Corbin, Steven (1953–1995)
Steven Corbin was born in 1953 in Jersey City,
New Jersey. Although he left before graduating,
Corbin attended the University of Southern Cali-
fornia film school and was at one time a fiction-
writing instructor at University of California, Los
Angeles. His three published novels, No Easy Place
to Be (1989), A Hundred Days from Now (1994)
and Fragments That Remain (1995), function as a
trilogy reflecting, celebrating, and critiquing con-
temporary black gay male culture and identity as
well as the cultural history from which it stems.
Corbin’s first book, No Easy Place to Be, is a
historical novel that explores the lives and rela-
tionships of the Brooks sisters, three very differ-
ent African-American women, in 1920 Harlem.
Corbin’s account of the emotional and sexual tra-
vails of Miriam, a nurse and militant Garveyite;
Velma, a sophisticated and sexually adventurous
“New Negro” writer; and Louise, a light-skinned
Cotton Club showgirl who ultimately finds the
problems of being a white-black woman too in-
tense and “passes” over into the white world,
presents a provocative vision of the intersection
of racial and sexual identities in the HARLEM RE-
NAISSANCE. With its in-depth exploration of Gar-
veyism, the politics of skin color, white literary
patronage and the “vogue” for black authors, and
the emergence of a recognizable homosexual and
bisexual subculture in 1920s New York, the novel
brings the period to life while reflecting and uti-
lizing the discursive construction and critical le-
gitimation of the Harlem Renaissance as a site for
academic inquiry that has taken place over the last
two decades.
Reminiscent of JAMES BALDWIN’s GO TELL IT ON
THE MOUNTAIN, Corbin’s second novel, Fragments
That Remain, tells a multigenerational story of
emotional and physical abuse as it is experienced
in the family of a successful black actor, the dark-
skinned but blue-eyed Skylar Whyte. Concur-
rently, the novel explores the issue of interracial
gay attraction in its depiction of the deteriorat-
ing relationship between Skylar and his white
lover, Evan Cabot. By telling the story from the
perspectives of Skylar, his mother, his father, his
brother Kendall, and Evan in individual chapters,
the novel offers a complex and ultimately non-
judgmental exploration of truth, memory, and
forgiveness and their effects on the formation
of personality and, more problematically, sexual
preference.
Corbin’s last novel, A Hundred Days from Now,
which was nominated for a 1994 Lambda Literary
Award for gay male fiction, tells the story of Dex-
ter Baldwin, an openly gay HIV-positive African-
American screenwriter, whose relationship with
Sergio Gutierrez, a closeted Mexican-American
millionaire who is dying from AIDS, devolves into
a disturbing tangle of self-hatred, homophobia,
and emotional sadomasochism as Dexter attends
to Sergio during the 100 days that it will take to
discover if the experimental bone marrow trans-
plant that he has received from his identical twin
brother will cure or arrest the progress of his dis-
ease. Published in the year before Corbin’s death,
this bleak novel may reflect aspects of Corbin’s
own losing struggle with AIDS, from which he
died on August 31, 1995, in New York City.
Although the critical response to Corbin’s nov-
els has been mixed and he never received the pop-
ular recognition from either gay or mainstream
readers accorded his contemporaries E. LYNN
HARRIS and JAMES EARL HARDY, at his best Corbin
adroitly walks the line between serious and popu-
lar fiction while exploring almost the entire range
of issues found in contemporary gay men’s fiction.
Corbin’s short fiction has appeared in the collec-
tions Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary
African-American Fiction, More Like Minds, Fron-
tiers, Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of Urban Black
Experience, Sundays at Seven: Choice Words from a
Different Light’s Gay Writers Series, and Black Like
Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African
American Fiction.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Duplechan, Larry. “Steven Corbin.” BLK (1992):
11–23.
Oliver, Myrna. “Steven Corbin: Novelist and AIDS
Activist.” Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1995,
p. A26.
Terry RowdenCorbin, Steven 119