negrosunshine:

despite my post college financial insecurities and the fact my three degrees in political science. art history. and african american studies (not listed in order of importance) are so abstract it qualifies me to work in pretty much nothing except the field of academia. i quit my non-academic full time job today and traded in my benefits to (in the romantic answer) sit in this coffee shop in the middle of the day and read and write. or (in the unromantic answer) i quit because it was a job made horrible by a number of factors, mostly constructed by issues of race, class, and sexuality. and while i knew my side career in the world of fashion and retail  would be no comfortable space for a radical black queer writer/activist, rent needed to be paid and working various jobs as a stylist and visual merchandiser has proven something im good at and gives me an outlet to release some of my creativity. with a full understanding there is no “safe space” in an anti-black world, a loose form of toleration becomes a tool of survival, and an unsteady peace can be found in the silence of non-response. but there is only so much a black queer can take. or something on the matter of what happens to a black student activist trained in critical black studies trying to make it in the world without getting arrested (again).

when i was working as a student activist and community organizer, my comrades and i found ourselves (more than we wanted to) having to explain, speak to, and testify against the micro-aggressions of anti-Black violence—those spirit injuring qualities of Black everyday living. though we found ourselves center stage, celebrated, and given “support” during high times of anti-black racism (“nigger” incidents, nooses hung, acts of police brutality[i], etc.) it was difficult getting our environment to reckon its ‘latent anti-blackness,’ or the fact just being Black is stressful enough. we racked our brains to the point of insanity coming up with nuanced ways of addressing the invisibility of Blackness while at the same time defending ourselves and “community” against the hypervisibility of Blackness. a task much better fought in numbers than alone.  and here i find myself, on the streets of chicago, largely alone, trying to make a life for myself.  running into the same issues of the past and trying to figure out the right strategies of dealing with it. which is a polite way of saying, im trying hard to keep my Nat Turner ambitions at bay and resisting the urge to send out a distress call to my various comrades now scattered throughout the world. and while im positive they are dealing with similar situations, they would laugh at me for this particular form of resistance, i quit, but before i did, i used some waka flaka flame (to perhaps my detriment).

 i accepted a position as a visual merchandiser at a downtown corner store with large windows! for those not familiar with the world of retail, this means i had a lot of space for me to create displays in the most focal part of the city. too bad i worked with a bunch of rude racist transphobic white hipsters.

 in queer-social spaces, its no secret black queers are not automatically accepted as part of the group. ive learned to deal with that, usually leaning on my middle-classed demeanor. ive written elsewhere on notions of beauty and class in queer spaces and my particular experiences, so i wont hash that out now. but at this new job, i was assumed straight (until one day i wore some short shorts), and in that initial assumption i was deemed outsider, which made for a horrible work environment, largely because white queer boys can be evil brats, particularly when they are hipsters, working in fashion, and ugly (okay, that last one was just me venting and being stupid, but seriously). the black queers i used to organize with would always joke, ‘the world doesn’t think Black-queer, you are either queer or you are Black, and since the Blackness is undeniable, black people can’t be queer.” Well that joke preceded me in my new job, and everything that comes with being Black in the world of fashion followed. there is some really interesting work out there on the position of Black bodies in the world of fashion and im surprised there is not more prominent work done on the relationship between black consumers, criminality, and retail. general assumptions are made concerning theft when Black bodies enter stores, not because Black people generally steal (there is no research to support that), but because Black people are assumed criminal (there is research to support that). this plays out in particular ways concerning my creative job inside stores, and will be something i need to work out without quitting and/or resorting to waka flaka flame.

when i style, or create a look, or come up with a concept, im usually envisioning a Black woman (I work mainly with women’s fashion). what colors, styles, cuts, textures would look good on my sister, friends, mom, aunts, and cousins. further, what looks go with the world i surround myself with on a daily basis. what could i create that would repeatedly flow down my tumblr dashboard? that creates a particular conflict between my coworkers and myself. though i was working at a store where black people shop (not just steal from), my visions of Blackness were deemed irrelevant or suspect, and no amount of queer boy fashion stereotype (in my short shorts) could save me from that shadow. so my sense of fashion, taste, and style was in question (and rest assured it wasn’t because I don’t have style, come see ‘bout me!).

