Toni Morrison Has Died at 88; When I Was 27, She Saved My Life

There was this woman. I loved everything about her in the same way that I still didn’t know how to love myself. Her caramel brown skin was pristine. I hated the acne scars that marred my own. Her smile looked like a Crest ad, and I hated the gap between my teeth. Her body was effortlessly curvy; mine lumped in the middle with a pouted belly and dimples at my elbows. I couldn’t understand what she possibly saw in me — far into my 20s, and still by all accounts awkward like a teenager. She gave me Toni Morrison.

It’s a vulnerable thing for a nerdy and book-ish black girl to say out loud, that I didn’t read Toni Morrison until I was old enough to know better. Most other black women I knew had committed entire verses to memory. They proudly rocked tote bags etched with her words or earrings made out of her image on and off Brooklyn subways and during our trips to Prospect Park, where we drank wine bought from Bodegas out of paper sacks and pretended to be classier than we were. By the time I finally read Toni Morrison, she was already more than a writer to me. She was a Patron Saint. Immortal.

We said our silent prayers to her in the black girl joy we scrapped together for our selves. In our stubbornness, in our eye rolls and pursed lips, the clicks of our tongues against the back of our teeth when we sucked in breath and said “Girl…”, the ways we held each other when it became too much on our own.

That sticky summer she handed me Sula. Nel and Sula were childhood best friends. They did almost everything together and completed each other’s sentences. “They ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin… they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly.” I wanted to contemplate my own wildness with this woman, though not the kind shared by two young friends running in the breeze. Or maybe exactly the same kind.

I read Sula upside down on my bed with a small fan pressed against my sweat. I remember royal purple bed sheets and the faint yellow outline of a nicotine stain on my ceiling that must have been from my apartment’s previous occupant — I’ve never smoked.

Then she handed me The Bluest Eye, which to the this day is the only book that for me, has a sound. The Bluest Eye is subway cars roaring to a stop and muted announcers who sound more like Muppets characters than actual human beings. It smells like dank concrete platforms and handlebars you know better than to touch and urine. It’s awful, but also comfort. There was a time when that was home. “Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty… A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” I didn’t get it. I never wanted to escape my blackness; I cloaked myself in it like armor.

That was never the point. I knew what it was to hate myself. Some days, I still do. I know the bloody raw flesh of crying silently when no one is looking and imagining clawing out of your own fucking skin so that you could see the world as someone else. Someone prettier, perhaps. Someone whom people smiled at. Someone who isn’t ignored or an afterthought. Bland. Ugly. Forgettable.

Toni Morrison laid bare the kind of secrets that we barely even whispered to each other, the shames that we buried underneath our quick tongues and sisterhood and fashion slays. She wrote for black women, and for that she is ours. There are going to be countless eulogies and write ups about the author and Nobel laureate. I assume that most of them will be a more thorough undertaking of her life’s accomplishments than the hazy rumination of one queer black girl about the summer of 2013. The thing is, Toni Morrison helped save my life. Today I wanted to make sure that she knew that.

In the closing of her Nobel address, Toni Morrison said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the the measure of our lives.” It’s probably going to be the quote most seen across your social media today. Still, this morning I was reminded of another: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

Toni Morrison was free. And in her freedom, she sought to give black women a taste of our own. We will be her legacy.

12 Quotes About Freedom from Queer and Trans People of Color to Meditate on This Independence Day

When I was 11 or 12 years old, my family started a tradition. On the morning of Independence Day, after breakfast and before we left for any cookout, we would read “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” by Fredrick Douglass.

On the day of this country’s founding, the black people who worked our soil and built our nation were only considered to be 3/5ths of a person – to be frank, even that fraction is generous. Indigenous communities were raped, stolen from, pillaged. Freedom was not the same for all of us. As I’m writing this post from the relative safety of my home, military tanks are lining up in the in our nation’s capital and concentration camps are holding human beings hostage at our border. Freedom is still not the same for all of us.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” – that’s  the American promise. It’s one we’ve never accomplished, an ever drifting horizon. Still, I believe in the work. I believe that every one of us has the responsibility to do our part and fix what’s broken. I believe in the unfinished project of America – its struggle, its activism.

I will not celebrate Freedom on the Fourth of July because American Freedom For All is a myth at best, an outright lie at worst. Instead, today I honor those who do the thankless labor of pushing our country towards being a better version of itself. Those who have been spat on, arrested, ignored, called despicable. Those who have felt the brunt of American violence and still choose to believe in an America that has yet to believe in them.

James Baldwin once said, “”I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” That’s what inspired this project. Queer and trans people of color know more about the ugliness of America than most. But we’re still here. We’re still fighting for our liberation.

Let us lift up those voices today.

James Baldwin, Writer

Gloria Anzaldúa, Writer

Audre Lorde, Writer

Beth Brant, Writer

Barbara Jordan, Politician and US House of Representatives

Cherríe Moraga, Writer

Barbara Smith, Scholar and Activist

Marsha P. Johnson, Trans Rights Activist

Cecelia Chung, Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Transgender Law Center

Ocean Vuong, Poet

Chrystos, Poet

Sylvia Rivera, Trans Rights Activist

Going Back Outside After the Streetlights Come On

TO CREATE A SELF YOU NEED:

Soil
Seeds
Water
Food
Sunlight
Attention
Care (This is not the same as attention)

You start out with soil and seeds and as you go along you nurture what you want to become. I wanted to be a forest. And, in the beginning, I was on my way.

My family, bless their hearts, are a physically active bunch who believe they aren’t because we don’t look like Sports Illustrated covers. But all we’ve been doing is moving our bodies.

At least as far as my grandparents, we’ve been farming, running, throwing shit, skipping shit, just plain outside doing shit as long as the street lights would let us come home.

My parents got me into a lot of sports – and I guess extracurriculars in general – when I was real young and that helped me be really comfortable being outside. What really made this happen is that I wanted to do things and the things I wanted to do would not be tolerated in the house, So you better take it outside.

And when you’re little, the backyard of your grandma’s house is an entire universe. You can skateboard and scooter and dig holes and throw balls and scream and throw rocks onto the garage roof and collect pieces of outside in your pocket to take home and play jungle gym on your grandma’s Cadillac (and have your cousin snitch on you even though they could’ve joined in) in a grand stroke of genius while sitting outside on a summer day.

That little bit of parking lot that was surrounded by the front yards of our townhouses on one side, a scramble of trees on another, and a grassy hill up above is more than enough for your imagination when your mom picks you up. She’s the one who taught you how to rollerblade and play hockey and rides your bike to see how well it moves. She and her sisters and mother teach you and your sister to double dutch and just move and you learn to move with her.

You figure when you go down south to visit family and friends with your father, that of course you take turns riding bikes with your friends because you couldn’t bring your own. You play hide and seek in the woods, and roll down hills and jump over blood splattered rocks in rivers as long as you don’t tell your mother. You climb your grandma’s willow tree, and sneak into the trunk of your Pop Pop’s car with your little sister tucked beside you, staring at the clouds through the sunroof, hoping if you’re still long enough, you don’t have to go back home.

There’s so much you can do outside! There’s so much open and space just like your imagination and you’ve always been creative! You only have to be scared when you go back inside.

My trees did not reach the heights I aimed for. My flowers did not always petal. Sometimes my grass flattened under rocks that shouldnt’ve been moved. It’s hard to tend to a forest all the time, especially when people’s words and eyes and hands demand that you do the opposite of grow. But, despite them, I still grew. Just slower. I’d go outside and the outside would recognize the forest in me. I’d listen to the trees by my house ’til the branches in me learned to reach back.

Before there was the abuse (I’m assuming), there was my little kid body and playing outside.

While there was abuse, there was my little kid body and then my not so little kid body and still playing outside.

Then there was an accident, and I realized I was the common factor in all this hurt. Then there was no longer my body and there was no longer playing and there was no longer outside.

What I mean is this.

Being outside made me feel infinitely closer to my dreams. I wanted to play in the WNBA by the time I was in middle school, wanted to be a famous writer even sooner than that, and believed I could get anywhere I needed to in the whole wide world as long as I had my bike. I couldn’t get to where I needed to go staying in my house, so I kept going outside. I kept going until I didn’t think I’d survive it anymore.

When I dribbled my basketball, outside the townhouses, looking at the trees, I wasn’t worried about my family disowning me for being gay. When I went for walks I thought about solving plot holes and making rhymes – not what men told me about my lips. When I was on my bike, I believed I could get to other places by myself, and nothing could stop me from getting to the other side of this. I was gonna get free.

being outside let me be a person.

Tor, author of the survivor blog Somatic Strength: Speaking When The World Sleeps, wrote this: “Having a self is dangerous when you’re being abused. Having a self is the most vulnerable thing you can have. A self is up for ridicule, scrutiny, a self might be destroyed if it’s determined your self is sinful. A self is a thing that is in direct defiance of abusers who have told you that you are nothing, you are worthless, you are supposed to be whatever they want you to be: nothing more and nothing less.”

Inside the house, I was whatever an adult needed me to be. Inside, I couldn’t be a self.

Until I got boobs and really worried about how I was gonna make this gay thing go away – I was about getting to the park at the end of the block before the swings were taken, throwing myself upside down on the metal bars at school, and swinging from monkey bars and running up and down jungle gyms that I was definitely too old for.

Being outside gave me a self I could hold on to.

I never realized how much I needed that ‘til after it was gone.

In June, right before I went to high school, I was playing on my scooter outside. A lot of kids were out and I was coming down a hill two blocks up really fast when a car started to come through. The rule was whenever a car came, you must get on the sidewalk and I was nothing if not a rule follower. There was a little dip in the sidewalk near my house and I was moving towards it, faster than I ever have before, when I screamed at one of the kids to get out of the way. I’m thinking I didn’t jump off because there were cars and I didn’t want to dent them and get in trouble and I was following the rules so nothing bad should have happened. Nothing bad should’ve happened. She didn’t move out of the way fast enough, I didn’t think and do something different fast enough. All I remember is the blood pooling under her head on the concrete.

There’s a running (ha) joke in my family that is: Me. When I think I’ve done something wrong, I don’t stick around, I don’t ask for help. I disappear.

When I was five or younger, I accidentally turned the TV in my granddad’s den to snow, and my whole family remembers watching me book it the hell out of there. I did not ask for help. I did not try to stay and fix it. I did not stick around to find out if I was in trouble because by then it would be too late. I ran. I run.

I kept looking at her crying, wishing she would stop crying, freaking out because I didn’t know how to make her stop crying. If people heard her crying then they’d know I did it and then I’d start crying not because of the concrete but because of hands or worse. I didn’t know the first thing about saving anyone and she was dying oh God she was dying oh God I killed her I killed

One of the little neighborhood boys ran up the block and knocked on her mother’s door and there were ambulances and my sister and I did not stay. I ran inside crying. My mom went outside to help and I put my scooter behind the basement door where the monsters were and she’s okay, she’s been okay and her mother’s okay and everyone’s okay –

but I stopped going outside to make sure it stayed that way.

TO DESTROY A SELF YOU NEED:

Clippers
Concrete
Ignore history
To not look back
but most importantly,

A way to make sure whatever was growing before can only do one thing: choke.

We all know that to be black and alive is to carry guilt and hopeless optimism and always worry (that you’re not doing enough to make your family/your ancestors/your anybody proud, that you will be the best and it won’t be good enough, that you won’t be good and it won’t be enough). You carry it in your heart, your legs, your arms, your spine, anywhere you can make them fit in your body.

To be black and alive and outside is to carry all this with a target you can’t scrape off, stitched into your back. To be black and alive and outside is to mistake alive for not dead.

This goes for every part of this story. But I don’t realize that yet.

After growing up in a predominantly black and brown school and neighborhood, I went to a predominantly white high school and spent as much extra time as I could there.

I hate to admit it, but I went because I wanted the opposite of everything that I was. I wasn’t skinny or straight or white, but I believed if I surrounded myself with it, I could be.

I figured if I was close enough, I wouldn’t have to worry about forgetting my history, they’d come and suck it out of me.

I gave up on the basketball dream and a lot more with it. I convinced myself I was an inside kid and that meant keeping everything on the inside.

I saw the basketball team as free. One of my friends told me she walked in on two of them kissing in the gym freshmen year. There was no apology in it. I never thought I could do something like that, even down the hall from the gym where I was in the theatre, hidden away in the spot loft, shining light down on people to make sure the attention was always kept away from me.

I pined after white girls even when black girls flirted with me, comforted me, made me feel more at home than I ever thought I could be. I turned my back on them, they looked too much like what my freedom wanted to be.

I was taking the train back home today and I hate hate hate going through DC because it’s gentrified and I don’t even know the place where I grew up anymore. But this time I sat on a different side of the aisle – you know how I am about my routines and needing to stick to them – and I glimpsed one of the streets we used to ride along.

it looked the same, it looked like I still could belong there.

It made me think about how I need to break the magical thinking of rituals and just get back outside. I don’t know, there’s a thread there somewhere.

Point here is there was a certain amount of safety that I took for granted.

You don’t worry about not coming back home until someone tells you that’s even a possibility. When my parents, and grandparents, and the news and everyone else told me that staying outside could keep me from making it back home, could keep me from making it back alive, I started to see the possibility of death everywhere.

When I was the reason for that possibility, I couldn’t see why I was allowed outside anymore.

I don’t get on my bike anymore. I stay by the tables at cookouts. I tried sitting outside during a panic attack once and could only think how ridiculous it was that I was sitting in really cold water.

I spent most of my life at my grandparents’ house. We never used the front door, only the back one that let out into the yard and the alley. In the summer, they’d keep the door open with the screen door closed.

After running through the house, outside and back over and over, my grandma told me and my little sister that we had to make a choice, we could stay outside or we could stay inside – we couldn’t waffle between both.

It’s hard for me to look at the past because it seems so obvious what I should’ve done back then and there’s no way now for me to fix it. I keep looking back forgetting that I was doing the best with what I had. It’s like nurturing a forest. It’s easy to say oh you should’ve added more sunlight here, built some protection there. But I was six. I didn’t think past playing in the dirt.

I made it out of school alive, just barely. I nearly died a lot after I walked down the Basillica steps. I nearly died less when I started intensive outpatient. They made us walk once a week around the neighborhood. I didn’t know the trees still wanted to talk to me. I touched the concrete inside of me. It hummed.

Last week I was talking to my sister about the accident (she was outside playing with us):

I just said, “Yeah I cant drive because of what happened with Camila” and before I could go on she goes, “Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense – but you know it wasn’t all your fault right?”

“There was a sixteen year old neighbor next door who was two timing with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend was coming at the same time the side man was leaving and he pulled out of the lot too fast. That’s what made you swerve. I know it doesn’t like make what happened not happen, but you shouldn’t be carrying this like that. You were eleven. I was nine. She was six. If anyone in that situation should’ve taken charge, it should’ve been the sixteen-year-olds. We didn’t handle it perfectly and of course the blood is gonna seem like too much – any type of scrape or bigger in the head area is gonna gush regardless, you just have a lot of blood up there, its inevitable. But keep in mind, those teenagers all saw what happened and none of them came to help.”

This absolutely changed the way I thought about it, about myself, a lot of things you know? And it made me think – I’ve kept this secret to myself for years. I wonder how much sooner I could’ve healed if I’d let it outside.

TO SALVAGE A SELF YOU NEED:

A place to start (soil preferable but sometimes concrete will do in a pinch)
Seeds
Water
Food
Sunlight
Attention
Care
To remember history

A lot of days now, I stand outside and just listen for a minute. Feel the sun and the rain and the snow and whatever the sky is giving, touch my face. I shiver, I sweat, I feel concrete and grass and dirt and rock beneath my feet. I’m twenty five and cannot believe it. I look up at the trees and the leaves look back. I never thought I’d see this.

Apparently growing up is finding the kid in you and trying to be brave enough to take them outside again – without warning them about coming home before the streetlights come on.🌲

edited by carmen.

“She’s Gotta Have It” Season 2 Finally Gives Nola Darling The Bright Light She Deserves

Slight spoilers ahead for season two of She’s Gotta Have It

As I watched the second season of She’s Gotta Have It, released on Netflix last Friday, I couldn’t stop thinking about Nola Darling. I realize that sounds painfully obvious; after all, the pansexual Brooklyn artist is the protagonist, narrator, and titular character of the show. But my mind was less focused on the specifics of the nine-episode dramedy itself, and instead wandered — grappling with the intertwined legacies that Nola has left behind in black film, black feminist critique, and the developing canon of black queer television and cinema.

OK, that’s a lot to write out all at once. It’s not hyperbole to say there are very few characters like Nola Darling. She casts a shadow that spans over 30 years and two storytelling mediums. Barely a handful of other black women characters can say the same, and if you begin discussing black queer women, I think it’s arguable that Nola stands all her own.

1986’s She’s Gotta Have It was the breakout film of a young Spike Lee’s career. It created one of the most instantly recognizable comedic characters in modern black cinema (Mars Blackmon, originally played by Lee and now taken on by Anthony Ramos). It also sold itself as a serious exploration of black women’s sexual agency. It’s that description that has left the film almost uniformly derided by generations of feminist critics. The movie ends in a graphic date rape scene that punishes Nola for her own perceived sexual liberation. bell hooks’ essay on the subject, “Whose Pussy is This?,” has become so canonized that it’s still taught in introductory gender classes decades later.

In both the film and Netflix interpretations of She’s Gotta Have It, Nola self-identifies as a “sex-positive, polyamorous, pansexual” (though the subject is barely touched upon in the movie). Somehow, it never seriously occurred to me before this weekend that one of the most looming and controversial black women on film of the last 30 years happens to also be queer. Looking back historically, representation for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in cinema has been desperately low. If you narrow those markers to black women, it nearly becomes a kiddie pool. Yet, here is Nola Darling. Stubbornly proud of sexuality, two-dimensional and sloppily drawn, and ultimately abused by a man that she trusted. She’s simultaneously iconic and purposefully never allowed to simply be.

In the 2017 press tour leading up to the Netflix remake’s first season, Spike Lee admitted that ending the film in a rape is the biggest regret of his career. The television series takes a different path for Nola, but the first season remained almost irreparably uneven, particularly as it related to her — more well-rounded but still under-explored — queer sexuality. Despite hiring a variety of black women to work with him on the revamped project, Lee insisted on directing every episode. Nola suffered for his creative shortcomings.

Lee also directs every episode of She’s Gotta Have It’s second season. A question that haunts me: If Nola Darling is one of the most famous, even if uncomfortable, black queer women in pop culture — what does it mean for us that nearly everything about her is so closely tied to the man who created her? Spike Lee’s influence over the last two generations of black film is indescribable; his fingerprints have indirectly touched or influenced almost every creator we enjoy today. I’m happy he won his long deserved Academy Award in March. But, he’s still famously sexist. With the notable exception of 1994’s Crooklyn, he’s never had a real interest in developing black women on screen beyond serving as a foil for the men around him.

