Behind the Scenes: The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project

Black History Month is often focused on prolific members of the Black community throughout history who contributed to the world in the name of betterment, and while they are incredibly important to our community, we often overlook those who are still alive and continuing to make a difference. We know that much of the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation has largely been led by Black members of the community who often don’t get enough credit for their contributions. This year, the Autostraddle team decided to focus our Black History Month coverage on the Black elders who are still here and still doing the work.

We connected with Black elders through a partnership with SAGE, the world’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of LGBTQ+ older people. Founded in 1978 and headquartered in New York City, SAGE is a national organization that offers supportive services and consumer resources to LGBTQ+ older people and their caregivers. Autostraddle was honored to talk with five Black LGBTQ+ elders, and we’ll be publishing these interviews throughout the month of February. We welcome our readers to celebrate these members of the Black LGBTQ+ community with us, while they’re still here to be celebrated.

a collaged background of paper and fabric and squggles. text reads: Behind the Scenes: The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project

These interviews have been incredible, and the project itself has been something we’ve been really proud to be able to publish. This is your support at work! Carmen, Vanessa and I discussed how best to handle the usual “Editor’s Notes” for this project. We opted to ask each of the writers who participated in the interview project to reflect on their experiences, and so, here are those reflections. Thank you so much for being members and being here to celebrate the Black elders who are here and doing the work.

xoxo,

Nico

Sa’iyda

As soon as Vanessa, our Community Editor, posted about the opportunity to interview Black elders through SAGE, I knew I had to take part in it! I love interviewing people, and getting to talk to an older Black queer person felt like a special treat.

I don’t have any queer Black elders in my life, and I didn’t realize how much I was missing that until I got off the phone with Ray Gibson, who I did my first interview with. Let me tell you, Ray is a HOOT. We talked for well over an hour, and I could have talked to him all day because it was so much fun. We laughed and laughed, and I realized that even though he’s old enough to be my dad, we could have a connection. He felt like the long-lost uncle I’ve always wanted (even though he’s not rich). It just felt so unbelievably validating to have that conversation with him. Like me, he has very little filter, and we could be honest with each other in a way that you don’t often get to be during interviews. The transcription of our interview was over 80 pages long, so there was so much that got left behind.

Doing my second interview with Barbara Abrams felt like a warm hug. She is one of the kindest women I’ve gotten to interview, and it was so comforting to speak with her. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t also a lot of fun! We shared some great laughs as she told me stories, and there was a commonality I felt with her because she lives in New York City, which is where I’m from. She also doesn’t have much of a filter, but in a very different way than Ray. She’s warm and comforting, but she takes no bs from anybody.

I developed such a closeness with both Ray and Barbara. Ray and I email each other now, which is so much fun, and I think I’m going to help edit his book when he’s ready. And I told Barbara next time that I’m in NYC, we’re going to have lunch together. This was truly a life changing experience for me, and I’m very grateful.

Dani Janae

I have relationships with people in their 80s so I was so excited for this project! I love the focus on Black queer elders during this month. Interviewing DonnaSue was so easy, I asked one question and she just started talking, hitting all of the notes I had. Our stories are different but touch in some places and I found that so special! I plan to actually keep in touch with her and that feels so exciting too.

I really got to work in all of the talking points we hit into the final doc which is why it’s so long lol. I wanted readers to see her in full light and be as enchanted by her as I was. It’s so important to see and hear our elders, to listen to them not only with the motive of learning, but just to see them as full complicated human beings.

DonnaSue was so wonderful and funny. Sometimes her jokes would catch me off guard because we’d have just been talking about something heavy. But I was totally wrapped up in her story and her language, it was a real ride.

I grew up with Black women in my immediate orbit but none quite like DonnaSue. Forming relationships with Black queer women is so important to me now, no matter their age, I just want to be surrounded by them. So this was a really wonderful opportunity that I’m so grateful for.

shea

This project was truly a dream come true for me. As a baby gay growing up outside of DC, I knew older LGBTQ+ folks existed but I didn’t know any personally. I can remember roaming the streets of DuPont Circle as a teenager, quietly ducking into Lambda Rising, and imagining what it might be to be like the folks with rainbows and graying hair who seemed so sure of themselves. Other than the fierce drag queens in the bars and clubs I went to on the weekends, I don’t remember seeing any Black LGBTQ+ elders when I was younger. To be able to interview not one but TWO elders filled my heart with so much hope and joy. Both of my parents are dead and I don’t really talk to extended family (ain’t homophobia a bitch?), so being able to connect with Don and Malcolm felt like a homecoming I’ve been desperately longing for. Both Don and Malcolm have such warm and affirming energy and their stories – their stories are full of so much love, passion, and hope.

I work in education as a Black trans person so my feeds and inboxes are often full of tragedy and despair regarding legislation and violence. These conversations were a breath of fresh air and a reminder of a past/future that is beautifully complex and defiantly bright. After our conversation, I sent Don a follow-up email telling him how much I appreciated our chat. He responded in typical “Don” fashion with a reminder that has made me feel less alone in this world. I’ll leave you with part of his note. May it warm your heart today: “…Whenever you feel alone in the world, you can call me up 24/7. I have my father’s boisterous laugh, broad shoulders right for crying on, and my mother’s arms known for giving world-class hugs. Human beings are social beings, so we all need each other to survive. This is especially true for those of us in the LGBTQ+ community…You and I are family.”

“I Don’t Want To Be Forgotten”

a black and white photo of Barbara Abrams, a Black woman and elder, is the center focal point of this collage. Beautiful collaged items including newsprint, colors, squiggles, and lines surround her. She's wearing a sweatshirt that says Brooklyn on the front.

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

Barbara Abrams works towards the betterment of LGBTQIA elders in New York City. Talking to her was like a warm hug. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Sa’iyda: Hi Barbara, thanks for your time today.

Barbara: Thank you so much for considering me for this call.

Sa’iyda: I’d love to know a little bit more about you, as a person. Maybe tell me a little bit about your childhood, your upbringing, and how it led you to the work you do and the person that you are now.

Barbara: My fantasies were television movies, like Annie Oakley. I always liked and was admired by women that fought back. They didn’t let a man push them around. In other stories on TV, the women were always catering to the man, no matter what he said. In reality, my mother was being beaten by men. I just felt like, that is my mother and I am going to save the day. Because I am not going to let this man, who doesn’t even smell right in my world, in my head, come to you. You let him come to you, you let him come in our house. But he’s not kind to you. And you said to me that if I ever get married one day, make sure I look at the man’s shoes. And they should be shiny, and they never should have holes in their socks. But every man she brought home, that’s how he looked.

Sa’iyda: Interesting.

Barbara: I said, “My God. I think she’s trying to save me, but she’s also afraid that I’ll make the wrong choice because she knows her choices are what they are. And she sees me, I’m her firstborn and I’m coming to save you.” I would come at those men with anything that I could find, that I knew would cause some bodily damage. And then that’s when I was just not afraid and saying, “You’re not going to continue to hit my mother the way you were doing. And I saw it, it’s not going to happen.” So I would hurt them. Well, I’d find things and I’d hide my weapons, my arsenal, I’d just hide it. And whenever that kind of situation occurred, I’d come out and the next thing my mother knows is I’m in the room and I’m wailing on someone.

That’s the way that happened, time and time again. And then after seeing that, Annie Oakley wasn’t really making it for me. I tried sitting with Gunsmoke, Miss Kitty was all right, but she wasn’t really doing it for me really. And then along came somebody named Mary Tyler Moore, and she lived in something called an apartment, in this place called New York. And I said, “I like the way this woman seems positive about herself, she knows what she wants and she lives alone. So living alone must be really nice.” So I decided… I was fresh out of high school and my mother and the neighbor next door wanted me somehow to marry the boy next door, which was the neighbor’s son.

I said, “Mommy, you want me to marry this boy next door?” I said, “I will kick his ass.” I cursed and that was a no-no. But that’s what I said. And she said, “You are going to marry that boy. He won’t beat you.” I said, “What? Mommy, who beats who around here?” So she just said, “Get in that house now and put on your good clothes.” Because we were obviously going to some kind of courthouse, because I don’t remember any of this. I was 18 or 19, fresh out of high school. And we did this. And then right after that, was Vietnam.

Sa’iyda: Oh wow, okay.

Barbara: I mean, he went right away, like the next day. In that day and age they drafted you by your first and last name, and his name was Abrams. So is mine. I kept the name. So he was off to the war and he would come back home on anything that was moving back to Florida. And to check on me, he would hide between houses across the street and all of that, to see if anybody was coming by. I couldn’t take the jealousy stuff. I had a dog, he used to kick the dog. I told him, “If you ever do that again… it just won’t be pretty. I don’t want to fight, but I will protect what I love. You know I don’t love you. You know that. You know this was your parent and my parent. This was their idea, it wasn’t mine.”

It just never got right for him. He couldn’t keep a job because he would tell his boss — my uncle told me this and then I eventually got it from him — that his wife was sickly and he had to leave the job because she had to go to the hospital.

Then I found out that he was doing this and I said, “I want to have a discussion with you, but you are not allowed to talk.” And he looked at me and he was getting ready to say something. I said, “If you say one word, you will never see me again and you’ll always wonder why.” So he didn’t say anything and I said, “I am going to leave you. I’m not going to tell you when, but I’m going to leave you. So I thought you should know that. It’s not like somebody abducted me or anything like that. There’s nothing here for me.” And he said, “But I don’t do anything.” I said, “It’s not you, it’s just that I don’t like you and I don’t love you.”

I was very straight up, I always have been. He looked at me like it wasn’t real and he went to work. And when he went to work, driving the car that we had, as soon as I saw the car turn the corner, I pulled my yellow steamer trunk from under the bed. I had purchased the trunk first and then I purchased five articles of new clothing. My mother always said to me, “Always know what you’re doing…” She was a good advisor, but she didn’t live the advice that she gave me. But she was a good advisor. She said, “Always be prepared to live your life for whatever you want.” I didn’t say, “Well, I didn’t want this.” I just said, “Thank you, Mommy.” I bought five articles of clothing, little by little, and put them in the trunk that was under the bed. And I washed my underwear that I had, that I owned, every night. Underwear and socks every day. So that everything was always clean, whenever that day or that moment came.

Sa’iyda: That you needed to go.

Barbara: Yeah. That’s how I live to this very day. If I’m going to do something, I never do it immediately, I think about it first. And then when I feel like I’m certain, no matter what, then I make that decision and I don’t need people to talk to me about anything. Because I’m sure about my life. I’m only talking about my life, doesn’t involve anyone else but me. So I like for people to not try to give me advice. I know who I am. I left, and about six months later, I saw a lawyer here in New York, and had the lawyer send him notifications that I’m asking for a divorce. And my mother gave me his phone number and I told him, “You need to sign those papers because I’m paying for the divorce and you don’t have to pay out of pocket anything.” Then that was that. Because there was never going to be anything different, never ever. And he said, “But I don’t want this, [I don’t want] anybody to think I did anything.” I said, “Listen, I’m telling you what you need to do and that’s it. I’m not going to talk to you long. I know you heard me, sign the papers.” He signed it and he sent them back, and I got a divorce. I still have the papers.

Sa’iyda: Wow.

Barbara: I’m just so excited about that. That’s years and years ago. He’s since died and they tried to get me to take his benefits from his death, as his wife. I said, “I am not your brother’s wife. And I never was. I don’t want things to be more complicated for your young mind. Just accept the fact that I was never his wife. Okay? I know he wanted me to be, but I’m not.” That was the end of it. When I came here [to New York], I asked my mother one day, abruptly to her, “Would you take me to the train station?” She said, “Yes, baby. When?” I said, “Now.” And she said, “Okay.” She didn’t ask me any questions because she knows how I live.

I’m dropped off at the train station, it comes into Penn Station. I see Macy’s when I come up to the street. I know [Mary Tyler Moore] lives around here somewhere. Just because in the movies of course, she threw her hat up—

Sa’iyda: Hat up in the air, right. Yes.

Barbara: So I said, “She lives around here somewhere. But that’s okay, I’ll see her eventually.” My first apartment was 110th Street at Central Park West. It was July of ’69. And that was the junkie era, where people were just bowing down, falling, almost to the street but never really landing. That junkie bow, that’s the name for it on the street. And I went into this building and I immediately asked the super of a building, “Do you have an apartment?” It was like $50 a month or $25 a month at that time. And you were brought up to this little small place and no windows or view or anything, but it didn’t matter. And the super said to me, “Ma’am, close your door young lady.” I said, “Get out of my apartment. You don’t tell me what to do.” Of course when he left and some crazy looking man passed, I might do it… I’m from Florida, we don’t lock anything.

Sa’iyda: You got to lock those doors in New York.

Barbara: I had to learn quick, but I had to learn my way. I saw the evidence that I needed to close that damn door. There was this crazy little man, who looked in at me, and I’m like, “This is my home. You don’t look at my home.” I closed the door, and when I did, I went to pull up the blind to look out the window — all I saw was a cement wall. Like in I Love Lucy or something. So I went out to just kind of figure it all out. Where am I? I sat on the bench at Central Park West and watched yellow taxis go by. I had never seen that many cars.

Sa’iyda: Coming from Florida, that had to be a huge culture shock.

Barbara: It was. But I was enjoying it. That’s the thrill I wanted. “Oh, look at all of these cars. Look at all these taxis. Wow, this is amazing.” And eventually, I found out what the Village was. I knew nothing, I’m just curious to find out about my life. What am I doing? I went to the Village and I used to sit on the street because this was the hippie era.

Sa’iyda: East Village or West Village?

Barbara: It was the West Village between West Village and Sixth Avenue. That side. Sit right there on the street and everybody with their bandanas around their heads, and punky, crazy looking clothes. Because I’m from Florida, everything’s got to be dressed right. I had to get me some jeans and look like everybody else. And start singing folk songs and all of that. So after that era, I went into the super dance era — it was David Mancuso, white guy from Yonkers, that came up with this idea of spinning music all at the same time in his apartment called The Loft. And all of the musical people, Diana Ross, all of these people used to be dancing right next to you. But it wasn’t about fan loving, it was about just dancing.

Sa’iyda: And having a good time.

Barbara: And having a good time. I’ve never been a drug person ever. I drank, I never, ever ordered beverages, I’ve never smoked cigarettes, I’ve never smoked anything. But I was around all of my friends that did smoke and I was the roller. I was the person that used an album cover and a card from a deck of cards, and faced off this big batch of… it looked like weed from a bush. And you rolled it up, crack it up, and used the card until the pieces that you were going to roll up in this tobacco was ready for whoever was going to smoke it to smoke it. I was always in a cloud — like the president [Clinton] said… somebody said he never inhales. But I was in it, so I had to be high to some degree.

Sa’iyda: You were around it, so there’s no way you weren’t.

Barbara: Well, around it because that’s who all of my friends were. Everybody smoked and did some kind of quaalude or something. And I just had fun all the time. Just danced day and night, until I got older. Then you just slow it down and then you go to parties. A friend at the time used to give parties by the World Trade on Sundays. You go there from three o’clock in the afternoon until 11pm that night.

And you just danced. You danced the whole time. Dance was like heaven to me. And then you grow some more, you mature more. I still worked, the job that I had at that time was at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I had a responsible position — I’m proud of myself for doing all this. I didn’t have a college degree. I earned one, my job paid for it in full.

As long as I had an A performance, they paid for it. So I’m just proud of myself because everything I ever did, in terms of living your life and taking care of yourself appropriately and being financially able to sustain your life and your choices, I did that for myself.

Sa’iyda: So when did you figure out or have inklings, or fully understand, that you were gay?

Barbara: Just before I left Florida, the woman I call my best friend, lived down the street. Her sister was gay. She used to come back and forth home, whenever she felt like it. And it’s the way she dressed and the way she walked down the street. People would pull back the curtain, my mother and her sisters, anybody else that was an adult. I’m not allowed to look at what they’re looking at, because I’m a child.

But I saw her and I was impressed with how she carried herself. Because she knew, had to know everybody was peeking. It’s Florida, it’s a neighborhood. You know that’s what people do.

She wouldn’t care. She’d just give a walk, she’d give a performance for the eyes. And she’d just do her walk thing. And I just thought it was so classy and just so elegant. I just said, “I like that.” And one day I’m sitting on the steps, you can call them stoops or you can call them steps, of my home, and she passed by. Because I had moved from my mother’s house, I had my own house. And I’m sitting there, playing with my puppy and she said, “Hi.” And I said, “Hi.” And she said, “Can I come over?” I said, “Of course.” And she came over and she sat on the steps with me. And she just said, “So how long have you been living here?” I said, “Not that long. I always lived with my mother down the street.” We were just doing fly-by-night talk. All of a sudden, she kissed me.

Sa’iyda: Oh!

Barbara: Yes. She just abruptly kissed me. I don’t know, maybe she saw something I didn’t even know yet. And I said, “I think you better go home.” And she said, “Okay.” Her mother had built on the side of their home, an apartment for her just to live her own private life. So I went inside because my mother always preached to me… My mother’s very spiritual, very holy and all of that. And I was just the opposite.

So I went in the house, my home, and I sat on the bed and I looked in the mirror, and I waited for an hour. What I was waiting for was for a fang to fall out of my mouth and I’d become monstrous looking, and not recognize myself as a demon. If you did things like that woman, you become monstrous by God. Gave me one more reason to think God ain’t right. So after waiting an hour, I felt that was sufficient.

I didn’t see any distortions of myself. So I went to this woman’s house and I said, “It’s Barbara.” She opened the door and I did to her what she was doing to me. I don’t know where that came from, but I knew it just felt comfortable and it felt right. And then I said, “Okay, I got to go.” And then the next thing I knew, I was trying it out on another friend, who was married to this guy.

We were talking and we were in her bedroom window. Leaning in the window, both of us, looking at children playing. And it was in the afternoon, late, and she turned… We were very close in body, in this window. And she turned and she looked at me, and I looked at her and we had eye contact. And neither one of us was removing ourselves from that eye contact. So I took the lead because I felt like I’d kissed my best friend’s sister—

Sa’iyda: You already kind of felt comfortable at that point.

Barbara: I felt very comfortable at that moment. I kissed her and she liked it. She told me, she said, “I like the way that felt.” I said, “Oh, you did? You want to do it again?” She said, “I’m scared.” I said, “Well, let me know when you’re not scared.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll leave.” And when I saw her again, she told me she was afraid I’d come back to Florida. She told me she was afraid that she wanted to see me. We had an intimate encounter. And she said she was in love. I’m like, “Oh. You can’t. You can’t be in love. I don’t even know about this part yet. But that can’t be right.” So I said, “Think about it and we’ll talk the next time I come.”

Sa’iyda: You’re exposing them to something they had no idea about.

Barbara: So now I’m back in New York again and I had met two different guys on two different occasions. This one guy, and he looked like a bodybuilder, but when it came time to want to be intimate with me, because he did all the poses and all of that, I’m like, “Oh my God. Look at this guy. There’s no way I could be with him. I just can’t do it.” I could never feel anything toward a man. I could like him as a person, that looked nice and handsome, but I could never… You can’t touch me. So I just accepted the fact that I truly was gay. I had to be gay. That was my acceptance of myself. I made an announcement in my own head that I was a gay woman.

Sa’iyda: And did you have the language and understanding of what that meant, at that time?

Barbara: I knew that it meant I like women. I like the same sex as myself, because that’s the way I explained it to my mother. I had her come to New York, to know where I lived, and to see where I lived, so that she’d know that I was fine. And there was no trouble or reason for her to worry about me taking care of myself. She said, “I want you to have a grandbaby for me. I want a grandbaby.” I said, “Well Mommy, you have to talk to Lamar…” That’s my brother. “About that. Maybe he can have you some grandbabies because I like women.” She says, “Lord, have mercy Jesus. Barbara Jean.”

So I’m just looking at her and I said, “Mommy, what do you think?” She said, “You just can’t go around having sex.” I said, “Do you think that’s what gay is?” And she said, “Isn’t that what it is?” I said, “No, it isn’t. I haven’t even had sex yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. I don’t know what it is. How you really get into it. I don’t know any of that. I just know I like women and I will not be having any children because I will not have an encounter with a man.” And she said, “Lord, have mercy Jesus.”

She just didn’t know how to accept that, but she knew that I made her life comfortable. That’s what she knew for sure. So she just decided to go smoke her cigarette.

Sa’iyda: You put her outside. I love it. So, how did you become an activist and how did you do the work where you speak about your experience?

Barbara: Because I’ve been to many centers where socially, people gather as LGBTQ people, like GRIOT Circle. Once I retired, I knew the woman that started the place called GRIOT Circle, Regina Shavers is her name. She’s deceased. But I felt like I needed to give back by giving my body and time, and energy, and my knowledge about just life in general as a principal status, by being there. I had the time. I didn’t have anything that I had to do, I could be there every day. And because of the type of person that I am, if I’m going to give you my time, I’m going to give you my time a hundred percent. And the people there, where I was a volunteer, saw that. And the next thing I knew, I was having responsibilities. I’m like, “Wait a minute. I shouldn’t be having keys to the office. I shouldn’t be taking money to deposit in the bank. I shouldn’t be having this responsibility. These are employees who have responsibility.” They liked the way I function.

And all those things mattered. If something had to be cleaned, it was cleaned properly. If something was broken, it was fixed properly. Things just had to be right, they could not be shabby. In the beginning, we started with one room, in the YWCA here in Brooklyn. And then we went from there to a big functioning building, to the fifth floor. And that’s where I was spending all of my time, there. So little by little, when people would come in to socially benefit from this senior place, they’d come in with knowledge from anywhere, varying places. And that was also helpful. So whenever I’m anywhere, I talk about the conditions of things that I know, living from this position of how I live my life.

Sa’iyda: Right. And how did you get involved with SAGE?

Barbara: I saw them someplace. I think I was probably working, again, volunteering with GRIOT Circle and SAGE came into place. And then it became a partnership. So therefore, I joined SAGE. And then if something else was around, promoting themselves as LGBTQ+, I joined that too. I join everything. And this way, I’m over here for a minute, I’m over there for a minute, but I’m consistently doing the same thing. I don’t want to be forgotten.

Sa’iyda: Why is it important to you, not only to do these things but to, as you say, not be forgotten?

Barbara: Enough of us don’t promote ourselves because we’re still hung up behind the wall. We hung up behind that curtain. Young people are not, older people still hide.

Sa’iyda: Why do you think that is?

Barbara: Because of society. They don’t want to be judged in a stereotypical way, the way my neighbor asked me, “Are you gay?” And saying, “I didn’t know. I didn’t see you that way.” We deal with politics every day. So you don’t need people that are just like you, in the same manner, to make life rough. We don’t need that. So just be respectful.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. Well, we have been talking for just about an hour, so I am going to let you go on with the rest of your day.

Barbara: It feels like it’s been 10 minutes.

Sa’iyda: I know. I just looked at the time, I was like, “Oh my goodness. We have been talking for almost an hour.” But this has been absolutely lovely and enlightening, and I appreciate your time so very much.

Barbara: Well, it’s been terrific talking to you. Thank you very, very much.

“I Needed To Create Something To Save Myself… That’s What I’ve Done”

a black and white photo of Malcolm Reid, a smiling Black gay man and elder, is the center focal point of this collage. Beautiful collaged items including newsprint, colors, squiggles, and lines surround Malcolm.

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

I can count the times I’ve been to Atlanta on one hand — once on a family vacation and another time, almost twenty years later, for work. Both times, I found myself wondering what it would be like to exist in a space so rich with Blackness, charm, and melanated queer community — what possibilities exist in a richness that defiantly merges past, present, and future? Last month, I got some answers and the results are shared in the beautiful transcript below.

I spent an hour in conversation with Black Atlanta’s gay uncle, Malcolm Reid — a passionate advocate and community organizer who’s spending “retirement” creating affirming spaces and programs for HIV-positive elders. Despite calling Atlanta home for the past four decades, I immediately hear New York in Malcolm’s voice when he talks of the wonderful relationship he had with his mother and his upbringing. “Atlanta is home,” he asserts though. In our conversation, we cover a lot — growing up Black, boy, and not-yet-gay in New York City, coming out, falling in love with Atlanta and his husband of 26 years, aging with HIV, and the importance of community for Black LGBTQ+ elders all over.

At 65, Malcolm Reid’s journey of finding self, home, and fighting like hell is one that reminds us that there is nothing more beautiful than building the life we deserve with the ones we love.

shea: Let’s start at the beginning – where are you from? What was growing up like?

Malcolm: So, I’m 65 years old. I was born in 1957 at St John’s Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. For the first four and a half years of my life, I lived in Brooklyn. And then my mother and father separated. So we moved to the Bronx and moved into Castle Hill Projects. In Brooklyn, we were living in Brevoort projects. Then we moved to the Bronx to Castle Hill Projects. I will say that back then the projects were the “lower middle class,” and “mid-middle class” housing for people. My mom always said that people that lived in the projects back in those days all had good jobs. They all wore uniforms to work. They were either nurses, cops, people that worked for the city or the post office, or whoever.

