Joseph F. Beam

Joseph Fairchild Beam (December 30, 1954 – December 27, 1988) was an African-American gay rights activist, writer and poet. He was the editor of In the Life: a Black Gay Anthology, the first compendium of Black gay writing. He was a board member of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and the founding editor of Black/Out magazine.

A second anthology, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, was completed by Essex Hemphill and Beam's mother after his death in 1988 and was published in 1991.

Early life and education Beam was born in Philadelphia on December 30, 1954, to Sun Fairchild Beam, a security guard, and Dorothy Saunders Beam, a teacher and school guidance counselor. He was raised Catholic.

He attended parochial schools in the Philadelphia area including Malvern Preparatory School and St. Thomas More High School. Beam also maintained ongoing correspondence with prisoners, which he later attributed to a "deep sense of my own imprisonment as a closeted Gay man and an oppressed Black man."

Through his writings, Beam aimed to alleviate the alienation of gay men of color, to help them create their own community, and to counteract the absence of positive images of them in the media and what he saw as 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 re-define the reality of race, sex, class, and gender in the United States. He was found dead on the floor of his apartment by friends and had been dead for several days.

In 1992, Beam's mother donated her son's papers to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

Yolo Akili founded BEAM (Black Emotional and Mental Health) in honor of Joseph Beam.

Works In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. Edited by Joseph F. Beam (Alyson Publications, 1986). Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Edited by Essex Hemphill, conceived by Joseph Beam, project managed by Dorothy Beam (Alyson Publications, 1991). .