Status Updates From Black, Queer, and Untold: A...

Start building…your own archives. Archives are initiated by collecting things you find precious. Things you want to preserve for yourself later: a good book, a bookmark, a pen, a beautiful postcard. These objects contextualize who you were. The lives we have lived. These are our stories and our responsibility to keep alive. An archive is collecting for the future, so that your stories don’t have to be untold.

Reader, this is your job too. How can you help unearth and amplify histories unknown or muted? And archive the present for the future? The work lies in documenting the community and stories around you. . . Take pictures of the beauty and people around you. Have conversations with your family about your histories.

“I am who i am, doing what I came to do” - Audre Lorde

“Maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.” - Huey P. Newton

In answering what she thought were positive outcomes of being homosexual, Ernestine Eckstein responded:
"I think homosexual relationships can be very creative. People who are freed from family responsibilities can begin to take more responsibility toward society. . . They can feel more at liberty to give of themselves to the outside world. And also, you can explore yourself more-which I think is very important."

Stormé might have been the first person to throw a punch at the Stonewall uprising in 1969 (at least, she claimed she did it!). Post-Stonewall, she was a bouncer for popular lesbian bars in New York

Stormé DeLarverie was a biracial drag king born December 24, 1920. The famously androgynous performer could pass as a white or Black man (or woman).

Being Queer and visible in the 1940s was dificult. . . I can imagine the fear of isolation, and, more likely, violence, were present realities in the minds of individuals living through this time. Regardless of their hardships, Queer leaders emerged as discreet forces during the movement, deeply rooted in the practice of nonviolence and persistence.

B.D. (bulldagger slang for butch lesbian)

The Harlem Renaissance would prove to be tremendously influential for all Black creatives looking for examples of excellence. And Queerness was the catalyst that helped fuel these changes.

“The Harlem Renaissance was surely as gay as it was Black.” - Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create to find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” - bell hooks