i don’t want this post to become a list of grievances with the job/company i just said bye to. i tendered my resignation to free myself from that burden. just know that after some tortuous days of catty white queer hipster boys, i seized my chance to make them a bit uncomfortable. it was late at night and we were changing around the store for the new spring season. i was in my zone choosing outfits for a display of nine mannequins, lost in the sauce of florals and pastels, someone asked me if i wanted to choose the music for the hour. i looked around as all the boys were watching me, walked up to the computer and thought about erykah or maybe d’angelo, but then i said to myself, i said, “self, lets get real ‘Black’ in here.” i put on waka flaka flame Pandora and turned it up. what i thought would be an interesting moment of awkwardness became a sad show of minstrelsy. two of the white boys knew every word, to every song and censored themselves from the word “nigga” but in a way that let me know, if i wasn’t there, they’d lean into that shit real good.

a few more days of contentious attitudes, and one particular email warning the sales staff to beware of the “trannies.” apparently “trannies” steal, and “trannies” are “African-American males with rough looking faces wearing girls clothes.” i tendered my resignation and here i sit, free to write and search for another job where i will have to keep my Nat Turner ambitions at bay. which doesn’t mean im not keeping them at bay right now.

[i] I paused before adding “police brutality” to this list. Blackness as criminal and criminal as Blackness structures the logic of U.S. policing; that said, the police structure is a day-to-day institution that reimagines, reinvents, and ultimately reinforces the aforementioned statement on the other side of the semicolon. The coupling of Black suffering and police violence is so naturalized that the conditions of possibility (time, space, and attributes) is a gendered race and class calculation when rendering a Black body “victim—” despite the mundaneness of police violence against Black bodies (psyche included). My list was meant to mark those moments deemed “events” in Black suffering, yet my comrades and I pushed back against the rhetoric of “event” and termed them “spectacles,” distractionary moments from the spectacular nature of Black everyday living. My pause comes from a meditation on the mundaneness of police violence and why so few Black bodies get turned in to “victims,” or cause for celebration, protest, and thinking through the institution of policing. 

negrosunshine:

 when i hear critiques of “gay is the new black,” sometimes i feel the critique actually misses the frightening truth of the statement.

“gay is the new black,” imagines a celebratory ending to black struggle, while also erasing the peculiar position of being black and “gay” in this society. it eliminates the possibility of intersectional analysis proffering a strange ‘post-blackness,’ requiring Black queers to catch up and identify with the 21st century civil rights struggle, no longer fought by Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and such, but now by Ellen, Lady Gaga (on our behalf), the cast of Modern Family, and the HRC.

that said, “gay is the new black” alarms me in a more terrifying way. it is the plain evidence that Black remains the baseline indicator of social oppression, ostracization, marginalization, exploitation, and discrimination. it is the social, historical, and theoretical standard to hold one’s social position against. “gay is the new black” openly means, i’m being treated like im black! the fact that it is said with such ease reveals the plain truth of black “inferiority.” and the fact that it is missed in so many critiques, further reveals the intricacies of anti-blackness, and the need for further analysis. 

negrosunshine:

*raises eyebrow*

*looks at screen*

great, now middle and upper class white queer people can be just like middle and upper class white people. middle and upper class queer people of color can keep on acting like they’re just like middle and upper class white queer people. and the rest of us can continue on struggling.

*rolls over, pulls sheets over head, clutches pillow* no 50% chance my bed and i ending in divorce. well then again, there’s that 32% chance a prison cot will be our homewrecker. 

navigatethestream:

wow….how this is loaded with fail. SUCH extreme fail where do i begin.

1. equating my self identification as being queer with who i sleep with is extremely problematic. sexual orientation/identity is not just to signal to others who you sleep with, but who you are inclined to build family, friends and community with. the notion that being queer is to let people know about my sex life is a tragic misnomer perpetuated by people whose understanding of identity based communities around sexuality is inherently limited. i suggest you educate yourself on the socio-political history of queer identities before you attempt to insinuate that my openness about my sexuality is to let people know who i’m bouncing around the bed-frame with 
2. your assumption i’m putting queer as the foremost identifying factor is patently false. yes, its one of the first things that i list about myself on my blog description, but its wrong to infer that because its listed first that somehow its the foremost identifyer about myself. if somebody listed that they stan harry potter and Josh Whedon first on their blog chances are they aren’t listing that information on a passport application or other spaces/venues where it fundamentally isn’t relevant. you talk about the identities important to you in the spaces which allow for it, but chances the order you list them in doesn’t mark importance nor how those things play a role in life outside of tumblr. 
3. so i’m supposed to care that you don’t find me interesting because i shout my sexuality to the rooftops and in your narrow mind that means i must have the personality of peeling, mouldy wallpaper? the earth under my feet is supposed to be drastically moved? or i suppose my feelings are suppose to be hurt because {DRAMATIC GASP} LLAWWD HAAVE MMURRCCYYY I IS QUEER AND THAT JUS MEANS AINT SHIT INTTURESSTTIINNG ABOUT MY LIFE OR MY PERSONALITY. yeah sorry son, i’m not the one. never have been, never will be. 
4. you not understanding is probably on a long list of personal short-comings. and what you don’t understand is once again, not really my concern so much as it is a personal problem which only you can work. To paraphrase Smokey the Bear, only you can rectify what you fail to understand.   

if my flagrant gayness really wretches at your core to the point of discomfort similar to experiencing hemorrhoids, then please refrain from navigating my stream, hop off, and go stargaze from outside! 

