Six Black Trans Women on Sending Abundant, Overflowing Love to Zaya Wade
The African diaspora in the digital age has communicated in ways not previously foreseen. Black cosplayers, black nerds, black writers, black readers, black naturalistas — these online communities of black people have found support and recognition from no longer being the only one they know of. Black political organising over the previous centuries birthed anti-lynching, civil rights, anti-apartheid, black feminist and black lives matter movements, however Black queer and trans folks have always struggled to be recognised within these movements. The incompatibility of gender transgression with black bourgeois respectability, which upheld the church and the nuclear family as the galvanising units for collective black advancement, meant that we were either banished or compelled to hide in plain sight.
The stories of Mary Jones, Frances Thompson, Lucy Hicks Anderson have been archived by the criminal justice system and excavated by those activists who fight against it. More recently, the stories of Tracey Africa, Miss Major and Martha P. Johnson have gained media attention thanks to the efforts of those who seek to ensure their stories are not intentionally sidelined and submerged. The specific connected battles of racism, misogyny and transphobia that black trans women face lead us to be so occupied with survival, that we have no time to ensure our marginality shan’t result in our erasure. Into this status quo strides Zaya Wade.
The news of a young black trans girl being loved out loud and absolutely by her family — with the intention of elevating her in life and centering her agency, in hopes of establishing her as a future leader — spread like wildfire on my timeline and had my inboxes popping. My instinct told me to reach out to the black trans women whose voices have been amplified into my life over the past few years and find out if they were as elated as I was.
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Micheala Danjé // Co-Founder of Cases Rebelles // Paris
“What I feel when I see the love that Zaya Wade receives from her family is physical.
It’s like I’m wrapped in softness. My emotion arises from the strong and public reaffirmation of a world of possibilities where we can be loved, accompanied and carried by our own people. I have been and still am supported by my black family: the one to which I am biologically related and the one I have chosen. This love, this desire to be there for one another, manifests itself against the story of what we have suffered, and what we are still undergoing. Where it exists, this love is powerful, political and revolutionary. Because it means that we can love ourselves to the full extent of who we are. I pray that all my little trans sisters receive this love, this support and that more broadly in the black community we can make sure all of our children grow in love and kindness. This love, this love from within, from ourselves, to ourselves, is up to us. It is invaluable and it is infinitely precious to us as we go out to face the world.”
Just like Zaya, I knew myself to be a girl at the age of three. Nearly everybody told me otherwise. By the age of five, I had given into their protests. They had convinced me that I was too ugly to transition. In my assessment of their world, my blackness ruled me out of being considered beautiful, and to further exacerbate the curse, I was dark skinned. My nose was distinctly African and thus classed as too flat, bulbous and unfeminine. My hair refused to flow in spite of nightly prayers and daytime imaginings.
When I found out about other trans people, I knew myself to be one of them, but they were so distant. The narratives around trans lives in the 1990s was so definitively in the realm of the scandalous fairy tale. I could not begin to fathom how I could live as a woman one day. Transitioning felt as rare and unattainable as a lottery win. Using the Bible as back up, my behaviour was policed in the belief that the essence of me, was worthy of extinction. Any evidence of delicacy, sensitivity and swish of sass was beaten deeper into my shapely fat and muscle, but could not be stopped from coating my bones.
Violence can send truth into hiding, but it cannot stop it from one day rising. Even in the face of genocide, we always win.
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Ashley Breathe // Co-Founder of T Time with the GURLZ // N.Y.C
“As a trans woman of color, I wish my parents would have had the patience and education to understand me. Not only to provide, but to protect me — not reject me. At 12-years-old not only did I know who I was, everyone around me told me who or what I was not!
I am happy Zaya has family that sees her for who she is, and allows her to express how she identifies. I was told very young “blue is for boys and pink is for fags!” I longed for every chance to visit girl cousins and to touch a Barbie. I was told to play with cars, G.I Joes… anything but Barbie. We have to allow children to be who they are, mistakes and all, and believe them when they tell you who they are. I always had to suppress my feminine side, which led to years of isolation, loneliness and depression! So be you, be bold, make mistakes, learn and grow! Live for you! People should appreciate knowing you. Being trans is beyond beautiful, we are valid and worthy! And those who don’t understand can detransition out of our lives!”
A year ago, Don Cheadle stood on the Saturday Night Live stage and called for us to PROTECT TRANS KIDS! Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union imbibed that message wholesale. Their daughter Zaya Wade was reintroduced and lifted up into the world. Black trans people the world over were blessed with a panacea our bodies have long deserved. The bit that got me crying in the video clip? When Zaya says:
“…When you reach that point of like, yourself… Like when you can look in the mirror and say ‘Hi’ to yourself. Like.. ‘Nice to meet you.”
She has summed up, at the age of twelve, what it has taken me so many more decades to realise. Although I always knew it, I can look in the mirror and be proud that I manifest the divine feminine through my actions, politics, being and body. I can send up a prayer of thanks that she will not ever face the violence, assaults and excommunication from family and community, that I, along with so many of my black trans sisters, continue to face.
Chloé Filani // Poet // London
“We see with our famous white counterparts — NikkieTurtorials and Jazz Jennings for example — that these young white trans women are supported by their parents through their transition, and at young ages. We see how they flourish. Jazz getting into Harvard and Nikki being one of the top YouTube beauty girls with 13.2 million subscribers. Having seen this disparity but now seeing Zaya being loved out loud and supported by her black family? Her future also looks bright, brighter than it is for most black trans women. I’m truly happy for her happiness and for the black trans girls of the future.”
There are people who are angry and pushing back on the expression of this free black child who will flourish into a gloriously nourishing womanhood. No doubt, they will stay mad. I worry not for the bleating of the ineffectual and the powerless; those who see the grace, intellect and eloquence of Zaya and instead retreat into the cave with the only “pseudo-scientific” factoids they’ve ever known to give them fleeting warmth. What’s so nefarious about the self-love they are witnessing that it causes them to upload poorly lit videos of constipated rage from their clammy locations? They long for the enforced brutality that coated their yesteryear. Bullies long for their victims. Colonialists long for stolen lands. Transphobes long for the days when all that was asked of them was to commence pointing, laughing and shaking their heads before the progression to bunched fists, whipping belts and bleeding wounds that could not cauterise.
In their sour sweaty bedrooms they conjure up fantasies where they can offer up our genitals as sacrifices to the metaphorical chopping block, way before any decisions have been informed by years of meditation, reading and consultations. Musing on what may occur six or seven years down the line, the paranoiac conspiracy theorists are strategizing. They promise their unthinking minions that there are appointments made and scalpels glinting in electric light ready for use tomorrow. We can expect a cacophony of hotep dog whistles and ill-tuned faux spirituals seeking to rile up the frighteningly mannered black conservative mindset with some message of “won’t someone please think of the penises?”
I will continue to marvel and smirk at those who try to convince the masses that black families cannot survive if they love their queer and trans kids unconditionally even though we endured actual slavery. Some days, when I am caught up in the mundanity of daily human being, I can easily forget that my existence is positioned somewhere between the radical and the miraculous.
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Shar Jossell // Journalist & Broadcaster // Los Angeles
“I feel so fortunate to witness a prominent Black family within American pop culture unapologetically love and support their child. So many folks didn’t receive that type of understanding —it truly makes me optimistic for the future. The Wades have broadened the conversation and hopefully ushered in a point of discussion that’ll make parents of trans youth do their due diligence, should their child ever feel comfortable enough to come out to them.”
This year I will turn thirty five years old — the average life expectancy for black trans women in the United States. A combination of middle class privilege, cultural capital and attained cisgender passability ensures I will no doubt meet a much grander old age than so many of my black femme transestors. I’ve prayed for many more years on an earth turning greener with cleaner air, fresher water and less poverty before I go up to laugh and kiki with Mother Marsha and them. Until recently, I imagined I would spend my autumn years raising the homeless trans teen girls of wherever I call home. Zaya Wade has recalibrated my envisioning.
Perhaps the black trans youth of tomorrow will be unbroken; much less traumatised and much more resourced, in a way I have not yet contemplated. Others have chastised me for overly romanticising a precolonial African past when black trans girls only knew peace and inclusion. Nevertheless, I indulge myself. I believe there was a time when I belonged. Before the slave ships arrived I cannot see my ancestors ejecting me from my home and community for my natural expression of self. Through the love that Dwayne Wade, Gabrielle Union and the Wade siblings are exemplifying, black trans girls can see themselves coming on home just like Shug Avery on a sunny song filled day.
As writer, activist and showrunner Janet Mock recently stated at Essence’s Black Women in Hollywood, Zaya Wade will be loved, honoured and protected because “She Is Worthy”. The black trans women of Pose, who were reached out to by Gabrielle and Dwayne, continue the revolutionary advocacy that she show has started. A revolutionary network of black trans women is now spiritually connected through technology and I am certain it will be the focal nexus of a transhumanist study in the near future.
The black trans girls who sustain me live lives that mermaids envy. Toiling against currents, we reach for our futures in destinations throughout the diaspora, which may keep us physically separate even though technology has brought us so much closer together. The poet and novelist Ocean Vuong has given my mind and soul the space to wonder if there might be such a thing as The Black Trans Atlantic. For the ocean between us all is so full of life begging for us to unite and indulge in our gorgeousness, here and now, for life is too brief to not do so.
Diamond Stylz // Co-Founder of Marsha’s Plate Podcast // Houston
“There is a breakthrough that happens vicariously when I hear a family member affirm their trans child. The words that they say transcends time and relation in its power to speak to the inner child within me that longs for healing from the shame and trauma directly — or indirectly — imposed on us for transitioning.”
This moment is important because I never thought I would live to see it. On a spring night some years ago, I told my truth. “I am a woman.” I breathed into myself.
I had been waiting to exhale since childhood, but it was as an adult that I felt I could now tell my inner child, she could count on me.
Seven Sensual Drag and Burlesque Acts Bringing Black Joy to D.C.
I started going to drag and burlesque shows when I moved back home to Washington, DC. The community I was starting to build included artists and performers of all kinds, and going to shows became a typical means of supporting a friend. Even when friends weren’t performing, I was drawn to the range of bodies I saw celebrated on stage — all genders, ages, sexual orientations, body types, abilities, and ethnicities. There were so many aspects of the shows that I didn’t see in other entertainment spaces in DC: ASL interpreters, trigger warnings, and considerable investment in ensuring both performer and audience were as safe as possible.
There is so much inclusivity and intentionality in the spaces created by Pretty Boi Drag, DC Weirdo Show, Swazz, Manic Pixie Nightmares, #TeamHusband and more. It had a powerful impact on me, and it turns out it had a powerful impact on many of the performers featured here. Witnessing others like them on stage motivated many of these performers to take the stage for the first time. For these performers, drag and burlesque are means of self exploration, self-care, healing, sexual expression and an opportunity to celebrate Blackness in a way that disrupts stereotypes. Here are just a few of the amazing performers in DC’s drag and burlesque communities.
Courtesy of Blaq Milk
Blaq Milk
Instagram: @blaq.milk
Blaq Milk is a drag and burlesque performer who grew up in Senegal and Mauritania. From their signature braids to their portrayals of aliens and demons, Blaq Milk infuses their performances with their Black nerd weirdness and West African culture. As a person on the gray-ace spectrum, their shows are less about being sexy, and more about embracing their weirdness—shouting at audiences while wearing creepy contacts and black light body paint.
DC’s drag and burlesque scenes have been a great place for them to play, explore, and get weird: “DC has a really diverse group of performers in terms of gender, race, and also in the types of acts that exist. People have a lot of space to be innovative and weird, especially the trans and non-binary community of DC….There are a lot of subcategories, and I’ve been really happy to see a lot of sideshow performance led by people of color.”
Courtesy of Blaq Milk
Courtesy of Blaq Milk
It’s not only the innovation and range of performance that draws Blaq Milk to the stage, it’s also collective care: “There’s a very important relationship between mental health and performance. Getting ready for a show can take weeks, you have to think of costuming, how the song makes you feel, and what you’re trying to say. You have to be very aware of who you’re talking to, and who you’ll be exposed to…It’s not just about me. It’s a shared experience…I’m taking care of myself doing something I love. I’m taking care of other people [by sharing that with them]. What they’re giving in return is not just money— [it’s] a connection. I have Asperger’s and there are a lot of things in my day to day life that would be hard to do, that I’ve learned to do through performance. Like looking at people straight in the eye. So there’s really a lot of trust between you and the audience…It’s beyond just tearing my clothes off—which is also fun and valid. For me it’s the connection that makes it really special, that makes me keep going back again and again.”
Courtesy of Your Rouge Photography
Ché Monique
Instagram: @mermaidchemonique
Ché Monique has performed burlesque for over a decade, starting out as a member of DC Gurly Show, the longest running queer burlesque troop in Washington, DC. “One night I [was surfing the internet] and discovered the Gurly Show and that they had monthly shows at this bar called Club Chaos and I went and it was the most amazing thing ever.”
When she first started performing, most venues featured burlesque performers who were “very white, very conventional body types.” Aiming to carve out safe and accessible spaces for Black performers and audiences, Ché Monique founded the troupe Chocolate City Burlesque and Cabaret. While the troupe is no longer active, its legacy lives on: “[Chocolate City Burlesque] changed the game and changed the vibe for performers of color. Just by watching what we were doing, we helped a little bit to pave the way for Pretty Boi Drag, and there were amazing performers that came through CCBC.”
Courtesy of Ashley Loth Photography
While seeing “fat, sexy ladies owning it” on stage drew her into burlesque, Ché Monique says it can be frustrating “to get tokenized as inspiration for people. It’s a double edged sword — because seeing people in an othered body thriving can totally open up the world and in that way I think it’s very powerful for people, but it’s one thing being inspiration for [another fat person], another to be inspiration for someone who is a size eight.” Nowadays Ché Monique doesn’t perform in spaces where she will be othered, and is mostly likely to perform at shows like Eat Your Hart Out: A Fat Burlesque Revue in DC.
Courtesy of Your Rouge Photography
Courtesy of Pretty Rik E
Lexie Starre and Pretty Rik E
Website: www.prettyboidrag.com
Instagram: @prettyboidrag
Pretty Rik E and Lexie Starre are the producers of Pretty Boi Drag, a queer people of color-centered drag king troupe founded in 2016. Their love for the DC performance community runs deep — it’s how the two met and fell in love.
For Lexie, burlesque is empowering, “I love the sensuality of burlesque; the tease, the slow burn, the audience waiting for your next move. There is so much power in a sensual performance. As a fat, black woman, having the opportunity to own my body and my sexuality has been an amazing experience.” Although, performing does come with its challenges. Lexie said “You can be riding high after a performance and then overhear an audience member refer to you as “the Black girl.” Not the one with the amazing stocking peel, not the one with the incredible costume, not any of the other descriptors that are used to differentiate your white counterparts.”
This is why, as Pretty Rik E, explains “Having spaces that center and uplift Black performers creates a magic you can almost feel. I have been to too many shows where I felt uncomfortable because I was either the only performer of color, or one of few audience members of color. There are so many talented Black performers in the scene and it’s important that they are given just as many opportunities to shine as their white counterparts.”
Courtesy of Your Rouge Photography
Majic Dyke
Instagram: @majic.dyke
Majic Dyke, “the king of beards and titties,” based his persona on that of a male stripper, a nod to the character Magic Mike. Being visible as a queer Black, African performer keeps Majic Dyke returning to the stage. He started doing drag as a way to express his sexuality. “My sexuality had been so closeted. I wanted my drag to embody all the things that I had to hide away my entire life.” Drag has also been a means of gender expression. “My blend of drag is very nonbinary, so when I come out super masc, and do a big reveal and it’s straight titties, people are often taken aback.” The surprise doesn’t last long, Majic Dyke says, and audiences are usually drawn to his blend of performance.
Courtesy of Majic Dyke
Courtesy of Majic Dyke
In DC, and nationally, the drag scene hasn’t always embraced kings, let alone those who blur gender in performance. Majic Dyke has watched DC’s drag scene expand from a polarized space centering white drag queens, to embrace “artistry that does not adhere to any specific rules as far as masculinity or femininity—drag that is just centered on self expression.” There’s still of course, “the patriarchy bullshit or the racism when you’re backstage,” which Majic Dyke says manifests in cisgender gay men portraying women in a really sexist way, who don’t filter the n-word, and who perform Black songs in a manner that’s essentially Blackface. “At the end of the day white men hold the most power in all of our society,” he adds.
It’s the ability to thrive in spite of these realities that Majic Dyke values. “It’s important to see us in ways that aren’t shrouded in our trauma–we can still live a life that’s full of love and positivity.” This is why Majic Dyke helps create spaces that center Black Joy, like co-producing Unforgivable Blackness, an all-Black variety show.
Courtesy of Diyanna Monet
Molasses
Instagram: @kingmolasses
Molasses wasn’t sure what drag name to adopt, but their partner had a flash of inspiration while she was cooking one day: Blackstrap Molasses. Molasses felt the full name was a bit much (their partner still adds the Blackstrap). As is the case for many performers, drag gave them the opportunity to explore themselves, “Drag allowed me space to explore my heritage and identity fully. I’m first-generation Nigerian-American and I think I carried a lot of shame diving into drag knowing where I was from and how I was raised…But the more I began to cultivate the type of performer I was, the more I allowed myself to shed those fears and understand how much of my heritage intersects with my queerness and drag and explore.”
Courtesy of Diyanna Monet
Courtesy of Farrah Skeiky
The DC drag scene provided a great space for this exploration, and the first song they ever performed was Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon. They wanted to disrupt the perception that Black kings only performed rap or trap music —they love rock too. Molasses was immediately met with support and encouragement, and says the camaraderie amongst drag kings in DC has been amazing. Performers support each other to actualize their visions both on stage and in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area (what locals call the DMV) at large. “I didn’t expect there to be such a stronghold of us really contributing to the cultural conversation of the DMV. I’m in complete awe and respect of my peers as someone who is very new.” Drag kings are not only creating safe spaces for performers and audiences at nightlife events, but also give back and make drag accessible to the greater DMV community through benefit shows, performing at schools, and other non-club environments.
DC’s drag community is inherently political. “The king scene in DC really reflects the pushback of the marginalized communities who are unfortunately leaving DC based on economics and cultural changes. With that it reflects a really beautiful, strong, diverse and honestly eclectic scene where you really see all sides of masculinity and femininity within what a drag king looks like in DC.”
Courtesy Diyanna Monet
Tre D. Thickum
Instagram: @tredthickum
Tre D. Thickum first saw drag at a Pretty Boi Drag open king night, an event where new and amateur drag kings can perform. They were hooked and decided to try it out for themselves.
For Tre, drag is a means of accessing joy. Hey Ya! by Outkast was the first song they performed. That night they almost didn’t make it to the stage. Tre’s job at the time was working with families and youth in Southeast DC to ensure students received wraparound support to graduate high school and college. A week before the open king night, one of the children they worked with was murdered. The child’s vigil was the same night of the show.
“Spirit was very clear: you need to create tangible joy right now. And it was the most freeing and liberating and cathartic experience that I could ever have. It was just complete joy, and it was something that I could share with everybody at that moment. I realized that drag wasn’t just about about performing, it really is an art that can heal. During a performance you are completely thinking about what is going to happen next. You’re like Oh, oh, what was that? That was a body roll. Was that a nipple? No? That was just glitter. I truly believe that we’re healers as well, just as any art is a form of healing. It was everything that I needed.”
Courtesy Diyanna Monet
Courtesy Diyanna Monet
Drag is so much more than “glitz and glamor and body rolls.” Many performers bring their politics into their acts, and use their platforms to raise awareness and funds to meet needs the government fails to. Tre lifts up performers like Ricky Rosé who recently produced drag shows to raise money for disaster relief in Puerto Rico.
