Jason Okundaye’s history of Black gay life is a quiet revelation
Jason Okundaye on the unearthing of Black British queer history, the decline of brick-and-mortar LGBTQIA+ spaces and how Revolutionary Acts explores the quiet revolutions of the everyday.
WORDS BY OTAMERE GUOBADIA HEADER DESIGN BY YOSEF PHELAN “More than anything, this book has been a love letter to these men, founded on a curiosity and appetite to know about people’s lives,” Jason Okundaye writes in the final pages of his outstanding debut, Revolutionary Acts.
Indeed it is this curiosity and appetite, that steers Okundaye’s vivid vital slice of Black gay Brixton society through six radical stories – Ted Brown, Dirg Aaab-Richards, Alex Owolade, Calvin Dawkins, Dennis Carney, Ajamu X and Marc Thompson.
As a prolific writer, Okundaye’s bold and masterful prose succeeds in transfiguring gossip – slick, mad, salacious, transgressive – into something numinous; his memory work bears all the hallmarks of divine enterprise.
