It took me a very long time to get to the point that I am at now, but I couldn’t be more appreciative of where I stand today. For years, I have devalued the Black experience and have struggled to love Black people (myself included). Growing up with so many privileges and being surrounded by so many other privileged people warped my sense of values and I believed that in order to be worth anything in this world, you had to essentially fit the white standard of excellence. You had to talk like them, you had to dress like them, and you had to behave the way they did in public. The world that we live in today still perpetuates that idea. I mean, you look back to the days of the Great Migration when the Urban League was promoting Victorian values over Southern culture and really not much has changed since then. I digress, however. I subscribed to these same values because they were the ones promoted as being the most appropriate and Black people don’t traditionally fit that mold because that simply isn’t us. We aren’t quiet and reserved and complacent or simple. We are loud and bright and confrontational and complex. We don’t wear the muted colors of the Victorian era well. We live in yellows and reds and oranges. For the first time, I’ve really appreciated the significance of all that and falling deeper in love with black people.
You’ve really just got to look at our history. Have you ever seen a people like us? Black people exist everywhere, are hated everywhere, are oppressed everywhere, and yet still manage to not only survive but to simultaneously thrive. We create our own spaces in every oppressive space, we build community wherever we land around our shared culture and lingo, we take care of one another like we’re all related (and we all are if you want to get technical), and we love unconditionally, sometimes to our own fault. Black queer people especially are unbelievably spectacular. It is hard to be Black and face the hatred of whites and the subsequent self-hatred that came out of the psychological conditioning of our people that has been occurring since our people got here, but it is even harder to be Black and queer, facing hatred from whites, Blacks, and oneself. Be that as it is, Black queer people, Black femmes, in particular, have been at the forefront of every single movement for Black liberation and civil rights, receiving the fewest benefits, none of the recognition, and all of the hatred.
Looking back at so many of the most legendary moments in American Black history, you can see the work of so many amazing Black queer people, but their names are almost always left out of the dialogue. That March on Washington Movement in the 1940s? That was organized in large part by Bayard Rustin, a gay Black man. How often do we see his name illuminated with the names of people like Malcolm X or Dr. King though? Being Black and gay was no cake walk in the 40s and to be in the spotlight to the degree that he was put him at substantially higher risk than many of his heterosexual peers, yet his activism was never muted because of it. That’s not it though.
Everyone knows about the Stonewall Riots of the late 60s, but many people don’t acknowledge all of the abuse that the Black transgender women and transgender women of color received from white cisgender gay men. Men that today benefit the most from the work that many of the Black transwomen of the past and present have died for and yet still don’t benefit from. The “Gay Liberation Movement” was led by women like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, but both women found themselves consistently under attack from not just straight white men, but gay white men too. They were pushed out of spaces they helped create, they were booed off stages at rallies, and they were trash talked consistently. Despite all of that, Black transwomen have continued to fight battles for all of us, even when they don’t receive the credit or full benefits of their labor. They give and give with passion and truly, we don’t do enough to protect them the same way they have always protected us.
This is true even in the ballroom culture that really gained a lot of traction in the 70s and 80s. I mean, when you think about how it all came together, you can’t help but feel pride and love for our people. We lacked the space in the white cishet world to be ourselves, so we made space to not only be ourselves but to be our most extravagant selves. When our families turned us away for things that we couldn’t control, we found families in ballroom culture. We provided for one another. We sacrificed for one another. We guided one another. We were a community through and through. We never lost the ability to love and care for one another, even when the world spat on us and told us that we were worth nothing. Do you understand how significant that is? Do you know what kind of strength that takes? I could go on forever, but the point is, Black people are so fucking amazing and I am so happy to be Black. I am so thankful to have that kind of resilience, power, and passion in my lineage.
I love us. I want so much better for us. We deserve so much more.
