Curls That Dance Under Any Light: Rediscovering My Queer Hair in India

I’ve had the same hair for 4 or 5 years now: wavy, almost-curly hair that falls in ringlets just past my shoulders. Learning to care for it has been a process. I started with the Rite-Aid-brand, silicone heavy “leave-in conditioners” that left my hair drier and crunchier than it was before. Since then, I’ve read think pieces and beauty blogs instructing me on how to handle my in-between hair. My hair, after all, is a far-cry from the glossy white hair that advertisers market for. It’s thick, coarse, frizzy, and dry. Learning from people of color, predominantly online, I’ve learned to wash it less, condition it whenever it is wet, and moisturize it with oil. It’s indicative of the work I’ve done to understand my body, and more particularly, those racialized aspects of my identity.

When I was a child, though, I wanted my hair to be straight. My mother was insistent that I never flat iron my hair. She invoked images of her own sister, bent over an ironing table in their Queens apartment, pressing the hot steam to her dark brown hair as if it were a wool coat.

No matter what I did to straighten my hair at friends’ houses, it did not listen. While it might appear disciplined for 30 minutes, slowly, the curls would return, and the shine would be lost. I, like my hair, tried to be more digestible. I made myself smaller, tried to speak less, tried to disappear. But I couldn’t stop myself from writing. Some years later, I would be proud of my body’s resistance. But in 9th grade, I wanted out.

At fourteen or so, I cut my own hair off in my family’s bathroom.

It was fall. The walls in the bathroom were a scattering of teal and icy blue tiles. I was looking in the mirror, halfway to falling in love with someone at the time. I was so afraid of my newfound affection that I feared would damage me. I was so afraid to grow up in the world as the kind of person I am. I called out to my mother, “Mom, I’m cutting my hair!” To which she said, “Okay, honey, make sure it is even.”

I cut my long, wavy hair up to my ears. And for the first time in my life, my hair was straight. Or I pretended that it was. Other things in my life appeared straight too, if I looked away at the right times.

The truth was that even as I cut it off, my hair was talking. It said, look at how beautiful I may be, if I am nurtured, if I am known. While people in middle school had manufactured curls with hot tools and fancy YouTube tutorials, I had paraded around with my big 50s barrel curls. Sometimes, upon receiving a compliment, I might find some affection within me for those curls. As I got older, my hair got bigger and longer. I grew into my sexuality and found my hair evidence of my body’s health and abundance.

In college, as I concurrently listened to my body, I listened to my head, listened to who my heart wanted to love. My hair finally reached past my shoulders and to my bust. I stopped watching videos online of white women attempting care for hair adjacent to mine in texture. I went to the Devacurl salon on Broome Street in Manhattan and sat in awe as a blond woman with curls fastened around the crown of her head like bubbles sheared my own. (I paid 200 dollars and swore to cut my hair for under 40 dollars for the rest of my life.)

Before I left for India, I was finally proud of my hair: the way, when just oiled, the curls seemed to dance under any light, the ringlets twisting and dancing down my shoulders like its own piece of abstract art.

Over this last summer, I played with the idea of cutting my hair many times. I have wanted to be queerer and queerer the more time I spent in the world. I was tired of having to prove to people that I was as gay as I knew myself to be. I was tired of having the relative privilege of passing. My queerness felt to me the most true part of myself, and I could feel it grow light in the weightlessness of August’s breeze. I looked at photos of women on Instagram and pitched the idea of me, with shorter hair, to many of my friends. Unlike my first dramatic haircut, this one would be of running towards something, instead of running away.

When I asked one of my closest friends, they said that no, I wouldn’t look good with a bob. Okay, I thought, I’ll have to find another way.

I, ever struggling to understand the exact size of my body and presence in the world, took them at their word. And truly, I loved my hair. It had always meant so much to me. I felt that I was finally doing it justice. It spilled forth from my scalp, a cloud of curls, and I felt very much the kind of woman I had always wanted to be. Never the kind of person that was meant to flourish in the world.

And yet, here I was.

When I went to India to study abroad, I expected the trip to be good for my hair. After all, here was a place where millions of people had hair exactly like mine, knew precisely how to care for it, love it, enrich it. But it’s one thing to have expectations, and another entirely to see them fulfilled.

Two months into studying abroad, things changed. I’ve always been comfortable presenting as uber feminine because, I believe, of the politics of presenting that way in the United States. Yes, I’m feminine, but I’m questioning expectations in the way I put together prints: bright colors borrowed from my mother’s closet, large black and brown sweaters from my father’s. In India, though, my production of personal presentation does not exist outside the norm. I try to wear traditional clothes for the sake of my safety, try to pass as straight, given that I’m living in a country where I have just been decriminalized. I grew up hearing, from my mother, how easy it is for people in this society to discipline the bodies of those who challenge the norm.

Producing a normalized presentation has come at the cost of my queerness. It always felt palpable on my skin at home. I could feel it interweaving itself in everything I touched. Here, its perfume is noticeably absent. I feel divorced from my queerness. Voicing this frustration has made me think about what parts of my presentation I can control without risking my safety. And it brings me back to my hair. Here, my hair is not the political tool it is the United States. It does not signify any resistance or pride. If anything, my hair conforms; young, Hindu women often have their hair long as an indicator of fertility. I can’t stand to be lumped in with these people, or to be further perceived as straight, or Hindu, or “good,” as my host-mom has often described me.

A few weekends into the trip, I was at Durga Pooja (a religious ceremony for the goddess Durga). Durga is a warrior goddess and an iteration of the god Parvati. She is known for fighting for the oppressed, and specifically for killing Mahishasura, a buffalo demon. She is one of the only female goddesses who is considered on par with if not more important than the male gods, though only in certain regions of India. I was shocked to see that the figurine styled to look like the goddess looked so much like me. She had big, upturned eyes, small lips, and the thickest, curliest, black hair all the way to the floor. Her figure was covered in gold and silk. To call it abundant does not approach the sheer magnitude of beauty and ornament at that religious event. In all other depictions, devis (goddesses) in Hinduism have their hair tied up as an indication of modesty. In her act of rage, Durga’s hair unspools before her. People at the Pooja even came up to me, pointing, saying, “Your hair looks just like hers.”

This would be an uncomplicated, romantic story, if I took this as a sign to keep my hair long. Durga, after all, is a murderous woman who has to be prevented from destroying the balance of the universe. She is central to Bengali culture, which is my culture, yes. But she’s also emblematic of a woman gone awry, driven mad by her passions. This is further complicated by Durga’s attachment to Hinduism, which (see one of the essays I wrote upon arriving) is not something I’m interested in supporting.

A professor recently lent me a book called “Women and the Hindu Right” that asserts how Hinduism and Communalism at large are tools of power which use women’s bodies as landscapes for contesting said power. In South Asia, with its history of violence between Hindu and Muslim people, Muslim women and folk have paid the price for the weaponizing of Durga’s image to justify the murderous woman. The radical, revolutionary women in this iteration (who is inspired by Durga) is fundamentally supportive of the institutions the men before her created. She is deeply feminine, and yes, angry, but in a way that is useful to the men around her. She is revolutionary, but she is still an object to be prepared for marriage, that endless act of subjugation on which the caste system is built.

The caste system, and the misogyny enshrined within it, has taken things from the women in my family. Casteism was maintained by endogamy or arranging marriages within a certain caste group. Women were not allowed to make choices for themselves because their lives had to serve the caste system. And so, the caste system took away women’s freedoms and with it their ability to reach for abundance, that thing which my hair always seemed to symbolize. My hair seemed an indicator to the aunties in India that I was a “traditional” woman, that I was like them, that I was truly “Indian.”

I recoiled from the possibility that my hair, that force which has always resisted discipline, seemed to have become an indicator of just that. I had few ways to express my queerness safely, to demand I be understood outside of that structural paradigm. I was tired of aunties reminding me of my imminent marriages and children and families. I was tired of being told about the men people were sure I would marry. Women like you, they said, playing with my long hair, marry lovely men. And so quickly, I decided. I needed to cut my hair off.

During a break, I used airline miles to fly to Taipei, where I could communicate effectively with the hairdresser. My Hindi was still nascent after those two months. But my Mandarin? Easy. Right before the hairdresser brought the silvery scissors to my chin, she asked me: Was I sure?

No, I said. I wasn’t. But please, cut it off.

Days after I cut my hair in Taipei, I started rewatching episodes of The Good Place, a sitcom about the afterlife. I wrapped myself in the soft fluffy duvet offered by the hostel and made like I was home in New York, hiding from the cold. One of the characters is played by Jameela Jamil. Jamil is famous, among other things, for advocating against narrow and impossible beauty standards. She is brown and painfully beautiful. Although my hair texture was never like hers — it was too curly, too coarse — I found myself missing my hair when I watched the show. I could have been like her, I thought: elegant, beautiful. But then I recalled that she did not exist in the context that I have been living in for the past few months.

In an American context, my femininity was never the digestible kind; I was able to use my racialized femininity to create spaces for breathing. Jameela Jamil’s character in The Good Place is deeply English. Certainly, hers is a subjecthood created by the diasporic colonial context, and so it is related to mine, but not the same. Not right now.

In India, in a different context, I was not able to use femininity as a tool to fight back. Though so much of this place is easy for me — the food, and the perpetual sunlight — its expectations are impossible. Femininity and its baggage have become the very gas that the culture was using to suffocate me. It was in that context, then, that I found my face pressed to the glass in Taipei, desperate for air.

I hadn’t realized how my hair taught me lessons about who I was until I had to cut it all away. When I talked to my friend Kelsey about the choice to cut my hair, I worried that I wouldn’t like my hair when I came back to the United States. The truth is that I love — I loved — my hair — but now it is gone. I am back to the haircut I gave myself when I felt similarly stifled at the cliff’s edge of adolescence, intent on forcing myself to be certain kind of pretty.

Kelsey said something I’m still thinking about today: Sometimes I like to think of [queerness] as something you have to hold onto tighter in certain times and places, but that never means it isn’t there. I had felt over the past two months like part of me was melting into the humid air. I needed to make sure I didn’t lose some pieces of who I was while I was here. I have been looking the whole time for a way to hold on to my queerness, to fasten it to me like a lucky charm, a rabbit’s foot, a loved one’s stuffed elephant.

I needed a way to escape all the expectations and demands of the colonial product that is Indian Womanhood — the way my hair became a symbol of fertility, heterosexuality, violence, and a particular strain of femininity.

Shearing away the hair that took years to grow is my way of holding on. It’s true, I’m sad at times, but I think it’s time for me to let go of that girl in the bathroom on 84th Street, so afraid of what the world would do to her.

It’s time to say goodbye to all that, all those memories of hopelessness and helplessness. I’m not sure I am any of the things that the aunties here tell me I am: Good. Hindu. Girl. I’m not sure about a lot of things these days. But I’ve found a way to care for myself that keeps me alive. This story isn’t really about my hair. It’s about adjusting to the expectations the world has for me, the way I am demanded to prim and trim different components to who I am to fit their expectations. So this is a story about femininity, yes, but it’s also about the way my femininity weaves the tapestry of being alongside the threads of my queerness. Cutting my hair was about asking questions, and challenging. It was about regaining my autonomy and asserting my refusal to engage with those lofty and hurtful expectations.

And who knows? Perhaps I’ll find something else to love about myself in the interim, something that tells stories about my sexuality that I’m finally ready to hear, answers. Perhaps this new thing will not be the kind to be cut away with a simple stroke of scissors.

Jillian Mercado Is Queer: Model, Activist and Gen Q Actress Comes Out on Instagram

Feature image via Jillian Mercado’s Instagram

Ahead of her debut on tonight’s episode of The L Word: Generation Q, Dominican fashion model and disability activist Jillian Mercado came out as queer.

She took to her Instagram on Saturday night to celebrate her recurring gig on the show and reflected, “I am proud to say that I’ve done so many great things for the disability community (there is so much more to be done done tho). Over the course of this year I had the absolute honor to know people from all communities that make me me. That being a woman, having a disability, being Dominican, and finally I can add to that magical layer being queer.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/B6E4b36lSWM/

Mercado went on, “Although I’ve always felt at home with the queer community and when love is love I understood that I’ve always known. It’s so beautiful when you can truly feel what freedom feels like inside your own body and space your in.”

Jillian Mercado was raised in New York by her seamstress mom (whom she credits with sparking her interest in fashion) and a shoe salesman dad. She was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy in her early teens and uses a motorized wheelchair to get around in her day-to-day life. She studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and started her career as a editorial beauty intern at Allure in 2009. From there she’s starred in campaigns for Diesel, Olay, Bumble, CK fragrance, Nordstrom, Target, and Tommy Hilfiger. Did I forget to mention she also worked on the merchandising campaign for Beyonce’s Formation tour? Because she definitely did that, too. She landed her modeling contract with IMG in 2015 and, relevant to our extremely gay interests, she’s now guest starring as Sophie Suarez’s sister Maribel on The L Word: Generation Q.

It’s funny — just earlier this week, I was joking with our Editor-in-Chief Riese that Dominican actress Rosanny Zayas playing Afro-Latina lesbian Sophie Suarez was a gift beyond my dreams. I mean, in one of the earliest episodes, she even lays her edges down with a toothbrush! Queer Latinas on television are becoming increasingly common, but are still rare across history. And black Latinas? Pssssh, forget it! I’m Puerto Rican, not Dominican, but we’re all familia and anyway — nothing makes me prouder than seeing my Caribeña sisters shine.

That quest for representation, for seeing yourself on screen is part of what’s driven Jillian Mercado, who in her post last night discussed that lack of representation for both Latinx and disabled communities was a catalyst for her career: “I was shocked when I was younger that representation was little to none in the fashion /entertaining Industry, so I worked day and night. Going to college and interning everywhere I could to start changing that mind set, and I have. From landing my first worldwide campaign and slowly making my way to where I am now as a recurring guest on The L Word! ⁣”

Well Jillian, you’re reppin’ hard sis, and con much orgullo. I’m just really excited and happy about this one, you know? If you want to learn more about Jillian’s work in disability activism and her fashion career, here’s a really great video from the folks at NowThis. And just for fun (!!!), here’s a photo of her slaying it with Indya Moore at Pride back in June:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BzdXOV0FLNJ/

And don’t forget that you can see Jillian Mercado on The L Word: Generation Q tonight on Showtime!

Trans Women of Color Organizers Are Building a Movement to Decriminalize Sex Work in D.C.

Feature Image credit to Darrow Montgomery

Imagine you’ve grinded for years as a member of a community coalition to get a hearing for a historic bill that will drastically improve your life if passed. A hearing is finally granted, and when the big day arrives, you scramble to get your John Hancock at the top of the list to give testimony.

Once the hearing begins, hours go by without your name being called. Although you signed up before them, representatives of organizations from other parts of the country and from other countries get their time at the mic before you. Worse, their speeches are denouncing the bill that you and other local grassroots organizers have put your blood, sweat, and tears into, labeling it harmful instead of helpful.

This was Tamika Spellman’s fate at an Oct. 17 city council hearing for the Reducing Criminalization to Promote Community Safety and Health Amendment Act of 2019, which calls for D.C. to fully decriminalize consensual sex work between adults. She said that organizations based outside of D.C. were given precedence to testify over local members of the Sex Worker Advocates Coalition (SWAC), a collection of mostly grassroots Black and Brown transgender and queer-led groups that’ve been moving in coordination to decriminalize sex work in D.C. since October 2016.

“A lot of the groups that worked with this movement were put at the trailing end of the hearing, and it was a 14-hour-plus hearing. Those voices should have been heard well ahead of them, and if anything, those that were from out-of-state should have been put at the end. Accommodating them because they’re from out-of-state made absolutely no sense to a movement that is local,” Spellman told me.

Spellman is the advocacy associate at HIPS, a D.C. nonprofit that provides harm reduction services, advocacy, and community engagement to sex workers and drug users. HIPS is the birthplace of SWAC, the DECRIMNOW campaign, and the Community Safety and Health Amendment Acts of 2017 and 2019.

When the 2017 version of the bill, co-introduced by two city council members, failed to receive a hearing, SWAC wasn’t deterred from their mission. More fired up than ever, the coalition intensified their advocacy, including appealing to city council, canvassing door-to-door and on the streets, writing op-eds, talking to the media, doing speaking engagements, and meeting with neighborhood boards and commissions. They also reworked the language in the bill to make it clear that it doesn’t endorse coercion, exploitation, or human trafficking.

SWAC’s endless hours of footwork on behalf of the Community Safety and Health Amendment Act weren’t in vain: Four council members reintroduced the bill in 2019, another council member co-sponsored it, and a hearing was scheduled. Emmelia Talarico, the organizing director of SWAC member No Justice No Pride DC, works closely with Spellman and told me that earning supporters and getting a hearing for the bill was truly a collective, long-term endeavor.

“I think all the different groups showed up in different ways. A lot of us have been organizing together for a number of years, and we have these relationships developed and this level of trust developed. We also respect a diversity of tactics,” Talarico said.