My mom was a nurse and it was just her. Growing up, we struggled but my mom always made sure that whatever she had to do, we (my sister and myself) were going to go to Catholic school and we were going to get the best education we possibly could. So with the help of her mother, they made sure that we had the best upbringing as kids as we possibly could. Then later on, she met a man and had my two other little sisters. So then we were a family of four with a single mom living in the projects. And I mean, we knew that we didn’t have everything, but we didn’t know that we were poor. You know what I mean?

My sister and I attended a Catholic high school, but my two younger sisters were the first kids in the family to go to the public school system. Mom was really cognizant of the fact that I was the only boy in the house and she didn’t want me in public schools. Even back then, she didn’t want me in public schools. So she made sure that we both graduated from Catholic high schools.

That was my upbringing. I was very much a typical boy – playing basketball and football, going to the community center, and all that New York stuff. I was hanging out in the street and doing all of that, getting in trouble, and all of that good stuff.

shea: You mentioned your grandparents helping take care of you. Can you talk a little bit more about the relationship with your grandparents and the intergenerational care network that helped raise you?

Malcolm: Oh yeah, I’d be happy to. Actually, I just want to take a minute to tell my grandfather’s story because it is the story of Black America. My grandfather was a twin, his name was Herman, and his brother’s name was Thurman. I never met Thurman — Thurman died. I can’t remember how old he was when he died, but he died long before I was born. But one day, my grandfather and his brother left Wilson, North Carolina, and they walked to Richmond, Virginia, got on a freight train, and ended up in New York City.

I always tell people, had the train ended up in Chicago, that’s where we would’ve been born. If the train ended up in Los Angeles, that’s where we would’ve been from because when they got on the train, they didn’t know where it was going. They just knew that they had to get out of the south. So, he got to New York and met my grandmother, and my grandfather and grandmother were together for 67 years before my grandfather passed.

When my mother and father broke up, my grandparents knew my mom was going to need help and they made sure that she was able to move from Brooklyn to the Bronx so that we could all be close together. They lived in the projects as well. Even though he wasn’t in the house with us, my grandfather was pretty much the man in my life. My father was around. He would come around and give my mother his little $30 a week or a month or whatever it was, but my grandfather was the person who taught me how to drive. My grandfather was the person who just made sure that I knew that it was about being a man — taking care of your family, taking care of your sisters, and doing all of that, because like I said, I was the only boy.

Now, I will interject and say that when I was eight years old, my father came by to give my mother some money. I think I was acting up, and my mother was always like, “I’m going to tell your father when he comes.” So she went and told him I’d been acting up and he came over and he did what parents did back in those days — he spanked my butt and then told me that I was the man of the house now. I was eight and I was the man of the house.

At my mom’s funeral, my sister reminded me of what happened next. She said, “yeah, and a couple of weeks later when you were walking around puffing your chest out, talking about you were the man of the house, mom grabbed you and pulled you to the side and said, ‘You are not my husband!’ Because I was bossing my sisters around and telling them what they should be doing. I was a bit of a terror back then!

My grandparents lived in the building directly across the street from my grade school. Their windows faced the school and my grandmother was always in the window watching what was going on. In New York, back in those days, the schools had a schoolyard, but they would also close the street so that the kids could play out in the street. If we were out in the street or in the schoolyard, my grandmother could always see. And whenever there was anything going on, she was on the phone calling my mother, “Malivene, you need to come up here after you get off of work!”

So yeah, it did take a village. Our friends’ parents and grandparents were always in the window looking out and seeing what was going on in the street. That’s how I grew up.

shea: That idea of a village just seems so different from mainstream culture today. A lot of kids aren’t outside, you don’t really talk to your neighbor. It’s so different from even the times when I grew up. Back then, it seemed like we knew everyone on the block and just living community.

Malcolm: And not only that but, Ms. Jones could come up to my mother and say, “Hey, I saw Malcolm on the basketball court doing so and so,” and my mother wouldn’t even ask any questions. She’d come home and spank my ass, because Ms. Jones had no reason to lie on me, right? Imagine telling parents today, “hey, I saw your child doing this or that.” They’d just look at you and say, “mind your own business.”

shea: Yeah. I remember growing up that if I was at my grandmother’s house or at church and one of the other old ladies saw me being mischievous, they would spank and then before I could get home, they would call and my grandma would get on me too!

Malcolm: Exactly.

shea: It was a community effort, definitely. But yeah, times are definitely changing.

Malcolm: Indeed.

shea: I want to just talk more about your relationship with your father and your grandfather, especially being a gay Black man. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Were you out to them? What were your relationships like?

Malcolm: No, I did not come out until I was 28 years old. I moved from New York to Atlanta when I was 23. And I moved to Atlanta so that I could be gay. There was such a stigma back then. My father’s favorite word was faggot. As I was becoming a teenager, he tried to be a part of my life, but he really wanted to be my buddy. He wanted to hang out. He wanted to teach me how to do all the “manly” things — how to go out to the club, how to drink, how to smoke cigarettes, how to do all of that stuff. Just feeling that stigma of growing up in the projects and the barbershop and just on the basketball court, playing basketball in school, and laughing at sissies and all of that stuff — I knew that I could not be gay in New York, so I hid it.

I started driving a cab in New York when I was 18 and those were my first sexual encounters. I would meet guys down in the Village and have little anonymous sexual hookups, but I was still very, very scared and very, very intimidated.

When I moved to Atlanta, I started to explore. My first ever relationship was here in Atlanta. After I got comfortable with him, I said, “Okay, it’s about time that I tell my folks.”

shea: And you were 28 then?

Malcolm: Yes and by that time, my older sister had moved down here as well. For me, that was kind of stressful too, because like I said, I moved to Atlanta to be gay, and now here she comes, right? I’m like, “why you got to come down here?” But she came down, and so she told me she was going to go to take the train back to New York to visit. So I wrote a letter to my mother telling her that I was gay. I also put in the letter that if she decided that she wanted to disown me, I would understand.

I wrote that in there because over those five years, between the age of 23 and 28, becoming involved in the gay community here, I knew plenty of people, especially from the south, whose parents had disowned them. Some of my best friends were people that didn’t have any place to go. They lived in shelters or whatever. So I made sure that I said that. The letter was cathartic for me because I knew that once I wrote that letter, I was free. Once I handed it to my sister, I was free. I told her, I said, “I’m going to give you this letter. Do not read it. Give it to mom when you get there.”

That was the first night that I went to a gay club in Atlanta. I went to a club called Foster’s, which then became Loretta’s. I had a great time that night. I mean, I just partied and I got home at God knows what time in the morning. Then, I spent the next day just pacing the room, waiting for the phone call.

About three o’clock in the afternoon, my mom calls me and she’s being quintessential New York mom, she’s talking about everything else but [the letter]. She’s like, “Your father’s had a flat tire. Your father decided to come to help me pick up your sister. I don’t know why he decided to be bothered, but he did. And of course, your father and his old raggedy cars, he had a flat tire,” and da, da, da. And I’m sitting on the phone thinking, Jesus Christ.

So finally she says, “So your sister gave me your letter and I read it. I have a question.”

I said, “What’s that, ma?”

She said, “Don’t you know your mother loves you?”

And I said, “Yeah, mom, I know.”

And she said, “So what’s this nonsense about me disowning you?”

I said, “Well, mom, I had to put that in the letter because I know so many people who that has happened to.”

She said, “Well, I’m not them. So don’t even!” Basically, so don’t go there with me. And then the next question she asked was, “Do you have somebody special in your life?”

And I said, “Yeah, I do right now.” She said, “Well, that’s good.”

Then we went on with the rest of the family conversation. Eventually, she asked, “Do you want me to tell your father?” I said, “I really don’t care. If you want to tell him, fine, you can.” She said, “What about your sisters?” I said, “Well, Kim and Nicole,” who were still living in New York at the time, I said, “Yeah, you can tell them.” I said, “I’ll tell Karen [the sister who moved down to Atlanta] when she gets back here.” So she said, “Okay.” That was our agreement, and that’s where we left it.

Over the years, my mom was a godsend to me because she was a nurse. In 1997, when I found out I was living with HIV, I was able to talk to her about things. A lot of my friends didn’t have that resource. She was able to tell me a lot of information. My mom is one of the reasons why I never got on AZT. My mom was like, “No, that’s killing people. Don’t do that.” She said, “They talk about it’s prolonging life, but it’s not giving anybody quality of life.” She said, “So don’t do that.”

And as my mother got up in age, I was able to move both her and her husband down here to Atlanta in 2012 and she lived down here until she died in 2020.

shea: Wow what a journey. So it sounds kind of like Atlanta is kind of home for y’all — or do you still consider New York home?

Malcolm: Oh no. I mean, sports — I’m still a Yankee fan, a Knicks fan, and a Giants fan. I will carry that with me always, so I’m a New Yorker at heart, but Atlanta is home. My whole family’s here now. All my sisters are down here. I’ve got friends and a solid community here. Atlanta is home.

shea: How did you choose Atlanta? I feel like a lot of people view New York City or San Francisco or LA as the places you want to go when you’re coming out. If you’re not in one of those places, you want to get there. So what drew you to Atlanta? How did you get there?

Malcolm: Like I said, I was driving a cab and my cousin — well, he’s not really my cousin – we grew up together as cousins. One day, he wrote me a letter. He was at Clark. It was Clark College back then before it became Clark Atlanta University. He was telling me how wonderful Atlanta was and how Black Atlanta was. Not knowing that I was gay, he was, “Man, do they got some fine honeys down here, man. You need to come down here.”

He eventually invited me to come down in September of 1980. I came down for a couple of days. I was supposed to come down for like a weekend and hang out. I ended up staying for three weeks, and really, really fell in love with the city. I still didn’t explore my gay side, but still was enamored with the Blackness that was here. It was like, not only were there Black people here, but Black people were here doing well. I also was drawn to the history. I’ve always been a political junkie. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was always about the Black Panthers, the Civil Rights Movement, and all of that stuff. So just seeing where Martin Luther King, Jr. had been and where all of this history happened was just amazing to me.

So when I went back to New York, I decided to drive my cab until the wheels fell off, make as much money as I could, and move back down to Atlanta. And that’s what I did. I moved down to Atlanta on December 18th, 1980. Before moving there, I did have this long list of cities that I was going to live in. I was going to explore the country. I was going to move to San Diego and I was going to live in San Francisco. I was going to go to all of these places. I parked my butt in Atlanta and never moved.

shea: I mean, Atlanta’s a great place to be though.

Malcolm: Oh yeah. Looking back on my life, I was definitely supposed to be here.

shea: That’s beautiful. Can you tell me more about your life in Atlanta and how it’s changed over the past few decades?

Malcolm: As I mentioned, I started dating a man when I was 28. I started to feel secure. The only thing about that relationship was that he was a little closeted too. He had his friends, but they didn’t go out much. They had house parties and everything else, but they kind of stayed to themselves. I wanted to explore more, so I moved on and met somebody else that had more friends, was doing more things, and was more out in the community. And so over the years, I’ve just continued to be a part of this community. Right now, if I walk into a bar with someone, they’ll say, “Dang — do you know everybody?” and I go, “Yeah, I’ve kind of been here for a long time.”

But the best thing about Atlanta is what happened in ’97 — I met the man who is now my husband. We’ve been together for 25 years. Now we’re both 65 and elder and we just have a lot of friends who feel like family.

shea: Ohhhhh! Tell me about your husband and all of the lovey-dovey things! Where did you meet?!

Malcolm: We met in the club, girl. You don’t meet a good man in the club! Well, I did. I had always been in long-term relationships. I was dating a guy for a while who was super jealous all of the time. I broke up with him, met this other guy, and he just was abusive — not in a physical way but abusive like he was trying to find himself, and quite frankly (excuse my French, there’s no other way to say this) he was fucking everybody in Atlanta. But, I was in love and so devastated.

So my friends told me, “You need to stop these long relationships. You just need to date, go out, and have dinner with guys.” So I did that. I dated a couple of people. I met one guy. He was really, really nice. We dated for a while but then it got time for us to have sex and it was horrible. So I got mad at all my friends. I was like, “Don’t ever give me advice again. I’m sick of y’all.”

After that, I called one of my friends on a Thanksgiving night and said, “I’m going to the club tonight. I’m going to have me a cocktail, and I’m going to be cute, and I’m going back to my old ways.” And he was like, “Okay if that’s what you want to do, let’s go.” So we went to Loretta’s to dance and I saw the guy that I had been dating. So I went upstairs to the bar and I was sitting at the bar all by myself — this big ole bar. They had just constructed this new bar at Loretta’s and it was huge. I looked across the bar and the bartender was on the other side of the bar talking to this group of people. When I looked at the group of people he was talking to, I saw this guy and was like, “Damn, he is gorgeous.” And he started looking at me!

The guy started walking around the bar toward me. Our eyes were on each other the entire time. He walked and walked and walked, and then was going to try to walk by me! And I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait — no, HELL NO!” So he’s like, “What?” And I was like, “You’ve been looking at me from way over there, I’ve been looking at you, and you just going to walk by and not say anything?” So he came over and we started talking. He bought me a drink and we started drinking. The next thing I knew, I was going down to the dance floor and I told my friend, Reggie, “Come get your coat out of my car because I’m leaving.” He was like, “You leaving? Where are you going?”

I said, “I met this dude.”

Reggie said, “You just went upstairs.”

I said, “Yeah, and I am leaving.”

We went to his place and we have been together ever since.

After we moved in together, we had a little barbecue at my house and he invited his whole family over. That night he said, “Baby, my family loves you.” I said, “That’s good. I’m glad.” He said, “No, you don’t understand. They ain’t never really seen me date anybody,” because he hadn’t really brought anybody around his family.

He said, “My nephew and my niece grabbed me and pulled me in the corner and they said, ‘Yo, Unc, don’t fuck this up. We like him.” And our families are still tight.

Working in the field I do, talking to gay men all the time, listening to the troubles that they have dating and relationships, and everything else — I realize that I’m blessed, but what I won’t do is give relationship advice. I tell people all the time, “Y’all’s problem is you keep trying to model your relationships after somebody else’s models, but you have to figure out your own path. What works for us may not work for you.” But ours does work.

shea: Amen! So do y’all have any kids of your own?

Malcolm: No, no. We have nieces and nephews. And then we literally have the Atlanta Black gay male community as nephews. I mean, if I walk into the bar, I hear “Hey, Unc!” all of the time. That’s who I am. As a matter of fact, my real nephew called me one day and said, “Uncle Kevin . . . Me and Ian are your only nephews, right?”

“Yeah!” I said.

“So how come everybody on Facebook calls you Unc?” he asked.

I said, “That’s just a term I’ve been deemed in the community.” I had to explain it to him.

shea: Yes for community! Tell me more about your work in the community and your journey living with HIV advocacy.

Malcolm: I work at an organization called THRIVE SS. And THRIVE stands for Transforming HIV Resentments into Victories Everlasting (the SS stands for Support Services). I retired from AT&T at the end of 2019. Prior to that, in 2017, I had started a program for Black gay men my age (over the age of 50) living with HIV, called the Silver Lining Project and that was under the THRIVE umbrella. So when I left AT&T, I became the program manager for the Silver Lining Project. Then in 2019, I became the Director of Programs for all of THRIVE and that’s the role I hold today. I just love being able to serve the community. I don’t get out in the street and do much outreach anymore. We’ve got more staff for that now, but I like putting together programs, making sure that the programs are working, and making sure the staff has what they need. I also do a lot of political advocacy. I’m the Federal Policy Chair for the US PLHIV Caucus. I also serve on a couple of community advisory boards and other coalitions. I try to keep my hand in policy work too because I think that that’s important.

I can’t complain. Life has been good. As a person diagnosed with HIV in the late nineties, I’m fortunate that I was diagnosed after ARTs. But let’s go back to my mom telling me about AZT. So in 1991, I read a story in Ebony Magazine about a Black man who had the “new gay plague” or whatever they were calling it at the time. I think they might have called it AIDS, but there was also HTLV-III and some other terms being used. One of the things that they said about him was that the lymph nodes on his neck were swollen. When I read that, it kind of scared me because the lymph nodes on my neck were swollen at that time. So I remember going to the phone and calling my mother. There’s a famous corner in Atlanta. There was a Krispy Kreme donut shop on the corner of Ponce de Leon and Argonne. Everybody knows that Krispy Kreme shop. It was a block away from my apartment and it had a payphone nearby. I walked to that payphone, called my mother, and told her about the article. I just started crying and said, “My lymph nodes are swollen.” She told me to calm down and said, “First of all, your lymph nodes could be swollen for a whole lot of other reasons, so let’s not jump to any conclusions. I want you to go to the doctor and they probably want to biopsy it. Let them biopsy it, let them tell you what it is.”

So I went to the doctor. The report came back a few weeks later — mostly medical jargon, but basically it was consistent with HTLV-III.

When I told my mom, she asked how I felt and I said, “Fine.” That’s when she said, “They’re going to want to put you on AZT — don’t let them do that. Just make sure you take your vitamins and make sure you eat well. It’s going to be okay. They’ll find something else.” So that’s what I did and I didn’t really think about it anymore after that. I mean I knew I had this thing, but I was feeling good and I just made sure that I kept up with my health. That was important to me.

shea: Talk to me a bit more about your policy work and organizing.

Malcolm: I’m the chair of the Policy and Action Committee for the US People Living with HIV Caucus, I am on the HIV Aging Policy and Action Coalition, and I’m on several community advisory boards for the metro Atlanta area. And you know about AIDSWatch, right?

shea: Yes, but tell me more!

Malcolm: Okay. So AIDSWatch happens every year. This year it’ll be in March. The last three years really were virtual, but this year we will be in person again — I’m looking forward to that. During AIDSWatch, we go to DC. The purpose of the convening is to make sure that we are building a community of advocates and that people know what the issues are, and what we’re advocating for — funding for the Minority AIDS Initiative, funding for the Ending the Epidemic Plan, and more, like funding to help reduce stigma, to stop policies that stigmatize gay and queer people, like in Florida for example.

I like being out at the forefront of the work and also behind the scenes, just trying to make our voices heard, my voice heard. I started the Silver Lining Project when I was working for AT&T and living with HIV. At AT&T, I had great insurance. My husband was a makeup artist with Estée Lauder, he had great insurance. We were fine. We were doing it, clubbing on the weekends, having a good time, and not thinking about anything. Then I started talking to people and they would talk about how they have to re-certify for ADAP every six months. And I was like, “What do you mean you got to re-certify for ADAP every six months? Your HIV is not going away every six months? What is happening here?” And they were like, “No, you got to re-certify to ensure your income hasn’t changed.”

I realized how that process was holding people back from life. People didn’t want to get promoted because if they got promoted, they would make more money and then lose their benefits. Other people were living on disability and then they wouldn’t come off of disability even though the medication was working and they were no longer “disabled,” because if you started working then you might reach the income level where you could “afford” your medication [without benefits]. I was like, “That’s crazy.” So I said, “Okay, let me see what I can do.”

I tell people this all the time, when you put something on your heart and the universe sees that it’s all good, the universe will send you the people or the tools that you need to make it happen.

A little bit later, I went on a Same Gender Loving Cruise and I met two friends of mine, Craig Washington and Jerome Hughes. Craig was already involved in the community and he was asked to hold a talkback at the end of the cruise about our experiences. The next thing I know, I found myself up on stage disclosing my status. When I did that, Jerome came to me and said, “Hey, I have this group that you might be interested in.” I said, “Okay, invite me.” The way he came up to me though, I was like, “Dude, is this Amway? Because you sound like Amway.” [chuckles]

So in October 2015, I went to the group — it was just all these guys in Atlanta living with HIV — some of them who I had seen on a regular basis. Half the room, I knew, because we’ve all been out in the clubs and everything else. I was like, “Holy crap. All these guys are living with HIV.” That group eventually blossomed into THRIVE. They were incorporated in December 2015. The group was founded by three Black gay men living with HIV — Daniel Driffin, Larry Walker, and Dwain Bridges. It was designed for us and by us. It’s been going strong for seven years. We are a membership-based nonprofit and we have probably the largest member organization of Black gay men living with HIV in the country.

Eventually, I started looking around, but I didn’t see anything for people my age. I would go to meetings and everything else, but everything was about young people. I was like, “This is kind of messed up and I don’t see anything for my age.” And then somebody said, “Well, there is an organization for older LGBTQ people called SAGE.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, let me go check them out.” But SAGE down here ain’t SAGE in New York [chuckles]. SAGE down here was very, very white and very, very old. It wasn’t working for me.

One day, I’m at a meeting and Larry, the THRIVE Executive Director said, “Well what have you experienced?” I responded, “Listen, I don’t see anything out there for guys my age.” He looked at me and said, “Well start it.” I looked over my shoulder, looked at him, and I was like, “Who me? Start what? I don’t know nothing about this. I work in corporate America. I don’t know nothing about no nonprofit stuff. I don’t know anything about this.”

But again, God sends you the people, the universe sends you the people. I met two guys — Claude Bowen and Nathan Townsend. The three of us sat down and we wrote a grant for the Silver Lining Project to get it funded. And it got funded, and it got funded massively. It was like a $400,000 grant for three years!

shea: Whoa!

Malcolm: And so with that money, THRIVE was able to get a building that we’re still in today and then start to gather other funds. We put together a program called Silver Skills, where we teach the members of the group about HIV and aging. What is HIV doing to your body? You may be on your retrovirals, you may feel better, but what is medical science saying about this? Why are you feeling the way you do? PTSD and trauma, dealing with growing up Black, growing up gay, growing up living with HIV, what are all those traumas? What things are you going through? Loss and depression? Many of us have lost friends and connections. Finally, the program ends with talking about stigma — what it’s about and how to overcome it.

We did that curriculum for three years. We met on a weekly basis or every two weeks with what we call Oba’s Roundtables, “oba” being the West African term meaning king or leader. We did Oba’s Roundtables on a regular basis, and then just had events and parties. One of the things that we pride ourselves at THRIVE and Silver Lining about is when you walk into this building, we don’t want you to be holding your head down and going, “Uh-no, I got HIV.” It’s about self-love. We want to have a good time. So we give great parties, we have great events. We’ve been doing that for seven years and the model is really, really successful.

Working with THRIVE and the Silver Living program, I also got asked to engage in other opportunities. I’m just known now for being able to support. I’ve turned into a policy wonk. People will say, “Okay, well if you need to know something about HIV law or whatever, criminalization, whatever, go, Malcolm has all of this stuff.” And just having the time of my life serving the people, and serving myself. And serving myself, right? Someone said, “I needed to create something to save myself.” That’s what I’ve done.

shea: Sounds like you’re staying booked and busy!

Malcolm: My husband says, “So you do realize you retired, right?” [chuckles]

Ronald Johnson, the Chair of the US PLHIV Caucus, and I joke all the time.

I’ll call and say “Hey Ronald, how’s retirement?” Ronald’s in his seventies and he’s “retired,” too. He’ll say, “Oh, it’s wonderful. I’m not doing anything.”

shea: Ah. Just sitting around. Just sitting around, relaxing — changing policy and all.

Malcolm: Yeah, we just chilling. One time, I said, “I think I’ll take up golf.”

shea: Ha! Before I let you go, I did hear you talk about just the lack of spaces and resources for gay Black men who are aging. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the lack that you see and the needs that you see. I do think in our society, so much of the funding and resources are geared toward young people, whether it’s youth or young adults. So I just wanted to know more about what you see and what you see the needs are, as more and more queer and gay people are aging.

Malcolm: Really it’s a social aspect. I remember being young and in the bar and pointing to an older guy going, “If I am in the bar at that age, please shoot me.” Now, I realize how blessed I am that nobody took me up on that because I’ll be dancing at the club tomorrow, having a good time, but I realized that having that social outlet is important. People see me and say, “No way you’re 65!” People begin to assume certain things when they age. You have to act a certain way. You can’t go out. You can’t do certain things. And that in itself makes you old. It doesn’t help you age, it makes you old.

So when we started working on Silver Lining, one of the things we said was we wanted to get people out of the house, because there’s somebody that’s saying, “Well, I can’t go to a bar anymore because I’m too old,” or, “I can’t go here because I’m too old.” And loneliness and isolation will kill you a whole lot faster than HIV will. So that’s part of our premise and goal — to make sure that people are living their full lives, enjoying themselves. It’s not just about going to a bar or a club. If that’s not you, that’s not you. But as long as you’re not sitting home going, “Oh, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.” I mean, get out. Go to a museum, take a class, do something to make sure that you’re keeping your mind active, your spirit active.

A lot of us don’t have kids and you don’t have children to come over and talk to you. So we want to make sure that we’re getting the people out there and we’re doing the things.

SAGE does a wonderful job because SAGE first seized on the notion that we weren’t supposed to be here this long. Especially If you’re living with HIV — nobody thought that they were going to get to be 65 or 70 years old. We were all supposed to be gone. But we’re here and now as we are getting older, we’re starting to see more and more of this. We’re starting to see more and more groups for older guys, because people realize, “Oh shoot, we’re still here and we got to do this.” It’s just a matter of making sure that people are living their lives to the fullest and they’re doing everything that they can possibly do to make sure that they are happy, healthy, and thriving. That’s what we need most.

shea: Yes! Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, you’re a busy person, to chat with me and share your story with me. I appreciate it.