What’s merciful about Season Two of She’s Gotta Have It is that, for once, Spike Lee loosens his grip just enough to let a black woman character speak for herself. She’s given wide space to selfishly explore her own desires and responsibilities on no one’s terms but her own. This iteration of Nola Darling is finally, and sublimely, allowed to step into the light of summer. For a character previously defined almost exclusively by who she slept with, she spends much of this season blissfully alone. She paints and works on photography and builds deeper platonic relationships with the chosen family she’s created. She leaves New York and travels to Martha’s Vineyard, to Puerto Rico. She eats dinner and drinks wine with her parents. A struggling artist, she gets mentored by real life greats Carrie Mae Weems and Amy Sherald. This is a Nola Darling who is doing the hard work of getting her shit together, and the process of watching her do so is resplendent.

So much so that on Sunday night, as I was working on this review, I texted a friend in what could have been a whisper: I think I actually like this season of She’s Gotta Have It?

As I fell deeper in love with Nola, I couldn’t help but also feel a bit mad. This Nola Darling is one of the most well-developed queer black women I’ve seen on screen. She’s self-aware and independent and passionate. She messes up and tries again. She weighs heavily what it means to sell out for your art or stay true to serving your community. Her artwork, even though its fictional, challenges pre-conceptions in a way that’s reminiscent of controversial black visual artist Kara Walker.

Still, she’s conceived and directed by a man I fundamentally cannot bring myself to trust when it comes to telling women’s stories, especially queer women’s stories. 30 years after the fact, I’m not sure that Spike Lee can ever undo the damage he caused in the original iteration of Nola Darling. I certainly don’t think he can do it while also pigheadedly standing right in the middle of a mess of his own creation. As much as I enjoyed this season, I never lost track of the lingering pain at hand.

This was most felt in the Season Two’s first episode, which has a graphic lesbian sex scene between Nola (DeWanda Wise) and her girlfriend, Opal (Ilfenesha Hadera). I couldn’t get past who I already knew was behind the camera. Despite it’s length and technical accuracy, it felt uncomfortable and dishonest, especially when compared to the great work in this arena being put forth by queer women of color creators like Tanya Saracho.

Nola and Opal break up very early on in the second season. That means that in the 18-month lapse between Season One and Season Two, Nola has matured in a stable, committed relationship with a woman. She’s become a maternal figure to Opal’s daughter, Skylar (Indigo Hubbard-Salk). By all measures, Opal and Nola are happily in love together — more than that, they’re sickeningly cute! It’s a disappointing decision on behalf of the writers to have all of that character development happens off-screen.

Nola doesn’t have another lasting relationship all season; her break up with Opal becomes the catalyst for her self-discovery. DeWanda Wise’s silent performance in first few minutes following their break up, as Stevie Wonder plays overhead, is transcendent. Wise’s performance throughout the second season is magnetic, and I’m incredibly excited for her bright career ahead. (A quick aside, I also think that throwing out all of your exes things with Meshell Ndegeocello blaring from your speakers is one of the most cliché queer black girl things I’ve seen on screen, but I did laugh a bit from recognition.) In the wake of her relationship with Opal, Nola — utterly crushed and stripped emotionally naked — finds a way to pick herself up from the ashes. The entire series is better for the reset.

That doesn’t mean that Opal — or Skylar — disappear from the season, they remain a part of Nola’s community. Mekka and Clorinda, two of Nola’s friends from the first season, also remain as mainstays. Mekka’s plot in the first season was plainly disrespectful to working class and poor black women, but it finds itself way to more solid and satisfying territory in Season Two. Nova’s previous romantic relationship with Mars turns solidly platonic, another move that strengthens the second season and provides the series with its most moving episode to date.

Episode seven, “#OhJudoKnow?,” finds Mars and Nola, along with other friends, on a service trip to Post-Maria Puerto Rico. Familiar with Lee’s work in documentaries like HBO’sWhen The Levees Broke, I had braced myself to be devastated and inconsolable. Instead I was greeted with nothing short of a love letter to my home island and our people. His care with Afro-Latinx culture left me feeling seen, held, and nurtured by the details of his work. In fact, it’s perhaps the most poignant tribute to Puerto Rico I’ve seen by someone who isn’t of Puerto Rican descent. There’s also a Rosie Perez cameo that’s so delightful you have to see it for yourself.

As always, Lee’s warmth and intimacy for black aesthetics and black culture is his greatest strength. The references embedded throughout She’s Gotta Have It are too numerous to name. Some of them are subtle, some designed to hit you directly over the head, all of them are welcome. Few people know how to depict the beauty of blackness on screen the way that Spike Lee does.

I was asked if you have to watch the unfortunate fist season of She’s Gotta Have It to dive into the more rewarding second. You absolutely do not. If you are a quick study or comfortable with Google for any blind spots, it’s very easy to pick up. In the second season of She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee has finally found his best and most self-determined black adult woman protagonist of his 30-year career. Perhaps, given Lee’s checkered and disappointing past, that is not saying much. It is true, nonetheless.

Vida’s Season Two Is a Triumph of Unapologetically Queer and Latinx Storytelling

When Emma Hernandez decided to stay in Boyle Heights and keep her mother’s bar out of financial ruin at the end of Vida’s knockout critically acclaimed first season, she did so with her eyes open. She knew that coming back to the very home she once ran from would mean sacrifice. She knew it meant walking down hallways that are haunted by sorrow – not just mourning the life of her deceased mother, but also mourning the lost queer coming of age that her mother’s self-inflicted homophobia cost her daughter.

Nothing about Vida is easy.

That remains true in the show’s second season as Emma and her sister, Lyn, work together to remount their family’s bar while also tending to the injuries of their stepmother, Eddy, who was despicably beaten in a hate crime during Season One’s finale. Lyn spent most of the first season as a walking hurricane of bad decisions – many of which she’s now being forced to deal with in the light of day, armed with not much more than a brave face. Eddy’s still wrecked with depression and grieving the loss of her Vida (Vidalia, the girls’ mother and show’s namesake). Somehow though it’s Emma who ends up shouldering the largest weight of her family’s pain.

Once again grappling with the scars left by years of her mother’s emotional abuse, Emma nonetheless refuses to sell away her family legacy to racist developers like Nelson, a Chicano who nickels and dimes his own community into further poverty and sees proximity to whiteness as wealth. The major conflict of the second season follows Emma as she needs to quickly turn a profit out of her family business before they all go asunder.

Vida continues to wrestle with the long-term effects of gente-fication, the gentrification of Chicanx and Latinx neighborhoods by younger, and often upwardly mobile Latinxs. Gente-fication is stickier than gentrification as it’s traditionally defined; it’s more intimate. It aches right at your skin — the pricing out of long time residents from their neighborhood by those who look like them, people who in many respects are the metaphorical children of the ones they are replacing.

Marisol, a teenage community activist who was peripheral in Season One and comes into much sharper focus this year, serves as a mouthpiece and Boyle Height’s protector. She’s fighting to keep the neighborhood from gentrifying, but doing so might come at great financial cost for the Hernandezes and put them right back in Nelson’s crosshairs. Here Vida rises to its own incredibly high standards, weaving together narratives of race and class that are nuanced and delicate. Choosing to handle them with care while making no easy decisions or shortcuts

Similar loving attention is taken with Vida’s portrayal of queer and lesbian sexualities, both of which are on matter-of-fact display as the show digs deeper into Eddy and Emma’s respective gay worlds. Emma’s second season arc in this regard is like nothing else I’ve seen. She still eschews labels, but through her lens Vida is refreshingly upfront, unapologetic and honest in its queerness. There’s no cultural translation given for straight or white ears. More than once I found myself tongue tied at the screen. This is queerness I’ve understood it to be and defined it for myself — mucky, rumpled and complicated, but nonetheless rooted and proud of my heritage and ancestors. Emma is relearning how to love past the hurt she inherited from her mother, and often that process is misread as being ashamed of her own people or her own home. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Roberta Colindrez’s Nico, a new character added this season, is central in Emma’s reclamation. A lesbian military vet and bartender, Nico’s patience with Emma in both business and love is absolutely breathtaking. I’ve long argued that Colindrez is a queer heartthrob, and Vida allows them to truly shine. Nico’s casual air of confidence left me blushing. Her old school intelligence and willingness to find bridges between generations of gay culture is inspired. This year Vida invests in conversations about queerness that stretch boundaries and purposefully push back against online PC “discourse.” It puts a mirror on each of us that asks tough questions about what we’re actually comfortable with.

That doesn’t mean that Vida’s second season gets it right all the time. There is some, perhaps expected, sophomore clumsiness. Though the season is expanded to ten episodes this year, the narrative felt rushed. The final product seems a bit unfinished, as if there was quite simply too much plot to cover. I found myself missing the unhurried pace of the show’s first season, when showrunner Tanya Saracho allowed each character to unfold in their own time, with little regard to traditional television storytelling norms. As much as thoroughly enjoyed Nico, I also missed Maria Elena Laas’ Cruz, who sadly does not have enough to do this season and whose character suffers as a result.

The most important tenets of Vida’s phenomenal first season remain the same — Tanya Saracho has no interest in answering questions easily. She doesn’t want queerness that can be explained away by Merriam-Webster or a college Gender Studies 101 class. She has no use for gentrification that can be reduced into a simple “us vs them” narrative. What would even be the point of sisters who love each other without baggage? Vida is messy, perhaps even more so than it was in Season One, if that’s possible.

In less capable hands that might be a serious concern. Other great queer shows of the last decade have lost their magic by constantly pushing their envelope without just cause (Netflix’s Orange is the New Black comes immediately to mind). Maybe it’s because Tanya Saracho is a queer Latina who comes from the communities she’s writing about, maybe it’s that she purposefully crafted a queer Latinx writers’ room like none other seen on television – I don’t know, but what’s clear to me is that Vida, while masterfully detailed to reflect the actual lives of queer Latinxs, has absolutely no interest in bowing to the rules and regulations of what a “good lesbian show” should be. Their mess is the entire point.

Being a queer upper middle class Chicana raised by your working class Mamí under a veil of her own self-hatred and homophobia is more than just a mouthful to say out loud; it’s a network of familial hurt, pain and systematic oppression that can’t be unraveled into neat, separate boxes. Moving back home to your childhood neighborhood, an open wound in its own right, and working to salvage the best parts of your mother’s legacy while constantly being reminded of the agony she caused you – that doesn’t come with a Happily Ever After.

Tanya Saracho demands more from her characters, from her audience. She requires our discomfort, our willingness to bring all of our messy selves in front of the television. She asks that of us because it’s the only way that we can reach out to hold Emma’s hands (as if she would ever take it) and follow her, Eddy, Nico, or Lyn over the next ten episodes. These women flay themselves open, showing us the soft underbelly of their worst impulses and behavior. The least we can do, is do the same.

These Five Black LGBTQ+ Activists Are Literally Saving The Planet

Talking about extinction isn’t mere hyperbole: According to a new United Nations assessment, as many as one million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction due to the actions of humans. Ironically, the people who’ve harmed our ecosystems most are the ones being paid to defend them.

People like me aren’t reflected on the staffs of organizations that proclaim to have the solutions to environmental problems. The Green 2.0 Working Group found that only 16% of staff at environmental nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies are people of color. Too many of these organizations refuse to acknowledge that climate change and pollution are rooted in environmental racism.

The only ones who can bring our planet back from the brink are Black and Brown descendants of peoples who lived harmoniously with land. As a Black queer non-binary woman, I wholly trust in the creativity, righteous rage, and resilience of Black LGBTQ+ people to reverse the devastating effects that colonialism and industrialization have wrought on our planet.

Black LGBTQ+ people may not be well-represented in mainstream environmental organizations, but the world needs to know that we’re creating our own environmental institutions and interventions that center the most marginalized among us. If you’re wondering what true environmental justice looks like, read on to meet five Black queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming activists and community organizers who are literally saving the earth.

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.” – Audre Lorde, A Litany for Survival

Asha Carter

Instagram: @suitlalumiere // @dc_greens
Pronouns: She // Her

At 14-years-old, Asha Carter traveled to the Galápagos Islands, where the government carefully protects the ecosystems, and 95% of the islands’ pre-human biodiversity remains intact. The trip showed Carter that it was possible to live in harmony and balance with land, a stark contrast to how we live in the United States, and sent her down a career path where she works to figure out how environmental justice (EJ) might liberate marginalized people.

“My work has really been directed by ‘how do we live in harmony with where we are?’ and understanding that so many of us for hundreds of years have been pillaged and extracted from in order to build what exists right now,” Carter told me during a phone interview.

As the Food Justice Strategist at DC Greens, Carter helps people and organizations move closer to racial equity through a food justice lens that allocates tools and resources to those who’ve been most impacted by systemic oppression. In her capacity as a social justice educator, community organizer, and EJ advocate, she’s surrounded by fellow Black queer women doing visionary EJ work, which she attributes to their lived experiences of navigating multiple oppressions.

“There are hella queer Black women in this space who are articulating their visions for the future, who are working with other people to get land, who are doing the work of getting each other free, and I am awed by that,” Carter said. “I think that there’s something to it that you have a bunch of queer Black women who ended up in this space.”

Carter’s political analysis has been shaped by peers, such as the folks at the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, a coalition of Black-led organizations who organize for food sovereignty, land, and justice. It’s also been influenced by her family: Her grandmother organized with the Black Panthers, and her parents brought her along to civil rights demonstrations as a child. Carter’s deep knowledge of racial justice organizing and its history makes her a powerful force for environmental justice. It even earned her a spot at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration.

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” –  Maya Angelou

Dominique Hazzard

Twitter: @hazzardeuce
Instagram: @peculiarivy
Website
Pronouns: She // Her

Food makes Dominique Hazzard tick. Ensuring that Black people have equitable access to food, especially her neighbors in Ward 8 of Washington, D.C., is the cornerstone of her organizing.

“Food is important to me as both one of the most intimate and universal parts of being human and as a place where some of our most pressing issues – capitalism, climate change, soil conservation, poverty, prisons – converge,” Hazzard wrote to me.

Drawing from her passion for getting fresh, healthy foods to her people, in 2017, Hazzard helped lead the Grocery Walk, a two-mile walk of nearly 500 Washingtonians between downtown Anacostia and Ward 8’s only grocery store in the name of food justice. Demands from the historic walk included having land set aside for urban agriculture, support for cooperative businesses, and funding for food programs.

Her lived experiences of Blackness and queerness allow Hazzard to conceive of such demands. They help her see that another word is possible and dare her to believe that the side of Black liberation will win. She learned how to organize within the youth climate movement and currently calls BYP100, a member-based organization of Black youth activists creating justice and freedom for all Black people, her organizing home.

Hazzard’s not only engaged in freedom struggle on the ground – the historian-in-training researches migration and the Black family, racism and real estate in the U.S., environmental history, and food history as a history doctoral student at John Hopkins University. She also helps nonprofits strategize around anti-racism and being accountable to the communities impacted by their work.

“I do this work because I believe that building a food system that is good for people and the earth is possible, because Ward 8 is my home, and because of my deep love for Black people,” Hazzard said.

“All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is Change.” – Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Dean Jackson

Instagram: @qtpocfarmer
Pronouns: They // Them

In the historically Black Hilltop neighborhood in Tacoma, Wa., the traditional lands of the Puyallup tribe, urban farmer Dean Jackson is busy creating things that the world needs. Hilltop Urban Gardens (HUG), a food sovereignty and racial and economic justice organization, was born out of Jackson’s vision to create a community resource during the Great Recession. If you’re looking for a textbook example of queer resiliency, simply refer to HUG’s origin story: Jackson is a Black queer, trans, and non-binary person – someone often told that they shouldn’t exist – who visioned something into reality out of necessity.

HUG’s programs are specific responses to the needs of their neighborhood. The Urban Farm Network, which started with Jackson building gardens in their neighbors’ parking strips, feeds the neighborhood – residents exchange their “time, talent, or treasure” for produce in lieu of money at HUG’s farm stand.

The organization’s Black Mycelium Project, which works closely with a group of indigenous herbalists, allows Black people to reconnect with land on their own terms; re-teaching them how to grow food and how to grow, prepare, and use plant medicines. Practicing Black and indigenous solidarity is a priority at HUG, which also runs a program for Black and indigenous youth to learn about the history of Black and indigenous organizing.

Furthermore, HUG engages in land and housing liberation work that defends, preserves, and increases Black-owned land in the rapidly gentrifying Hilltop neighborhood. Jackson says that while gentrification and displacement are huge environmental justice issues, they have a hard time convincing other environmental organizations of this. These organizations’ refusal to put gentrification and displacement on their agendas is ultimately rooted in racism.

“It might be easier to restore a waterway to be a salmon-breeding area than it is to address gentrification, but in the meantime, by environmental organizations not doing that, it looks very much like a demonstration of anti-Blackness,” Jackson stated to me during a phone interview.

Another way Jackson sees anti-Blackness manifest in the realm of environmentalism is white organizations co-opting EJ. They want these white organizers to know that what they’re doing isn’t EJ – what they’re doing is practicing white supremacy.

“White people can move their resources to EJ work,” Jackson said. “They can use their positionality to support EJ work, but they can’t actually lead it.”

“Dear seed,
Thank you for such strong roots.
Love always,
The fruit.” – Self

Jeaninne Kayembe

Instagram: @_oro5_
Pronouns: She // Her, They // Them

At the intersection of public art, food security, community safety, and youth organizing, you’ll find Jeaninne Kayembe, a queer Black and Asian-Pacific Islander woman who prioritizes creativity as a tool in solving the issues that marginalized people face. At the age of 19 Kayembe co-founded Urban Creators, a North Philadelphia organization that’s transformed over three acres of blighted land into the Life Do Grow Farm, which now yields fresh produce for dozens of local families each year.

Life Do Grow Farm is a site where cultural and social change is created. The work there has contributed to a 40% decrease in violent crime in the immediate area. It’s a space where Black and Brown young people can feel safe and become leaders, having employed and provided leadership opportunities to 117 youth. The farm also serves as a platform for artists to showcase their work at events such as the HoodStock Community and Arts Festival, which Kayembe executive produces, and is the foundation of Kayembe’s creative placemaking practice.

Urban Creators is a place where political education happens organically, like through Kayembe’s conversations with young men of color who work on the farm about cultural and social issues that can be difficult to discuss, such as queerness and rape culture.

Off of the farm, Kayembe often finds herself educating rooms full of people who aren’t used to seeing a queer woman of color speak truth to power. Teaching white environmentalists about the nuanced experiences of young POC requires her to code switch and navigate many different terrains.

“It has been my work to build that bridge to young people of color so they see their place and face in this movement,” Kayembe told me.

