Danez Smith Curates Queer Poetry for The Boys in the Band Cast

As we opened the New York Times today and turned to the Style section, we were thrilled to see a portfolio of poetry curated by Danez Smith and performed by the cast of  Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, which is being revived after its premiere 50 years ago in 1968. Alexander Chee introduces the portfolio, writing:

Danez Smith, 28, who curated the below selection of poems read by the cast and director of “The Boys in the Band” in this video series, and who goes by the pronoun “they,” is a good example of how we talk about ourselves now: They are black, queer, poz, a poet, a performer. “When I was figuring myself out, both as a writer and a queer person, I had examples of how to do it boldly and bravely — Assotto Saint, Essex Hemphill, Carl Phillips, Mark Doty, Jericho Brown — and there was never a push toward ambiguity,” Smith says. “Instead, it was a push toward a queer poetics, and a queer poetics of color.

Smith, whose 2017 collection, “Don’t Call Us Dead,” was a National Book Award finalist, is a risen star in a fast-expanding galaxy of talented queer poets: Saeed Jones, Ocean Vuong, Alex Dimitrov, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Max McDonough, Richie Hofmann, Julian Randall, Keenan Teddy Smith, Jameson Fitzpatrick. This band, boys or not, is making the most of our expanded vocabulary, playing with language to make work that speaks — profoundly and unapologetically — to who they are, where they come from and where they are going. As Danez Smith says of the iconic 1987 ACT UP slogan, “‘Silence=Death’ showed us that our freedom was in our visibility.

Get your Monday started off right and head to NYT for poetry, theater, and style.