During the hard-won council hearing, Talarico, a mixed-race white and Puerto Rican non-binary trans woman sex worker, and Spellman, a Black trans woman sex worker, sat through testimony after testimony of individuals conflating sex work with sex trafficking, stating misinformation (i.e., the bill would allow for brothels and empower pimps), and even equating the full decriminalization of sex work to human chattel slavery in the US, which Spellman found particularly upsetting as a descendant of enslaved Africans.

Many of the bill’s opponents advocated for partial decriminalization, known as the “Nordic model,” the “Equality model,” or the “End Demand model,” which purports to only criminalize buyers, but both Talarico and Spellman call this a false solution.

“Studies have shown that is has not helped with trafficking, that it’s been more or equal harm to full criminalization, and sex workers are losing money. They’re losing their ability to negotiate. STDs are rising because you don’t have the ability to negotiate for safer sex, and crime is expanding because you’re not in control of where you’re meeting,” Spellman said.

While the concerns of outsiders ultimately convinced the council to not bring the bill to a vote for now, several national and international organizations are following SWAC’s lead, such as Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR).

Tyrone Hanley, a senior policy counsel at NCLR, says that supporting SWAC and the DECRIMNOW campaign in reaching out to D.C.’s LGBTQ+ residents and testifying at the hearing are some of the highlights of his career thus far.

“I think what was really powerful about that day was that it was very clear that the side supporting the decriminalization of sex work was very local, very grassroots, and very community-centered,” Hanley said.

As a gay Black man, Hanley believes decriminalizing sex work is necessary to ending violence against LGBTQ+ people, but he says it’s just one of many issues that needs to be addressed to ensure trans women of color in D.C. are able to survive and thrive.

Statistics underscore Hanley’s sentiment despite the district’s progressive, trans-inclusive anti-discrimination laws. According to the Washington, DC Trans Needs Assessment Report, 57% of trans people of color in the city earn less than $10,000 a year, 49% have been denied a job due to being perceived as trans, and 21% have been sexually or physically assaulted in the workplace. Furthermore, 47% of Black trans respondents and 47% of Latinx trans respondents reported currently working in the grey and underground economy, which includes sex work.

Trans women of color are overrepresented in all of these categories but are also some of the fiercest fighters against the myriad injustices trans people experience in D.C. At HIPS, Spellman is working to end unjust evictions and excessive application fees. Talarico helped found the NJNP Collective, which provides resources such as housing, job seeker services, and jail and legal support to the city’s trans communities. The collective also offers paid organizer training to trans people of color as an alternative form of employment to sex work, which prepares them to represent themselves at decision-making tables.

Unsurprisingly, Spellman doesn’t plan on leaving decision-makers alone anytime soon when it comes to passing the bill to fully decriminalize sex work in D.C.

“We’re going to be all up their butts until we get a vote. We’re going to continue the work that we’ve been doing. We’re going to continue growing this movement. This is nothing but another hurdle that we’re going to leap over because a year ago, they did not think we would get as far as we did. They were shocked that it moved as much as it did,” Spellman said. “So now that we know we have the attention, we’re going to continue to play on that. We’re going to continue to push hard. The efforts that we put in… that’s nothing compared to what we’re getting ready to do now.”⚡
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Edited by Carmen
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“I Am the Terrorist I Must Disarm”: An Interview with Staceyann Chin

I was in high school when I first saw Staceyann Chin perform, barefoot and incensed, on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. She was fearless in her rage, her sexuality, her eloquence. Whether taking down the “war on terror,” naming the difficulties of immigrating to the U.S., or detailing some kinky, nails-down-the back sex, the visceral truth of her poems could hardly be contained by the stage. In the twenty plus years since her debut, she has performed all over the world, released a memoir, and written and starred in her one-woman show Motherstruck!, which has now been made into a series. All the while she’s chronicled her journeys as a lesbian, an immigrant, and a mother with the same beautifully unapologetic voice.

Chin’s Crossfire: A Litany for Survival may be her first collection of poems, but it is already situated in a powerful lineage of queer black writers, featuring an introduction by Jacqueline Woodson, an epigraph quoting June Jordan, and a titular homage to Audre Lorde. I guzzled it down in a day and a half, unable to stop thinking about it even when I wasn’t reading. It’s the tonic I needed and that I hadn’t realized I’d been thirsting for. There were the poems I remembered, but beyond nostalgia, I felt the same sense I felt all those years ago — as if I were being granted permission. From the start, Staceyann’s work has been about embracing and confronting the fullness of her life and community, with all of the conflicts, heartaches, triumphs, and the fullness of humanity laid bare.

Staceyann and I spoke about this piercing new book and how she tackles queer community, relationships, and staying present to our capacities to harm and heal one another.

…this book stands as testament to the Black lesbian life that has been lived in Brooklyn for the last 20 years. The kind of robust, sexy, political presence of it.

Jehan: I was surprised to learn that Crossfire is your first collection of poems. What led you to publish this collection now?

Staceyann: I was thinking of legacy and royalties. I think post-child, you’re thinking, ‘What would I leave to her?’ And also I’ve been watching the way that this administration has bent truth. It got me thinking about how, for example, some people say ‘these are Africans and these are what there experiences of slavery were,’ and I felt like a lot of the reason that those people can sell those narratives is because there weren’t many first-hand accounts of that experience. I have been living in New York and I‘ve been experiencing a particular strain of New York life because of gentrification and because of the way that the world changes rapidly. Neighborhoods are existing in a way that entire communities are being erased and our experiences are not documented. And I thought to myself that this book stands as testament to the Black lesbian life that has been lived in Brooklyn for the last 20 years. The kind of robust, sexy, political presence of it. And I look around me and I don’t see it anymore. All of my friends have moved to upstate New York, to Charlotte and Jersey, and Brooklyn no longer belongs to the working class lesbian. And so, many of my poems reference a New York that I lived. So I felt like the book was necessary.

Jehan: Particularly when we’re talking about queer and lesbian communities in New York, and what ends up happening when these spaces are no longer able to exist, and the places that queer people would congregate in the city are diminishing or almost gone? It’s interesting what you say that it’s about documenting—

Staceyann: —and bearing witness. Because we were here. Absolutely we were here.

Jehan: Exactly. And one of the things that struck me about the poems and the theme of documentation is that they weren’t dated. I thought it was an interesting way of framing the poems to not have them mark those specific times. My read was that, in some ways, there is a timeless quality.

Staceyann: Yes. I think that also the context, the work is so specific. The references are so specific. Like “Open Letter to the Media” that openly references the Afghanistan War, the towers falling. I mean, the poems were created on Microsoft Word documents. So it’s easy to see when. But I didn’t think that the poems were speaking to each other in a chronological way. I thought that they were more thematically related. So I decided to see how they work together. I wanted it to present the fullness of a life. And also, in my own life, and in the tradition of oral storytelling, like how my grandmother would tell me stories, dates were largely inconsequential. Time was presented only in relation to other things. So if she was telling me a story, she would say “Oh, I think it was Christmas because your mother had just come in from ‘so and so,” or “I think it was before your brother was born.” “No, I don’t think you were walking yet.”

Jehan: I was definitely noting the subsections and the thematic overlaps of the various poems. I think what was interesting is that there are so many resonances — for example, the multiple forms of violence you’re marking throughout the book, particularly in the first two sections where you’re thinking about historical and colonial violence, as well as gendered and sexual violence.

Staceyann: Mmhmm. I think towards the end of the book I also started to look at the ways I represented violence in my relationships, whether or not it was unwittingly. I’m thinking of how we bruise each other. I mean, the bruising of each other is inevitable. What’s most important, I imagine, is how we deal with that fact. That is maybe the true mark of the kind of human you are. What’s the imprint you leave on someone? Because it’s not that you never hurt them. There’s no relationship in which there is no hurt. But it’s the way that people deal with that hurt that makes it tolerable or not.

Jehan: That sort of violence definitely resonated for me, particularly in the “Love” section. What does that reckoning look like for you? How do you recognize the violence and stay attuned to it?

Staceyann: So June Jordan wrote one of my favorite lines. She wrote “I am the terrorist I must disarm.” And we’re all perpetrators of some sort. This is why, this notion of this person who is monstrous… we all have the capacity to cause great harm to each other. The closer we are to people, the more we say we love them, the more they render themselves vulnerable to us, then the greater their capacity for hurting us. Even as I raise my daughter, one thing has remained consistent: my ability to acknowledge that I have hurt her and my willingness to apologize and make amends that, at the center of it, is in consideration for her needs. That’s what I think will allow us to survive. I think much of my work is to center her feelings and her needs, and to stay open to listening and being better.

But the ones who make the co-creation of the healing, the ones who acknowledge that they were capable of hurting you, I find that those relationships are thriving. Even, I think, in the midst of great difficulty or challenges.

Jehan: Hearing you say this makes me think of one of the stylistic choices you make in Crossfire. You have these forward slash line breaks in the middle of a verse. I’m wondering if, in that way, the slash was signaling to this ethos of staying in the midst of what’s on either side of that break.

Staceyann: That line break is the slanting of the line forward to leave space and is also about the line moving forward. It’s not necessarily a new thought or a new thing. And I would go as far as to say that one can completely see how the work that happens on the page has been informed by my relationship to the work in performance. Because the speaking cadence moves it. It has the voice in it. Is it the lowering of the voice? The deepening of a louder roar? Those nuances have certainly added color to my writing and my choice to write the thing down.

Jehan: I was certainly hearing your voice as I read. In large part because of the orality that you preserved on the page. One of the things I wrote down was ‘protest songs.’ I was thinking of poetry from the trajectory of oral history, and how many of your poems feel like these rallying cries and anthems. They work so beautifully on the page and could also be performed or sung at a protest.

Staceyann: I kind of ran away from that for a long time because the idea is that a working performance, the text is somehow substandard. And so, it’s not as complex as work that’s meant to be consumed on the page. For a long time, maybe I didn’t allow for them to be published because I didn’t want people to tell me that they weren’t complex.

Jehan: I always think it’s part of colonialism to privilege the written over the embodied and the spoken. Those are so often our communities’ ways of passing down knowledge and history.

Staceyann: But it’s funny because when white people perform it’s always so celebrated. Opera is all performance, right? Or like when Sting releases a song they go, “Oh it’s so beautiful, it’s so complex!” But when we do it, when there’s melanin, it’s no longer complex.

Jehan: This is part of what you address in poems such as, “Words Like Rape,” right? There it seems you’re addressing demands that poetry use metaphor and simile.

Staceyann: Thank you, I think that’s right. What I was trying to do there was show that sometimes the word is needed.

Jehan: That same complexity is clearly marked in the shifts in your family relationships. Specifically you talk about evolutions in your relationships with your parents and brother.

Staceyann: The poems about my mother and father are from when I was younger, late twenties, early thirties. And the poem from my brother was written this year. And I think you’ll note that I was still in the immediacy of the hurt from my parents and the poem from my brother was written from up here (gestures above her head). Back then I was very aware of being hurt by them. I felt it personally. Now I don’t take it so personally. Which doesn’t take away from the pain of not speaking to my brother. That’s still there. But I realized it’s not unique. In that way that I was talking about my parents, there’s no way to be in a relationship and not hurt someone. In fact, maybe that’s one of the universalizing themes of the book, that we are all going to hurt each other. So while it is definitely painful, I’m able to see what’s happened between me and my brother from a distance.

I make community. Nowadays, people live where they can, not where they choose so community is not always a given. So I go to people’s houses. I bring them in.

Jehan: How do you find community?

Staceyann: I make community. I always invite people into my home for tea. And I go for tea. I haven’t dropped my coloniality! (waves tea mug) No, but all jokes aside, I’ve been really good at making community. I wouldn’t say I’m an extrovert but I do like having people around. My child has a queen sized bed and I have a king sized bed because we need room for flesh. I have a couch because I need room for people to sleep. Nowadays, people live where they can, not where they choose, so community is not always a given. So I go to people’s houses. I bring them in.

I used to have these parties at my home every Saturday night, where friends would come over and we’d have these black lesbian parties. And they were sexy — black lesbians would be giving each other lap dances and talking about sexuality. The parties still happen now, but people live farther away, they’re not as frequent. And now we have kids, so you might be there one Saturday and then there’s seven children running around. It’s not as sexy anymore but there’s something really beautiful about that evolution too.

Jehan: What do you want people to take away from Crossfire?

Staceyann: I don’t know. I think that what Jackie [Jacqueline] Woodson says in the foreword is really true — this book invites you to step into the crossfire. And that will be a different experience for different people. Some may try it and say, “Well, I tried it but it wasn’t really for me.” And others may really find it a powerful experience. But either way I think you really have to let the poems wash over you.

The Burlesque Show

Photos courtesy of Chanel Moye, Ellanie Emanuelle & Seher Roychowdhury.

One evening following Afropunk, four friends walk into a venue. They go up three flights of stairs and find seats at the back of the small bar. One by one, womxn are introduced to the crowd; they dance around the stage, sensually removing silk gloves and sparkling dresses to Burlesque Blues and the likes of Peggy Lee, B.B. King and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

I’d lost some interest in this samesie-performance-style by the time Poison Ivory was introduced, but when the music started and I saw the stage blessed by the presence of a beautiful black body, my attention was on her. I’d never seen a black burlesque performer before. She spread her white feathers out like angel wings, displaying such grace, not looking at the audience.

She ended her performance by pouring champagne down her arched back as we watched it drip between her legs. They say you never forget your first.

I was hooked. I wanted to find that rush of representation again. From New Orleans to the United Kingdom, I tried. I witnessed burlesque performers appropriate Japanese culture, performers use the mockery of class for entertainment, drag scenes that appeared to be mostly whitewashed. I couldn’t match the high I felt watching or the same level of representation or power oozing from a performer, no matter where I looked.

Nearly a century after bisexual singer and cabaret dancer of colour, Josephine Baker, and 20 years after Rio Savant was crowned the first black queen for Miss Exotic World — Poison Ivory was named Miss Exotic World in 2016. I found myself once again at a bar, up three flights of stairs and sitting in the back of an all too familiar venue, this time with my partner (let’s call her Reesha.) The atmosphere feels different to the first time — more people of colour, more visibly queer couples, perhaps even a younger audience and definitely more black performers in the line up.

When Poison Ivory performs, I witness once again a black womxn own the stage. If only for another few minutes, we stare. We just stare and cheer and clap. White feathers spread out like angel wings — this time, her eyes flirting with spotlights; a clear and increased confidence.

As the interval approaches, Reesha convinces me to go up and tip a dollar if Poison Ivory is the one dancing on stage. The two most giggly brown queers approach the stage one by one. Lizzo’s “Tempo” plays and our tunnel vision blocks out every white guy in the room. Reesha approaches and kneels by the stage, dollar in her mouth. Poison Ivory smiles and kneels slowly bringing her face to Reesha, taking the dollar bill. Reesha slowly puts another dollar in the strap of Poison Ivory’s bra. “You’re incredible,” she whispers in Poison Ivory’s ear.

When I approach, she says “Hi” and smiles in a way that tells me she recognizes brown bodies coming to show solidarity, to say “we see you” with a tip and a kind smile. If that’s my head making up a story I’m going to keep rolling with it.

“Tempo” is still playing. I try to put a dollar bill inside the leg of her swimwear, which reads “Tits and Tattoos.” She dances down towards me quickly and I miss the spot I’m aiming for. She does it again and laughs softly. My hands are shaking. I’m trying so hard to concentrate on this; it is after all, my first time tipping a dancer and I’m trying to comfort the introvert in me. I giggle back and hide my face. She turns around and leans up against a pillar on stage. I tip her. I’m still shaking.

Burlesque, drag and striptease can allow us to embrace and tell our own stories through our work. The art of the striptease and revival of the neo-burlesque scene is giving space to seeing ourselves. In a small bar dubbed “World Famous” in New York City, Poison Ivory showed me there’s power in performance, in representation of race and of fuller black bodies. We have the power to take the stage, to own the stage, and just like my first time tipping, that stage can be our playground.

Crossing the Atlantic to the London, there’s a melting pot of queer and trans people of colour performing at nights organized by and/or for people of colour such as LICK, JuiceBox Events and The KOC Initiative.

LICK is a strip night for womxn, by womxn happening every few months (sometimes every one month if we’re lucky). The night prides itself on creating safe spaces for womxn with performances and DJ’s across running until 5AM — playing mostly hip hop and R&B. They’ve taken over London’s premier gentlemen’s clubs multiple times. Can we get a: “Yes! Take up that space!”

Three years ago, founder Teddy started LICK with no idea how popular it would get. At the time, she says, “all the gay bars were and still are dominated by gay men, often not letting womxn in, and the occasional monthly party we could find were so seriously lacking in diversity and/or our taste in music.”