Building relationships lies at the heart of Kayembe’s activism. What makes Urban Creators’ work so impactful is their commitment to deepening their relationships within the organization, with the community at-large, and with the local environment. Through relationship-building, growing food, and making public art to facilitate a safer community, Kayembe’s aiming to change the narrative of what environmental justice can mean.

“I believe all organizing is science fiction. Trying to create a world that we’ve never experienced and never seen is a science-fictional activity.” – adrienne maree brown

Rachel Stevens

Website
Pronouns: She // Her, They // Them

Rachel Stevens wants everyone to feel safe – no easy feat during these times we’re living in. In her current home Los Angeles, in central Florida where she’s from, and in the Amazon rainforest where she completed a service learning project – she’s witnessed up close and personal how colonization hurts Black, Brown, and indigenous peoples and their land. This is why Stevens’ praxis is grounded in protecting both the earth and humans; she views them as interconnected.

For Stevens, the street violence she experiences as a multiracial Black, queer, non-binary, genderfluid femme is deeply tied to the harm she experiences due to environmental contamination.

“We can’t look at how these oil industries are contaminating the air and making it hard to breathe and seeing that that’s a breach of safety without seeing that patriarchy is also a breach of safety for people, as well as white supremacy,” Stevens said to me during a phone interview.

Stevens carried her experiences of interpersonal violence and systemic oppression with her while organizing with STAND-L.A. (Stand Together Against Neighborhood Drilling), a coalition of community members who live or have lived near drill sites that fight to end oil extraction in LA. As part of a STAND-L.A. campaign, Stevens supported residents in pressuring LA City Council to require a 2,500-foot health and safety buffer be put in place between oil drilling operations and people’s homes. During this campaign, she recognized the different ways in which the residents’ struggle for safety intersected with her own.

In their environmental justice work, Stevens sees a need for sustainability not only in how we treat the earth, but also in how we treat each other. They hope to see more people within justice movements prioritize building sustainable relationships and practicing community care.

“We really need to care deeply for each other, fight for each other, see our inherent dignity in each other, and admit that we need each other fiercely if we’re going to win and create this sci-fi world of safety that we’re striving for,” Stevens said. 🌲

edited by carmen.

“Someone Great”: Gina Rodriguez, Brittany Snow and DeWanda Wise Add a Lesbian BFF to the Gal Pal Comedy Formula

What’s the prescription for getting over a heartbreak?

Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) is a 29-year-old music journalist who lands her dream job as an editor at Rolling Stone. Nate, Jenny’s boyfriend, breaks up with her. So, Jenny calls her two best friends, Blair (Brittany Snow) and Erin (DeWanda Wise, She’s Gotta Have It), to take her mind off her pain with a wild night out in New York City.

The trio’s plan for the day: shopping, smoking, drinking, singing along to Selena, and, just when they least expect it, personal growth. Erin’s a black lesbian with impeccable eyeliner and an effortless comeback for every exchange. She’s been casually dating Leah, a fashionable and open-hearted South Asian boutique owner. Leah’s ready for more out their relationship, but Erin’s got serious cold feet. All the smart ass quips and sexy smiles in the world aren’t going to save her from growing up, and she’s just not ready yet.

Someone Great’s the movie debut of Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (creator of Sweet/Vicious) and leads with its heart first. At the same time, it’s a bit like Broad City on steroids, with each comedy bit and one-liner working overtime to outdo the one that came before. The soundtrack – which features Lizzo, Mitski, Frank Ocean, Lorde, Outkast, and more – is a character of its own. Fitting for a movie where the protagonist is a writer, Someone Great is a love letter to love, to your twenties and impending fear of adulthood, to your best friends. The “someone great” isn’t a romantic partner at all – it’s each of the girls, bringing out the best in each other.

Natalie and Carmen got together to relive every hilarious moment. You can stream Someone Great on Netflix.

Natalie: Where should we start? Friday in North Carolina was kinda miserable. There were heavy storms with sporadic tornado warnings popping off. I opted to spend the night at home, watching Someone Great and celebrating the end of Lent with some cheap wine – which is kinda the perfect way to enjoy this movie.

Carmen: Hmmhmm. I watched it on my laptop while laying in bed on Saturday morning. The rain was doing this pretty grey streaking thing across the glass that I was obsessed with. My bed was warm and soft. Another ideal way to be introduced to this crew.

Natalie: I feel like Gina Rodriguez keeps picking movie roles to get her as far away from Jane the Virgin as she possibly can.

Carmen: OK SO YES! One thing that kept throwing me really hard was Jane the Virgin just cussing up a storm! And smoking joints the size of my head! And taking Molly!

Natalie: I think she’s definitely taking those roles intentionally… so people don’t see her as the “girl next door” for forever.

Carmen: I came to like her in Someone Great though! It was a little…. jarring? at first. But I got there.

Natalie: Yeah, I liked Gina as Jenny. I know Gina Rodriguez wants a break from the wholesome JTV thing, but I think her real strength is making a character endearing. And that was really helpful in this movie that had very little exposition and moved from break-up to recovery in the span of one day.

Carmen: I think Someone Great was very effective in throwing its audience into the deep end and then working its way backwards, so that you got to know all of the characters better via flashbacks. One of the reasons that works is because… we all know what we signed up for before we hit play on the Netflix queue, right? We know a “girl power rom-com” and all its clichés. I appreciate that Someone Great didn’t try and pretend it was something it wasn’t.

BUT I also think it worked well because Gina Rodriguez, DeWanda Wise, and Brittany Snow are all very empathetic actors. You care for them and want to root for them right away.

Natalie: The flashbacks were effective – particularly in terms of showing how everyday things can trigger you, like Jenny buying the Diet Coke at the bodega – but I wouldn’t have minded it being spread out over more time. I also agree that Gina Rodriguez and Brittany Snow are naturally compassionate actors. I feel like I’m just starting to get to know DeWanda, though.

Carmen: DeWanda Wise really works for me! To be fair, at least part of that is because I’ve only seen her in two things – this movie and her leading role in the Netflix series remake of She’s Gotta Have It – and she played gay in both of them. Not that I’m complaining!

I didn’t love the first season of She’s Gotta Have It for a lot of reasons that have to do with Spike Lee’s choices as a director and very little with her. I found DaWanda’s take on Nola Darling to be charming, despite that show’s otherwise many shortcomings. Her charm is turned up tenfold as Erin in Someone Great.

The first time we meet Erin, she’s in bed with another woman of color, which I adored. Let the audience know right away what they are getting in to.

Natalie: Absolutely. I thought immediately about what you’d written when a similar scene happened in the first season of Black Lightning and how rare it is to see two women of color in bed like that.

Carmen: In the next scene, Erin’s still a little sex hung over and coming home to her apartment. She tells her roommate, “Dude I went to pet a chihuahua outside of our building, and it was a fucking rat.” That’s when I knew – I was in love.

I was very much expecting Erin’s sexuality to be a minor part of the story. I feel like when you have the “gay best friend” in a straight woman’s story, we all sign up expecting the worst and press play anyway.

Natalie: I definitely didn’t think we’d get as much of her story as we did. How’d you feel about the non-committal lesbian, though? I feel like we’re seeing that character a lot these days.

Carmen: Well, you know what really did work for me? That they framed her being non-committal around a very specific baby gay experience (which I won’t spoil) that I think a lot of queer audiences can relate to and that movie made it clear that she hadn’t moved on from that initial hurt, in part, because she had straight best friends. She spent years with no one to talk to about it. When that truth came out, it hit me hard. I wasn’t expecting it.

The “Shane trope” (for lack of a better phrase) is very common in lesbian or bisexual pop culture. BUT it’s not often explored underneath the skin. Similarly, we’ve seen lots of queer women of color besties in a straight crew (Kat from The Bold Type and Emily Fields in PLL both come to mind), but we don’t often get to explore what that group dynamic means for the character in question. How does it feel to be gay without a gay community to lean on?

Natalie: Yes, absolutely.

Carmen: Ok!! This is making the movie sound much more serious than it is. Whoops! At it’s core, Someone Great is a comedy about getting high and drunk with your girls and listening to some great pop music and growing up a little in the process.

Natalie: The soundtrack was great! Lil’ Kim! Big Freedia! Lizzo! (Hey! Congrats on that album drop on Friday!) SELENA!

Carmen: I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE SELENA SCENE! Back to my earlier point, Someone Great really doesn’t stray far from the girl friendship comedy playbook – there’s multiple required “girls dancing together in their kitchen and while getting dressed” scenes and there’s this take on the “girls sing an emotional song together scene.” But you know what? It worked for me! Because it was Selena! AND WHEN IS THE SONG THE GIRLS SING TO IN A MOVIE EVER SELENA?? When does a Latina, drunk in a bodega, get to have the intimately familiar experience of crying her eyes out to “Dreaming of You” while her girls have her back? And they were so cute together!

Natalie: That scene really was great. Their friendship felt lived in.

Any surprising moments in the movie for you? I didn’t pay attention to the cast list, so Rosario Dawson and RuPaul popping up were a surprise for me. Jaboukie Young-White was a highlight. I want to see a lot more of that kid. He was hilarious.

Carmen: Oh was he the Jaden Smith knock off? (sorry, but it was true)

Natalie: Aww, yes.

Carmen: His scene was funny! I also enjoyed that RuPaul is a high end Molly dealer, without losing any of the gay fabulousness of RuPaul. That was a good touch. May all the Molly dealers in the world have satin robes and tiny dogs laying on velvet floor pillows with tiaras on their heads. Amen.

Natalie: Their love for pets was weird and never fully explained. Maybe just because they were high 96% of the time.

Carmen: Real talk, I think anything unexplainable can be summed up with “maybe just because they were high 96% of the time”

Natalie: Did you relate to one character more than the others?

Carmen: It’s weird because I didn’t necessarily see myself in any of the girls. I don’t even know if we would be friends in real life (I don’t do drugs and I clearly don’t have their capacity for alcohol consumption), but I still enjoyed them? Their friendship was sure as hell one that was a lot of fun to watch.

I also LOVED the aesthetics of the movie, like Jenny’s “Latina AF” crop top, or the “Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter” poster in Erin’s bedroom. They didn’t whitewash their characters of color for the sake of some kind of colorblind friendship narrative, and for that I was supremely thankful. Black girls and Latinas like to act silly, do dumb ass highjinks and sing in our underwear to pop ballads just as much as white girls do.

(Though, there were some moments where the movie tried too hard. If I saw one more background throw pillow or coffee mug with hot pink “feminist” written across it, I was going to scream.)

Natalie: Right. I love that Netflix is really cornering the market on the rom-coms featuring POC leads, because that’s been untapped for so long. Though I don’t think Someone Great is as good as To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before or The Incredible Jessica James.

Carmen: Oh see? I definitely liked this more than Jessica James! I mean, I liked Jessica James. It was a pleasant summer afternoon on the couch. But it didn’t stick with me.

Carmen: Alright, let’s do a few rapid fire questions! Ready? Favorite song from the movie!

Natalie: oh shoot.

Carmen: Hahaha! Messing us up already!

Natalie: This is an impossible question! Most meaningful? Selena. Favorite? Freedia and Lizzo.

Carmen: I was going to say Freedia and Lizzo, because for a second I forgot that Selena was on the soundtrack. And now I’m going to Latina hell forever. (In Latina hell, it’s a lot of white people in somberos drinking Coronas.)

OK! Dumbest thing you ever did while drunk or high?

Natalie: Besides have sex with some really unfortunate people?

Carmen: THAT DEFINITELY COUNTS.

Once, for my 21^st birthday, we all got very high and almost burned my apartment down because one of my friends thought he could roll a joint using toilet paper instead of, like, proper rolling papers?

Do you hope that DeWanda Wise continues to play black queer women forever? (trick question)

Natalie: Of course

Carmen: I just hope that when the next season of She’s Gotta Have It drops in May, they finally let Nola Darling keep her damn girlfriend.

Natalie: I need a Netflix rom-com with her as the lesbian lead.

Carmen: So say we all!  OK, favorite scene?

Natalie: The medley of them getting dressed, but that’s more about the music and the dancing. I also loved the big writing scene on the subway.

Carmen: Yes! That scene was gorgeous and heartbreaking and heartwarming, all at once!

I think mine is less a scene and more of a line: “Our bestie is drinking champagne out of a green juice bottle that still has green juice in it.”/ “Oh like a green juice mimosa? That’s actually kind of genius.”

Because it is.

Natalie: We should probably wrap things up.

Carmen: I think it’s safe to say that if you’re the kind of person who likes Bridesmaids, Pitch Perfect, or The Bold Type, you’ll probably find something to like or love about Someone Great. Do you think that’s fair?

Natalie: I do. I also think Girls Trip fits.

Carmen: GIRLS TRIP!

Natalie: But less graphic.

Carmen: Yes, it’s like Girls Trip’s less raunchy kid sister who went to NYU and made some white friends.

Natalie: LOL. Yes.

Carmen: Which, to be honest, is all I ever wanted to be able to say about a movie. Instead of a white girl comedy with a token woman of color friend, Someone Great gives us the opposite. That alone is worth it.

Lena Waithe’s “Boomerang” Is Bringing a Gay Reckoning to BET

Last week on BET, Boomerang began its episode the same way it’s begun each episode that’s come before: With the title in simple, bold print over a blank screen. This time? The word went from black to rainbow, and just like that I already knew – we were off really to the races.

When the sitcom premiered in February, I detailed the black pop culture and TV field that it was joining – one where critics’ darling black trans and queer television productions like Pose were still not getting the awards recognition it deserved from organizations like the NAACP, where black LGBT millennial voices were still being erased en masse out of our own cultural productions. I hoped that, given Lena Waithe’s professional reputation and the fact that Boomerang came out the gate with two black queer characters (Tia, a lesbian, and Ari, one of the few black bisexual men on television) in its main cast, this show could help move the needle.

In the last few weeks my expectations have been more than exceeded. Not only has Boomerang proven itself to be one of the most cutting edge black voices on television, it’s also invested in showcasing a full spectrum of young blackness, including sexuality. The crew of 20something best friends at the sitcom’s core include upper middle class and wealthy black characters Simone and Bryson (whose parents are the central characters in the original Boomerang movie that the BET sitcom is spun-off of); there’s also working class characters like Tia and Ari, Tia works as a dancer at a strip club and Ari hustled odd jobs – including being a bouncer at a gay club – to support himself as the first in his family to go to college; David and Crystal, college sweethearts who are now divorced in their mid-20s, are people of faith; David is the pastor of his own storefront church.

Over the course of it’s first seven episodes Boomerang has taken its time with the history and development of each character, eschewing the typical frantic comic beats of a mainstream sitcom for a more subtle and lived-in humor that echoes Waithe’s signature writing style in her Emmy Award winning episode of Master of None. Joke payoffs come from intimately knowing the perspective of the person speaking, rather than anything madcap.

Not that I have something against eccentric, pushy, or over the top comedies! Television shows like 30 Rock, which always rushed to its next joke even at the sake of its own plot, or Brooklyn 99, where common catch phrases (“Noice!”) rule the day, have a well deserved place in sitcom platform of the last decade. The original film Boomerang based itself off the frenetic energy of its lead comedian, Eddie Murphy. Still, there is something refreshing about the writers’ room that Waithe has assembled for Boomerang; they don’t mind leaving room to ride the air of quiet humanity in between the show’s beats.

This approach works particularly well for Tia and Ari, both of whom have their sexuality dealt with upfront and with zero-to-no fanfare. When the audience learns of Ari’s bisexuality in the second episode, it’s dealt with in a funny text message conversation with Simone that involves Ari boasting over his most recent hookup. In the fourth episode (“Call A Spade”), Tia’s girlfriend, Rocky, a stud black lesbian, is introduced to the audience mid-hookup with Tia. Rocky’s clad in a grey undershirt, Tia’s making out on top of her in her t-shirt and panties, when Simone busts through the door. There’s nothing aghast about it, in fact Simone just rolls her eyes and continues to talk about the emergency of the day (a family friend has found herself in lock up after a drunk yelling match with her boyfriend). As the girls rush off to save their friend in need, Rocky agrees to be their ride – after Tia promises to finish where they left off later, of course.

It’s been weeks and I still can’t get that particular episode out of my head. BET has a common phrase they use in their advertising, “We Got You,” but the truth is that they haven’t always had the backs of their black LGBT audience. I’ve racked my brain and I cannot think of a single other time when I’ve seen two women share a bed on their network. Now here are Tia and Rocky, and they’re leaving nothing to the imagination. It’s treated as common as the time of day. There’s no less scandal to it than any of the numerous straight hookups shown on the show. Two episodes later in “Homecoming,” a flashback dedicated to the crew’s college years, we watch Ari’s first gay kiss. It’s framed as romantic and warm, perhaps even innocent. Once again, my jaw was on the floor.

I couldn’t believe this was BET that I was watching at all. Just within the last 10 years, this network was still bleeping the word “homosexual” off their syndicated reruns of CW sitcoms The Game and Girlfriends.

Then came last week. In its seventh episode, aptly titled “PRIDE,” the crew attends Atlanta’s Black Pride festival to film Tia’s newest music video (to the best of my knowledge Atlanta Pride happens in summer and this crew is 100% wearing winter coats, but you know what? Let’s give it a pass). It’s here that the unhurried pace of the show’s character development really pays off. As our writer Natalie put it:

https://twitter.com/natthedem/status/1108200966199885824

Most striking is that we not only see Tia and Ari comfortable in their own black queer skin, but that the director chooses to highlight – via portrait style close ups – a variety of festival goers. Black trans women and men, black studs and butches, black femmes of all genders, black drag performers, black masc gay men – the whole family is accounted for. And we’re happy, we’re smiling, we’re…. Proud. There is not a single second in the episodes 22 minute run time where black queer folks are asked to check any part of ourselves at the door. It’s unforgettable and, quite frankly, revolutionary.

Of all the representation, it was the inclusion of black trans people throughout the festival that left me choked up. In June 2013 – for those keeping track, that’s less than merely six years ago – B. Scott, a black non-binary trans femme performer and gossip columnist, was forced off of the BET Awards red carpet for their femme fashion. After being invited by the network to help with their awards show coverage, Scott was asked to remove their make up, change into more “masculine” clothes that they felt uncomfortable in, and pull back their long hair. Maybe this feels like a small moment for those who didn’t live through it, but I’ll never forget my outrage. The utter confirmation that, as a black queer person, my acceptance in black cultural spaces was always going to policed and reprimanded. That cultural gatekeepers like BET might never actually accept “all of us.” Scott settled their lawsuit against the network in 2015, but those scars take a long time to heal.

Last week, Lena Waithe took a hammer to that legacy. Tia starts her music video framed in the fans of two black femme gay men living every bit of their ballroom life. It’s cathartic and joyous and simultaneously the queerest, blackest piece of art I’ve seen since Pose went off the air last summer. It’s certainly the blackest and queerest thing I’ve seen on a black network EVER. David and Crystal are using the festival to recruit new partitioners to their church, proudly declaring that “being queer isn’t a choice; it’s a gift from God.” Maybe the line was directly squared at a portion of BET’s church going audience, I don’t know, but damn it was healing for me to hear.