Malcolm: Not a problem at all. I love telling these stories because, for me, it’s about letting people know there’s life after an HIV diagnosis. There’s life after 50. There’s life after 65. Get out there and continue to live your life. Don’t slow down. People ask me all the time, “When are you going to just slow down,” and everything else. I said, “I guess the day that they carry me out of here.”

Ain’t nobody trying to slow down! Life is fun. Keep doing it.

“Mother Has Lived, What Can I Say?”

a black and white image of DonnaSue, a Black butch elder, is at the center of this collage. the artist has layered newsprint, paper, and lines over the photo to create a gorgeous playful picture of DonnaSue

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

I don’t talk about it enough, but I feel very strongly about intergenerational queer relationships. I have queer friends and community members in their fifties and sixties and older, and I cherish those relationships so deeply. It’s invaluable to have a friend who has been through what you’ve been through and more, and can impart some wisdom and hope.

So, when the idea of interviewing an LGBTQ elder was presented to us, I was really excited and jumped at the chance. This excitement grew tenfold when I first emailed DonnaSue to schedule our interview. Just from our brief exchange, I could tell she was serious, vibrant, and whip-smart. When we both logged into the video chat, my nerves were eased as I was greeted by her face.

DonnaSue Johnson describes herself as a “big, black, beautiful, Bohemian, bougie, Buddhist butch.” She was born in 1956 in South Jersey, to policeman Donald Johnson and mother Sue, hence DonnaSue.

“I had a great childhood. I truly, truly did. I was born the same day my grandfather died, my maternal grandfather, who was a physician and a civil rights activist,” she says. “He went to Lincoln University with Thurgood Marshall and Langston Hughes.”

DonnaSue’s life is full of historical tidbits like this. Her father’s father was a Buffalo soldier and a reverend. Her family has a rich history, and her own life is just as interesting. She shares with me that her family was very academically focused, and that academic excellence was embraced in the home.

DonnaSue recounts one story in which her brother ran home from a day of school crying and asked “Mommy, didn’t we [Black people] do anything?” and after that moment the family bought the Black History Encyclopedia and began to learn Black history together. DonnaSue says that she is still to this day learning Black history, and we briefly talk about American civil rights activist and lawyer Pauli Murray.

DonnaSue excelled in school, and eventually made her way to college, attending the HBCU Virginia State College, now University. She says that this was a way to get the Black experience, having grown up in a predominantly white area of New Jersey.

“I majored in special education. My mom was a special ed teacher. My grandmother was an early childhood educator. I think I mentioned my grandfather. My paternal grandfather was the physician for the black community in Burlington County,” says DonnaSue. “But he also was the first president of the NAACP for Burlington County in New Jersey. I was in a marching band. I played basketball, softball, tennis. I pledged Delta.”

After graduating, DonnaSue says she was a part of Black organizations like Jack and Jill, and also was a debutante, she jokes:

“Mom tried her best to get this butch out!”

After getting her degree in teaching, DonnaSue says that career path didn’t work out for her, so she decided to enlist in the Air Force. She went into officer training school to become an officer instead of the other routes into the Air Force at the time: ROTC, academy, or 90-day programs. Her schooling took place in San Antonio, Texas.

DonnaSue and I don’t talk a lot about this time in her life.

“It’s hard to talk about this part of my life because I am a one-hundred percent disabled vet. I suffered from military sexual trauma and PTSD, and major depressive disorder, but I didn’t even know what was going on,” she says. “I didn’t recognize it until decades later. I just kept on pushing pushing pushing.”

Throughout my talk with DonnaSue, even in the moments where we are talking about something serious or heavy, she always finds a way to bring gravitas and a lightness to the topic. She always has a joke or a saying that eases the tenser parts of our talk. I learn that after the Air Force, she went into social work for 40 years.

She says her favorite gig was “emergency psychiatric crisis intervention” in an emergency room setting. There, she would determine the level of care for each person on an individual basis. Back when she started, the levels varied from, to use her words, “I give you a card and say, ‘bye, call as you need’” to “the most restrictive which would be taking away your civil rights and forcing you into treatment on a commitment status because you’re a danger to self and others.”

“We were working to assist folks in having an opportunity to live and get better with whatever they were dealing with,” she says.

I can tell what this job meant to DonnaSue just from talking to her. At times, she’s on the verge of tears remembering working with families or individuals.

Now, DonnaSue works with SAGE, the oldest and largest advocacy organization aimed toward the care of LGBTQ elders. SAGE is based in New York, where DonnaSue lives now, but also has nationwide programs.

Having worked for SAGE for more than eight years now, DonnaSue says the pandemic definitely shifted how they administered care to the elders they serve. SAGE shifted to a hybrid level of care to make sure elders had their basic needs met as well as their social needs.

At SAGE DonnaSue leads many groups, one of which is called America’s Burning, where in 2020 they covered the three P’s: Politics, Pandemic, and Protest.

“We had a community of LGBTQ seniors, mostly Black lesbians, who were these women who are so intelligent and bright. They were on top of their games in terms of wanting to know about what was going on,” she says.

The group covered topics like the Tulsa massacre and many other massacres that happened to Black Americans, and most recently covered Pauli Murray’s work.

DonnaSue says she was out during her time in the military, before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a policy. She says it was like a “witch hunt.” Stationed at Travis Air Force Base between Sacramento and San Francisco, DonnaSue recounts her first gay day parade with Sister Boom Boom and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

She says in those days, during the AIDS crisis, she was doing a lot of dating despite messaging that “lesbians don’t get AIDS,” a phrase that makes her roll her eyes.

“I’ve read ‘And The Band Played On,’ read the pages, and I’m like, ‘oh my god, I was there. I was there.’ As much drinking, drugging, fucking, and sucking that I was doing in my twenties, imagine if I was a man? I might not be here.”

In the time we had together, we didn’t get into all the juicy tidbits about DonnaSue’s dating life that I wanted to, but she tells me she’s single now after having a long-term partnership end, and regales me with the story of the 10-year polyamorous relationship she had with a married couple.

The couple had three children that called her “Aunt Donna,” and they still keep in touch to this day despite the relationship ending. She still remembers birthdays and big days for the family.

“Mother has lived, what can I say, Dani?” she laughs.

We talk much more about DonnaSue’s social worker, and she tells me about getting her Masters at Fordham University, and becoming a workaholic who didn’t have time to really process the trauma she experienced in the military.

She was a part of the first ACT team in Jersey. ACT stood for Assertive Community Treatment, and there was also PACT (Program of Assertive Community Treatment) where she saw clients who had dual diagnoses, like those that struggled with mental health and substance abuse disorders. She says it wasn’t uncommon to hear:

“Excuse me, can I please continue getting high because that helps the voices?”

“Basically, my modus operandi was ‘Do you want a cup of coffee and a piece of pie,’” she says, and you get the sense that DonnaSue deeply cared for every person she encountered during her 40 years in social work. Even though she must have seen hundreds of people, it feels like she knew them all and brought them all the highest form of care she could.

“I’ve worked with a lot of seriously and persistently mentally ill people who are also co-occuring disordered, which means they were mentally ill and chemically addicted,” she explains. “I love the job. Most recently, I was working for an adult day healthcare center for adults that had HIV and AIDS, mental illness, and chemical addiction. That was a magnificent job. You see a lot of death because folks, for whatever reason, they weren’t adherent, they weren’t compliant with their medications. Some are still with us thank goodness.”

We also talk about Buddhism, and how it has served as a place to find peace in difficulty for DonnaSue. She says that she learned that most obstacles are brilliantly disguised blessings. And that when you look at it this way, a firework goes off in your head, and that’s when you can look for solutions, options, strategies, and answers.

“I’m here to say, ‘Be you, be yourself, Celebrate whatever you want to do. It’s important.’ When I say everything happens for the best, my grandmother taught me that way before I became a Buddhist. As I got older, I said. ‘What about death? What’s good about death?’ and I figured two things out. Number one, it teaches us how precious life is. As we move forward in life and all the different decisions we have to make, always remember, life is precious. You’re going to make it.”

“The other thing is, if anyone tells you you got plenty of time, they are not a reliable source of information. It’s a bald-faced lie when someone says you have plenty of time. Look at how you were on your game today making sure we connected. This time is precious.”

At 66, DonnaSue says she is working on a project for TEDx and a 501(c)(3). She’s also working on a presentation for Yale University. She’s got irons in the fire and wants other lesbian elders to know that it isn’t too late for them, that you’re never too old to get things started for yourself.

DonnaSue also ends our talk with a little wisdom that I needed, and I hope if you need it too you can hear it.

“In our community, in the Black community, so many of us have had childhoods where we were taught by our guardians that what is said and done in the house, stays in the house. That’s what they learn and then they pass it on, it’s generational. But there’s no need to suffer anymore. There’s no need to suffer anymore. Talk therapy helps, sometimes medication is needed. Talk to somebody. It’s safe. Find somebody that works.”

We end our talk with plans to keep in touch with one another, and I’m so excited and grateful for the opportunity to get to know DonnaSue. Everything she said was something I needed to hear or made me laugh out loud on a day when I didn’t feel like laughing. It was a pleasure and an honor and I hope you love getting to know her a little more too!

“And I Said to God, Isn’t Being Black Enough? Do I Have To Be Gay Too?”

a black and white photo of Donald Bell, an older Black man with a beard and a large smile. Behind Don is a gorgeous collage filled with yellows, blacks, blues, and reds.

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

I am often the oldest person in the room. I have spent much of the last decade surrounded by LGBTQ+ youth – teaching them, reading with them, and researching them. Last summer, some of the teenagers I worked with labeled me a queer elder. I chuckled and gladly accepted it given my refutation of “the TikTok” and my love of “old folks music,” but I know I’m no elder yet. I save that title for legends like Donald Bell, a gay Black third-generation Chicagoan whose commitment to organizing and community spans more than five decades.

On a dreary Ohio afternoon in January, I dialed Mr. Bell’s number to chat. His hello was a bear hug that roared through the phone’s speaker like sunshine. “I’m sorry we’re not on zoom so I can see your beautiful face, but I’m sitting here looking at it on the website.” What a charmer. I smiled for more than an hour until we hung up. We talked about Chicago, growing up gay as a member of the Stonewall Generation, and what it means to bridge intergenerational differences as an aging member of our community. When we were done chatting, I was certain of three things regarding Donald Bell.
1. He is as brilliant as he is charming and honest.
2. He loves his city, his people, and his work.
3. He is [without a doubt] an absolute legend.

This is him in his own words, on his own terms, in a world that he is continuing to carve into something better for all of us. — shea wesley martin

On his activism

I have been an activist all of my life. I guess I was drawn into the civil rights movement in my youth. I was born right after World War II, and of course, I was intrigued by Black servicemen returning from the war, honoring and continuing to work towards the Double Victory Campaign. During the war, many Black servicemen vowed to fight against fascism around the world and then come home and fight segregation here. So that, along with Black parts of the labor movement, like A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters was all happening around me as I grew up. It was always there.

When I was six years old, Emmett Till’s body was returned to Chicago. As a child, I was not allowed to attend the services — no children were, but what I saw was how disturbed the grownups were. And this was traumatizing to me as a child, traumatizing to all of us because I mean, this was the first time I’d seen men cry in public, and the sense of urgency just reverberated through all of us. I first learned, at the tender age of six, the danger of being born into Black skin. Later on, when I was 13, The March on Washington for Jobs and Civil Rights occurred. I was too young to attend, but I did follow it all and when I started high school that year, I was part of a movement. We started what we called human relations clubs at several of the more progressive Chicago suburban high schools. So this [activism] has been a part of me for my entire life — from civil rights to all of the movements that came as a — the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement (as we called it at the time), the revival of the labor movement, and of course, the anti-war movement.

All of these things have been a part of me from my earliest youth and have carried on, not only with community activism, but with what I learned and was taught were the basic responsibilities of an American citizen. I have spent nearly 40 years as an election judge. I wasn’t interested in being a politician but I was interested in the American people getting off their butts and honoring the opportunities that they had. And that’s a huge lift. But it’s always been important to me that people get out there and they defend their civil rights by using them.

On lost histories and stories

I’m a third-generation Chicagoan. My family did not come here as part of the Great Migration; we came here long before that. My grandpa settled in Chicago just after the World’s Columbian Exposition in the 1890s. My maternal family was part of Pilgrim Baptist Church which is considered the home of gospel music. My father’s side of the family comes from another progressive Baptist church. We were steeped in that tradition. It’s very important to us, our identity, and our approaches to faith. For Black people, gospel music and gospel culture tie us to our American history because our people, African Americans, are resilient. And it has been the objective of white America from the very beginning to control us and then subsequently eliminate us. We have survived attacks on the Black body, Black identity, on the Black family dating back forever. There is no institution north, south, or anywhere else that cannot trace its legacy or “greatness” to our enslavement or the contributions of African American people. But again, that story is hidden and it impacts the way we think about ourselves but it also impacts the way that people think about us.

The first ever permanent settler of Chicago, the fastest-growing city in human history, was a Black man. We know history is whitewashed; it’s straight-washed. It’s (upper) class washed — all of those attributes of privilege are the prevailing ones that rule our histories, legacies, and our sense of belonging (or not belonging) for marginalized people.

Here in Chicago, one of the things that we’re proud of is the fact that despite New York, LA, and San Francisco being considered the “gay hubs,” we have a long and very significant history in the LGBT community. It’s here where the first homophile organization in the US was established, the Society for Human Rights. Most folks credit that to Henry Gerber who registered the organization with the State of Illinois as the secretary of the organization, but what is lost is that it was John T. Graves, an African American minister who was the president of that organization. So our LGBT library here, Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, bears the name of Gerber, but the legacy of Graves is lost. And that story — the erasure of our contributions — is repeated over and over and over again.

On Black Chicago, homosexuality, and community

Like most Chicagoans, I grew up in an immediate community of people who look just like me. Chicago historically has been and continues to be one of the most racially, ethnically, and class-stratified places on the globe. And so segregation is us in terms of history. Not all of that is necessarily bad because it also allows us to be a place of incredible rich cultural diversity. Chicago is American all the way down, from its very roots. And in its growth, it became the place that African Americans wanted to migrate to before the end of slavery and after slavery. The growth of what we call the Black Metropolis was so fast and is still going.

I currently live in Boystown, on the north side of the city, but it started on the south side in the Black community. In the 1890s, men, who were then called musical rather than gay, were welcome in the community and they could socialize. They could be in bars. They could find residences. As the (gay) community started to assemble, it started migrating north to where it is now. But that starting point and the connection to the community on the south side is lost in our histories. So many in the gay community don’t speak of the legacy and the advocacy that comes from the Black community.

These days, the Black community is characterized as the most homophobic of ethnic communities but that is not the truth of our history. The truth of our history is that gay, lesbian, and gender-expansive people were normal and recognized in the Black community. In 1938, an openly gay Black man and minister built the First Church of Deliverance. That congregation still survives, led by an openly gay man.

There used to be a cultural event that happened on the south side that included the entire Black community called Finnie’s Ball, a drag event that happened every year. Everybody went and everybody participated.

Even when my mother lost her mother, the person that she found comfort with was a trans woman who lived on the first floor of their tenement building and who was known as “Mama” in the neighborhood. “Mama” was there to comfort my mother and my grandfather didn’t have any aversion to it. He said, in the vernacular at the time, “well, you go and spend time with that sissy, I’m glad she’s there to help you.” These are stories and situations that are not portrayed in the modern community when people look at the Black community and the LGBT community. But our histories are totally entwined. And I’m sure that it’s the same in New York and LA and San Francisco and everywhere else, that the most marginalized communities are also the most welcoming for other marginalized communities.

On Chicago, the “LGBT oasis” of the Heartland

Well, Chicago was in fact the LGBT oasis of the Heartland, the middle of the country. People routinely migrated to Chicago from where you are [in Ohio]. For a long time, both when I was a student and working in my career in higher administration, Chicago and the Chicago metropolitan area served tons of students coming to universities. It is a huge place; it’s the engine of the heartland of our country. This is where our food and industrial development came from. So that oasis experience happened here too. This city was perceived as a safe ground. Of course, the political ramification of that is that Illinois is one of the few states in the union with full civil rights for LGBT people. It’s one of the few states where you can get married one day and the next day, you don’t have to fear getting fired from your job for being gay because we have full civil rights. We worked very hard at it.

The news never covers it all. The only thing that people hear about Chicago is about shootings so they’re not getting the truth about Chicago. While the LGBT community is reminded every day that there’s a “don’t say gay” law in Florida and there’s an “anti-CRT” law in Florida, what they’re not told is that three years ago in Illinois, we passed a mandate for teaching LGBT history in all of the public schools. As long as popular culture continues to treat us (and other places in the interior parts of the United States) as flyover country, our communities will never be aware of the progress that we are making.

In fact, I’m being seated tomorrow as one of the founding commissioners of the Illinois State Commission on LGBT Aging. This is a first-in-the-nation endeavor — a three-year commission to investigate the status and condition of LGBT elders throughout the state of Illinois to assess what services we are receiving, what needs we are having met, and what difficulties we are having in seeking housing and other services at this point.

In the news, we’re just in dire situations all the time. I think it is really easy right now to feel discouraged or saddened by the state of the world for LGBTQ folks, and Black folks, and there is often a narrative that is portrayed and passed on to our youth, especially that LGBTQ elders don’t exist, that we don’t grow old but we do — we’re here.

On schooling, growing up, and sexuality

Well, of course, not only was there no LGBT presence in schools; there was no LGBT presence in the world. I was born in 1949, in the middle of the 20th century. And when I was growing up, when I was maturing, I lived a heteronormative life, like many LGBT people of my age. I knew as a child that I was different but I didn’t know what that difference was. I couldn’t describe it, I couldn’t define it. And in adolescence, when I heard words like homosexual, I knew it wasn’t something anyone talked about. So I found a safe place to look into it and the safe place was usually the library. We had our nice little Andrew Carnegie Library downtown. I went to the library. They had uncensored sources of information, unlike our schools. The Webster’s dictionary sat open on a pedestal on top of the books in the reference room. Everything, of course, was print media at that time, so I also grabbed the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So I looked up the word “homosexuality” in both of those things to get an understanding of what it was. And I noticed that the pages in both the dictionary and the encyclopedia were smudged. A lot of people had been doing that but I had no idea who those people were or how to connect with them or to have anybody to have any conversation about this with. That was our experience.

As an adolescent, I dated. I had girls and women in my life that I loved. By the time I got to university, my high school sweetheart and I had been going together for so long that we were actually engaged to be married. It wasn’t until I was a sophomore in university that I had an experience that identified for me what that difference was. I was an orientation leader, so I went back to school early and I met my resident advisor. And when he opened the door, I had what I generally call “a Walt Disney moment,” where all of a sudden, there’s music floating through the air and there’s birds tweeting and butterflies and all of this stuff — I had fallen in love at first sight. I knew instantly what it was. I went back to my room and I had what we call a “come to Jesus” moment in my room by myself. I spent hours praying, crying, and just going crazy over this. And I said to God, isn’t being Black enough? Do I have to be gay too? In thinking through that, at that time, I formulated what would become a practice of my life — using one oppression to inform the other. I recognized that there had been no choice about being Black. There was no pre-birth line where you lined up at the table and they asked, “hey, you guys want to be Black? Come on over here and sign up!” That wasn’t an option. You were born Black and that was it. It was your challenge in life to come to a safe, emotional, and psychological space where you were okay with that. And even though society’s constantly telling you that you’re worthless, you have to free your mind from that, to value yourself, and to not be driven crazy by your own existence.

So I said, well, that must be true about this gay thing too. I decided that I was going to live my life in a headspace where I could value what I was and value all of the things that I was — this man in Black skin, this man who was attracted to other men — and I was going to be okay. I wasn’t sick, as they were saying in the DSM at the time. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t a mistake or offense to God, I wasn’t a criminal. I was just a person just trying to make it. And that’s how I’ve gone through my life. That’s how I’ve survived it.

On creating community and building a legacy

Our people had to come out. I was growing up in a time of tremendous social upheaval in the United States. All of these liberation movements were happening and communities were coming into visibility. In the 70s, the gay community came into visibility, bars moved from back alleys to front streets. We lived together and our communities grew. Places that historically have been identified as gay spaces, whether we’re talking Chelsea in New York or DuPont Circle in Washington or The Castro in San Francisco, all of those places grew into existence after the Second World War and during my lifetime. But when I was a teenager, there were no pride flags, there were no national LGBT organizations. There was no space. So during my lifetime, those spaces emerged. That’s what we developed. That’s the legacy of my generation. And I am part of the first “out” aging generation of LGBT people. When I was young, I didn’t think about being 80 because I didn’t see anybody who was 80. We didn’t even think about it. But now I’m part of the first “out” generation of LGBT elders, or the “Stonewall Generation,” as some call us. We have a legacy to pass on to our youth.

First of all, we have to identify LGBT youngsters as ours, within the LGBT community, we have to form intergenerational relationships that are similar to the ones that exist, where people grow up in their communities of origin and their families of origin. Many of us are estranged from those families and those communities. So we have to make our own. And what has to happen is that young people have to recognize us as the people upon whose shoulders they stand, the people who went from the conditions in which I was born, to the conditions that exist now. And we have to recognize as the elders, that it’s the young people who are our legacy.

It’s the young people who will value what we’ve done. It’s the young people who will receive our work product as we move on in time. And hopefully, they will appreciate us as we have come to appreciate those who preceded us, who lived under incredibly worse times. So intergenerational relationships are essential at this time in the LGBT community because there will never be another generation like mine. There will never be another generation that comes from obscurity into public prominence.

We are now part of the American social and political fabric. We are out there and we can’t go away and we won’t go away. And some people are saying, oh my God, there just seems to be more of that homosexuality, there just seems to be more just gender stuff out there. And I don’t believe that there’s more. I just believe that we are now visible. And I believe that the question of gender identity and the questions of sexual orientation are questions that all humans have to deal with.

People will tell you who they are when they come into recognition of who they are. And society has just got to get ready for that.

On aging, the word “queer,” and the necessity of intergenerational connections

SAGE is our largest organization that advocates for those of us in the aging [LGBT] community and that’s important because in our society when we age, we grow into a new -ism. And believe me, as a person with all the -isms that I’ve grown up with, I was not pleased to encounter this new -ism around 65 as I entered the social safety network. Many folks become very paternalistic, telling aging people what we should do and how we should do it. As aging people, we appreciate the support and we appreciate the commitment of our younger allies, but they have to understand that we continue to be fully functioning people up to the levels of our capacities.

All of us who are aging are human beings who need social connections to exist, and this is a basic human need. And we know it, we know that we can deliver medically viable babies all the time but if those babies are not connected, if they’re not held, if they’re not touched, if they’re not talked to or sung to, no matter what we feed them, they will struggle. All humans need socialization. Many of us [aging LGBT people] have lost our siblings, we’ve lost our lifelong friends, we’ve lost our parents. Some of us have even lost our children and that’s a loss that we as human beings are just not wired for. That’s the worst loss of all. We end up with fewer and fewer social contacts. And we need connections. We hope that both our children of origin and our children of choice, the LGBT younger generations, will help fill that need. We need that connection and hopefully, they will benefit from it too. Could I talk about one thing that I really think is an important intergenerational thing to deal with?

That’s around the issues of language and identity — I specifically want to talk about the word queer.

I believe as an individual that every person has the right to his, her, or their identity. Each of us is who we say we are. If you say that you are queer, I’ve no problems with that at all. I get it. That’s your identity. In this age, many people identify as queer but what I want youngsters to understand is that queer can be a very triggering term for those of us who are older. I’ll use myself as an example.

I was born in 1949. At the time I was born — and in the time in which I grew up — homosexuality was universally illegal in all of the United States. It was also illegal in most countries in the world. So we were criminalized. Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder in the DSM. So we were pathologized. Homosexuality was thought of as inconsistent with the designs of the creator in most faiths and houses of worship. So we were demonized and the use of the word queer was a direct reflection of the oppression that we experienced. When I was in university, if you were identified as queer and that word got to the Dean of Men’s office, you could be dismissed from the university. This is before the Supreme Court made its ruling that public institutions had to guarantee students the right to due process. You could be kicked out of school. It would not only wreck your personal and your professional life but also cost you your student distinction and you could end up fighting in Vietnam. Newspapers published “queer lists” on Mondays, listing the names of men who’d been arrested and detained in local lockups from gay bars, from police raids. And so not only was your personal life ruined but you were also subjected to becoming a social outcast. If you were identified as queer and you were harmed bodily, whether you were gay bashed or you were killed, your queerness could be a legally recognized defense and get someone acquitted in courts of the law. So what I’m saying is that for many of us, that trauma is still there, and while I respect individual identity, what I push back against is using the word queer to describe our community. Again, this is my personal stance but I try to take the time to explain it so that there’s better intergenerational communication and understanding.

From my life experience, the word queer is as triggering as the word “nigga.” And I know we continue discussions about that within the African American community too. I just think that what we need to do is gently engage one another in conversation so that we can establish an understanding of where we stand on those things. I’m not denying anyone the right to identify as queer or as a nigga. I’m just gently requesting that we not assume that the terminology for our time is okay for a collective identification of the entire community. That’s my stand on that.