Although founded by a white queer womxn, LICK has grown to have a huge impact on the community and for black queer womxn. It’s somewhere where womxn of colour seem to feel comfortable. This might be because Teddy consciously books black womxn as dancers, artist and DJ’s. “I think everyone should be doing the same. Representation especially for the black queer community is extremely important,” Teddy notes. It proves there’s a need for events that center black womxn and there previously wasn’t a market for it; LICK events have grown from selling 200 tickets to 2000 tickets for a night, selling out nearly every event in advance over the last year.

There’s still a long way to go for permanent space for queer people of colour, especially when much of the LGBTQ scene is dominated by gay bars, but LICK has been a start, evoking feelings that are reminiscent to the first time I saw Poison Ivory.

Womxn led LGBTQ/QTPOC collective JuiceBox Events is where, for the first time, I saw performers of colour, of ambiguous genders, different body types and abilities share the stage. Their event programmes burlesque and striptease performers, taking over a club for one night every few months.

Cofounders Krystal and Jenn say “being LGBTQ/QTPOC womxn ourselves we understand the frustration and disappointment in being a queer person of colour without a space to celebrate our culture and heritage safely. This is why we have created JuiceBox Events, to empower and provide a platform for the underrepresented in our community.”

At JuiceBox, you’ll see some pole work, floor work and performers straight up bringing people in from the audience, Magic Mike style. Traditionally we’ve often seen cisgender and femme people on burlesque and striptease stages. JuiceBox actively works to book amab, non-binary, MoC and masc performers. They’re also giving dom/stud performers a platform and dom/stud audiences an opportunity to be brought on stage, too. Philadelphia based gender fluid stripper Mighty performed at the most recent JuiceBox, bringing multiple people on stage.

When asked about how they see power in their performance, Mighty told me, “being a black gender fluid performer to me is to be able to control and play with versatility that gives you more freedom to express yourself. I represent gender fluid in front of the people I perform for in ways that express masculinity and femininity in a combination that allows me to interact with more kinds of people.”

Whilst I’ve never been dragged around the stage at JuiceBox, it’s where I received my very first professional lap dance. I was brought to the VIP balcony and seated on a couch next to someone I didn’t know. Together, we exchanged looks as if to say “OMG OMG OMG” and at one point we high-fived as drag king Romeo De La Cruz gave her a lap dance, and Cruz’s wife, burlesque performer and drag king, Jada Love, gave one to me. There’s something powerful about a black foursome, double lap dance safe space in the middle of a queer striptease event. Something just as powerful when the people giving those lap dances are diverse in gender presentation and body types.

Jada Love describes her time performing at JuiceBox as an “empowering experience” where she’s free to express herself on stage, “the crowd gives you love and cheers you on, which is uplifting.” Her spouse, Romeo, and quite often performance partner at events agrees, “JuiceBox is a queer experience like no other. The fact that it is black womxn led and 1000% inclusive of all bodies, genders, sexualities, cultures, languages and identities. Not just onstage with performers, but the attendees. As a performer it has given me a space to be me, let go and be respected as a person, not an object or fetish — especially as a trans enby, no T, no surgery — every humxn takes me for me, even ones that haven’t seen someone like me represent and be free openly. JuiceBox isn’t just an event; it’s a FamLITly.”

Masculine-of-center folks in the burlesque and striptease scenes might still be lacking, but London also has the KOC Initiative, a drag king collective for kings of colour founded by drag king Zayn Phallic (get it?).

The first time I saw Zayn perform I was in a basement lesbian bar — one of two lesbian bars in the UK, waiting for what I imagined would be another all-white lineup. It turned out to be a repeat of the first time I had seen Poison Ivory years before. Out of nowhere this brown king owned the stage, with a rendition of TV theme tunes through the years (including Dexter, Pokemon and Fresh Prince of Bel Air) as he changed each outfit to suit the song. Finally he stripped down to his red thong, lip syncing and gyrating to the Baywatchtheme tune; biceps hugged by red arm bands. The performance ended as he poured sun tan lotion down his chest and squirted the bottle on fans. The audience clapped and cheered for this newcomer.

Zayn was the first drag king of colour I had seen that made me think I could do that, too. Many kings embody their narratives through their performance. It’s totally possible to own a stage, have fun with it and seem comfortable in your skin. Zayn ran drag king workshops for new kings of colour, hosting a summer training that resulted in an amateur showcase. KOC Initiative continues to thrive in London, Brighton and Bristol — three major cities, bursting with queer up and coming performance and an audience eager for them.

Poison Ivory started it for me — noticing that there’s a serious lack of performers of colour in the burlesque, drag and striptease scenes. With the presence of JuiceBox Events, LICK and KOC Initiative in London, there’s an emerging pool of talent that continues to pave the way for queer performers of colour who aren’t booked just to tick boxes and reach diversity quotas. JuiceBox, LICK and KOC put people of colour at the forefront of their lineups and in the marketing of these lineups. Organizers like Zayn share their knowledge and hold space for other kings to try out their material.

Seeing myself represented in these performers has been a form of resistance, resilience and power, whether on one side of the Atlantic or the other. In a bar up three flights of stairs, Poison Ivory showed me black people exist in these spaces. She’ll always be my first.⚡

Edited by Carmen

Lena Waithe’s “Queen & Slim” Left Me Still Hungry for Black Queer Freedom

This review contains spoilers for Queen & Slim

I was in bed scrolling through Instagram when I saw the footage of Alton Sterling’s murder. I wasn’t prepared. It left me gasping aloud, not even aware I’d started crying. Innocuously nestled between pictures of friends at the beach, taking selfies, was the video of his shooting. It happened so fast, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. When I finally did register it, I was stunned, both unable to believe his murder was real and upset at my own astonishment.

Let’s be clear, Queen & Slim isn’t that. But it’s not much of a departure.

The film opens with two gorgeously dark-skinned people on a painfully lackluster first date. Already I feel myself getting pulled in just out of sheer thirst — it’s so rare to see deeply hued people as romantic leads. We find out early on that Queen, an attorney, had responded to Slim’s months-old Tinder message because her client was sentenced to death row and she didn’t want to be alone that night. They continue muddling through the awkwardness of the evening until Slim is pulled over while driving Queen home. Almost immediately it’s clear that the white officer is angry, and his anger is in need of a target. Things escalate quickly, ending with a bullet in Queen’s leg and Slim shooting the officer dead in self-defense.

They embark on a harried journey through Ohio to Kentucky, then on through Nashville to New Orleans where Queen’s uncle lives and can offer some aid (trans actress Indya Moore is one of his girlfriends). As they drive, their backstories take shape, along with tentative plans for escaping their present circumstances. Along the way they discover that they’re the accidental heroes to whole swaths of Black folks exhausted by police violence. Unsurprisingly, many others see them as villains. Their actions spark a revolution across the country with uprisings against the cops carried out to inevitable, horrific ends. With the help of Queen’s uncle and his motley crew of ex-military comrades, a plan is hatched to get the pair to Florida and, from there, on a plane to Cuba. So they can be free, “like Assata.”

They don’t make it. Not to Cuba, not even to the plane. Dropped off yards away from the aircraft, Queen and Slim smile in disbelief, running towards their freedom and looking so relieved as the impossible becomes real. The thing is, they had us believing it was possible, too. There were audible gasps and shouts in the theater as numerous cop cars become apparent in the distance. I was among them, having let myself believe that they had a chance. Both characters were brutally killed on the tarmac.

The fact that I identified so heavily with the movie speaks to some strengths in Lena Waithe’s script. Her unwillingness to translate cultural moments and references acted as an invitation to relax into our shared tongue. The dialogue was restrained in parts but also lush in the moments where more was needed. While there were times I found myself filling in plot holes, I didn’t really mind because of how successfully swept up I became in the film’s more successful moments.

The movie was a first for her and also for director Melina Matsoukas, who is perhaps best known for directing Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” Visually, the film is an absolute stunner. One of its biggest triumphs is its unyielding tribute to Black life and Black living in the U.S. south. As the pair travel from Ohio to Kentucky, to Nashville and on to New Orleans, we’re shown the naked beauty of the south, unadorned by contemporary attempts to make it less Black and less poor than it is. As a southern transplant myself, it was so refreshing to see familiar landscapes outside of a framework that presents them as blights or problems.

The love that emerges between the two characters is equally as stunning. Brilliantly and subtly acted by both Turner-Smith and Kaluuya, Queen and Slim’s connection may be borne out of necessity but is affirmed in their ability to balance each other through moments of grounding and of flight. When one panics, the other holds them steady; and in turn when the reality of their plight starts to wear, the other breaks the tension with much-needed levity. All this, alongside an impeccable soundtrack, made the couple’s journey towards each other and their precarious future all the more irresistible.

But maybe that kind of fiercely magnetic beauty is all the more noticeable when it’s gone. Queen & Slim gave me so much of what I needed but ultimately dug into a wound that may never really heal. Viewers were asked to suspend their disbelief about some of the more dubious plot points — Queen as a lawyer who mouths off to a cop clearly escalating in aggression strikes as one glaring example — in the same ways they were simultaneously compelled to believe that another life was possible for them.

Queen & Slim’s narrative of fugitivity was far from sexy, all too familiar to Black and Brown folks who understand this precarity as inherent to our being. Each character reminds the other that they are Black and they are criminal, a harsh reminder of how Blackness has pretty much always been wrapped up in illegality, as existing on the “wrong” side of the law.

That I keep questioning myself and my own desires for a freedom unbridled by these restraints is probably evidence of the imaginative muscle I need to strengthen. In the final moments, in the morgue, the funeral, the street corner memorial, I felt silly for believing any other ending was possible. In all honesty, that thought sent me spiraling.

I know my partner Karen had a similar experience, too. I know our visceral responses were informed by the individual heaviness we carry and the collective weight of Black and Brown queer struggles. The movie just hit too close to home. I can’t help but wonder if it really is too neat, or too saccharine, to envision them actually getting on the plane. Where would the movie have taken us if they’d actually touched down in Cuba? If they’d actually been able to fully evoke Assata Shakur’s legacy? Yes, the narrative is grounded in the present moment, in the ways Black people have always existed, but can’t fugitivity become a freedom realized in this life? Is it too much to ask that we finally get to see us win?

Queen & Slim left me as rife with contradictions as the film itself. At once I was hungry for more images of the characters’ lusciously deep skin, and simultaneously I was overfed on images of that skin covered in blood. Waithe’s recent comments on her (white) influences and a Twitter storm about the controversial casting call for Queen all left me wanting more from her and from the movie. Her comments betray a limited view of Blackness that, in turn, seems to limit her character’s potentials.

I think Queen & Slim is beautifully, tragically of the culture, if not for it. It’s a film certainly reflective of our current moment and of our history. Perhaps, my envisioning of a utopia or even just a place that lets us live might be better satisfied by looking elsewhere. Maybe the answers to most of my questions lie in other films and applying less pressure to this one. So much of this movie’s burden lies in its rarity, a burden we know isn’t shared by white films. It’s especially important to mark this moment for Waithe and what she has accomplished as one of few queer Black women, and far fewer masculine presenting, in Hollywood.

For a work touted as blackness for Black people, Queen & Slim ultimately offers not hope or a way forward, but more images of beautiful Black corpses added to the growing canon of Black death for consumption. And I’m simply not able to keep bearing witness.

After the movie, Karen and I sat in the theater for a few minutes before I turned to her and said, “I need a drink.” She agreed: “We can’t end the night like this.” We promptly headed to a queer bar, not even caring that we were two of just a handful of women. We were just happy to be surrounded by loud-talking, bass-heavy QPOC joy.

Holigay Gift Guide: Support These POC Indie Designers in 2019!

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Today’s Black Friday, considered to be the “official start” of the holiday shopping season. On average, 70% of the adults in America will do at least some holiday shopping between now and Monday. That’s just the beginning of the little over $500 that most Americans will spend on presents this holiday season. There’s a lot of money to go around, and whatever your feelings about consumerism and capitalism, we think that you’ll agree — it would be great if some of those funds found their way into people of color owned businesses, artists, and communities.

The Speakeasy, Autostraddle’s collective for our writers of color, got together and shared linkes and dream shopped from all our favorites. We hope you find something to love on this list as much as we loved making it. Spread the joy of economic responsibility, racial justice — and really cute earrings — this holigay season.

(An * before an item or shop name indicates the the shop is queer-owned, in addition to being POC owned)

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Look Good, Look Good, Look Good

1. KEEP FAMILIAS TOGETHER Tee ($26, $2 from every shirt goes to Northwest Detention Center Resistencia, supporting those facing deportation) *2. Mrs & Mrs Claus Happy Holigays Tee ($24, Royal Rainbow always gives a portion of all sales to local organizations supporting the LGBTQIA community. You can read more about their policy) 3. Sir & Madam “Sir” Pullover in Salt and Pepper ($150) 4. Daughter Of An Immigrant Crew Neck Sweatshirt ($35) 5. What Would The World Look Like If Colonialism Never Happened? Tee ($20) 6. Chisholm for President Sweatshirt ($35)

There are two things to love about the “Keep Familias Together” tee: 1. Its graphic is gorgeous 2. It puts its money where its mouth is, donating $2 from every purchase to local organizations that support those facing deportation in our country.

Reneice found the cutest way to get into the holigay season — with two Mrs. Clauses kissing under the mistletoe! Tired of people messing up your pronouns, or want to show some love for the masc cuties in your life? Shelli recommends the “Sir” sweatshirt out of Chicago. And 2019 brought us more women running for President than any other time in US history, what better way to celebrate it than by buying a sweatshirt honoring the first black woman to ever run for the Presidency — none other than the late, great Shirley Chisholm.

Setting Up the Spot

1. Not the Same Mug ($15.95, this shirt saying “Hey Google, play “Knuck If You Buck” is also a gem) 2. Thick Thighs Save Lives Wall Hanging ($55) 3. Scent & Fire Candle in “Come Thru, Queen” ($18) 4. Ladies of 90s Hip Hop/R&B Coaster Set ($48, they also have a James Baldwin Prayer Candle that’s a stunner) 5. James Baldwin Pillow ($42) 6. S Is For Soul Throw Pillow ($50)

Keeping it real: We just want this James Baldwin pillow and nothing else matters. Well, the “come thru Queen” candle — which smells lightly of vanilla, brown sugar and queer fabulousness — would be a nice addition while we’re at it. ALSO what about a throw pillow for our couch honoring the original action hero babe (and Bette Porter’s big sister) Pam Grier. Ok and maaaaybe a coaster set for our living room with the quotes and hand drawn images of 90s women hip hop greats. Actually you know what? This whole list please. We want it. Thanks.

The Whole Crew Drippin’

1. Brown Skin Girl Tote Bag ($20) *2. Bad Bitch 14K Gold Bracelet ($27) 3. Head Wrap in Dusty Rose ($24, the website also has easy to follow YouTube tutorials for those new to the head wrap game) 4. Drippin’ Cocoa Honey Hair Clips 3pc Set ($27) 5. Frida Hoops ($40) 6. Juneteenth Canvas Red Black & Green Watch ($155, the canvas watchband is fully adjustable) *7. Lez Denim Snapback ($25) 8. Se Hable Spanglish Tote Bag in Denim ($30) 9. Recycled Leather and Turquoise Earrings ($28)

Shelli found these “Bad Bitch” bracelets and even just looking at them makes our inner Rihanna want to come out and play. Then, Natalie recommended the “Brown Skin Girl” tote bag (named after our favorite Beyoncé song of the the summer) and Carmen found queer owned Stuzo’s denim hat letting everyone know exactly how much of a Lez you are, and now it’s it was all over.

Did we mention that Stuzo is also a favorite brand of Lena Waithe? She wore the designer when she made out with Halle Berry on The Jimmy Kimmel Show earlier in the year. Maybe you can wear it as a lucky charm to make out with the hottie of your dreams, who’s to say? The “Frida Hoops” were actually on display last year at El Museo del Barrio in New York for their Dia de los Muertos celebration — just in case you’re into in incredibly wearable art.

ETC

*1. She’s So Handsome 8”x11″ Print ($11.50) *2. Weedy Bubble Heart Earrings ($4.20) 3. Lena Waithe Lapel Pin ($11, there’s also one in honor of trans activist and elder Marsha P Johnson) *4. End Trans Detention 17″x26″ Poster ($35, there’s also available an 11″x17″ version of the print for $20) *5. Indigenous Land Rights Stickers ($6, stickers come in a set of 2, Measures approximately: 3″ x 5″) 6. The Desi Dulhan 8”x10″ Wall Hanging ($32)

Abeni found some absolutely beautiful prints this year from ggggrimes, a queer non-binary artist  — and the “She’s So Handsome” dedication to masc gender non-conformity across black history, was a clear favorite (though everything in that shop is stunning, so definitely click the link!). Sarah recommends supporting queer creator and “friend of Autostraddle” Kaylah Cupcake — who’s figured out how to turn weed into actually jewelry that we’re sure someone in your life is going to adore. The “End Trans Detention” poster is absolutely essential for any home, and it’s currently on sale, so it’s a real steal.

If you got a little coin to spend, do it here! It’s damn worth it.