When Ari runs into an ex-girlfriend at the festival – she’s supposedly attending to support her “gay ass” brother, but to be honest with you she’s the worst ally I’ve ever seen – she berates him for his bisexuality. She tells him that she’s gonna pray for him. Still, Ari stands strong. He won’t put himself into a box for anyone.

In fact it’s Ari’s pride in his sexuality that inspires him to change the format for Tia’s video altogether. Instead of just being about her, the new music video becomes about us. A black lesbian surrounded by her queer and trans family, brought together, celebrating our own skin and our own love and existing in our fully black world without any apologies.

If you weren’t paying close attention, if you didn’t know the history, you might have even almost missed it – but what Lena Waithe is producing on BET right now is nothing short of a reclamation.

Bump that, it’s a reckoning.

The Harassment of Young M.A and Including Black Butches When We Talk About Violence

feature image via Instagram

I want to be very intentional about this piece.

It’s about the black community and my struggles within it, particularly with straight and cis black people. Though I’ve definitely got many opinions about my community, these are the precise moments that it’s most difficult to talk about them publicly, especially in non-black spaces.

Last month, rapper and person I really just want to fucking fight right now Kodak Black left a comment on an Instagram of masc lesbian rapper Young M.A and Nicki Minaj saying “Both Of Y’all a Get It.” Black’s harassment of M.A has continued on for weeks, hitting an even lower low on his latest single, “Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy.” He raps, “I be pullin straps on these fuck niggas/I go Young M.A on these dumb bitches/like a dyke man, you niggas can’t fuck with me/I’m fucking Young M.A long as she got a coochie.”

On Monday, Young M.A responded on her Instagram Live, calling Black’s obsession with her “weird.” Then, he escalated the harassment up some more in an Instagram video of his own (which I won’t link to), saying “I’m talkin’ about how are you a girl but you don’t want your pussy penetrated?” He repeats throughout the video, “Don’t be mad cause I want you.” He says this shit as if cis men’s wants, regardless of others’ lack of consent – we see you, rape culture – hasn’t been a root of violence against marginalized people since we’ve been on this goshforsaken planet.

Young M.A then responded in another live video that fans online had blown everything out of proportion. She implied she just wanted it all to end. Now, I could be projecting, but M.A seemed sad and tired as shit here. Every time I think of Young M.A, I think of a funny, cocky and confident black stud with word play that makes the greatest artists in the game right now pale in comparison. To see her differently, especially after a month of open and direct sexual harassment from some ain’t no shit nigga, is disheartening to say the least.

Young MA is being sexually harassed pic.twitter.com/5m6oZDb08Y

— aka PROP (@hoodxbuddha) March 18, 2019

This afternoon, Kodak Black tried to walk back some of his comments. But what really has gotten to me is the responses all week on social media. There’s a common belief within our community that humor is one of the ways that black people can survive anything. But too often we use that as an excuse to punch down on those most marginalized among us. The only kind of humor that helps black people survive is the kind that brings us together in solidarity. The shit I’ve been seeing has been divisive and ugly and honestly terrifying. I’m not seeing jokes. All I’m seeing is people reminding me that they will justify violence against our black queer bodies, even though we don’t deserve it.

There are men out there making Kodak Black seem like the victim. They pity him, saying that he’s revealed himself as a homosexual by wanting Young M.A because “she’s basically a dude anyway” and if there’s one thing straight black men fear and abhor, it’s black gay men. Then there are women who’ve argued that Young M.A somehow she deserves violent language hurled at her because of the way she talks about women in her songs and music videos (to be clear, Young M.A has a lot of toxic masculinity that does need to be addressed. But while she’s being harassed isn’t the time to do it). Plenty of cis and straight people have been saying online that Young M.A acts like too much of “a man” to be hurt or affected, or that this harassment is a rude reminder that she’s not really a man anyway. It’s the same language that we always hear when a woman is being harassed: that she was asking for it, that she brought this upon herself, what else could she possibly expect.

There’s still another layer to it though, because Young M.A is a black stud lesbian. It’s like Roya Marsh wrote last year in FlyPaper Magazine: “Some folks just can’t fathom any hetero-predator wanting a girl like me. Some folks can’t fathom a woman like me having sex appeal to a man eager to conquer…. Most days my femininity is catcalled into existence. They consider me woman enough to fuck back into a woman the world can accept.”

Masculine-identified & presenting queer and trans folks are sexually harassed ALL. THE. TIME.

Kodak’s harassment of Young MA happens everyday to other studs, AG’s, transmasculine folks, nonbinary/ genderqueer folks, etc. Destroy one-dimensional narratives of gender violence.

— Hunter Shackelford (@huntythelion) March 18, 2019

This is not easy to write because, as black people, there’s already enough against us. Every time I hear about another black man murdered, I stay quiet. It always feels like we’ve got more important things to worry about than how black lesbian and queer people, especially gender non-conforming, masc, or stud folks, are being treated. But right now, I wanna believe that we’re important enough to talk about too. There has to be room to talk about black butches when we talk about violence in black communities. Maybe Zamara Perri puts it best: “Just by living in their truth black butch women (black studs, black doms, black tomobois, black masculine of center women or whatever label you want to use) risk being victimized by some insecure heterosexist male asshole who sees her as a threat to his own masculinity.”

After headline grabbing violent tragedies, there are those posts that go around where people ask, How can we stop things like this from happening? How can we keep this from escalating? Unfortunately, time and time again, so many people show they don’t really mean it. Because those big headline tragedies start with “little” things like this. They start with gender non-conforming people being harassed in the street, being harassed online. And if you don’t take the little things seriously, why should we trust you’ll show up when the much more dangerous things come for us?

When black people with cis or straight privilege make someone more marginalized than them the butt of a joke and others laugh, that’s allowing this shit happen. When the internet laughs at an accused rapist like Kodak Black, someone who is intent on making someone else uncomfortable and constantly ignoring their boundaries and giving no fucks at all about consent, that’s part of the problem. When straight black women tell their friends about how they’d love to get with Young M.A, but don’t celebrate the black butches already in their life – instead turning up their nose at them or only interested in fetishizing them – that’s adding to the culture that makes this harassment excusable to others. Yes, maybe it seems small, but it’s no less dangerous.

I was going to tell you stories about the men that corner me and “shoot their shot” even though my walk, my face, my hair, my clothes, my everything make it obvious they shouldn’t even be on my court. I was going to tell you about the men that have followed me after I’ve said no, who wait for me to turn “no” into a “maybe” just so I can make it home alive. But I don’t feel like putting that here. I don’t want to see how it will be turned around inside out and sideways, slashed through so that the blame will belong only to me. I don’t want to see how people will find humor in my fears. Jokes that make violence appear innocuous is how we get dead.

But we know this. If people are not gonna answer me when I ask for help with the man stalking me on the train, why would they answer me when he’s stealing my breath from me?

Reaching Out for My Queer Muslim Community to Hold Me After Christchurch

On Friday afternoon in Christchurch, New Zealand, two mosques were attacked in a mass shooting, with 49 confirmed dead and 39 still in critical condition. Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has declared this “New Zealand’s darkest day,” being the largest massacre in New Zealand’s recent history. The timing is significant: Fridays are important holy and historical days in Islam and the Juma’ah afternoon prayers serve a similar function to Sunday morning church services – a time for most of the local Muslim community to come together, especially those who only come to the mosque for this one prayer a week.

I learned about the massacre at the same time I heard about the organisers for the Malaysian Women’s March being investigated for sedition by the Malaysian Government on accusations of holding “an illegal LGBT gathering.” My heart had warmed at the photos of rainbow flags and queer pride slogans taking the streets of a country I was born and raised in and now have citizenship of – but which never truly felt like home.

Both news breaking at once broke me: it brought to light how much someone like me was truly unwanted. I’m too queer, too “Other”, too much of an ex-Muslim enough for Malaysia. But I also still have “Islam” on my Muslim-country ID card with a Muslim name and a Muslim upbringing; I can’t scrub that away from me, just like I can’t scrub away my melanin. A white supremacist terrorist isn’t going to care about my complicated feelings on identity to decide whether or not to shoot me. I’ve already gotten death threats on Melbourne trams just for being brown. I saw many of my queer Malaysian peers, especially queer Muslims, grappling with a similar dilemma: caught between one group using religion to deny their existence and another claiming that their faith means they shouldn’t live.

That Friday night I went to see my dear friend, jazz cabaret chanteuse and QTPOC community leader Mama Alto, perform at a local LGBTQ bookstore & performance space. I was anxious about going – I was emotionally overwhelmed, scared for my safety, feeling vulnerable and exhausted after being bombarded with all this news from every outlet. But Mama is also a queer gender-diverse brown South East Asian, so I figured she’d understand my pain.

As she sang in her Cinderella gown and talked about The Diva, about queer representation and marginalisation and singing for your life, I was hit with nightmares of someone breaking through the front door with a gun and aiming straight for us. Chaos as bookshelves and tables were upended and people tried to huddle and the damask-patterned walls turn further red and what if my cis gay white guy best friend sitting next to me tried to be the hero and take a bullet for me and I survived because of him but now his blood is on my hands…

I squeezed my best friend’s hand, trying to remind myself that nothing is happening now and nothing will likely happen, trying to focus on Mama’s voice.

Mama and I caught up backstage at the end of the show. We held each other tightly as I cried into her gown and babbled about the anxiety attack from earlier. She told me that she too was broken, that she was super late for her soundcheck because she felt that going out would put her at risk of death. But then she saw my name in the ticket booking list and she knew that there would be at least one person in the audience that would understand.

If you want to help but are feeling lost, especially if you’re not Muslim, see if there are initiatives near you like the Victorian Mosque Open Day (happening this Sunday in Melbourne) to meet your Muslim neighbours and get to know their practices. Check in with your Muslim, immigrant, refugee, and POC friends to see what help they need. Donate to the official victim support fundraiser.

In times like these, when people don’t understand us and decide that this means we shouldn’t live at all, we need to connect with the people that do understand, even if just a little bit, even if peripherally. Now, more than other, we need each other.

A Playlist to End The Longest Black History Month EVER. Let’s Party.

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2019 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queerness.

There’s been versions of this joke circling around on Twitter. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there are a lot of folks who are prepared to call 2019 The WORST Black History Month Ever.

I mean the last 28 days alone have seen: luxury designer brands like Gucci, Prada, and Burberry thinking it’s OK to design sweaters that look resemble blackface and send nooses down their runway (what??); the Virginia Governor’s past forays into actual literal blackface (oh and his wife, the First Lady of Virginia? She gave out cotton to African American students during a tour of the Governor’s Mansion) (HOW?); there was that one time when Liam Neeson thought about killing a black guy; and – whatever my personal feelings on the matter – I literally cannot say another word about Jussie Smollett even if I tried. Oh and this is comparatively small, but then Green Book won Best Picture at the Academy Awards! Spike Lee almost walked out of the ceremony. I have never felt more in tune with his spirit.

There’s been a petition to just pack up this February all together and move this year’s Black History Month celebrations to July. I’m sure you can understand why.

That’s not to say it was all bad. There was some good in there, too: Ruth E. Carter and Hannah Beachler broke records by becoming the first black women to win in their respective Oscar categories (Costume Design and Production Design) – they also became only two out of three black women to EVER win outside of an acting category. And they did it within 10 minutes of each other! Regina King? Now also an Oscar winner. And perhaps you heard the good news but it looks like R. Kelly may spend the next 70+ years in jail for his decades of statutory rape and molestation of black girls. 🙏🏾

I’m really proud of all our Black History Month work at Autostraddle this month. We questioned the rumors of Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo’s love affair. We highlighted black femmes who are often forgotten. We learned more about the closeted black lesbian political great Barbara Jordan. We re-imagined ourselves in classic films and in cosplay. Sometimes it felt like the world was imploding around us, but we dug our heels in deep. We celebrated each other, our queer and trans siblings, and those who came before. It’s a journey that I’ve been humbled to walk.

But now, I AM TIRED – and I bet a lot of y’all are too. I’m ready to kiss the last hours of the longest 28 days on record away with a fucking party!

I’ve been listening to this list nonstop for 24 hours. I promise it’s full of cross-generational bangers. Hope you enjoy. Remember – celebrating blackness doesn’t end in February. Take this list with you year-round. I believe in being 365 BLACK at all times. Stay black. Stay beautiful. Stay proud. ✊🏾😘

THE PLAYLIST

If you have Apple Music instead of Spotify, no worries I have you covered.

THE TRACK LIST

1. Jamilah Woods — “Blk Girl Soilder”
2. Labelle – “Lady Marmalade”
3. Betty Davis – “They Say I’m Different”
4. Jill Scott and the Roots – “You Got Me” (LIVE)
5. Vickie Anderson — “Message from the Soul Sisters”
6. Queen Latifah feat. Monie Love — “Ladies First”
7. Janelle Monáe – “Django Jane”
8. The Internet – “Gabby”
9. Mary J Blige – “My Life”
10. Whitney Houston – “You Give Good Love”
11. Anita Baker – “Giving You The Best that I Got”
12. Prince – “The Beautiful Ones”
13. Lauryn Hill – “Everything is Everything”
14. Meshell Ndegeocello – “Fool of Me”
15. Tracy Chapman – “Fast Car”
16. Kehlani – “Honey”
17. Stevie Wonder – “As”
18. Notorious BIG – “Juicy”
19. Lil’ Kim, Da Brat, Angie Martinez, Lisa Left Eye Lopes, Missy Elliott – “Not Tonight (Ladies Night remix)”
20. Donna Summer – “Hot Stuff”
21. Tina Turner — “What’s Love Got To Do With It”
22. Aretha Franklin – “Rolling in the Deep” (YOU WANT TO HEAR THIS ONE)
23. TLC – “What About Your Friends”
24. Diana Ross – “I’m Coming Out”
25. Patti LaBelle – “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (LIVE)
26. Chaka Khan — “Sweet Thing” (LIVE)
27. Roberta Flack — “Killing Me Softly”
28. The Fugees — “Killing Me Softly” (Yes, you must listen to them back-to-back. I don’t make the rules of blackness. Thank you.)
29. Missy Elliott — “Work It”
30. Minnie Riperton — “Lovin’ You”
31. Solange – “F.U.B.U.”
32. The Carters – Black Effect
33. Kendrick Lamar – “Alright”
34. Donny Hathaway – “Someday We’ll All Be Free”
35. Big Freedia feat Lizzo – “Karaoke”

* BONUS TRACK, because Queen Bey don’t believe in nobody’s Spotify: Beyoncé — “Freedom” (“Lift Every Voice” Remix from Coachella ’18)  *

Four Black Queer Writers in Conversation About Jussie Smollett and Holding Up Space for Each Other

This piece was co-written by Natalie, Reneice, Alexis, and Carmen. We’re four of the black members of The Speakeasy, Autostraddle’s collective for its writers of color.

Whew, it’s been one helluva Black History Month, hasn’t it?

In the early morning of January 29^th, Jussie Smollett, a gay black actor best known for his role on FOX’s Empire, reported that he had been attacked by two individuals in downtown Chicago. He’s alleged that his attackers assaulted him with homophobic and racist slurs, physically beat him, poured a chemical substance on him, and wrapped a noose around his neck. Some reports have claimed that at one point during their attack, the assailants chanted “This is MAGA Country.” These are horrific charges that we first wrote about as they occurred. The incident seemed to further highlight the very real, recent ongoing rise of hate crimes in the United States.

Then, after weeks of speculation, last Thursday the actor was officially charged with filing a false police report. He was arraigned and released on bail. Though his motives remain unclear, the Chicago Police have alleged that Smollett paid $3,500 to two brothers – Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundario – to stage the attack. The Chicago Police (CPD) further allege that Smollett sent himself a racially threatening and homophobic death threat letter to FOX studios on January 22nd. The ongoing case circled through yet another twist over the weekend as the FBI came forward with the announcement that they were not yet comfortable with the analysis that Smollett sent himself the letter, seemingly contradicting the CPD. There are also subsequent reports that Smollett’s check to the Osundario brothers was for personal fitness and nutrition benefits, not an attack.

Non-black queer people and straight cis people have had very different interactions with this tumultuous, ongoing news story than queer black folks.  Our closeness to its themes has at times felt overwhelming, intimate, and ultimately – isolating. Watching the narrative and facts evolve has been met with pain or confusion. Disbelief. Heartbreak. Exhaustion. In fact, as writers for this website, there were times when we struggled with how to approach the topic at all.

We realized that if we were feeling alone, angry, sad, or bewildered – chances were good that a lot of you, our black queer and trans siblings, were maybe feeling the same way. So we decided to sit down at our virtual kitchen table and hold open space.

Whatever you’re going through right now, please know that you are not alone.

First of all, this has all been a lot. Let’s check in with each other. How have yall been holding up this month?

Alexis: This has been a really shitty month, but most of my months feel shitty, so I’m not sure that’s saying a whole lot. With this and all the extra kinds of tomfuckery people are pulling during Black History Month (I cannot even properly describe to you the pervasive and subversive racist act my dad and I were on the receiving end of today, for example. That alone, the utter inability to tell you, has me ready to live in the woods). I don’t feel anything I haven’t already felt – disappointment, anger, fear, etc. – just deeper and a bit more intense than usual.

Natalie: It has been a lot but, surprisingly, I’m okay. Admittedly, being okay means that I’ve disengaged myself from conversations and focused the bulk of my energy on other things (my nephews help a lot in this regard).

Reneice: Yeah, I’m similarly feeling drained, disappointed, and disengaged this month. It’s been a minute since I’ve felt so low and unwanted in this world. It’s been hard to function, it’s been hard to process and understand, and I’ve found myself in a very bitter and even defeated mindset more often than not.

Carmen: I think my largest feeling right now is exhaustion? Y’all, I am tired. This month has been tiring. It’s the longest and most isolating 30 days I can actively remember as a black queer person in this country and it hasn’t even actually been 30 days yet!

There is almost nothing that white supremacy will not do to assert itself. History has proven that time and time again.

What was your first reaction when you heard about Jussie’s attack? Do you regret that reaction now?

Alexis: My first reaction was to Jussie’s attack was just hopelessness.

Natalie: I had that exact same reaction, Lex.

Alexis: Logically, I know that just because someone is famous, that doesn’t protect them from evil and shit. It’s just that, I always hope in the back of my mind, that if you’re [something] enough, you can buy/possess/hold on to the safety that you can’t get when you’re not enough. You know? Which is fucked up. It’s one of those things where you’re hoping it gets better on the other side, and then you find out there is no other side. Shit’s just the same in a different way.