Do you see this film as sort of validating – for lack of a better word – the ways in which gay men have connected historically, ways that are kind of demonized by some of the more vocal, increasingly conservative quarters of the community?

It’s such a complicated issue, isn’t it? For a long time gay men fought to be seen as different, doing our own thing: This is our lives, this is what we do, accept it. There’s a conservatism that has come into the gay community: We’re just like you, just like everyone else. And maybe some people are and they do want to get married and so on, but that doesn’t mean that other people that don’t wanna get married… [He pauses.] Sometimes, I feel like the straight world is actually hooking onto the idea that they’re quite happy for us to get married because it means, “Whew! They are like us.”

A lot of so-called progressive hetero folks support gay marriage because ultimately it validates them and an institution that validates them and their relationships. It removes the weight of respecting and valuing truly diverse ways of being.

Yeah, it validates them. And now you get this pressure. I’ve got my mum asking me when I’m gonna get married, and I’m like, “Probably never.” 

Look, of course everyone should have the right to get married. But I think people need to remember sometimes that we don’t all need to be the same. There’s thousands of different types of relationships that people can have, whether it’s completely monogamous or it’s not monogamous, or they’re married or they’re single or whatever it is. All of those are valid as long as you are doing what you want to do, and it’s your choice. Our forefathers [he laughs] fought to not be like everyone else, and to be accepted on their own terms. It’s complicated. It’s quite exhausting and there is a point where you maybe do want to be seen like everyone else. [Laughter] 

I hope the film shows that it’s a complex issue. Nobody’s usually on one side or the other. Glen may say, “I don’t want to get married,” but if you listen to him enough then you realize he does want to be in love and he does want some security, and so we’re all just flowing along on this thing of, “Do we want it? Do we not? Security? Freedom? What do I want?”

The main thing is simply to be allowed to come up with your own definitions of security and freedom, which may be in direct opposition to the notion of marriage.

Absolutely. And that’s nothing to do with being gay. A struggle that almost everybody faces is finding that balance between feeling like they’re free as an individual, and having a kind of social safety and comfort. Everyone deals with that. It’s universal.

negrosunshine:

Some of my earliest memories of politics come from riding around with my grandfather listening to talk-radio. Papa retired from the U.S. post-office before I was born, so when I was younger, he was always there for my divorced parents and me. When dad was away at sea, or later when he moved back to Florida, and mom was at work, or off doing her single-woman thing, Papa would pick me up from school, take me to acting classes, dance lessons, track practice, rehearsals, or whatever else I was involved in at the time. Or sometimes I would just ride around with him as he kept himself busy doing the things a retired, restless Black man does, while his wife is teaching school, or sewing quilts, or doing her wise-Black woman thing. It was always my papa and I: cruising the streets of San Diego, listening to the conservative talk radio the city had to offer. Sometimes he would yell at the radio in stern disagreements with the passionate voices coming out the speakers, and other times he would nod along in approval with the opinions coming through. I never quite understood what was going on, but I knew we were Democrats, and in 1992 I knew to vote for Clinton (if I could), and in 1996 I knew to re-elect Clinton (if I could). By 2000, I came into my own, which was actually shaped by the earlier days, so I knew why I wanted to vote for Gore (but still I couldn’t). And to this day, I’m not sure why I ever toyed with the idea of being a medical doctor, or dreamt of dancing with Ailey, my future was shaped and molded from the car rides with my Papa, and as I write this I begin to understand the roots of my deep engagement with politics and activism. And I also begin to further understand the risk we take in not critically engaging the rhetoric of the day, the institutionalized rhetorical gestures that reveal a certain politic, and the commonsense rhetoric that constitute our intimate relations.