DC’s drag community disrupts norms and celebrates all identities. For Tre, it’s even a family activity—their wife, Leigh Crenshaw, co- produces Unforgivable Blackness with Majic Dyke. In so many ways, Black performers are leading the way. “We are cracking open what it means to be in drag,” Tre explains, there is “non-binary drag, alien drag.” In DC there are places where assigned female at birth (AFAB) and trans individuals are still not embraced and drag kings are viewed as little more than a novelty act, but king performers are “going into those spaces and shattering those norms.”
Now, four years after I returned to DC, drag and burlesque shows remain exciting and boundary pushing. The producers and performers centering Black entertainers create a welcoming place for people from various marginalized backgrounds to commiserate, be sensual, and find joy in community. I value this immensely, as I navigate a home I scarcely recognize in the wake of gentrification, exacerbated by 45’s regime bringing white supremacists donning MAGA hats to the city. We must celebrate the power of drag and burlesque spaces for performers and audiences alike. We must sustain it — so offer up your venue for a show, tip your performers generously, and maybe even go on stage yourself! 🔮
Edited by Kamala
“Gentefied” Will Drop Brown Queer Love Bombs All Over Your Netflix Queue
“I’m all for fighting comadre homophobia with queer love bombs.”
Yessika Castillo (Julissa Calderón) is standing around with her closest friends and her girlfriend, Ana Morales (Karrie Martin) — the entire chingona squad casually hanging out at night in the Boyle Heights neighborhood they grew up in.
Ana’s been commissioned by a rich white developer and art-dealer who has been buying up property in the Los Angeles neighborhood. He first encountered her at a children’s birthday party, where she was painting faces just to be able to do her art. He quickly establishes himself as the young artist’s “benefactor” of sorts, parading her in front of his Art World friends as “a gift.” Now he wants Ana to paint a mural on the side of a neighborhood corner store, without the business owner’s permission. And yeah — it’s as gross as it appears. Yessika nicknames ole dude A Colonizer, and she is most certainly not wrong.
Here’s the problem, the mural that the neighborhood colonizer wants Ana to paint? It’s of two Mexican wrestlers in the throes a full-on make out. Those luchadores, with the complete strength and beauty of their queerness painted from the earth to the heavens, have become a proxy for Ana’s own queerness, along with Yessika’s as well. If Ana paints the mural, she’s supporting the gentrification that’s waging an economic war against her own family and neighbors. If she bows to neighborhood outrage, her silence is complicit in saying that homophobia has a place in Boyle Heights. That she and her girlfriend, along with every other queer brown kid who grew up going to that same store for their after-school hot Cheetos fix, don’t have a home there.
A mural is no longer just a mural. It’s an opportunity to lob “queer love bombs,” but what does that matter if those same bombs come with the price tag of boxing out your own? It’s in these moments of tension between individual and community, between structures of economic exploitation and systematic racism, moments where questions of “who belongs” present themselves with no easy answers, that Netflix’s Gentefied most shines.
Gentefied is centered on three adult cousins — Chris, Erik, and Ana — as they work to keep their grandfather’s taco shop, Mama Fina’s, afloat amid rising rents. They face an untenable situation. In order to raise the money, the shop must begin catering to the needs of a more affluent clientele, a tight-rope walk that also feels a lot like displacing friends (already you can see how the mural plot fits right in). Chris, who grew up in mostly white spaces and dreams of being a Michelin-chef, believes their solution resides in a trendy “cutting edge” menu that will attract new customers. Erik, who like Ana was born and raised in Boyle Heights, worries about losing their connection to the community. Ana, the queer youngest cousin, just wants to change the world through her art, continue her love story with Yessika, her girlfriend since high school, and keep the other two from killing each other with their macho pride. Each cousin has their own talents, though they have to get out of their own stubborn way to find it, and Mama Fina’s needs all three of them to survive.
Originally conceptualized as an indie web series with Sundance roots, Gentefied gets its name from the obvious mash-up of gentrified and gente, often used to describe the intra-community gentrification that often happens in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights as affluent Latinxs actively participate or encourage the gentrification of their own ‘hood. Many Autostraddle readers have encountered this framework on television in Tanya Saracho’s Vida, which is also set in Boyle Heights, and also uses gentefication as the underpinning structure of its narrative.
From a production perspective, there are more similarities between the two shows: Both are bilingual productions from Latinx creators — Gentefied comes from Marvin Lemus and Linda Yvette Chávez, and is produced by America Ferrera. Both have faced some amount of pushback from real life Boyle Heights activists who are weary of the attention the productions bring to their neighborhood. Both have deep benches of writing and directing talent compromised of queer people and people of color. Gentefied’s directed in part by Lemus, Ferrera, and Autostraddle favorite Aurora Guerrero (Mosquita y Mari). For the first season, their writing room included up-and-coming trans Latina writer Camila Maria Concepción, who died by suicide just as the series was released by Netflix and whom the cast and crew have lifted up in magnificent light.
Both Gentefied and Vida are exquisitely detailed love letters to and portraits of the immigrant Chicanx communities that birthed them. I don’t list their similarities in some misguided interest of competition, but because I’m dumbstruck at the assortment of wealth for both shows to even exist. Still, their difference in tone couldn’t be more stark.
via Netflix
In Gentefied, Boyle Heights radiates warmth and light. Neighbors sit on lawn chairs on the sidewalk; grandfathers grow hot peppers in their backyard; cute kids with cholo dads get free tacos for reading books; activist women plot on park picnic benches. The show’s voice is assured, funny, comforting. It intimately understands the politics of code-switching in ways few other shows fully capture. In a pitch-perfect moment early on, Ana reminds Erik to “use your white voice” when the pair find themselves at the bank. Unfortunately, the show’s overall tone takes longer to establish. Gentefied can be clumsy (I found the first two, and ironically, the last two episodes the most difficult to reconcile). It seemingly can’t decide if it wants to be a working class family sitcom, a dramedy, a zany satire lampooning white people, or a coming-of-age story about brown millennials trying to survive. In its worst moments, the storytelling comes across unintentionally off-kilter, as if it can’t quite find its groove.
At the same time, it doesn’t need to be narratively perfect. Gentefied is hellafied fun, smart, and has a lot of damn heart. Why can’t that be enough? Sure, the show would benefit from telling a more cohesive story across its ten episodes, but its not like I didn’t find myself enamored regardless. Gentefied finds its strength in its characters. And surprisingly for a show that I watched for the lesbians, it was the tough-on-the-outside, hard-headed, but deeply loving and humbled Erik who walked away with my heart. Smaller characters are equally well-drawn and memorable, like the neighborhood marachi musician who begins the show as a comic relief, but becomes a heartbreaking symbol of the economic warfare strangling those most vulnerable in Boyle Heights. Ana’s mother starts the series raging on her daughter to find “a real job” and dismissive of her life choices, only for the two to bond together in a scene that’s sure not to leave a dry eye among those watching at home.
Of course through it all, there is Yessika and Ana. There are moments when two of them can be #RelationshipGoals personified. In fact, they’re so adorable that Ana’s younger sister videotapes their love story as a part of her Confirmation class (sure, that’s partly to make the nun’s head explode, but it’s still real cute). Yessika, a community activist, knows that to love Ana is to love her family, no matter how many times the cousins’ antics pull Ana from their warm shared bed. Loudmouth, always eating, always dreaming Ana is not ostracized for being gay; Yessika is as much part of the crew as any other cousin. Mama Fina’s also has a dyke working in the kitchen, Norma, that the girls grew up idolizing — and for good reason, she’s a badass! There’s no trauma. Just the sweetness of their love. Quite simply, it feels damn good to see two Latina lesbians fully themselves, accepted by their loved ones, and at no point expected to leave their queerness at the door.
Getting to spend time in Boyle Heights makes the fight against displacement personal, which only becomes more poignant and complicated when Yessika and her friends step into their role as defenders of the neighborhood. Without giving away too much detail, a plan devised by the cousins to save Mama Fina’s puts them squarely in the crosshairs of Yessika’s activism. Yessika sagely implores the cousins not to bend over backwards for white folks — “they may love all our shit, but they don’t love us.” Her warnings fail. Instead, as she later confesses to Ana, she finds herself isolated by Morales’ unspoken racism. She cries to her girlfriend that she’s being written off by her family as some angry black woman stereotype, despite all their years growing up together.
According to the showrunners, Yessika was always designed with an Afro-Latina actress in mind. Originally she was imagined as Mexican, but the character was later adjusted to be Dominican, reflecting Julissa Calderón’s heritage. As Lemus noted to Remezcla ahead of Gentefied’s premiere, “Gentrification and ‘gentefication,’ is very much a class issue. And I think a lot of times we have this conversation around gentrification that’s very black or white or very brown and white. But with Boyle Heights and gentefication specifically, we wanted to explore class. We wanted to explore how Latinos themselves can discriminate… We really wanted to explore those issues of anti-blackness and colorism within the Latinx community.” Watching Yessika be an out and proud queer Afro-Latina, the kind of woman who wears “Fro Life” T-shirts and “La Sabia” sweatshirts with earrings as big as her head — it’s a revelation. Afro-Latinas are still a rarity in television, and then to talk about queer ones at that? Whew. Bless La Santa Sophie Suarez, we’ve only just begun.
Which is why what I’m going to say next will probably seem nit-picky. I’m so thankful that we’ve finally begun telling Afro-Latinx and queer Afro-Latinx stories on television, that Latinx creators are recognizing the double standard in Hollywood and using their platform to work towards correcting it. But when Yessika complains on-screen that, in the end, the Morales family wrote her off as a stereotype? It doesn’t excuse the fact that the writers of Gentefied did, too. Calling out a racist act within the television show doesn’t negate what happened. The Moraleses wrote Yessika off because by that point, the writers had as well. She wasn’t arbitrarily stereotyped as the “angry black girl” by the people she loved, she became consciously written as one. Those are production choices.
If you’re going through the care to write black characters into a Latinx world in which we already exist, don’t reach for the lowest hanging fruit.
I want nothing more than to write Gentefied a glowing review that leaves us all scrambling for our Netflix queue. By most measures, the show more than deserves it. If you haven’t yet — you should watch Gentefied. You should fall in love with the Morales family. You should remember the ways that capitalism is tearing families like ours apart. You should laugh and think and squeal to your heart’s content.
But also, you know — maybe throw some of those queer love bombs for my girl Yessika, too.
Ain’t I A Bottom
Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.
via Bethany Vargas & Keyla Marquez
At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered the speech that came to be known as “Ain’t I A Woman.” Her remarks briefly juxtapose her observations that both the antislavery and women’s rights movements, in which she participated, overlooked black women. “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?” she asked — demurring only slightly from the more explicitly political and religious overtones of the talk. This refrain remains poignant for Black femmes, because regardless of the dis-likeability of being presumed helpless, we have never had the privilege of opting out of this exposure with the undignified and unsightly: we have never been given any “best place.”
bell hooks notes that unabated since our arrival on American shores, Black women have done “men’s work,” or jobs that were considered too harsh, dirty, or impolite for ladies. (The essay, “sexism and the black female slave experience” is the first in a collection of essays named for, and taking up lines of thought, from Truth’s speech.) The historic struggle for the freedom to do all work that suits us, regardless of gender, figures dissimilarly from the perspective of women who have been forced to do the most harrowing work, on and off working hours.
I’ve been a ringleader and a tomboy for the better part of my life. I was frequently the only girl invited to boys’ birthday parties before puberty. I remember whooping ass in laser tag, relishing the gendered underdog justice of imputing competitive humiliation. In middle school, my father chuckled reminding me, whilst I wept that boys didn’t like me, that I should “stop busting their balls.” Since 4, I’ve been an athlete, eventually becoming competitive enough to serve as a select soccer team striker, and to win the shot put championship in my high school league. I’m a (fairly) charismatic diplomatic type: I was elementary school president, I served on my high school senate, and now, I work as an artist, curator, and host, and programming director for creative communities.
I’m disgusted by the idea that the power positionality I teach from would be the one I fuck from. There is NOTHING more satiating to me than relinquishing my quotidian responsibilities to a stern, caring, and intense top.
My first job was as a lead kindergarten and first grade “looping” classroom teacher — a turn from my earlier legal aspirations, upon the catalytic learning that prisons use 3rd grade standardized reading test scores to compute likely prison populations when creating their business bids. I anxiously planned literacy minutiae, amidst grim odds: first year school serving a vast majority of students whose family fiscal status qualified them for free lunch in Downtown Los Angeles. Most of my students began school speaking basic conversational English. They’d have to read short chapter books by the end of our 360 instructional days together to be on grade level (sidenote: I did not have an adequate classroom library at any time in my tenure as a primary teacher).
My life feels replete with responsibilities wherein serious outcomes depend on my effort. In community work and conceptual art, I analyze and confront previous learnings, work steadily to destabilize long worn Western (binary) philosophies, and propose novel interactive societal configurations. Even as an artist, I’m typically at the helm of creating and seeing out a vision from inception to final product. People are attracted to this sort of direction, guidance, clarity and levity of authority, and it’s flattering, but give me a break.
I’m disgusted by the idea that the power positionality I teach from would be the one I fuck from. There is NOTHING more satiating to me than relinquishing my quotidian responsibilities to a stern, caring, and intense top; quieting my high stakes planning brain, and becoming liquid, pliable: everything. Best topped, I’m not sure of when we, or where I, begin and end; when I’ll be allowed to cum, what I’ll become, or if I’ll ever come to: infinity.
At a party recently, a friend and I are messy tongue kissing and grinding, when she shouts over the sumptuous, turnt-up Toni Braxton club remix, “you’re such a top!” (Funny! I actually consider earnest and playful humping to be one of my more little girlish qualities.) Generally, I do go a bit more top drag at a party for the entertainment of dance partners, friends, and onlookers, but front grinding, as we were doing in this particular instance, is especially enjoyable, in part, because of its power neutral positionality — a facet I try to be sensitive about, especially, in queer POC party spaces.
I’ve needed to do quite a bit of dirty work to write this very essay, to go into this pain — personal essay is such a power bottom genre. I asked some of these friends, out of too many to recall and too many to bear, why they’d categorized me as such (loudly, and to my face). One friend knew they’d fucked up and it opened up my forgiveness strongly. They were sweet and doting, and admitted: they’re such a bottom, and truthfully, they do want me to top them. This best case was a misunderstanding, nonetheless.
I’d love for people, but friends, especially, to hold space for me to enact a sexual self that is separate from how I show up in public scenarios. Play and fantasy are cardinal spaces where someone might anticipate different behavior from me, from anyone. I enjoy this complexity: interpersonal negotiation that permits surprise, moments that remind me of the novelty and multiplicity of interpersonal content. It’s undistinguished of us (supposedly) critically superior queers to hold so tight to these old ways of knowing (how to fuck and get fucked).
I’m used to, but saddened by, misinterpretations of my identity and position. Black and femme, I’m particularly used to underestimations of my capacity and skill: but actually, I am an immaculately lush and artful bottom. At my last birthday party, near the end of a several hours, somewhat fucked up haze, I straddle one of my closest friends. A vortex appears and we deep kiss and grind, she pulls me closer navigating the precise tilt of my lordosis. I’m sure some of my friends perceive me, here, as a rambunctious, assertive top, but she knows with a seemingly predetermined awareness, not by any archetypal gender performance on either of our behalf, nor previous interaction, that she guides this moment. I feel our closeness, I trust her immensely. She sees me, feels me: baby, (whore), birthday brat, wants a ride, wants a smooch, innocent — small enough that my weight doesn’t make me feel unmanageable. A show of effort from a queer Black femme, bottom oriented, herself, just for my birthday.
Little did I realize at the time, my friend was writing a piece about exploring her topness. She mentioned that our experience, which we often recall with the sweetest fondness, helped her tap in, and it made me feel empowered, to nurture space and encouragement for a friend to understand lesser exercised sexual power. We grew closer knowing she could trust what I would do with that energy and understanding of her: not abuse it or manipulate the positionality of our friendship to see it overextended.
It’s painful but also quite inconvenient that when trying to get off with other queer people, that I should be so frequently misunderstood. I’ve had difficult time understanding my queerness, because I’ve felt othered from predominant (cis, white) queer archetypes. In high school (pre-Tumblr), the time many first explore their queer desire, the women who were positioned as the most desirable, if not viable writ large, were white, thereby giving me a bit of cognitive dissonance about what it meant to be attracted to women.
Through early adulthood, I fucked Black cis boys, and white cis boys who wanted to fuck like they imagined Black men fucked, because they were the only ones who would bend me over and insult me, with no questions asked, and this, too, is because, they suffer raced/gendered archetypal expectations in their sex lives. In as much as these men had already stuck around through the more confrontational aspects of my personality, I felt securely respected each time I got choked; each time one remarked how nasty I behaved, it was in contrast to of my totally noble character otherwise. In queer spaces, this misunderstanding cuts deeper, because it is the less anticipated betrayal. After years of wanting deeper connection with queerness, it’s been a slap in the face (not the good kind) to be reminded that here, too, we respond to dominant desire narratives.
Even if well-meaning, conscription to work is just that: the act of fantasizing about being topped by a black femme is predicated on a fantasy of non-consensual labor. After years of being America’s moral and material mule, all the while providing unimaginably elegant care, and some of the most sensually and spiritually impactful creative work of our time, Black women are imagined as superwomen (see: non-human) and this fantasy leaves us under cared for and overworked for less satisfaction and reward in any space — sexual, erotic, moral, social, political, economic — that has been affected by the ubiquitous history of the trans-atlantic slave trade (see: all).
At a party one fine evening this Black History Month, my lover and I absconded to my bedroom, while my sweetly perverted, slightly younger cohort of friends listened in to our lovemaking. They remarked about my music taste (ugh!), the auditory revelation that I am, indeed, as much of a bottom as I say, and my lover’s apparently fruitful, and enduring efforts. “They’re fucking Mandy for the community,” one young Blacqueer femme remarked in gratitude, moved by the soundtrack of my reaction to my lover’s doting and articulate composition. My lover is a divine top: they do the work, joyfully, dancing, competent, big and strong. And their spirit yearns with the will to work: an assertion of responsibility. They fuck me and it feels like purpose and implicit herein is the notion that I am deserving of work, planning, story, and some of their most sensitive creativities. This gift renews my efforts, stretches my muscles and intelligence, in ways that pay off for those around me.
Bottoming isn’t about womanness: sex, gender, or its presentation. Plenty of women — many of my favorite women, in fact — top, and, plenty of men bottom. But to introduce a binary, and then refuse to examine the archetypes therein implied is irresponsible; especially given that most tops, at least among the Autostraddle community, identify their gender presentation as stud/AG, Butch or masc of center; and most bottoms, identify their gender presentation as high femme, femme, and lazy femme. (The term “lazy femme” strikes me similar to “messy bun,” in that, respectability and desire norms haven’t made space for what it means when Black women are low maintenance.) For this reason, and others foregrounded in this writing, I’m looking forward to seeing the future iteration of this study disaggregated by racial group, or maybe even skin tone — and I’d be curious to know (messy), the rates with which non-Black people perceive Black people’s gender presentation correctly.
(The term “lazy femme” strikes me similar to “messy bun,” in that, respectability and desire norms haven’t made space for what it means when Black women are low maintenance.)
Being perceived as a sexual object, or, as requiring and deserving care, demands time and fiduciary investments that are materially less available to Black femmes. For some in this leather derivative binary schema, indicating position and preference is as easy as switching a handkerchief from one side to the other –– yet another indication, that even in queer spaces, we often default to binaries invented by white men. For me, bottom visibility would involve a feminization I resent having been categorically divested of in the first place. I might be aided by wearing a dress, losing weight, getting breast implants, getting a weave, or wearing heels, but even this stylized femininity, indicated in part by discomfort and prostration, wouldn’t be the most accurate style depiction of my femininity. A more nuanced admirer, however, might register that my wardrobe is strongly indicative of the sex I like to have: I’m nurtured and nurutuing in easy and cozy knitwear sets that skim and hug, things that fit me without additional tailoring costs when few garments adequately hold the contours of my fullness. Ain’t I a bottom?