I don’t know if we necessarily have to have one catchall term because we represent expansive populations of people. And I know these are difficult times. So we just have to be able to civilly and compassionately talk to one another because we don’t want to foster the idea that we are different. We, in fact, want to encourage the idea that all of humanity is the same. But just to recognize that we’ve come to this place from different paths and to honor those paths because you can’t fully come to understand different individuals’ experiences without being open to honoring the past that they came along. If we could just have this conversation amongst the generations without anyone — whether elders or youngsters — feeling that the other is wrong, then we can make progress. We have to make room, we have to make space for each other.

On what comes next

Well, I’m excited about new formal areas of advocacy that I’m moving into this year. I just got a call from the Mayor’s office with an invitation to join the Mayor’s advisory committee here in Chicago. I am serving this year as an ambassador for PRIDEnet, based at Stanford University, where they house The Pride Study, a longitudinal study focused on the LGBT community across the country. I’m really proud to be working on that project, especially as a member of the aging community, because our experiences shouldn’t be lost.

“I Didn’t Know Trans Men Existed Until I Saw Chaz Bono on Dancing With the Stars”

a black and white photo of Ray Gibson, a Black trans man and elder, is the center focal point of this collage. Beautiful collaged items including newsprint, colors, squiggles, and lines surround Ray.

The Autostraddle Black Elders Interview Project — Art by Demetria

Our first interview subject is Ray Gibson, a Black trans man who is an Air Force veteran, a longtime LGBTQ+ activist and an all around good time. This interview was edited for clarity.

Sa’iyda: Thank you so much for doing this. I’m so excited to have a chat just about you and your life and things you’ve experienced. So I guess, tell me about your early life. Let’s start at the beginning.

Ray: Well, I’m a son of the baseball legend Bob Gibson. And that in and of itself set me on a course that is very unique in this country because I’m Black. And being a celebrity trust me, it was wild. It was very wild, very jet set. But that was my normal, so I didn’t know I was that different until I got older.

But when I got older, I definitely knew where my drive came from, where my winning attitude came from, where all of that came from, was my childhood. And I got to travel a lot; I’ve lived all over this country. I’ve traveled abroad by myself. So I had a lot of culture, a lot of strength from the 1960s. And basically I was just really fearless because my dad was the same way and I watched him like a hawk. And so everything about that life ended up a part of me.

Then I joined the service. My cousin told me just a year ago that I told her and another cousin of mine that I was going into the service for them to make me a better man. Now, I don’t remember saying that, but I have no doubt it came out of my mouth. Things like that came out of my mouth from time to time, and when I was aware of it coming out of my mouth, I was horrified because I didn’t understand where it came from. I’m like, “Where in the hell did that come from?” I told my mom when I was 13 that I wanted a sex change. And I’d never heard of such a thing. I didn’t know of anything like that at 13 years old in 1970.

I didn’t know anything about that world, but it came out of my mouth. But as soon as it came out of my mouth I was like, “Oh, shit. What did I just say?” It was the day my menstrual cycle started and I was beside myself because that was the final straw to the illusion that I had that I thought I was a boy.

Sa’iyda: Did you feel that you were a boy from a young age?

Ray: From six. I made up all these weird things. Like, okay, well, I was six. And then when I was eight, I was playing hide and go seek with these boys, and they exposed their penises to me in the bushes. And I thought, “Oh, what funny looking little worms.” But the first thing I thought was, “Where’s mine?”

And so from that age until about the sixth grade, I just blanked out. I didn’t know what to think, I was very confused. I thought I was a boy. I thought I was a girl. I didn’t know what was going on. And then we had sex education, and I made up that I was just latent and my penis would grow in puberty. It was just in my head. I mean, I just thought that’s what was going to happen. So when the opposite things happened, it freaked me out.

Sa’iyda: Right. You have your menstrual cycle, you begin to—

Ray: And the boobs.

Sa’iyda: Right, I was going to say that you begin to develop breasts.

Ray: The boobs started showing and all this stuff was like, “Oh my God, my dog gone body done defied me.” And I didn’t have nobody to talk to. I mean, these were just all things I was thinking, and I didn’t know how to talk about them. I didn’t know how to articulate nothing. I barely spoke as a child. And I was an athlete as well.

Sai: So that definitely had some sort of effect on your body as well.

Ray: The fact that I didn’t grow anymore is what had an effect on me. And them boys kept getting bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier, and I had to stop playing with them because they were starting to hurt me. But I played just about every sport, and I was on the track team. I was just a great athlete. I took after my dad. That stuff was in my blood, and I was just very serious about it. So I’d say what my background gave me was just this insane amount of ambition. I mean, I wasn’t going to be stopped by nothing. Even if I had to cheat, lie, steal, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to be stopped. I was going to win at all costs.

Sa’iyda: Let’s talk about what it was like growing up Black, even though you were the child of a celebrity, in the 60s and 70s.

Ray: It was a trip. I mean, there were things that we had to do. My mother used to like to take us to where my dad was training in the winter in Florida. We had to pee on the side of the road going cross country, because there was still white only bathrooms. And the gas stations wouldn’t let us use the bathroom at the gas station so we had to pee on the side of the car.

Now, as a child, I thought that was a little adventurous, and I asked my mother why. And of course, we were too young for her to really explain it to us, but it was annoying. I mean, who the hell wants to piss on the side of a car? The 60s was very tumultuous. And as a child observing that, I observed more of my mother’s reaction to what was going on than anything.

Sa’iyda: Were you and your mother close?

Ray: Well, yeah, because she raised us. My dad was gone nine to 10 months out of the year, every year for my entire childhood and my teenage years. He retired when I was 16 or 15, something like that.

But yeah, my mother’s reaction, and she got put in jail for sit-ins and stuff like that, which my father was like, “You can’t do that. You’re Bob Gibson’s wife. You can’t be getting arrested.” And she just looked at him like, “Mm-hmm whatever, Bob.” My mom was a fireball. And so when people or leaders were getting assassinated and stuff like that, she would just bawl her head off. Hell, she bawled her head off for Kennedy and just the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.

And she didn’t much care for Malcolm X, and I never asked her why. But I am more like Malcolm X than I am them other guys. So because of them and what my father was, my father had his way of dealing with it too in professional baseball. He got the entire league to integrate. Him, Bill White, and Curt Flood got together and got the entire Major League Baseball to integrate, and stopped putting the Black players over here and the white players over there. So that was his effort of the 1960s.

At the time, it was very important because the way they made the Black players live, it was disgusting. I mean, they put them in boarding homes and stuff. Or sent them over to some Black woman’s house who took care of them and had extra rooms in the house. And just the way they had to live versus these highfalutin hotels and stuff that the white players got to be in. And it wasn’t as effective. The teams weren’t as effective when the Black players had to deal with all that extra stress. So growing up in that, again, when you’re in that, it looks normal.

Because everybody was going through it. And I kept wishing I was older, and I could go to the places my mom was going because I wanted to complain about it too. I wanted to be a part of it too.

That was one of the most remarkable times in the history of this country. But at the time, it sucked. And they put us in a white neighborhood, all white neighborhood when my dad started making money. And he moved us out of the hood and that’s when all of the interesting shit began.

Sa’iyda: Oh, I’m sure.

Ray: All the racism. But again, when my dad was gone, my mom was kicking butt at home. I remember getting called a jigaboo or something by this little boy that was chasing me down a hill. And I turned around and busted his tooth out of his mouth. So I got sent to the principal’s office, and my mom got called. And she came to the school and she asked me first what happened, and I told her. And then she sat there and listened to the principal, and then she said, “You know what? Huh, I give my child full permission to kick anybody’s butt who calls them out by name.” All they could say was okay, because my mom was a fireball. She wasn’t playing when it came to her kids.

And I was only four foot nothing until I got to high school, but they were afraid of me because of the TV. The way the media portrayed Black people is scary and mean. So they automatically assumed that’s what I was. And after busting that kid’s tooth out, nobody ever called me that name or any names again.

So yeah, I went through the 60s and the 70s, and then I left home, things were a lot different by then, though.

Sa’iyda: Right. So let’s move to that. You went into the military?

Ray: After falling flat on my face trying to live. I got kicked out of the house because my dad did not like the idea that I was into women. And so I fell flat on my face. And after scrunching around, ended up with the wrong crowd, getting involved in drugs and alcohol, all that whole scene. I had a brief one-night stand with a celebrity, but we ended up friends. I was just a kid. In fact, she had no business messing around with me with her over that. She was in her 30s and I was 17. But she talked me into joining the service. She said, “You are too smart. You have an excellent mind. You’re just throwing it away in these streets, and these people will kill you out here. Stop messing around with these people in the streets. You have no business. Join the service.” And I said, “yeah, okay.” And a year later I did.

Sa’iyda: So you were 18, 19? And if I’m clocking this right, we’re now in the late 70s, early 80s. And what form of the military did you join?

Ray: The Air Force.

Sa’iyda: And what was that like?

Ray: Oh, God. Well, you know what, it gave me the training of my lifetime. I had an awesome career with it, but at the time, I couldn’t stand it because I was the wrong gender. And somehow in my head, I knew that. I knew it. I used to sit there and watch the guys.

And then I was the only Black person, the only Black person that showed up on my unit for about the first six months to a year. And the guys used to try to hit on me. So there was a lot of sexual harassment going on. And then there was racism too.

And I didn’t dare come out about being a lesbian. That’s what I thought I was. That’s the only thing I could relate to was my body, not my mentality. So that’s what I thought I was. And back then you could not, there was no, don’t ask, don’t tell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You got kicked out of the service if they found out. So I was in the closet.

Sa’iyda: So you were in the closet, you’re dealing with sexual harassment, you’re dealing with racism. And at the same time, you’re dealing with the understanding that the body that you are in is not quite right.

Ray: Not quite. Something was wrong. Something was off. And I kept thinking, why aren’t I being… Even in bootcamp, it was like, why aren’t I being trained with the men? I just had no… But see, again, I didn’t have nobody to tell this stuff too. So it was just tormenting me in my head. And then I would have to just keep it moving because there was nothing I thought I could do about it.

Sa’iyda: Right. And at the time, had you ever seen a trans person?

Ray: No.

Sa’iyda: Did you know anything about trans people?

Ray: Nope. I knew about transvestites, drag queens, and another word. But I bumped into one in a club one time, and I still didn’t know that was a transgender woman.

Sa’iyda: But you had never seen trans men?

Ray: No, I didn’t even know trans men existed until I saw Chaz Bono on Dancing With the Stars. There was this long stretch in between when I fought in the military and finding out about Chaz Bono that I just tried to bury that stuff because it was just annoying. Because there was nothing I thought I could do about it. I didn’t know what, I had no verbiage. I had no English for what was really going on with me. And when I saw Chaz Bono, I about pissed my pants. I really was like, “What the what?”

Sa’iyda: Right. Because growing up, you had known Chaz as Chastity.

Ray: That’s exactly what I said when I saw him on the TV was, “Wait a minute, wasn’t that Chasity? And what they doing with all that fucking hair on his face? And what’s the what?” I was all confusing the pronouns. At first. And then I had to hear every single time that if they interviewed that guy, I had to hear what they said. Because all of a sudden, everything that I ever thought about myself came rushing back to me. But I still fought it. I was scared. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what it would mean for my life. I had no idea how Chaz got to be Chaz. I was looking around seeing how transgender people were being treated, and I didn’t want to go through that bullshit all over again that I went through when people thought I was a lesbian. I got beat up. I got called names. I got all sorts of stuff happening, and I didn’t want to go through that. I thought, “Come out again as an elder, the middle aged?” I said, “No, I don’t want nothing to do with this.” So I tried to leave it alone, but it didn’t leave me alone.

Sa’iyda: So you tried to outrun it.

Ray: I could not outrun it. I could not. Because despite what I tried to do, I went home. I was in a deep depression at the time that had nothing to do with that, had to do with my life, losing track of my career, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

And so all I did was research. I moved to Atlanta. I was in Texas at the time, and I moved to Georgia and got a therapist. And told the therapist that I think that I’m like Chaz Bono. And she said, “Yippee.” She was excited.

She said, “Oh, I’ve got transgender clients.” And I looked at her like, “Lady, I just gave myself a death sentence, and you’re happy about it.” So she would try to get me to talk about it, and I refused to talk. I didn’t even know what my concern was. I just know I was mad that she wanted me to talk about it because I didn’t want to talk about it.

So I ran from it for four years. I ran, tried to run. And then when I’d leave her office, I’d go home and research transgender and what that was. Every day. Every day I was researching it.

I got a hold of this huge research guide so I could read all sorts of stuff in it. I can’t remember its name anymore. But I kept researching it. So despite my best effort to bury it, and, “Oh no, I’ll be a lesbian.” I told my therapist, “I’ll be a lesbian the rest of my life. I don’t care. I don’t want to be trans. I don’t want to have to come out to my family all over again. I don’t want any of that.” Because the first time was bad enough. Can you imagine what they’ll do about me saying, “I’m a man.” Oh, come on now. But it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I didn’t know people saw it. People saw it, I was the last one to know.

My relatives have told me they saw it when I was really young. I was really different. So I told the woman I was dating at the time. And then sometime between me telling her and the end of that year, I finally embraced it. Actually, I made an appointment. I told my PCP at the VA that I thought I was a man. I might be a man.

And she said, “Okay.” She set an appointment. She didn’t even ask me no questions. She saw it too. And she set me up an appointment with an endocrinology doctor. And I chickened out of the appointment. That was in 2014. And I got scared. I got scared of the side effects of testosterone on an elder. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And then the surgeries appalled me. I was like, “Oh, no. Surgery at my age? Oh, man.” So I was 58 years old.

Sa’iyda: But you weren’t that old.

Ray: Well, I was older than everybody else that was in that world. Although I wasn’t really connected to that world, I didn’t know anything about it until I started to transition. And then I dove head first. I don’t do anything half ass. I don’t do anything halfway. I dove right in. I mean, I’m living my best life because I finally found the missing link to me. I’ve always been an overachiever.

Sa’iyda: What was that like? When you finally stopped running.

Ray: It was euphoria. It was pure bliss for about a year. I was so happy. I was so beside myself, relieved. It’s like 1000 pounds lifted off of my shoulders. I felt like, wow, this was it. I said, “I’m amazed I did so well considering I have that fighting against me.” But I managed to keep putting it out of my consciousness every time some thought would come up about it. I would just, oh, keep it moving. Just don’t even. Yeah, okay. I heard that, but let’s go this way.

I didn’t have any choice because I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t know what had happened to me at birth. I didn’t know any of that. I just knew I just had to grin and bear it, because I didn’t know I could do anything about it. But once I found out that I could, wow. Now everything happened in stages, of course. I first started on HRT. Then came binders, packers. Oh my God. The first time I bought a packer. Oh my God. It was my missing penis that was supposed to grow.

I was so happy that I got kicked off of Facebook for posting myself in my briefs and my packer with my packer on. I didn’t have it exposed. I was taking pictures, snap, snap, snap. I couldn’t stop looking down. I was like, “Oh, oh, oh, oh. This was it. This was it.” Then I got a binder and I thought, “Okay, this is it. This was the way my chest was supposed to look like when I was 12.” But the first thing I knew I had to do, because I didn’t have civilian insurance, was to get top surgery. And it took me four or five years because I was on a fixed income, and the veterans don’t give us surgeries. They cover the HRT, but not gender confirmation surgery. So I finally did some things and ended up having some money to get my top surgery. And oh, wow.

I’ve got three birthdays a year. I’ve got my natal birthday, I got my manniversary, and my sobriety date. I’ll be 40 in May. 40 years clean and sober.

I’m writing a book about my life. It got real difficult when my dad passed away.

Sa’iyda: So how did your relationship change? I know he had kicked you out because you said you were lesbian.

Ray: He kind of freaked. Well, I was so much older. I was 58 when I told him. And he just was like, “Okay.” I suppose he talked to my brother and his new wife, his second wife. He must have talked to them about it, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. So I knew something was up. And I kept telling my brother, “Something’s up with Dad.” “Oh, he’s happy that you’re happy.” And I said, “That doesn’t mean he’s happy.” That’s code for, “I don’t want to talk about my feelings about this.”

My sister passed away and I had to go home. But I had to go home with hair on my face. And I present as male 24/7. There’s no distinction anymore. And [my dad] kept staring at me. I was like, “Is he staring at me because he’s curious? Is he staring at me because he’s mad? Or is he staring at me because he’s glad?”

I kept ignoring him because I have a habit of exciting the entire fricking room when I’m in a room. So everybody was talking to me at the same time, but he was just staring. And finally he said, “Ray.” I said, “What?” He said, “Do you ever shut up?” I said, “Yeah, when I go to sleep.” Everybody started laughing, started talking again.

He was mad that I changed my name. I legally changed everything. I changed my birth certificate too. And he was upset about that. I practically had to force him to at least say it so that we could begin to grapple with it. And on his deathbed, he called me a man. It was bittersweet — that’s what I’d been wanting my whole life from him, but it was too late to build any kind of relationship off of that.

He never knew what to do. He didn’t know what to do with me as a lesbian. He sure enough didn’t know what to do with me as a man. He was like, “How?” I just wanted him to say it, say something so we can talk about it. Say, “How now can you see yourself as a man? What’s up with that?” But funny thing about straight folk, well cis gender folks, even if they’re lesbian, even if they’re part of the LGB, is they don’t ask questions.

I told everybody in my family, “Look, you don’t have to accept what I am. But it sure would help if you understood a little bit about it, because y’all are coming from a funny place that I can see. And not knowing anything, even though you love me, is still awkward.”

Sa’iyda: Right, right. So how did you get involved with SAGE?

Ray: Long time ago, in the beginning of my transition, I was interviewed by one of the guys on the board. We talked to each other a couple of times a year. And he got involved in SAGE, and then he turned me onto them. I’m looking at them like I look at the whole rest of [the LGBTQ community]. Wondering, okay, when is my personality going to come out and they’re going to get turned off? So I’m just observing, and because I’m a veteran, it kind of takes me out of the whole healthcare side of it. So SAGE isn’t going to be able to touch that, and I can’t touch the civilian side.

I do this interview thing at least three times a year. And I also help the diversity training at the VA for incoming interns. I get to talk to them about being a Black trans man. And my doctors tell me that I turn their training into an experience and they never forget me.

Sa’iyda: I am sure you do because this has been a real experience.

Ray: Has it been fun?

Sa’iyda: It has, it has.

Ray: Well it’s been great. Thank you. Thank you for your time.

Sa’iyda: Oh, anytime truly.

Editor’s Notes: On Black History Month 2021

A cartoon graphic of a paper airplane is colored In a lavender purple

An inside look, just for A+ members, from Autostraddle’s editors on the process, struggles, and surprises of working on what you’re reading on the site. We learn so much from this work before it ever even makes it to your eyes; now you can, too!

This is my third year editing Autostraddle’s Black History Month series. I began planning my first one just a few weeks after I started full-time as an Associate Editor. I was looking back on that time this morning, hoping to be “inspired” about what to say today, and found this:

“It’s my favorite holiday. Maybe it sounds strange to you to call Black History Month a holiday. After all, there’s no Santa Claus coming down the tree or an Easter Bunny bringing baskets. No ‘day after’ sale on candy. No rainbow colored balloon arches like the kind that adorn gayborhoods every June. In fact, Black History Month is probably thought of as stodgy – tired black and white photographs of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jackie Robinson.

Here’s the secret about Black History Month: few people know how to celebrate the way Black people know how to celebrate. And we celebrate this month FOR US. We don’t look towards white eyes or ask for white approval. The morning of February 1st social media streams are filled with gifs and memes, well-timed quotes and inside jokes, words of affirmation. Black churches host banquets. Community centers put up billboards draped in red, black, and green. There are talent shows and pageants where little black girls are forced on stage in itchy thick white cotton tights to recite Maya Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman’ and ‘Still I Rise.’ Our littlest ones fumble through the words of the Black national anthem, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ There are dozens of these traditions happening all across the country this month, and I love each and every one of them. At the 2017 Emmys, Issa Rae told a reporter, ‘I’m Rooting For Everybody Black’ and even though it wasn’t technically Black History Month when she said it – nothing better captures the attitude.”

It’s still true, you know. I am unapologetically, over the moon, absolutely just cheesy cornball, would probably make you roll your eyes levels, proud of being Black, especially during this — the 28 Blackest days of the year. And still, I found this year’s Black History Month hard to plan. Hard to even be excited for.

I’m sure part of that is pandemic exhaustion. Pandemic exhaustion wears more heavily when your Black. When your people are in every way bearing the brunt of the virus — between two and three as likely to contract it, overrepresented in the essential work industries that put them in daily direct contact with it and in the resulting unemployment caused by its economic effects, conversely underrepresented by nearly every measure of who has access to a vaccine.

I went into lockdown on March 11th, 2020. My father called on Sunday March 22nd to tell me that he was being hospitalized with difficulty breathing. He was put on a ventilator the next day. He stayed on that ventilator for nearly two months. It was 102 days — July 2nd — before he walked back out of that hospital. There’s an entire Spring he won’t remember ever again, vanished from his life. An entire Spring that I spent traumatized. A Spring of learning medical terms and keeping haphazard notes in a small yellow notebook, of waking up nauseous every day and unsure how to steady my next steps, of doctor’s phone calls on top of doctors phone calls and memorizing the name of every single nurse — just hoping that if they remembered my name in return then maybe, just maybe they would treat my father like he belonged to somebody. The surgeries when I couldn’t be there.

I don’t know why I’m sharing that now. I never have before.

I think it’s because recently a (white) friend of mine was talking about the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer and how she felt “reinvigorated, like a world of change and ‘people power’ was finally really possible” and all I felt was worn out and exhausted. I’ve loved Black people since before I knew the words or how to spell them. I’ve been in the streets for our lives long before last summer. Where others feel inspired, I’m left wondering what took so damn long. I’m left frustrated knowing that this, too, won’t be change.

Maybe I needed you to know all this so you could understand what drew me to this year’s Black History Month theme. When I first read Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham’s Black Futures in December, I was spent out of possibility. I also didn’t have the energy to keep circling the past. But within their gorgeous multimedia art book (which you should absolutely cop if you haven’t yet, consider it my Official Editor’s Recommendation) was a simple premise: “What does it mean to be Black and alive?” Starting from that inquiry, they assembled an archive of the digital landscape and communities built and the art found in the living life and breath of Black people right now. It was small, just asking us to look around and see the magic in our every day — and that was my restoration.

I wrote out a prompt. I sent Sarah (the graphics genius and design director behind all the beauty you’ve witnessed this month) an embarrassingly rough looking mood board. Then miraculously, carved deep into the late nights around the ongoing Autostraddle fundraiser that’s eating our days, the two of us got to work.

Carmen created a mood board for the vibe of Black History Month that had eight parts: a photograph of the art instillation "There Are Black People in the Future" which had the words in lights, there's also images of Andre Leon Talley dancing with Grace Jones at Studio 54, Solange Knowles dancing with a friend in 2019, african Ankara fabric, and starry night skies. The words "Black Futures" are cut out in the center in glowing letters.

My first attempt at a mood board. Ever.

An example of past Instagram calls (for the grid and stories), along with Twitter and Facebook calls, for Autostraddle's Black History Month 2021. In all three sized graphics in bold purple lettering it says "Submit to Black History Month" and in lavender lettering it says "Black queer writers and artists, send your essay/poetry/criticism/visual art on what you're taking from the past and how you're envisioning the possibilities of our abundant queer futures.

Sarah turned my mood board into this gorgeous collection of calls for work.

I’ve loved every essay we’ve published this month. They easily represent my best editing work at Autostraddle, and one of the truest distillations of a vision I’ve had go from concept to completion.

It’s a small party of sorts, carefully curated, and I’m ecstatically proud (what did I tell you about being a cornball) of each and every one. I’m so grateful to Lazarus Letcher and shea martin for the meditations they provided on gender, of politics, of finding yourself in the past — or letting go of what’s there once you do. Without knowing each other, their pieces find a harmony, each picking up where the other let off. And if that’s the case, then Khalisa Rae Thompson turned up the heat! Once you read the line “When I was twelve or thirteen my mother caught me and a female friend dangling our vaginas” — you really can’t come back from that, in the best kind of ways. And today here I am, rounding out our group with some memories of my Aunt Lorna, who taught me everything about telling Black stories that I know.

There’s two days left in Black History Month. Make the most of it. Tell Black Stories. Encourage Black Storytellers. Don’t stop in February. Tell them every other day of the year, too.

Addendum

Thank You to Sarah Sarwar for being a friend, and for putting up with my terrible graphic design skills with a smile, patience, and flourish. Everything she makes is a treasure — and here’s some behind the scenes of what that looks like in practice:

Carmen’s Notes:

“I love how she looks with the starry night, I love the richness of the purple flowers. I love how it looks like a collage and multi-media art. I just LOVE it. I can’t stop gushing… I’m also wondering what it looks like with the purple pushed back to the edges more so it is crowding her less? I made a very terrible mock up of what I mean.”

