butch, lesbian, & trans masc history

Queer Love in Color / Brown, Black, Queer and Invisible, Jamal Jordan.

Why do no gay people look like me? Jamal Jordan, a black digital editor at The Times, lamented growing up. So as an adult, he decided to give a gift to his younger self: the imagery of queer love. Jordan traveled tens of thousands of miles across the globe intent on meeting queer people of color.

“I have always envied straight people for their total dominion over happy love stories. In stories about queer people of color, particularly trans people of color, sub­jects are often presented as victims." But the book is really a celebration of how each person (and pair) eventually learned to love themselves—despite “every cue in the world telling them it’s impossible.”

All photos courtesy of Jamal Jordan.

Kay and Blaine, who now live in Oakland, California, first met at a party in Philadelphia in 2018. A few months after that, Kay was physically attacked. “Like, yeah, you read the statistics,” Kay told Jordan. “You hear this is the most violent year for transgender people in recorded history. You know that, statistically speaking. But then it’s you. I never thought I would be physically beat the fuck up in public in New York City.” Friends came to their support, but the only one they wanted to see was Blaine. “We have worked through a lot of trauma, a lot of things that we’ve experienced individually,” they continued. “But we’ve built our relationship through that, supporting each other and growing through the most difficult times of our lives.”

Enchantra and Antwanette photographed in Mobile, Alabama.

Nadine and Sze’s meet-cute in 2003 couldn’t be more different from Mike and Phil’s. Nadine caught Sze’s eye when she left a bell hooks quote in the comments section of her Ani DiFranco fansite on LiveJournal, at which point she sent Nadine a mix CD. Upon receiving it, she told Jordan, “I was immediately wooed.”

Picture from the Photographer Kalynn Youngblood, in her series Staged Portraiture and Documenting daily Black Life.

damn okay giving the people what they want !

Happy Black History Month!

Storme DeLarverie in 1994, between pictures of herself before she was a male impersonator (left) and during the Stonewall rebellion of 1969. She fought “ugly,” her word for bias of any sort. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“Nobody knows who threw the first punch, but it’s rumored that she did, and she said she did,” said Ms. Cannistraci, an owner of the Village lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson. “She told me she did.”

Ms. DeLarverie was a member of the Stonewall Veterans Association and a regular at the pride parade, but she rarely dwelled on her actions that night. Her role in the movement lasted long after 1969. For decades she was a self-appointed guardian of lesbians in the Village.

Tall, androgynous and armed — she held a state gun permit — Ms. DeLarverie roamed lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues and points between into her 80s, patrolling the sidewalks and checking in at lesbian bars. She was on the lookout for what she called “ugliness”: any form of intolerance, bullying or abuse of her “baby girls.”

Ms. DeLarverie had grown up in the South, of mixed race, and spent part of the first half of her life singing and performing as a man. Identity, for her, had been especially complicated, and she did not want others persecuted for theirs.

“I can spot ugly in a minute,” she said in a 2009 interview for Columbia University’s NYC in Focus journalism project. “No people even pull it around me that know me. They’ll just walk away, and that’s a good thing to do because I’ll either pick up the phone or I’ll nail you.”

(Don’t reblog with “I’m white, but…” because frankly, I do not gaf!)

Boys Will Be Boys--Unless They're Girls

From The Arizona Republic, August 1949

"When It's All Said n' Done", Olivia Morgan, 2024.

The series, titled "When It's All Said n' Done," seeks to depict an intimate scene between two Black masc lesbians, showcasing the romance, vulnerability, and femininity that exists between them. It also captures the moment after they have shared their most sacred parts, questioning whether they need to resume the facade of heteronormative masculinity and revert to the gender-normative roles imposed on them by others.