I savor sexual ease and weightlessness. A quick illustration of how arousing this is for me: most of my recent very serious crushes have at some point in early interactions, usually on a dance floor, picked me up. This unburdening lightness, a less corporeal reality, is too infrequently visited: my body doesn’t read as delicate (or low weight) enough to be swept away, or to be saved, or to be protected. Ain’t I a bottom?
Many Black women are raised to give our apparent struggles the stiff upper lip. We’re told that despite our social, political, and economic realities, we are not to act helpless, or out of control, fearful, or victimized. We’re taught to be loud, and proud, and bigger than the world sees us. And at the end of all of that effort, in my most private and intimate moments, I wish to lay my burdens down. Ain’t I a bottom?
Through patient observation, and comparison among queer peers, I hypothesize that when I’m being conceptualized as a top, it has some to do with my social type, and hometowns, but also lots to do with things which I have little to no access to control. Having been raised in New York City and Massachusetts, where women are fuller bodied, more inclined to wear pants and flat, walking-friendly shoes, and dress more responsively to weather, my gender is differently accented now that I live in LA –– in Angeleno queer spaces, when the temperature drops, and my upbringing reminds me it’s pants season. Growing up in the metropolitan 1990’s, it seemed like most women I knew wore cropped short haircuts, even the Princess of England sported a haircut that might now be seen as fairly queer. I have the option of extending my own kinky-curly hair, and sometimes I do, but the fact that kinky-curls or Black cultural hairstyles aren’t portrayed and perceived as femme, or desirable, at least in the mainstream, just goes to show that we have quite a ways to go in dismantling the anti-Blackness in queer social life.
I am, (currently) short and kinky-curly haired, chubby bellied, small tittied, narrow boned, long, front-to-back voluminous, and limited, timewise, and (to a lesser extent, only recently) financially — and consequently, too invisible in my identity as a femme, and therefore too invisible in my identity as a bottom. Although typically offered in jest, if not lust, I am reminded that I am not adequate or sufficient to deserve care and “best place;” that I am illegible as a femme, as a woman, and it not only insults, badly, it also causes material, social, and economic disprivilege and underprotection. Even most graciously read, marginality aside, the idea that outspoken leader types like myself, should not learn from pain, should not enjoy care, should not find insight in submission, makes for limitations that I do not wish to be governed by.
We must disentangle Blackness from topness. If queer community earnestly aspires towards relief from cis heteropatriarchy cum white supremacy cum hypercapitalism, we must work to provide more holistic and diligent means of care, especially for those who, as a result of those systems, are less likely to be seen, understood, and loved. The conversation that begs disaggregation between gender roles, sex roles, and social performance often halts at personal style and pronouns, but it must go far deeper than that. My actionable here, is that after I finish with this essay, I’ll do some more reading in Black on Both Sides, by C. Riley Snorton. The perils of bottom (or top) believability, the right to determine our sexuality, and the emotional and corporeal dangers of misinterpretation harm many more than I. Queer community is an ecology of care, not a late-phase high school popularity contest: we need new rules or no rules for respectability. The outcome isn’t rank but sustainability.
Most of us could stand to refresh our queer studies and ethics, and this should carry over to who and how we fuck. We must decolonize desire, and therefore, we must disembody desire. We, forward thinking and lusty queers needn’t limit our field of erotic potentiality, because of outdated raced gender presentations and social behaviors, which we, better than anyone, know are premised, at least in part, on the need for survival and access to wealth. When we call up one binary, no matter how playfully, we must answer for them all.
So what are we really saying when I’m categorized as a top? Maybe we’re imagining me in a gleefully dominant act of penetration (although, penetrating lovers doesn’t particularly arouse or get me off, and the dominance/submission in my sex tends to flow in evenly exchanged current). Maybe we’re saying that my gifts of storytelling are so seductive that they imagine it’d be sexually enjoyable for me and my partners if I’d direct sexual encounters, when in reality, I find few things more sexually off-putting, inflagrante, than being asked, or expected, to provide next steps. Not surprisingly, the people who think aloud that I’m a top, aren’t people I’m sexually engaged with. So what is the non-sexual stimulus that leads to this conjecture? Maybe they’re just calling me loud-mouthed and flat chested.
The thing we have to do with binaries is simple, and nuanced. We have to acknowledge that these binaries are limiting, that they limit some more than others and we have to do everything we can to unlearn them, but we cannot be binary blind, all the while reinforcing binaries with queer quips and desire discrimination and refusing to document the harm we enact on the binary’s behalf. We know these binaries fail to reliably predict sexual style or prowess, but we still rely on them to predetermine social outcomes, and prioritize social efforts. It’s not our fault: the canons of Western culture privilege the powerful getting their dicks sucked. But it is our fault: for not problematizing the sociopolitics of our desire. Perhaps we’re so pleased to be at this place in our cultural queer acceptance, that we’d prefer to not disrupt this peace, and perhaps, we have ingratiated ourselves into community we’d imagined to be liberatory, only to once more become hungry for deep and satisfying understanding, connection, and care.
Until this liberation is realized, I’m happy to get a bit switchy during every third Mercury retrograde, but please see this as my formal plea (a stern, yet victimized, proclamation, that is both top and bottom, at once) that when you see me, you see someone who is capable of multiplicity, and softness, and enduring a hard fuck. Ain’t I a bottom? Surely. Either that or nothing at all — I’d find pleasure in the dissolution.
The Invisible Addicts: Addiction and Treatment in Black LGBT Communities
Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.
The first depiction of alcoholism I ever saw on TV was on one of my favorite shows, Degrassi. I grew up watching soap operas and shows that were far more mature than my age should have allowed, but for whatever reason, this Degrassi scene stuck out the most to me.
Ellie was a character that I identified with greatly. She was angsty. She wore black nail polish and those fishnet sleeves. She rolled her eyes constantly. I wanted to be just like her when I got to high school. Ellie’s mother, however, was a different story.
Ellie’s mom is an alcoholic, in episode five of Season Four, “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” we get to see the real repercussions of her mother’s disease. Her mother’s drinking has caused Ellie to start secretly planning to move in with her equally angsty boyfriend, Sean. In this particular episode, Ellie’s mom shows up to a parent-teacher conference drunk and embarrasses her daughter. She’s slurring her words, accosting Ellie’s teachers and even manages to have an offensive interaction with her boyfriend. The truly alarming part of the episode comes when Ellie’s mom passes out drunk while making dinner and almost burns the house down. This is the final straw for Ellie, who moves out shortly after.
This depiction, and many others I’d seen growing up, made me believe that alcoholism was a thing that only affected white families. It was either the trailer park father passed out on his couch surrounded by crushed cans of beer, or the white mother in her kitchen sneaking sips of wine while her family sat in the other room. If teens were involved at all, it was because they were in crisis. Heartbroken, lost friends, abusive parents; they turned to drinking to ease some pain they were too young to deal with — but they were always white.
As I got older, I began to question these depictions and the possible effects they would have on marginalized populations, specifically the black LGBTQ community.
In an article published by The Fix, Dee Young asks the question “Why aren’t more black people in AA?”
“Maybe, in a way, AA is like churches. Even the most liberal churches in the city, Black or white, are almost completely segregated. People say it is the most segregated hour in America. I also think that a lot of minorities have a mistrust of institutions. Who can blame them? Our country has a long history of racism.”
Redlining is a distinctive practice that saw neighborhoods divided into “hazardous” zones with red ink, these zones were mostly populated by low-income, minority residents. This had lasting effects that hindered residents’ abilities to receive fair housing, banking, and finances, as well as the ability to accumulate wealth. In short, redlining divorced black and poor residents from the resources they needed to thrive. I could not find any specific data that linked this historic practice to rehabilitation and other sober living facilities, but it’s not a stretch to believe that better rehab facilities and treatment centers have been more readily available to those that had more money.
When I was a child I remember going to the corner store to get snacks for my brothers and niece, and watching as the group of older black men sat at the counter drinking beers for the day. At that time, I thought it looked so nice to sit with your friends and spend the day together laughing and watching TV. I had no reference for what addiction was even though it was around me constantly.
In the neighborhood I lived in, it was not uncommon to see drug deals and overdoses out in the street. I did not understand the weight of alcoholism and drug addiction on life until I began to struggle with my own problems with alcohol. Since I started young, I considered drinking to be a method of survival. It was a way to get myself to the next day and away from the overwhelming emotion that plagued me at every moment. Like many black girls, I was taught that what I felt was either too much or unimportant; it was to be relegated to the confines of my body and not to be shared with others.
Drinking gave me solace and companionship that I didn’t get from the outside world, it became easy to get lost in it.
Redlining policies make it easier to dehumanize black people, keeping them away from the aid they needed while giving the appearance that the symptoms of their oppression were of their own making. For The Guardian, Brian Broome interviews Erica Upshaw Givner, the founder of Vision Towards Peace. Broome writes
“Back when Upshaw-Givner was working with African-American veterans, pregnant women, and youth on methadone, it was different than it is now. A lot of times, when you look at our counterparts, they want to justify this addiction as, ‘Well, it was just pills. I was in a car accident and one thing led to another.’ But, when our people had those issues, they were still a dopehead or a dope addict and that was the label they had.”
This narrative around black addiction is one that lacks empathy. Black addicts are lead to believe that they don’t have a problem, they are the problem. Addiction is not an issue that can be solved but an inherent part of their being. So then there are no solutions, no work to be done, and people are left suffering, On this, Broome, a black gay man, writes:
“I remember my own psychological self-abuse when I was using drugs. I was just an addict. It was my fault, and there was no way out. I remember knowing for certain that I was no victim of an epidemic. I was just garbage and knowing that made me want to use more. I wondered if I had known that I was just the victim of an epidemic, whether I would have thought differently.”
Broome puts into words what many struggle to; the fear that you are fundamentally not cared for, that your status as an addict and a black person equates to worthlessness. This fear is coupled with a mistrust of institutions that comes from a long history of medical racism and eugenics disguised as treatment, such as the Tuskegee Experiment and the forced sterilization of black women.
Additionally, to be in active addiction and seek help means to force yourself to contend with some of the lowest and most humiliating moments of your life. It requires that you ask for help when you need it, which can seem like an impossible task.
In my own struggle to get sober, I would spend days telling myself that my bottoms were “not that bad.” That the next day I would drink lighter, drink less, have water between glasses. I had a vague sense that I had a problem, but facing that seemed insurmountable. For one, I did not want to become a stereotype. I already faced discrimination and hate for being a black gay woman. I truly believed that struggling with alcohol and going to rehab was “white people stuff.”
If I came out as an addict, it would subject me to even more hardship and bias from the people around me, my family and peers.
I started drinking around the same time I came out of the closet, but it wasn’t until I was 19 that I had my first gay bar experience.
I went to a local bar with my nephew and saw a drag show for the first time. I was immediately alarmed by the sense of community and togetherness I felt in that space. I wasn’t worried about offending straight women by looking at them, or being harassed by straight men. It was wonderful.
For LGBTQ people, our history with addiction is through a complicated lense. Historically, the bar has been more than a meeting place. It’s a place of liberation and political action. Even before the days of Stonewall, the bar was a place for LGBTQ people to seek refuge and share power with one another. Of course, drinking and dancing were a part of these institutions — but so was seeking and enacting change.
Despite police harassment and the criminalization of homosexuality, many gay men and women decided to live their lives fully and out loud. In a post World War II America, gay bars became a place to escape criminalization. For gay and lesbian soldiers that lived their lives in isolation and fear, having a space to be themselves was more than a matter of the community, it was one of life and death. Allison Tate outlines the important history of gay bars in her article for The Advocate:
When AIDS began devastating the gay community in the ’80s, the bars became the places for folks to gather, grieve, and raise money for men dying from the disease. Interviewees credit lesbians for stepping up to care for gay men when nurses wouldn’t touch or feed their patients and for donating blood because gay men weren’t allowed to do so. They also point out how many drag queens did shows for no pay and donated their tips to those suffering from AIDS. ‘I don’t know where we’d be without drag queens and the lesbians,’ says David Coppini, manager of WCPC.
For LGBTQ people, bars were always more than drinking and partying places, so what does addiction look like in our community?
Many factors contribute to a higher percentage of addicts in the LGBTQ community, including stress and discriminatory practices in addiction treatment. The basic complications in LGBTQ addiction and treatment comes down to a question of need. High levels of stress from social prejudice and bigotry leads to anxiety, fear, isolation, anger, and mistrust. This increases the desire or impulse to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Additionally, there are limited treatment services that are knowledgeable about LGBTQ-specific issues and needs when we finally do seek treatment.
A study completed by the NCBI uncovered that out of “854 treatment programs that reported to have specialized treatment services for LGBT people, only 62 confirmed these services actually existed during a telephone follow-up.” An overwhelming percentage of these treatment centers that claim to be specialized are really no different than their non-LGBTQ focused counterparts. What does this mean for LGBTQ people? That we’re being enticed by promises of inclusivity and likely giving money to these centers, only to not have our needs unmet.
This study found that “stigma, intolerance, and open discrimination” were the most major barriers to treatment. These issues touch almost every area of our lives, so of course it comes as no surprise that it persists even in recovery. This same stigma, intolerance, and open discrimination drives many LGBTQ people to drink in the first place, pushing us into bars that have become our only safe haven in a world that shuns us. The gay bar, a space of revolution and solidarity, can at times can become a breeding ground for what is known as “rainbow capitalism.”
Rainbow capitalism is the practice by which many brands shift their outreach and marketing to target and take advantage of LGBTQ consumers. It’s most often, though not only, seen during Pride month. Where there were once floats of local organizations and drag performers, there are now major corporations like Walmart, Wells Fargo — and more notably, alcohol brands. How many of us have gone out to a bar or to a grocery store and seen bottles of vodka adorned with rainbow stripes and graphics? These tacky optics are aimed at creating a sense of belonging and unity toward a community that has long been ostracized and penalized for merely existing. However, these solidarity optics don’t reach far beyond the confines of their wallets.
In 2019, Bud Light debuted its rainbow-striped can in celebration of World Pride month. By purchasing the bottles, Bud Light agreed to donate $1 (up to $150,000) to GLAAD. While this may seem like an act of solidarity and activism, it and many other tactics like it are a way to capitalize off of the dollars of our community. With 20-30% of LGBTQ people being affected by substance abuse compared to 5-10% of the general population, these adverts do more harm than good. They tap into our need to be seen and heard in order to make a profit. If an advertisement makes a certain group feel comforted and accepted, that demographic will be more likely to buy said product.
With many companies like Chick Fil A and Hobby Lobby taking bold anti-LGBTQ stances, it is understandable how one might feel tempted to buy products that seem to champion love and acceptance. I’ve personally been moved or swayed by the emotional tactics employed in these ads, and that’s because they are supposed to make us feel. We are finally seen, finally heard, and so we want to throw our weight behind whatever force is pushing that message. But just as presidential candidates pander by showing up to Pride events in feathered boas or sitting down to eat soul food with black religious leaders, these brands have a singular interest in mind: money.
For black gay addicts, we are pressured at both ends. As members of the LGBTQ community, we are being targeted by predatory alcohol companies. As black people, we are naturally skeptical of any entity that claims to be a “treatment” center. Black people also seemingly aren’t included in conversations centered specifically around alcohol addiction, leading many to believe it isn’t a problem in our community. Black LGBTQ people face several intersections of oppression and discrimination which can make it harder for them to seek treatment. Anti-blackness is global and clouds every institution’s ability to see black people as a human before anything else. We don’t always feel at home in white LGBTQ spaces because of fetishization and racist incidents, and homophobia in the black community pushes us into a space where only we exist to lift each other up. When media, real and fictionalized, does not tell stories that reflect our realities, sometimes even we are incapable of seeing it.
This isn’t to say that there is no hope. There are millions of people in recovery today, many of whom are black or a person of color. As more addicts divorce themselves from the shame and stigma that comes with admitting your addiction to tell their story, more people in need will follow.
One of the only reasons I’m sober today is because people around me talked about it, they extended their hands and hearts to me without knowing it. This was how I knew I could get better. Seeking treatment does not have to be steeped in skepticism or worry. Change can start with even the smallest of us telling the truth. The National Black Alcoholism and Addictions Council is a program committed to “educating the public about the prevention of alcohol and other drug misuses; increasing services for people with alcohol dependency and their families; providing quality care and treatment, and developing research models specifically designed for the African American community.” This and many other organizations are working with addicts to make sure their stories do not end with hopelessness and shame.
The National Black Alcoholism and Addictions Council can be reached at 877-NBAC-ORG (622-2674) or http://www.nbacinc.org. There is help available if you need it. You are not alone.
..The Quiet Lesbian Biography of Lorraine Hansberry
Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.
“Lorraine Hansberry is a problem to me because she is Black, female and dead,” the feminist lesbian writer Adrienne Rich once wrote. She meant it less as a criticism for Hansberry and more as a lament that she was gone so soon and that the work she’d left behind had been adapted by Hansberry’s ex-husband and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff. Rich wondered where Hansberry’s hand ended and where Nemiroff’s began.
“So many of the truths of women’s lives, so much of women’s writings, have come to us in fragments, over time, that for decades their work is half-understood and we have only clues about their real stature,” Rich continued.
The time Rich longed for — that moment where we piece together the works of Lorraine Hansberry to appreciate her real stature — may finally be here.
With increased access to her papers, black feminists are helping “us see [Hansberry] unidealized, unsimplified, in her fullest complexity, in her fullest political context.” Hansberry is afforded that context in Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. We see her unidealized and unsimplified in Tracy Strain’s award-winning documentary, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart and within the pages of Imani Perry’s “third-person memoir,” Looking for Lorraine, Hansberry is given her fullest complexity.
That said, as someone who is interested in how one of the most celebrated black women of her time, grappled with her race, gender and sexuality at the same time, Lorraine Hansberry remains something of a problem for me. The question of her sexuality does not exist in my mind: There is sufficient evidence, both from Hansberry’s own hand and anecdotally from those with whom she interacted socially, that Hansberry was a lesbian. But the how of it all — how did she know, how did she feel about her lovers, how did she reconcile her identities, how did she end up married — we have to piece together in fragments.
Born in 1930, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was the youngest of Carl and Nannie Hansberry’s four children. To those around them, the Hansberrys were inspirational — both parents were college educated with thriving careers, Carl as a real estate mogul, Nannie as a teacher and political activist. However, because they lived in a world that stymied black advancement through segregation and discrimination, the Hansberrys were forced to live in Chicago’s South Side ghettos like everyone else.
Lorraine grew up isolated as a child. As older siblings are wont to do, Lorraine’s refused to spend time with her. Even her parents kept an emotional distance from their daughter: keeping her provided for materially, but refusing to coddle their children, even when sick.
Carl and Nannie Hansberry were not strangers to the harshness of the world. In 1937, they sought to buy a home in a white neighborhood and were inundated with threat as they engaged in three year long legal battle that would ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court. Their utilitarian style of parenting was, seemingly, their way of preparing their children to exist in that world. But Lorraine craved emotional connection, an opportunity lost forever when her father died unexpectedly when she was just 16. In hindsight, it feels as though the rest of her life was a persistent chase for that connection.
While she eschewed a number of her parents’ political ideals — they were purveyors of “respectability politics” before that even was a thing — Lorraine understood activism as part of her calling too. She led the debate team in high school, studied local and global politics and committed herself to becoming a journalist. She graduated from Englewood High School in 1948, intent on attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison, when someone leaves this message in her yearbook:
Dear Lorraine,
These years I’ve known you have been the most wonderful in all my life. You don’t know how I lived for each day when I could come to school each morning and behold your wonderful face. And now that we are parting I don’t know how I will go on. Please hurry back to me Dear one. I would like to murder you.
