In this first book-length investigation of choreographer David Roussève and his REALITY dance company, Alessandra Williams theorizes his evening-length choreographies and dance-films as crafting a gay black man's experiences of sexuality, race, gender, illness, and ethnicity beyond the binary of historical traumas versus everyday joys. Williams persuades readers to envision how Roussève reinterprets his personal journey to establish "bittersweet" intersections across difference, such as his choreographic attention to his queer black story of HIV and AIDS alongside the memories of his Creole sharecropper family members in Louisiana or the experimental possibilities of world dance practitioners. Rooted in dance, gender, and sexuality studies, this book mobilizes ideas regarding the position of queer performance as "black dance" and the role of African American postmodern choreography in narrating experiences of globalization. It further examines the place of multicultural dancing bodies in expressing the intersectional layers of a queer black story and its relation to other livelihoods, especially women of color. Bittersweet renews attention to scholarship on queer embodiment and African American contributions to U.S. culture through such dance analyses as Roussève's reinvention of his biography and familial stories of the American South, his film of an Indonesian woman's diasporic journey, and his choreographic reimagining of Billy Strayhorn's queer artistic life.