Happy Sunday! I love being Black. Let’s keep that Juneteenth energy and keep celebrating all things Black folks and liberation.

All Black Everything

+ Lena Waithe shares her favorite Black-owned and queer friendly businesses. 

+ According to Black LGBTQ leaders, here’s are some of the best books

+ Queer Black playwrights to know and love!

+ NOLA music history is queer and Black

Groups like the Powder Box Revue, usually referred to by the cringey and outdated title “female impersonators,” are common in the newspaper listings for black nightclubs in the era when rock and roll was dawning. More than a few future recording artists on the LGBTQ spectrum, like Little Richard and Billy Wright as well as Marchan — for whom language was probably insufficient to pinpoint their actual identity — got their start onstage in that role, though certainly many more of those performers’ individual names and stories have been lost to history.

+ LGBTQ refugees are finding a haven in Kenya

Queer Homes, Queer Friends, Queer Family

+ Kim Kelly at Bitch writes about coming home and queer country music.

+ Get weepy in two minutes listening to someone talk about the LGBT chosen family who raised him.

+ These moms in Utah will fight homophobes for you (kinda).

+ Leo Sheng of The L  Word: Generation Q has shared so much of himself with us.

+ What if we used queer friendships to rethink what platonic relationships were and meant?

+ The Gorgeous Nothings, an archival show about trans women and queers who put on variety shows in prison during the 1920s and 30s is destined to become a musical.

+ The Five Lesbian Brothers are still out there lesbianing and loving each other.

Pride, Power, and Culture

+ Essential Pride reading from T Magazine’s archives.

+ Queer literary culture in India

+ Enrique Aguido’s pantheon of queer mythology

+ How Pride marches made history

Hey, I love you! Clean your kitchen. No really, everything is manageable with a clean kitchen, I promise. Hope you’re walking and reading and getting off the computer (even if just to watch TV on a TV and not a computer) and still checking in with your friends AND WEARING A GOD DAMNED MASK. Did I say I love you? Yes, well, doubly so. Have the best week that you can. ❤️

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