GLR January-February 2025

ple were still having sex amid the gloom: “We still had sex, but it was strange ... the safe practices started to come into play.” That juxtaposition echoes the ethos that he has consistently es poused: a recognition that sex is a mode of being together that sometimes defies the fears that accompany it, including the real ity of one’s death. “I look back and recognize that there’s some strength in me that got me through that I wasn’t fully aware of, but that I could tap into to get through.” I first conceived of this essay as an opportunity to consider the potential of lingering with an archive, attending to the emotional and physical resonances that stay with the viewer through the mul tiple returns to the images. How does the archive, as a repository of feelings and memories, invite introspection into the interior di mensions of a subset of Black life, and in this instance, the expe riences of Black men who desire men in the 1970s and 1980s in Chicago? Many may turn to Patric’s photographs as a site of Black gay representation, highlighting the importance of visibility. Eve lyn Hammond has reminded me that visibility without an articu lation of what one hopes to achieve or seeks to disrupt is dangerous, and often co-opted by a superficial stake in being seen without any material change. Patric articulates his position on his archive clearly: The photographs are mementos of desire—for him and the men and the sexual encounters they experienced.

cation of the identity of those pictured. Of the hundreds of subjects in the archive, some look at the camera, others are caught mid-conversation in the Rialto or or dering a drink; some walk in the streets of Chicago, while oth ers hang out in Jackson Park or by the concrete shore of Lake Michigan. The photograph is not a document of an absolute truth, and Patric’s reflections on the encounters that surrounded many of these images gesture to the richness of experience that seeps into that in-between space that Ajamu affirms, one which an identity will never hold. These men negotiated their own mul tiplicities, the complex interwoven understandings of self that each person possesses. This emotional interior is too often dis regarded in discussions of Black life in favor of a fixation on what can be immediately seen or observed. While we have not discussed it at length, spending time with McCoy’s archive cannot help but remind us of the impact of the HIV / AIDS crisis, with most of the images taken during the height of the epidemic. For those who were there, the archive must also carry undertones of grief as a record of lives lost. Patric recalls: “There was an awareness of certainty of your mortality ... you’re seeing people die who did the same things you did, with the same people ... you had a sense that this could happen to me and having to come to grips with that.” He also reaffirms that peo

This poem may be interpreted as an expres sion of queer desire and as a coming to terms with the reality of a love that could not be, at least not in the light of day. Wright apparently didn’t get the girl—or at least not yet.

for animal rights. A final hint from the archives seemed to answer one question definitively. Among the last items in Wright’s collections was a

book of poems she wrote in the latter half of her life. A number of them were written on Valentine’s Day for an unspecified love:

My hands are torn by the spokes I clutch as the wheeling years go by And the dust of their passing grays my head And my eyes are dim with the dust they shed. ... And think how year by year I love my lovely dear! She is my noonday bright A faint note added in pencil re vealed that the poems had been dedicated to “E. J. G.” Researching the queer lives of suffragists like Wright requires a meticulous excavation of the archival silences, a reading be tween the lines of existing sources. These small discoveries can help to shine some rays of light into the darkness, illuminat ing a previously unknown queer history of the women’s suffrage movement. Wendy L. Rouse is a historian and the author of Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022). She is my starry night, She is my heart’s delight My very dear.

January–February 2025 founders of the National Humane Education Society, which fought After college, Wright went to Paris to study art and became ac tive in the militant suffrage move ment. Her letters from this time period reveal that she had a crush on the suffragist leader Emmeline Pankhurst, whom she met on the steamship to Europe. Wright was so enamored that she traveled to London to participate in Pankhurst’s protests. She shocked her friends and family back home when they read in the newspapers that Wright had been arrested for holding a stone that she was preparing to throw through a win dow to demand the vote for women. She went to jail along with over 200 suffragists arrested that night, where they launched a hunger strike to protest the govern ment’s oppression of women. When Wright finally returned to the U.S., she continued her ac tivism in the suffrage movement, reuniting with her college friends, including Goode. They joined to gether in a life of activism on be half of women in the National Woman’s Party and later as

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