening for their names.
On the anniversary of Melvin Dixon's death, I hope he's hearing his, here.
[The excellent introduction by poet the Kate Rushin starts at 13:08. The address by Melvin Dixon starts at 17:18]