Empire actor Jussie Smollett

Natalie: Yes! There’s a small part of me — a small part of all of us, perhaps — that hopes that there’s something we can do to protect ourselves from being victims of the world’s racism and homophobia. These moments that serve to remind us that there’s really nothing we can do are so, so jarring.

I also felt heartbroken, of course, for Jussie and for the entire Smollett family. They’ve been part of my life since Jurnee was playing Michelle’s best friend on Full House.

Carmen: The Smollets are one of those families who I’ve long held in my heart. I still first think of Jurnee as Michelle Tanner’s best friend! Which isn’t to say that she (or her siblings) haven’t had long and successful careers since that history. Only that I felt intimate to them because of her work, which dates back to the root of my childhood.

Natalie: And, yes, I believed him… and I will never for a second regret having done that. There are a lot of folks for whom the details of the Smollett attack sounded concocted from the outset and to a degree, I get it, but also, I wonder: Do you realize how pernicious racism is in this country? There is almost nothing that white supremacy will not do to assert itself. History has proven that time and time again. For hate crimes in particular, the spectacle is the point — it’s Vincent Chin being bashed to death by a baseball bat; it’s Matthew Shepard tied to a fence; it’s James Byrd drug behind a pick-up truck. It’s meant to make a statement beyond death, that’s the point.

Carmen: That’s the thing! In retrospect I understand a lot of the cynicism around his story – who randomly carries bleach and a rope in the middle of the night walking down the street in one of the richest neighborhoods in Chicago, etc. But also, no matter how wild my imagination of what racism and homophobia in this country can look like, to paraphrase one of my favorite writers Jamilah Lemieux, “America has always been wilder.” There’s a reason that his account felt true on a gut level, right from the beginning – it’s intangibly weaved into whole history of this country.

I hope that if presented with a similar situation in the future, I would react with the exact same empathy and compassion that I gave not only Jussie, but the entire fabric of our black queer and trans family. The danger of our lives isn’t changing because of one singular incident.

Reneice: My initial reaction was a combo of anger and fear. Like you both said, there are endless examples of senseless murders with almost unbelievable methods and execution in this country, and they are very real.

If there’s one thing living in this country has taught me, it’s that white Americans have really delighted in finding new deranged ways to kill black people. So of course I believed the attack was real. Far worse things happen with regularity, hate group registration and membership are on the rise (Ed’s Note: for the third year in a row). All these people are feeling emboldened to openly share or act on their violently racist homophobic beliefs. It’s a real danger.

I was afraid to leave my apartment for a few days after the news broke, as I am after any news about someone being attacked or killed for looking and loving like me. I was afraid for Jussie, for all QTPOC, and for whatever message that succeeding at such a high profile attack was sending to all the people who wish to harm us. I was afraid of the message being given those people, who now know they’d be able to do so much hurt with little to no consequence, because the the system is rigged in their favor.

Honestly, I’m still in disbelief. It just doesn’t make sense to me. If it truly was Jussie, I’m so unforgivingly disappointed.

What about his subsequent arrest? Did that affect you, too? 

Alexis: When his case “turned,” I was really pissed off and really sad and really confused. Then, being confused just made me more sad and more pissed off.

I refuse to believe a victim is lying because being a victim is complicated. There is no such thing as a perfect victim; given the opportunity, everything will eventually be turned against them because society is fucked up. I refuse to be one more person who does not believe them. I know how it feels not to be believed and I wouldn’t wish that shit on anybody.

So, when the case turned, it felt like a huge fuck you to victims and it pissed me off. And then, when we all, I guess, realized out that the Chicago Police Department had potentially manipulated the case and what was presented wasn’t necessarily the truth – that pissed me off even more! Victims are already taken advantage of. This just felt like another way to screw them over. It felt like another reason for people not to believe victims.

Natalie: There was a moment, during the Chicago Police Department’s press conference, where the weight of the disappointment landed directly on my chest. I had flashbacks to the Duke lacrosse scandal and what a chilling effect that had on a community just down the road from where I grew up. That case has been weaponized against every rape survivor in the years since and I feared the Smollett case becoming that for future hate crimes. But, in the days since, I’ve mellowed — mostly because I’ve been reminded that CPD is trash — and just started to come to grips with the fact that we’ll probably never know what really happened.

Carmen: That’s been the hardest part for me, coming to terms with the fact that we’ll probably never know for sure. I can’t deny that a lot of what’s surrounding Jussie Smollett right now doesn’t make complete sense; I also can’t deny that the Chicago PD has not handled this case clearly or professionally. This is not how you build trust.

Reneice: Yeah, I was bewildered. I cannot even begin to imagine why Jussie would orchestrate something like this. Honestly, I’m still in disbelief. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And this statement being made about him wanting a better salary being the motivation? So then the next logical move is to stage an attack? It’s nonsense. I don’t think we have the full picture. I’m not willing to throw my support and belief behind CPD. If it truly was Jussie, I’m so disappointed.

Unforgivingly disappointed.

I’m not paranoid for not trusting any police department at face value. Still, the cognitive dissonance can certainly feel that way.

So then, did the Chicago Police Department’s involvement in this case impact the way you looked at this story?

Alexis: I don’t trust the police for shit and that still hasn’t changed. It won’t ever change.

Natalie: I hate that, for even a second, I considered them a fair arbiter of justice. The Chicago Police Department has always been trash and, likely, will always be trash. This is the same police department that blamed Laquan McDonald for his own death for over a year when they knew what really had happened. They tried to keep it a secret. This is the same police department that had its own black site to torture and interrogate people. The same police department that had to be publicly shamed into investigating the deaths of two trans women. That police department has never been interested in justice for black folks or LGBT people.

Chicago PD Superintendent Eddie Johnson on ABC’s Good Morning America, Monday February 25th.

With each passing day, it seems like the CPD’s case against Jussie unravels a bit more — first, the alleged payment, then the letter — and, now the Superintendent is going on Good Morning America?!

They are not interested in justice. They are interested in rehabilitating their image at the expense of black and gay people.

Reneice: Yep. See the above responses.

Carmen: Part of what bothers me is the feeling that every time there’s a new “turn” in this case, I find myself having to re-explain – especially to white people, though not exclusively to them – the very valid reasons for distrust between black communities and CPD. Even in the last few days, as further developments in the story have cast new doubt on the police department’s case against Jussie, I feel like I’ve largely seen these new wrinkles being reported in black media.

I’m not paranoid for not trusting any police department at face value (Natalie already did a masterful job of explaining why). Still, the cognitive dissonance can certainly feel that way sometimes.

According to the National Anti-Violence Project, of the total number of anti-gay or trans homicides in 2017, 75% of the victims were people of color. 56% of those victims were black.

What has this incident revealed to you about the support systems that exist (or don’t exist, as the case may be) for LGBT people? Do you feel those support systems are the same or different for black LGBT folks?

Natalie: I don’t know that it’s revealed anything, as much as it’s reaffirmed the belief that all of our support is conditional. No battle is ever really won. Your worth is up for debate at any possible moment. The support system that you have around you can be destroyed, just as quickly as it was erected.

Whenever I hear someone engage in rape apologism, I’m always quick to remind them that there’s probably someone in their life who’s been victimized and now knows that person can’t be trusted with their truth. The same is true here – we now know who our allies are and who if, God forbid, something happens to us because we black and/or queer, whom we can trust with our truth.

Reneice: I can’t say that this really made me think about or question my support system, but I do agree with Natalie it was a reminder that in this white, cis, straight, oriented world, support and safety for black queer people will always be conditional.

Alexis: The support systems for LGBT people are super different from the ones for black LGBT people. There was something I was reading – maybe I was just having a conversation with someone – that, even if something goes against white LGBT people, at the end of the day, they can fall back on being white. We don’t have that.

There is absolutely nothing we have to fall back on and when our community (especially straight and cis black people) also gives up on us, it’s one of the most inhumane things that can be felt. And I’m sick of it.

Natalie: To Lex’s point, seeing straight and cis black people wholly accept the leaks and overall narrative from the CPD, when they absolutely would not have accepted the CPD’s response as legitimate in almost any other circumstance, has been particularly difficult to stomach.

Carmen: Yes. Yes, yes. Thank you for naming it. That’s been the hardest part for me as well.

Natalie: Right. Our support systems have never been the same. Whatever support systems we have exist almost exclusively between other QTPOCs. We can only count on ourselves to lift each other up.

Reneice: The knowledge that our support system exists exclusively between QTPOCs is exactly why I said the Smollett case didn’t necessarily affect mine. I already know better than to have hopes of leaning on anyone outside our community in times like these. So yes, the support systems are different. Nearly every LGBTQ service, center, charity, or publication was and is made to best serve the white LGBTQ population. As QTPOCs, we’ve had to navigate that and support our own communities with fewer resources.

Smollett following his arraignment

Carmen: And even within QTPOC spaces and black queer/trans spaces, I can’t help but think about our black trans and gender non-conforming siblings first in times like these, right? Black trans women and gender non-confirming femmes remain the largest group affected by anti-LGBT hate crimes. According to the National Anti-Violence Project, of the total number of anti-gay or trans homicides in 2017, 75% of the victims were people of color. 56% of those victims were black.

Reneice is absolutely correct that as queer and trans people of color are often forced to make do without the resources given to our white peers. Natalie and Lex are absolutely right that we’re also often without the support of our straight and cis communities of color as well. But, even when taking all of that into account, our trans and GNC siblings are often still left without proper support – even within our own spaces. How can we do our part to help lift that burden? What’s our role? I’ve spent a lot of time this month thinking about that.

“We say ‘believe survivors’ because it is the first step toward transformation and because it requires empathy but it also, often, expands our understanding of what bodily autonomy looks like.” – Tarana Burke, Founder of the #MeToo Movement

I know this is hard because everything still feels unfinished, but for right now: What’s your takeaway? What would you want to say to any other black LGBT people, if you could?

Alexis: My takeaway is this is there’s no reason for me to catch up on Empire any time soon, lol (which pains me because I’m in love with Taraji).

I think when all this first happened, I felt a different kind of hopeless. Generally, hopeless – at least in regards to myself – is already kind of my default. That’s not new. I’m also kind of disillusioned by certain kinds of hope when I think about the world at large. But, usually I can find a crack of hope in someone close to me. I couldn’t do that this time. I felt stuck. It really messed me up for a while.

Two things happened on the internet that started to bring me out of it: First, in their Instastory, @k_pmz talked about how this Jussie thing is fucked up – but also, it was always going to be fucked up because no one ever believes victims and survivors. So, the only thing we can do is show up for each other and continue to do the work. They’re fundraising for Za-hair, a black trans man who was attacked by seven people in a convenience store. More than anything, that showed me that whatever Jussie Smollett did or didn’t do wasn’t really a conversation worth having if people weren’t going to act in response to it. And a lot of people I know, weren’t.

The second part was actually two tweets by @Judnikki: “i will never be embarrassed for believing someone that was attacked because i’m not a liar and empathy is not about being right. / i’d rather believe 100 ppl and find out 10 are lying then be miserable and ignorant like the rest of you.” That part about empathy not always being right, it made me feel like a weight was lifted.

There’s this thing within the black community about having to be right all the time, about having to be beyond perfect and invincible in order to be considered human. I couldn’t find evidence that would support Jussie. I couldn’t turn people who believed the police into people who didn’t. I couldn’t do anything to make my straight and cis friends and family care more.

I couldn’t explain how terrified I am all the time to people I love. They don’t know how this fear is lodged in my throat. It felt like this entire Smollett case just gave me another time to try to defend my existence and fail. So I’ve tried to remember Toni Morrison telling us that it’ll never be enough. White people and non-black people or straight cis black people will always demand that we prove we’re human. For them, “there will always be one more thing.” I don’t want to waste my time reaching for one more thing when I could be reaching for a community that already loves and supports me. Those are the people who need me to show up for them, the way they already show up for me.

Last thing, let me also say this: I recently saw Be Steadwell’s musical A Letter to My Ex and aziza barnes’ BLKS play at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Being in spaces that are intentionally black – spaces that are cultivated by black LGBT people who are keeping their eyes and hearts on black LGBT people and our stories – is so healing, especially during a time like this. To my community, please keep creating and finding one another. Keep reaching out and talking and listening and laughing, because we really are all we got.  We are more than enough. I forget sometimes, but I hope we’ll remember it more often than not.

Reneice: Be safe. Believe victims. Hold people in power accountable. Love yourselves and each other. Don’t give in.

Natalie: It’s hard for me to know what to take away from this mess, honestly. I keep thinking about this strange fact: The same judge that arraigned Jussie Smollett on filing a false police report last week also arraigned R. Kelly on sexual abuse charges on Friday.

We lose nothing by believing victims when they tell us their stories, but the cost when we don’t believe victims is far too high for us to continue paying it. Whatever happened here – always default to empathy. Always offer your compassion. As the founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke, notes:

“We say ‘believe survivors’ because it is the first step toward transformation and because it requires empathy but it also, often, expands our understanding of what bodily autonomy looks like.”

That’s how we create a better world for all of us.

Carmen: It’s hard to turn to love in times like this, I get it. It’s hard to open yourself and your heart when it feels like the world is punching down on it. I’ve always believed it’s harder to love than to become callous. I think that’s still true. Believing survivors first is an act of love. Taking care of your community is an act of love. And I suppose acknowledging distrust and pain is also its own kind of love, because it’s the only way to open a door towards healing. I think we’re doing disservice when we imagine love as pink paper hearts and kissy face emojis. Community care is sticky, ugly and complicated. It’s opens you up to pain and humiliation. I also believe, despite whatever its costs, that’s the kind of only love that is worth it.

Proudly Black, Fat, Queer and Making a Home for Myself in Cosplay

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2019 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queerness.

I often tell people that I have the geekiest love story ever told. I pretend to be embarrassed by it but, in reality, I think it’s pretty frickin’ adorable — don’t tell my partner, though, cuz I’ll never hear the end of it. The two of us met writing fanfiction back in 2001, a time where sex scenes were labeled as lemons and our favorite Gundam pilots were labeled by numbers instead of character names. In 2002, we met in person at Anime Central, me decked out in Gundam Wing merch and her rocking a hand-sewn outfit to become one of her favorite anime characters.

She’d go on to explain the concept of cosplay to me, and unbeknownst to the both of us, it would become a big part of our lives together.

Photography by Elyse Lavonne

I remember feeling completely relaxed around her. More importantly, I remember feeling at ease as we held hands and walked the convention halls together. I never had a moment where I worried about someone starting some homophobic nonsense just because some folks feel the need to clutch their grandmother’s pearls when they encounter two ladies in love.

For three days, at the Hyatt Regency in Rosemont, Illinois, I felt like I could be myself.

This is why I’m so protective of the geek community. It’s a space that embraced me as I was taking baby steps out of the closet. I saw folks using LGBTQ+ flags as capes and others who cosplayed, drew, and wrote queerness into the fandoms that I loved. Honestly, it was probably one of the best places to explore my sexuality and go from assumed straightness, to assumed lesbianism, to most definite bisexuality.

But with my love comes a critical eye.

At 18, I clung to any bit of reassurance I could find. At 35? I’m more cautious about who I let into my circle. My acceptance is valuable. I’ve learned that it’s something that folks need to earn versus me trying to fit into someone else’s box.

If I had to pinpoint when my new way of thinking started to brew, I’d say it was back in 2013. Originally I’d thought I had to find a character who looked exactly like me in order to partake in cosplay. Spoiler: you’d be hard pressed to find many fat, black women in the media — let alone in geekdom. But by 2013 I’d been cosplaying on and off since 2004. My partner had become my seamstress. We’d go to two or three conventions a year. We would usually wear one costume, on Saturday, and be content with that.

One day, I’d gotten some pretty nasty comments about my cosplay. I’d love to say that it was a dark and stormy night to build suspense, but women who look like me deal with discrimination even on the brightest of Tuesdays. The comments ranged from whale comparisons to suggesting that I indulge in crispily fried birds — chicken, to be exact. In all honesty, it was the type of playground level commentary you’d expect from someone who could hide behind a Tumblr username.

Long story short: I didn’t take that shit lying down. I ended up gaining an online following over the very thing I was being made fun of for: being a fat, black, queer woman.

I spent the next couple of years upgrading my status as — gasp, a SJW — branding myself as a slayer of Internet nonsense because, seriously, what even IS a lesbian bed death? (Disclaimer: I know what it is, I just had to look it up.) My cosplay evolved from having my partner make exact replicas of character outfits to designing looks I was comfortable in. Styles she’d make that represented the character and me as a person. I could show my love for a character with my fat, black body, because at the end of the day, I was the only person who could cosplay a character my way. My conventions expanded from two a year to damn near two a month, and I’d rock a different look every day instead of just once.

Along the way, I’d continue to try my best to inspire those who knew me online or from cons to love themselves despite what random Twitter-User-With-Two-Bot-Followers said to them. I became more vocal about the issues that were important to me, namely, the interlocked oppressions and struggles of fat folks, black folks, queer folks — in an always necessary word: intersectionality.

Which brings me back to that critical eye.

I didn’t want to comment on it at first, because I didn’t want folks to think I was ungrateful for their support. These were people who had been there for me from the beginning of my fandom journey. They cheered for me as I dealt with a whole host of commenters who felt more like those random monster encounters in RPGs. We had history together. There was this fear that lingered in the back of my mind that people would think I didn’t appreciate them. But I realized that some were forgetting the and in my character bio. I’m black and queer and fat and a woman. There were those who were separating each of those labels.

Sure, some people were all smiles and you’re such an inspiration when I told off some jerk online who criticized my weight, but those same folks were suddenly uneasy when I brought up race. Even positive, uplifting hashtags like #28DaysOfBlackCosplay were met with, “Um, excuse me, I’m curious about what you’d think if I started 28 Days of WHITE Cosplay.”

I’m exaggerating. It was definitely less civil than that.

If you’re unfamiliar with the hashtag, #28DaysofBlackCosplay was created in order to shine a light on black cosplayers, a group who’s prone to discrimination and/or being treated like some rare trading card because wow I didn’t know black people were into that! Chaka Cumberbatch-Tinsley’s digital movement is celebrating it’s 5^th anniversary this year and addresses a serious issue of exclusion within the geek community while giving black cosplayers visibility and a sense of community. But, as is often the case with anything with the word black in the title — folks took offense, even if they’d had my back before, even if there’s nothing negative about the hashtag.

This happened from all angles, too. I’d get virtual hugs about women’s issues, but head-scratching over whether or not the characters in my book had to be queer — “NOT THAT I HAVE ISSUES WITH GAY PEOPLE REPRESENTATION MATTERS I JUST THINK INSERTING AN ALL MIGHT SIZED FIST IN MY MOUTH IS A GOOD LIFE CHOICE.”

Sorry not sorry for the My Hero Academia reference.