Yours always,
The signature is scratched out — perhaps intentionally, perhaps not — and, thus the author’s name remains unknown. But while Perry chalks it up to “adolescent melodramatic form,” the note reads queer to me… the byproduct of young love, driven apart by time and chance. It’s the first piece of evidence we’re given that Lorraine might be something other than straight.
Lorraine Hansberry at Freedom magazine, via The Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust
Hansberry didn’t last long in Madison, staying at UW for just two years before dropping out, but she was gifted a tremendous education in those years. She shifted her focus away from journalism and to applied arts. She was exposed to Sean O’Casey, an Irish playwright, who perhaps inspired her style more than anyone else. From O’Casey she drew the boldness to tell very specific stories that exposed “the human personality and its totality.” She’d grown up internalizing the message from her parents that every success and every failure reflected on the race and that made its way into her writing. Through O’Casey she came to understand, as Perry points out, “she didn’t have to think about positive and negative representations but rather simply true ones.”
Hansberry embroiled herself in politics in a way she hadn’t (or couldn’t) before and traveled to Mexico. In the bohemian city of Ajijic, Lorraine found a place to mourn — her father had intended to move his family to Mexico but, instead, he died there — and a place to find peace, surrounded by people more like her… including, presumably, other gay women. That desire to belong may have driven her out of Madison and, ultimately, led her to New York City — first to Greenwich, then to Harlem — in 1950. It’s here that Hansberry’s lesbianism became a fixed (but still hidden) part of her identity.
She found herself in Harlem: becoming a journalist at Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom, joining protests and committing herself to the Communist Party. Her connections brought her to the attention of the FBI. They stripped her of her passport and began their surveillance of her in 1952. Around that same time, she met Robert “Bobby” Nemiroff at a protest against racially discriminatory hiring practices at New York University. He shared her politics, intellectualism and a passion for the arts. He immediately grew smitten, but Lorraine took a bit longer to warm to the idea.
My Dear Bob,
Once again I wrote you a very long letter — the important simple things which it said were that I have finally admitted to myself I do love you, you wide-eyed immature un-sophisticated revolutionary.
Nemiroff didn’t make the earth move, Hansberry wrote in a thinly veiled reference to For Whom the Bell Tolls, but her “sincerest political opinion is that we have reached a point in a truly beautiful relationship — where it may become the fullest kind of relationship between a man and a woman.” They married in June 20, 1953 in Chicago, after having spent the night before protesting the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Their love felt more practical that poetic. He gave her the emotional connection that she craved, financial support when she needed it and kept her her disciplined with her work. I remain uncertain what he got from her in return.
During her periods of loneliness and depression, Hansberry leaned on Nemiroff but also sought refuge in books, particularly Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Though they disagreed on some things, Hansberry found a compatriot on those pages… someone who, like her, rejected expectation and who carved out a space where questions of race, gender and sexuality could exist simultaneously. She’d pen Flowers for the General, wherein a college student named Marcia falls in love with her classmate, Maxine. Marcia tries kill herself when she’s outed to the entire school and Maxine comforts her. Marcia reveals that she knows Maxine’s also attracted to women too. Maxine confirms her attraction but is determined to marry her boyfriend anyway. Basically, Lorraine Hansberry wrote Lost and Delirious… but in 1956.
The next year, Hansberry’s life changed dramatically: She hosted a dinner party to share the first draft of the play that became A Raisin in the Sun and was offer a deal on the spot. She and Nemiroff quietly separated (they wouldn’t divorce until 1964) and Hansberry began her most direct engagement with the queer community to date. She joined the the lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, and would, in November 1958, host the group’s founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon at her home. When DOB began publishing Ladder, a magazine about the lives of lesbian women, she wrote in — first contributing letters signed with her married initials, L.H.N. or L.N., then contributing a short story called “Chanson du Konallis” under the nom de plume, Emily Jones. Those letters would out Hansberry after her death, when The Ladder‘s former editor, Barbara Grier, identified her as the author in 1976. From Hansberry’s second letter to Ladder:
I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced and dissect and analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion. It is time that ‘half the human race’ had something to say about the nature of its existence. Otherwise — without revised basic thinking — the woman intellectual is likely to find herself trying to draw conclusions — moral conclusions — based on acceptance of a social moral superstructure which has never admitted to the equality of women and is therefore immoral itself.
She — or, Emily Jones, rather — would also pen three short stories for ONE, the nation’s oldest magazine featuring the “homosexual viewpoint,” “The Budget,” “The Anticipation of Eve” and “Renascence,” all as Raisin in the Sun worked towards its Broadway debut. As she wrote more queer characters, her desire to experience that life for herself grew and she finally ventured out into lesbian society.
Hansberry went to house parties in the Village and on the Upper East Side with Edith Windsor, Louise Fitzhugh and Patricia Highsmith. In Looking for Lorraine, Perry offers scant details of Hansberry’s love affair with Molly Malone Cook, Renee Kaplan, Dorothy Secules and Ann Grifalconi. Cook would go onto have an epic 40 year romance with poet Mary Oliver but her relationship with Hansberry came first. In fact, Perry suspects that Oliver mentions it, without naming Hansberry outright, in their book, Our World.
[Cook] had… an affair that struck deeply; I believe she loved totally and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad… This love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed — not necessarily badly, but changed. Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much.
Elise Harris provided, perhaps, the best roadmap of Hansberry’s romantic relationships in her 1999 piece for Out magazine, “The Double Life of Lorraine Hansberry.” Without access to Hansberry’s personal musings (those documents weren’t accessible until 2010), Harris reached out to the lesbian community in New York City.
“She was intellectually such a genius that her emotional life didn’t catch up,” Marie Rupert told Harris. “If she had lived longer, there would have been a developing and growing. She would have been more able to cope with the conflicting aspects of her nature.”
Harris goes into detail about Hansberry’s relationship with Renee Kaplan, a two-year affair that began soon after the Broadway debut of Raisin. Kaplan’s recollections paint the image of a Lorraine Hansberry that is unburdened and carefree: relaxing and reading Langston Hughes, building snowmen and making snow angels in the snow. They broke up — “sexually it was not a great relationship,” Kaplan told Harris — but the two remained friends until Hansberry’s death.
There was a similar lightness to Hansberry when she met Dorothy Secules, a resident of the building that Hansberry bought with the money from Raisin. In Secules, Hansberry found a “woman of accomplishment” and someone who loved politics as much as she did but also knew how to have fun.
“The four of us would have grand times,” her friend, Miranda d’Ancona, recalled. “I remember Lorraine lined us up, all three of us, she in front, to teach us [the latest dance]. We all collapsed laughing; it turned into total silliness. That was the part of Lorraine that was so irresistible, where her intellect could take a rest for a while and just enjoy the fun of the evening.”
What we know of Hansberry’s relationship with Secules suggests that it was contentious, in part because Nemiroff sought to maintain his hold on her, but on her deathbed, Harris reports, Hansberry confessed her love for Secules.
As someone who once included her homosexuality on a list of things she liked and hated, it was a final reconciliation of her life’s great truths.
Eight Black LGBTQ Poets to Give Your Flowers To Right Now
Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.
Non-avid readers of poetry, when asked to think about what poetry is, will list off names from the “literary canon.” Usually, these poets are white, male, and deceased. Many of them have been pioneers in craft and form but contrary to popular belief, poetry did not die with them. It continues to be an ever-evolving, changing form.
Poets like June Jordan and Audre Lorde have paved the way and inspired the voices of many black poets for generations; their impact cannot be overstated. However, I’ve noticed we celebrate our poets when they have passed and not as much when they are here on earth with us. We have to recognize the past while giving love and recognition to those we still have.
In a sense, we never really lose a poet. Their work lives on with us through books, memories of seeing them read, or video evidence of performances. Here in 2020, we can start to form new memories and associations with these eight wonderful poets. I believe they are the face of reviving the genre. I always want to push poems on people, so I’m also presenting you with some of their recent or upcoming works. Head to your favorite, local, indie bookstore and pick up a few of the collections on this list before the month is over!
Danez Smith
Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez just released a collection of poetry called Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020), which you can buy and open for a secret surprise! They also are the author of award-winning Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Their first collection, [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.
Why Danez
I first was introduced to Danez Smith when they came to my city to do a reading as a Cave Canem fellow. Immediately I was electrified by their performance energy, voice, and general aura. They co-host one of my absolute favorite podcasts, VS (versus), with poet Franny Choi. It is a hilarious, moving look into poetry as craft and practice through conversations with some of the most dynamic poets of our time. When listening, I’m always struck by Danez’s ability to get to the seed of a thought in a poet, and their ability to make that seed erupt into fruit or flower. The same magic is done in their poems. Smith’s poems often start with an almost conversational voice that sharpens to deliver devastating lines. Many of those lines celebrate the triumph of blackness in a world that wants to shun and harm it.
A Poem to Start With
Come, tonight I declare we must moveinstead of pray. Tonight, east of here,two boys, one dressed in what could be blood& one dressed in what could be bloodbefore the wound, meet & mean mug& God, tonight, let them dance! Tonight,the bullet does not exist. Tonight, the policehave turned to their God for forgiveness.
New or Upcoming Collection
Follow Danez on Twitter
Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary (Graywolf, 2016), winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Bestiary was longlisted for the National Book Award (2016) and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award (2017). She received her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. She’s an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, where she teaches creative writing.
Why Donika
I began reading Donika Kelly’s collection Bestiary after I had finished my own manuscript of poetry. It’s a stunning collection that handles grief and abuse through images of mythical beasts and creatures. The first poem I had ever read by her is the one I have linked below, and to this day I recite parts of it to myself as I move throughout my life. The action of writing her name in the sand, the syllables perfectly timed, can carry me through a bad moment. Kelly’s poetry often takes the reader into the dark territory but emerges with understanding and love. Bestiary as a collection is imaginative, stunning, and leaves the reader in an almost meditative state, contemplating the lasting effects of trauma on the mind and the language we use. It as anchored by love poems written from the perspective, or out of the perspective of different mythical creatures: werewolves, centaurs, mermaids, etc. These poems allow the speaker to say the unsayable, which is a confrontation many poets come to at some point in their careers; how to write the hard poem. Bestiary is a masterclass in writing the hard poem.
A Poem to Start With
The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings
To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, whitepetals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I amin love.
Collection to Read
Follow Donika on Twitter
Justin Phillip Reed
Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet and essayist. He is the author of Indecency (Coffee House Press, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, and a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second full-length collection of poetry, The Malevolent Volume, will be released in April 2020. He is the 2019-2021 Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Reed received his BA in creative writing at Tusculum College and his MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as Junior Writer-in-Residence.
Why Justin
This poem linked below is one of incredible sight, one that rings with a painful truth that many black women know. To be seen in such a way by someone who is not a black woman is necessary and fraught with emotion. Reed’s poetry is poignant and filled with that same sense of urgency depicting vivid and imaginative pictures of black life. Some of his poems feel like sermons, others read with playfulness and musicality that is a sign of reverence for language. The images in his poems are so vivid and jarring at times that reading them silently, I can feel the tension in my mouth and body. That visceral reading experience is rare and deserves to be celebrated.
A Poem to Start With
Pushing Up Onto Its Elbows, the Fable Lifts Itself Into Fact
Collection to Read
Unlike missing Black girls, taking Black girls is a Western custom. It seems likely that such a statement will soon appear inaccurate: the white space in new textbook editions will have nothing to say about it, if the white spaces behind those textbooks have anything to say about it. That Black girls are quintessential American palimpsests is not a question but an anxiety. _________ would rather forget that Black girls were made receptacles for what the authors of Liberty and Independence would not speak.
Angel Nafis
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012) and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. She earned her BA at Hunter College earned her MFA at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is also a Cave Canem fellow, like many of the other poets on this list. With poet, musician, artists and partner Shira Erlichman, she started the ODES FOR YOU TOUR. Along with poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an “internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo.” Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Why Angel
I found Angel Nafis on twitter through interactions with Danez Smith, and a few months later a friend bought me a copy of the BreakBeat Poets’ Black Girl Magic volume, in which one of Angel’s poems was published. What I love about her work is that everything feels so excruciatingly timed and rhythmic. This may be a by-product of being versed in both spoken word poetry and page poetry, and also just being an incredibly observant poet. So much of my enjoyment of poetry is the rhythm, so it is lovely to be able to read a poet that values it as well. Even her poems without punctuation still read with an ease and delicacy that makes you forget you haven’t seen a comma or a period at all. Her hold on the glory of language is palpable and that makes each word feel like something to reckon with. The line in this poem “lacerated like a web” actually makes you feel the laceration; it’s evocative and painful, you can feel your body curling into the bruise of it. That’s damn good writing.
A Poem to Start With
Angel bowled over like a promise.Angel howling, adhered to a ribbon of prayer.Angel, splayed like a galaxy.Angel, viscera smooth and glistening.Angel, dilated like a cashed check.
Collection to Read
Follow Angel on Twitter
kemi alabi
kemi alabi has been published by The Boston erview, The Rumpus, Guernica, Catapult, Black Warrior Review, Best New Poets 2019, The BreakBeat Poets vol. 2 and other publications. Their debut collection The Lion Tamer’s Daughter will be published by YesYes Books in August 2020
Why kemi
The poem I’ve chosen here is the only one that links to a book and not a poem, and that’s because I really think you should read this poem as it appears in the context of this book. kemi alabi is a poet I think about a lot, and I can’t wait for their collection to come out this year. They are an expert deliverer of gut-punching lines and stanzas. Whether writing in form or in free verse, you get the sense that alabi has physically endowed every word with an immeasurable force by hand. Lines land with a loud thunk, though the weight does not negate the grace. The staccato-esque style in which this poem is written allows for each word to carry its own weight, the spareness of words compared to the white space on the page makes sure the words are doing the heavy lifting.
A Poem to Start With
Mr. Hotep Says #Blacklivesmatter and He’d Kill a Dyke
the dyke within
tires of
the nigger without.
sick of rope
when the brick
calls her name
same blood,
same alley,
wrong hands,
wrong headline.
New or Upcoming Collection
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (YesYesBooks, Forthcoming 2020)
Follow kemi on Twitter
Dawn Lundy Martin
Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual-video artist. She is the author of Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017), Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015) – which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011), and A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007). Martin is a professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She’s also the recipient of a 2018 NEA Grant in Creative Writing.
Why Dawn
Dawn Lundy Martin is a legendary poet who’s work I’ve admired for years. Her poems are warm and urgent, and depict the trials and triumphs of life as a black person and a queer person. Martin is currently the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics of the University of Pittsburgh, a program that builds off of the legacy of collectives like Cave Canem which seek to uplift and amplify the voices of black poets worldwide. When it comes to championing young black poets, Martin is certainly doing the work. Her poems often visit the violence that happens in domestic scenes and how the idea and space of a home can be tainted.
A Poem to Start With
Dear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’re beached and bloated, lieon shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’s Long Island, and the weatheris fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man?
Collection to Read
Rickey Laurentiis
Rickey Laurentiis was “raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark.” They are the recipient of many fellowships and foundational support including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded him a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. Laurentiis received an MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis and a Bachelor’s in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. Laurentiis was the inaugural fellow for the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Fellowship and is currently working on their next collection of poetry on desire and pleasure.
Why Rickey
Rickey has been described as a “magician who can slow down time” and that description is very apt. You get the sense that whatever object they have presented before you is being stripped to it’s most naked form. The language drips and covers. Each poem uncovers something different about the reader’s own mode of thinking, they can serve as an interrogation and as a balm. I have been intrigued by their meditation on penetration in their poetry, both as a queer sex act and an act of violence. The poem I’ve chosen here pairs incredible violence with the tender act of the speaker almost reaching out to lick the feet of the men who have been murdered for their desire for each other. This image strikes me as reclamation and a way of praising the dead.
A Poem to Start With
This was my eyes’ closed-eyed visionThis is what a darkness makesAnd how did I move from that distance to intimacySo close I could seeThe four soles of their feet so close I was kneeledCould lickThose feet as if I was because I becameThe fire who abided
Collection to Read
Xandria Phillips
Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. They have received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Wisconsin Institute. Their poetry has been featured in American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Their first book, Hull was published by Nightboat Books in 2019.
Why Xandria
This poem is a sexual delight that chronicles an experience that is common to many LGBTQ people – leaving a vibrator on through the night. It’s a meditation on pleasure and intimacy that will leave you wanting more poems, more power. Phillips’ work often deals with that intimacy and the greater question of being a vulnerable person in the world. Their poems confront the history and the present together in the same room, while discussing the intricacies of being a black queer person in a post-colonial world.
A Poem to Start With
Ode to a Vibrator Left On All Night
Remember the animal that after escaping,
returns to captivity. Choice crushed mybody into shapewear. Want for motion
free of direction folded me into carswith strangers. I want when I want, and then
I wish for corrosion. This man and I bothnameless as rust in scrap metal garages
of memory. I am too versedto lavish praise on stamina alone,
but I must admit, my girl has bars.
New or Upcoming Collection
Follow Xandria on Twitter
Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: February’s Revolutionary Hope
Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.
Well friends, with February comes Black History Month and, for me, a mix of frustration and… frustration. While I certainly take advantage of any and all opportunities to celebrate being Blackity Black Black Black, the longstanding framing of any sort of history is straight men doing things. And when it comes to Black history, ours is often framed as “the first Black person to be in a white space” as opposed to a centuries long legacy of continuously disturbing the peace.
Black History 101 notes that the month-long commemoration was borne out of Carter G. Woodson’s desire to honor Fredrick Douglass’ and Abraham Lincoln’s birth month. What may be lesser known is that Black History Month is for us, for Black folks. Woodson’s focus was on community uplift and in generating a foundational, empowering knowledge in our own history. So often, approaches to history are about these lone figures divorced from the radicality and community of their time. I am a firm believer that our internal, intra-community work should begin by focusing on our own knowledge and healing. As Toni Morrison, Black genius and recent ancestor, once said: “the function, the very serious function of racism… is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being.”
This is what I mean about centering Blackness as part of a practice of self and communal liberation. If the lesson of last month’s “Uses of the Erotic” was self-confrontation as an act of radical love, then February’s selections tell us to turn that unwavering gaze to our communities as an act of “revolutionary hope.” I’m pairing Lorde’s 1984 conversation with James Baldwin and, arguably, her best-known speech, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in the hopes of generating a community conversation between Black queer folks, not unlike that of Baldwin and Lorde.
In “Revolutionary Hope,” the eternal brilliance of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin graced Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts with what can only be deemed a calling in. Their discussion covered intra-racial violence, sexism, homophobia and more as they sought out the origins of so much Black marginalization.
James Baldwin: Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you. That’s why we’re sitting here.
Audre Lorde: I don’t, honey. I’m sorry, I just can’t let that go past. Deep, deep, deep down I know that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out – out – by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.
This conversation takes place three years before Baldwin passed away. I’m still surprised that, so late in his life, Baldwin remained invested in ideas of an American dream whose farce had been disproved so many times over. What’s so beautiful about Lorde’s response is the firmness of her rebuttal and the way she identifies her strategy for living — to fiercely and openly carve out a place for herself at whatever the cost. Whether she survived or didn’t, it would be in the fullness of her truth as an out Black lesbian.
JB: We are behind the gates of a kingdom which is determined to destroy us.
AL: Yes, exactly so. And I’m interested in seeing that we do not accept terms that will help us destroy each other. And I think one of the ways in which we destroy each other is by being programmed to knee-jerk on our differences. Knee-jerk on sex. Knee-jerk on sexuality…
JB: I don’t quite know what to do about it, but I agree with you. And I understand exactly what you mean. You’re quite right. We get confused with genders – you know, what the western notion of woman is, which is not necessarily what a woman is at all. It’s certainly not the African notion of what a woman is. Or even the European notion of what a woman is. And there’s certainly not [a] standard of masculinity in this country which anybody can respect. Part of the horror of being a Black American is being trapped into being an imitation of an imitation.