Carmen's Aunt Lorna smokes a cigar. She's a light skin Black woman in her late 60s. She is cut out against a black starry sky and there are purple rose petals growing out of the side of the image like a vine. There are hand drawn purple marker streaks and black marker streaks from when Carmen is trying to explain to Sarah how to better contort the roses to frame Aunt Lorna's face.

Sarah’s Final Version:

“I can DEF try this!!! great idea!”

Carmen’s Notes:

“shea (the author) has a lot of really great photos of themself on social media, I’m wondering if incorporating one or two of them will help fill the space and also take the singular focus off of Kamala? Don’t laugh at my ‘art’ LMAO but — does this make sense to you?”

A portrait of a cut out of Kamala Harris from Inauguration Day 2021 against a purple starry night sky. There are hand written notes in white that sloppily say "Photo" inserted on either of her side. This is Carmen telling Sarah where photos can go.

Sarah’s Final Version:

“It does!!! Also I think we could add in images of Sojourner Truth? Also what if the pearls cover Kamala’s eyes? seems more aligned with what the essay conveys.”

✨

Everything That Matters Is Stuck in the Back of My Throat

“She died six months ago, and you still can’t say her name!”

In January, I was helping my mother pack up our Christmas tree. She keeps it up longer than most people would deem “OK” — in part because we’re Puerto Rican and that means Christmas isn’t over until January 6th when the Three Kings visit baby Jesus and bring him his baby presents. It’s a whole thing. And in part because… fuck what other people think, you know? Christmas is her favorite time of the year. And she should be able to extend it as long as she wants. Winter’s hard enough as it is.

We were taking down the bulbs, the oldest ones. Shiny and delicate with chipped paint at the temples, aluminum peaking through and dotted rhinestones that have long ago been rubbed dull but still manage to catch light. They were my grandmother’s and every year my mom tells the story of how my grandfather would wait until she was home for Christmas before putting them on their family tree. I try to imagine them in a cramped Brooklyn apartment. I try to imagine her young. These are ones we save for last, wrapped individually in crinkly reused tissue paper, stored away like gems.

I told mamí that I was worried about her. I’m always worried about her. I’d worry about a ladybug on a blade of grass if you let me. But my mom? She’s 64 and this past year has sometimes felt like watching her age ten more. She said she was fine. I didn’t believe her. She said she was worried about me, I scoffed. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve had some spells in the last eleven months; I haven’t always showered, I haven’t always gotten out of bed. But nearly a year into a pandemic that’s doubled as one of the worst years of my life, I also haven’t fallen into one of my trademark depressive episodes. I know what true darkness looks like. And I knew that this wasn’t it. So instead, we got louder. Each round a new one of who had the most right to be worried more.

I know she wasn’t screaming, but in my head it was the same:

“She died six months ago, and you still can’t say her name!”

The night my mother told me that Auntie Lorna’s cancer had returned, I laughed. I was heating potato skins in the oven, drenched with cheddar cheese and bacon. A treat two months into a pandemic for which it increasingly felt like there was no end in sight, I was going to pair them with a ice cold beer and a romantic comedy — comfort food to go with comfort television, Love & Basketball, I think. Her words kept echoing in my head, bouncing thisaway and thataway like a ping ball machine that had no lights, no bells, no prizes to win. “Auntie’s cancer has returned.” I elevated somewhere outside of myself, watching these hollow bones move my arms to pick at melted cheese from a cookie sheet. “Auntie’s cancer has returned.” It was the funniest four words I had ever heard.

There are two versions of Lorna C. Hill.

Lorna Curtis Hill was the founder and Artistic Director of Ujima Theatre Company, Inc. She founded the organization in 1978 in Buffalo, NY, and at 43 years old Ujima is currently oldest Black arts organization in Western New York — it’s one of the oldest Black theatre companies left in the country, period. My Aunt Lorna was the first woman to ever be accepted to Dartmouth, where she received a B.A. in American Intellectual History in 1973. She received her M.A. in Theatre in 1978 from Buffalo State. In 2014, she retired from the Buffalo Public Schools, where she taught theatre. She was the recipient of countless (and I mean countless) local and national recognitions.

I can recite all these things because I was tasked with writing her longform obituary. It was published in full by Buffalo’s local Black paper, The Challenger. My Aunt’s leaving of this earth was covered by every newspaper and television station in the city of Buffalo, because her imprint cannot possibly be untangled from the city itself. She was, in and of herself, Black History. For many people, that will be her legacy.

But when my Aunt Lorna smiled, it was the sun. She had a language and humor unto herself. She loved beer and cursing and playing cards and her garden. Her standards were exacting and her trust hard-earned, but my God her love was eternal. If you don’t know or didn’t grow up celebrating Kwanzaa, ujima is a Swahili word meaning “collective work and responsibility.” And from that tenet, she built my family.

My Aunt Lorna is not my mother’s biological sister. But they were sisters. Her children are not technically my cousins, but to fix my mouth and call them anything else would be a lie. What’s a blood relation when y’all are raised together. When your oldest memories are of each other’s faces and the sounds of your smiles. When you’re going through the very worst shit in your life, theirs are the names you first think to call. In 34 years, I have lived in five cities and no less than eight houses, but Auntie Lorna’s house is the one that I think of as a childhood home. It’s where my initials are engraved on a swingset, where I celebrated my 18th birthday, where I know by heart how many steps to the second landing or where to find the exact mug I love in the cabinet. The tucked away corner where I could read books in quiet and the table downstairs where you could always find someone willing to talk the hours away. The indentation of the couch where I’d fall asleep with the sound of Auntie Lorna and my mom playing Spades real loud carrying over from the backyard as my lullaby.

Her home was hers, but she also made sure that it was ours. You were never lost, there was always a home you could come home to. Collective work. Responsibility.

In my favorite photo of Auntie Lorna, we are in the backyard which was her favorite place. We’re celebrating her “One Year Cancer Free” party. Margaret (Margaret, Auntie Lorna, and my mom raised me) threw it. There was overflowing women everywhere, more women than chairs or steps or even sometimes it felt — places to stand. Music and speakers and sunshine and barbecue. I caught her laughing at the picnic table set up at the side of the house, she was smoking a cigar and just really making a show of it on purpose. She had long dangly red earrings that she made herself and a top in West African prints. I grabbed my camera. She winked at me and took a long drag inhale, making sure I got a good shot. There was nothing worth doing for Lorna Hill, unless you were gonna do it right.

She was small. Slender, not magnificently tall — though as a kid I thought she towered in her elegance. But no, she was small. And large. She was the largest woman I’ll ever know.

Once, when I was about eight, I got straight As on a report card.

Whew chile… you couldn’t tell me nothin! All As, you hear me? Not a B in sight — and those other letters of the alphabet? Never met them. Didn’t even want to know their names. That day I walked on water. My shit didn’t stink. I was but a small child goddess among mortals.

That night, we were working in the theatre. I ran up to Auntie Lorna, she was always person I most wanted to impress. We were inseparable during rehearsals, I’d sit in the chair next to her or behind her, reading off her script (I could barely read) and falling asleep in her lap.

“Auntieeeee! Guess what??” I was bouncing like a jack rabbit.

She raised her eyebrow, “Hhhhmmm?”

“I got! ALL! As!!!”

I had been imagining this moment all afternoon. My big reveal. The way her face would crack in two from smiling. That she would swoop down and hug me and ask for every detail. I was going to recite exactly how I did it! All the facts I had learned, how I could multiply now and how neat my penmanship had become. A one woman show, the burning bright lights of Broadway, starring Carmen — that’s me!

She quirked her eyebrows again and looked down. I stopped in my tracks. I had played this all wrong.

“Good. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Then she turned back to her work. My bruised eight-year-old ego left to be picked up in her shadow.

I tell that story often you know, pausing in all the right places for comedic effect. The build up, the let down. The lessons learned about not bragging over accomplishments. I told it again this summer to Auntie Lorna’s home health aide, after my mother and I packed up our lives and moved back to Buffalo to be with her in her last weeks. The aide whooped and laughed in all the right parts, but Auntie Lorna just smirked.

“I’m glad you remember that day.” She motioned for me to get in bed with her. I folded my body close, like when I was little. She held my hands in her own.

“It’s not that we don’t celebrate our wins. It’s that we don’t celebrate when there’s still more work to do. You were always smart Carmen, that was never the question. What were you going to do with those smarts, that’s what mattered.”

The first time Auntie Lorna was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was 24 years old. I wrote her a letter.

I wrote about a concert she and my mom took us to (myself and my younger cousin, her daughter) when I was about 10 years old. Sweet Honey in the Rock is a Black women’s a capella ensemble of folk singers. A capella folk music wasn’t exactly aligned with my music tastes in fifth grade (I was into Brandy, LL Cool J and the Spice Girls) but we had gotten dressed up, which felt special and unusual to hear music, and it was my first time in a fancy concert hall, so I was willing to play along.

But there was one song. I made my mom buy the CD. As a teenager, I downloaded it on my iPod. As an adult, I still stream it. My kid brain couldn’t describe exactly why, but “There Were No Mirrors in My Nana’s House” felt warm and all encompassing — like a hug. Gentle and sweet like a lullaby, but with none of the implied sleepiness.

“There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house,
no mirrors in my Nana’s house.

I never knew that my skin was too black.
I never knew that my nose was too flat.
I never knew that my clothes didn’t fit.
I never knew there were things that I’d missed,
cause the beauty in everything
was in her eyes (like the rising of the sun);
…was in her eyes.”

And you see, that song was us. The beauty of everything was in her eyes, and in her reflection I saw myself. As an adult it’s taken me a long time to unpack just exactly how anxious I was as a child. How terrified I was of making the wrong choice or saying the wrong thing or how exhausted I was from all the loud voices screaming all the time in my own head that I was going to somehow mess up. But in Auntie Lorna’s presence, I only felt calm. With her, I heard quiet. It was secure. Unwavering. And when you’re a kid who’s very insides feel like they are clawing away at you — the search for that quiet? It’s everything.

I sent her the lyrics, written in sharpie on a notecard. I told her, if people ever wanted to know the very best of what’s in me, they only needed to know her.

I was reading recently about how cruel it is not to be able to mourn in ritual. I feel guilty, because my aunt didn’t die of Covid and I don’t want to co-opt a narrative that isn’t mine to claim. But she did die this year. And because of this time we’re living in, my family was not able to have a memorial.

We were able to be together, which I know counts us as luckier than most. Having created a tight circle around her care in her last weeks, we were always only together anyway — before “pods” became an uptick in Covid related slang we may never soon forget. The night she left us, we drank beer and played Spades in her backyard until it was so dark we used our phones propped up against bottles for light. And I know, I know she was with us. But damnit —

Lorna C. Hill was larger than any one life. She was supposed to be sent home with drums at her feet. With the many, countless people who loved her being able to sing her name and hold each other out loud and in public.

And what comes for those of us who are left? Where does grief go, how can it work through our bodies, when it’s left unattended. I wish I was smarter, somehow, more poetic. I wish I knew how to be in service, the way that she taught me. To find a way to guide through. Instead I just feel… here.

Here is a really fucked up, angry, mundane, nothingness place to be.

I promised myself I’d write about Auntie Lorna for Black History Month when I saw a tweet that said something to the effect of, “the story of how your grandparents met, that’s Black history too.”

Lorna Hill was Black History in a literal sense that she did community work for Black people for decades and that will have an impact that outlives her in every capacity. She’s also my Black history in that you cannot tell the story of my being without her. I imagined that in writing about the woman who so loved Black people and so believed in Black stories — the woman who’s greatest gift to me was in loving those same things — during the unequivocal BLACKEST month of the year — I’d have a better ending.

Instead, all I have is an ellipsis. Grief is a flat circle. And I never imagined I would have to live through grieving her.

My mom’s right. I haven’t talked about my Aunt Lorna. The funny thing is, I haven’t been able to bring myself to talk about pretty much anything else, either. I talk a lot. I mean every day, from the minute I wake up. I can fill almost any space with my voice. But I also don’t talk much at all, if you know what to look for. The trick of talking about everything is that you’re really talking about nothing.

Everything that matters is stuck in the back of my throat. I don’t know what to say. I still can’t bring myself to say that she’s not here. I was there. I watched them carry her away. I close my eyes and she’s still right here, she’s right here next to me.

But now I’ve said 2,644 words about Auntie Lorna. She remains the very best of me.

Queering Faith: Reclaiming the Holy of Sexuality

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2021 Black History Month essay series. In their recent stirring multi-media anthology Black Futures, Black queer creators Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew ask, “What does it mean to be Black and alive?” And so, this Black History Month, Autostraddle is reaching past, and pushing forward, to explore realities beyond (the pain of) what we have inherited.

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill…For the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.” ― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Even now I’m terrified they’ll read this.

Last week was Audre Lorde’s birthday. I am sitting in my lingerie with wine wondering how to write a response to her essay “Usage of the Erotic”.

She says, “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling… For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.”

I think about all the ways that just being herself was a risk. To be openly queer and Black was a radical act. Add being a person of faith? Something is always out to attack our intersectionality.

I’ve always wanted to write like Dorothy Chan and Tiana Clark, with the fierceness of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Just this past week, I hosted a reading where I was the feature and all my poems were the best kind of raunchy. I listened to the work of Imani Davis and Raych Jackson and marveled at their vulnerability and honesty. I cried for days after wishing I could be that brave. The freedom that seemed to come naturally for them, was still awkwardly resting in my mouth.

And what about Tokyo at night and Ingres’ Princesse de Broglie
and whips and bodysuits and catsuits and handcuffs,
kinking it up, the whole boudoir
delivered to my doorstep, and in this sushi bar in Downtown Phoenix
when the whipped plum ice cream comes — Dorothy Chan

I longed to unburden myself of the Baptist shame I’d carried around for years. Growing up, no one besides Audre and Adrienne Riche spoke about their desire or the body, and being sheltered in private school and the weekly church functions didn’t leave much room for exploration. Nor did I dare to explore that side of myself. Thirteen years of Christian school uniforms, choir practice, and Bible quiz bowl every year. Secretly, I always wondered what the book of Songs of Solomon was about. I’d hide under my bed reading verses that painted vivid descriptions of a woman’s breast or the curvature of her backside. The pages my mother and school kept concealed.

Yes, the boy hovers
above you, a generic ruffle
of gasp & ohmygod. But let’s not
kid ourselves, shawty. We both know
to whom you really pray. Brooklyn’s sky
is too twitchy for stars, so this is all
you know of night: — Imani Davis

For years, I have been aching to write about sex and desire. Each time I do, it is a trip into a bear field, a walk on a tight rope, a risk that is always worth it but still terrifying. The first time I attempted, it just came to me. During a writing session one night, a repressed memory popped but up in my head and the words started pouring. I was recalling the trauma of my mother exercising the demon of my queerness. I was twelve or thirteen and her friend came over to visit her and brought her daughter. Our mothers told us to go to the room and play together so we occupied our time with babies and action figures. I’m not sure how we even started, but before you knew it we were talking about bodies and giving ourselves pleasure. I asked her if she’d been kissed before and we practice mimicking the motions on our hands. Then I told her I had discovered a new way that I thought was very innovative: rubbing my vagina on the bedpost. I asked her to try it with me. We were having a good ole time grinding until my mother and her friend walked in and caught us. What’s left with me now is the memory of being taken to the basement and being exorcised. The holy water, the oil, the scripture. They were convinced we were possessed. We never spoke of it again.

Looking back, I understand my mother didn’t know what else to do. God and the Bible, scripture was all she knew. After writing the poem, it made its way into my new book and into the play production, I wrote. I knew I’d have to read it on the opening night of my show. Who was dead front row center? My mother. I stepped on stage, started with a joke, then opened with the first sentence which gives the whole memory away. “When I was twelve or thirteen my mother caught me and a female friend dangling our vaginas.” She just smiled, but I’m not sure she understood the gravity. In that moment, I felt like I was flying and truly free. A memory that I had pushed down was being told with confidence and boldness in front of my mother almost twenty years later.

It wasn’t like my mom hadn’t seen me be wild on stage before. Just the year prior, I directed the Vagina Monologues at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and performed Eve Insler’s moaning triple orgasm scene with my mother in the audience, but she’d never heard my own explicit words. Never a true memory that she had encouraged me to repress, to bury so deep, I thought it was a bad dream.

After the show, she took me for pizza, and we didn’t talk about it. She said, “That was a really good performance — anything you want to tell me about it?” I replied, “Nope”. We just kept going. We never spoke of it again.

It’s that silence that makes me continue to write, knowing the risk. The things we never speak of. The queerness. I can count on my hand the number of times we have. The time I told her my friend and wedding officiate was gay, and she said “Maybe she’s confused.” I knew the conversation was pointless, so I said, “No, she’s been gay. I think her mind is pretty made up”. And that was the end.

As I become more comfortable with my true self and exploring my sexuality and sensual writing, I also become hyper-aware of the risk. Someone could read my poem and that would be the end of me.

The fear isn’t just of my mother or immediate family finding out about my double life through my writing. Last month, I hosted my monthly Women Speak poetry reading, and like clockwork, the panic set in that my in-laws would see it on Facebook and decide to come. Each of whom are pastors with no idea that I am queer and married to their son. I know they might eventually read my two books coming out this year that talk about queerness and desire, and that creates daily anxiety.

To publish books and stories about sex and desire make me feel more in tune with my spirituality, but that’s not something easily said to in-laws that you want to see you as wholesome. The taboo is always looming. Where I’m from, Black folks don’t mix the spirit with the flesh. The desire with devotion. Keeping up the act is exhausting. Hiding certain articles I’ve published on my website so people don’t click on them. Deciding not to announce that I’ve been featured in queer anthologies. The tinge in my stomach that someone will see my recent poem publication announcement and I’ll be outed.

How do you tell them your poem about pussy doesn’t negate your love for God? That your spirituality isn’t separate but an extension of you? Can you imagine the awkwardness at the next family gathering? I remember when my aunt saw the article I shared on Twitter about not feeling attractive to women, non-monogamy, and navigating the queer community while married. I told her it was just research for the story. My double life had caught up with me once again.

I love poets like Tiana Clark, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Chan. Their freedom and the queer representation they provide is greater than their fear. Audre Lorde talks about embracing the erotic because it allows one to more fully feel other aspects of one’s life, and to look at those aspects more carefully and honestly. In other words, accessing one’s sexuality fully and without shame means one can access spirituality more fully, too.

Somehow, these authors’ determination to live fully and truly themselves was worth the risk of disowning and fear.

Now, all my work hinges on that intersection of spirituality and sexuality. The dichotomy of desire and spirit. What I’m learning is they are connected. That every time I speak out my identity, I am freeing the shame that has followed me for so long.

Mackerel

when I was 12,
my mother caught me
& a” female friend” dangling
our vaginas on the
end of the bedpost
like live bait.

rubbing our maple wood
against the slippery pole
trying to catch a spark
on the cold, hard thing
between our legs
The mesquite of our innocence
roasting
over flames sent signals to the room
where my mother and her friend
sat talking,

And we were just at the point
of falling
off the bone,

the moment where the pink
of the Salmon is so tender,
when she opened the door,

doused our flame with holy

water & scriptures, made us bow
our head and promise to forget
the sweet communion of burning.

Years after she scrubbed the cedar
from our clothes, I learned
that my body is only alive
when it was free to choose
when & where it starts a fire, how
long it allows itself to be
wet & waiting.
The power comes in
knowing that your body is no tadpole,
nor fish to roast over hot coals,
it is the flame itself,
the blue and red ghost that
survives even after the smoke clears.

More of the author’s poetry: WAP as Wishing Wells, Through the Looking Glass, Eve Leaves Adam for Yvette, and also Mackrel in its original typed form.

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Wrestling With Kamala and Beyond: Reckoning With Blackness, Womanhood, and What Comes Next

I. Birthright

Akron, 1851. In a meeting hall full of both Black and white faces, a six-foot-tall woman with oiled leathered skin rises to speak. She is rumored to be man. She be too tall, too masculine, too Black to truly be woman. Her feminine birth name betrays the whispers – Isabella; her declared name signals that she is more concerned with a higher purpose. Sojourner Truth (meaning one who is seeking truth) addresses the room, giving a concise speech that would later be recorded and recited by Black scholars and activists alike for centuries to come.

“Ain’t I a woman?” she asks the crowd. “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?” Ain’t I worthy of being helped? Of receiving the best? Of being loved like white women? Of being cared for in this world? Ain’t I worthy of being seen in the most delicate ways possible?

150 years later, Black women are still asking the world the same question. We ask when Serena is ridiculed for arguing during tennis matches, when Michelle is compared to monkeys, when we are shackled during childbirth, when we are raped, when there are no marches when we die, every time there is another report of a Black trans woman killed, when Breonna is murdered while sleeping, when we breathe without asking permission:

Ain’t we women? Ain’t we worthy of being seen in the most delicate ways possible?

History tells us “no” and so we hunker down. We cling to ourselves, uplift each other, scrounge up ounces of #blackgirlmagic to make the world better and more bearable for the next generation who will ask the same questions of their world.

To be Black and woman is my birthright; to be loud in my defiance, fierce in my brilliance, magical in my resilience, beautiful in my melanin; to be sister, daughter, sis, queen, star, baby girl. It is all I have ever known — until now.

II. Womanhood

Vermont, 2020. My body, a Judas in all her forms, bled the day we won. Blood drenched my boxer briefs as my body celebrated a victory for womanhood, for Blackness, for a return to a democracy that pretends to care about folks like us. I sat on the toilet in our tiny mountainside bathroom and cried. When the blood comes, the tears most always accompany it. When my female organs remind me of my birthright, my stomach knots and my body contorts into an unfamiliar “she” that I used to be. She goes to buy tampons because she is always out. She washes her underwear, curses her maker, and informs her wife that the devil is visiting despite all of the cease and desist orders she has written to the universe.

I know that womanhood and periods are not synonymous. I have read the essays. I have reminded people on the internet — reminded myself — that not just women bleed, that gender and sex are not the same thing. When I was younger, I bled only once each year and considered it a gift of apology from a creator who made a mistake in assigning my organs. Unfortunately, my irregular periods were as short-lived as my femme stage of queerness. These days, my period reminds me that I cannot read and discourse my way to self-acceptance. Bleeding is one of the last things that connects me to a female-ness that makes Black womanhood almost unbearable.

In a meme-worthy video, Kamala Harris’ voice comes in a half-whine. “We did it, Joe.” She is smiling, dressed down in athleisure, outside in the sunshine. I watch the video again. I do not smile. There is no sunshine in my windowless bathroom.

Kamala Devi Harris — Black and South Asian, an AKA from the Bay would be our next Vice President. As usual, Black women did The Most. The best part about Black women is when we do The Most. On graduation day, we show up with noisemakers and signs and cheers even when they ask us to hold our applause. Can’t nobody tell Black women to hold our applause for our success. Mama gon’ scream for her baby no matter what. Kamala is ours and Black women make it known. So my body, clinging to Black womanhood, traded in air horns and applause for blood clots and cramps.

When I stand up and look in the mirror, I see my mother in my reflection: short hair, glasses, smirk, big eyes. I see my grandmother in my mother. See her mother in her.

“We did it,” my ancestors echo.
“Who is we?” my soul responds.

Over the next few days, Black women show out.

“You know she went to Howard, right?”
“Let me get my pearls out, chile!”
“They ain’t gonna know what to do with themselves now.”

In art, Kamala walks with Ruby Bridges’ shadow. She stands on the shoulders of giants, painted with John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and John McCain. In essays, she becomes our heroine – the first, the holiest, the Blackest despite her South Asian heritage that is not honored as much as it deserves to be. She is not only our next vice president. She is woman. She is Black. She is worthy.

Ain’t we women?
“Hell Yes,” we chant and promise to don pearls and Chucks in her honor.

For the victory of Madame Vice President Kamala Devi Harris suggests that Black women are now “worthy,” a cause for celebration. We — Black, women, and tired — have been chasing worthiness since before Sojourner asked that room in 1851; since they ushered us off of ships in shackles and priced us for auction; since they stripped us of our names, homes, and womanhood and called us Black.

In the “we” that won, I search for my own joy and came up empty. This is not my first rodeo. I know girls like Kamala. Those who are the epitome of Black girlhood in the best ways possible with light skin, thin frames, straight hair, pearls, and parents who got money so they could get all the degrees. The ones that get the world and say “you can, too,” reaching down to pull me up. I am too heavy though, too rough, too unpolished, not enough money, gold chain dangling instead of pearls.

The progress of Black girls and women like Kamala Devi Harris has never guaranteed progress for folks like me. I have spent my life mourning my inability to twist my spine, slim my thighs, soften my soul to be woman enough.

III. Girlhood

Virginia, 2007. In the picture, I am wearing a pink linen skirt suit. Draped in part-tablecloth, part potato sack, I smile flanked by my two best friends in high school. They are twin stallions, beautiful in both body and soul. We each hold a glass of water while posing for the photo. I really wanted a glass of punch, but when I saw the punch bowl, I also saw the future — red punch on my linen skirt suit that was my mama’s favorite outfit for me.

“You look so neat,” she had said when I came out of the dressing room months earlier. Neat was mama’s best compliment for fatness. According to my mother, there were three rules for fat Black girls:
1. Never smell.
2. Always watch your mouth — use correct grammar and act like you got sense.
3. Wear clothes that fit; be neat.

