Tracing the past, shaping the future

To look forward to a better future, one must understand the past. For Dan Royles, that history may be obscured — but it’s not invisible and it can be traced back to human action.

“I want to inspire my students to question the everyday things that they take for granted, because it helps them understand their world at a deeper and more critical level and hopefully gives them a sense of possibility,” said Royles, an associate professor of history at Binghamton University. “If everything has a history, that means that whatever we don’t like about the world we live in can be changed and we have the power to change it.”

Royles studies African American life and culture and LGBTQ+ identity and community. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley — where he began as a studio architect before changing his major — and later, his doctorate from Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the winner of the LGBTQ Religious History Award.

His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, was published in 2020 by University of North Carolina Press. It was a finalist for the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. He also runs the African American AIDS History Project, a digital archive of responses to HIV/AIDS in Black America, and is a co-lead for the Miami AIDS Memorials Project, a community-engaged effort to commemorate the impact of HIV/AIDS on South Florida’s diverse communities.

As part of his research, he launched both an oral history project among African American AIDS activists and an online archive of the fight against HIV/AIDS in Black America through African American AIDS History.

“The oral history project was really crucial to my research,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to write without the oral histories. As I was doing those early interviews, sometimes people would say, ‘Oh, I have this binder of materials. Do you want to take a look at it?’ And so that’s what I started to digitize with permission. That became the basis for the digital collections project.”

Back when Royles was still a graduate student, he was told the story of Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI), one of the first black gay services organizations in the country, and its founder — a women named Rashidah Abdul-Khabeer, a black Muslim nurse. He says in this early point in his career, she didn’t fit his idea of an AIDS activist, an image shaped by white gay activists in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). That mold, in fact, was one she was pushing up against even at the time to get resources for education in Philadelphia’s minority communities.

“There was this whole dimension to a story that I thought I knew, but it just didn’t show up in that other story,” he said. “I figured, ‘I’m a second-year graduate student, I’ve been doing this for barely any time at all, and there’s probably more stories like this to tell.’ And of course, there are. In the end, I found a total of seven that became the chapters of the book.”

In the book, he presents other African American AIDS activists — including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users and Black feminists — who have pursued many approaches to slow the epidemic’s spread and address its impacts. Archival collections assisted in the work.

Royles says that his research works to figure out what’s missing from our larger narratives and then finding a way to tell those stories.

“What I think is valuable about understanding this history is not just diversifying how we think of AIDS activism, although that’s part of it. It’s that flawed narrative lends itself to shifting the blame for that disparity back onto the people who are most affected. That story readily becomes one about homophobia in the Black church or the passivity and powerlessness of communities,” he said. “In many cases, they have fewer resources than other communities, but they’re mobilizing, they’re dealing with difficult, thorny issues — but they are dealing with them.”

Finding Claude Brown

Royles is also working on a project he’s calling Finding Claude Brown, a biography of the author of the 1965 novel Manchild in the Promised Land, which shows Harlemites’ struggles to survive during the 1940-50s and Brown’s own youth spent in and out of reform institutions. White middle-class Americans at the time struggled to reconcile urban violence with the recent victories of the civil rights movement. Through Manchild, Brown created a space for himself as an interpreter of the time and its conflicts.

Using his research, however, this project hopes to look at Brown’s best-known work and of the author behind it with a more critical eye. How did he deal with the afterlife of his own success, and what does the arc of his career tell us about race and the politics of the public intellectual during his lifetime?

“He has this very mythologized life because he writes this book about his life in which, in his telling, every man and boy that he meets wants to be him and every woman that he meets wants to sleep with him. So, he’s maybe an unreliable narrator in some ways — but an interesting guide for the world of Harlem that he documents,” Royles said. “That book is going to be about pulling those things apart. The goal of the book is finding out: who was he, outside of these ways that he creates this mythology around himself and what is his life like, really, in the decades after Manchild was published?”

He first decided to explore the book as a graduate student at Temple, where he took a job teaching a course in African American history at a medium security correctional facility in New Jersey. As a last-minute replacement, he was nearly as new to the curriculum as the student inmates. Overwhelmingly, to his surprise, they responded positively to the book’s autobiographical nature.

“They were positive about how authentically they said he had captured their experience. They identified strongly with him, which was interesting, because my read of the book was from a more academically trained background, viewing him as an unreliable narrator,” he said. “Their enthusiasm for it really sparked my interest. It made me want to engage more. The project comes from this tension around the authenticity of the narrative to see what we can document from other sources, and probe what they can tell us about his life after the book was published.”

These past experiences and his dedicated work on the African American AIDS Activism Oral History Project and To Make the Wounded Whole also serve to push back against a narrative he encountered: the massive disparity in HIV infections in this country along racial lines as a relatively recent phenomenon and as a story in which African Americans are largely victims. This narrative is largely incorrect.

“We think of HIV/AIDS is an epidemic, but it is also a symptom of the inequities that persist in our society,” he said. “AIDS indexes inequality — racial, gender, sexual identity, class, immigration status. These stories show us the ways in which our vulnerabilities, and the ways that we mobilize against them, are both intersectional. So many of the people in this book are organizing at the intersection of different minority identities. They give us models for organizing against inequity and understanding the problems that we live with.”

Through it all, Royles has learned more — and still is — than he could have imagined as a student about the places, people and things that shape us. He’s happy to talk about it — but his most important lesson will always be the opposite.

“Oral history has taught me how to listen to other people and not just while waiting your turn to speak. For me, that has been transformative,” he said. “I can see how that has rebounded to other parts of my life, to my teaching, to my relationships, to how I try to engage people with empathy, especially people who don’t think like me or agree with me. Oral history has made me a better person.”