Photography by Nude Carbon Studios shooting for the group X Geek

The worst (and most awkward) case scenario? Having a clash of the identities when one was propped up over or against another. “Black people should protest peacefully, like queer people” is a thing I’ve heard people say with their whole entire chest. I’d kindly point out how Stonewall was, in fact, a riot, and that they were asking a black queer woman to separate her identities because one was, supposedly, better than the other.

As the eldest Brady Bunch daughter once said: “Sure Jan.”

The whole enterprise was awkward, infuriating, and exhausting. I could wear my giant Rainbow Brite ballgown to Pride and get all the love, then have a white woman badmouth Black Lives Matter to my face. Yes. This happened. Truth be told the ability to simultaneously compliment and insult is quite common in identity division. We convince ourselves — hey, at least she liked my giant, ruffled rainbows, right? At least she was at Pride and here for the LGBTQ+ community, right?

But is it really support if my and is purposely being ignored? Insulted?

People don’t realize how damaging it is to only acknowledge a part of someone instead of their entire being, especially if you’re gonna badmouth one aspect of a person’s identity, but praise, support, or comfort the other. I don’t expect an immediate understanding of my fat, black, queer experience, but I would — at the very least — want some compassion.

I still adore the geek community. I always look forward to going to conventions, playing elaborate games of dress up, reuniting with friends, and meeting new people. I don’t think I’d be as open as I am if I hadn’t found this space with its black celebratory hashtags, it’s rise of queer-friendly merch in artist allies, and its cosplay is for everyone mantras. That doesn’t mean the community is without its flaws.

It’s OK to question the things you love. It’s OK to point out the problems and ask for folks to do better by you. It doesn’t mean you love it any less, it just means that you know that you deserve better.

Lena Waithe’s “Boomerang” Has a Black Lesbian, Bisexual Representation and a Lot of Heart

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about black history. I’m sure that’s to be expected, since it’s February and all. I’m in the middle of editing Autostraddle’s Black History Month series. There’s also a lot of buzz surrounding the reboot of this little known show you may have heard of called The L Word (haha) that has left me, as a television critic, thinking about the long history of queer women’s and queer black women’s representation on screen. This month has found me looking back, questioning, trying to find those patterns and questions that were maybe once forgotten.

Which makes it probably the ideal time to start thinking about a Lena Waithe project. There’s a lot to love about Lena Waithe (whom we’ve more than once jokingly called everyone’s favorite imaginary celebrity girlfriend at this publication), but one of the things I’ve long respected most is that she’s a walking encyclopedia for black television and black pop culture. She studies our creative expression the way that an NYU film student pours over the AFI’s 100 Greatest Films list. She reveres it, references it in her work. She honors it. As someone who lives for black pop culture in the same way, it’s always drawn me to her productions. To paraphrase Waithe – I, too, see the God in us.

That’s why I was intrigued when her first green-lit sitcom, following her historic Emmy moment as the first black woman to win for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series, was for a reboot of the 1992 black cinematic classic Boomerang. We throw around words like “iconic” a lot these days in internet slang, but there simply is no other way to describe Boomerang’s 27-year-long legacy in black culture. I rewatched it recently and was floored by the cast alone: Eddie Murphy, Halle Berry, Robin Givens, Martin Lawrence, David Alan Grier, Tisha Campbell, Lela Rochon, and – I’ll still never believe this – EARTHA KITT AND GRACE FREAKIN’ JONES! That’s all before the first line is even uttered! I already want to lie down on a couch.

The cast of BET’s Boomerang

If you’ve never seen Boomerang, it’s a romantic comedy where Marcus Graham (Eddie Murphy), a womanizing advertising executive, finds himself in a love triangle between Jacqueline (Robin Givens) and Angela (Halle Berry). Many jokes, howling laughter, and more than a few spit-take worthy lines later, he ultimately ends up with Halle. Waithe’s new sitcom for BET (co-produced with none other than Ms. Halle Berry herself) follows Angela and Marcus’ daughter, Simone Graham (Tetona Jackson) as she and her crew of friends – including Jacqueline’s son Bryson (Tequan Richmond) – navigate life as black millennials conquering careers and romance.

I would have been invested in this project no matter what. It’s smartly written; some jokes held up even better upon re-watch – a rare calling card. It’s unapologetically draped in a love for blackness. But here’s when things get really interesting: BET’s Boomerang has not one, but two, queer black characters in it’s main cast — Angela’s lesbian close friend and client, Tia (Lala Milan), and Bryson’s bisexual best friend, Ari (Leland B. Martin). It’s painfully rare to see a bisexual male character on television, let alone one who’s black and also masc. That’s quite frankly unheard of. Ari is light and funny, he’s a talented filmmaker and one of the boys. His charisma leaps off the screen. None of his friends raise an eyebrow at his antics (well I mean, they do, but not because he’s bi). In many ways, he’s an early heartbeat of the show.

Tia’s a complete scene stealer. She’s defies so many boxes or tropes of what we’ve been programmed to expect from a black lesbian on TV. First, when most black queer women on television are being actively de-sexualized, Tia refreshingly owns her sexuality right out the gate (forewarning, the on-screen joke in the second episode that leads to the character revealing her sexuality to the audience is a little cissexist and gave me pause. The joke is very brief and I’m hoping that moving forward Boomerang finds ways to address Tia as a lesbian without throw away lines that focus on genitalia). She’s a dancer at a strip club who dreams of stardom and performs in day-glow body paint with phrases like “Black Lives Matter” and “#MeToo” adorning her thighs. When one of her friends suggests that she sell more of a male fantasy to make better income at the club, you know by making the men believe she’ll go home with them at the end of the night, she rolls her eyes and essentially responds, “Why? I won’t.”

Lala Milan as Tia.

Tia’s love interest has yet to make an appearance, but is slated for upcoming episodes. I did a little digging online and am ecstatic to report that she appears to be a stud butch, yet ANOTHER essential representation that we almost never get to see. Which is one of the many reasons that with less than two weeks on air, Boomerang is already proving itself to be vitally important.

As many of you know, Autostraddle maintains the largest independently operated database of lesbian and bisexual women on television. In preparation for this review, I consulted that database and found only two other reoccurring or regular black lesbian characters in American sitcom history. Both of those characters were on television shows that only lasted a single season. They also were isolated within majority white casts. Conversely, one of my longest standing gripes about the current black renaissance on television is the lack of black queer representation in majority black shows. I love Issa Rae’s Insecure, but I’ve never known a real life crew of black millennials in a big city like Los Angeles who had no gay friends. It’s more than “not representative” of the times we live in. Millennials of color make up the largest portion of LGBT folks in our age bracket. Against that backdrop, what we’re facing is erasure. Flat out.

In Boomerang’s cast of six regulars, we have two out queer characters who are loved and supported by their friends. Their sexuality is treated matter of fact and nonchalantly. My favorite moment? When Simone texts Ari to ask about the new male hookup he brought to game night, he writes back “Oh that’s all me.” She asks about ole girl from last week. His cocky response? “That was last week.” It’s the kind of playful boasting I’ve shared with friends in text messages that are definitely not meant for public consumption. There’s nothing more that’s needed to be said. Similarly, none of Tia’s friends bat an eye that she works at a strip club. There’s no judgement in this crew’s love for each other.

It can’t be overstated what a breakthrough moment this is for black television. I can personally attest that within the last decade, BET was still bleeping the word “homosexual” off its airwaves when it ran reruns of sitcoms from other channels. Let that sink in. Now imagine the same network running a new half hour comedy where one of the main characters is a black lesbian who works at a strip club with a butch girlfriend and the other is a bisexual guy who casually talks about his hook ups of multiple genders. Both existing in a world where they’re allowed to be free from a white gaze. That’s the power of Lena Waithe.

Last week we found out that F/X’s groundbreaking black and brown LGBT production Pose had been snubbed by the NAACP Image Awards. The Image Awards, celebrating their 50^th anniversary this year, were designed to honor outstanding people of color in film, television, music and literature that are often forgotten or left behind by white critics and media. Pose’s omission, especially given its recent success in nominations at the Golden Globes and Critic’s Choice awards, was particularly glaring. The Image Awards have recently proved themselves progressive when it came to black and brown LGBT inclusion. This setback was a poignant reminder.

Those of us who fight for inclusion and a home in our communities must always remain vigilant. It’s not enough to be only partially accepted. We can’t just passively assume that our humanity will be seen when there are so many who would rather ignore that we’re here. As Pose producer, director, and screenwriter Janet Mock so elegantly stated in the wake of the show’s shutout: “Respectability politics will not save us.”

That’s the environment in which Boomerang is making its debut – one in which black visibility in pop culture is peaking at one of its greatest heights, but black queer and trans folks cannot give up our fight. We must continue seeing the humanity in ourselves, because so many others refuse to. I couldn’t be more excited to have Lena Waithe’s creativity out there pulling for us.

Boomerang is airing on BET, Tuesdays at 10pm EST. For those without cable, a season pass can also be purchased on Amazon Prime.

The Black Lesbian Movie Project

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2019 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queerness.

Hey, hello, what’s up!

As we know, I’m a huge fan of black culture. I also think that almost anything can be made better if it were gayer, so Autostraddle (bless their hearts) is giving me the chance to be the change that I want to see in the world. Allow me to butch up our favorite black movies, thereby even making them even MORE fantastic than they already are!

Coming to America

(L to R: Gina Yashere as Semmi, the best friend; Tessa Thompson as Imani, the love interest; and Lena Waithe as Akeem, the Crowned Prince of Zamunda)

Original Stars: Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall
Original Plot: Eddie Murphy stars as the Prince of Zamunda, who convinces his father, James Earl Jones, to allow him to leave home for the first time to look for his true love.

Now, Let’s Make it Gay: Lena Waithe, Tessa Thompson, Gina Yashere

THIS IS PRIME LESBIAN MATERIAL. I mean, everything is if you try hard enough, but imagine it: Lena Waithe – faced with the possibility of an unwanted arranged royal marriage in Zamunda – leaves her black ass country to come to black ass QUEENS, NEW YORK with her black ass best friend, Gina Yashere, to look for and fall in love with her black ass QUEEN, Tessa Thompson!

Bonus: John Amos, returning in his 1980s role as the love interest’s father, still suddenly turns nice and tries to kiss up once he finds out Lena is royalty, but James Earl Jones pulls a Mufasa on his ass and scares the shit out of him once he finds out John Amos DARED to treat his daughter as if she wasn’t good enough for Tessa Thompson. Because you see in Zamunda, where they are lightyears ahead of us, gay is not just good – that shit is fucking stellar!

Eve’s Bayou

(L to R: Lynn Whitfield as Roz Batiste and Viola Davis as the woman who will sweep her off her feet)

Original Stars: June Smollett-Bell, Lynn Whitfield, Samuel L. Jackson
Original Plot: Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) is a young girl living in 1960s Louisiana when she finds out terrible secrets that can tear her family apart. Samuel L. Jackson plays the cheating husband, Louis. Lynn Whitfield is Roz, his wife, a black woman who has put up with a man’s bullshit for way too long. As Eve takes matters into her own hands, she learns that messing with spiritual magic affects more than just the one you cast your spell at.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: Viola Davis

I AM HERE TO REPAIR ROZ BATISTE’S HEART AND I AM WILLING TO IMPOSE EVERY KIND OF MAGIC TO DO IT. Samuel L. Jackson is cheating on my girl and the whole Louisiana bayou knows it! I will not stand for it! So, when Roz and her sister-in-law Mozelle (Debbie Morgan) go out to the market and agree to get their fortunes told by a very-in-touch-with-her-easily-scares-children-side Voudou Priestess Diahann Caroll, imagine Roz’s surprise when Lady Diahann tells her that she’ll run into an answer that will solve all her problems later that very same day.

Who does my homie run into? NONE OTHER THAN VIOLA DAVIS, who smiles at Roz as they reach for the same vegetable. Roz is instantly smitten.

Friday

(L to R: Me as Craig and Nia Long as Debbie, my long time neighborhood crush and soon-to-be girlfriend)

Original Stars: Ice Cube, Chris Tucker, Nia Long
Original Plot: Ice Cube and Chris Tucker are best friends who are hanging out and getting high on a Friday. After losing his job, Craig (Ice Cube) spends the day sitting on his porch with Smokey (Tucker). They’re trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their day, when trouble comes along and decides for them.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: Starring ME!

I’m not going to tell you that I pitched this post solely so all my favorite movies could have black lesbian leads and sidekicks.That is not why this came about at all. But, in this very movie, I will be the star because in my heart of hearts I believe that in some form of SOME UNIVERSE I’m destined to be with Nia Long.

You’ll see me in this movie shooting the shit with Smokey while we’re sitting on my porch, trying to figure out how not to get my shit wrecked by Big Worm and Deebo, and finally standing up to the neighborhood bullies instead of running away because HOW DARE DEEBO PUT HIS HANDS ON DEBBIE. Oh, and in the end? I get the girl.

Soul Food

(L to R: Wanda Sykes as Wanda Sykes, Irma P. Hall as Big Mama Joe, and CCH Pounder as Deborah, Big Mama’s oldest kept secret)

Original Stars: Irma P. Hall, Vivica A. Fox, Vanessa Williams, Nia Long
Original Plot: Every Sunday, a black family gets together for family dinner. The three sisters: Teri (Vanessa Williams), Maxine (Vivica A. Fox) and Bird (Nia Long) struggle with loving each other through the pain as they cope with the possible loss of the foundation of their family, Mama Joe otherwise known as Big Mama.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: CCH Pounder and Wanda Sykes for a special guest appearance

Maxine’s son, Ahmad, who looks up to Big Mama and is one of her closest confidants, is given an important truth one day. When he sneaks into Big Mama’s hospital room, he asks her why she always keeps an open chair at the table every Sunday. He’s expecting the same old story of how the chair is supposed to be a reminder that those they love are always welcome to join them even if they can’t always find their way back home. (Yo, sorry, not to hype myself up but that was a LINE! I got skills!) It’s the story that Mama’s girls have always recited with fondness as they think about their father.

This time, though, Mama Joe explains that it was for the woman she met at the grocery store fourteen years ago. Deborah (played by CCH Pounder). With a light in her eyes that Ahmad hasn’t seen before, Big Mama talks about the one who checked in on her nearly every day after she found her once tearing up in the vegetable department. The woman who came over when the rest of the family was busy at work or fighting or maybe even a mixture of both. The woman tried to get Mama Joe to worry a little less and laugh a little more. She saved the seat for the woman who pulled her from the kitchen to dance in the living room, all smiles, reminding Big Mama in that sing-song voice, “You weren’t born to stay in that kitchen all your life.” She saved the seat for the woman who knew after their dance was over, Big Ma would still go back and finish cooking. Because she knew cooking sprinkled itself into everything and everyone she loved.

At the end of the movie, Ahmad doesn’t just invite Faith – the cousin who only appears when she needs something and is misdirected as fuck, especially when she directs herself into her cousin-in-law’s pants – to the table. He invites Deborah, too. When everyone asks who she is, Deborah smiles and Ahmad says, “This is the woman that loved Big Mama in the way she deserved.”

(PS: Teri could have a girlfriend at a drop of a hat if she just chilled a bit. I’m imagining Bette Porter. Of course, because I still haven’t finished The L Word and I don’t know whatever possible true love Bette is supposed to have. But Jennifer Beals and Vanessa Williams ending up together as a badass hot lawyer dream team? It’s what we deserve.)

Also, Wanda Sykes NEVER comes to these family dinners and has no real role in the movie, but she happens to stop by for a quick second at the exact perfect time and everything is worth it ’cause she makes this face:

right when Vanessa Williams says the iconic line: “Faith fucked my husband!”

The Wood

(L to R: Danielle Brooks, Samira Wiley, and Janelle Monáe as three childhood best friends competing to lose their virginity in the gayest coming of age story yet to be told)

Original Stars: Taye Diggs, Richard T. Jones, Omar Epps
Original Plot: Two stories wrapped in one, a man gets pre-wedding nerves and his best friends have to get him back on track before the big ceremony. As they do so, they reminisce over their friendship and how they fell in lust and in love back when they were just three black boys in the late 80s making a bet to see who could lose their virginity first.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: Janelle Monáe, Samira Wiley, Danielle Brooks

This is going to be the same tale of three black women that are trying to get to one of their gay weddings on time, but keep fucking shit up as the bride-to-be questions whether or not she can stay with one person forever. As they go through their day – running to exes for help, fucking up their outfits and generally just being self-imposing hurricanes of chaos – they reminisce about the bet they made as teenagers as to who could lose their virginity first.

Now, you may think, mmm okay, that’s cool whatever – but think about it: We’re talking about three black girls deciding to lose their virginity to other girls. In the 80s. In black ass Inglewood, California. This is the best movie you will ever see because who even has the range, the nuance, the depth, THE COURAGE to tell a funny ass story where three black girls are ON A MISSION TO LOSE THEIR VIRGINITY ON THEIR OWN TERMS AND THEY END UP HAPPY AS SHIT??? Get Ava DuVernay and Dee Rees in here, this needs to happen immediately.

Love & Basketball

(L to R: Sanaa Lathan as Monica and Gabrielle Union as Shawnee, high school enemies turned girlfriends)

Original Stars: Sanaa Lathan, Omar Epps, Gabrielle Union
Original Plot: Quincy (Omar Epps) and Monica (Sanaa Lathan) are two neighbors that love two things: basketball and each other. The movie follows them through childhood and early adulthood as they work through family troubles, relationships, and staying true to their greatest love: basketball.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: Let’s keep Sanaa Lathan and Gabrielle Union and get rid of Omar Epps!

You and I both knew this was coming.

Let us remember the small, but important mean girl part played by Gabrielle Union. In the second quarter of the movie, Quincy and Monica have not gotten together yet and Quincy decides to date Shawnee (Gabrielle Union) since Monica can’t give him a straight answer about whether she likes him or not. Shawnee’s  real pretty and loves to remind Monica that she’s not the kind of girl Quincy should be with. Because Monica is the type of girl that should be with Shawnee.

Instead of Quincy and Monica falling in love, Monica mistakes her feelings for Quincy as wanting to be with Quincy when she really wants to be like Quincy and date girls. This isn’t too much of a reach, Monica needs a treasure map and several compasses to acknowledge her feelings even though she’s always in them. Think about this, I really believe Monica usually forgets that emotions exist?? Like she can ball so hard motherfuckers wanna fine her, but does she know she’s also allowed to check in with her heart and be like “we doing okay in there, buddy?” Of course she doesn’t! And who better to remind Monica that she’s allowed to feel shit than the girl who gets a rise out of her the most?

Girl’s Trip

(L to R: Queen Latifah as Sasha and Regina Hall as Ryan Pierce, old college girlfriends reunited)

Original Stars: Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tiffany Haddish
Original Plot: Regina Hall stars as Ryan Pierce, a highly successful businesswoman, wife, and “next coming of Oprah” who decides to reunite with her college best friends at the Essence Music Festival. As she comes to terms with her failing marriage, she’ll need her friends now more than ever.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: Still Regina Hall and Queen Latifah!

