Craig G. Harris papers

1986-1993

Craig G. Harris was a prolific gay African-American writer, poet, AIDS activist and health educator born on April 8, 1958 in the South Bronx, New York. Harris was involved in community service from an early age, serving as president of the Co-Op City Youth Branch of the NAACP from 1972 to 1976. He attended Vassar College from 1976 to 1980 where he studied English and Education. After graduation, he worked as an advertising account executive, a news reporter for the New York Native, and an assistant to the executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

In 1986, Harris moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the National Coalition of Black Lesbian and Gays, where he coordinated the first national conference on AIDS in the black community. He was a founding co-chair of the National Minority AIDS Council in 1987 and later became the Health Education/Media Specialist for the Spectrum AIDS Project of Washington, D.C.

Harris returned to New York in 1988 to serve as executive director of the Minority Task Force on AIDS. Shortly thereafter, he started working as a consultant to the Education Department of Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), and became Assistant Coordinator of Prevention Education in 1989. He would work at the GMHC until his death in 1991 and was responsible for developing some of the first safe sex brochures for people of color, including "Loving, Caring, Sharing" and "Brothers Loving Brothers".

In the 1980s, Harris was a prominent voice of the renaissance in black gay writing and literature. A journalist, essayist, fiction writer and poet, he was an early member of Other Countries, a New York-based black gay writer's collective founded in 1986. Harris' work was published in newspapers and magazines like The Advocate, Ebony, Gay Community News, New York Native, Outweek, and The Washington Blade, and his stories and poems were collected in anthologies such as In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, Gay Life, New Men New Minds: Breaking Male Tradition, The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets, and Tongues Untied, a poetry anthology. At the time of his death, Harris was working on "Hope Against Hope," an unpublished volume of poetry exploring living with HIV/AIDS.

Harris was diagnosed with pulmonary Kaposi's sarcoma in January 1991, and died on November 26, 1991 of HIV-related complications at the age of thirty-three.