For both Baldwin and Lorde, the beauty is in the rigor. Their disagreements and differing positionalities are apparent throughout the conversation; but what is also constant is their clear love and respect for one another, the type of fierce, queer love that requires folks to challenge and better each other. One particular instance that stands out to me is how Lorde doesn’t allow the overlaps of Blackness and queerness to obscure some internalized misogyny that Baldwin makes apparent throughout “Revolutionary Hope.”
AL: But we have to define ourselves for each other. We have to redefine ourselves for each other because no matter what the underpinnings of the distortion are, the fact remains that we have absorbed it. We have all absorbed this sickness and ideas in the same way we absorbed racism. It’s vital that we deal constantly with racism, and with white racism among Black people – that we recognize this as a legitimate area of inquiry. We must also examine the ways that we have absorbed sexism and heterosexism. These are the norms in this dragon we have been born into – and we need to examine these distortions with the same kind of openness and dedication that we examine racism.
I first happened upon this conversation in the early days of Tumblr(!), and now, so many years and reads later, I realize that what has most intrigued me is how these two could hold one another to task in such a way that it deepened and didn’t end the conversation. It’s a methodology-in-action that is the prequel to “The Master’s Tools.”
In that speech, Lorde recounts an experience at an NYU humanities conference and the relegation of Black feminists and lesbians to one panel within the entire conference. Although the subjects of her critique are White feminists, particularly at the moment of feminism becoming a permanent fixture in academia, her critique echoes the cautions she voiced against Baldwin’s belief in the American Dream. She famously warns against Black folks’ adopting the methods of their oppressors.
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
Within both readings, Lorde’s position remains constant: Our power and our freedom lie in our ability to embrace our differences as the source of our collective strength. She goes on to say:
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of differen[t] strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”
I think it’s easy to fall prey and misread “The Master’s Tools” as a critique that’s brutal as it is beautiful in its truth. But much like the Baldwin conversation, the framework of revolutionary hope is crucial. As with all liberation struggles, the commonality is a belief that we can do better, that we can live freely and openly, that we can do right by one another. For this Black History Month and beyond, I hope we can take our cue from Lorde and do the difficult work of calling each other in as Black people, as queer folks, and as members of so many divergent and overlapping communities.
Here’s one last quote to meditate on, for good measure:
“Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
Have you enacted your own reckonings with yourself and your community? What does that look like for you? What have your experiences been? Please let me know in the comments!
The Dyke Kitchen: Diaspora Co. Queers Your Spice Cabinet
The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.
“How do you use Instagram as a part of your art practice?” one of my friends asked me one morning as I was stirring my pot of oatmeal. I paused to think about what I’m truly on there looking for, how all the images I see and put up create a narrative about the world I tune into.
There are illustrations of hot Asian skater girls with scraped knees smoking cigarettes from @helllllenjjjjjo, an audiogram from my friend’s new podcast episode on power and the body, adrienne marie brown’s selfie face, queer parties, art parties, drag shows, chocolate chip cookies, many shots of pages of books. I do think about my Instagram feed as a form of world-building, even if my own self-projections are pretty basic, and so it was no surprise that it’s how I came across Sana Javeri Kadri and her radical spice company, Diaspora Co., there. It fits perfectly in my world.
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Part of that is because, as Javeri Kadri will tell you, she’s a powerhouse at marketing, and a professional photographer, who, I’ll say, takes gorgeous photos. She started Diaspora Co. in Oakland, CA in 2017 because she saw an opportunity to provide well-sourced turmeric, from small farmers in India to the kinds of people who care about what they eat and where it comes from. I’m from Oakland, I’m half-Indian, I’m queer, I’m into food as politics: I’m one of those people.
I saw a photo of a friend-of-a-friend modeling a Diaspora Co. tote, and got totally reeled in by the ethos of decolonizing the spice trade in India. Javeri Kadri partners with small farmers who would not be able to work with giant spice companies, who sustainably grow things like organic, single-origin, heirloom strains of turmeric, black pepper, chilies, and cardamom. Diaspora buys directly from farmers, which gives them a much higher cut, and means we get the spices at their freshest, with madly potent flavor.
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I wanted to talk to Javeri Kadri because she’s excellent at what Toni Cade Bambara proclaims is the job of the cultural worker: she makes the revolution irresistible. “I wanted my own little esoteric, queer island,” Javeri Kadri says. I wanted to know how she made that island, how her past relationships with food, family, culture, race and her queerness all merged to prepare her for this radical business. We spoke over the phone on what was a cozy evening in LA and a bustling morning for Javeri Kadri in Mumbai. She shared with me some of the personal history that led her to Diaspora Co.
Javeri Kadri grew up in Mumbai, and food played a big role in her life from the start. She tells me about a kindergarten graduation party, where nobody could find her to take a group photo, and it was because she was hidden away, eating all the bowls of popcorn for the celebration afterward. “My dad had to hide whole fishes from me at the table, or else I’d eat it all before he even got it,” she says matter of factly. “My food identity always existed, but I didn’t know that it was possible for my queer identity to exist until later.”
However, when Javeri Kadri looks back, her queer beginnings are easily revealed. “I grew up fairly wealthy, but sometimes the very rich kids, they’d get copies of Teen Vogue and we would go to the paper recycler, and get old copies for ten rupees. I’d then very methodically cut out the Abercrombie & Fitch models and put them up on the wall, and I knew I was enamored of them, this happened for years.”
Javeri Kadri remembers when she was in sixth grade and there was a girl who she knew she wanted to be her best friend. “One day she held my hand after for lunch from the first floor to the third floor to our class. I never thought of it as, ‘we’re going to get married’, I didn’t think of it as romantic love, it was just the feeling that we were going to be best friends for the rest of our lives. So it caused me a lot of turmoil when she held someone else’s hand the next day! I felt so wronged and rejected by so many girls for so long, and of course, now I know why, it’s because I wanted something more than they did.”
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The more I hear, the more I get the sense that Javeri Kadri is someone naturally inclined to want something more, and figure out her own way to do it. Javeri Kadri did eventually discover the possibility of queerness when she went to high school at the prestigious and famously progressive United World College — “I’m the perfect product of my school: crunchy, queer, wacky, believes in world peace” — but she took a while to come out to her parents.
She comes from a tight family unit that she loves, and had internalized messages that being queer was a toxic Western value. “Subconsciously I knew that it would sever me from these families and cultures that I wanted to be a part of.” When she did come out it was when she was 22, and it was for someone she was dating, which she now realizes wasn’t the right way to do it. “White women were like, ‘Just come out!’, but third culture and POC kids, we need help and support. You have to do it on your own terms, and you can stand to the side of it as long as you need, it’s a revolving door.”
“I saw that people like us, the brown people who run kitchens and the food industry, weren’t represented and I didn’t feel comfortable expressing myself in that space. But that’s changed since 2016.”
Though it’s been a source of struggle, Javeri Kadri seems to adeptly navigate the role being an outsider who is inside, and finds power there. Since age16, she’s worked in every aspect of the food industry imaginable — “line cook, waitress, farm agriculture, ice cream delivery truck” — and when she came to the U.S. when she was 18, she says the food industry gave her a crash course in the racial dynamics of America. “I saw that people like us, the brown people who run kitchens and the food industry, weren’t represented and I didn’t feel comfortable expressing myself in that space. But that’s changed since 2016.”
Javeri Kadri was doing marketing for a boutique, high-end grocery store, when she realized that she needed to start her own project. “All the white people at work seemed so comfortable bringing their moms to work, and showing them around because they felt a natural belonging to this high-end food world. My mom is a super accomplished badass architect and I had one of the best educations available in India, and I still felt like we didn’t belong? And I was what, shooting citrus all day? It was clear across the board that I wasn’t feeling comfortable with who I was or where I was.”
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In that way, Diaspora Co. is the place where Javeri Kadri’s truest identities collide. She can support farmers in India and spend more time there, be part of a socially-conscious food movement in the U.S. (she mentions that her Oakland community and her People’s Kitchen Collective family have always believed in Diaspora Co, even when she hasn’t) and give people the tastes of home that grocery stores don’t offer. Javeri Kadri is also open about her queer identity as part of the brand. “It immediately signals your values and ethics, it tells people what you care about. I’ve had older customers be like ‘Why do you have to bring sex into it?’ but other people want products that are relevant to them.” The company has grown massively, by 600 times, in the past two years, so she’s clearly not wrong.
Finally, Javeri Kadri has found Instagram to be an incredibly useful networking tool. She’s met a lot of her food industry contacts and heroes that way. “It’s a great equalizer. I’m competing with intergenerational American wealth and old boy’s clubs that I don’t even know exist because I only moved here 7 years ago. So Instagram is my new girls club,” she says with a laugh.
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It’s also a place where her practice is beautiful, visible, clear. “Something needed to change,” Javeri Kadri said when I first asked about the origins of Diaspora Co., and it’s inspiring to follow her as she makes those changes, with every new farmer, new chili, new snack, new post with her girlfriend, Rosie Russell, new admission of human vulnerability. It’s a practice that livens up my feed, my food, and also brings actual people together — my own sister and my parents now text me to report on the ways they use the Diaspora Co. chilies, turmeric, and pepper I gave them for Christmas. Following Javeri Kadri makes my own esoteric, queer island feel even more viable every time I get a glimpse of hers, and if I can get that on Instagram, I feel like we’re doing something right.
Black, Queer, and Here Without Apology: The History of BLK and Black Lace Magazines
Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.
“Where the news is colored in on purpose.” That was motto of BLK Magazine.
In 1988, the first issue of BLK was published in Los Angeles by Alan Bell. Bell, who got into the world of queer indie media by overseeing the publication of Gaysweek in New York between 1977 and 1979, designed it to be a safe haven for black gays and lesbians that would rival the titans of black publishing – JET, Ebony, or Essence. In 2014 Bell told Dr. Kai M. Green, whose dissertation “Into the Darkness: A Black Queer (Re)Membering of Los Angeles in a Time of Crisis” remains one of the few lengthy studies of the magazine, that he wanted to create “a Black magazine for gay people and not a gay magazine about Black people.” The distinction is important.
There’s been a lot of talk online lately about the so-called death of queer media. I say “so-called” not because isn’t a brutal time to be working for independent media, and especially for media that caters to LGBTQ+ communities that have not often been valued by the mainstream, but because calling for our death implies that this is the end. There has been gay media for as long as there have been communities of gay people. Our stories have to be told, and there will be those who’ll be there to record them. That’s not going to change. The premature call of our demise flattens that important history; we’ve reached back and carried each other before, we will do it again.
In his pocket of queer black Los Angeles in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, for communities that were facing all but a genocide in the wake of HIV/AIDS, Alan Bell took up that mantle. When BLK first published, it was a 16 page black-and-white newsletter with a circulation of roughly 5,000. By the time the end of its publication, it had grown into a 40 page magazine with full color covers, a paid subscriber base, national product advertisement, and global distribution reaching 37,000 people. It told our stories.
And that history is foundational. It gets into our core and changes how we see ourselves. In 2020, when we talk about the Stonewall Uprising – widely considered to be the start of the modern gay rights movement – it’s become more common (though still, not nearly enough) to uplift the names of the black and brown trans women like Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who were at the frontlines of that fight. In fact, the duo finally have a statue in their honor in front of the club. But in June 1989, a date squarely at the center of Stonewall’s active white-washing of history, BLK honored it’s 20th Anniversary with this letter from the editor by Mark Haile:
In the retelling of the tale, history has become myth and desperation is remembered as romance. Changes and omissions, whether accidental or intentional, are nothing new in American History when it concerns people of color, gays or women.
And the Stonewall Legend does concern people of color. If that sultry weekend’s street theater is to be regarded as the launching pad of the modern gay rights movement, then it is essential for us to know the key players who started it all: drag queens, hustlers, jailbait juveniles, and gay men and lesbians of color. The out casts of gay life thus showed homosexual America how to make a fist, fight back, and win self-respect.
It would take yet another 20 years before the majority of LGBT media would catch back up. I realize of course that you are reading this from the pages of a queer independent media company, so I probably don’t have to convince you, but this is why having independent media is so vital. If we aren’t telling our stories, and telling them the right way, lifting up those who are “the out casts of gay life” and pointing out who does the work that the rest of us get to reap the benefit of, then who will?
In addition to having black lesbians on the editorial staff of the mothership magazine; BLK also created a spin-off, Black Lace, an erotic magazine for women. (There was also Blackfire, an erotic magazine for men; Kuumba a co-sexual poetry journal; and Black Dates, a calendar of events across queer Southern California). Black Lace sadly only was in print for four issues – though that’s not much worse off than Kuumba’s five issue run – and I am once again indebted to Dr. Green, who was able to go through the issues as a part of his work.
In the inaugural issue of Black Lace, editor Alycee J. Lane opened with a letter that grapples with what it means to talk about black women’s queer sexuality publicly:
FINALLY! BLACK LACE AFTER TOO many late night and early morning conversations and political debates and asking should I? Or shouldn’t I? And worrying about the devastating infinite measurements of political ‘correctness’ and meditating on what it means, feels like to be an African American lesbian loving other African American lesbians, sex and multiple orgasms, knowing—do you hear me? –knowing that we have been and continue to be sexual animals to the Amerikan imagination, working our asses off to prove the perversion of that imagination all the while internalizing the frigid Victorian sensibility of no sex, I don’t think about sex, I don’t want sex, I don’t even know what my own pussy looks like.
It’s the last line that I’ve come back to most. “I don’t even know what my own pussy looks like.” It somehow both breaks my heart to think of a woman who’s risking so much to be herself and love and fuck openly with whomever she pleases, and still not knowing what her own body looks like intimately; and also makes me so unspeakably grateful for the Alycee Lanes past who wrote like this so I could sit here as an editor of a publication that writes openly about dildos and strap-ons and orgasms three to four times a week. So much of what we take for granted as queer women, even as black queer women who don’t always have much, that we can reach with our fingertips – others had to claw at with their open palms and pray to hold on. (Fun fact! Black Lace’s second issue actually took on my favorite subject – Dildos!)
I first discovered the covers for BLK in a Twitter thread about a month ago and the images stayed with me. It’s so easy for our history to get lost, to slip away. When I originally mapped out this Black History Month post, I thought it was going to end triumphant. I wanted to tell you how ecstatic I was to “discover” this black queer history. And I am! But I’m also somehow… wistful? Perhaps melancholy?
BLK stood on its own for six years and 41 issues. Black Lace lasted half of a year on four issues. Autostraddle has been here for a decade, which in gay years might as well be a millennia. I’m really proud to stand on the shoulders of Alan Bell and Alycee Lane; I feel connected and kinship with them – imagining that they had a lot of the same gay and dyke drama, and money drama (always, always money drama) that I have with my writers now. I think of the small office in Los Angeles that was BLK’s home and wonder what it would look like alive today. Would it feel the same frenzied, hilarious energy that I share with Autostraddle’s black writers whenever Young M.A releases another video of her licking her lips?
What I said earlier in this piece is absolutely true. I know that queer media isn’t dying, because storytellers don’t die. Just this morning, I was able to commission a black trans woman to write about Zaya Wade’s coming out. I know that it’s my job to hold the line for as long as I can, and then make way for the next person to do the same. But I guess today I am a little bit sad anyway. I want a thousand more issues of Black Lace. Sometimes its very tiring to figure out the road there.

Always In The Middle: On Being Biracial & Bisexual
For most of my life, I have been loudly introducing my ethnicity. It usually starts because of my name. After it gets mispronounced a few times — Kirsten? Kristen? Katharine? — there is almost always a comment about it being “unique” or “exotic” followed by a perplexed look and me explaining that my name is Punjabi because my dad is from — surprise — Punjab, India.
On the one hand, part of me appreciates these conversations. They are a jumping off point to explaining my racial identity because it’s not readily apparent. It gives me a moment to explain how my dad emigrated from India, arrived in Canada, and eventually met my mom. But at the same time, I envy people who don’t regularly get a mini interview just from announcing their name. And while I understand the enormous privilege I have from being white passing, sometimes I wish I didn’t have to explain my ethnicity to anyone and that it was apparent just by looking. Instead I often feel like I have to prove my ethnicity and while I am happy to share a photo of my parents at their two weddings, one Sikh, one Anglican, it can be a little exhausting.
Growing up biracial has felt like one long balancing act. At 16 I was on vacation visiting my dad’s side of the family. The entire trip had felt fraught with racial tension. Somehow being amongst all of my cousins I felt like I didn’t belong — to this day I joke that I am the “white sheep” in the family. I was the only one who doesn’t speak Punjabi beyond a few words and their constant jokes about “goras” felt like a personal attack (though, now, as an adult I understand that it wasn’t, and instead was a response to the frequent racism that they dealt with from white people). My uncle ranted that bringing up his children in Canada had left them disconnected from their heritage and that they couldn’t even name different types of daal — ironically that was one thing I could do. The subject of “losing your culture” came up over and over again as though living in Canada meant that my family had to give up every aspect of their Indian identity.
Photo of Kirthan as a kid, via the author.
At one point a very distant relative asked me if I was “white washed.” I didn’t know how to respond. I already look white. I am part white. Admittedly most of the culture that I consume is from white people. I grew up listening to grunge and alternative music, a genre that is overwhelmingly white. And while some of my favourite TV shows have been lauded for having diverse casts (thank you, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), most of Hollywood still puts white people front and centre even in roles that are meant for people of colour — looking directly at you, Scarlett Johansson.
But does that negate all the Indian culture that is such a deep part of my identity? Does it erase the hours spent trying to learn Punjabi, the weekends spent at gurdwaras and reception halls in Brampton and Mississauga? What about the Indian friends that were practically family? Did they not count either? My upbringing was a mix of mainstream Western culture on one hand, with Punjabi food, music, and movies, on the other. Just to make things more complicated, my dad had taught my mother how to cook so all of the daal, roti, sabzi, and saag that I grew up eating night after night was actually cooked by the only white person in my family. I had no idea how to answer that question in a way that wouldn’t feel like I was betraying some part of my identity.
Being asked that question is not only insulting but it’s impossible to answer. Am I supposed to choose between my mother and my father? Am I supposed to pick only one ethnicity out of the two that make me and ignore the other? How can I pick one when I am always both things? It is not a switch that I can turn on and off. When I am around Indian people I don’t suddenly become 100% Indian. When I am around white people, I don’t become 100% white. I am always me and I will always be both.
Strangely enough, it is often when I’m only with one group or the other that it feels like my ethnicity comes into play. Around Desis my difference is obvious. Almost every time I am at a party wearing traditional Punjabi clothing I wonder if someone thinks I’m just a white girl playing dress up. But being around groups of just white people is tricky. It seems that when you get a lot of white people together there’s always someone who takes it as an opportunity to casually reveal that they are racist. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to speak up when an acquaintance of mine would randomly drop a slur against South Asians and then react with shock when I explain my background.
Being asked to choose feels as though I am expected to erase a part of myself and discard it, as if it were worthless. I could easily go through life as a white woman but I know it would wear on my soul to deny my Punjabi roots. At the same time, I don’t want to pretend as though I am all Indian all the time. My mom’s English-Scottish heritage might not be as exciting to most people, but it’s equally important to me. I want to feel tied to both cultures and I’ve finally realized that I can take my time with each one. As with all things, one side is not more worthy than the other. It all matters. It’s all equal.
While I came to this conclusion about my ethnicity several years ago, it’s only recently that I realized this way of thinking also applies to my sexual identity. I’m bisexual. I’m interested in men, women, trans and non-binary people. But while my ethnicity has always been a straightforward fact, my sexual identity took on a much different learning curve.