I have a 2,000+ word document on Girls’ Trip because THEY ALREADY COULD’VE MADE THIS GAY AND THEY ROBBED US. Ryan and Sasha (Queen Latifah) were most definitely together in college when Ryan got cold feet about coming out and instead started dating the football players because it was safer. She left Sasha and all her dreams in the dust. That’s already in the story, so all I’m asking for is the explicit declarations!!!

Show me where Ryan tries to talk to Sasha, but messes up all her words because she’s still supposed to be in love with her husband, except that’s not going well and Sasha is right here and she never thought she’d get to see her again. Has she gotten even prettier? Is that even possible? Is her smile even brighter? Ryan wonders to herself, “why have I been with that dude when I’ve only been reunited with Sasha for one day and already feel more at home than I have in years?”

I DEMAND to see Sasha pulling away from Ryan after Ryan refuses to open up to her out of fear of vulnerability. I want to hear Sasha tell her, “You hurt me. We were supposed to be IN LOVE together.” I want the heartache of watching Ryan recoil when she thinks one of those famous people at the festival can hear them. I need Ryan to tell Sasha how she really feels. In the closing scene of the movie, when Ryan gives that big motivational speech to all the black women in attendance that they deserve good love, the best love – I want for her to say she’s found that love in her best friend and for that cheating fuckface of her husband to walk on stage right when Ryan goes, “Like I’ve found in Sasha. Like I still do everyday.” CAUSE IM A CHEESEBALL AND I WANT IT.

Do The Right Thing

(L to R: Regina King as Mookie and Rosie Perez as Tina, girlfriends fighting on the hottest day of summer)

Original Stars: Spike Lee, Rosie Perez
Original Plot: It’s a hot summer day in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn as Mookie (Spike Lee) goes to work at Sal’s Pizzeria. As he makes deliveries, racism shows its face at just about every corner and the mostly black and brown neighborhood deals with subtle and overt violence.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: Regina King

T H I S IS M Y S H I T. Regina King is taking over Spike Lee’s role as Mookie, the pizza delivery person who works at Sal’s and is the audience’s guide to the neighborhood. Sure, I want Regina King to be in this because I love her and I just think she and Rosie Perez would be good together, but there’s an even deeper reason I need this to happen. Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks is one of my favorite comics and one of my favorite TV shows AND IN THE TELEVISION SHOW REGINA KING VOICES BOTH BROTHERS AND HAS NEVER BEEN PROPERLY RECOGNIZED FOR THAT. How will this movie change that? I don’t know, but what I’m saying is Regina King contains multitudes, her multitudes contain multitudes, and she’d be perfect in this. Then one of my favorite movies would be EVEN MORE PERFECT and we could add another classic to her already beyond amazing thirty year (and counting!) career.

The Best Man

(L to R: Regina Hall as Candace, the dancer; Sanaa Lathan as Robin, the fiancée; Nia Long and Gabrielle Union as Jordan and Murch, two college best friends)

Original Stars: Harold Perrineau, Morris Chestnut, Taye Diggs, Terrence Howard, Sanaa Lathan, Regina Hall, Nia Long
Original Plot: Harper (Taye Diggs) is a new writer that, thanks to being picked by the Oprah Book Club, is about to blow up. But as he joins his college friends for his best friend’s wedding weekend, his book digs up years old drama in the crew. Important for our needs is Murch (Harold Perrineau), the nerdy friend in the bunch who’s in a loveless long-term relationship with the gold digging Shelby.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: Gabrielle Union, and still… Nia Long!

Literally everything in this movie stays exactly the same except for two things:

1. Murch is now played by Gabrielle Union. She gets Candice (Regina Hall) to fall for her after reciting an Audre Lorde quote to her at the bachelor party where Candi is dancing. Yes, that really is a plot point from the movie.

2. Jordan (Nia Long) has most definitely been trying to figure out her sexuality. As soon as she sees Robin (Sanaa Lathan) at the church, she’s like “Oh shit.” Is it my life’s goal to make Sanaa Lathan and Nia Long play more lesbian parts? Of fucking course! That would be magical, like imagine if we had a bunch of our favorite actresses decide to do more woman-loving parts? We deserve this.

House Party

(L to R: Teyana Taylor as Play, Nafessa Williams as Sharane, Karrueche Tran as Sydney, and Zazie Beetz as Kid)

Original Stars: Kid ‘N Play, AJ Johnson, Tisha Campbell
Original Plot: As Kid dodges bullies, cops, and gunshots to get to his friend’s house party, he tries to get the girl of his dreams and make a name for himself as one of the best rappers in his school – all before his dad figures out he snuck out. There’s lots of 90s dancing.

Now, Let’s Make It Gay: Zazie Beetz, Teyana Taylor, Nafessa Williams, Karrueche Tran

Zazie Beetz is Kid, a young, mostly dorky girl in that “everyone wants to date her sort of way.” She gets suspended from school and needs to keep her dad from finding out before her best friend’s party starts. After trying to stay ahead of a bunch of Mean Girl style bullies and outsmarting cops all night, the party officially begins when Kid walks in. Teyana Taylor is Play, who’s hosting the party and trying to keep the shenanigans to a minimum ’cause “ain’t nobody fucking up my mama’s house.” Kid ‘N Play both have their eyes set on Karreuche Tran and Nafessa Williams, Sydney and Sharane respectively, the prettiest and most popular girls in school.

Guys, I only know for sure for sure that Teyana Taylor can dance her ass off, but I’ve been laughing at this set up all night. Please watch Claws and tell me Karrueche wouldn’t be funny as SHIT in this movie. As soon as some shit pop off, imagine her calm distant demeanor VANISHING as she moves people out of her friends’ way with a deep ass “MOVE, BITCH!” (of course Ludacris’ instrumental version of the song plays in the background). Try to tell me that Zazie wouldn’t play it really cool for like .25 seconds before finding out Nafessa has a crush on her. You tell me that Teyana Taylor wouldn’t look amazing slow dancing with Karreuche. (I’ve GOT EVIDENCE YOU’RE WRONG)

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And here’s further evidence Teyana would play a great lesbian.

Look me in my eyes and try to LIE TO MY FACE.

Young, Gifted, Black, and Closeted: Barbara Jordan’s Political Rise in a Country Not Yet Ready For Her

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2019 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queerness.

Early in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee began an impeachment inquiry into the President of the United States over the Watergate scandal. A bulk of the investigative work would be handled by an army of lawyers — including a recent Yale graduate named Hillary Rodham — but eventually, the task of moving impeachment proceedings forward fell to the committee’s 38 members. Still a freshman congresswoman, Barbara Jordan sat through opening statements from the committee’s senior members before she had an opportunity to address the nation in prime time on July 25, 1974.

The words? Eloquent. Her statement is universally considered to be one of the greatest speeches in American history. The voice, though? The voice, it was magical. Her contemporaries, including fellow Congressman Andrew Young, Molly Ivins and Bob Woodward, said she had the voice of God. She said, in part:

Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: “We, the people.” It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that “We, the people.” I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in “We, the people.”

Today I am an inquisitor. An hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.

The nation had watched the Watergate hearings for months — 71% of households told Gallup that they’d watched the hearings live — and while that’d had a deteriorative effect on Nixon’s poll numbers, most Americans didn’t believe it warranted his removal from office. Jordan’s opening statement on the Articles of Impeachment changed that. In her allotted time, she was part professor, explaining to the public the president’s obligations under the Constitution, and part prosecutor, clearly laying out the evidence to prove wrongdoing. There was never a moment where the viewer was left thinking that Jordan’s aims were partisan in nature; instead, Americans were convinced of Jordan’s fidelity to our nation’s values and ideals.

“What Barbara Jordan did [in] that appearance, she articulated the thoughts of so many Americans. Frankly, when she ended it, it was no doubt in my mind that we’d have a Senate investigation and that the president might very well be impeached or have to resign,” longtime CBS newsman Dan Rather once said.

Photo Courtesy of the The Barbara C. Jordan Archives at Texas Southern University

Following Jordan’s statement, public opinion turned firmly against the president. For the first time, a majority of Americans thought Nixon’s actions warranted removal from office. Two weeks later, the president would resign, in disgrace; Jordan — the “big and fat and black and ugly” girl from Houston’s segregated Fifth Ward — had brought down the president.

Those 15 minutes would ultimately define Barbara Jordan’s life. She became a household name: universally adored by folks on the right and the left, among black and white households. She got fan mail at her Congressional office by the truckload. One supporter took out billboards all across Houston that said, “Thank you, Barbara Jordan, for explaining the Constitution to us.” Her high profile earned her the keynote speaking slot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. On the day she spoke — giving another one of the most celebrated pieces of political rhetoric in history — her star eclipsed everyone. She was, perhaps until Barack Obama, the most universally beloved black political figure in American history.

But those 15 minutes also created a mythology around Barbara Jordan that is a bit deceiving. It’s a kindness that is, usually, only extended to men. The kindness that allows the most notable thing they ever did to cloak everything else, including the negative things. As altruistic as Barbara Jordan may have been in that moment, that was not representative of the entirety of her career. The full story of Barbara Jordan is one far more complicated than history seems invested in telling.

“I think the interesting thing about Barbara that is seldom said… very few people really realize that Barbara Jordan was a good politician. She said, ‘I am not a female politician. I am not a black politician. I am a politician and I am good at it,'” Gov. Ann Richards once said about her good friend Barbara. “Barbara was criticized a great deal during her life because she was not ‘militant enough,’ because Barbara had no patience for symbolism. She had no interest in being a symbol. She had interest only in proving herself by her effectiveness and leaving a legacy of what she had done, not just what she had said.”

Photo Courtesy of the The Barbara C. Jordan Archives at Texas Southern University

The history that Jordan was making wasn’t of much interest to her, change was. She became an institutionalist — a firm believer in the necessity to make change from within — even as Civil Rights activism, which championed external pressure on the system, exploded across the nation, particularly, in the South. She ran for public office twice, losing both times, before the Supreme Court case, Reynolds v. Sims forced Texas to equalize the population across legislative districts. The third time was, indeed, the charm and Jordan became the first black person to serve in the Texas Senate since 1882 and its first black woman ever.

Jordan stepped into the Senate and, immediately, set to figure out how things worked. She studied all the technical aspects of her job, most notably developing an encyclopedic recall of parliamentary procedure — but she also found her way into the backrooms where drinks are spilled and deals are made. She stepped into this room of all white men, some racist, and charmed them all. She played the guitar. She told jokes and, probably more importantly, let them tell their jokes, even if they were sexist and racist. She challenged their stereotypes about black folks by just being herself, and never called out her colleagues for their missteps.

Richards recalled, “If you are a Texan and you’re in public office or you’re running for public office, it’s necessary that you kill something. And if you’re not a good shot or you can’t kill a bird, you still have to show up at the hunt… because the newspaper’s gonna take a picture and you can’t be absent. So Barbara was on a quail hunt one year with a bunch of good ol’ boys and you can imagine how much training she had in bird shooting in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. But before the evening was over, Barbara had a buncha white good ol’ boy rednecks singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and it was that facility, that ability, that she had… in a personable way into the power structure, that’s what made Barbara Jordan so successful.”

To her credit, her membership in the good ol’ boys club won her some substantial legislative victories — on extending the minimum wage to cover non-unionized farmworkers and domestics, the Equal Rights Amendment, fair labor practices and preventing voter suppression — and earned her the respect of her peers. After just one session in the Senate, her colleagues unanimously recognized her with a resolution of appreciation, calling Jordan a “credit to her State as well as her race.” Her colleagues would elevate her to president pro tempore, allowing her to serve as Governor for Day, before she left Austin for greener pastures. Among the friends Barbara Jordan would make in Texas? The future president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ saw in Jordan a kindred spirit — someone with his capacity for deal-making, someone invested in protecting his Great Society programs and, perhaps most importantly, someone who remained loyal — so he opened a lot of doors for her. He introduced her to folks that would fund her Congressional run and, once she was elected, he got her that prized seat on the Judiciary Committee.

But Jordan’s style didn’t appeal to everyone, particularly Civil Rights activists who thought her too cozy with the white establishment. Curtis Graves, an activist that’d been elected to the Texas House at the same time as Jordan, was particularly critical. When Jordan announced her candidacy for the US House, Graves assumed that she would help maintain the Texas Senate seat for Houston and when she didn’t, he lodged a primary challenge. Graves didn’t have the money or the institutional support so, instead, he attacked Jordan mercilessly. She was called a “tool,” bought and paid for by the white establishment. He questioned her blackness and his supporters spread rumors about her sexuality.

Barbara Jordan with her partner Nancy Earl. Photo Courtesy of the The Barbara C. Jordan Archives at Texas Southern University

Jordan never confirmed her sexuality publicly, not once. It wasn’t until her obituary ran in the Houston Chronicle in 1996 was there any public acknowledgement of her longtime partner, Nancy Earl. Their relationship — which included Earl saving Jordan’s life after a near drowning incident at the house they shared — wasn’t a secret to close friends and family; it just wasn’t fodder for public consumption. Jordan treated her sexuality like she treated her race, gender and health: she didn’t want to be pigeonholed or have anything obstructing her path to gaining more power.

She was ambitious, unapologetically so, and, as ambitious people in politics are wont to do, once she’d mastered her role in the House (including passing the 1975 Voting Rights Act over the objections of her home state leaders), she wanted to do more. But the system that never imagined a place for Barbara Jordan from its inception could not find a place for her then. Despite being floated as a potential vice presidential candidate in 1976, Jimmy Carter extended no offer to Jordan to join his cabinet. She made no public statements about why she was leaving Congress after just six years to return to teach at the University of Texas, but told MS. Magazine, “I did know that in Congress one chips away, one does not make shots, one does not make bold strokes. After six years I had wearied of the little chips that I could put on a woodpile.”

She’d venture in and out of public life after that: working for a free South Africa with the Kaiser Foundation, testifying against the confirmation of Robert Bork in 1987, giving the keynote at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, chairing the Commission on Immigration Reform and collecting the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. Bill Clinton wanted to nominate her to the Supreme Court — for what would become Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat — but by then, her health was failing.

Barbara Jordan died on January 17, 1996; she was just 59 years old. In news reports across the country, her 15-minute statement at the Watergate hearings was part of the lede of her obituary. Maybe she would’ve wanted it that way. But it’s also important to remember that her contribution to public life was more than just those 15 minutes — that girl from the Fifth Ward had made a way out of no way.

23 Black Queer and Trans Femmes to Follow on Instagram This Black History Month

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2019 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queerness.

We need more truth and love and joy for black femmes in the LGBT community. I made this list to call that in. Every day, my existence is made better by the efforts of beautiful black femme souls working to make this world a better, safer, more inclusive place. Still, our moments of celebration can feel few and far in-between. Our advocacy and hard work in shaping resistance movements go unseen. I’m more likely to see the news that one of my trans sisters was murdered or abused than hear about their accomplishments and the light they’re bringing to our lives. It has to stop.

These are 23 of the black, queer and trans femme women and non-binary people that make me feel overwhelmingly seen and loved on social media. Every person on this list deserves their own celebration – or at minimum your follows and likes to amplify their voices. Following their accounts has been a balm for my soul. I know it will be for yours, too.

This Black History Month we are supporting the black femmes currently making history. Get ready and if you aren’t already, I suggest you sit down before reading this list, cause honey these glorious embodiments of black femme magic are sure to sweep you off your feet.

All images are from each person’s personal Instagram.

Nay Bever

Nay pretty much does it all. She’s an LA based artist (find her work @gaudylosangeles) and model who has worked with prominent creators in the body positivity world such as Gabi Fresh, Shooglet, and Adipositivity. She’s also co-host of the podcast “Attack of the Queerwolf!” When she isn’t doing all that, she’s on IG doing the advocating against fatphobia and giving us the unapologetic “not here to please you” black girl content we all need. Follow her here.

Munroe Bergdorf

The intense levels of public scrutiny Munroe Bergdorf has faced the last couple years – especially in the wake of calling out L’oreal for their racism – hasn’t slowed this model and activist down one bit. If anything, it’s encouraged her to proudly double down on her activism. Munroe is the first of many people on this list fighting for inclusivity and equality in the fashion industry and world at large. One look at her IG page full of fierce femme looks and words of encouragement will it make it clear why she stays booked, and she always will, despite the haters. Follow her here.

Reneice Charles

My editor gave me permission to shamelessly promote myself, so of course I’m taking her up on that. Hello, I’m Reneice! I’m one of the few black, fat, queer, women food writers around. I write a baking column called Femme Brûlée right here on Autostraddle.com! I’m also an MSW, activist, body positive life coach, and lover of plus size swimsuits. My Instagram is where all these skills intersect. I live for swim photoshoots, post often about food in my stories, and denounce all the ‘isms and ‘phobias I can through writing, food, modeling, body positivity and self love. Follow me here.

Kiersey Clemons

If Kiersey Clemons isn’t already on your out, queer actress to watch list, go ahead and add her right now. Her talents on screen can were most recently seen in RENT Live, as well as indie film favorites Hearts Beat Loud, Dope, and Netflix’s Easy. All queer roles! Her talents on IG include incredible fashion posts, advocacy from the heart, and selfies that should be next to the definition of “Black Girl Glow”. Follow her here.

Cora Harrington

Cora Harrington is the founder and Editor in Chief of the blog The Lingerie Addict, the world’s largest lingerie blog. Everything I know about intimate apparel I learned from Cora and her new book In Intimate Detail, which is available for purchase now. The Lingerie Addict was the first place I ever saw that bodies like mine and high quality lingerie meet. I came for the inclusivity and stayed for the in-depth knowledge of the lingerie world and the breathtaking photoshoots Cora posts of herself modeling the latest fashions. It’s content that’ll make you blush in all the best ways. Follow her here.

Laverne Cox

Laverne Cox is a force and a vision. She’s an Emmy winning television producer, Emmy nominated actress, model, and LGBT advocate. She is the first ever trans woman to star (and slay) on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. She also continues the trend of being an impressively talented black woman who somehow still finds time in her schedule to educate, support and uplift our community. Follow her on IG for all these accomplishments, and because no one works a fan or red carpet like Laverne Cox – her insta stories will remind you of that almost daily. Follow her here.

Erika Hart

There is no one, NO ONE in my online world that does as much activism and education around black AND disabled AND queer AND fat lives as Erika Hart. She’s a sexuality educator, activist, performer and cancer warrior who proudly went topless at Afropunk following her double mastectomy so that she could help dismantle the lack of visibility of black and brown bodies. I feel centered by Erika and her Instagram, and am stronger because of it. Follow her here.