She never said this but from personal experience, I knew that fat Black girls were not as beautiful, as delicate, as woman as skinny Black girls. I knew that skinny Black girls were not as treasured as skinny non-Black girls. I knew that skinny white girls were the best. I knew that this worked for everything. I knew that my straight shoulder-length hair was my best womanly feature which is why my mother spent $40 every other week to get it done. Five years later, when I decided to cut my hair off, my mother sent me a two-page email begging me to reconsider. The fear between her sentences echoed the quiver in her voice I’d heard a few years prior when I told her I was queer. She was not afraid of who I was becoming, but how the world would treat me when I became it.

I don’t know why my mother thought linen would be a good idea for her tomboy daughter. I actually don’t know why anyone thinks linen is a good idea. It wrinkles within minutes and never looks as crisp in real life as it does on the plastic mannequins in department stores. The linen skirt suit came from Dress Barn. I’d outgrown the junior sizes back in elementary school and was forced into womanhood before I was ready. To be fair — I’m not sure I would’ve ever been ready for Dress Barn. The truth is I was born as queer as they come. I am queer boy, queer girl, queer being, queer beast, queer heaven wrapped in messy, rugged, caramel-coated melanin.

Looking back at the photo, I can feel my mother’s pride — of me, her daughter who won a scholarship she would later waste in a year of recklessness; her daughter who managed to keep Pepto-Bismol linen skirt suit wrinkle-free despite being crunched into an auditorium seat for an hour; her daughter who smelled good, used correct grammar, and was neat; who was beautiful, Black, and woman on that day.

Months later, I would wear the same linen skirt suit to a different function. The blood would come and spot the back of it. Instead of washing it out, I would throw it in the trash without telling my mother. When my mother died eight years later, my body bled for a month in clotted mourning that spoiled every pair of pants I loved (none of them linen nor pink).

IV. Reckoning

Inauguration Day, 2021. Kamala Harris is dressed head-to-toe in a purple outfit designed by Christopher John Rogers. She pulls it off. I imagine myself in the same suit and see only “Violet. You’re turning violet!” vibes. I do not watch the inauguration. I am worried that there will be another attack — on the proceedings or on my own soul. I cannot take another day of tears, isolation, and heightened gender dysphoria.

Later, I watch a recording and watch her raise her hand and solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; to take the obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; to well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which she is about to enter.

Pause. Rewind. Play. Celebrate.
Pause. Rewind. Play. Grieve.
Pause. Rewind. Play. Rage.

We did not ask for this. We asked for revolution, for abolition, for a radical shift in our being and dreaming. We got Kamala and once again thanked a country for giving us less than we deserve. In America, being grateful for receiving less than we deserve is our birthright as Black women.

On plantations, Black women toiled day and night under white masters, spent their days in their master’s fields and kitchens preparing gourmet meals for others, and hoped to get scraps to nourish themselves and their own. Black women spend their lives twisting their forms and tongues in hopes of being worthy of the humanity we deserve. Centuries of years later, we remain malnourished in almost every way possible, still settling for table scraps. When you are hungry, the crumbs taste like heaven.

“Celebrate the progress, shea. Be grateful for representation. Be happy to be Black and woman and American today.”

I stopped believing in the lie of progress a long time ago. America sold us a promise of progress and said “just a little bit longer.” Ain’t nothing revolutionary about assimilation; about being just palatable enough for them to say “I guess so” and mark your name on the ballot as the lesser of two evils.

I will not downplay the success of Kamala Devi Harris, our first Black, South Asian female vice president. She is brilliant, strong, beautiful. An alum of the most prestigious HBCU, a former attorney general, and the daughter of scientists, she has a panoply of accomplishments. Her greatest accomplishment may perhaps be her appeasement to whiteness so much so that enough white folks found her palatable to vote her into office. 150 years later — they say Kamala’s win is their answer to Sojourner’s question, but what Kamala’s victory signifies is not a victory for Blackness or Black womanhood; it is a reminder that this white supremacist nation rewards those of us who are able to get as close as possible to whiteness, to womanness.

I don’t know Kamala personally, but I know her in the way that we all know someone who reminds us of someone. I’ve been chasing Kamalas (and their victories) my entire life. What I know for certain is that the progress of wealthy, well-educated, cishet Black women has never ensured the progress of folks who look and sound like me — fat, queer, fluid, loud, and not quite woman enough.

For months, my body has been mourning the faux revolution they sold us — crumbs disguised as a feast worthy of celebration. I am tired of settling for table scraps in both politics and life. I want the entire loaf I deserve — personhood that is elastic and brilliantly queer, a Blackness that is not judged by its palatability to whiteness, to be considered worthy and affirmed regardless of how I measure up to standards of womanhood.

V. Beyond

Today, 2021. When I wear a suit, my little sister smiles and tells me I look neat, a nod to my mother’s legacy of wanting us to feel worthy and safe in this world as Black women. I smile back and tell her I always look neat, that I am my mother’s child.

She asks me if I am still her sister. I tell her yes because it is all I know and brother feels too harsh for my kind of delicate. A friend stops mid-sentence to apologize for saying “girrrlllll” as she reads someone for filth. I tell her not to apologize. That I am okay with it. That “girl” feels like home uttered from her tongue. I do not say that I am scared. That sisterhood, girlhood, and womanhood feel like the only pieces of my mother and grandmother that I have left. That leaving it behind means going beyond what I know to be true. That I am afraid of answering my own “Ain’t I A Woman?” question with a resounding, “no” or “not quite.”

Two years ago, I sat in the backseat of a packed UberPool in Boston and composed a thread where I tried to make sense of being both a Black woman and non-binary. The thread was welcomed by a community and friends who would love me no matter what.

The truth is I haven’t felt like a Black woman for years. But it is all I know and I believe in the magic of Blackness so I committed to bending and breaking it, taking pieces that would make me feel included, affirmed, and part of what I know to be true. These days, though, the louder Black womanhood becomes, the less it resonates with my own being.

When we were little, they told us we were pretty. They said we could grow up to be whatever we wanted. They dressed us in the most beautiful dresses, spun us around, and called it magic. They said that Blackness was holy, womanness was the most wonderful thing in the world, said the combination of the two was the greatest gift God gave to this earth.

In their truths, we molded ourselves to fit the image of what is beautiful, magical, Black, and woman. My mama raised me to be a strong Black woman and perhaps the strongest thing I can do is release womanhood for something truer, an existence where the can never be enough “too much.” Where my too muchness, queerness, and ruggedness stretches into infinity and we call it beautiful, dope, and magnificent

With Kamala Harris’ inauguration and “success” as a Black woman, I am forced to make my own commitment – to asking my own questions and finding my own way; to reckoning with and dreaming of what comes beyond a womanhood that only ever felt as comfortable as a pink linen skirt suit.

Ain’t I a Woman? I don’t know.

What is beyond Black womanhood? Beyond the magic of Black girlhood? Beyond the connections of Black sisterhood? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am ready to be fearless. To dream beyond Black womanhood and know that wherever I land, I — Black, queer, and not-quite-sure — am worthy, so worthy of all of the love, affirmation, and power the universe can muster.

I wish Kamala the best in this world. I wish us the courage to go beyond what has been defined for us. I wish us a world where Blackness and gender are as infinite and undefined as the night sky in the mountains. I hope that Converse comes back into style because they are timeless. I hope more people wear pearls because we all deserve to feel like royalty. And I hope that more of us feel comfortable with mourning and inaugurating ourselves into living authentically.

VI. Inauguration

I, shea wesley martin, do solemnly affirm that I will support and defend my right to explore and exist within, outside of, and beyond Black womanhood; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely but scared as hell, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the charge of being authentically and unabashedly queer, Black, and worthy of love; So help me God. Ashe.

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Gender Fluidity and the Black Atlantic

I don’t remember when I stopped calling myself genderfluid.

Looking at my digital footprint, especially around my early days of gender exploration, the word felt like such a home. At some point, I grew tired of constantly defining and explaining and settled in under the nonbinary umbrella as the word seemed to eclipse and encompass all things not man or woman. But I miss my watery home and the ways it makes me feel connected to my human ancestors, and more importantly the Atlantic. The way the label gives me the freedom to be solid and slippery and still — down to the molecules, me.

Both of my parents swam in big bellies on the Atlantic, the children of American parents born on European soil. Before that, it gets hairy — with orphans on both sides, the trauma of enslavement erasing any tribal or national identity, and the toll of addiction severing any knowledge of even the Irish county my ancestors immigrated from. For me, I’ve found great comfort in the deep and wide of the Atlantic, and the way the water connects me to kin, named or unknown.

I never quite know how to respond when someone asks where my family is from. I can typically tell by the tone and the face if they’re trying to place me in a racial taxonomy to figure out how to treat me, or if they’re searching for a line of kinship. I typically just say “Black Irish” and let all the double meanings and beings hang in the air.

I think I stopped defining my gender as fluid to make myself more palpable. I grew up as the fly in the buttermilk, the lone Black face in class pictures — chemically straightening my hair for most of my teenage years in an effort to take up less physical and social space. Coming out as a lesbian I felt a need to stay even more in line — when I fell in love with a boy, I kept him hidden not wanting to make any more waves in my community. When I first bound my chest and looked in the mirror and saw a body that looked like a home I hid behind booze and intentionally forgot this homecoming for many more years — thinking how difficult it already was to be Black, queer, and mentally ill, I couldn’t possibly add being trans to the list. Coming out as trans was hard enough, and while genderfluid was used more in the early days of my transition it seemed to fall to the wayside and nonbinary seemed a term that cis people could more readily understand. I recognize now that I stopped calling myself genderfluid to make cisgender people more comfortable. So often in my life, I’ve whittled down my truths to make them easier to swallow or understand. I understand who I am, and that’s all that matters.

I’m the last generation of trans people that didn’t’ have words for ourselves or our experience, but as early as I could remember I knew I wasn’t a girl or a boy. My dear and darling parents graciously let me wear boy clothes most of the time as a child. I would sometimes acquiesce to wearing a matching dress with my sister for photos or big church functions, but for the most part, I wore baggy soccer uniforms. The only trans people I saw were on Jerry Springer when I was at home sick — and lord knows that wasn’t the positive mirror I needed. The first trans masculine person I ever saw was Max on The L Word, witnessing the abuse he faced and the exile from his queer community scared me into the closet for another decade.

I came out as genderfluid when I moved to the desert. On Tiwa Pueblo land I found trans community and queer people of color for the first time in my life. I met people that used they/them pronouns, that changed their names. I learned that I could take control of my body with hormones or surgery, both or neither. I discovered that these terms, these in-betweens or refusals to be pinned down could mean different things to different people. I learned that there was no script for this life, this body, this gender. The freedom I felt reminded me of long afternoons floating on my back, weightless and present.

One of the things I love about being part of the queer and trans community is how often our language shifts and moves with the times. In the preface to Transgender Warriors, the wise and inimitable Leslie Feinberg says, “The words I use in this book may become outdated in a very short time because the transgender movement is still young and defining itself. But while the slogans lettered on the banners may change quickly, the struggle will rage on. Since I am writing this book as a contribution to the demand for transgender liberation, the language I’m using in this book is not aimed at defining but at defending the diverse communities that are coalescing.” While I sometimes get salty about trying to stay hip and with it, I also celebrate that the changing language and labels have always been a part of trans history and there is nothing wrong with us hunting for and choosing words like feel like home.

I roll my eyes at the idea that trans people or anyone that exists beyond or without the gender binary is new — or a trend. Embracing my watery genderfluid identity is embracing my Atlantic legacy and the ways my ancestors might have understood my existence.

Water plays a big part in many West African cosmologies, from what I can glean from diving into voodoo and Santeria and what they were able to hide and keep from Yoruba beliefs. I’ve always been enthralled by the orisha Olokun. I’m not initiated in any of these traditions but have drawn great strength from learning from these living archives what enslavement tried to erase — especially around gender and sexuality. Depending on where you stop along the coast of West Africa or dock along the diaspora, Olokun has a different gender — but what tracks across the different belief systems and geographies is Olokun’s link to water.

I like to think of Olokun taking care of all the ancestors we lost to the sea, by force or by choice. Sharks knew to follow slaver ships because there was always blood. In the Wake, Christina Sharpe interviewed a physics colleague Anne Gardluski to ask about the presence of these ancestors in the ocean — she says that 90% to 95% of organic material in the ocean gets recycled over and over again, “no one dies of old age in the ocean.” The Atlantic, like many Black scholars have already noted, is quite literally an ancestor.

I always wonder what words my ancestors had for someone like me, what my role would’ve been in society. Until we recover these, I’ll stick with what I have. Here, holy and wholly, genderfluid.

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Foolish Child #90: It’s Black History Month, I’m on Break

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Ain’t I A Bottom

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.

via Bethany Vargas & Keyla Marquez

At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered the speech that came to be known as “Ain’t I A Woman.” Her remarks briefly juxtapose her observations that both the antislavery and women’s rights movements, in which she participated, overlooked black women. “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?” she asked — demurring only slightly from the more explicitly political and religious overtones of the talk. This refrain remains poignant for Black femmes, because regardless of the dis-likeability of being presumed helpless, we have never had the privilege of opting out of this exposure with the undignified and unsightly: we have never been given any “best place.”

bell hooks notes that unabated since our arrival on American shores, Black women have done “men’s work,” or jobs that were considered too harsh, dirty, or impolite for ladies. (The essay, “sexism and the black female slave experience” is the first in a collection of essays named for, and taking up lines of thought, from Truth’s speech.) The historic struggle for the freedom to do all work that suits us, regardless of gender, figures dissimilarly from the perspective of women who have been forced to do the most harrowing work, on and off working hours.

I’ve been a ringleader and a tomboy for the better part of my life. I was frequently the only girl invited to boys’ birthday parties before puberty. I remember whooping ass in laser tag, relishing the gendered underdog justice of imputing competitive humiliation. In middle school, my father chuckled reminding me, whilst I wept that boys didn’t like me, that I should “stop busting their balls.” Since 4, I’ve been an athlete, eventually becoming competitive enough to serve as a select soccer team striker, and to win the shot put championship in my high school league. I’m a (fairly) charismatic diplomatic type: I was elementary school president, I served on my high school senate, and now, I work as an artist, curator, and host, and programming director for creative communities.

I’m disgusted by the idea that the power positionality I teach from would be the one I fuck from. There is NOTHING more satiating to me than relinquishing my quotidian responsibilities to a stern, caring, and intense top.

My first job was as a lead kindergarten and first grade “looping” classroom teacher — a turn from my earlier legal aspirations, upon the catalytic learning that prisons use 3rd grade standardized reading test scores to compute likely prison populations when creating their business bids. I anxiously planned literacy minutiae, amidst grim odds: first year school serving a vast majority of students whose family fiscal status qualified them for free lunch in Downtown Los Angeles. Most of my students began school speaking basic conversational English. They’d have to read short chapter books by the end of our 360 instructional days together to be on grade level (sidenote: I did not have an adequate classroom library at any time in my tenure as a primary teacher).

My life feels replete with responsibilities wherein serious outcomes depend on my effort. In community work and conceptual art, I analyze and confront previous learnings, work steadily to destabilize long worn Western (binary) philosophies, and propose novel interactive societal configurations. Even as an artist, I’m typically at the helm of creating and seeing out a vision from inception to final product. People are attracted to this sort of direction, guidance, clarity and levity of authority, and it’s flattering, but give me a break.

I’m disgusted by the idea that the power positionality I teach from would be the one I fuck from. There is NOTHING more satiating to me than relinquishing my quotidian responsibilities to a stern, caring, and intense top; quieting my high stakes planning brain, and becoming liquid, pliable: everything. Best topped, I’m not sure of when we, or where I, begin and end; when I’ll be allowed to cum, what I’ll become, or if I’ll ever come to: infinity.

At a party recently, a friend and I are messy tongue kissing and grinding, when she shouts over the sumptuous, turnt-up Toni Braxton club remix, “you’re such a top!” (Funny! I actually consider earnest and playful humping to be one of my more little girlish qualities.) Generally, I do go a bit more top drag at a party for the entertainment of dance partners, friends, and onlookers, but front grinding, as we were doing in this particular instance, is especially enjoyable, in part, because of its power neutral positionality — a facet I try to be sensitive about, especially, in queer POC party spaces.

I’ve needed to do quite a bit of dirty work to write this very essay, to go into this pain — personal essay is such a power bottom genre. I asked some of these friends, out of too many to recall and too many to bear, why they’d categorized me as such (loudly, and to my face). One friend knew they’d fucked up and it opened up my forgiveness strongly. They were sweet and doting, and admitted: they’re such a bottom, and truthfully, they do want me to top them. This best case was a misunderstanding, nonetheless.

I’d love for people, but friends, especially, to hold space for me to enact a sexual self that is separate from how I show up in public scenarios. Play and fantasy are cardinal spaces where someone might anticipate different behavior from me, from anyone. I enjoy this complexity: interpersonal negotiation that permits surprise, moments that remind me of the novelty and multiplicity of interpersonal content. It’s undistinguished of us (supposedly) critically superior queers to hold so tight to these old ways of knowing (how to fuck and get fucked).

I’m used to, but saddened by, misinterpretations of my identity and position. Black and femme, I’m particularly used to underestimations of my capacity and skill: but actually, I am an immaculately lush and artful bottom. At my last birthday party, near the end of a several hours, somewhat fucked up haze, I straddle one of my closest friends. A vortex appears and we deep kiss and grind, she pulls me closer navigating the precise tilt of my lordosis. I’m sure some of my friends perceive me, here, as a rambunctious, assertive top, but she knows with a seemingly predetermined awareness, not by any archetypal gender performance on either of our behalf, nor previous interaction, that she guides this moment. I feel our closeness, I trust her immensely. She sees me, feels me: baby, (whore), birthday brat, wants a ride, wants a smooch, innocent — small enough that my weight doesn’t make me feel unmanageable. A show of effort from a queer Black femme, bottom oriented, herself, just for my birthday.

Little did I realize at the time, my friend was writing a piece about exploring her topness. She mentioned that our experience, which we often recall with the sweetest fondness, helped her tap in, and it made me feel empowered, to nurture space and encouragement for a friend to understand lesser exercised sexual power. We grew closer knowing she could trust what I would do with that energy and understanding of her: not abuse it or manipulate the positionality of our friendship to see it overextended.

It’s painful but also quite inconvenient that when trying to get off with other queer people, that I should be so frequently misunderstood. I’ve had difficult time understanding my queerness, because I’ve felt othered from predominant (cis, white) queer archetypes. In high school (pre-Tumblr), the time many first explore their queer desire, the women who were positioned as the most desirable, if not viable writ large, were white, thereby giving me a bit of cognitive dissonance about what it meant to be attracted to women.

Through early adulthood, I fucked Black cis boys, and white cis boys who wanted to fuck like they imagined Black men fucked, because they were the only ones who would bend me over and insult me, with no questions asked, and this, too, is because, they suffer raced/gendered archetypal expectations in their sex lives. In as much as these men had already stuck around through the more confrontational aspects of my personality, I felt securely respected each time I got choked; each time one remarked how nasty I behaved, it was in contrast to of my totally noble character otherwise. In queer spaces, this misunderstanding cuts deeper, because it is the less anticipated betrayal. After years of wanting deeper connection with queerness, it’s been a slap in the face (not the good kind) to be reminded that here, too, we respond to dominant desire narratives.

Even if well-meaning, conscription to work is just that: the act of fantasizing about being topped by a black femme is predicated on a fantasy of non-consensual labor. After years of being America’s moral and material mule, all the while providing unimaginably elegant care, and some of the most sensually and spiritually impactful creative work of our time, Black women are imagined as superwomen (see: non-human) and this fantasy leaves us under cared for and overworked for less satisfaction and reward in any space — sexual, erotic, moral, social, political, economic — that has been affected by the ubiquitous history of the trans-atlantic slave trade (see: all).

At a party one fine evening this Black History Month, my lover and I absconded to my bedroom, while my sweetly perverted, slightly younger cohort of friends listened in to our lovemaking. They remarked about my music taste (ugh!), the auditory revelation that I am, indeed, as much of a bottom as I say, and my lover’s apparently fruitful, and enduring efforts. “They’re fucking Mandy for the community,” one young Blacqueer femme remarked in gratitude, moved by the soundtrack of my reaction to my lover’s doting and articulate composition. My lover is a divine top: they do the work, joyfully, dancing, competent, big and strong. And their spirit yearns with the will to work: an assertion of responsibility. They fuck me and it feels like purpose and implicit herein is the notion that I am deserving of work, planning, story, and some of their most sensitive creativities. This gift renews my efforts, stretches my muscles and intelligence, in ways that pay off for those around me.

Bottoming isn’t about womanness: sex, gender, or its presentation. Plenty of women — many of my favorite women, in fact — top, and, plenty of men bottom. But to introduce a binary, and then refuse to examine the archetypes therein implied is irresponsible; especially given that most tops, at least among the Autostraddle community, identify their gender presentation as stud/AG, Butch or masc of center; and most bottoms, identify their gender presentation as high femme, femme, and lazy femme. (The term “lazy femme” strikes me similar to “messy bun,” in that, respectability and desire norms haven’t made space for what it means when Black women are low maintenance.) For this reason, and others foregrounded in this writing, I’m looking forward to seeing the future iteration of this study disaggregated by racial group, or maybe even skin tone — and I’d be curious to know (messy), the rates with which non-Black people perceive Black people’s gender presentation correctly.

(The term “lazy femme” strikes me similar to “messy bun,” in that, respectability and desire norms haven’t made space for what it means when Black women are low maintenance.)

Being perceived as a sexual object, or, as requiring and deserving care, demands time and fiduciary investments that are materially less available to Black femmes. For some in this leather derivative binary schema, indicating position and preference is as easy as switching a handkerchief from one side to the other –– yet another indication, that even in queer spaces, we often default to binaries invented by white men. For me, bottom visibility would involve a feminization I resent having been categorically divested of in the first place. I might be aided by wearing a dress, losing weight, getting breast implants, getting a weave, or wearing heels, but even this stylized femininity, indicated in part by discomfort and prostration, wouldn’t be the most accurate style depiction of my femininity. A more nuanced admirer, however, might register that my wardrobe is strongly indicative of the sex I like to have: I’m nurtured and nurutuing in easy and cozy knitwear sets that skim and hug, things that fit me without additional tailoring costs when few garments adequately hold the contours of my fullness. Ain’t I a bottom?

I savor sexual ease and weightlessness. A quick illustration of how arousing this is for me: most of my recent very serious crushes have at some point in early interactions, usually on a dance floor, picked me up. This unburdening lightness, a less corporeal reality, is too infrequently visited: my body doesn’t read as delicate (or low weight) enough to be swept away, or to be saved, or to be protected. Ain’t I a bottom?

Many Black women are raised to give our apparent struggles the stiff upper lip. We’re told that despite our social, political, and economic realities, we are not to act helpless, or out of control, fearful, or victimized. We’re taught to be loud, and proud, and bigger than the world sees us. And at the end of all of that effort, in my most private and intimate moments, I wish to lay my burdens down. Ain’t I a bottom?

Through patient observation, and comparison among queer peers, I hypothesize that when I’m being conceptualized as a top, it has some to do with my social type, and hometowns, but also lots to do with things which I have little to no access to control. Having been raised in New York City and Massachusetts, where women are fuller bodied, more inclined to wear pants and flat, walking-friendly shoes, and dress more responsively to weather, my gender is differently accented now that I live in LA –– in Angeleno queer spaces, when the temperature drops, and my upbringing reminds me it’s pants season. Growing up in the metropolitan 1990’s, it seemed like most women I knew wore cropped short haircuts, even the Princess of England sported a haircut that might now be seen as fairly queer. I have the option of extending my own kinky-curly hair, and sometimes I do, but the fact that kinky-curls or Black cultural hairstyles aren’t portrayed and perceived as femme, or desirable, at least in the mainstream, just goes to show that we have quite a ways to go in dismantling the anti-Blackness in queer social life.

I am, (currently) short and kinky-curly haired, chubby bellied, small tittied, narrow boned, long, front-to-back voluminous, and limited, timewise, and (to a lesser extent, only recently) financially — and consequently, too invisible in my identity as a femme, and therefore too invisible in my identity as a bottom. Although typically offered in jest, if not lust, I am reminded that I am not adequate or sufficient to deserve care and “best place;” that I am illegible as a femme, as a woman, and it not only insults, badly, it also causes material, social, and economic disprivilege and underprotection. Even most graciously read, marginality aside, the idea that outspoken leader types like myself, should not learn from pain, should not enjoy care, should not find insight in submission, makes for limitations that I do not wish to be governed by.

We must disentangle Blackness from topness. If queer community earnestly aspires towards relief from cis heteropatriarchy cum white supremacy cum hypercapitalism, we must work to provide more holistic and diligent means of care, especially for those who, as a result of those systems, are less likely to be seen, understood, and loved. The conversation that begs disaggregation between gender roles, sex roles, and social performance often halts at personal style and pronouns, but it must go far deeper than that. My actionable here, is that after I finish with this essay, I’ll do some more reading in Black on Both Sides, by C. Riley Snorton. The perils of bottom (or top) believability, the right to determine our sexuality, and the emotional and corporeal dangers of misinterpretation harm many more than I. Queer community is an ecology of care, not a late-phase high school popularity contest: we need new rules or no rules for respectability. The outcome isn’t rank but sustainability.

