Trying to Hear Assotto Saint’s New Love Song, Thirty Years Later

Assotto Saint (1957-1994), poet, publisher, editor, cultural activist, staged his multidisciplinary theater work New Love Song in New York City in 1989, bringing together a group of Black gay men on stage to represent disparate and shared experiences of Black and gay life in the midst of the mounting AIDS epidemic.

Offering stories, dancing, rituals, and chants derived from African-diasporic religious practices and belief systems, Saint and his cast, some of whom were practitioners or culturally connected to these spiritual traditions, shifted the stigma of being marked as Haitian, Black, gay, and HIV positive, and demonstrated the strength to be found at that intersection instead.

New Love Song functioned for its audience and performers alike as a space for collective grieving and healing around the bodily threats of HIV/AIDS, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. In this talk, I will describe my process of seeking out witnesses who could serve as bridges to the performances of New Love Song.

In light of limited audiovisual documentation, I have sought to answer the following questions: How might we hear, how might we take into our bodies and feel, the vibrations that passed through the bodies in that theater? How might we be moved to face contemporary struggles by the ancestors that sustained Saint, and the ancestor that Saint has become?