The Drag Kings of Taipei

We pile on to the metro in one laughing mass, our faces covered in glitter and painted beards. It’s evening in Taipei, and the air conditioning of the train is a sweet relief from the city’s tropical heat. Everyone takes the metro here. We’re sharing space with young professionals taking advantage of the holiday weekend, uncles and aunties ending their night just as we’re beginning ours. My group of drag kings stands out. An ugly thought comes: I’m so glad there are white people here.

If you’re visibly Western in Taiwan, you get to defy norms. You’re considered ‘weird’ already — it’s a judgment, but also a shield. Glancing around me, I speak louder and in English, hoping everyone hears the flat nasal drone of my American accent. For what might be the first time in my life, I want people to think I’m not from here.

Most of the time, I try to blend in. My accent’s not entirely local, my Chinese sometimes stuttering, but my face does all the work for me when I’m trying to pass as Taiwanese. If I follow the rules (no tank tops but short skirts are okay; start your sentences with a 不好意思, excuse me, if you’re interrupting someone), then I don’t have to stand out anymore. It feels strange to be so unmarked, to see people recognizing me as girl without the immediate prefix of Asian.

In drag, I’m not invisible. I know that fitting in is a privilege. Every day people so much braver than I am face more than the judgment of the metro, but my mind is still stuck on imagining what the people watching us must think. I watch my drag parent, Skye, confident and flamboyant in their sequins and goatee, and try to follow their example.

Skye (Sawyer Darling in drag) is white, Canadian and a mainstay of Taipei’s drag scene. I only tried drag in the first place because they invited a group of potential drag kings from Facebook into their home, taught us how to coif and contour, helped paint a beard onto my face. Once I asked them how it felt to do drag in Taiwan as a white foreigner, wondering if their experiences were anything like my own.

“So many of the most popular performers in Taipei for years have been foreigners, so I felt very welcome,” they said, “But it always made me feel uncomfortable that there was so little Taiwanese representation.”

Uncomfortable is the right word for it. I’m both awkward in my halting Chinese and guilty whenever I escape to the majority-white spaces where people default to English. On the one hand, Westerners in Taiwan are expats, immigrants who move through Asia with an ease and privilege that my parents never had in the US. On the other, they’re often considered perpetual foreigners, unable to become fully Taiwanese without renouncing their original citizenship. Skye’s lived in Taipei for nine years, far longer than my two, but because my mother’s from here, they have a permanent resident card while I have a passport.

My claim to being Taiwanese feels precarious. I’m hyper-sensitive about not fitting in. All I have is my family and my face, enough to look right but never enough to belong.

Skye suggests a selfie, and we pose together, scowling for the camera. “He’s not alone!” they write in the caption. We’re not like everyone else on the metro, nothing like the idea of Taiwanese-ness I judge myself for not conforming to, but we’re like each other. That’s enough.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sawyer Darling (Skye Grimm) (@sawyer_darling)

My drag persona is Mandrew D. Johnson III, a hipster with man-bun and a lumberjacky shirt I borrowed from a butcher friend. I sit with my legs apart, find walls and furniture to lean against. Mandrew has his own personality: the kind of douchebag at a party who won’t stop talking about political issues he’s only vaguely informed about and doesn’t get embarrassed when he talks about his writing.

He has the kind of full beard that I could never actually grow, a lush abundance of facial hair uncommon among most East Asians. I’ve named him Johnson and not Zhang, given him a library-book copy of Infinite Jest for a prop. Mandrew, like all my pop-cultural models of masculinity, is American.

All my idols are Western and so many of them are white. The people I imitated in adolescence when I was trying to figure out who to be were the quippy white kids on TV, pop-punk singers, and sci-fi novelists with European last names. Even though media in the 2000s tried to be diverse — the white characters always got the best lines.

I moved to California from Shanghai at fourteen and threw myself into learning how to be an American. It’s a little like doing drag. I lower my voice as Mandrew to sound more masculine, and in the US I make my voice louder or else I won’t be heard. The way I sit changes. My gestures, my humor, the inflection of my voice are all calibrated for a particular audience. Seven years later, when I moved back to Asia, I had to relearn the whole act in reverse, shedding my American skin.

I copy my family to teach myself to be Taiwanese, but I have no gay family. I’m disconnected from the queer history of a culture I no longer have the right as my own. I don’t know who to imitate to learn how to be queer and Taiwanese.

Left to right: the author as Mandrew D. Johnson, Roman Coke and Man Baobao posing in drag.

Taipei held its first drag ball in June, the organizers taking cues from American ballroom culture to build a runway of their own. They had big plans: a much larger venue than before, a lip synch battle, and more drag kings than I’d ever seen on stage in Taiwan. Skye pasted googly eyes as an extension of their eyeshadow, their face painted in an otherworldly design. For years, they’d been one of the only drag kings in Taipei, and they were excited to finally see more.

“There are very few drag kings in Taipei by comparison to queens. ‘Folks didn’t know there was a place for them,'” according to Skye. “Another aspect is that often AFAB (assigned female at birth) people are taught to be quiet rather than to stand up and be loud. Drag is a place to be loud, so it takes a special kind of courage to take chances and get out there.”

It was a courage I didn’t yet have, but one I was grateful to witness. There was something different about that night, a magic that let people express themselves in ways I’d never seen in Taipei before. The queer scene in Taipei can sometimes be binary. Our only lesbian club, Taboo, has a historic policy of charging men more than women that they’ve adapted awkwardly to a more inclusive understanding of gender. There’s often a separation between queer female and queer male spaces.

At the drag ball, there were kings and quings dressed both dapper and bizarre, as pop-punk idols and otherworldly beasts. There was Luca Distraction in blue lipstick and an orange goatee; Top Poki baring the word TOP written in duct tape on cleavage; Roman Coke with a green goatee to match his hair. Dan Dan Demolition took the stage lip-synching to heavy metal, face painted completely blue.

“[My drag name] is my Chinese nickname plus demolition, because I’m destroying gender norms and expectations,” Dan Dan told me, “I was a Miss Taiwanese American and the whole time we were learning pageant makeup (which is quite heavy) it just felt so much like drag to me, especially since, as a non-binary person, the entire process of pageant was a very performative thing.”

“My drag is an entertaining and creative exaggeration of my non-binary identity. Sometimes I’m being self-expressive, sometimes it’s satirical, sometimes I just want to create something beautiful.”

For so many of the kings there, drag meant freedom. Drag let Sawyer Darling explore femininity and Roman Coke explore masculinity. People played with culture like they played with gender, with names that worked as bilingual puns (shout out to Man Baobao) and costumes that were cheeky takes on traditional hanfu.

I was part of the crowd, cheering myself hoarse for everyone who walked the runway. I saw performers without the separation between Asian and Western, lesbian and gay that I’d gotten used to in Taipei. With each introduction, the emcee said every sentence twice, in English and in Chinese, calling on the crowd to vote in gesture and noise, a wordless language all of our own.

Top Poki performing.

I left Taiwan this June. The person I was in Taipei is an ocean away, and I’m still trying to discover the version of myself that being back in America will make me become. I still see the drag kings in Taipei through updates on social media, watching them grow and flourish. They rented out a boat for a show last month. I gazed at the shaky smartphone videos of their performance, interrupted often by whoops of sheer joy.

Like many other diaspora kids, I grew up wondering about parallel realities. What would I have been like if my parents had never came to America? Would I like the same things that I like now, have the same fears, the same dreams? Would I have ever come out? Now I have another parallel universe to think about, the one where I stayed in Taipei. Every time I paint that beard back on my face, stepping back into Mandrew’s shoes, I’ll feel an echo of that familiar tropical heat.

Donning drag is a transformation. You’re turning into someone different than the person you are in your everyday life, revealing a part of yourself that you’re normally not allowed to access. Drag shows us that identity doesn’t need to be serious or enduring to be true. I became Mandrew just like I became Taiwanese, and even before that American. I can be Alison or 瑩珊 or Mandrew, or all my names, or none at all, or make up a new one of my own.

More About Drag in Taipei

Kings to Follow:
Sawyer Darling (referred to as Skye in this article), an earnest king with soulful eyes and a love of gallantry, passion, and — most importantly — rhinestones!
Top Poki, a Korean Rice King and the runner up in BLUSH’s Taipei Is Burning lipsynch drag battle.
Dan Dan Demolition, smashing the patriarchy since 1989.
Roman Coke, a good old fashioned lover boy originally from Ireland.
Luca Distraction, a theatrical fuckboi with a heart of gold.
Man Baobao 饅寶包, a Tâi-oân drag king who makes it steamy on stage.
Dr. Wang Newton, the original Taiwanese-American drag king and a source of advice and inspiration to kings in Taipei.

Where to See the Kings:
BLUSH Taipei, a monthly queer party at B1.
Spectrum Formosus, a music/art/queer festival coming November 2019.
Parade after Parade, LEZS magazine‘s Pride afterparty on October 26, 2019.

About Drag in Taipei:
Hsinyi Wang’s Drag Queen/King Project is a photograph series focused on Taipei’s drag performers.
Banana Magazine featured Taipei’s drag queens in their fifth issue.

Getting Stonewalled at Stone Mountain

Stone Mountain is located in Stone Mountain Park, 3,200 acres of forest speckled with outdoor attractions, dining, shopping, and even golf. Amidst all this natural beauty is the highest relief sculpture in the world: the Confederate Memorial Carving. Towering four hundred feet above the ground ride three Confederate figures on horseback, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The carving of these Southern Civil War leaders began in 1915, spearhead by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). That same year, the then defunct Ku Klux Klan proclaimed its modern rebirth with a cross burning at the summit of Stone Mountain. But it would take decades of work before UDC’s vision became Georgia’s unfortunate reality. Even when the park officially opened to the public on April 14, 1965 — the hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — its anti-Civil Rights centerpiece was incomplete. Two years after the 1968 publication of “The Confederacy Rides Again—In Granite” in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 10,000 visitors attended the memorial’s dedication on May 9, 1970.

Today, the largest Confederate monument in the world is a homing beacon for modern Ku Klux Klan activities; for over fifty years it was the location for an annual Labor Day cross-burning ceremony, all in the name of hate and white supremacy. In 2016 the mountain and its sacred history to second and third national Klansmen drew a number of Confederate flag welding radicals for a white power event. As recently as last year, Klan organizers were planning a pro-white rally known as “Rock Stone Mountain II,” but were denied a permit by local authorities who cited the event as a “clear and present danger” to public safety. Despite the breadth of news articles and opinion pieces, this monumental dilemma remains protected by state law — in 1958 the state of Georgia bought the dome monadnock and all the surrounding land. Post the Charleston church shooting in 2015 there emerged a nationalwide movement to remove monuments, flags, statues, and public works that pay homage to the confederacy. Yet, the Confederate carving on Stone Mountain remains unaltered.

I knew none of this when I agreed to go to Stone Mountain Park. I was just a recently transplanted northerner working in the south looking to celebrate the Fourth of July with a backyard barbeque, like any good American. And yet there I was, at the suggestion and accompaniment of a friend, staring at an Americana mosh-pit. Necklaces and toys intermittently glowed red, white, and blue: a constellation of stars and stripes pulsating on earth. Families on red and white picnic blankets strained against the humidity, excessive body heat, and restless that comes from waiting.

After a brief welcome and service announcement The Star-Spangled Banner began to play. We all rose to the overwhelming sound of the national anthem, the lyrics filling the space between us and the rock face. Supposedly the Fantastic Fourth Celebration at Stone Mountain, is an epic firework display with state-of-the-art visual effects. Though to be honest, I can’t recall the actual show itself. I know from YouTube and conversations with past attendees that the ending is Elvis’ “American trilogy.” That at the moment when the pyrotechnics can’t get any more mind-numbing “Dixie” also known as “Dixieland” or “I wish I was in Dixie” — the best-known song to come out of blackface minstrelsy — animates the men on horseback.

I don’t clearly remember this macabre display of revisionist history because at one some point in that patriotic experience my friend began to get restless. During the National Anthem, as we shifted from one swollen foot to the other, my friend leaned in to ask if I thought this was an extended version. Just then, in the midst of shrugging my shoulders, I heard, “What, were you expecting it to be sung in Spanish?”

I wish I could tell you he was white. That he wore red, white, and blue, starting from the vizor of his MAGA hat down to the confederate belt buckle looped through his denim jeans. That’s the image we want to see when we think of racism; it’s the snapshot of a person that we can compartmentalize and file away under white supremacy, fascist patriarchy, and “to be avoided.” But he wasn’t white, and his clothing was innocuous. And yet, maybe we should have been more cautious. How were we to know that we were being watched? At what point should we have realized our conversation was being listened to? What was it about a question exchanged between two friends, that gave him the right to make us feel unwanted? There he stood surrounded by his family, all of them girls, just like us, only younger and with darker skin. “What, were you expecting it to be sung in Spanish?”

That question, despite the heat, caused the hairs on my forearms to rise. Could I have misheard? It rang ceaselessly in my ears, echoed on. It bounded off the faces of President Davis and Generals Lee and Jackson to come back and hit me squarely in my colored stomach. I didn’t know a microaggression could have such a bodily impact. An almost gelatinous weight, not unlike the patriotic Jell-O molds surrounding me. It gathered in the pit of my stomach and made me acutely aware of the space my body was taking up — my presence in relation to my location.

This was a dangerous place. I absorbed the realization from the ground up; the baseness of the mountain and all it commemorated sucked up into my Fourth of July flipflops. I wanted to kick them off, to run along Stonewall Jackson Drive as fast as I could and leave that Southern experience behind me. But I didn’t run, and every Fourth of July I see that towering monument, I hear the bitter question, “What, were you expecting it to be sung in Spanish?”

I don’t live in the South anymore. My relocation is not in direct correlation to my experience at Stone Mountain, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t rejoice at the distance put between me and the sweet tea States by my new appointment. As for my experience, there are always people of color who can relate, who have a similar story of their own. In fact, many said, “Well, that’s to be expected.”

There was that word again: Expect.

“What, were you expecting it to be sung in Spanish?”

“Well, that’s to be expected.”

“You went to Stone Mountain, did you really expect anything different?”

Yes, I did. Internalized white supremacy cannot and should not be expected as a fact of life, nationally memorialized, and played to the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Black American Gothic: A Southern Herstory of Black Magic Women

feature image via Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016)

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve found myself drawn to darkness. To horror, fantasy, and sci-fi. To demons, witches, fallen angels. People on the margins have long been relegated to the dark corners of society; it is no wonder that those of us who are queer or black or woman or all three have found some kinship with the shadows, an urge to tap into the hidden aspects of our nature.

Through embracing this darkness, black women have found an integral place in Southern Gothic literature.

People have been entranced by Gothic literature since the 18^th century. Named for the dramatic pseudo-medieval architecture that was popularized in the 17^th century, Gothic literature emerged as a subset of Romantic literature and employed terror, suspense, and the supernatural. It’s characterized by moral decay and higher-level societal critiques. When the genre made its way to the US, the looming castles were replaced with antebellum homes, red dirt, and swampland. Southern Gothic, the ever-popular subset of American Gothic literature, is a successful evolution of the genre because of elements of danger and decay are already intrinsic in the American South. Though we have been erased from much of the so-called canon, Southern Gothic literature is inherently and necessarily black and feminine.

Beyoncé Lemonade (2016)

My most prominent introduction to the genre was Beyoncé’s Lemonade. When the visual album was released three years ago, I was enthralled by the powerful, witchy imagery of black women and the depth of their anger, joy, magic, and despair.

Black women birthed America. Literally — their descendants populate the entire country. Metaphorically — black women’s labor, food, love, pain, and sacrifices fed and grew the land we now lie on. For many black Americans, the South holds a bittersweet place in their heart; as much home as sorrow, as much ghostly as ancestral.

Black women have long turned to art to unpack, remember, and heal from our collective herstory, and black women’s Southern Gothic blends West African mythology, Christianity, voodoo, mysticism, ghost stories and more to create a uniquely African American art form. Our role in this storytelling has become a powerful way for us to excavate the past and mold our futures.

Harriet A. Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Reshaping Gothic Constructs

Initially serialized in the New York Tribune under a pseudonym, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl made Harriet A. Jacobs one of the first black women to publish a book in the United States and uses classic Gothic constructs to share her experiences as a slave in North Carolina. Harriet and her work fell into obscurity during the Civil War, but was rediscovered and authenticated during the Civil Rights Movement, becoming a canonical first-person slavery narrative.

Written primarily with an audience of white women abolitionists audience in mind, Jacobs’ story doesn’t shrink away from the horrors she faced. Instead, it exposes the grotesque world of her enslavement. Jacobs used her sexuality to escape slavery; she revealed that despite the shame it caused her, she chose to take a white man as a lover both to spite her master and to give herself and her children a better chance at freedom. A woman who took control of her sexuality and went on to escape north to work with Frederick Douglass? What a feminist icon.