The car rides with my grandfather exposed me to a certain commonsense (which was later complicated with the addition of liberal talk-radio to the San Diego market, and my own personal adventures in the 24-hour TV news cycle and the internet), which strengthened my navigational skills in Political Science classrooms and activism circles. I owe a great debt to Papa for never shielding my young ears from the rhetoric of the day; and while I will forever pay homage to my roots—my foundation—as I further come into my own and my activism evolves out of classrooms and organizing spaces toward ways of living/coping, I realize the constitution of a particular intimacy, the political car-rides of my childhood, are subtended by a certain point of contention in the present day relationship between me and my papa.

My grandparents were in the last group of family/friends that I “came-out” to.[i]As I write this, I am actually realizing I’m quickly approaching the one-year mark from that particular evening. The emotions and tensions were so high, that the memory is more of a haze than a concrete event in my life, and perhaps this is a spiritual/mental defense mechanism, as I was attacked on multiple fronts, from the people I love the most in the world. It was also a very specific and important trial in my activism career: the moment of realization that the work I had been deeply engaged with students on my campus, friends, comrades, enemies, and strangers, was not taken up at home, with the people I love most in the world.

When I told Papa I was queer, gay, a boy-who-likes-boys, a homosexual (all signifiers that floated around in this conversation), his initial response was “man, you better be careful. That will kill you.” And what I thought would be a link to his strong Christian values, actually became a sincere concern for my health. “The AIDS boy, the AIDS. Men like you are dying all the time,” he followed up. Searching for my sense of time and space, I had to re-remember it was 2011 and not 1989, and I was standing queerly alone in the home I grew up in, not next to my comrades firmly against the world. He then asked, “Do the people at your house know?” I was serving as a Resident Advisor at the time, and I was “proudly out” to pretty much everyone who knew me, including my residents. And at the moment when my grandfather was asking me about the people I live with, I was thinking the man who initially exposed me to politics was backwards and a minority in his fear and hate of “homosexuals,” while Papa was most likely thinking the same thing: I was backwards, and a minority in my love for other men. In the same conversation my grandmother mentioned something about Proposition 8, which was a search for common ground that would alleviate some of the tension and provide a language we could all speak to, but I lacked the energy of not only exposing myself as a queer, but as a radical Black-queer activist as well. And even if I engaged in a conversation on gay-marriage, what tools do I have to deal with the fear and hate of homosexuality my grandfather has, that was exposed in the mentioning of AIDS, or concern for my residents? My grandfather is not a stupid man, and in his logic (which I desperately wanted to be a backward/obscure way of thinking), marriage is not a cure for “the AIDS” and it certainly does not quarantine me, and “men like me,” from the rest of society. And it is that very ‘fear and hate’ that assist in the structuring of our lives, that which we often diverge energy away from confrontation, and rest on common grounds of the gay marriage debate, or gay adoption, or “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And this is not to say these are not contentious debates or that there is an easy road to solution. Rather, I want to point to the very real fact: that even if I were able to marry, my grandfather’s response to my “homosexuality” would not change. And further to link my grandfather’s response to a popular rhetoric structured by fear and hate of homosexuality.  

As I prematurely begin to wrap up this post because it has become longer than I wanted without getting anywhere close to the point I want to make, I fear I have rested on a language/rhetoric that may cause confusion in the point I’ve conjured in the preceding paragraphs. So I’ll tell it plain in this last paragraph and use the words, “an intro,” in the title which will allow for me to come back to this line of thinking and give everyone reading some more at a later time (let this also serve as a invitation to initiate conversation with me and we think, speak, and write together). In my critique of the mainstream LGBT movement’s uses of gay marriage, gay adoption, and DADT, I am not attempting to shift my weight behind the “FCKH8” and “It Gets Better Campaigns.” I worry tremendously about the recent sensationalizing of  “queer suicides” and “anti-bullying” causes. Further, it is not my intention highlight a uniquely homophobic culture within the Black community. Rather, I am searching for radical conversations on sexuality that deal with the messy complications of Blackness. And/or a sharpening or trading of tools that can contend with all that stuff we tend not to talk about when are discussing gay marriage, or bullying and suicide—as if they were recent inventions of the twenty-first century.

I am happy @jeromeiznice has linked me with the work he and @liquornspiceand @howtobenoladarling are doing. it is important work and i know we are not the only ones. many of us are finding our voice and i continue to search and listen! 

[i] I want to stress that “coming-out” is a dynamic process that is never complete. Queer people “come-out” in many different ways, at many different times, to many different people, and often times to the same folks over and over and over again. I also want to point out the fact that I “came-out” to my grandparents so late in my life, despite the numerous advice over the years to ‘tell grandma first!’ As I understand now, there is just something about the unconditional love a grandmother has for her grandchildren, which, while she may not understand or agree with you one-hundred percent, she’s going to be on your side.