“Anytime one tries to take fragments of one’s personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.“
- Name: Assotto Saint (Born as Yves François Lubin)
- Born: October 2, 1957
- Died: June 29, 1994
- From:Les Cayes, Haiti (Based in New York from 1970)
- Pronouns: He/him
- Contribution/Impact: He was a trailblazer and central figure in Black gay arts culture of the 1980s and 90s through his original theatre company, Metamorphosis Theatre, and his editing and writing on the Black gay experience. After he and his partner were diagnosed with HIV, Saint became active in AIDS activism, appearing in No Regrets (Non, Je Regrette Rien) (1993).
- Occupation: Poet, publisher, performance artist
- Known For: The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (1991); Here to Dare: 10 Gay Black Poets (1992)
- Awards: Won a Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Poetry category as editor of the Road Before Us in 1991. He won a fellowship in 1990 in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and got the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum’s James Baldwin Award
Assotto Saint was a Haitian-born American poet, publisher, and important figure in Black and LGBTQ community in the 1980 and ’90s. He founded Metamorphosis Theatre with his partner, Jan Holmgren, whom he also formed an electric duo with, Xotica. In addition to publishing and writing his own works (poetry, essays, plays), Assotto Saint participated in the Black gay writer’s collective Other Countries, founded his own publishing press (Galiens Press), and edited multiple poetry anthologies. Both Galiens Press and Metamorphosis Theatre were explicitly devoted to works about the experiences of Black gay men. Both Holmgren and Saint contracted HIV and died from AIDS-related complications. They are buried alongside each other at Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York.
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