As a work of nonfiction, Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, of course, does not utilize supernatural Gothic elements, but her soul-baring prose laid the groundwork for the authors and artists who walked in her footsteps.

Julie Dash Daughters of the Dust (1991)

Time, Ritual, and Magic

Detangling our history is harder than detangling our hair — the webs of our lineage weave back and forth through time and space.

Julie Dash’s cinematic masterpiece Daughters of the Dust is narrated by an unborn Peazant family daughter and follows the Peazant family as they prepare to leave their Gullah island community off the coast of Georgia. The family matriarch, Nana Peazant, wears an indigo dress and mourns the imminent loss of her family. The other women, dressed all in white, look ahead as they ready themselves for a brighter future.

Migration has been a constant theme in black history. Whether through self-determined migration like Peazant family’s move North or that first terrible voyage across the sea, we have been left both resilient and untethered by our movement. My grandparents took part in the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the Midwest, North, and West Coast to escape the chokehold of the Jim Crow South. My Granny speaks fondly of spending summers with her grandma in Mississippi. My late Nana loved her time in Arkansas at her grandparents’ farm. And neither of them ever went back.

Despite all the South has put my people through, it calls to me.

Black Southern Gothic contains a curious lightness. Black skin bathed in sunlight, bodies of water, and joyful songs are common. Authors seem to fill a need to embrace freedom, lightness, and purity that had been stripped from us. This lightness serves as a foil to the muck we’ve waded through and the specters that haunt our families.

In works like Daughters of The Dust, magic bumps up against reality. There are no tell-tale hearts, no ghosts in the attic. Instead, ancestral magic flows freely through day-to-day rituals in the tradition of magic realism.

Tension arises in Dust when Nana Peazant insists on preserving her traditional rituals while her relatives have adopted Christianity. She places a piece of her own hair, along with the hair of her mother, in a locket to keep her relatives safe as they leave home:

“Now, I’m adding my own hair. There must be a bond . . . a connection, between those that go up North, and those who across the sea. A connection! (a few beats, then) We are as two people in one body. The last of the old, and the first of the new. We will always live this double life, you know, because we’re from the sea. We came here in chains, and we must survive. We must survive. There’s salt-water in our blood.”

This tension is reflected today in the small but growing movement of black witches and traditional African religion practitioners moving away from Christianity. The church has been a place of solace for generations of black people. But for many, it is a reminder of bondage, a source of patriarchy and even abuse. It’s especially fraught for queer black women, who have often been told explicitly that we are not welcome. I can recall one particularly harrowing skit at church about a lesbian sent to tempt an unsuspecting teenage girl into a life of sin.

Magic, folklore, and ritual connects us to a deeper past and lights a way forward.

Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)

Sexuality and a Queer South

When I was in high school, I stole a copy of The Color Purple from my high school’s library. Shug taught Celie about sexual pleasure, and it was the first time I had ever seen a black woman’s sexuality explored as something positive and independent from men. Their friendship and eventual heartbreaking romance was the first time I had seen a black lesbian relationship… anywhere. It would take me years to come out as bisexual, but The Color Purple stuck with me. After surviving decades of horrific abuse, Celie has her first tender, positive sexual experience with a woman. They go on to form a close, if deeply flawed, connection for the rest of their lives.

There isn’t a tremendous amount of representation of black lesbians in American Gothic literature. The tripled marginalization of queerness, blackness, and womanhood means seeing queer black women in art of any genre a precious rarity. Yes, there’s a danger in being a queer black Southern woman. But also a deep beauty.

I can’t help but wonder how many black women throughout history have sought out sexual and spiritual healing from one another, and what relationships have been erased by rampant homophobia and sexism.

Carrie Mae Weams The Louisiana Project (2003), courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems

Photograph and Performance

The prolific and divine Carrie Mae Weems has been producing haunting black and white photographs of black people for thirty years. “The Louisiana Project,” her photo series for the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, is an eerie and stunning exploration of Louisiana’s rich history. Her back to the viewer, Weems explores the ghostly grounds of an antebellum estate. Barefoot in a loose dress, she seems at ease as she dances through the halls and peers out at the vast country landscape. Whenever I view these images, I am struck how liberated and self-possessed Weems seems. This black woman has made a home for herself in a place haunted with hostility, the ornate halls echoing with the dark whispers of a none-too-distant past.

I’m a visual learner, so I am enthralled by the aesthetic elements of Black Southern Gothic work. As a senior in college, I drew inspiration from “The Louisiana Project” to create “We Wear The Mask” — my thesis in solo performance. I’ve long been interested in the different spaces black women occupy, whether by choice or as relegated by societal constraints. In my project, I chose to focus on the different archetypes of black women: the Mammy, the Jezebel, and the Tragic Mulatto.

My performance was a collage of found material from theatre, literature, music, art, and academia. I used the dynamic movement captured by Weems’ photos as the basis of my pseudo-choreography. The opposition inherent in her images — black and white, womanhood and patriarchy, playfulness and solemnity — informed my work. I created a script that wove back and forth through time and was bookended with despair (Dunbar’s We Wear The Mask) and hope (a saucy quote from Suzan Lori Parks). The piece itself is right now relegated to the annals of academic history and lives on somewhere in Barnard’s digital archives, but the introduction to Weems’ images have stuck with me as I build my creative career. She reminds me that I have the power to carve out space for myself.

I’d be remiss to go without acknowledging three literary giants: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a lush, romantic, and heartbreaking example of the genre. Butler is known for her science fiction, but her time-traveling multigenerational novel, Kindred is quintessentially Gothic. And though many of Morrison’s novels fit squarely in the genre, Beloved stands out as a Southern Gothic jewel and overall literary masterpiece. There are so many works that I have left out and so many more to come.

Black women mean everything to me. I want the world for those of us alive today and those of us to come. Black Southern Gothic fosters my connection to history, family, and an ancestral magic I can sometimes feel in my bones on the right kind of rainy afternoon. It provides a space for the healing of generational wounds while allowing us to remain in contact with our past. I look forward to seeing the ways we will continue to recreate ourselves. We are infinite.

VIDEO PLAYLIST: These Bangers from Rhythm + Flow’s Lesbian Rapper Londynn B

When Netflix debuted their three week “reality music competition event” Rhythm + Flow earlier this month, it was clear right from the start they were pulling no punches.

The ten-episode rap series is modeled a bit after The Voice or American Idol, with undiscovered rappers vying for their big break under the guidance of judges Cardi B, T.I, and Chance the Rapper. It keeps all the best parts of its predecessors (heartfelt stories about dreams of stardom, watching career growth and high stakes in real time, soundtracks that make you want to leap on Spotify) while also doing away with the worst of them (gone are months long audition reels and cheaply done covers of ‘80s ballads — every rap spit is a bonafide head bangin’ original). Throughout the series there are cameos and “guest judges” from some of hip hop’s most iconic stars — Snoop Dogg, Rhapsody, Killer Mike, Fat Joe, Lupe Fiasco, Anderson.Paak and the late, great Nipsey Hussle to name a few. When it premiered at the start of the month, Time magazine named it “the best music competition show in years.” And they were damn right.

Yes, Rhythm + Flow is a lot of fun (and seriously, surprisingly good!) if you love rap music, but what nearly killed me dead was that it’s also surprisingly gaaaaaaaay. There’s two queer men and three queer women rappers who make it out of the audition rounds into the the Top 30. Two of them make it to the TOP EIGHT — shout out to Chicago’s Big Mouf Bo! — and one of those lesbian rappers, Atlanta’s Londynn B, makes it to the FINAL FOUR!

There’s no denying Londynn B is the complete package from the first time she picks up the mic. She’s a lesbian Cardi B by way of Grace Jones — all charisma, swagger, and sex. With the bars to back it up. She has a wife, a young daughter, and she’s taking no fucking prisoners.

As of last week, all of Hustle + Flow is now available on Netflix, so if you want to find out if the queen takes her crown, you’ll have to watch on your own. In the meantime, we here at Autostraddle wanted to congratulate Londynn on making it to the finals with a look at her most iconic performances.

Episode 6: Rap Battles — Londynn B vs Inglewood IV

Before the battle began, Inglewood IV complained to the cameras that having to compete against a woman put him at a disadvantage because he couldn’t call her bitch without being unfairly labeled as sexist — which is first of all ridiculous, because this is rap music we’re talking about. Second of all, if you have to make excuses from the jump, boo-hooing about why you’re going to lose, then you deserve to have your whole ass sent packing back home. Of course Londynn delivers.

“I’ll take your baby moms and let her eat my butt.” — An icon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFB2cogPap8&feature=youtu.be&t=12

Episode 7: Music Videos — “I Can’t Change”

When this video aired, Chance the Rapper declared “I Can’t Change” the best song in the entire competition up to that point. I could watch it forever, and I dare you to get its infectious chorus out of your head from the first time you hear it. A true bop for the ages.

https://youtu.be/Re943syZE6M

Episode 9: Collaborations — “Rose in Harlem” with Teyana Taylor

Netflix dropped some behind-the-scenes footage of the first time Londynn met R&B star Teyana Taylor (along with her adorable daughter!). Londynn described herself as a longtime fan of “Rose in Harlem” and Teyana’s work. “I was a fan because for one, we’re both moms. And two: everything that gets done by women is always downplayed and when I heard the song, I felt that.”

I felt that, too.

https://youtu.be/dz8L_xge9FE

Episode 10: Finale — “Only One”

Some artists focused on creating just one single for their finale performance; ever the overachiever (because black women have to work three times as hard to be seen), Londynn performed a medley of three tracks. And honestly? Any one of them could be a Billboard hit this winter if she wanted them to be.

You can listen to Londynn B’s greatest hits from Rhythm + Flow on Spotify, Tidal, or Apple Music. Don’t forget to follow her on Twitter or Instagram. Congrats again, girl.

New Queer Horror Film “Spiral” Explores the Blind Spots of White Gays

In Kurtis David Harder’s Spiral, the real monster is white complacency. Picture this: It’s 1995, and a gay interracial couple is moving to an idealistic suburb outside of Chicago. The couple consists of a middle-aged, upper-middle class white man and his much younger, poorer black husband.

The white partner is recently divorced, taking on full custody of his teenage daughter as the mother escapes to Costa Rica with her new family. The black partner is a former New York City club kid with a tragic past and a desire to turn his life experience into a flourishing writing career. To see a story like this was a breath of fresh air at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival in a year when many of the entries were focused on examinations of the white middle class, with emphasis on the breakdown of the traditional family unit.

We have seen situations like this in horror before, most recently in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but going back even further you can see the bones of horror classic The Stepford Wives and even the drama The Women of Brewster Place deep within Spiral. The conflict is based on the tension between assimilation and standing out. Get Out occurs in our current world, one that pretends to be post-racial when it very clearly isn’t. But the world of The Stepford Wives is at odds with a fantasy version of America that conservatives wanted to hold onto, one where the turning tides of women’s liberation and racial justice were seen as a threat to peace and the nuclear family. And given Spiral’s central conflict, I would be remiss not to mention the lesbian couple in the 1989 television film The Women of Brewster Place, who argue between assimilating to their homophobic religious community or maintaining relationships with their queer friends in the city. This idea that a “normal life” requires a completely straight social circle is a prevalent theme in Spiral.

Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) is suspicious from the moment he and Aaron (Ari Cohen) arrive in town with their smartass daughter Kayla (Jennifer Laporte). He is greeted by his new neighbor Tiffany (Chandra West) with a potted plant and an off-handed comment about how she doesn’t “see a lot of” them in town. In that moment it’s hard to tell if she’s talking about gay people, black people or both. Malik and Aaron are the only gay couple in the neighborhood, but Malik is the only black person there, period, and his isolation is constantly felt throughout the film. Tiffany and her husband Marshal (Lochlyn Munro) play on that isolation with stock phrases like “love is all that matters” that placate Aaron, while making Malik even more suspicious.

This is a dynamic that often happens with interracial couples, on and off-screen. Despite the fact that Aaron is gay, his whiteness and financial security provide him with a level of ease and privilege not afforded to Malik. He believes Tiffany and Marshal aren’t homophobic with minimal evidence, interpreting their civility as a sign of being politically and socially evolved. In 2019 — where white people from both sides of the political aisle cry for a return to civility in the face of a violent, white supremacist government — we could easily imagine Aaron as part of that chorus, ignoring the fact that politics have never been civil for people of color. Aaron is the prototype of the contemporary white conservative, a stance with little understanding of structural inequality and the way that changes shape through time.

Malik, on the other hand, keeps having recurring nightmares of a gay bashing he suffered when he was young. The details of the incident are obscured, but the trauma stays with him and he’s likely suffering from undiagnosed PTSD. As he spends more time in the suburb, he keeps thinking back to that night. In the images we see him, younger, in a car with a young white man and they’re kissing. Later on as things get more dire for Malik, we see more of the memory: White men with bats approach the car, smashing the windows and beating Malik’s boyfriend. It’s unclear how a gay black man was able to walk away from such an incident unharmed — perhaps that wasn’t considered by the film’s white writing and directing team — but the scenes are affective nonetheless, emphasizing how suburbia is an unsafe place for Malik and how inconsiderate it is of Aaron to expect him to be comfortable there.

Fueled by fear and paranoia, Malik uncovers tapes recorded by the lesbian couple who lived in his new house with their teenage daughter 10 years earlier, in 1985. Watching the grainy footage, I couldn’t help but wonder if the film had focused on an interracial lesbian couple instead, especially considering that the main events of the film are only two years out from Ellen DeGeneres’ monumentally public walk out of the closet.

Though queer themes are more likely to be represented by women in horror, very rarely are lesbian relationships given the serious tone and consideration that is at play in Spiral, as well other queer genre films such as Stranger by the Lake (though the recent Knife+Heart is a step in the right direction). Still, Spiral’s inclusion of a lesbian couple within its mythos is admirable and bolsters the film’s prevailing thesis that all marginalized people have reason to be distrustful of the deceiving perfection of suburban life.

As Spiral progresses it becomes obvious that Malik is right to be suspicious of the neighborhood and the true horror of the film comes from how easily his partner Aaron decides to side with his white neighbors, allowing them to sow seeds of doubt into his relationship. Aaron’s fatal flaw is his inability to acknowledge the validity of his black partner’s concerns, leading to an increasingly nightmarish turn of events that could all have been avoided if he hadn’t put his whiteness first. Spiral is a horror film that reminds us that love and solidarity are active pursuits and lack of empathy often leads to tragedy.

The Best 45 Bars From Young M.A’s New Album “Herstory In The Making”

Hello and good DAY! Young M.A, the stud of my dreams and yours, has finally dropped her debut album and my GOD it’s good. She makes me wanna make her a plate, playfully flip her off, and then you know, go do grown folk shit together. And baaaabbyyy, she also has some vocals on this one. We got a little autotune, a little “lemme try and sing-rap like Drake” and it works. It works, it works, it works. All this album makes me wanna do is twerk on a real goon. I cannot wait to lose my shit when the DJ plays “NNAN” at the club. I cannot wait to have makeup sex to “Stubborn Ass.” I will walk down the aisle to “My Hitta.”

For real y’all, Young M.A is probably one of the best rappers in the game right now, one might even argue, THEE best rapper. And to hear her rap in a way that I culturally understand as loving, about other women? My little gay heart is THRIVING. This is the soundtrack to my black queer love story. When she said she didn’t need her niggas because she had her girlfriend??? Legitimately teared up, my dude. She made a gay ass album with 21 songs and they are ALL bangers. Even if rap isn’t your forte, give it a listen. She deserves the streams, in addition to our love and devotion. And this is just her first!! Imagine all the bars waiting for us in the future 😍. Keep it up papi, and also please come to Austin. I just wanna talk.

Here are her 45 best bars, presented in list form.

1. I don’t need this, I need a blunt

Me too

2. I don’t wanna care, I just wanna cum

Also, me too

3. Damn I wish love was illegal

Aries be like:☝🏾

4. I like them tatted bitches – Hi, Kehlani

https://www.instagram.com/p/B2QCNbyH8zS/

5. But I’m a dyke and she a femme it’s a synonym

6. I put this dick inside her soul, nigga

7. Ooh, she’s a leaker

8. Bad bitch, she only smoke blunts with the glass tips

Just @ me next time papi

9. Shawty ain’t never need a nigga ain’t never ever need a nigga for nothing!

10. I’m usually a ho, but girl I got this dick for you

11. Ooh, that’s a bad bitch, You can tell she eat her collard greens and catfish/ I’m trying to make your daughter cry, sorry Miss Jackson/ I wear that pussy on my face like it’s in fashion

12. And I don’t need my nigga ’cause my girlfriend is my hitta

13. Holy fucking moly, I’m a superstar

14. She ain’t shy but a broke nigga make her nervous

15. Don’t take Molly don’t take Xanies but it’s weed inside the pantry

16. Pretty motherfucker, put me on the front of Vogue

17. Finessing, get back to the work ain’t no resting

18. I fuck her during tax season, perfect timing

19. Yeah I’m Young M.A, but she call me papi

20. Fuck all that humble shit

21. I hate paying bills

🗣️ a little louder for the landlords in the back

22. I can school your favorite rappers, I’m your new principal

23. I’m a sexy-ass cocky individual

24. With your stubborn ass/ Such a stubborn ass/ Come here rub my head/ While I rub your ass

25. Queen shit 👑

26. Call the po-po, ho!

27. That renaissance sounding ass flute at the beginning of “She Like I’m Like”

28. She like, “Thank you, lil daddy”

29. This is just us, this is how we are/ I am your nigga and you are my bitch/ You never leaving, I ain’t never leaving/ Why even trip?