Most of us could stand to refresh our queer studies and ethics, and this should carry over to who and how we fuck. We must decolonize desire, and therefore, we must disembody desire. We, forward thinking and lusty queers needn’t limit our field of erotic potentiality, because of outdated raced gender presentations and social behaviors, which we, better than anyone, know are premised, at least in part, on the need for survival and access to wealth. When we call up one binary, no matter how playfully, we must answer for them all.

So what are we really saying when I’m categorized as a top? Maybe we’re imagining me in a gleefully dominant act of penetration (although, penetrating lovers doesn’t particularly arouse or get me off, and the dominance/submission in my sex tends to flow in evenly exchanged current). Maybe we’re saying that my gifts of storytelling are so seductive that they imagine it’d be sexually enjoyable for me and my partners if I’d direct sexual encounters, when in reality, I find few things more sexually off-putting, inflagrante, than being asked, or expected, to provide next steps. Not surprisingly, the people who think aloud that I’m a top, aren’t people I’m sexually engaged with. So what is the non-sexual stimulus that leads to this conjecture? Maybe they’re just calling me loud-mouthed and flat chested.

The thing we have to do with binaries is simple, and nuanced. We have to acknowledge that these binaries are limiting, that they limit some more than others and we have to do everything we can to unlearn them, but we cannot be binary blind, all the while reinforcing binaries with queer quips and desire discrimination and refusing to document the harm we enact on the binary’s behalf. We know these binaries fail to reliably predict sexual style or prowess, but we still rely on them to predetermine social outcomes, and prioritize social efforts. It’s not our fault: the canons of Western culture privilege the powerful getting their dicks sucked. But it is our fault: for not problematizing the sociopolitics of our desire. Perhaps we’re so pleased to be at this place in our cultural queer acceptance, that we’d prefer to not disrupt this peace, and perhaps, we have ingratiated ourselves into community we’d imagined to be liberatory, only to once more become hungry for deep and satisfying understanding, connection, and care.

Until this liberation is realized, I’m happy to get a bit switchy during every third Mercury retrograde, but please see this as my formal plea (a stern, yet victimized, proclamation, that is both top and bottom, at once) that when you see me, you see someone who is capable of multiplicity, and softness, and enduring a hard fuck. Ain’t I a bottom? Surely. Either that or nothing at all — I’d find pleasure in the dissolution.

The Invisible Addicts: Addiction and Treatment in Black LGBT Communities

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.

The first depiction of alcoholism I ever saw on TV was on one of my favorite shows, Degrassi. I grew up watching soap operas and shows that were far more mature than my age should have allowed, but for whatever reason, this Degrassi scene stuck out the most to me.

Ellie was a character that I identified with greatly. She was angsty. She wore black nail polish and those fishnet sleeves. She rolled her eyes constantly. I wanted to be just like her when I got to high school. Ellie’s mother, however, was a different story.

Ellie’s mom is an alcoholic, in episode five of Season Four, “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” we get to see the real repercussions of her mother’s disease. Her mother’s drinking has caused Ellie to start secretly planning to move in with her equally angsty boyfriend, Sean. In this particular episode, Ellie’s mom shows up to a parent-teacher conference drunk and embarrasses her daughter. She’s slurring her words, accosting Ellie’s teachers and even manages to have an offensive interaction with her boyfriend. The truly alarming part of the episode comes when Ellie’s mom passes out drunk while making dinner and almost burns the house down. This is the final straw for Ellie, who moves out shortly after.

This depiction, and many others I’d seen growing up, made me believe that alcoholism was a thing that only affected white families. It was either the trailer park father passed out on his couch surrounded by crushed cans of beer, or the white mother in her kitchen sneaking sips of wine while her family sat in the other room. If teens were involved at all, it was because they were in crisis. Heartbroken, lost friends, abusive parents; they turned to drinking to ease some pain they were too young to deal with — but they were always white.

As I got older, I began to question these depictions and the possible effects they would have on marginalized populations, specifically the black LGBTQ community.

In an article published by The Fix, Dee Young asks the question “Why aren’t more black people in AA?”

“Maybe, in a way, AA is like churches. Even the most liberal churches in the city, Black or white, are almost completely segregated. People say it is the most segregated hour in America. I also think that a lot of minorities have a mistrust of institutions. Who can blame them? Our country has a long history of racism.”

Redlining is a distinctive practice that saw neighborhoods divided into “hazardous” zones with red ink, these zones were mostly populated by low-income, minority residents. This had lasting effects that hindered residents’ abilities to receive fair housing, banking, and finances, as well as the ability to accumulate wealth. In short, redlining divorced black and poor residents from the resources they needed to thrive. I could not find any specific data that linked this historic practice to rehabilitation and other sober living facilities, but it’s not a stretch to believe that better rehab facilities and treatment centers have been more readily available to those that had more money.

When I was a child I remember going to the corner store to get snacks for my brothers and niece, and watching as the group of older black men sat at the counter drinking beers for the day. At that time, I thought it looked so nice to sit with your friends and spend the day together laughing and watching TV. I had no reference for what addiction was even though it was around me constantly.

In the neighborhood I lived in, it was not uncommon to see drug deals and overdoses out in the street. I did not understand the weight of alcoholism and drug addiction on life until I began to struggle with my own problems with alcohol. Since I started young, I considered drinking to be a method of survival. It was a way to get myself to the next day and away from the overwhelming emotion that plagued me at every moment. Like many black girls, I was taught that what I felt was either too much or unimportant; it was to be relegated to the confines of my body and not to be shared with others.

Drinking gave me solace and companionship that I didn’t get from the outside world, it became easy to get lost in it.

Redlining policies make it easier to dehumanize black people, keeping them away from the aid they needed while giving the appearance that the symptoms of their oppression were of their own making. For The Guardian, Brian Broome interviews Erica Upshaw Givner, the founder of Vision Towards Peace. Broome writes

“Back when Upshaw-Givner was working with African-American veterans, pregnant women, and youth on methadone, it was different than it is now. A lot of times, when you look at our counterparts, they want to justify this addiction as, ‘Well, it was just pills. I was in a car accident and one thing led to another.’ But, when our people had those issues, they were still a dopehead or a dope addict and that was the label they had.”

This narrative around black addiction is one that lacks empathy. Black addicts are lead to believe that they don’t have a problem, they are the problem. Addiction is not an issue that can be solved but an inherent part of their being. So then there are no solutions, no work to be done, and people are left suffering, On this, Broome, a black gay man, writes:

“I remember my own psychological self-abuse when I was using drugs. I was just an addict. It was my fault, and there was no way out. I remember knowing for certain that I was no victim of an epidemic. I was just garbage and knowing that made me want to use more. I wondered if I had known that I was just the victim of an epidemic, whether I would have thought differently.”

Broome puts into words what many struggle to; the fear that you are fundamentally not cared for, that your status as an addict and a black person equates to worthlessness. This fear is coupled with a mistrust of institutions that comes from a long history of medical racism and eugenics disguised as treatment, such as the Tuskegee Experiment and the forced sterilization of black women.

Additionally, to be in active addiction and seek help means to force yourself to contend with some of the lowest and most humiliating moments of your life. It requires that you ask for help when you need it, which can seem like an impossible task.

In my own struggle to get sober, I would spend days telling myself that my bottoms were “not that bad.” That the next day I would drink lighter, drink less, have water between glasses. I had a vague sense that I had a problem, but facing that seemed insurmountable. For one, I did not want to become a stereotype. I already faced discrimination and hate for being a black gay woman. I truly believed that struggling with alcohol and going to rehab was “white people stuff.”

If I came out as an addict, it would subject me to even more hardship and bias from the people around me, my family and peers.

I started drinking around the same time I came out of the closet, but it wasn’t until I was 19 that I had my first gay bar experience.

I went to a local bar with my nephew and saw a drag show for the first time. I was immediately alarmed by the sense of community and togetherness I felt in that space. I wasn’t worried about offending straight women by looking at them, or being harassed by straight men. It was wonderful.

For LGBTQ people, our history with addiction is through a complicated lense. Historically, the bar has been more than a meeting place. It’s a place of liberation and political action. Even before the days of Stonewall, the bar was a place for LGBTQ people to seek refuge and share power with one another. Of course, drinking and dancing were a part of these institutions — but so was seeking and enacting change.

Despite police harassment and the criminalization of homosexuality, many gay men and women decided to live their lives fully and out loud. In a post World War II America, gay bars became a place to escape criminalization. For gay and lesbian soldiers that lived their lives in isolation and fear, having a space to be themselves was more than a matter of the community, it was one of life and death. Allison Tate outlines the important history of gay bars in her article for The Advocate:

When AIDS began devastating the gay community in the ’80s, the bars became the places for folks to gather, grieve, and raise money for men dying from the disease. Interviewees credit lesbians for stepping up to care for gay men when nurses wouldn’t touch or feed their patients and for donating blood because gay men weren’t allowed to do so. They also point out how many drag queens did shows for no pay and donated their tips to those suffering from AIDS. ‘I don’t know where we’d be without drag queens and the lesbians,’ says David Coppini, manager of WCPC.

For LGBTQ people, bars were always more than drinking and partying places, so what does addiction look like in our community?

Many factors contribute to a higher percentage of addicts in the LGBTQ community, including stress and discriminatory practices in addiction treatment. The basic complications in LGBTQ addiction and treatment comes down to a question of need. High levels of stress from social prejudice and bigotry leads to anxiety, fear, isolation, anger, and mistrust. This increases the desire or impulse to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Additionally, there are limited treatment services that are knowledgeable about LGBTQ-specific issues and needs when we finally do seek treatment.

A study completed by the NCBI uncovered that out of “854 treatment programs that reported to have specialized treatment services for LGBT people, only 62 confirmed these services actually existed during a telephone follow-up.” An overwhelming percentage of these treatment centers that claim to be specialized are really no different than their non-LGBTQ focused counterparts. What does this mean for LGBTQ people? That we’re being enticed by promises of inclusivity and likely giving money to these centers, only to not have our needs unmet.

This study found that “stigma, intolerance, and open discrimination” were the most major barriers to treatment. These issues touch almost every area of our lives, so of course it comes as no surprise that it persists even in recovery. This same stigma, intolerance, and open discrimination drives many LGBTQ people to drink in the first place, pushing us into bars that have become our only safe haven in a world that shuns us. The gay bar, a space of revolution and solidarity, can at times can become a breeding ground for what is known as “rainbow capitalism.”

Rainbow capitalism is the practice by which many brands shift their outreach and marketing to target and take advantage of LGBTQ consumers. It’s most often, though not only, seen during Pride month. Where there were once floats of local organizations and drag performers, there are now major corporations like Walmart, Wells Fargo — and more notably, alcohol brands. How many of us have gone out to a bar or to a grocery store and seen bottles of vodka adorned with rainbow stripes and graphics? These tacky optics are aimed at creating a sense of belonging and unity toward a community that has long been ostracized and penalized for merely existing. However, these solidarity optics don’t reach far beyond the confines of their wallets.

In 2019, Bud Light debuted its rainbow-striped can in celebration of World Pride month. By purchasing the bottles, Bud Light agreed to donate $1 (up to $150,000) to GLAAD. While this may seem like an act of solidarity and activism, it and many other tactics like it are a way to capitalize off of the dollars of our community. With 20-30% of LGBTQ people being affected by substance abuse compared to 5-10% of the general population, these adverts do more harm than good. They tap into our need to be seen and heard in order to make a profit. If an advertisement makes a certain group feel comforted and accepted, that demographic will be more likely to buy said product.

With many companies like Chick Fil A and Hobby Lobby taking bold anti-LGBTQ stances, it is understandable how one might feel tempted to buy products that seem to champion love and acceptance. I’ve personally been moved or swayed by the emotional tactics employed in these ads, and that’s because they are supposed to make us feel. We are finally seen, finally heard, and so we want to throw our weight behind whatever force is pushing that message. But just as presidential candidates pander by showing up to Pride events in feathered boas or sitting down to eat soul food with black religious leaders, these brands have a singular interest in mind: money.

For black gay addicts, we are pressured at both ends. As members of the LGBTQ community, we are being targeted by predatory alcohol companies. As black people, we are naturally skeptical of any entity that claims to be a “treatment” center. Black people also seemingly aren’t included in conversations centered specifically around alcohol addiction, leading many to believe it isn’t a problem in our community. Black LGBTQ people face several intersections of oppression and discrimination which can make it harder for them to seek treatment. Anti-blackness is global and clouds every institution’s ability to see black people as a human before anything else. We don’t always feel at home in white LGBTQ spaces because of fetishization and racist incidents, and homophobia in the black community pushes us into a space where only we exist to lift each other up. When media, real and fictionalized, does not tell stories that reflect our realities, sometimes even we are incapable of seeing it.

This isn’t to say that there is no hope. There are millions of people in recovery today, many of whom are black or a person of color. As more addicts divorce themselves from the shame and stigma that comes with admitting your addiction to tell their story, more people in need will follow.

One of the only reasons I’m sober today is because people around me talked about it, they extended their hands and hearts to me without knowing it. This was how I knew I could get better. Seeking treatment does not have to be steeped in skepticism or worry. Change can start with even the smallest of us telling the truth. The National Black Alcoholism and Addictions Council is a program committed to “educating the public about the prevention of alcohol and other drug misuses; increasing services for people with alcohol dependency and their families; providing quality care and treatment, and developing research models specifically designed for the African American community.” This and many other organizations are working with addicts to make sure their stories do not end with hopelessness and shame.

The National Black Alcoholism and Addictions Council can be reached at 877-NBAC-ORG (622-2674) or http://www.nbacinc.org. There is help available if you need it. You are not alone.

Foolish Child #66: Black History Month

The Quiet Lesbian Biography of Lorraine Hansberry

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.

“Lorraine Hansberry is a problem to me because she is Black, female and dead,” the feminist lesbian writer Adrienne Rich once wrote. She meant it less as a criticism for Hansberry and more as a lament that she was gone so soon and that the work she’d left behind had been adapted by Hansberry’s ex-husband and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff. Rich wondered where Hansberry’s hand ended and where Nemiroff’s began.

“So many of the truths of women’s lives, so much of women’s writings, have come to us in fragments, over time, that for decades their work is half-understood and we have only clues about their real stature,” Rich continued.

The time Rich longed for — that moment where we piece together the works of Lorraine Hansberry to appreciate her real stature — may finally be here.

With increased access to her papers, black feminists are helping “us see [Hansberry] unidealized, unsimplified, in her fullest complexity, in her fullest political context.” Hansberry is afforded that context in Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. We see her unidealized and unsimplified in Tracy Strain’s award-winning documentary, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart and within the pages of Imani Perry’s “third-person memoir,” Looking for Lorraine, Hansberry is given her fullest complexity.

That said, as someone who is interested in how one of the most celebrated black women of her time, grappled with her race, gender and sexuality at the same time, Lorraine Hansberry remains something of a problem for me. The question of her sexuality does not exist in my mind: There is sufficient evidence, both from Hansberry’s own hand and anecdotally from those with whom she interacted socially, that Hansberry was a lesbian. But the how of it all — how did she know, how did she feel about her lovers, how did she reconcile her identities, how did she end up married — we have to piece together in fragments.

Born in 1930, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was the youngest of Carl and Nannie Hansberry’s four children. To those around them, the Hansberrys were inspirational — both parents were college educated with thriving careers, Carl as a real estate mogul, Nannie as a teacher and political activist. However, because they lived in a world that stymied black advancement through segregation and discrimination, the Hansberrys were forced to live in Chicago’s South Side ghettos like everyone else.

Lorraine grew up isolated as a child. As older siblings are wont to do, Lorraine’s refused to spend time with her. Even her parents kept an emotional distance from their daughter: keeping her provided for materially, but refusing to coddle their children, even when sick.

Carl and Nannie Hansberry were not strangers to the harshness of the world. In 1937, they sought to buy a home in a white neighborhood and were inundated with threat as they engaged in three year long legal battle that would ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court. Their utilitarian style of parenting was, seemingly, their way of preparing their children to exist in that world. But Lorraine craved emotional connection, an opportunity lost forever when her father died unexpectedly when she was just 16. In hindsight, it feels as though the rest of her life was a persistent chase for that connection.

While she eschewed a number of her parents’ political ideals — they were purveyors of “respectability politics” before that even was a thing — Lorraine understood activism as part of her calling too. She led the debate team in high school, studied local and global politics and committed herself to becoming a journalist. She graduated from Englewood High School in 1948, intent on attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison, when someone leaves this message in her yearbook:

Dear Lorraine,

These years I’ve known you have been the most wonderful in all my life. You don’t know how I lived for each day when I could come to school each morning and behold your wonderful face. And now that we are parting I don’t know how I will go on. Please hurry back to me Dear one. I would like to murder you.

Yours always,

The signature is scratched out — perhaps intentionally, perhaps not — and, thus the author’s name remains unknown. But while Perry chalks it up to “adolescent melodramatic form,” the note reads queer to me… the byproduct of young love, driven apart by time and chance. It’s the first piece of evidence we’re given that Lorraine might be something other than straight.

Lorraine Hansberry at Freedom magazine, via The Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust

Hansberry didn’t last long in Madison, staying at UW for just two years before dropping out, but she was gifted a tremendous education in those years. She shifted her focus away from journalism and to applied arts. She was exposed to Sean O’Casey, an Irish playwright, who perhaps inspired her style more than anyone else. From O’Casey she drew the boldness to tell very specific stories that exposed “the human personality and its totality.” She’d grown up internalizing the message from her parents that every success and every failure reflected on the race and that made its way into her writing. Through O’Casey she came to understand, as Perry points out, “she didn’t have to think about positive and negative representations but rather simply true ones.”

Hansberry embroiled herself in politics in a way she hadn’t (or couldn’t) before and traveled to Mexico. In the bohemian city of Ajijic, Lorraine found a place to mourn — her father had intended to move his family to Mexico but, instead, he died there — and a place to find peace, surrounded by people more like her… including, presumably, other gay women. That desire to belong may have driven her out of Madison and, ultimately, led her to New York City — first to Greenwich, then to Harlem — in 1950. It’s here that Hansberry’s lesbianism became a fixed (but still hidden) part of her identity.

She found herself in Harlem: becoming a journalist at Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom, joining protests and committing herself to the Communist Party. Her connections brought her to the attention of the FBI. They stripped her of her passport and began their surveillance of her in 1952. Around that same time, she met Robert “Bobby” Nemiroff at a protest against racially discriminatory hiring practices at New York University. He shared her politics, intellectualism and a passion for the arts. He immediately grew smitten, but Lorraine took a bit longer to warm to the idea.

My Dear Bob,
Once again I wrote you a very long letter — the important simple things which it said were that I have finally admitted to myself I do love you, you wide-eyed immature un-sophisticated revolutionary.

Nemiroff didn’t make the earth move, Hansberry wrote in a thinly veiled reference to For Whom the Bell Tolls, but her “sincerest political opinion is that we have reached a point in a truly beautiful relationship — where it may become the fullest kind of relationship between a man and a woman.” They married in June 20, 1953 in Chicago, after having spent the night before protesting the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Their love felt more practical that poetic. He gave her the emotional connection that she craved, financial support when she needed it and kept her her disciplined with her work. I remain uncertain what he got from her in return.

During her periods of loneliness and depression, Hansberry leaned on Nemiroff but also sought refuge in books, particularly Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Though they disagreed on some things, Hansberry found a compatriot on those pages… someone who, like her, rejected expectation and who carved out a space where questions of race, gender and sexuality could exist simultaneously. She’d pen Flowers for the General, wherein a college student named Marcia falls in love with her classmate, Maxine. Marcia tries kill herself when she’s outed to the entire school and Maxine comforts her. Marcia reveals that she knows Maxine’s also attracted to women too. Maxine confirms her attraction but is determined to marry her boyfriend anyway. Basically, Lorraine Hansberry wrote Lost and Delirious… but in 1956.

The next year, Hansberry’s life changed dramatically: She hosted a dinner party to share the first draft of the play that became A Raisin in the Sun and was offer a deal on the spot. She and Nemiroff quietly separated (they wouldn’t divorce until 1964) and Hansberry began her most direct engagement with the queer community to date. She joined the the lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, and would, in November 1958, host the group’s founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon at her home. When DOB began publishing Ladder, a magazine about the lives of lesbian women, she wrote in — first contributing letters signed with her married initials, L.H.N. or L.N., then contributing a short story called “Chanson du Konallis” under the nom de plume, Emily Jones. Those letters would out Hansberry after her death, when The Ladder‘s former editor, Barbara Grier, identified her as the author in 1976. From Hansberry’s second letter to Ladder:

I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced and dissect and analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion. It is time that ‘half the human race’ had something to say about the nature of its existence. Otherwise — without revised basic thinking — the woman intellectual is likely to find herself trying to draw conclusions — moral conclusions — based on acceptance of a social moral superstructure which has never admitted to the equality of women and is therefore immoral itself.

She — or, Emily Jones, rather — would also pen three short stories for ONE, the nation’s oldest magazine featuring the “homosexual viewpoint,” “The Budget,” “The Anticipation of Eve” and “Renascence,” all as Raisin in the Sun worked towards its Broadway debut. As she wrote more queer characters, her desire to experience that life for herself grew and she finally ventured out into lesbian society.

Hansberry went to house parties in the Village and on the Upper East Side with Edith Windsor, Louise Fitzhugh and Patricia Highsmith. In Looking for Lorraine, Perry offers scant details of Hansberry’s love affair with Molly Malone Cook, Renee Kaplan, Dorothy Secules and Ann Grifalconi. Cook would go onto have an epic 40 year romance with poet Mary Oliver but her relationship with Hansberry came first. In fact, Perry suspects that Oliver mentions it, without naming Hansberry outright, in their book, Our World.

[Cook] had… an affair that struck deeply; I believe she loved totally and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad… This love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed — not necessarily badly, but changed. Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much.

Elise Harris provided, perhaps, the best roadmap of Hansberry’s romantic relationships in her 1999 piece for Out magazine, “The Double Life of Lorraine Hansberry.” Without access to Hansberry’s personal musings (those documents weren’t accessible until 2010), Harris reached out to the lesbian community in New York City.

“She was intellectually such a genius that her emotional life didn’t catch up,” Marie Rupert told Harris. “If she had lived longer, there would have been a developing and growing. She would have been more able to cope with the conflicting aspects of her nature.”

Harris goes into detail about Hansberry’s relationship with Renee Kaplan, a two-year affair that began soon after the Broadway debut of Raisin. Kaplan’s recollections paint the image of a Lorraine Hansberry that is unburdened and carefree: relaxing and reading Langston Hughes, building snowmen and making snow angels in the snow. They broke up — “sexually it was not a great relationship,” Kaplan told Harris — but the two remained friends until Hansberry’s death.

There was a similar lightness to Hansberry when she met Dorothy Secules, a resident of the building that Hansberry bought with the money from Raisin. In Secules, Hansberry found a “woman of accomplishment” and someone who loved politics as much as she did but also knew how to have fun.

“The four of us would have grand times,” her friend, Miranda d’Ancona, recalled. “I remember Lorraine lined us up, all three of us, she in front, to teach us [the latest dance]. We all collapsed laughing; it turned into total silliness. That was the part of Lorraine that was so irresistible, where her intellect could take a rest for a while and just enjoy the fun of the evening.”

What we know of Hansberry’s relationship with Secules suggests that it was contentious, in part because Nemiroff sought to maintain his hold on her, but on her deathbed, Harris reports, Hansberry confessed her love for Secules.

As someone who once included her homosexuality on a list of things she liked and hated, it was a final reconciliation of her life’s great truths.

Eight Black LGBTQ Poets to Give Your Flowers To Right Now

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.

Non-avid readers of poetry, when asked to think about what poetry is, will list off names from the “literary canon.” Usually, these poets are white, male, and deceased. Many of them have been pioneers in craft and form but contrary to popular belief, poetry did not die with them. It continues to be an ever-evolving, changing form.

Poets like June Jordan and Audre Lorde have paved the way and inspired the voices of many black poets for generations; their impact cannot be overstated. However, I’ve noticed we celebrate our poets when they have passed and not as much when they are here on earth with us. We have to recognize the past while giving love and recognition to those we still have.

In a sense, we never really lose a poet. Their work lives on with us through books, memories of seeing them read, or video evidence of performances. Here in 2020, we can start to form new memories and associations with these eight wonderful poets. I believe they are the face of reviving the genre. I always want to push poems on people, so I’m also presenting you with some of their recent or upcoming works. Head to your favorite, local, indie bookstore and pick up a few of the collections on this list before the month is over!

Danez Smith

Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez just released a collection of poetry called Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020), which you can buy and open for a secret surprise! They also are the author of award-winning Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Their first collection, [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.