I didn’t come out as bisexual until I was 32, in part because it took me that many years to realize that my sexuality was real. I spent most of my life being attracted to men and believing that my attraction to other people was just curiosity. After all, in the late 90s and early 2000s, bisexuality was generally regarded as either a passing experiment, being in the closet (ie. the belief that most bi people are actually gay and just afraid to fully come out), or non-existent (dishonorable mention to Sex and the City for having an entire episode dedicated to questioning the orientation of a bisexual character).
When I look back at the years in which women, in particular, were labelled “bicurious”, told that they were just “pretending” as a way to attract men, or that they were going through a phase, it’s no wonder I was so confused. It was that kind of thinking that made me spend years telling myself, “Sure I’ve had sex with women but I’m mostly straight!” I can’t count how many times I had an experience with a woman only to come up with some sad reason that it didn’t count and I wasn’t “really” queer.
After watching Cruel Intentions a few too many times, my first kiss with a girl at age 14 left me wondering if maybe we were just practicing or treating it like a one off experiment. Years later I found threesomes to be a comfortable way to explore having sex with women but somehow decided that the mere presence of a man discounted anything I had done with a woman (does eating pussy really count if you’re being fucked by a dude at the same time?) It still took several years after sleeping with women one on one to make me realize that I am, in fact, queer as the day is long.
Oddly enough the same thinking that helped me make peace with my heritage — acknowledging that I am both Caucasian and South Asian at all times — somehow didn’t always translate to my sexuality. I genuinely thought that I had to be equally attracted to the same gender and other genders to be a “real” bisexual. Instead my attraction varies widely. At times I feel like I’m boy crazy and I’m only a little attracted to women. Other times I feel queer as fuck but in the back of my mind I know that I still have some attraction to men.
My sexuality is completely fluid, ebbing and flowing in ways that are a mystery even to me sometimes. The only thing I know for sure is that just like my ethnicity, my sexuality is real and it is valid. I don’t have to quantify it or prove it in any way. Instead I literally go with the flow. I go out on dates with whomever I’m interested in, I hook up with the people I find attractive. I’ve finally started to feel like I can take up space in queer settings without feeling like a tourist. As I’ve learned to embrace my queer identity, it finally feels like a real part of who I am.
While I have enormous privilege in being both white passing and straight passing, these elements that make my life easy in many ways also cause me to feel like an imposter in my own communities. Although I don’t speak Punjabi, I do know what’s being said when people stare at me and murmur, “What’s that gori doing here?” every time I’m at a function. As much as I wish I could reply with a snappy comeback, I’ve found that ignoring the comments and having a good time is the best thing I can do for myself. If people are going to make assumptions about me, I’m not overly inclined to reach out to them. Instead I find my friends and family and spend time with the people who welcome me as I am.
As far as my sexuality goes, I am certainly not the first bisexual woman who has fretted over being “not queer enough.” While it’s somewhat frustrating, I have decided that the best way to feel confident about my identity is to announce it whenever I get the chance. Online meme culture has had a surprisingly positive impact on how I represent myself. I share jokes that question how a bisexual person can be attracted to everyone and yet be perpetually single. In person, I correct people when they assume that I am only dating men. These acts are small but doing them over and over helps me to convey who I really am. I note my queerness and ethnicity whenever and wherever I can. I use it to start conversations, mostly so that other people who are in the same boat know that they aren’t alone.
I have finally learned to accept all aspects of myself. Perhaps my identity oscillates at times but in a world that attempts to force me to choose one side of a binary, I remain firmly in the middle. I cannot and will not choose just one thing. I won’t erase any part of me. After years of struggling to answer the question, “What are you?” I have finally realized that I have an answer. I am biracial. I am bisexual. I am complete.
Edited by Kamala
Zaya Wade Is Trans and Loved: Dwyane Wade Shares 12-Year-Old’s Coming Out with Ellen
In an appearance today on The Ellen Show, retired NBA star Dwyane Wade cements himself as a real life model for all parents of LGBT kids when he details his support of his child, Zaya.
Fair warning, though, you might need some tissues.
We’ve watched Zaya’s emergence through the eyes of her famous parents, Wade and model/actress/all-around badass Gabrielle Union. They’ve been nothing but supportive. We saw the family accompany Zaya to Miami Pride in April. In September, Wade’s eldest son Zaire created family “Pride” themed shirts for donations to GSLEN (Gabrielle captioned her photo of them with the hashtag #StopKillingBlackTransWomen). We’ve seen Wade clap back at trolls who dared to criticize his child’s fierce nails and fashion.
Last month, a photo popped up on social media of Pose stars Angelica Ross and Hailie Sahar ringing in the new year with Gabrielle. It wasn’t an accident, but a reflection of the friendships that have been forged and deepened by the Wades as they sought out support to be better allies for Zaya. Both Ross and Sahar have been candid about, not just their trans experience, but their experience with their families’ initial reactions: Sahar talks about it in a new BET web series called “In My Truth” and Ross and her mother appeared on Black Women OWN the Conversation in a segment that left me in tears.
https://twitter.com/angelicaross/status/1227250615346028546
Back in December, Wade affirmed his love for Zaya — though not by name — on the “All That Smoke” podcast, hosted by two fellow former NBA players, and used she/her pronouns to do it.
“I’ve watched my son, from day one, become into who she now eventually has come into,” Wade said. “For me, nothing changes with my love. Nothing changes with my responsibilities. Only thing I got to do now is get smarter and educate myself more.”
Wade stumbles occasionally but with each discussion of Zaya, he proves himself to be a person who’s learning and growing. By doing it publicly, he’s modeling for a whole world how to parent a trans child. Not everyone can reach out to the cast of Pose for information about how to create a better world for their daughter, but the Wades are offering a public roadmap on how parents can be better.
Despite wanting to keep Zaya away from the public eye because of her young age, it’s clear that the Wades — Dwyane, Gabi and Zaya — understand what a gamechanger sharing her story could be for trans young people, particularly black trans youth, and the parents of those daughters.
“You are a leader. You are a leader and this is an opportunity to allow you to be a voice,” Wade recalls telling Zaya during his interview with Ellen.
This is your voice, Zaya, and we hear you loud and clear.
Meet Zaya. She's compassionate, loving, whip smart and we are so proud of her. It’s Ok to listen to, love & respect your children exactly as they are. Love and light good people. pic.twitter.com/G2lLVdD2VT
— Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) February 11, 2020
I’m Not a Fabulous Queer
I got obsessed with Anna May Wong the same year I changed my pronouns and began tentatively approaching the men’s section at Forever 21. Glancing over my shoulder as I picked through t-shirts that were too big for me, I always berated myself for not dressing more feminine on the days I decided to go shopping. That way, maybe people would think I was just shopping for a boyfriend or some other man in my life. Instead, I felt exposed with my ill-fitting pants and button-downs whose shoulder seams spilled down to my shoulders like I was wearing a rice sack.
Around the same time, I was taking a printmaking class. We were supposed to be making prints about queer ancestors, people in history that we felt somehow connected to. I tried googling pictures of Anna May Wong and watching clips of her movies, mostly because I wasn’t sure who else to research. I’d read somewhere that she was the first chinese american Hollywood star and queer. I thought, Why not?
Most of what I found horrified me. There were pictures of her in the cheongsam with the dragon down its length, the beaded headdress, the short tasseled skirt — all a white man’s fantasy of the orient. Restricted by the racism of early twentieth century Hollywood, Wong’s roles included the princess daughter of Fu Manchu, an exotic dancer murdered by her boyfriend, and a woman who dies by suicide after her white american husband leaves her. In an interview, Wong once quipped that she had died a thousand deaths.
But there was also Wong herself, always staring so boldly back at the camera. I was not expecting her presence to be so strong, for her to be so defiant despite everything. I still wonder how it felt to be so visible, what it must have felt like knowing that you were not considered human — to absorb all of that and still insist on being seen.
It is a cliché to talk about asian americans and representation, when representation means more movies showing the world that we’re more than nerds with tiger moms. I saw Crazy Rich Asians grudgingly and only because it was free once on a plane. Mostly, I was bored. Some of my cishet friends who still fuck up my pronouns seem to have felt empowered by it, though.
I do not want to talk about representation when we could be talking about climate justice, but here I am. I do not want to talk about visibility because it seems so unimportant. I’m embarrassed that I’m at best one degree of separation from cishet east asian american men who “reclaim” their masculinity by appropriating Black culture and objectifying women; the kind who believe that the most pressing issue in asian america is the lack of roles for asian american actors.
I don’t want to talk about visibility because I’m still ashamed of that lonely, aching part of me that still longs for recognition. I don’t want to talk about representation, but I’m fascinated by pictures of Anna May Wong: the one where she clutches a pipa seductively against her body, the one where she is surrounded by fake flowers. Most of all, I love the one where she is wearing a tuxedo and top hat, pressing a glass of wine to her lips, insisting on her right to joy.
I was too busy being awkward as a pre-teen to learn how to put on make-up, but I still fantasize about having that perfect cat eyeliner and brightly colored lipstick. This was what I was thinking of when I agreed to go to a make-up class for trans API’s. I didn’t realize how much make-up requires looking at your own face. As I nervously poked at my eyelid with an eyeliner pencil, I wasn’t sure if I was more uncomfortable with the fact that the eyeliner was making me look more feminine or because I didn’t like drawing attention to myself in general. I’ve spent so much time trying to ignore my face, my entire body, that I couldn’t know for sure.
I’m not a fabulous queer. I wear the same pants I owned in high school and am in perpetual need of a haircut. This suits me just fine. I don’t like drawing attention to myself, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I’m not a fun person to meet at parties because I radiate anxiety and don’t know what to say when asked about myself. My therapist says this is because I don’t think I deserve to take up space. I’m afraid that it means I don’t know how to be seen when it matters, when I need to stand up for others, for myself. I’m afraid it means that I’m a coward.
Being invisible is in some ways a privilege. QTPOC who are visible — the community organizers, healers, performance artists, astrology memers — are subject to scrutiny at best and violence at worst. Unfurling myself means exposing all the parts of myself I’ve worked so hard to protect, means admitting that I believe I deserve to be seen and loved.
For the past couple of years, I’ve thought a lot about getting a chinese dragon tattooed on my arm. It’s something I always find an excuse not to do. Too painful. Too expensive. What if I move somewhere where the weather’s really hot, get a job where I have to look professional, and then have to wear long-sleeve shirts every day? Also, what right does my silly, diasporic self have to put a chinese dragon on my body? Is this my version of a dragon cheongsam, an exotic dance, a choppy accent?
I think about these things while doodling dragons on my arms. Usually, they end up looking more like scary monster birds or sad lizards, but I don’t mind. I pace around my room and imagine the real thing, sometimes just a forearm tattoo, sometimes a full sleeve. I like this imaginary person, the way they move through the world like they’ve never questioned their belonging. I think that maybe the way forward is too pretend.🔮
Edited by Carmen
Black Queer People Writing Ourselves Into History: An Autostraddle Master List
Welcome to Autostraddle’s 2020 Black History Month Series, a deliberate celebration of black queer clarity of vision and self-determination.
Just a little over six months ago, this past August, marked the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship that reached America. That ship arrived at Point Comfort in what was then the British colony of Virginia, and it had onboard 20 to 30 enslaved Africans.
To mark the occasion The New York Times launched The 1619 Project, asking us to reframe what it would mean to seriously consider 1619 as the start of our nation’s birth, as opposed the date we’re all taught in elementary school, 1776 (the adoption of Declaration of Independence). Doing so requires placing the fights and contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. But more than that, it requires never losing track that anti-black racism is at the very root of what we even call America. Project curator Nikole Hannah-Jones reminds us that black people have always been “the prefecters of this democracy;” after all “No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it.”
When I sat down to write this post on Autostraddle, a queer and proudly indie digital magazine, I didn’t expect that I’d open by referencing a large-scale media corporation like The New York Times, and certainly not quoting a project that’s over a half-year old. But Hannah-Jones’ demand that we reimagine the stories we’ve told ourselves about who we are as a people still hasn’t shaken from my bones. Without consciously knowing it, her words rumbled in the back of my head as I planned out the month ahead.
This February – in the year of our (Audre) Lorde 2020 – at Autostraddle we’re talking about 20/20 vision and dedicating our Black History Month in observance of “Black Clarity.” If it’s one thing that not only the Americas, but the global black diaspora, has taught us – it’s that there is no such thing as “winning” within a system inherently designed on the degradation of your own humanity. Or to quote queen mother Audre, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We have to burn that fucker to the ground first. We have to tell our own stories, and create our own timeline; we have to nurture ourselves on our own terms.
As we imagine new worlds for ourselves as queer black women, we want to know –who were the visionaries of our past? And who are those visionaries right now? As queer and trans black people, who have we’ve loved or looked up to? When did have we found clarity about our purpose? Who helped us imagine our own future?
We want this year’s Black History Month to be serious, as the month’s title often implies. But also – we want it to be sexy, fun (and funny), JOYful. We want it to reflect the multiple ways that black people see ourselves and walk through our world.
And so, we begin it here. By writing ourselves back into our own history.
To kick off this Black History Month, I’ve collected some the best of Autostraddle’s past. These are only some of the ways that black lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans women and non-binary folks have found ourselves and written ourselves. We’ll here all month, and every month thereafter, giving you content that’s uniquely black and feminist and queer, much like what you’ll read below.
Spend some time this weekend, this month (and far beyond February) reading black queer people.
Happy Black History Month.
What to Read and Leave Feeling Inspired
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/how-whitney-houston-taught-me-the-greatest-love-of-all-for-my-queer-black-self-369034
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/toni-morrison-has-died-at-88-when-i-was-27-she-saved-my-life/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/black-fat-queer-cosplay-and-making-a-home-for-myself/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/what-can-black-queer-people-learn-from-the-lost-queer-joy-of-the-civil-rights-movement/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/shoulder-pads-and-short-cuts-how-grace-jones-made-me-powerful-369692/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/we-thought-we-had-the-voice-forever-in-memoriam-of-maya-angelou-239301/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/line-breaks-for-resistance-how-black-poetry-lets-us-rescue-ourselves-371430/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/these-five-black-lgbtq-activists-are-literally-saving-the-planet/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/what-if-this-was-a-celebration/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/martin-luther-king-day-roundtable-whats-in-your-black-justice-toolkit/
What to Read and Learn Something New
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/black-august-a-feminist-and-queer-syllabus-for-black-liberation/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/lorraine-hansberry-liked-hated-and-was-bored-with-being-a-les-242239/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/barbara-jordan-closeted-young-gifted-black/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/how-coretta-scott-king-leveraged-mlks-legacy-to-fight-for-gay-rights-446442/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/playlist-black-queer-music-history-pt-1-early-20th-century-367986/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/playlist-black-queer-music-history-pt-2-1930s-1960s-368459/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/black-american-gothic-a-southern-herstory-of-black-magic-women/
What to Read and Remember That Not Everything About Black People Has to Be Traumatic
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/23-black-queer-and-trans-femmes-to-follow-on-instagram-this-black-history-month/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/playlist-fuck-independence-day-celebrate-black-women-instead-385291/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/10-lyrics-to-help-you-practice-your-blackgirlmagic-daily-348656/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/afros-the-new-alternative-lifestyle-haircut-141175/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/the-burlesque-show/
What to Read When You’ve Got Time (#Longreads. Group Projects. And Personal Essays.)
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/i-never-meant-for-my-hair-to-be-the-way-back-to-the-lighthouse-378634/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/making-the-dive-and-loving-myself-dangerously-315660/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/the-rumors-were-enough-josephine-baker-frida-kahlo-their-romance-and-me/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/i-didnt-know-how-to-be-poor-black-biracial-and-queer-so-i-wasnt-346644/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/the-m-word/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/six-tips-for-navigating-chicago-as-a-baby-black-queer/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/the-qpoc-speakeasy-speaking-out-with-love-to-mike-brown-250313/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/living-while-black-queer-and-sometimes-mistaken-for-male-186151/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/going-back-outside-after-the-streetlights-come-on/
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/black-history-month-roundtable-series-what-would-it-mean-to-queer-black-history-month-410402/
Nine Queer Writers of Color on “Generation Q” and The L Word’s Legacy of Whiteness
When Showtime confirmed that the long awaited reboot to The L Word — something that had been talked about since the summer of 2017 — was finally, definitely, happening, we anticipated another season of talking, laughing, loving, breathing, fighting, fucking, crying and drinking. In the months that followed, we learned that the L Word reboot wouldn’t just be about clinging to nostalgia, it would be about building on our memories with a new generation that that was “a little browner and a little less cis.”
While The L Word: Generation Q is definitely a little browner — it featured 12 new queer characters of color in its first season — media conversations surrounding the show have largely remained driven by white points of view, so we set out to change that. Members of the Speakeasy — Autostraddle’s collective of queer writers of color — got together to talk about the Gen Q’s first season, enjoy each other’s company, gossip about Bette Porter, and ask hard questions about where the show has succeeded (or sometimes, fallen down) at separating itself from the original series’ legacy.
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
OK! What’s your L Word origin story?
Kayla: Like many, I first watched The L Word in secret. The first few episodes I saw were in middle school at my friend’s house, because she had a cool older sister and parents who paid for premium cable. I don’t have a ton of memories about watching that first time — I’m sure my brain was overloaded with complicated GAY feelings! I didn’t watch the show in full until later, in college, after it had already hit Netflix. I didn’t watch on Netflix though, because what if my parents saw my queue and had questions! So I rented DVDs from my college’s media library, and I think the only person who knew I was watching was my roommate… plus my thousands of followers on tumblr who were privy to my daily musings on how hot Helena is and also how the basketball episode is absolutely ICONIC. I gradually became known as someone who introduced people to the show for the first time, bringing my iPad to social gatherings and forcing even the heterosexuals to watch.
Shelli: I actually saw The Real L Word first. I had a roommate for a bit when I moved to a new neighborhood in Chicago and she had already seen the original. I was deeply obsessed with the reality show, but hadn’t seen the original. I think she had the box set if I remember correctly, and eventually we popped one in and watched a few episodes – I was not impressed. I liked the reality aspect of TRLW better. I actually watched the entirety of the series last summer and that is when I started falling for it. Helena & Dana in particular made my bits tingle something crucial.
Christina: I stumbled upon The L Word in high school, the way you used to discover TV in the early aughts — my parents weren’t home and I was flipping through the channels. I saw two women making out and I was… interested, to say the least! I didn’t know anyone who watched it, and I wasn’t out at the time, so for a long time it was just this show I watched sometimes when I was home alone. It wasn’t until I rewatched on Netflix in college that I was like “Ohhhhh right right because of being a homosexual, that is why I liked this so much!”
Dani Janae: When I was like 12-ish, I would stay up late while everyone else in the house was sleeping. I’d probably have a drink (yes I know this is sad, but life got better) and scroll through all the channels I wasn’t allowed to watch during the day with my family. One night I came across a scene of two women fucking in like an arm chair or something? My whole world just flipped. I was out of the closet to myself and some friends by then, but seeing that was like “okay yeah i’m GAY gay.”
Later on in life, I was hanging out with some girl I knew from high school that was also a lesbian. We were chilling on her bed when she brought up The L Word and asked if I’d seen it. I said no, so she put it on for me. There was the same scene from when I was 12! The one where Dana and Alice have sex for the first time. I quietly kept that detail to myself and just enjoyed the flashback to baby Dani sliding off the couch while watching two women fuck for the first time.
Bailey: It was the scene just before Alice and Dana finally hookup for me, too! I was a teenager and home alone (I think my mum had gone to an Al Green concert) – I remember having “last channel” programmed in case anyone came home. I watched Dana and Alice hookup to CeCe Penistons Finally and immediately bought Season One the next day.