30. I don’t wanna nag I just wanna nut

I mean… I admire the honesty.

31. I just want some head baby come and let me feed you

32. I just wanna work it out with you babe/ ‘Cause I ain’t get no pussy in like two days

33. Damn that pussy sweeter than some Kool-Aid/ I just wanna drink it till i’m woozy

34. It’s crazy how I got a big dick without a dick

🙈

35. I’d rather be inside some pussy than do this interview

36. Fucking up a Amex this is not a Vis-er [Visa]

37. Yo, she fire Brown skin, pretty brown eyes/ Slim waist, but her hips kind of wide/ Thick thighs, she about 5’5″, or about 5’6/ Pretty tits sittin’ high, legs crossed when she sit

38. I wear that pussy on my face like it’s in fashion

39. And if your ex was a disease then I’m the vaccine

40. And I don’t have a boo ’cause I think I was meant for you

41. Ayy, yeah, she my bottom bitch/ But when I need it, just like season, she on top of shit

😈😈

42. And she get what she want (Uh huh), can’t ever tell her no/ She my lil’ spoiled bitch, she got that oil drip/ Apologies to my exes, and no this ain’t my confessions/ Appreciate your time and investment, patience and effort/ Having ya’ll was part of a blessin’/ Y’all all belong on the cover of Essence/ No hard feelings, no love lost

JUST LIKE WE DESERVE!!!

43. When we get home, better take off them clothes and no phones/ Put your hair in a scrunchy (Hair in a scrunchy)/ Freak in the sheets but a queen in the streets, got me singin’, like, “Isn’t she lovely?”

44. Tell the pig “oh, we don’t know who did it”

Prison Abolitionist Tea!!!

45. Yeah, throw her ass on the bed when she’s fussin’ and cussin’, uh Like, assume the position, stop makin’ assumptions

Download, stream, or buy Herstory in the Making wherever you listen to music.

Rihanna’s Sexy Savage X Fenty Show Left Me in Tears of Black Fat Queer Girl Joy

Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty show is so blatantly inclusive and body positive from the jump — it caught me by surprise. Following a brief opening montage featuring glimpses of the fierceness to come, we are graced with queen RiRi herself sharing that she made a point to look for “unique characteristics in people that aren’t usually highlighted in the world of fashion” while creating the show. That’s echoed by Fenty’s senior VP Jennifer Rosales, who explains that uniquely there’s no target audience for the Savage X Fenty show, but rather “It’s for everyone. [Rihanna] wants everyone to feel beautiful, everyone to feel empowered, everyone to feel and have that strength within them to become the best version of themselves.”

I made it exactly seventeen minutes and twenty-seven seconds into watching the Savage X Fenty show before bursting into tears of black, fat, queer girl joy. Even the intro already had me choked up.

We slide right into behind the scenes photos and interviews with models of all shades, shapes and sizes in Savage X Fenty lingerie sharing what sexy means to them. Just a few minutes in and there’s already been more diversity and inclusion in this production than any mainstream fashion show I’ve ever seen or heard of. I should’ve known that I needed to have tissues on deck by this point, but was far too invested to dare hit pause or look away. The energy’s so high, all the cast members are smiling and laughing, understandably equal parts excited and nervous. Then suddenly Raisa Flowers is on camera mentioning that that she’ll be the first model to walk in the show. I repeat, a black queer plus-size woman was chosen to open the Savage X Fenty show.

I know that Rihanna has not, does not, and will not ever come to play, but still in all my wildest dreams I never imagined this. The formal opening credits roll and the show opens with the camera focused on one of the most statuesque black women I’ve ever seen, frozen in a pose that balanced grace and power flawlessly. Then it pans out to Rihanna surrounded by majority POC dancers in matching but varied black mesh bodysuits that looked equally stunning on every hue curve and roll (and there were MULTIPLE dancers with rolls on that stage y’all) — my mouth dropped open and my hand suddenly found its way to my rapidly tightening chest.

Before I could catch my breath, it happened. Raisa Flowers strutted onto that stage glittering to the heavens adorned in jewels wearing a new cutout variation of that same mesh bodysuit. There was nothing I could (or would) do to stop the tears. I’ve been looking for myself in mainstream fashion shows for 30 years, and the very first thing Rihanna did in her moment was say, “I got you sis.”

It’s no secret that the world of fashion has long prided itself on being exclusionary. For a very long time — and lets be real, still to this day in far too many shows, collections, and eyes of designers — if you were not white, thin, and rich, fashion was not for you. I’ve received a very thorough education throughout my life in all the ways fashion excludes bodies like mine and those that belong to people I love. Black and brown bodies. Bodies with disabilities, scars, and stretch marks. Bodies that enjoy the love of same and/or many genders, that are soft and expansive or petite and muscular. That carry the shapes and histories of our ancestors. We had the doors closed in our faces in space after space, with a smug smile and a reminder that “we don’t have anything here for you honey.”  Rihanna said no more, all are welcome, and then literally let us walk the walk.

Not only do these incredible, historically marginalized and oppressed models and dancers walk the walk in the Savage X Fenty show, they do it front and center, and far from alone. There are no tokens in this show — absolutely no identity stands alone. Whereas some designers consider embracing inclusivity to mean including one model for diversity points, usually at the end of the show or on the sidelines, in the Savage X Fenty show they are centered again and again with at least one person —and in most cases many other people — with shared intersections of identity. This allows for an energy of solidarity that’s beautiful and untouchable. I shed even more tears when Laverne Cox did what she does best and danced across the stage like she owned it. At Normani’s appearance my tears were joined with screaming and raising my hands in thanks to the universe for the gift that is her dancing (especially in that tantalizing beige bra and panty set, covered in lip prints paired and with high waisted sheer stockings). Bella Hadid came out glowing like royalty in a sunshine yellow longline bra and high-rise thong set with a headpiece/cape combo fluttering behind her followed by multiple other models donning head covers matching their lingerie sets. I cried again when the choreography to Tweet’s “Oops, Oh My” ended with FIVE fat dancers together on stage Tearing. It. Up. I fell all the way apart. This show! I was simply not ready, but also I’ve waited my whole life for it.

I was also blown away by the level of inclusion within the pieces of lingerie showcased in the collection. Rihanna ensured that there would be sets that work for those who feel sexy and confident in evocative revealing lingerie, those who find their glow in modesty, and everyone in between. There were looks for folks with gender neutral and masculine style tastes. I’m excited to note — in yet another break from a common fashion industry mistake — it wasn’t just the plus-size bodies that modeled the looks with fuller coverage.

A range of style options are shown on every body type, and  the genius of having dancers and models moving on stage together allows you to actually see how the lingerie functions in motion. These are pieces bodies can really move in! They look stunning not only while standing still or walking upright, but when you’re dropping it low and doing splits. Wanna know if you can twerk in those garters or throw a leg up on your partner’s shoulder without fear of something snapping off and flying straight into bae’s face? Savage X Fenty’s got you, boo. Curious about whether that bodysuit, bra, or bralette will work for your chest? Watch the line of 10, sometimes 20 or more, people with chests of every size body-rolling in unison to get your answer!. Or just watch it ‘cause it’s hot. Either way, my recommendation is to watch it.

You should also get prepared for the refreshing experience of seeing a lingerie fashion show that has nothing to do with male gaze. This is not about catering to men by objectifying women in played out ways; it’s about women feeling sexy and empowered for and by their own damn selves. When the male performers come on stage, they never interact with any of the models or dancers who, if they haven’t all left the stage completely, sit in silence unbothered. In contrast, when Halsey comes out for her performance in the black lace robe of my dreams accented with strappy black garters with silver hearts in the middle, the script is flipped in ways I will be grateful for for years to come.

She nuzzles and caresses the women on stage with her. They return those same tender touches, and more. As Halsey sings and makes her way down a staircase, she runs her fingers down the torso of a dancer wearing a light pink satin bodysuit that looks irresistibly soft to the touch and my body let out a visceral groan! This is a bisexual celebrity engaging in sensual, seductive touch, but it’s completely respectful, beautiful, artistic and on a mainstream fashion platform! Halsey continues down those stairs to be further caressed and grind slowly with another dancer in a sizzling neon green lace lingerie set (with GLOVES!) — things eventually get so sexy between them I started fanning myself and rewound it a few (more than a few) times. It’s all staged and choreographed with a woman’s gaze at the center, and never once feels degrading or demoralizing. Just powerful.

There is so much power in having artists like Fabolous, A$AP Ferg, Big Sean, DJ Khaled and Fat Joe rap about bad bitches without ever using any as pawns. The show takes time to uplift Tierra Whack for her bars. Khaled and Fat Joe perform their songs in front of a giant wall filled with cutout archways lit up in rainbow colors, an obvious show of LGBTQ+ allyship which brought me more joy (and of course more tears). These artists operate in an industry and culture that’s often drenched in misogyny and homophobia, but they stood on the Savage X Fenty stage and instead sent a different message.

There were SO many celebrities with staggering followings on that stage. I did some quick math and the count of JUST the Instagram followers collectively among all the big names — many of which I’ve failed to list here, there were just so many! — is well over 300 million. Think about that reach. The resounding impact of their message that diversity and inclusion are the rule, not the exception. That black, brown, trans, disabled, fat, queer, lives matter. That the people and cultures the fashion industry has long stolen and appropriated from — all while barring us from entering — don’t just deserve a seat at the table. No, our ancestors made the damn table off the sweat of their backs. We own it. And we own everything else, too.

There really aren’t words for what Rihanna has done here.

You can stream the Savage X Fenty show on Amazon Prime.

Top 10 “A Black Lady Sketch Show” Sketches to Send You Into the Weekend Laughing

Last week, BET aired their annual Black Girls Rock Awards and, as is too often the case, black queer girls — particularly black trans girls — were left out of the narrative. Pose star, Angelica Ross, tweeted her disappointment and the hoteps and herteps have been in her mentions ever since.

Thankfully, though, this summer gave us A Black Lady Sketch Show which distinguished itself as a model of inclusivity. The show’s creators, Robin Thede and Issa Rae, understand what BET, seemingly, does not: that the stories of “black ladies” are incomplete without black queer women included in them. As Carmen wrote last month, “ABLSS recognizes that ‘black ladies’ come across a variety of gender identities and sexualities. Black lesbians are funny. Black queer women are funny. Black trans women are funny. And we aren’t going anywhere, any time soon.”

The HBO series wrapped up its six episode first season last Friday and, while the sketch series will return for a second season, that debut seems so far away. Until we get some new episodes, we’ve got to make due with the best sketches from Season One.

Here are my Top 10:

1. Get the Belt // Episode 106:”Born at Night, But Not Last Night”

Black nostalgia is a precarious thing: on the one hand, there’s that sentimentality that comes with remembering our pasts, especially our childhoods, but, on the other, it’s almost inevitable that whatever time’s being reflected on was fraught. It’s why “Make America Great Again” never really had much resonance for our community. So doing a good comedic sketch evoking black nostalgia? A difficult needle to thread… and yet, ABLSS manages to do just that with “Get the Belt.” Can something be both slightly traumatic and absolutely hysterical at the same time? Apparently so.

“We set ‘Get the Belt’ in 1992, mainly because I wanted to wear this Salt-N-Pepa wig. But also because it was the last time you could whoop your kids without getting child services called. Ah, the good ol’ days!” Thede joked during her weekly livetweet of the show.

2. Bad Bitch Support Group // Episode 101: “Angela Bassett is the Baddest Bitch”

The “Bad Bitch Support Group” is the third sketch of ABLSS’s inaugural run and, right away, it lets you know about what kind of show this is about to be. Yes, that’s Angela Bassett — AKA, the reigning queen of Wakanda — leading the support group of bad bitches, an early sign that ABLSS will attract all of Black Hollywood’s Elite. But, more importantly, I think the “Bad Bitch Support Group” illustrates how ABLSS handles black lady politics. Masked in the hilarity of the debate between being a “Bad Bitch” or an “Okay Bitch” or — shutters — a “Basic Bitch” is an insightful commentary about modern beauty standards.

But perhaps my favorite moment from the sketch is when Kiana, played by the inimitable Laverne Cox, takes it upon herself to police the space. She says, “I just don’t know how I supposed to feel safe in the presence of an aspiring ‘okay bitch.’ Her attendance here undermines the whole notion of the Bad Bitch Support Group.” There’s something beautifully subversive about seeing a trans woman be the arbiter of safe spaces. Also? I need someone to greenlight Laverne Cox as a lead in a full-throated TV comedy right now.

3.The Basic Ball // Episode 102: “Your Boss Knows You Don’t Have Eyebrows”

There are about thousand ways that “The Basic Ball” could’ve gone horribly wrong. A sketch appropriating ballroom for the basic bitches among us could’ve easily veered off into lampooning the culture, but because there are empowered black queer women in the writers’ room — Lauren Ashley Smith, Ashley Nicole Black and Brittani Nichols — and queer people featured in the sketch, it never goes in that direction. The sketch itself is a celebration of ball culture and a hilarious affirmation that the fact that “you could never” rings true. Ms. Elektra Wintour would be proud.

4. Courtroom Kiki // Episode 106: “Born at Night, But Not Last Night”

On more occasions than I’d care to remember, I’ve walked into a room and been the only black woman in the room. I look around, I sigh, and proceed about my business, knowing that whatever happens in that room, I’ll be seen as the symbolic representative for all black women. It’s exhausting. But sometimes you’re lucky enough to find yourself in a room where everyone is a black woman and it feels like cause for celebration.

“I have done this in elevators, waiting rooms, stores, every time I end up in a spot with only Black women, I do this. We do this. This is real. It really happens and this sketch is my heart,” ABLSS writer Amber Ruffin shared.

5 + 6. Invisible Spy: Part One & Part Two // Episode 101: “Angela Bassett is the Baddest Bitch” // Episode 102: “Your Boss Knows You Don’t Have Eyebrows”

There are moments when, as a black woman and, particularly, as a big black woman, I am hyper-visible to the world — I feel like everyone’s eyes are on me — but there are other moments when, as a black woman and, particularly as a big black woman, I disappear.

I am, to quote Roxane Gay, “extraordinarily visible but invisible.” That experience made Ashley Nicole Black’s adventures at Trinity, the Invisible Spy, feel even more resonant. Despite being the CIA’s best agent, most of the time, her regular appearance allows her to slip through even the tightest of security undetected, but when an elusive target darts through a TJ Maxx-like store to make her escape, Trinity’s suddenly hyper-visible… and everyone suddenly thinks she works there.

I won’t embarrass myself by telling you how many times that’s happened to me but I will say, I’ve learned the hard way never to wear a red polo shirt when I’m making a Target run.

My favorite thing about the Invisible Spy sketch: Aja Naomi King’s guest starring role as the villain in Part Two. She and Trinity are in a standoff when the CIA agent falters. Trinity concedes, “I’m sorry, you are so hot, I’m honestly, having trouble focusing.” As someone who thirsts over Aja Naomi King every week on How to Get Away With Murder, this is the relateable content I’m after.

7+8. Church Open Mic: Part 2 and No-Fun Threesome // Episode 105: “Why Are Her Pies Wet, Lord?” // Episode 106: “Born at Night, But Not Last Night”

On its face, there’s nothing spectacular about these two sketches. The first starts with couple who use their microphone time before the church’s potluck dinner to solicit fellowship — in a biblical way — from the membership. In the second, they’ve found themselves a partner and prepare to have a threesome. Both sketches are funny, no doubt, but the thing that takes them over the top… the thing that makes these two of my favorite sketches of the entire series… is that the female half of the coupling is played by Amber Riley.

Amber Riley, of Glee fame. Mercedes “I’m Beyoncé, I ain’t no Kelly Rowland” Jones. Turns out, hearing Mercedes Jones say, “You know, I got so excited to eat that taco, I forgot to ask if you have any boundaries,” was a thing that I needed in my life. Who knew?

Personally, I feel like this opens up a whole new lane for Glee fanfiction that we haven’t explored.

9. Dance Biter // Episode 101: “Angela Bassett is the Baddest Bitch”

The best thing about a shows with genuine representation is you get to step into moments like these… ones that feel so lived in and comfortable, that you could easily see yourself (or, in my case, a younger version of myself) stepping into a scene an feeling right at home. “Dance Biter” is so steeped in black queer culture that everything feels familiar, even the characters’ dialogue echoes things you’ve heard from your friends. A few of my favorite lines:

“Oh my God, please don’t do this, I’ve got eight exes in this corner alone and you don’t see me causing a scene.”

