Emanuel Xavier

Emanuel Xavier (born May 3, 1970), is an American poet, spoken word artist, author, editor, screenwriter, and LGBTQ activist born and raised in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn. Associated with the East Village, Manhattan arts scene in New York City, he emerged from the ball culture scene to become one of the first openly gay poets from the Nuyorican movement as a successful writer and advocate for gay youth programs and Latino gay literature.

Born Emanuel Xavier Granja in Brooklyn, New York to an Ecuadorian mother, Xavier’s father left shortly after learning of the pregnancy. He was raised in Bushwick during the 1970s, then a predominantly immigrant neighborhood made up of Puerto Rican, Black, and Italian residents. Xavier has spoken openly about being sexually abused as a child by a family member.

During school integration efforts, he was bussed to a largely white elementary school in Queens, where he encountered racism. At sixteen, after coming out as gay to his mother and her live-in boyfriend, he was forced out of the house. He survived as an underage sex worker along the Christopher Street West Side Highway piers and entered the 1980s ball scene, becoming associated with the House of Xtravaganza and building relationships with figures later seen in the documentary Paris Is Burning.

Xavier eventually returned home under strict conditions and completed his diploma at Grover Cleveland High School (Queens). He attended St. John’s University, earning an associate’s degree in communications before leaving school and moving to the West Village, where he became involved in New York City’s gay nightlife and worked as a drug dealer. He later found steadier work at A Different Light (bookstore), where he first came into close contact with queer literature and community-based arts circles. Xavier has described poetry as the outlet through which he began to process trauma, identity, and anger.

In the mid-1990s, Xavier helped introduce spoken word poetry to LGBTQ+ audiences by organizing the monthly series Realness & Rhythms in the basement of A Different Light (bookstore) in NYC. He self-published his first chapbook, Pier Queen, in 1997. The collection has been noted for its thematic ties to works such as Tongues Untied by Marlon Riggs.

With encouragement from legendary ballroom figure Willi Ninja, Xavier founded the House of Xavier in 1998 and launched the annual Glam Slam competition. Originally hosted at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and later the Bowery Poetry Club, Glam Slam blended ballroom performance with spoken word, and at times collaborated with the House of Xtravaganza.^{[citation needed]}

His autofiction novel Christ Like was published by Painted Leaf Press in 1999 and shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award in the Small Press category. The book was reissued by Rebel Satori Press in 2009 as a tenth-anniversary edition.

Following the events of 9/11, Xavier helped organize Words to Comfort, a poetry benefit held at the New School. His poem "September Song" was archived on the initial National September 11 Memorial & Museum website and later appeared in his 2002 collection Americano.