Why Danez

I first was introduced to Danez Smith when they came to my city to do a reading as a Cave Canem fellow. Immediately I was electrified by their performance energy, voice, and general aura. They co-host one of my absolute favorite podcasts, VS (versus), with poet Franny Choi. It is a hilarious, moving look into poetry as craft and practice through conversations with some of the most dynamic poets of our time. When listening, I’m always struck by Danez’s ability to get to the seed of a thought in a poet, and their ability to make that seed erupt into fruit or flower. The same magic is done in their poems. Smith’s poems often start with an almost conversational voice that sharpens to deliver devastating lines. Many of those lines celebrate the triumph of blackness in a world that wants to shun and harm it.

A Poem to Start With

Tonight, in Oakland

Come, tonight I declare we must move

instead of pray. Tonight, east of here,

two boys, one dressed in what could be blood

& one dressed in what could be blood

before the wound, meet & mean mug

& God, tonight, let them dance! Tonight,

the bullet does not exist. Tonight, the police

have turned to their God for forgiveness.

New or Upcoming Collection

Homie

Follow Danez on Twitter

Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary (Graywolf, 2016), winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Bestiary was longlisted for the National Book Award (2016) and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award (2017). She received her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. She’s an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, where she teaches creative writing.

Why Donika

I began reading Donika Kelly’s collection Bestiary after I had finished my own manuscript of poetry. It’s a stunning collection that handles grief and abuse through images of mythical beasts and creatures. The first poem I had ever read by her is the one I have linked below, and to this day I recite parts of it to myself as I move throughout my life. The action of writing her name in the sand, the syllables perfectly timed, can carry me through a bad moment. Kelly’s poetry often takes the reader into the dark territory but emerges with understanding and love. Bestiary as a collection is imaginative, stunning, and leaves the reader in an almost meditative state, contemplating the lasting effects of trauma on the mind and the language we use. It as anchored by love poems written from the perspective, or out of the perspective of different mythical creatures: werewolves, centaurs, mermaids, etc. These poems allow the speaker to say the unsayable, which is a confrontation many poets come to at some point in their careers; how to write the hard poem. Bestiary is a masterclass in writing the hard poem.

A Poem to Start With

The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love.

Collection to Read

Bestiary

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Justin Phillip Reed

Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet and essayist. He is the author of Indecency (Coffee House Press, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, and a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second full-length collection of poetry, The Malevolent Volume, will be released in April 2020. He is the 2019-2021 Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Reed received his BA in creative writing at Tusculum College and his MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as Junior Writer-in-Residence.

Why Justin

This poem linked below is one of incredible sight, one that rings with a painful truth that many black women know. To be seen in such a way by someone who is not a black woman is necessary and fraught with emotion. Reed’s poetry is poignant and filled with that same sense of urgency depicting vivid and imaginative pictures of black life. Some of his poems feel like sermons, others read with playfulness and musicality that is a sign of reverence for language. The images in his poems are so vivid and jarring at times that reading them silently, I can feel the tension in my mouth and body. That visceral reading experience is rare and deserves to be celebrated.

A Poem to Start With

Pushing Up Onto Its Elbows, the Fable Lifts Itself Into Fact

Collection to Read

Indecency

Unlike missing Black girls, taking Black girls is a Western custom. It seems likely that such a statement will soon appear inaccurate: the white space in new textbook editions will have nothing to say about it, if the white spaces behind those textbooks have anything to say about it. That Black girls are quintessential American palimpsests is not a question but an anxiety. _________ would rather forget that Black girls were made receptacles for what the authors of Liberty and Independence would not speak.

Angel Nafis

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012) and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. She earned her BA at Hunter College earned her MFA at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is also a Cave Canem fellow, like many of the other poets on this list. With poet, musician, artists and partner Shira Erlichman, she started the ODES FOR YOU TOUR. Along with poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an “internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo.” Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Why Angel

I found Angel Nafis on twitter through interactions with Danez Smith, and a few months later a friend bought me a copy of the BreakBeat Poets’ Black Girl Magic volume, in which one of Angel’s poems was published. What I love about her work is that everything feels so excruciatingly timed and rhythmic. This may be a by-product of being versed in both spoken word poetry and page poetry, and also just being an incredibly observant poet. So much of my enjoyment of poetry is the rhythm, so it is lovely to be able to read a poet that values it as well. Even her poems without punctuation still read with an ease and delicacy that makes you forget you haven’t seen a comma or a period at all. Her hold on the glory of language is palpable and that makes each word feel like something to reckon with. The line in this poem “lacerated like a web” actually makes you feel the laceration; it’s evocative and painful, you can feel your body curling into the bruise of it. That’s damn good writing.

A Poem to Start With

Angel Nafis

Angel bowled over like a promise.

Angel howling, adhered to a ribbon of prayer.

Angel, splayed like a galaxy.

Angel, viscera smooth and glistening.

Angel, dilated like a cashed check.

Collection to Read

BlackGirl Mansion

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kemi alabi

kemi alabi has been published by The Boston erview, The Rumpus, Guernica, Catapult, Black Warrior Review, Best New Poets 2019, The BreakBeat Poets vol. 2 and other publications. Their debut collection The Lion Tamer’s Daughter will be published by YesYes Books in August 2020

Why kemi

The poem I’ve chosen here is the only one that links to a book and not a poem, and that’s because I really think you should read this poem as it appears in the context of this book. kemi alabi is a poet I think about a lot, and I can’t wait for their collection to come out this year. They are an expert deliverer of gut-punching lines and stanzas. Whether writing in form or in free verse, you get the sense that alabi has physically endowed every word with an immeasurable force by hand. Lines land with a loud thunk, though the weight does not negate the grace. The staccato-esque style in which this poem is written allows for each word to carry its own weight, the spareness of words compared to the white space on the page makes sure the words are doing the heavy lifting.

A Poem to Start With

Mr. Hotep Says #Blacklivesmatter and He’d Kill a Dyke

the dyke within

tires of

the nigger without.

sick of rope

when the brick

calls her name

same blood,

same alley,

wrong hands,

wrong headline.

New or Upcoming Collection

The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (YesYesBooks, Forthcoming 2020)

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Dawn Lundy Martin

Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual-video artist. She is the author of Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017), Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015) – which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011), and A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007). Martin is a professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She’s also the recipient of a 2018 NEA Grant in Creative Writing.

Why Dawn

Dawn Lundy Martin is a legendary poet who’s work I’ve admired for years. Her poems are warm and urgent, and depict the trials and triumphs of life as a black person and a queer person. Martin is currently the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics of the University of Pittsburgh, a program that builds off of the legacy of collectives like Cave Canem which seek to uplift and amplify the voices of black poets worldwide. When it comes to championing young black poets, Martin is certainly doing the work. Her poems often visit the violence that happens in domestic scenes and how the idea and space of a home can be tainted.

A Poem to Start With

[Dear one, the sea…]

Dear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’re beached and bloated, lie

on shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’s Long Island, and the weather

is fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man?

Collection to Read

Discipline

Rickey Laurentiis

Rickey Laurentiis was “raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark.” They are the recipient of many fellowships and foundational support including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded him a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. Laurentiis received an MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis and a Bachelor’s in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. Laurentiis was the inaugural fellow for the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Fellowship and is currently working on their next collection of poetry on desire and pleasure.

Why Rickey

Rickey has been described as a “magician who can slow down time” and that description is very apt. You get the sense that whatever object they have presented before you is being stripped to it’s most naked form. The language drips and covers. Each poem uncovers something different about the reader’s own mode of thinking, they can serve as an interrogation and as a balm. I have been intrigued by their meditation on penetration in their poetry, both as a queer sex act and an act of violence. The poem I’ve chosen here pairs incredible violence with the tender act of the speaker almost reaching out to lick the feet of the men who have been murdered for their desire for each other. This image strikes me as reclamation and a way of praising the dead.

A Poem to Start With

I Saw I Dreamt Two Men

This was my eyes’ closed-eyed vision

This is what a darkness makes

And how did I move from that distance to intimacy

So close I could see

The four soles of their feet so close I was kneeled

Could lick

Those feet as if I was because I became

The fire who abided

Collection to Read

Boy With Thorn

Xandria Phillips

Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. They have received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Wisconsin Institute. Their poetry has been featured in American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Their first book, Hull was published by Nightboat Books in 2019.

Why Xandria

This poem is a sexual delight that chronicles an experience that is common to many LGBTQ people – leaving a vibrator on through the night. It’s a meditation on pleasure and intimacy that will leave you wanting more poems, more power. Phillips’ work often deals with that intimacy and the greater question of being a vulnerable person in the world. Their poems confront the history and the present together in the same room, while discussing the intricacies of being a black queer person in a post-colonial world.

A Poem to Start With

Ode to a Vibrator Left On All Night

Remember the animal that after escaping,
returns to captivity. Choice crushed my

body into shapewear. Want for motion
free of direction folded me into cars

with strangers. I want when I want, and then
I wish for corrosion. This man and I both

nameless as rust in scrap metal garages
of memory. I am too versed

to lavish praise on stamina alone,
but I must admit, my girl has bars.

New or Upcoming Collection

Hull

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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: February’s Revolutionary Hope

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

Well friends, with February comes Black History Month and, for me, a mix of frustration and… frustration. While I certainly take advantage of any and all opportunities to celebrate being Blackity Black Black Black, the longstanding framing of any sort of history is straight men doing things. And when it comes to Black history, ours is often framed as “the first Black person to be in a white space” as opposed to a centuries long legacy of continuously disturbing the peace.

Black History 101 notes that the month-long commemoration was borne out of Carter G. Woodson’s desire to honor Fredrick Douglass’ and Abraham Lincoln’s birth month. What may be lesser known is that Black History Month is for us, for Black folks. Woodson’s focus was on community uplift and in generating a foundational, empowering knowledge in our own history. So often, approaches to history are about these lone figures divorced from the radicality and community of their time. I am a firm believer that our internal, intra-community work should begin by focusing on our own knowledge and healing. As Toni Morrison, Black genius and recent ancestor, once said: “the function, the very serious function of racism… is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being.”

This is what I mean about centering Blackness as part of a practice of self and communal liberation. If the lesson of last month’s “Uses of the Erotic” was self-confrontation as an act of radical love, then February’s selections tell us to turn that unwavering gaze to our communities as an act of “revolutionary hope.” I’m pairing Lorde’s 1984 conversation with James Baldwin and, arguably, her best-known speech, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in the hopes of generating a community conversation between Black queer folks, not unlike that of Baldwin and Lorde.

In “Revolutionary Hope,” the eternal brilliance of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin graced Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts with what can only be deemed a calling in. Their discussion covered intra-racial violence, sexism, homophobia and more as they sought out the origins of so much Black marginalization.

James Baldwin: Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you. That’s why we’re sitting here.

Audre Lorde: I don’t, honey. I’m sorry, I just can’t let that go past. Deep, deep, deep down I know that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out – out – by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.

This conversation takes place three years before Baldwin passed away. I’m still surprised that, so late in his life, Baldwin remained invested in ideas of an American dream whose farce had been disproved so many times over. What’s so beautiful about Lorde’s response is the firmness of her rebuttal and the way she identifies her strategy for living — to fiercely and openly carve out a place for herself at whatever the cost. Whether she survived or didn’t, it would be in the fullness of her truth as an out Black lesbian.

JB: We are behind the gates of a kingdom which is determined to destroy us.

AL: Yes, exactly so. And I’m interested in seeing that we do not accept terms that will help us destroy each other. And I think one of the ways in which we destroy each other is by being programmed to knee-jerk on our differences. Knee-jerk on sex. Knee-jerk on sexuality…

JB: I don’t quite know what to do about it, but I agree with you. And I understand exactly what you mean. You’re quite right. We get confused with genders – you know, what the western notion of woman is, which is not necessarily what a woman is at all. It’s certainly not the African notion of what a woman is. Or even the European notion of what a woman is. And there’s certainly not [a] standard of masculinity in this country which anybody can respect. Part of the horror of being a Black American is being trapped into being an imitation of an imitation.

For both Baldwin and Lorde, the beauty is in the rigor. Their disagreements and differing positionalities are apparent throughout the conversation; but what is also constant is their clear love and respect for one another, the type of fierce, queer love that requires folks to challenge and better each other. One particular instance that stands out to me is how Lorde doesn’t allow the overlaps of Blackness and queerness to obscure some internalized misogyny that Baldwin makes apparent throughout “Revolutionary Hope.”

AL: But we have to define ourselves for each other. We have to redefine ourselves for each other because no matter what the underpinnings of the distortion are, the fact remains that we have absorbed it. We have all absorbed this sickness and ideas in the same way we absorbed racism. It’s vital that we deal constantly with racism, and with white racism among Black people – that we recognize this as a legitimate area of inquiry. We must also examine the ways that we have absorbed sexism and heterosexism. These are the norms in this dragon we have been born into – and we need to examine these distortions with the same kind of openness and dedication that we examine racism.

I first happened upon this conversation in the early days of Tumblr(!), and now, so many years and reads later, I realize that what has most intrigued me is how these two could hold one another to task in such a way that it deepened and didn’t end the conversation. It’s a methodology-in-action that is the prequel to “The Master’s Tools.”

In that speech, Lorde recounts an experience at an NYU humanities conference and the relegation of Black feminists and lesbians to one panel within the entire conference. Although the subjects of her critique are White feminists, particularly at the moment of feminism becoming a permanent fixture in academia, her critique echoes the cautions she voiced against Baldwin’s belief in the American Dream. She famously warns against Black folks’ adopting the methods of their oppressors.

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

Within both readings, Lorde’s position remains constant: Our power and our freedom lie in our ability to embrace our differences as the source of our collective strength. She goes on to say:

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of differen[t] strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”

I think it’s easy to fall prey and misread “The Master’s Tools” as a critique that’s brutal as it is beautiful in its truth. But much like the Baldwin conversation, the framework of revolutionary hope is crucial. As with all liberation struggles, the commonality is a belief that we can do better, that we can live freely and openly, that we can do right by one another. For this Black History Month and beyond, I hope we can take our cue from Lorde and do the difficult work of calling each other in as Black people, as queer folks, and as members of so many divergent and overlapping communities.

Here’s one last quote to meditate on, for good measure:

“Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

Have you enacted your own reckonings with yourself and your community? What does that look like for you? What have your experiences been? Please let me know in the comments!

Black, Queer, and Here Without Apology: The History of BLK and Black Lace Magazines

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.

“Where the news is colored in on purpose.” That was motto of BLK Magazine.

In 1988, the first issue of BLK was published in Los Angeles by Alan Bell. Bell, who got into the world of queer indie media by overseeing the publication of Gaysweek in New York between 1977 and 1979, designed it to be a safe haven for black gays and lesbians that would rival the titans of black publishing – JET, Ebony, or Essence. In 2014 Bell told Dr. Kai M. Green, whose dissertation “Into the Darkness: A Black Queer (Re)Membering of Los Angeles in a Time of Crisis” remains one of the few lengthy studies of the magazine, that he wanted to create “a Black magazine for gay people and not a gay magazine about Black people.” The distinction is important.

There’s been a lot of talk online lately about the so-called death of queer media. I say “so-called” not because isn’t a brutal time to be working for independent media, and especially for media that caters to LGBTQ+ communities that have not often been valued by the mainstream, but because calling for our death implies that this is the end. There has been gay media for as long as there have been communities of gay people. Our stories have to be told, and there will be those who’ll be there to record them. That’s not going to change. The premature call of our demise flattens that important history; we’ve reached back and carried each other before, we will do it again.

In his pocket of queer black Los Angeles in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, for communities that were facing all but a genocide in the wake of HIV/AIDS, Alan Bell took up that mantle. When BLK first published, it was a 16 page black-and-white newsletter with a circulation of roughly 5,000. By the time the end of its publication, it had grown into a 40 page magazine with full color covers, a paid subscriber base, national product advertisement, and global distribution reaching 37,000 people. It told our stories.

And that history is foundational. It gets into our core and changes how we see ourselves. In 2020, when we talk about the Stonewall Uprising – widely considered to be the start of the modern gay rights movement – it’s become more common (though still, not nearly enough) to uplift the names of the black and brown trans women like Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who were at the frontlines of that fight. In fact, the duo finally have a statue in their honor in front of the club. But in June 1989, a date squarely at the center of Stonewall’s active white-washing of history, BLK honored it’s 20th Anniversary with this letter from the editor by Mark Haile:

In the retelling of the tale, history has become myth and desperation is remembered as romance. Changes and omissions, whether accidental or intentional, are nothing new in American History when it concerns people of color, gays or women.

And the Stonewall Legend does concern people of color. If that sultry weekend’s street theater is to be regarded as the launching pad of the modern gay rights movement, then it is essential for us to know the key players who started it all: drag queens, hustlers, jailbait juveniles, and gay men and lesbians of color. The out casts of gay life thus showed homosexual America how to make a fist, fight back, and win self-respect.

It would take yet another 20 years before the majority of LGBT media would catch back up. I realize of course that you are reading this from the pages of a queer independent media company, so I probably don’t have to convince you, but this is why having independent media is so vital. If we aren’t telling our stories, and telling them the right way, lifting up those who are “the out casts of gay life” and pointing out who does the work that the rest of us get to reap the benefit of, then who will?

In addition to having black lesbians on the editorial staff of the mothership magazine; BLK also created a spin-off, Black Lace, an erotic magazine for women. (There was also Blackfire, an erotic magazine for men; Kuumba a co-sexual poetry journal; and Black Dates, a calendar of events across queer Southern California). Black Lace sadly only was in print for four issues – though that’s not much worse off than Kuumba’s five issue run – and I am once again indebted to Dr. Green, who was able to go through the issues as a part of his work.

In the inaugural issue of Black Lace, editor Alycee J. Lane opened with a letter that grapples with what it means to talk about black women’s queer sexuality publicly:

FINALLY! BLACK LACE AFTER TOO many late night and early morning conversations and political debates and asking should I? Or shouldn’t I? And worrying about the devastating infinite measurements of political ‘correctness’ and meditating on what it means, feels like to be an African American lesbian loving other African American lesbians, sex and multiple orgasms, knowing—do you hear me? –knowing that we have been and continue to be sexual animals to the Amerikan imagination, working our asses off to prove the perversion of that imagination all the while internalizing the frigid Victorian sensibility of no sex, I don’t think about sex, I don’t want sex, I don’t even know what my own pussy looks like.

It’s the last line that I’ve come back to most. “I don’t even know what my own pussy looks like.” It somehow both breaks my heart to think of a woman who’s risking so much to be herself and love and fuck openly with whomever she pleases, and still not knowing what her own body looks like intimately; and also makes me so unspeakably grateful for the Alycee Lanes past who wrote like this so I could sit here as an editor of a publication that writes openly about dildos and strap-ons and orgasms three to four times a week. So much of what we take for granted as queer women, even as black queer women who don’t always have much, that we can reach with our fingertips – others had to claw at with their open palms and pray to hold on. (Fun fact! Black Lace’s second issue actually took on my favorite subject – Dildos!)

I first discovered the covers for BLK in a Twitter thread about a month ago and the images stayed with me. It’s so easy for our history to get lost, to slip away. When I originally mapped out this Black History Month post, I thought it was going to end triumphant. I wanted to tell you how ecstatic I was to “discover” this black queer history. And I am! But I’m also somehow… wistful? Perhaps melancholy?

BLK stood on its own for six years and 41 issues. Black Lace lasted half of a year on four issues. Autostraddle has been here for a decade, which in gay years might as well be a millennia. I’m really proud to stand on the shoulders of Alan Bell and Alycee Lane; I feel connected and kinship with them – imagining that they had a lot of the same gay and dyke drama, and money drama (always, always money drama) that I have with my writers now. I think of the small office in Los Angeles that was BLK’s home and wonder what it would look like alive today. Would it feel the same frenzied, hilarious energy that I share with Autostraddle’s black writers whenever Young M.A releases another video of her licking her lips?

What I said earlier in this piece is absolutely true. I know that queer media isn’t dying, because storytellers don’t die. Just this morning, I was able to commission a black trans woman to write about Zaya Wade’s coming out. I know that it’s my job to hold the line for as long as I can, and then make way for the next person to do the same. But I guess today I am a little bit sad anyway. I want a thousand more issues of Black Lace. Sometimes its very tiring to figure out the road there.

Black Queer People Writing Ourselves Into History: An Autostraddle Master List

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.

Just a little over six months ago, this past August, marked the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship that reached America. That ship arrived at Point Comfort in what was then the British colony of Virginia, and it had onboard 20 to 30 enslaved Africans.

To mark the occasion The New York Times launched The 1619 Project, asking us to reframe what it would mean to seriously consider 1619 as the start of our nation’s birth, as opposed the date we’re all taught in elementary school, 1776 (the adoption of Declaration of Independence). Doing so requires placing the fights and contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. But more than that, it requires never losing track that anti-black racism is at the very root of what we even call America. Project curator Nikole Hannah-Jones reminds us that black people have always been “the prefecters of this democracy;” after all “No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it.”

When I sat down to write this post on Autostraddle, a queer and proudly indie digital magazine, I didn’t expect that I’d open by referencing a large-scale media corporation like The New York Times, and certainly not quoting a project that’s over a half-year old. But Hannah-Jones’ demand that we reimagine the stories we’ve told ourselves about who we are as a people still hasn’t shaken from my bones. Without consciously knowing it, her words rumbled in the back of my head as I planned out the month ahead.

This February – in the year of our (Audre) Lorde 2020 – at Autostraddle we’re talking about 20/20 vision and dedicating our Black History Month in observance of “Black Clarity.” If it’s one thing that not only the Americas, but the global black diaspora, has taught us – it’s that there is no such thing as “winning” within a system inherently designed on the degradation of your own humanity. Or to quote queen mother Audre, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We have to burn that fucker to the ground first. We have to tell our own stories, and create our own timeline; we have to nurture ourselves on our own terms.

As we imagine new worlds for ourselves as queer black women, we want to know –who were the visionaries of our past? And who are those visionaries right now? As queer and trans black people, who have we’ve loved or looked up to? When did have we found clarity about our purpose? Who helped us imagine our own future?

We want this year’s Black History Month to be serious, as the month’s title often implies. But also – we want it to be sexy, fun (and funny), JOYful. We want it to reflect the multiple ways that black people see ourselves and walk through our world.

And so, we begin it here. By writing ourselves back into our own history.

To kick off this Black History Month, I’ve collected some the best of Autostraddle’s past. These are only some of the ways that black lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans women and non-binary folks have found ourselves and written ourselves. We’ll here all month, and every month thereafter, giving you content that’s uniquely black and feminist and queer, much like what you’ll read below.

Spend some time this weekend, this month (and far beyond February) reading black queer people.

Happy Black History Month.

What to Read and Leave Feeling Inspired

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/how-whitney-houston-taught-me-the-greatest-love-of-all-for-my-queer-black-self-369034

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/toni-morrison-has-died-at-88-when-i-was-27-she-saved-my-life/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/black-fat-queer-cosplay-and-making-a-home-for-myself/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/what-can-black-queer-people-learn-from-the-lost-queer-joy-of-the-civil-rights-movement/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/shoulder-pads-and-short-cuts-how-grace-jones-made-me-powerful-369692/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/we-thought-we-had-the-voice-forever-in-memoriam-of-maya-angelou-239301/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/line-breaks-for-resistance-how-black-poetry-lets-us-rescue-ourselves-371430/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/these-five-black-lgbtq-activists-are-literally-saving-the-planet/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/what-if-this-was-a-celebration/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/martin-luther-king-day-roundtable-whats-in-your-black-justice-toolkit/

What to Read and Learn Something New

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/black-august-a-feminist-and-queer-syllabus-for-black-liberation/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/lorraine-hansberry-liked-hated-and-was-bored-with-being-a-les-242239/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/barbara-jordan-closeted-young-gifted-black/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/how-coretta-scott-king-leveraged-mlks-legacy-to-fight-for-gay-rights-446442/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/playlist-black-queer-music-history-pt-1-early-20th-century-367986/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/playlist-black-queer-music-history-pt-2-1930s-1960s-368459/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/black-american-gothic-a-southern-herstory-of-black-magic-women/

What to Read and Remember That Not Everything About Black People Has to Be Traumatic

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/23-black-queer-and-trans-femmes-to-follow-on-instagram-this-black-history-month/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/playlist-fuck-independence-day-celebrate-black-women-instead-385291/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/10-lyrics-to-help-you-practice-your-blackgirlmagic-daily-348656/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/afros-the-new-alternative-lifestyle-haircut-141175/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/the-burlesque-show/

What to Read When You’ve Got Time (#Longreads. Group Projects. And Personal Essays.)

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/i-never-meant-for-my-hair-to-be-the-way-back-to-the-lighthouse-378634/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/making-the-dive-and-loving-myself-dangerously-315660/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/the-rumors-were-enough-josephine-baker-frida-kahlo-their-romance-and-me/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/i-didnt-know-how-to-be-poor-black-biracial-and-queer-so-i-wasnt-346644/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/the-m-word/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/six-tips-for-navigating-chicago-as-a-baby-black-queer/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/the-qpoc-speakeasy-speaking-out-with-love-to-mike-brown-250313/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/living-while-black-queer-and-sometimes-mistaken-for-male-186151/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/going-back-outside-after-the-streetlights-come-on/

https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/black-history-month-roundtable-series-what-would-it-mean-to-queer-black-history-month-410402/