Queer Radiance

This chapter, by Tyler T. Schmidt, centers on Beauford Delaney’s Self-Portrait in a Paris Bath (1971) to query the relationship between aesthetics and erotics in Delaney’s later work. Delaney’s depiction of himself as African royalty cites but also subverts European modernists’ interest in African sculpture and asks us to theorize anew a lineage of queer Africanist expression that might be drawn from Delaney to later artists such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode. The chapter also takes up James Baldwin’s narration of his public sex encounters in the essay “Here Be Dragons” (1985), placing it alongside discussions of the bathhouse by Samuel Delany, Douglas Crimp, and others. The bathhouse in Delaney’s painting is a site of queer radiance in queer time, in which the bathing Black body is linked to both a past and a future eroticism, prefiguring discourses about spaces of public sex published after Delaney’s death.