The following statement was issued by Lisa C. Moore of RedBone Press following Ernest Hardy's receipt of a 2007 Beyond Margins Award for Blood Beats: Vol. 1.

“. . . Neither mainstream nor “alternative” critics and media outlets take a meaningful look at the substance (or lack of it) in what is being sold as blackness. And academics wrap ideas and conversations in unnecessarily convoluted language and concepts that keep whiteness at the center and make it impossible for anyone who doesn’t have a vast background in Marx or Foucault to even know what is being discussed.

More crucially, black voices and perspectives are rarely, if ever, positioned as voices of authority on the spectrum of music and film that is collected here—from French film to underground hip-hop. My writing is not a “performance” of blackness in order to convince either black or white readers of my “authenticity.” And I don’t shy away from my sexuality in my writing, choosing instead to bring the depth and richness of my assorted experiences as a black man from a blue-collar background, who is gay and largely self-educated, to bear on my criticism.

Blood Beats examines popular culture from a center that is black and gay; black gayness/gay blackness is the vantage point from which the world is viewed. It’s challenging but accessible work that speaks with the language, music and passion of the present.

The goal of the collection is not to rush the fraternity of academia or mainstream critics, but to look at the political and cultural underpinnings of modern, popular American culture and highlight the ways in which homophobia, misogyny, white supremacy and class bias fan throughout the film, movies, music and videos that we all consume. It’s also both a documentation and celebration of those points of resistance that are truly revolutionary.”

—Ernest Hardy, 2004


After reading those lines from Ernest Hardy’s book proposal, and later his manuscript for Blood Beats, I thought, “What brilliance! Why has no one published him?” I subsequently learned that Ernest had, indeed, tried to get his collection of work published, but each time was told that he’d either have to make it “less black, more gay” or “less gay, more black” for marketing purposes, as if he could do either. As Ernest himself says, he writes from “a critical center that is melanin-based/feminist/pro-queer/unabashedly-leftist”—which fits wonderfully within the RedBone Press mission: publishing quality work by black gays and lesbians, and work that facilitates discussion between black gays and lesbians and the black mainstream. His work deserves to be discovered by a black gay/lesbian audience hungry for exceptional writing, and by a broader mainstream audience that needs to hear from his critical center. I’m proud and happy that PEN has recognized his brilliance with a 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award; this award is just the sort of thing to fuel those discoveries.

—Lisa C. Moore, publisher, RedBone Press