Donja R. Love: Writing Black Queer Life for the Stage

Donja R. Love writes Black queer life for the stage. A Philadelphia native, he has built a body of work — including "Sugar in Our Wounds" and "One in Two" — about love, identity, and survival in Black queer lives, stories American theater has mostly kept at the margins. Love puts them at the center, and he does it with joy as much as grief.

"Sugar in Our Wounds" is about queer love during the Civil War. "One in Two" starts from a statistic: one in two Black gay and bisexual men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime. Both plays bring depth and joy to how LGBTQ+ people of color get portrayed. They also double as declarations — that Black HIV-Positive Stories and Lives Matter — pushing back on the monolithic portrayals Black queer people usually get on stage.

Love is an activist as well as a playwright. He advocates for greater representation and works to open space for other Black and queer voices in theater. That work has earned him the Terrence McNally Award, and POZ Magazine has recognized him for what he does on and off the stage.

His method is part of the point. Love collaborates with directors and actors of color, so the people telling these stories know them from the inside. He builds dream-like, ambiguous settings in his plays that mirror the disjointed experience of being HIV-positive — the clarity and the confusion that come with a diagnosis.

It's Black History Month, and Love belongs in the record. His plays hold the complications of Black queer lives without smoothing them over, and they imagine a world where those lives sit inside our common story instead of outside it. The work comes from a plain desire: to see his community represented whole, in all its range. The plays show what art can do when it takes that desire seriously — how it can heal, and how it can challenge.

The intersection of Black and queer identity holds more stories than American theater has made room for. Love keeps writing them down and putting them on stage, and each play makes a little more room for the next one.

His work raises up voices the stage has long overlooked, and it asks something of the audience in return: listen, sit with it, let it change what you think you know about love and identity. That invitation is worth taking.