“Is she really going to stand there like we not about to get back together 12 more times before we break up for good?! The audacity. The gall. The temerity.”

“You think I’m trying to leave the turnup because I passed out in the alleyway under mysterious circumstances?”

So real, so hilarious.

10. 227: The Reboot // Episode 103: “3rd & Bonaparte Is Always in the Shade”

Reboots are all the rage these days but reboots of classic black television shows of the ’80s and ’90s rarely enter that discussion. There was talk of a New York Undercover reboot but it wasn’t able to score a network pick-up. Every now and again, you’ll hear talk about a reboot of Living Single or Martin but nothing ever seems to come to fruition. We’re getting a Girlfriends reunion on an upcoming episode of black-ish but that’s far short of the full reboot we deserve. Thankfully, the women at ABLSS came through for us, delivering a pitch perfect reboot of the NBC sitcom, 227.

Everything about this sketch is great. I love how it captures Rose’s perpetually naïveté and Pearl’s habit of throwing non-stop shade from her window perch. And Robin Thede’s turn as Sandra Clark? Short of Jackée herself, I cannot imagine anyone doing it better. Only thing missing from the sketch? Oscar winner, Regina King, reprising her role as Brenda Jenkins.

Have you caught up on A Black Lady Sketch Show yet? If not, why are you robbing yourself of joy? You can still find it on demand and streaming across all HBO platforms. What were your favorite sketches?

Six Tips for Navigating Chicago as a (Baby) Black Queer

1. When you get the job offer, say thank you. Negotiate for a higher salary, say thank you again.

Sign your name on the dotted line. Sing “Crazy, Classic, Life” by Janelle Monae into your mirror with emphasis on “Young, Black, Wild, and Free.” When you decide to move to Chicago for said job – stare straight ahead at the path before you. Don’t dwell on the fact that you don’t know a soul in Chicago; that you’ve never paid a bill or lived alone before. View this as an opportunity to rebuild, to grow, to shape yourself into the person you know exists inside of you in a city you’ve always wanted to meet.

Pull out your tarot deck, shuffle the cards, and be grateful when you get “The Tower” which symbolizes radical change. Don’t be frightened by the card itself which shows lightning striking, a crumbling building, and large swaths of smoke hiding the figures of burning bodies. Focus only on the hope in the card – the smoke clearing, the beginnings of a blue sky.

2. Don’t trust the internet.

Get your first glimpse of Chicago when you go apartment hunting. Walk around with facts you don’t need to know in your head (Chicago – the home of the Twinkie, 52 million travelers per year). Fuse these facts with your first hand experience. Develop a crush on the wide spread legs of the canals downtown.

Look up safest neighborhoods to live in Chicago because you are a woman and you are afraid of the masked man who hides in alleyways and parking lots. Limit your apartment search to places in the North because you figure it’s the farthest from the infamous South Side where (the news says) violence reigns. Feel ashamed for this choice later.

Meet your realtor who is Romanian with shocking red hair and blue eyes. Listen as he tells you “this neighborhood is safe” and “don’t go down there – that’s where things get sketchy.” Settle on a place in Lakeview East and do the Boystown thing: get the Sunday Funday brunch, nod hello. Dole out eyerolls to the old white women who clutch their purses tighter when they pass your Black body on the sidewalk. With pain in your stomach, realize the only Black faces you see in your neighborhood are bagging your groceries with a tight smile at Jewel Osco.

Pick up a book on the history of Chicago and wish you had done so sooner.

3. Observe Chicago by yourself and become fast friends.

Notice the movements on the train.

From your train stop to Monroe, there are busy looking white people who wear blazers, polos, and bejeweled flats. They sit on their cell phones or they read the latest Ann Patchett. They grumble under their breath when you sit next to them on the train – your thighs too wide, your afro too big. Your first few weeks in Chicago, you feel bad you can’t give them the clean lines they seem to long for.

Begin a tumultuous love affair with the weather.

Chicago is a moody bitch. Chicago can cradle you, spritzing puffs of fresh air across your collarbone on a hot day like you are walking through the perfume aisle at Macy’s. The next day, Chicago can be a bully, grinding cold wind into your melanin in a way that makes you wonder if the weather can be racist (the answer, you have learned, is HELL YES, by the way). Gripe and groan, and when you’re finished – fall in love with Chicago’s unpredictability. Start wearing layers, strip tease in the sun.

Track your growth, become a witness.

You spend so much time alone that you start to notice things about yourself. You say “sorry” less and you walk outside more. You read more books. You learn how to cook. You buy a rose quartz crystal from Alchemy Arts for self love and forgiveness. You realize you have so much you have never forgiven yourself for.

A few weeks after you move to Chicago, you don’t worry about the faces they give your body on the train. You walk into the car and you ease into the seat and you pull out a book and you delight in the space that your body takes up.

You are still trying to understand what it means to be a Chicagoan, but while you figure it out, you set your legs like roots into the ground on the El train and you ride the waves of the track – each bump and pivot and twist, an affirmation.

4. Remember that you are Queer and Black, that means you don’t have to be alone.

“Queer Artsy Black Femme seeking INTERSECTIONAL feminist friends. Will affirm your unheard poetry and offer quality book recommendations. Maybe attend a late night speakeasy?” Write drafts of ads for Queer personals pages on Instagram and ask your friends which one best describes you. When the ad posts a week after you arrive in Chicago, respond to the ever-growing messages of “let’s hang out” and “what books are you currently reading?” Meet up with these people, even though you keep a nervous stone in your chest.

Meet A, who is Jewish and tall with brown unruly hair, at a coffeshop in Lakeview West to discuss how difficult and exciting it is to be pansexual – how you simultaneously long for people with penises while also experiencing fear of rape or assault or ridicule. Go to the Korean food festival and gab about how your periods are in sync over bibimbap. Make jokes about how your wombs have been conspiring with each other.

Meet L – a Black, poly plant mom who keeps yoni eggs and crystals around her apartment. Tease her about her chosen home of Bridgeport, where American flags and “We support Blue” signs hang off of porch railings. Attempt to impress her with homemade bubble tea and when you forget the correct straws, laugh and spoon boba out of the mason jar like you’re eating ice cream.

Meet up with C at Volumes Bookcafe and order the Molly Weasley tea latte. Listen as they tell you about their favorite childhood books and their love for devised theatre. Take down notes in your journal and swear to look up the references later.

Of course, discuss sex: who you’re fucking, who you want to fuck, the kinks you’re getting into, the shame you’re trying to break through. Feel your nipples get hard when _____ mentions their latest sexual partner(s) – how their toes curled, how tears came out of nowhere because it “felt. that. good.”

Start the slow, wonderful process of falling in love with your friends. Write poetry about the size of their hands, the cadence of their voices, the ways that they hold you – without clinging – as you transform and grow into yourself.

5. Attend Pride Month events. Experience love for your people in your limbs. Pray no one touches your hair. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

Take L with you to a Thursday night queer party at a rooftop bar downtown. Allow yourself to get drunk from too many rose sangrias. Comb your fingers through your natural afro. Step touch-step touch.

Watch the girl as she sidles up beside you and waves her hips like she’s trying to find balance on the El. Make a simile of her body, observing the way the multicolored pink/green/blue strobe lights make her pale skin look like birthday cake ice cream.

Her: You’re a great dancer.

You: Awww thanks; it’s not that hard at all – let me show you.

Twiddle fingers and slide hands up thighs that are slick with sweat. As she grinds on your leg, she tells you she is not American. She is only here for one more night. Though you are still new to the city you say “Welcome, Welcome.” You own the fact that you’re a local now – you grind and twist through the night like the sun will bring death.

When you’re hot and sweaty, take a break and watch L stride up to the DJ and request “Ape Shit” – her braids swinging behind her, barely covering her exposed midriff. See the DJ smirk and clap their hands on the 1-3, “Sorry – it’s not THAT kind of party.”

Hump to Lizzo even though your dancing becomes more rigid. Carry the microaggression in your chest. When you get home, find out you’re 100% that bitch… who needs to process the night’s complexity in their journal.

Ask yourself the questions you are still living: What kind of party was it then? What are the rules, and who makes them? How can you can be Queer and Black and Fat and Femme in this Windy City? How can all those things exist and not exist inside of you all at once?

6. Remember, Beloved – You are enough.

It is Pride. Look down the block to see drag queens, leathers, and groups of baby queers moving together in amoebas of glitter, cat ears, and rainbow flags. Choose your outfit the night before: a neon pink dress shirt, a tank top with mermaid fins over the nipples, tight black pants, platforms, and a whole array of buttons that let people know who you are. A QTPOC Rising button placed prominently above your left shoulder.

The plan is set, the group is waiting.

Get out of bed. Climb back into bed. Feel guilty and luxurious.

While the parade is happening down the block, read a book about radical self love and dip a spoonful of honey into oolong tea. Unwrap the pink dildo from the scarf hidden on your bookshelf and make your body crackle with electricity until you lie spent and happy and proud of how much you have come to love your own company.

Realize that Chicago with its crowded trains and your studio apartment and your new friends – is beckoning you to know that you are enough.

You’re not a bad Queer for staying in bed on Pride. You’re not a bad Black person for choosing Lakeview. You are a whole human being and the city – your city – is big enough to hold you and your contradictions.

Breathe into the fact that you have found a place where you can ask meaningful questions and grow into yourself. Accept this place for who it is even with its imperfections and pains. Pray that this acceptance will be a lesson in accepting your own self.

Continue to say yes.🗺️

Edited by Carmen.

Dear White People Season 3 Finally Gives Us the Nerdy Black Gay Girls We Deserve

It’s no secret that Dear White People has a checkered history with its depiction of queer black women. In both the Netflix comedy series, which premiered its third season on the streaming network earlier this month, and the original film that the series is based on, openly gay director/writer/producer Justin Simien has created a world that is  incredibly smart and stylized. His depiction of being a black college student at a predominantly white university is sometimes too on the nose with its satire, but is ultimately always a fresh and loving tribute to smart ass, political, and pop culturally aware black kids in their early 20s (obviously I can relate). However, black lesbians and queer women have consistently fallen short.

In the first season, ‘90s legend Nia Long guest starred as Professor Neika Hobbs, a lesbian-identified professor of African American history who is engaged to Monique, but is having a secret affair with a male undergraduate student. That sounds awful and gets worse! Though the trend is very slowly turning, it’s still rare to see a black woman in a romantic relationship with another black woman on television. In that sense, Neika and Monique were making history. So was both disappointing and impactful that Neika spent the season hooking up with her male student on-screen without ever showing the romantic relationship between her and her (appropriately aged, NOT A STUDENT) woman fiancée. Yeah, that’s not a great start.

Nia Long in Dear White People Season One

In the show’s second season, the TV series seemingly attempted to correct these early mistakes, this time focusing on two separate lesbian plots that were much smaller, but better executed. In the first of those two plots, Lena Waithe (who also helped to produce the original Dear White People film) guest starred in a parody of VH1’s Love and Hip Hop franchise. In the second plot, a supporting character in the series, Kelsey Phillips, comes out as a lesbian to her roommate Coco. Up until her coming out scene, Kelsey had largely served as Dear White People’s comic relief thanks in part to her Hillary Banks-style valley girl vocal inflection and love for her dog, Sorbet. Her coming out scene is subtle, but it’s certainly no joke and signaled a broader future development for her character.

Now in its third season, Dear White People takes even greater swings at black queer women’s representation – further developing Kelsey into a three-dimensional character that’s independent of her roommate and one-off jokes, while also facilitating the coming out of another established character. Brooke Morgan is a media studies undergrad whose main character traits up to this point have been: being nerdy, being very annoying, being an excellent student journalist, and having lots of random hookups with men. Brooke and Kelsey start regularly crossing paths at the campus coffee house where Brooke works as the manager. Their courtship is a slow burn over the first half of the season. It’s sweet and dorky and by the third or fourth time they were on my laptop screen I was physically drawing little invisible hearts over their faces with my fingers! Squeee!!! Little black nerdy girls in baby gay love!! SO CUTE!!

I loved everything about how unexpected and awkward Brooke and Kelsey were together! I love that Kelsey, who’s been primarily known as being ditzy, rich, and sheltered starts to fall in love with a student who has to work her way through school. I love that Brooke and Kelsey both drive everyone around them absolutely bonkers, but they don’t mind each other’s most irritating traits. I love that because of Kelsey, Brooke starts to come out to herself as sexually fluid (she never gives herself a label) and that because of Brooke, the audience learns new layers about Kelsey that would have otherwise been left as broad, unexplored strokes. During their build up, everything around them just feels pink and bubbly and caffeinated. It’s a welcome romantic reprieve on a show that often leads the one-two punch of its jokes with heavy politics first.

Given Dear White People’ past, I was worried that Brooke’s sexuality was being set up for the worst of biphobic tropes. And Kelsey, who is looking for a longterm romantic relationship, is wary of being a mere college “experimentation” for Brooke, which really didn’t do much to assuage my fears. Without veering too far into spoilers, I will say that the two have surprisingly mature conversation about their specific wants and needs before taking their romantic relationship to the next level. Even though they don’t end the season together, that’s because their relationship helps Brooke grow and realize new truths about her own goals and desires, not because she’s written as some cruel or untrustworthy “evil” bisexual whom lesbians should stay away from. A door is left open for a fourth season friendship (or maybe – if I’m selfishly lucky – a romantic rekindling!) between them. Admittedly it’s a delicate tightrope to walk, but I think Dear White People ends up on the right side of that history.

Dear White People’s greatest strength has always been its willingness to dive into black interiority. By that I mean, Dear White People not only showcases that blackness is not a monolith from the outside looking in, but also within that black diversity, each character has their own unique set of motivations and worldviews. There’s quite literally no other show like it on television right now that’s willing to dig deep into black psyches. Which is why I was delighted that in its third season, the show made a deliberate point out of building out its LGBT characters. Dear White People has always had a strong, fully developed, central gay character in Lionel – the male lead of the original film and an early protagonist for the series. This year Lionel finally makes gay friends and develops a queer crew that includes – D’unte, the flamboyant grad student who becomes his mentor (Griffin Michaels, in the season breakout role. You won’t forget him!); Genifer, a trans woman student played by trans actress Quei Tann; Michael, an HIV+ student who eventually becomes Lionel’s love interest; and our very own darling Kelsey.

There’s a scene where the crew is hanging out together in Lionel’s room as Kelsey is first deciding what to flirt text to Brooke early in their relationship. I had to pause it. It’s a small thing, maybe not even noticeable if you aren’t black, and queer, and used to never seeing yourself on-screen. There were five queer black kids together, just chilling on a bed, limbs in a pile and laughter abundant. FIVE OF THEM. TOGETHER. I had chills. No matter how many times I may have lived it in my own life, I had never actually watched it before displayed in front of me. Not in a major series. Not even once. That moment? It’s a gift of recognition that I’ll cherish.

Laverne Cox also guest stars this year. Her character, Cynthia Fray, is a filmmaker visiting campus and serves as surprisingly fun Ava DuVernay/ Spike Lee hybrid. Cox is gifted as always, but I have found her guest work this year to be incredibly strong – both here and in A Black Lady Sketch Show. Including Cynthia Fray, there are a grand total of seven black LGBT characters on this season of Dear White People. That’s not to be overlooked, it makes this the largest number of any black cast this side of the black gay classic Noah’s Arc, which aired a full thirteen years ago!

On top of everything else mentioned, you can expect to find thoughtful and complicated meditations on the impact of #MeToo in black communities, along with some very funny (even if a little dated already) satire on The Handmaid’s Tale, Elisabeth Moss, Scientology, and white feminism. I’m not sure that Season Three of Dear White People is it’s strongest season, it finds itself lost and meandering for the entire first arc before settling in and ending the season on firm ground. Still, it’s positively its gayest season by a mile – and hey, that’s not nothing!

The Mexplainer: A History of Anti-Brown Violence in the American Southwest

Mi familia had just moved into a big, white house in a “good” neighborhood, the kind of place where the windows weren’t supposed to have bullet holes. Nonetheless, here they were, pocking the panes of my little sister’s bedroom. I ran, found my father, and brought him to survey the vandalism. His green eyes squinted. Rage, terror, and disgust contorted his face. His brown bald spot glistened. He marched to the phone and dialed the sheriffs.

We, the second Mexican-American family to “pioneer” this elite community, awaited law enforcement. We milled about in racial anxiety. None of us dared speak about what had happened. White people had fired in our direction. I wanted to believe it was an accident pero I knew mejor. Mi familia had taught me the history of our gente so I understood the gringo capacity for chicanery and atrocity. Since gringos first decided to manifest their destiny on our land, Latinx people in the United States have been forced to live under a regime of fear and degradation: White supremacy.