Briq House

Briq House’s burlesque performances are refreshingly unique and overwhelmingly sexy. They changed my life. They also earned her the much deserved bragging rights of one of the Top 50 Most Influential Burlesque Industry figures of 2018. She is also Executive Producer of Seattle’s Sunday Night Shuga Shaq, the only all-POC Burlesque Review in the Pacific Northwest. Briq’s Instagram will have you fanning yourself and reaching for water to quench your level 10 thirst. Her page is an altar to black femme sexuality, a reminder that sex work is absolutely real work, and radiates with the kind of infectious confidence that will have you taking an impromptu solo boudoir shoot like the goddess you are. Follow her here.

Samantha Irby

Samantha Irby is the  New York Times best selling author of We Are Never Meeting Again. She writes the hugely popular blog Bitches Gotta Eat, which is full of the funniest and most heartfelt writing I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. She has published two other books, Meaty and New Year, Same Trash. Her Instagram is full of hilariously relatable content and expert memes as well as incredible book recommendations, top notch food content, and adorable cat photos. Follow her here.

Fatima Jamal

Fatima Jamal, also known as @fatfemme online, is an incredibly talented artist, writer, and public speaker whose work centers and explores themes related to the body. She’s also a fierce fashionista and plus size model who slays the gram flawlessly while advocating for unapologetic self-love. It’s no wonder she was named one of the coolest queers on the internet by Teen Vogue, and I have to agree. Her presence on my timeline is always a gift! Follow her here.

Jazzmyne Jay

BuzzFeed producer and bodacious babe Jazzmyne Jay really knows how to give good ‘gram. She’s a style icon, so the outfits are always on point, and I’ve fallen into every single one of her thirst traps. Plus, you’re likely to leave her page uplifted as she’s also an advocate for body positivity. Follow her here.

Jari Jones

Trans model and activist Jari Jones could teach one master class in Slaying The Gram and another in changing the face of the historically racist, transphobic, and fatphobic fashion and beauty industries at the same damn time. She holds brands accountable and looks damn good doing it. Jari’s IG feed is bound to give you closet envy and her smile is one of the brightest around. Follow her here.

Kelela

Kelela is a contemporary R&B artist with a voice like honey who’s open about her sexuality in an industry that’s still far too silencing of queer love. Her music is turn the lights down sensual, her style is eye catching, and you can experience it all on her IG. Follow her here.

Lizzo

If you haven’t had a solo dance party to one of Lizzo’s confident, affirming, catchy as fuck tracks yet, then do yourself a favor and get on that. Her songs are the uplifting powerful bops every black queer femme deserves and her music is a major element to maintaining my glow. You might wanna get on her Instagram, too. It’s full of the juicy thirst traps and her signature videos of twerking while playing the flute (like the multi-talented diva she is). Follow her here.

Kim Milan

Kim milan is an award winning writer, educator and activist whose work and excellence is internationally recognized. Her racial justice trainings are some of the best available worldwide. She also teaches yoga classes with her precious daughter in tow. Talk about goals! Kim is an incredible role model for black queer parenting and entrepreneurship. One look at her Instagram shows that Kim’s love for her family, herself, her work, and the community are fierce. Plus, all those baby smiles are bound to give you the warm fuzzies. Follow her here.

Janelle Monáe

There is SO much to say about Janelle Monáe that I’m just going to say: If you aren’t yet following her IG for her Afrofuturist award winning music, or her award winning career as an actress, then please follow for the way Janelle wears her looks and the way it makes you feel. Her outfits on Instagram make me scream daily. Her music has been fuel to my black resistance for years and will be for years to come. Follow her here.

Jasika Nicole

If you search Jasika’s name on Autostraddle.com it’ll be made clear pretty quickly that our love for her runs deep here. Along with being an award winning actress (Danger & Eggs, Suicide Kale, Underground, Scandal, Fringe, and many more) Jasika is an expert seamstress. Follow her on insta for incredible DIY sewing inspiration, adorable spontaneous dance breaks and my personal favorite, couch karaoke. Follow her here.

Aaron Philip

Aaron is a disabled, gender non-conforming, femme tearing down the walls of ableism in the fashion industry. This bright beautiful star is working to increase visibility and accessibility for black, queer, disabled fashionistas everywhere. Her presence, work, voice, and style are flawless and so needed. Especially for the millions of people worldwide who had never seen anyone that resembles them in high fashion until Aaron. Find her on IG for all the looks, all the equality work, and such expert level smizing I’m sure Tyra is proud. Follow her here.

Ali Simon

Doing the good work of decolonizing the world of health and wellness, Ali Simon is a body positive yoga instructor with one of the most popular and inclusive classes in Los Angeles, CA. You can imagine then that her Instagram is a source of uplifting, affirming love and care content for all bodies, especially marginalized ones. Follow and get your flow on.

Jessamyn Stanley

Jessamyn Stanley makes defying stereotypes look like art. She’s a yoga teacher for bodies of all sizes and abilities, a body positivity advocate, and writer. Carving out space in the yoga industry for fat, queer, black bodies is no small feat, but Jessamyn does it with a smile on her face and a hand out to pull as many people into the light as she can. I can’t get enough. Follow her here.

Portia Wilson

Portia Wilson is the founder of Deeper Genius Acupuncture & Healing Arts in Los Angeles, CA. Through her practice of acupuncture she works to dissolve the barrier between black women and wellness/preventative health. I’ve had the pleasure of being treated by Portia and it was by far the best experience I’ve ever had with a physician. If I’d known a healthcare experience could go so well, I’d have a completely different relationship with the industry, and that is exactly the magic and importance of Portia’s work. Follow her to see how good the present and future of healthcare can be.

Tessa Thompson

If you’ve seen Tessa Thompson in literally anything she’s done (there’s SO much), but especially for the purposes of this site, Janelle Monáe’s Pynk  music video, then you know why she’s on this list. You can also watch her on TV in Westworld, in the movies Selma, Dear White People, the Creed series, Sorry to Bother You, and Thor: Ragnarok (Valkyrie! That bodysuit!). Then follow her on Instagram and swoon at literally everything she wears and every time she and Janelle bless us by being in the same place at the same time. Follow her here.

Indya Moore

Afro-Latina trans model and actress Indya Moore stepped on the MainStage with year with F/X’s Pose and she has no intention of stopping any time soon. Did we mention that she just landed an entire Louis Vuitton campaign!! She serves looks like they are breakfast, but it’s her advocacy and constant genuine care for trans and queer communities of color that will keep you coming back for more. Follow her here.

The Rumors Were Enough: Josephine Baker, Frida Kahlo, Their Romance and Me

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2019 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queerness.

The first time I discovered that Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo maybe fucked each other, it was the middle of the night.

I was caught in a Google-loop during an insomnia spiral. There was a blog post that was only a few sentences long. I tried to find it recently and couldn’t. There wasn’t much to go on (there still isn’t), but even the whisper of a love affair between the infamous Mexican feminist artist and the African American dancer in Paris set my heart beating overtime.

It was one of those moments where everything I thought I knew to be true was maybe also a lie, like the first time you find out your mom had this whole other life before you were born. I’d grown up learning about Josephine Baker. She was a very in vogue Black History Month figure when I was a kid, there were posters of her in my school library. Dancer, American expat living in Paris, secret spy of the Parisian military – I always thought she was glamorous. I was the kind of kid who knew I was “girly” long before I had any queer language to call myself “femme.” Josephine Baker kicked ass in diamonds and gowns, flawless make up. She was my personal hero. No one ever bothered to say she was bisexual.

According to her biographer and son Jean-Claude Baker, it’s likely Josephine Baker had affairs with many women. Clara Smith, a successful blues singer who worked with Louis Armstrong. Mildred Smallwood, the first African American woman to appear in American Dance magazine. Bessie Buchanan, the first African American woman to have a seat in the New York State Legislature. The famous bisexual author Colette. So, why not Frida Kahlo?

Frida, after all, was much more open about her sexuality, even back then. She had rumored relationships with fellow artists Georgia O’Keeffe and Jaqueline Lamba, along with actresses Dolores del Rio and Paulette Goddard. She was comfortable playing with her gender presentation, dressing in turn as butch and femme. In 1939 Frida Kahlo, recently separated from her husband Diego Rivera, traveled to Paris for an exhibition of her work. The showcase was hosted in part by the Lourve, with Kahlo’s “The Frame” becoming the first painting by a 20^th century Mexican artist to be purchased by the museum. At the time, Josephine was working for French military intelligence.

There’s this photo. One single photo. That’s all the proof we have that these two bisexual women of color shared space with each other. It’s a photo that’s spawned what can feel like a thousand loosely held together rumors. Some believe that Kahlo seduced Josephine that same night, others have Josephine making the first move and the affair taking place over several months. In the 2002 movie Frida, the two are depicted as meeting at a nightclub after one of Baker’s performances and implied to have fallen into a relationship for the duration of the artist’s time in the French capital.

This is also where everything falls apart at the seams. Josephine Baker, noted black bisexual artist, and Frida Kahlo, noted Latinx bisexual artist, shared one room together one time. To the best of any documented knowledge, everything that happens after that point is fiction or internet rumor. There are those who’d then argue that we shouldn’t give the rumors much weight or publicity. Lots of people share rooms with each other, it doesn’t mean they ran upstairs to have sex right after.

And yes, there is comfort in cold, hard facts. But when has queerness ever been left in fact? Here’s another set of facts: Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo are, separately, two icons that meant a lot to me in my black Latina youth. I was in my early 20s before I ever heard that either was queer. What would it have meant for me to have bisexual role models who looked like me when I was 12 instead of 22? What would it have looked like to take seriously that Kahlo and Baker, if not lovers, could have certainly at least been queer family to one another. That there’s another path for kinship between queer women of color that dates back to the early 20^th century and across national borders. What if there’s – gasp! – an Afro-Latinx Power Couple that eludes us right at our fingertips.

Documenting queer history is difficult. It’s nearly impossible to navigate. Early 20^th century queerness is not legible in ways that you or I understand as “lesbian” or “bisexual” from our viewpoint in 2019. It’s much more fleeting. If we’re honest with ourselves, it still is. There’s what we assume or accept as fact, then, just like in life, there’s the messiness of what we can possibly never know for sure. We often make concessions for our historic queer icons, because sometimes the other choice is never seeing ourselves in a timeline beyond our own lifespan.

That’s the thing. For all of the historic queer women couples we know, painfully few of them are between two women of color. If there’s a crop of rumors surrounding Frida and Josephine, there’s a reason. I understand it intimately. It’s a desire to be seen, to imagine that there’s a you before the you that you are now. That she, too, could have found love.

Searching for confirmation if Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo were ever lovers is maddening and fruitless. Ultimately, it even misses the point. It matters less if they slept together. It matters more, so much more, that perhaps they even could.

Femme Brûlée: Not My Aunt’s Sweet Potato Pie

I’m sorry to say it, but this is not my Aunt Necy’s sweet potato pie recipe. That’s something I truly have to apologize for because Aunt Necy’s sweet potato pies are perfect. They have been for my whole life. They’re so good that I see Thanksgiving dinner as the stuff you have to eat before it’s time for pie. There are years that Aunt Necy makes over a dozen sweet potato pies to fulfill requests from family who know that one slice at the holidays just isn’t gonna be enough. No no, we need one to take home as well. She sent me back to school with an extra pie every year while I was in college. I’d tell her I shared it, and sometimes that was true, but sometimes I just ate the whole thing myself ’cause I couldn’t help it! They’re that good!

I’ve never loved a pie as much as I love her sweet potato pies. I can see her so vividly standing in the kitchen over a giant metal bowl full of sweet potato that she peeled hot with her bare hands by some form of magic I’ve yet to learn, pouring in sugar and milk, tasting and adjusting the spices as she goes. That’s part of the reason this isn’t her recipe, ’cause there isn’t really one you can follow. There are steps you can be told but no exact measurements. She just knows it. It’s done by taste and feel, and learning a recipe like that takes careful study of its creator in action.

The thing is, I do know Aunt Necy’s sweet potato pie recipe. I can make It pretty well too, but even still it’s just not hers. ‘Cause it doesn’t have her love, her essence, her decades of practice and devotion to contributing to our family’s wellness and celebration via sweet potato pie. This is also not her recipe because one of the few southern culinary superstitions I believe in is that the best recipes should be kept secret, and if you do share you have to tweak the recipe juuuust enough that it’ll still be delicious, but not as good as the original. So that’s what I’ve done here.

Given that it’s Black History Month and we’re doing a lot of talk about celebration here since Autostraddle is turning ten, I thought it was only fitting to share a recipe for this pie that’s such a tradition in Black American celebrations. Truly, pumpkin pie who? I will die on the Team Sweet Potato hill, hopefully with plenty of brown sugar and cinnamon. So, while this recipe is not my Aunt Necy’s and therefore not perfect, it’s still one of the best. Roasting the sweet potato brings out it’s natural sugar so you don’t need as much in the filling. No chance of a cloyingly sweet vaguely sweet potato flavored pie here. It’s sweet and rich like the New Orleans jazz I listen to while baking it, and smells so good out of the oven you might just pop it on the window sill and hypnotize someone into following the mesmerizing scent trail to your kitchen cartoon-style.

I could tell you about how the flaky buttery crust supports the vibrant, caramelized sweet potato so well, or I could just say that to me, this tastes like all the best things about home. Like history and a connection to ancestors long past. Like a love letter to a little baby queer cook who loves her Aunt Necy and her sweet potato pies. That’s what my version tastes like. How wonderful, too, that yours will be filled with whatever love and legacy you bring to the kitchen. Food is so incredible in that way.

Ingredients:

1 prepared 9 inch pie crust*
2 cups (400g) roasted, mashed sweet potato
1 cup (8oz) evaporated milk
4 tablespoons (57g) butter, melted
3/4 cup (150g) brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 large eggs

Note: I use the crust recipe from my apple turnovers, subbing buttermilk for the ice water for this recipe! It can be made and refrigerated a day ahead, then just let sit at room temp for 30 minutes before rolling. The pie filling (excluding the eggs) can also be made, covered and refrigerated a day ahead. Just don’t forget to whisk the eggs in before pouring the filling into your pie plate!

1. Preheat the oven to 350° F.

2. Roll out the pie crust then transfer to a 9 inch pie pan.

3. Fit the crust to the pan and trim the edges, leaving about a 1/2 inch overhang that you’ll then fold underneath to reinforce the crust. You can use dough scraps to patch any broken or thin areas of the crust.

4. Add any decorative touches to the edge of the crust that you’d like, I just went with scalloped edges, and set aside.

5. In a large bowl using a stand or hand mixer, mix together the sweet potato, evaporated milk, melted butter, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and lemon zest until smooth. Add the egg last and mix until incorporated. If you like a really silky texture, which I do, you can blend it with an immersion blender.

6. Pour into your prepared pie pan.

7. Bake for 35-45 minutes or until the edges are set and the middle of the pie jiggles just a little when you shake the pan. I like to sing “Jiggle it” by Young leek when I check the pie,  In case you were curious. Now comes the time for patience. You’ve gotta let this pie cool to room temperature on a rack and then for at least 2 hours –but overnight is best– in the fridge. This allows it to set and gives the flavors time to blend.

8. I’m a firm believer that sweet potato pie is best eaten cold and all on its own like the star of Black culinary culture it is.

9. But a little whipped cream and extra cinnamon definitely doesn’t hurt. Happy Black History Month!

Black Queer Resiliency Will Guide Us Through Black History Month

Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2019 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queerness.

I had an entire other plan for how to open our Black History Month series. 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 1^st 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, actress 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. 28 days that are unapologetically For The Culture.^TM

So yes, there’s another version of this post, existing in another timeline of our universe, where I shouted from the rooftops about BLACK EXCELLENCE AND BLACK JOY. For sure those are going to be reoccurring themes in the pieces we’ve curated for Autostraddle’s Black History Month series. But then this week happened, and I scrapped it.

On Tuesday morning, Jussie Smollett, one of the most famous young black gay men in the country, was viciously beaten in a racist, homophobic hate crime in Chicago. He was called a nigger and a faggot. He was left with a noose around his neck. In the days that followed, there was a hollow echo in my chest that I couldn’t shake – something inside of me was cold, broken. Many of our black queer writers were scrambling to make deadlines and put together this series that you’re going to read all month, but we had to stop. We had to hold each other. We had to be angry. We had to mourn.

It’s not solely about Jussie Smollett (it never was; he’s been the first to say that himself). It’s about what’s happening to so many of our sisters, brothers, and gender non-conforming siblings. It’s about black trans women who face violence daily and it goes unchecked. It’s about being afraid to walk your dog at night, dress how you feel most comfortable, or hold your lover’s hand. It’s about how our visibility won’t protect us. It makes us a target, and knowing that but being brave enough to stay visible anyway. It’s about white supremacy that’s alive in 2019 the way it was alive in 1969 or 1869. It’s about the ways that white supremacy is a twin ideology with homophobia. Both exist to rob black queer communities of our very ability to feel safe in our skin. And it’s about how we grab ahold of each other and fight back.

It’s almost cliché, a queer women’s magazine opening its Black History Month series with a meditation on Audre Lorde. Lorde is also my favorite writer, so perhaps it’s most cliché coming from me. (What could be more cliché than a black queer girl with an Afro and big earrings and a back tattoo walking around quoting Audre Lorde? Nothing, I suppose.) Still, when I could no longer feel inside of myself – when everything went numb from anger and grief – this is what snapped back into my clearest focus: “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing. The first time I read those words, I’m sure I was in a place in my life where I felt safe. Now I’m constantly terrified. I think it’s because it’s the same fight, always the same fight. Hatred is before us, unvarnished and bare. I don’t know how to be “afraid of nothing” when all I can feel is fear about everything. But, I do know how to be deliberate. I know what it means to deliberately get out of bed after spending full day alone under the covers. I know what it means to deliberately force myself to laugh. To brush my teeth and wash my face and walk out of my front door. To love.

It is that resiliency that has seen black queer people through – and it’s that deliberate, stubborn black queer resiliency that I am holding on to with my knuckles and blind faith. This month we’re going to highlight black femmes you can follow, and re-imagine classic black love films with a lesbian lead. We’re going to fantasize about ourselves in superhero and Disney Princess cosplay. There will be space for thoughtful meditation on what it means to be someone like Barbara Jordan, the most famous black woman politician in history, and still struggle with your sexuality in the closet. We are going to talk about food and poetry. Us black queer folk? We’re gonna beat our faces or polish our kicks until we can see ourselves smiling back in them. We’re going to hold on tight and put one foot in front of the other. Nothing pisses the racist homophobes off more.

This morning, on the first day of Black History Month, Jussie Smollett released a public statement: “During times of trauma, grief and pain, there is still a responsibility to lead with love. It’s all I know. And that can’t be kicked out of me.”

If you are looking for actionable ways to help in the fight, consider donating to Affinity Community Services, which serves Chicago’s black LGBTQ community and has a focus on black women. Until then, we’ll be back on Monday with more of our Black History Month content. ✊🏾