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Effects of weather variables on suicide are well-documented, but there is still little consistency among the results of most studies. Nevertheless, most studies show a peak in suicides during the spring season, and this is often attributed to increased temperatures. The purpose of this study is to test the relationship between monthly temperature and monthly suicide, independent of months or seasons, for five counties located across the United States. Harmonic analysis shows that four of the five counties display some seasonal components in the suicide data. However, simple linear regression shows no correlation between suicide and temperature, and discriminant analysis shows that monthly departure from mean annual suicide rates is not a useful tool for identifying months with temperatures that are colder or warmer than the annual average. Therefore, it appears that the seasonality of suicides is due to factors other than temperature.

Given this queer space we find ourselves inhabiting currently -one in which the past and our futures seem to demand so much of our now: What sort of moment is this in which to pose the question of black/queer/diasporas? Following Stuart Hall, who argues that "moments are always conjunctural . . . have their historical specificity; and . . . always exhibit similarities and continuities with the other moments in which we pose a question like this," this introductory essay proposes a genealogy of black/queer/diaspora work. 1 This work emerges from radical black and Third World lesbian feminist art, activism, and scholarship, and builds on the scholarly and programmatic practice of black queer studies and queer of color critique.Black/queer/diaspora work emerges in a moment in which the terms black, queer, and diaspora -between the porous strokes I have added here -have already begun to be elaborated beyond the metaphors and concepts offered by any one of these constituencies, and beyond false dichotomies of essentialism and antiessentialism. Such collections as E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson's Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, Jennifer DeVere Brody and Dwight McBride's Callaloo special issue "Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies," and a number of other works have already drawn on the lineages of black queer studies, which I turn to in subsequent sections. "Plum Nelly" and Black Queer Studies each emerge in different ways from the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium conference, organized by Johnson at the University

Intervening at the nexus of queer anthropology, black resistance, and Latin American and Caribbean culture and politics, I examine sites, modalities, and limits of “erotic subjectivity” during Cuba's Special Period in Time of Peace (Período Especial en Tiempo de Paz)—the economic crisis of the 1990s. I trace how nonheteronormative black Cubans have been reinventing ways to participate, officially and unofficially, in a number of fraught, uneven exchanges on the ground. I aim to outline a genealogy of the political possibilities for nonheteronormative black Cubans. [queer, black, Cuba, subjectivity, gender]

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