Mainstream media consistently fails to comprehend or capture the racial anxiety provoked by this current administration. Instead, coverage of Latinx people often filters us through the White gaze, thus distorting the Latinx massacres in Gilroy, California and El Paso, Texas. These slaughters have made Brown folk tremble and for readers unfamiliar with how the White gaze operates – allow me to mexplain. During the fourth grade, my little brother, a Brown nerd, forgot to bring his homework to school. His White teacher scolded him in front of his White classmates, barking, “If you keep this up, you’re gonna wind up working in the field picking berries with your parents!”

The school district next door employed our parents. Our mother taught bilingual kindergarten at Miller Street Elementary School. In Mexico, she’d worked as a chemist. Our father worked in a messy government office with Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother pinned above his desk. A trained linguist, he directed the Migrant Education Program, a federal project which aims to ensure that all migrant students achieve academic success and graduate from high school ready for “responsible citizenship.”

Sedentary Americans ought to enroll in the Migrant Education Program because irresponsible citizenship is the order of our day and disgusted by widespread gringo apathy. I’m here to SHOUT that we feel powerless. I am here to SHOUT Toni Morrison’s words, “The function of freedom is to free someone else!” Wake up, gringos, please! Dispense with the performative hand wringing and act.

When I asked my friend, poet Griselda Suarez, about her well-being in the aftermath of the attacks, she answered, “I can no longer tell anyone who engages in cordial greetings that I’m doing OK. It’s time for all of us to say that we are terrorized, being hunted.” Los dos gabachos who massacred nuestra gente in Texas and California did so as avowed Mestizo hunters. The manifesto posted by the El Paso killer roots his motives in the 1845 American doctrine propounded by John O’Sullivan: “Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Manifest Destiny has yielded to Manifesto Destiny.

The history of anti-Latinx vigilantism in the American southwest is bone-chilling. Historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb spent years excavating this horror, studying the lynching of persons of Mexican origin or descent in the United States from 1848 to 1928. Their research reveals that “scholars persistently [overlooked] anti-Mexican violence.” According to Carrigan and Webb, the lives of Black and Brown people have long been imperiled – “the chance of being murdered by a mob was comparable for both Mexicans and African Americans.” Their definition of lynching as a “retributive act of murder for which those responsible claim to be serving the interests of justice, tradition, or community good” qualifies the recent massacres as anti-Latinx lynchings.

Strange Fruit, the anti-racist dirge popularized by Billie Holiday, conjures gothic images of this violence, the “bulging eyes” and “twisted mouth.” Bodies reduced to “a bitter crop.” To this red harvest, we may add Stephen Romero, whose six-year-old corpse now rests in a small white casket; he’s one of three victims lynched in Gilroy, California. The notion of future funerals for lynched Black and Brown children sickens me but such is our legacy.

I’ve taught in California high schools for fifteen years and have taken stock of the omissions I’ve found in textbooks when it comes to representing the terrorism Whites have perpetrated against Black and Brown folk since the eighteenth century. Teaching materials omit the Ku Klux Klan’s commitment to terrorizing Latinx people in California, particularly in San Diego County. According to historian Carlos Larralde, “an alien laborer who challenged his employer’s authority might be hanged.” Dead Mexicans hung from oak trees, stomachs torn open, tripas spilling. White women who accused Latinx men of arguing with them could have these men silenced by Klansmen who slit throats. These same men raped, beat and blinded Brown women. Severed brown heads dotted fence posts, terrifying Mexicans into submission. In Santa Maria, California, the town where mi familia’s windows were shot, photographs featuring the Klan participating in a civic parade hung the public library foyer.

Back to those bullet holes.

The sheriff who responded to my father’s phone call went and spoke to our neighbors. He returned with a smile and “good” news: Some White boys had been playing with guns next door and never intended to do us any harm. He suggested we not worry about what happened. Boys will, after all, be boys.

Mayor George Hobbes governed Santa Maria when we moved into that White neighborhood, and in the summer of 1990, Hobbes attracted national attention after delivering a speech at the Santa Maria Valley Economic Development Association. “At this time in Santa Maria,” Hobbes explained, “we have a Mexican problem. We have a difficulty with scads of illegal aliens that have come across the border, and they’ve made our neighborhoods look not like Santa Maria.” Hobbes proposed a solution to the “Mexican problem.” He urged the federal government to construct camps along the US Mexico border in order to contain the threat.

My father would grimly joke, “A solution, a solution, a solution, where have I heard that before?”

“A Black Lady Sketch Show” Is Queer, Brilliant and Ridiculously Funny

I’m just gonna say it. We, the black delegation, declared 2019 the Hot Girl Summer and we played ourselves. I know it’s controversial, but hear me out – almost every black girl I know who started summer joyfully quoting Megan Thee Stallion lyrics on their IG captions and in their group chats is ending summer barely holding on. It’s me. I’m one of those girls.

This summer has been a blur of anxiety attacks, fights I don’t mean to keep tripping into with loved ones, racism and micro aggressions at work, holding down my friends through various dramas of their own, and did I mention a few hospital visits? Oh yeah, I had a handful of those, too. The line between Hot Girl Summer and Hot Mess Summer is thin, and I found it. Which is probably why I’ve been putting off writing about HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show. I think I felt intimidated, maybe a little unworthy. Even its black girl muppet-puppet theme song is a tribute to Hot Girls! Never mind the fact that it’s also one of the most memorable and catchy black television themes that I can remember – seemingly destined to go down in history alongside Rosie Perez and Jennifer Lopez dancing to In Living Color and Aretha Franklin’s rendition of A Different World. It opens right at the top with Megan’s distinct flow, “All the hot girls make it pop, pop, pop/ Bad bitches with the bag say ah-ya-ya!”

Do bad bitches sit in front of their computers in a hot pink sports bra with a blueberry stain down the front from breakfast that they were too busy to clean? While eating frozen white chocolate chips straight out of the Nestle bag because that’s easier than figuring out air conditioning and we’re writing on a deadline, so fuck it? That’s the situation in my apartment right now.

I first fell in love with A Black Lady Sketch Show the minute I heard that Issa Rae and Robin Thede were assembling an entire black women’s comedy writing room. I love sketch comedy. I’ve watched every episode of Saturday Night Live for at least the last 15 years. When I was ‘90s kid, my cousin and I would do our homework to reruns of In Living Color with the volume on low so Granny wouldn’t hear us doubled over in laughter. Despite his painful and upsettingly stubborn insistence on transphobia, I can still quote most of The Chapelle Show from memory (even when I wish I couldn’t). I firmly believe that the complexity and nuances of black humor are not showcased nearly enough mainstream comedy. This means I was an easy and early sell for ABLSS.

It also means that I know what I’m talking about when I say this: A Black Lady Sketch Show is so good that it’s positively dumbfounded me.

I can’t believe it took me this long to tell you that, on top of everything else, A Black Lady Sketch Show is gaaaaaay! There are three black queer women in the writers’ room (Lauren Ashley Smith, Ashley Nicole Black, and Autostraddle fan favorite Brittani Nichols!) and a black queer woman (Ashley Nicole Black) in the central cast of four. The first two episodes include two sketches specifically designed around black queer culture and, in an important detail to highlight, when taken together both of those sketches demonstrate a variety of black masc lesbian presentations that’s nearly impossible to find on television. In a future episode, a black bisexual woman describes her sexual awakening via The X Files’ Mulder and Scully. Lena Waithe has already guest starred. Yes, she was a babe. As has Laverne Cox! I couldn’t stop laughing! To be honest, all of the guest casting is a rolodex of Who’s Who in Black Hollywood (get ready y’all, even Patti LaBelle is coming!)

I’ve written before about how difficult it is to find black LGBTQ+ representation in black television. Actually, I’ve written about it a lot. Black queer women and women of color should not have to watch predominately white casts where our character is a mere sidekick or after thought just to be able to see ourselves. It’s a generations long trend that’s slowly changing. This is the forefront. A Black Lady Sketch Show recognizes that “black ladies” come across a variety of gender identities and sexualities. Black lesbians are funny. Black queer women are funny. Black trans women are funny. And we aren’t going anywhere, any time soon.

I couldn’t possibly explain the back-breaking team effort that goes in to making comedy feel this effortless or what it feels like – for the first time in my comedy loving life – to enjoy a sketch without first having to filter it through several male, white, and straight lenses just to get the joke. In fact more than once I paused ABLSS and wondered aloud if people who weren’t black women would even understand what was making the action on screen so funny; let me tell you that the sensation alone was liberating. There’s absolutely no reason that anyone watching A Black Lady Sketch Show won’t enjoy a good deep belly laugh, the same way I’ve laughed countless times over a Seth Meyers’ Weekend Update sketch on SNL, even though it was written by Ivy League educated white men who never intended me as their target audience. The difference is that for once everything from the writing, the hair and make up, the lighting, the casting was designed with me in mind. And that, even if you put all of those elements aside (and you shouldn’t) – the show itself is EXCELLENT.

I’d put any part of A Black Lady Sketch Show against critics’ darlings like Donald Glover’s ATL or Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Veep, the best of Tina Fey’s SNL or anything from Mad TV and I wouldn’t break a sweat worrying about losing my lunch money. ABLSS is smart. It’s observational and absurdist. It’s the exact opposite of mindless humor; it requires the audience’s full attention. Some sketches or characters follow a narrative arc across various episodes, others are one-offs, all of them are designed with thought and care. There’s room for silliness, for spy action-adventure, cultural commentary, and sci-fi. I realize at this point it sounds like I’m basically saying “everything and the kitchen sink!” and it sort of becomes meaningless, but my point is the exact opposite: A Black Lady Sketch Show never chooses to limit itself; it sets a new bar and then rises to that challenge every single time.

I’ve already included two full sketches along with this review, but you know what? Here’s a third! Because it went viral among all my queer friends last weekend, and I would hate for you to miss out. Also, because maybe my Hot Girl Summer didn’t work out how I’d hoped, but I realized while writing this review is that A Black Lady Sketch Show never asked for my perfection. They’ll gladly take my mess. They’ve been there, girl. They just want to help us laugh through it.

When Your Face Reflects the Mirror

There are places where I am beautiful, and places where I am not. In Chicago, where I live now, I am beautiful. In the little Massachusetts suburb where I grew up, I am not beautiful. In Taiwan, where my father’s family lives, I am not just beautiful, but so gorgeous that when I was a kid random strangers would congratulate my relatives on how pretty I was.

I don’t look different in those places. I don’t act or dress differently. I don’t wear more make up in one place or another. My body doesn’t change. But I can feel the way people look at me change. And knowing that I am considered beautiful somewhere, even if it isn’t where I live, has changed the way I understand my body and the way I think about my own identities.

Growing up in my hometown, I knew who the beautiful girls were. They were the ones gifted the prize of popularity, and they had long blonde hair or tender black curls, and they all had perfect tans all the time. The boys wanted to date them, and the unpopular girls could either dye their hair or go to tanning salons to perhaps become one of those girls. Popularity there was founded on how close you could get to that ideal beauty.

In my almost all-white Massachusetts school, the fine brown hair and Irish-pink skin my mother gave me were so ordinary, they didn’t merit a second look. You can’t throw a rock without hitting an Irish person with brown hair around there, and that kind of staunch ordinary-ness does not make for popularity.

Me as a freshman in high school.

None of my other features, luckily, were deemed remarkable either, so I escaped any bullying for my appearance. My classmates were sometimes surprised to find out I was Asian at all. Whether this speaks to my ability to pass as white or my classmates’ ignorance remains unresolved to this day.

Overall, I was fairly reconciled with my unremarkable looks, though I did desperately want to dye my hair. Blonde, red, black – any color that wasn’t brown. My mother nixed that idea, much to the consternation of my 10-year-old self. Generally, though, I had accepted that I would never be inducted into the enclave of beautiful girls. There didn’t seem to be anything to do about it, so it didn’t feel like something to get worked up about.

When I was in middle school, my family visited my relatives in Taiwan for the first time. It was my first time in my father’s homeland. It was my first time living in a place where Asianness wasn’t just a miniscule part of the community, but the norm. “Asian” was hardly even a coherent concept in Taiwan; there my Asianness was as invisible as my whiteness was in America.

Most things about Taiwan felt natural to me. The subtropical summer heat was not far off from a muggy New England August. My grandmother’s cooking was a superior version of all the Chinese food I ate at home. The 24-hour bookstores were (and are) transcendent.

The culture shock for me was the sudden discovery that I was beautiful. My grandmother said it, my relatives said it, pretty ladies in shops said it. In America, we might brush that off as politeness, but in Asia declaring someone beautiful is not a frivolous event. Beauty is a high stakes game in Taiwan. Being called beautiful in Taiwan is less a compliment than it is a congratulations. It means you made the grade, and I had made the grade in a way I never imagined was possible. I was one of the beautiful girls.

It took time for me to understand what they saw in me that could be defined as beautiful. When I looked in a mirror, nothing had changed; I was as unremarkable as ever. It was the ads in the Taipei subway that eventually taught me how I had become “a beautiful girl.” In the subway entrance by my grandparents’ apartment, there was a moisturizer ad that showed a row of dewy women who all looked exactly the same. They had oval faces with glowing moon-pale skin and noses that somehow convinced you they weren’t really there at all, and their brown hair was pulled back sensibly out of their faces.

Staring at that ad, I knew I didn’t really look like those women. My face was the wrong shape, and my nose had always been very much present on my face. But I had things in common with them, too. I was pale. My hair was brown. And it seemed like that was enough to make me beautiful.

What irony! The things that made me so ordinary at home made me extraordinary in Taiwan. My Irish features were a dime a dozen in Massachusetts, but I never met anyone in Taiwan with pale skin or naturally light hair. The things that pushed me away from the American feminine ideal brought me closer to the perfect Taiwanese woman.

Yet my newfound beauty evaporated on the plane. No one at school thought I was more attractive. No one asked me out. Like the good food and the stellar bookstores, my beauty was a vacation perk that I couldn’t take back home. While I’d certainly enjoyed being told I was beautiful, my visits to Taiwan were so brief that they never actually changed how I felt about myself.

Those brief moments of beauty were like weird but fun little ego boosts – until my cousins began to dye their hair brown and use cosmetic tape to fold their eyelids like mine. I don’t know if they ever lightened their skin, but that option was certainly presented to them. It was painful to watch my relatives, girls who I always thought were so gorgeous, change themselves to look more like the women in the Taipei subway ads. More like dull, humdrum me. Why should they have to change themselves to look more like me when they were so lovely?

The high-flown phrases I’d heard on TV or read online started to slot into place in my mind. My cousins were subject to unrealistic beauty standards. Taiwan’s beauty standards were Eurocentric, in part due to Taiwan’s relationship to colonialism. The beauty standards my cousins and I experienced were causing us to have self-hatred. And on and on and on.

It repulsed me that I had the things my cousins felt they must artificially recreate. When I went to Taiwan to visit family, the proclamations of my beauty began to feel less like pleasant surprises than reminders that Taiwan’s beauty standards were so ridiculous that the simplest way to achieve them was to have children with someone from another continent. And the U.S. was no different. When I looked at the women in ads here, I realized that, just as I had never seen a Taiwanese woman who looked like the Taiwanese ads, I’d never seen an American woman who looked like the ladies in hair salon magazines. Their beauty was just as detached from daily life as that of the moon-pale Taiwanese models.

Tragically, just as much as gravity is an undeniable physical reality, beauty is an inescapable social reality. You can’t just jump out of the Earth’s atmosphere because you want to, and, no matter how much I try to deny beauty a place in my head, it won’t go away. Every commercial I see, every movie I watch, every pair of jeans I try on is telling me how I should look. Beauty worms its way back into my life again and again.

The approach I’ve tried to take, is to understand it as well as I can. I want to catch it in the act before it affects me too much. I now know that my childhood desire for blonde hair was based in the beauty industry’s colonialist glorification of Northern European features, so I generally ignore that impulse. When I look in the mirror and start to feel down on myself about the shape of my body, I remember the fury I felt over my relatives disliking their bodies because of Taiwanese beauty standards, and I try to feel that same empathy for myself.

It doesn’t always work. I’m a human being.

In the meantime, I was surprised to find when I moved out of my little suburb that I was beautiful again. I never expected to be beautiful outside of Taiwan, but in Chicago people have actually shown interest in me, which has been quite a twist. Here it’s not my whiteness that makes me beautiful. It’s my mixed-ness. My whiteness is comfortingly familiar to prospective dates, but my Asianness is unusual and sexy. Multiracial and mixed-race people apparently have an exotic allure, especially Asian mixed people. If it sounds gross, let me assure you: It is.

Beauty is never going to be simple for me. It’s never going to be simple for anyone. I struggle with how I should think about beauty as an Asian woman, as a genderqueer woman, as a woman who loves women, and that’s just the identities I’ve been working on recently. I don’t have answers, and I probably never will. All I can do is know what it means when I wish my nose were smaller and know what I’m participating in when I decide I want to put on lipstick.

I’m trying not to let beauty control my life. We’ll see how it goes.🗺️

Edited by Carmen.