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Jehan: I happened upon The L Word some time in high school, so around 2003-ish, once I cracked the one passcode my parents used for absolutely everything and broke into the blocked “risqué” channels. I watched an episode or two but was actually kind of disappointed because I thought it would be more scandalous than a bunch of people sitting around The Planet all day. I couldn’t identify with the whiteness, the thinness, the incredible LA-ness of it all, so I wandered off in search of more melanated, more queer pastures.
Recently, about a year ago, I binged the series on Netflix with some (moderate to heavy) live annotating from my partner and became a faithful reluctant fan. It still has all the problems I recognized back in high school, but I appreciate what the show has done and meant for queer folks, and I just wish I’d been participating while it was on the air.
Al(aina): What’s wild is that I feel like I didn’t see it all until after it was off (I was 13 when it started), but I also have a very vivid memory of watching the final season live?? So I really have no clue. I definitely, obviously, watched it again in college with my first serious person, like all good lesbians do. I would be lying if I didn’t say that OG The L Word was what turned me off of living in LA.
Protect Angie at all costs! I’d go into battle for that kid.
Now that you’ve seen Gen Q, what did you enjoy about the series? What do you feel the show got right?
Dani Janae: I think the show has heard the criticism from the first run and put lots of effort into righting past wrongs. We’ve seen lots more POC, better trans representation, and less blatant biphobia. It has struck a balance between giving us the lives of old characters (Shane, Alice, Bette) and letting new additions have full lives both along side and separate from them. I really really love Angie. She’s like the coolest teen in the world. I love that she’s figuring out her sexuality and there isn’t some big drama over it. She just gets to be.
Carmen: Protect Angie Porter-Kennard at all costs! I’d go into battle for that kid.
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Bailey: Angie’s one of my favourite characters! I also appreciated the original characters. Honestly, this probably comes from having experienced more in life since the show ended ten years ago, but I really related to that moment of realizing you might not be marrying the right person, or your person, at the right time.
Jehan: Yeah, I honestly really enjoyed watching the original characters grow up! I liked checking in with our problematic faves to see what they’re up to, what inappropriate people they’re sleeping with, all of it. I’ll also say it was refreshing to see them grappling with issues around queerness and representation in a way that sorta kinda acknowledges both the privileges and insularity of the white lesbian world.
Kayla: I’m also surprised by how much I enjoyed the storylines involving the original characters! I’ve seen some people say that the smashing together of the rich and glamorous lives of the original characters and the more grounded storylines involving the new characters is awkward, but I love that juxtaposition actually. I love the original for its sense of fantasy, and I like that we still get that feeling somewhat here, with Shane hopping off a jet and Alice being a lowkey celeb – but there’s more of a self-awareness in this iteration of the show in terms of what queer life looks like for different people and how class impacts that.
I also just love the aesthetics of this show? The direction is a lot tighter, the music cues are great, the fashion is aspirational, the sex scenes feel a lot more real.
Shelli: Watching the OG crew grow up was perfect. The music was great and I can see where they are going with this new crew, too. I liked that reflected back some of our real situations (still needing roommates going into your 30’s to pay rent, Finley dealing with family back home, etc). They are going in the right direction! I just hope some of that direction is making sure Finley stops wearing those god awful dykey denim cutoffs!
Al(aina): I really appreciated how they brought up drinking and sobriety with Tess and Finley, because everyone drank absolutely too much in the original series and we need to talk more about alcoholism in our community. Tess saying that she drank to get away from her life, but stopped drinking so she could feel again?? I’m in this picture and I don’t like it!
I also enjoyed Micah’s storyline about where he wanted to be touched. It was a sweet scene and it (and I think Micah’s treatment for the most part) is something I really appreciated after they did Max so dirty.
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Carmen: Yes! I really loved that scene for Micah in particular! I really like Micah and Leo Sheng, and I hope there’s more of him next year, along with integrating him more into the core friendship circle. He often still feels like an outsider – even in his own home! – but he’s really tender and I think there’s depth there to further explore.
Also, because NO ONE ELSE SAID IT, I’m going to put on my Afro-Latina crown real quick to say that Sophie Suarez now royalty to me! And I will go anywhere that her smart mouth tells me to go. No questions asked.
Imagine you’re in the writers’ room, Sarah Shahi says she’s open to returning, do you vote yes or no?
Jehan: No. Carmen was so mistreated and was also not played by an actual Latina so I’m not here for more of either problem.
Dani Janae: That’s a hard No for me. I was never big on Carmen, I thought she kinda put Shane in this box of the women she wanted to date, but that wasn’t really who Shane was/was ready to be. I’m a Shane apologist and I think they never really dove into why Shane is so malleable and willing to bend to whatever people want from her. Also, the show now has Latina characters played by actual Latinas, so I don’t even think we need Carmen anymore.
Shelli: That is a hard and loud NO! She was not played by someone who was actually Latinx and the writers’ room could literally not ignore that. Let’s also let Shane keep growing and not keep throwing her exes back at her. She has a fucking rescue dog now, so I think lots of new pussy is on the horizon.
The L Word, Season Three
Kayla: I think fan attachment to Sarah Shahi is a little out of control. In addition to the issue of casting, Carmen is not really the best written character! I’d much rather see a character like Tasha or Jodi return. And the biggest bummer for me is that Pam Grier can’t ever come back.
Natalie: Despite the fact that I loved Carmen de la Pica Morales with the intensity of a thousand suns, I would’ve absolutely voted No… though, admittedly, that’s easier for me to say than it must have been for those Latinx writers in the Gen Q writers room, so kudos to them.
People feel very entitled to their nostalgia, even when that nostalgia causes harm for others. For those writers to draw this line in the sand on this new show, it’s big. It was this show saying, “Sometimes we have to take a risk. Let’s make the show we want to make.”
Christina: I think it’s weird that there has been all of this conversation about her coming back or not coming back, I didn’t know she mattered that much in the greater context of the show? I mean, yeah, I loved Carmen, but like I loved a lot of things that weren’t great when I was 15! I don’t know y’all, Sarah Shahi’s not Latinx, let’s just all let this one go?
Al(aina): LOL the only character who needs to come back is Tasha.
Natalie: That is an absolute fact.
Why is The L Word so scared to have a visibly black dark skinned, 4C hair queer character?
According to Marja-Lewis Ryan, even Ilene Chaiken admits that that the original was, ostensibly, a show about white lesbians. Do you think Generation Q shed that legacy?
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Dani Janae: The show has done a pretty good job of shedding this legacy. It actually took me a beat to think of all the white lesbians, everyone I think about when it comes to this show is a person of color. That’s really refreshing.
Bailey: For sure, it was an upgrade. But I think there’s still long way to go. It’s still a show about white or light skin queers of similar socio-economic class, and in a reality where no one is plus size. There are so many communities in LA that I hope they can represent next season.
Jehan: Yeah, it’s been so-so. It feels like white lesbianism 2.0 in that, yes, there are more people of color, more masculine of center folx, and more trans people. But for me, there are times where that’s coming across like a band-aid.
The show is still centering a type of queer representation that is about making sure there’s “at least one of_______” without actually engaging queer politics. Where are Micah’s friends??? He is a trans guy in LA and only hangs out with cis women? Why are there still so few Black people in this LA? In 2020, why is everyone’s biggest problem still either their relationship or getting acceptance from their parents? My hope is that Season Two goes much deeper into some of these missing communities and perspectives.
Kayla: In some ways, Generation Q exceeded my expectations in terms of racial inclusivity, but to be fair, my bar was LOW! I still think Vida is the far superior show when it comes to portraying a diverse queer Los Angeles. One frustration for me with Generation Q has been that a lot of the people of color still feel underdeveloped (which taps into what Jehan just said).
They’re not necessarily steeped in stereotypes, but they still just leave a lot to be desired in terms of full, dynamic, nuanced character development. Quiara and Felicity are two of the biggest examples, but I think the same can also be said of Micah and Dani, whose backgrounds and motives aren’t nearly as fleshed out as some of the white characters on the show.
Carmen: Yeppp! Lemme just quickly co-sign Kayla here and then go on about my way.
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Shelli: Why is The L Word so scared to have a visibly black dark skinned, 4C hair queer character?
Sophie is as close as we got and yes, I dig her but she was not created to represent me. It feels like they are so scared to write a black queer character. They made Sophie streetwise, smart, snarky and dope, but I feel like they did that for their Afro-Latinx character because they were worried about the black-lash they would get from writing a different kind of black girl that same way. And sometimes it felt like Sophie was trying too hard. And yes, we had Tasha in the original but they wrote her so one note, closed off and seemingly always angry.
Carmen: I’m definitely someone Sophie was written to represent, and I absolutely couldn’t agree with you more.
Christina: On a scale of one to ten, I’d give Gen Q a five on shedding legacy? Yes, there are a lot more characters of color than the original, but as Shelli said, there still no dark-skinned folks, there are still no fat folks, and I don’t think we’ve really seen any non-binary folks? I’d love to see more about Micah’s life, who his other friends are — doesn’t he have other trans dudes in his life? I don’t love that “adding more QTPOC” folks is just adding a bunch of cis beige women.
Al(aina): Yeah, nah the show is still a white show.
With Dani, Sophie and Micah, it felt like Gen Q was grounding the show in a new generation that included 12 new QTPOC characters. Did you feel more represented by the reboot than you did by the original?
Bailey: I feel like I can relate to a few more characters because I’m no longer a teenager watching as a means of dreaming about my queer future; not only am I seeing my future represented, I’m seeing my past play out too. There were points where I felt I could see myself in Micah, but I also wish Micah would have more scenes that didn’t revolve around his gender. On the other hand, I did feel represented in sobriety and recovery by two white queers. It’s complicated!
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Kayla: This is actually a tough one for me to answer! My instinct is no? I’m sort of torn in a few directions here, because yes I do overall find aspects of this show — and especially when it comes to the characters of color — more relatable than I find the original. Also, I’m not someone who necessarily needs to see characters with my exact identities in order to feel represented (I deeply connect with Elena Alvarez on One Day At A Time despite not sharing her exact identities). THAT SAID, there are so freakin FEW queer South Asian characters on television!! Yeah, I would love to see it here.
Dani Janae: There is more color and youth in the show, but I don’t necessarily feel more represented. I’ve screamed about this on Twitter – but where are the fat women on this show? I know there’s got to be one gay, fat actress in LA that would love to be a part of this project. WE did get Roxane Gay on the finale but her guest spot kinda gets bulldozed by… white lesbians, which was a choice. But I digress! I’d really love to see some body diversity next season, especially given the amount of sex scenes we’ve gotten this season. Fat people also have sex and we are very good at it.
Shelli: Where are the bodies? Where is the fatness? Where are the curves? Where are the queer charecters who are interested in bodies that aren’t thin? We need to see that.
Carmen: Amen.
Christina SERIOUSLY where are the fat folks and the dark skinned folks???
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Jehan: Dani feels like a cardboard cut out of Bette, but less charismatic. Sophie is probably the most compelling to me, but I don’t think her storyline is being done justice. I want to know more about her family, not as a foil to Dani’s rich light-skinned Latinidad, but because she deserves the same amount of space to explore her Afro-Latinidad and her own family dynamics. Micah deserves so much more, too. He hardly ever shows up and, as Bailey said, it’s ALWAYS about his gender. What does he do, what’s he into? I need more!
Al(aina): This show rings far more true to me than the original did, for reasons similar as Bailey. But also like, how is there not a single fucking stud????? Not a SINGLE fat person??? ZERO Black or brown trans women??? That’s not my life!
And they’re all so… settled. Sure, they have roommates, but it feels very strange to me to see all these young queers with full time jobs who can afford to go out many nights a week. None of my friends are living like that; we’re all crying about the gig economy and debating whether or not to go back to school. Where’s that?
Most of the couples we saw on the original show were interracial, and while that’s fine, it’s also a trope in a lot of media. Seeing two black people together and in love is just so rare!
In the OG series, the only black person in Bette’s immediate circle was her sister Kit, but Gen Q expands on that in its first season. What did you think about this change?
Dani Janae: Okay so when the trailer was released and before we knew who Felicity was I SCREAMED when I saw Bette was dating a black woman. Based on the finale it looks like she’ll be dating another one, and that is so fucking important to me. Most of the couples we saw on the original show were interracial, and while that’s fine, it’s also a trope in a lot of media. Seeing two black people together and in love is just so rare! I think it’s really important for Bette, but also for Angie, to have that representation of black people in their circle.
Carmen: I’ve been screaming “Bette Porter with a Black Girlfriend 2KFOREVER!!!” since August after that trailer drop, and I’m not done yet! Seeing Bette with a black woman after six seasons of her being paired with a white partner who, ahem let us never forget, had such little regard for Bette’s blackness that didn’t even want a black child!!, was my own personal sweet redemption.
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Carmen: (I also screamed from surprise joy a little when Tina came back! Not that I want Bette with her! I’m complicated. Moving on.)
Jehan: It feels like every Black person on the show is positioned for some White or lighter skinned character’s development. And yes this includes Angie. Kit, Felicity, Quiara… none of them exist outside of how they advance Bette or Shane’s narratives. Angie is beginning to have her own storyline deepen but for me, her character is toeing the line of advancing Bette’s development more than her own.
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Shelli: I agree with Jehan so strongly. Also, where are Bette’s black friends who she isn’t fucking? Does she not have black aunties? Cousins who live in LA with kids around Angie’s age? It’s TV – we can get creative in a well-written way. I do LOVE that Bette has been falling for these black women with natural hairstyles though, so kudos on that.
Christina: The lack of black folks in Bette’s life has always been a disappointment for me. As thrilling as it is to see Bette fuck a black woman, I’d honestly rather have her find some black friends that she is not fucking — I love Bette, but it’s not exactly like she tends to keep the people she fucking around her very long…
Al(aina): Bette needs real Black friends next season. Like, at LEAST two. I don’t know any Black queer people in LA who exclusively hang out with white people, especially white women.
How did you feel about the way the show handled Kit’s absence?
Dani Janae: It was crushing without a doubt, but it made sense, at least for me. In the first L Word we saw her relapse more than once. For some people, addiction is a lifelong struggle. It is sad, but I think it was an appropriate way to address her absence. What I didn’t get is how no one knew she was related to Bette Porter and that she had died. In a celebrity obsessed world, it seemed like this should have been a readily available fact about her life.
Bailey: Kit was famous, everyone would have known that this was why Bette was running for Mayor. The show eventually handled the aftermath of all of Bette’s losses well, albeit given hardly any screen time and also managed by her daughter. How can anyone ever forgive Tinaaaaaa for not going to Kit’s funeral though, that’s my question.
Natalie: THIS IS MY QUESTION. How do you forgive her for that? I think I’d forgotten how much I disliked Tina until Bette said she hadn’t come to Kit’s funeral. Then it all came flooding back. I’m still mad about her not wanting a black baby and now I’m gonna be mad about this for forever.
The L Word, Season Six
Jehan: I really recommend that people read Grace Lavery, Danny M. Lavery’s and our own Christina Tucker’s take on this in the Shatner Chatner because I wholeheartedly agree with their breakdown of how the show has done Kit so wrong.
The main takeaway from their argument is that Kit never once got a win. From the first iteration to the reboot, she is the recipient of so many stereotypes of Blackness and is regularly a plot device for Bette’s development. I was irate when Bette only revealed Kit’s death as a way to clear her name for pushing Felicity’s husband. He attacked Angie, that was reason enough. And as Dani just pointed out, it seems a quick Google search should have revealed the info on Kit’s death much earlier in the show. Also, Bette was adamant she wasn’t going to share her “reason for running” because it was private… until it became convenient to do so.
Christina: Thanks for mentioning that piece Jehan! I still agree with myself, Danny and Grace — Kit deserved so much more than being this cardboard cutout of black stereotypes. Regarding Tina, I have never forgiven her for being surprised Bette wanted a black kid in like, episode two of Season One? TINA IS GARBAGE!
Al(aina): I really hated it. Really, really, really hated it. As has been said by other people, Kit deserved to be a whole person and not just “an addict” as Bette kept referring to her (also, stop calling people addicts, yeah?). I’ve always felt like Bette was dealing with some serious “I’m light skinned and have a white mom” guilt and her decision to run for mayor after Kit’s overdose feels very rooted in a past that she isn’t choosing to face and well friends, that’s why she and everyone else on this show should be in therapy.
In my dream world, the OG characters of The L Word get the audience to pay attention to the lives of queer women, women of color and poor women.
Particularly as it relates to representation for QTPOC, what changes would you like to see in Gen Q’s forthcoming second season?
Dani Janae: Add some fat people for the love of God. More butches and studs for me to secretly thirst after.
Bailey: More inclusion always and please. Shade/colour, size, class, and age – I could go on but I will never stop.
Jehan: More depth. Just across the board, let’s go deeper. I need something more than surface level representation.
The L Word: Generation Q, Season One
Natalie: I definitely agree about adding more depth to the new characters and about continuing to expand who’s represented as part of queer community, especially trans and non-binary characters, but I’d add one (probably unpopular) thing… which, given that time is finite, is necessity: less of a focus on the OG characters. In my dream world, the OG characters of The L Word are similar to Piper on Orange is the New Black: a trojan horse to get an audience to pay attention to the lives of queer women, women of color and poor women.
Shelli: Bodies & Brokeness please. PEOPLE ARE POOR AND SOME OF US DON’T HAVE POOLS. Show that struggle from living paycheck to paycheck while also trying to enjoy life. Give me a fat character where her size is not their entire storyline, the same way Micah’s transness shouldn’t be his. If I don’t see a big baddie black bitch next season breaking hearts and making terrible decisions I will be upset.
Christina: Fat folks, dark skinned folks, more character development, and get Bette a black friend ASAP.
Carmen: X2!
Al(aina): AND BRING BACK TASHA.
The Lunar New Year Coming Out Letter I’ll Never Send To My Mom
You left me so many boxes of stuff.
At first they filled the living room of my tiny apartment. Clothes, purses, food, knick-knacks, kitchen tools, bathroom stuff — it was like a housewarming gift for a house already full of your things. I’m convinced that during all the time I’ve lived here, you never really grasped how little space I actually have. Or maybe you did, but you never let it stop you from insisting I take this or that thing I don’t really need: a half-empty bag of anchovy broth powder because what if you want to make stew one night but you ran out of dried anchovies, or a box of five-year old decrepit eyebrow pencils and lipsticks, just in case, because you never know, or a whole drying rack because everyone needs a drying rack of course even with no possibility of it fitting on my tiny, cluttered kitchen counter.
And I take all those things, sometimes with a smile and sometimes with an eye-roll, because I’ve learned to speak your language, I know what you want to say. I feel it when I’m cramming all the shit into my car and you’re going back to the kitchen to get me a can of rice punch to drink on the way back, even though there’s already 12 in the backseat. I care about you. I love you. I’m going to miss you. And maybe just a little bit of I need to get rid of all this junk last-minute and have nowhere else to put it but we’re moving out of the country in a week so just take it.
If it weren’t for my girlfriend, I’d still be stumbling through my living room, stepping over all the I love you and I care about you boxes stubbornly taking up space. I don’t even look down, because if I don’t see it, then I don’t have to deal with it.
But she’s already there, sorting through each box more lovingly than I would. She carefully finds a place for each thing and she tosses what we don’t need. I watch her from the corner of my eye — sometimes she picks up something, turns it over a couple times, then looks at me. Every time our eyes meet, I can’t help but smile.
Umma, this woman feels like home to me. I know you could understand.
Sometimes, she’ll come to me, her eyes lighting up, holding something from one of your boxes that I had long forgotten about. Whenever she’s excited, I can see it on her whole face and it feels like the sun is shining on me.
“Were these your flashcards when you were little?” I squint at the small box in her hands. Yung-uh geu-rim ka-duh. Oh my god, I hadn’t seen those since I was a toddler. She laughs. “It looks like you scribbled all over it!” I start laughing too.
