Nuclear Lovers. A contemporary, friend, and col-
league of such writers as Joseph Beam, Donald
Woods, MELVIN DIXON, ESSEX HEMPHILL, David
Warren Frechette, Redvers Jeanmarie, and RANDALL
KENAN, Lubin was a part of New York’s Blackheart
Collective, formed in 1981 by a group of artists
and writers. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a
period that witnessed the death of many black and
gay writers, Lubin served as literary executor of the
work of several writers who died of HIV/AIDS-re-
lated complications.
Lubin was also a charter member of Other
Countries: Black Gay Expression, the New York-
based black gay writers’ collective, which, when it
was founded in 1985, helped mark the beginning of
what many scholars and critics now consider a re-
naissance in black gay writing and literature. Lubin
served as the poetry editor of the distinguished
journal Other Countries: Black Gay Voices (Other
Countries Press, 1988); he later independently ed-
ited and published two anthologies through Galiens
Press, which he founded in 1989: the Lambda Liter-
ary Award–winning The Road before Us: 100 Gay
Black Poets (1991) and Here to Dare (1992). A third
anthology, Milking Black Bull, which he conceived
and edited, was ultimately published posthu-
mously by Vega Press (1995), one of the few black
gay presses in existence at the time.
Lubin’s chapbook Triple Trouble was published
in Tongues Untied (GMP, 1987), a British collection
that also included the work of Dirg Aaab-Richards,
Craig G. Harris, Essex Hemphill, and Isaac Jack-
son. Galiens Press published two collections of
his poetry: Stations (1989) and Wishing for Wings,
which was published in November of 1994, five
months after his death. In 1990 Lubin was awarded
a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Founda-
tion for the Arts and recieved the James Baldwin
Award from the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership
Forum. A compendium of Lubin’s writings, Spells
of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fictions, Essays and
Plays of Assotto Saint (Richard Kasak, 1996), was
collected posthumously by his publicist and long-
time friend, Michelle Karlsberg.
Considering the realities of the period dur-
ing which he matured as a writer, Lubin’s work,
particularly his poems written in the early 1990s,
often dealt with AIDS, the politics of AIDS, race,
and identity. Much of his work was created “at the
mercy of an age where horrific images hang / in an
oblivious silence that draws poetry / which must
be written / with blood” (Wishing for Wings, 1).
Succumbing to AIDS-related complications, Lubin
died on June 29, 1994, in New York City.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hemphill, Essex, ed. Brother to Brother: New Writings
by Black Gay Men. Los Angeles: Alyson Publica-
tions, 1991.
Hunter, Michael B, ed. Sojourner: Black Gay Voices
in the Age of AIDS. New York: Other Countries
Press, 1993.
Jugular Defenses: An AIDS Anthology. London: Os-
cars Press, 1994.
Larkin, Joan, and Carl Morse, eds. Gay and Les-
bian Poetry in Our Time. New York: St. Martin’s,
1988.
Lassell, Michael. The Name of Love: Classic Gay Love
Poems. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.
Other Countries: Black Gay Voices. New York: Other
Countries Press, 1988.
Saint, Assotto, ed. Here to Dare: 10 Gay Black Poets.
New York: Galiens, 1992.
———, ed. Milking Black Bull: 11 Gay Black Poets.
Sicklerville, N.J.: Vega, 1995.
———, ed. The Road before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets.
New York: Galiens, 1991.
———. Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction,
Essays and Plays of Assotto Saint. New York: Rich-
ard Kasak, 1996.
———. Stations. New York: Galiens Press, 1989.
———. Wishing for Wings. New York: Galiens Press,
1994.
Steward, Douglass. “Saint’s Progeny: Assotto Saint,
Gay Black Poets, and Poetic Agency in the Field
of the Queer Symbolic.” African American Review
(Fall 1999): 507–518.
G. Winston JamesSaint, Assotto 443