“I used to scribble on ALL my stuff.” Even the hwatu cards you gave me had pen marks and holes in them. I don’t even know how I managed that: hwatu cards are thick and sturdy. I loved the way you would shuffle them so quickly; the sound of those hard plastic cards is still so satisfying.
“It’s so hard to imagine now that I had to learn English like this,” I say, holding up a card. There’s a picture of an airplane, with the English word in big letters and the Korean underneath. I remember all the English workbooks and cards you’d study with me and the little cartoons you’d watch with me. How fluently I could speak to you back then. How a lot of things changed when I started school on a U.S military base. How things changed even more when we moved to America.
“Now I can barely speak Korean right,” I snort. “It feels…awkward when I try sometimes. Like something unfamiliar in my mouth.”
“You’ll learn again. You have so much time,” she smiles at me. “Would it be weird if I used these to learn Korean?” I hug her and say no.
I know her language, too. We have a whiteboard in the kitchen where I wrote the Korean alphabet for her. She sounds out each letter, slowly, familiarizing herself with them. She listens when I break down a word for her, when I explain what each part means. She remembers — or she tries to. She knows what I like and flips through Maangchi’s cookbook (my saving grace, especially now that you’re halfway across the world) and learns how to make it for me. I know what she means when she takes care of a chore for me just to get it out of your way, when she asks me if I’ve eaten yet, when she brings me something from the gas station on the way home.
You do the same things, umma. I know you can understand.
—
Soon our kitchen is nearly overfilled: tofu, rice flour, gochugaru, odeng, mandu, imitation crab, Spam, anchovies, kelp broth, galbi marinade, dried red peppers, mung bean powder, seaweed, sweet red beans, soup soy sauce, gosari, bean sprouts, pickled radish, ginseng wine, and a huge doenjang jar that you repurposed to hold fresh kimchi. But most of all, I notice the bag of oval-shaped tteok and a big piece of frozen beef brisket: ingredients for tteok-guk, the main dish for Lunar New Year.
This is the first year I’m making my own tteok-guk for Seollal and god I really, really don’t want to. Yeah, maybe it’s because we both know it won’t be as good as yours. But honestly? It’s just because I’m so damn tired.
I wish I could tell you why. I wish I could tell you about this whole crazy year. New relationships, lost relationships, relationships in peril. Friends I can’t be friends with anymore. Exes I still love. Mistakes made, lessons learned, wounds healing and ripping open and healing again.
I know you could understand.
When we moved to the southern U.S five years ago, I thought what a hilarious joke this must be to somebody. Getting sent off to the middle of nowhere after living such a rich life in a vibrant city I had always called home. Just as I had started realizing who I am and just as I had realized I’m not the only one who feels different.
Now you’re there and I’m here and I think I have a family. I found a community where I never thought I would. I learned to expand my world beyond my assumptions and preconceived notions about who matters and who doesn’t and what makes a place worth living in. Most of all, I thought I wouldn’t have to feel alone anymore.
But Seollal lasts three days and for three days I have felt alone. And I know you can understand that, even though you won’t say it.
—
You know I’m a journalism major, umma. You heard me on the radio. I almost never write things without sources. I don’t say things that aren’t supported by a fact, an observation, a reality understood by someone other than me.
There’s safety in this. It’s what I love in theory and essays and news and journalistic writing. I can’t be wrong if I have a solid argument. I’m not taking risks if I fact-checked everything twice. I can’t be vulnerable if I only write what is tangible, what has been proven, what I can see.
But all I can offer you now is my truth.
It comes from what hangs in the air between us. It comes from what we feel that’s left unspoken. I have nothing to prove to you, nothing to justify, nothing to make up to you. We built a wall between us and then wiped the dust off our hands and pretended it had always been there.
This has to be enough. I have to try, umma. I have to try because you linger in every part of who I am, from my nicotine addiction to the temper I always hold on a leash to the face that looks back at me in the mirror.
—
I’m not coming out to you as a lesbian. I know you already know.
You knew before I even knew. When I was twelve, you found the strips of photos I had taken with my best friend at a photobooth in the city.
“Why you take this kind of picture with her?” You held up one of the strips of photos in front of my face. “Why you hang out with her every day…all day, every day. You don’t have any other friends?”
I looked at the photos. My friend and I looked so happy. We were smiling with teeth, making silly faces, our arms around each other. We were absolutely glowing. Nothing about the photos seemed blatantly out of the ordinary. But you were always so fucking observant. It was annoying how much you could pick up on.
We just looked so happy with each other. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? I knew that’s what you saw. I knew it scared you. But a part of me that I could not identify yet felt hurt that you weren’t happy for my happiness.
And then you looked me in the eyes and said If I ever find out you’re gay, you won’t be my daughter anymore.
—
My girlfriend is marinating the galbi. I’m still so tired and she knows it. She got me an energy drink and a snack and hugs me. I want to cook with her tonight — I’ve been looking forward to it.
I think I want to marry her, umma. Not now, but maybe someday. I wish I could ask you how you know when you’re ready. What to do when you’re scared of messing it up. When you’re scared you already messed it up.
You did find out, eventually. Now you pretend like you didn’t — but you did. We both remember what happened. The tears, the screaming, the threats, the cursing. You’re disgusting. You’re sick. The catatonic state you went into later. Not returning my calls. Having to relay messages to you through Dad. The fear that I’m about to lose everything.
And yet, still, here I am, with the same girlfriend you tried to throw out of my apartment, still receiving massive amounts of kimchi from you, and going through the same boxes of stuff you gave me that I’m probably just gonna have to donate to Goodwill eventually. And when we were all saying bye to each other at the airport, you made me promise that I’ll message you on KakaoTalk. I sent you sae-hae bok-manhi ba-deu sae-yo — happy new year — yesterday and you never responded. I know it’s just because you’re an old person who doesn’t know how to work a phone but I fucking miss you anyway.
I’m not coming out to you as a lesbian, umma. I’m coming out as your daughter.
I know I still am to you, even though things are different now. I’d throw away everything I own and everything you’ve given me if I could just hear you say you still love me anyway. That it’s hard for you to accept, that you feel hurt or confused or scared or angry, but that you still love me. That you actually give a shit about who I am and what the fuck I’m doing with my life. I’m tired of being a stranger to you and I’m tired of tripping over boxes in my living room because you’re incapable of just being vulnerable with me.
And as much as I want to, I can’t really blame you. I don’t even want to be mad at you. I know you had a hard life. I know your grandmother raised you with all the baggage of imperialism and war on her shoulders. I know you wanted to be the kind of mother you never got to have in your life.
It doesn’t have to be any harder. You didn’t lose me. You didn’t mess up — well, not too badly, at least. The point is that I’m still here, I turned out fine, and I’m stubborn as ever. I’m not going anywhere.
—
I have so many bottles of Aji-Mirin in my pantry, umma, I don’t need any more. I don’t need more Tupperware or kimchi or bags of “healthy” rice with grains — you know I don’t even really like that stuff, but I eat it anyway because of you. I don’t need to know how long to soak beans before I cook them or how to roll gimbap without a bamboo mat or what to put in bulgogi marinade.
Honestly, I could live if we never talk about food and cooking ever again. I think we’ve beaten that horse to the point where you’d need dental records to identify its corpse. And Asian Americans: I don’t wanna hear anything about but food is so important in our cultures!! The reality is that we all talk about food (and nothing but food!) all the damn time because it’s much easier than talking about real shit. How about in 2020 we quit bothering our mothers and grandmothers for their budaejjigae recipes and start asking them where this “army base stew” even came from and why they had to eat it in the first place?
Why don’t we think about how much shit they went through to even be able to pass these recipes and stories down to us before we use it to chase clout or write a thinkpiece?
I just want to try with them as hard as they’ve tried with us. And I haven’t been very good at it. But I’m making a promise to myself that I will say all of this to your face one day. I’m just not ready yet. But I will, even if it takes me ten Seollals without you.
—
Listen, umma, I need you to make me tteokguk again some time, even though it won’t be Seollal anymore (with mandu please!) — and then I need you to ask me what I’m doing these days. I need you to ask me what my job is like and why I love it and what I want in the future and what I care about most and why I care about it and what I do for fun. I need you to stop treating me like a stranger that you’re forced to feed. I need you to see me.
I need you to let me be your daughter again.
We’re cooking now, umma. I’ll send you photos when we’re done and I’ll lie and say it’s just as good as yours. The Year of the Pig is finally over and I’m…relieved. The zodiac is starting from the beginning again. With the Rat leading me into a new decade, it actually feels like a fresh start this time.
The weight of the entire past year is on my shoulders, so I decide to shrug.
Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: January’s Uses of the Erotic
Welcome to Autostraddle’s new series, Year of Our (Audre) Lorde, a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.
For a while now, I’ve referred to the Gregorian calendar date as “The year of our Audre Lorde 20___ ” in response to fuckery big and small occurring around the world. I meant it mostly in jest but also to invoke the spirit of a woman whose work continues to ripple outward with such a profound impact on the communities I belong to. This moment, this year is not any more urgent than the time in which Lorde sat down to write. Queer lives, Black lives, and those of all other marginalized folks remain under threat. Precarity is still a frayed tie that binds us.
But we are still here. Still alive. I realized that, personally, I have spent the last few years bracing for whatever comes, never anticipating that the peace, the joy, and the pleasure I so craved were in fact things that I deserved. Lorde speaks to a heaviness not unlike this, a longing for something other than the world she had, but she also loosens herself from these psychic holds, favoring our supreme ability to fully claim our own freedom.
Thus, in the YEAR OF OUR AUDRE LORDE TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY, in the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, communal healing, resolutions, and just generally leveling up, I vow to deeply engage with the Queen Mother’s work, allowing it to saturate my every day for the entirety of the year. I want this to be an exercise in deep reading, deep listening, and deep living. I’m not interested in reading her because I “should”; I’m interested because what little I’ve already encountered lets me know she, like so many of our ancestors, has gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.
For our first installation, in her essay “The Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde challenges us to understand that life-force she deems as “the erotic” beyond the realm of the sexual, and to harness it as a source of our divine power in all aspects of our lives.
I first came across “The Uses of the Erotic” as part of a performance art fellowship. It was a couple of years ago, just before I came out, and just when I’d been looking for a way to get out of my head and into my body. Lorde was one of many authors we were asked to both read and embody, and she was integral to an experience that helped open me up to the fullness of my queer desire and my artistic capabilities. It was the perfect queerdo, POC, intergenerational space I needed to move from “not really straight” and “I guess I’m an artist” to “yeah I’m definitely fucking queer” and “I will write, paint, and dance all over your shit.”
I will write, paint, and dance all over your shit. (Picture taken by Jenny Koons, of the performance 125th & FREEdom.)
Lorde explains that “the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” What continues to stay with me is her imperative that we not look away. That we stand face to face with this chaos of feelings and move into a space of action.
As part of the performance fellowship, I was terrified at the prospect of putting my body in plain sight, with all of the writerly, wallflower-esque tropes abounding. But the thing I most dreaded turned into an experience that shifted how I move through the world, at least for a time. We brought our ritual to the street with a closing intervention moving east to west, across Manhattan, for five hours. The fear I felt at being so visible morphed into a kinetic, communal vibration that pulsated between the onlookers on 125th St and each of us in the ensemble. But like most transcendent feelings, it hasn’t lasted. In some ways it almost feels surreal now, to think that I was able to bring my full self into view like that. That woman is someone I want to return to, someone I need to feel again.
Bring your full self into view. (Picture taken by Jenny Koons, of the performance 125th & FREEdom.)
So in recognition of this January/ New Year vibration, I’m inviting y’all to join me in meditating on “The Uses of the Erotic.” Stand in front of a mirror reciting Lorde’s words over and over. Make them an incantation. Chant them while nourishing yourself — cooking, bathing, doing a masturbation meditation. Envision your erotic power filling your body to brim and spilling over into a manifestation of all you need and deserve to not only live but thrive.
I’ve pulled some choice quotes that I’ll keep on repeat for the rest of this month. I’m trying my best not to look away:
“Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. […] The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.”
Saying “it feels right to me” is the act of trusting yourself, which seems so elegantly straightforward and yet so profound because it goes against everything we’re taught about how to be in this world. Keeping this on repeat!
“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.”
I read this and wept. Like a full-on ugly cry. This image of Lorde dancing is just so beautiful, and I cannot remember the last time I danced this way.
“For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”
I find this especially powerful because I get so easily caught up in the #hustle that is being a working artist. I love working consistently, but I also need to remember why I do this work and to feel more inspired again.
“When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”
While this is a clear moment of more binary approaches to gender, I think a more inclusive approach to womanhood and marginalized genders offers a look at how each of those traditions and histories offer us opportunities for reclamation and empowerment, especially in community with one another.
“In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
One of the best lessons a therapist gifted me with was the framing that a lot of my pain (depression, anxiety, etc.) comes from trying to survive in a world literally not built for my Blackness or my queerness. I think this lesson from Lorde is similar in that it offers a light away from these states and this way of existing that drains our eros, our erotic energy, our spirits, and offers a way back to feeling more whole.
What rituals, meditations, and other tools will you employ to center Lorde’s work? Leave a comment about how you’ll mark this Year of our Audre Lorde below!
What Can Black Queer People Learn From the Lost Queer Joy of the Civil Rights Movement?
I didn’t know Martin Luther King was human until I was already well out of high school.
That sounds awful, and would embarrass the people who raised me, let me try again:
I grew up as a “well behaved” Black girl in metro Detroit, which means that I firmly grew up within the shadow of Martin Luther King’s myth. If you’re Black, and especially if you’re Black and grew up in a major Black city any time in the last half century, you know the drill. You know the speeches, and the church breakfasts, the symbolic marches, and the documentaries. You know the service projects. You learn “I Have a Dream” well before most of your white peers, and by the time they’re finally covering the scrapped together basics of the civil rights movement, your parents have already so deeply instilled in you that you have to be twice as good to get half as much that Dr. King’s dream might as well just stay that — a dream. The King I knew was an icon. A martyr. Depending on whom you ask, a savior. But he was never a human being.
Usually when people talk of Dr. King’s humanity, they zero in on the ways he was fallible. They speak of his numerous affairs behind his wife’s back; they note that he didn’t do enough to stand up for one of his lead organizers, Bayard Rustin, when he faced rampant homophobia; sometimes they even mention that Dr. King enjoyed a bit of gambling on the side. What you hear less often is that he was only 26 years old when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He was 34 at the March on Washington. He hadn’t even reached 40 when he was assassinated. Martin Luther King was a young man.
The first time this really occurred to me, it was because of a photo of Dr. King flirting with his wife, Coretta. It looks like it’s cold outside and she’s kissing him on his cheek, her gloved hand rested on his shoulder. His eyes are larger than usual, turned to the upper corner as if to put on a performative “aw shucks.” It’s silly and playful. I’ve seen hundreds photos just like it from couples on Instagram.
The next time I thought about how young Martin Luther King really was, it was when I saw him in a corner pressed against the performer Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy’s mouth is open so big with laughter, it’s almost doubled. King’s shoulders have hunched up so far, they’re at his ears. They’re definitely spilling some kinda tea, and it is HOT. There’s so much joy there, but looking at the picture makes me almost sad. Why was I an adult before someone bothered to tell me that Martin Luther King ever laughed?
Y’all I am tired.
There’s an expectation — on days like Martin Luther King Day or Black History Month, specifically — that Black folks — especially the Black folks who occupy liberal “woke” circles, like the kind often occupied in queer communities — will spend the day teaching. And to be fair, I’ve made my career teaching Black history. I joke that “Martin Luther King Day through February 28th is when I make most of my coin all year.” So, I definitely signed up for this and I knew what the deal was when I penned my signature. But, more than anything, this year, I want to wish Black queer and trans people joy. Martin Luther King didn’t fight that damn hard for us not to have a quality of life that comes with celebrating our joy and humanity first.
The desire to find footprints of something gay and happy and Black to write about led me back to Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. Two Black queer writers whose friendship and intellectual partnership have become a myth of its own right. A Black gay man that for many QTPOC, “venerable” would only be the beginning — an understatement of what he’s meant to us when words stop having meaning. To Lorraine, he was Jimmy. She was closeted lesbian playwright and essayist whose most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun, is still performed by high schools in every city nationwide, so much so that it borders on cliché. He simply called her “Sweet Lorraine.”
If you’re a Black queer nerd (or perhaps even if you’re not) there’s a photo that’s probably being conjured in your mind right now. In it, James Baldwin’s smile takes up half his face. His arms are wide. His tie’s askew. His hips are rocking to beat that, even in a still image, you can somehow hear. Lorraine is facing away from the camera, snapping her fingers to the same tune. She doesn’t let go of her famous cigarette. It’s the kind of photo that gets shared every year on his birthday, on her birthday, whenever someone wants to spark a little fun on social media timelines.
Here’s something most people won’t tell you: That’s not Lorraine in the picture. It’s an unnamed CORE worker in New Orleans. The reason the photo is shared prolifically and is so closely associated to Hansberry and Baldwin, however, is because it perfectly encapsulates their friendship. Here they are, as described in Baldwin’s own words in the essay he named after her nickname, “Sweet Lorraine:”
We walked and talked and laughed and drank together, sometimes in the streets and bars and restaurants of the Village, sometimes at her house, gracelessly fleeing the houses of others; and sometimes seeming, for anyone who didn’t know us, to be having a knock-down-drag-out battle. We spent a lot of time arguing about history and tremendously related subjects in her Bleecker Street, and later Waverly Place, flats. And often, just when I was certain that she was about to throw me out as being altogether too rowdy a type, she would stand up, her hands on her hips (for these down-home sessions she always wore slacks), and pick up my empty glass as though she intended to throw it at me. Then she would walk into the kitchen, saying, with a haughty toss of her head, “Really, Jimmy. You ain’t right, child!” With which stern put-down she would hand me another drink and launch into a brilliant analysis of just why I wasn’t “right.” I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister.
That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister.
You know the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words? Well this might be one of those few times when the words do it better.
It’s the rowdiness. The unbridled laughter, so loud that others would mistake it for a fight. The hands on the hips and name calling. The stumbling home at dawn that still doesn’t feel like an ending, only an ellipsis of what’s next to come. That’s the story I want to talk about today.
James Baldwin was at the March on Washington, of course — as was almost every other Black person with even a modicum of intellectual or political celebrity (ironically, Lorraine Hansberry was not; she was at home recovering from surgery). Those famously drawn moments, with their stoic black and white photographs and stern promises of a better tomorrow, are important. Their performance of “respectability politics” that asked Black activists to wear their supposed Sunday best for long walks in blazing sun as a proof of their humanity for white people who never gave them a second thought in the first place — that’s important. Those are stories of heroes that I learned as a child, and I don’t take them for granted. Not for a second. And most certainly, not on this day.
But this? This after-hours queer mess, full of sweat and entangled limbs and exuberant slurred words? These stories of bossy femmes in slacks who made a home out of their kitchen for their smartass friends to bang tables and talk loud? Of Black queer folk who loved on themselves in the middle of the night, and together built a family of children that, nearly 60 years later, they’d never get to meet? That’s what I find myself most clamoring to remember.
It’s not about who we are when the cameras are turned on, but the ways we care for each other when no one is looking but us. When we’re exhausted from this fight. When we have to promise ourselves that we’re worth it right now. When kisses and laughter are our ports in the storm.
Martin Luther King Day Roundtable: What’s In Your Black Justice Toolkit?
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often co-opted and remembered as a pacifist, but he was a fighter for black liberation above almost all else. That’s the legacy that Autostraddle is remembering. On this holiday, we’re honoring his work by asking ourselves: What’s in your Black Justice Toolkit, right now?
What are the intellectual, emotional, physical “tools” that you’re using to fight for justice in black communities? What are the tools that you think we need to be building? Simply put, what does black liberation look like for you, and what are you prepared to do to get there?
We invite you to join our conversation in the comment section.