Black Girl Dangerous

FREE CECE MCDONALD.

by Mia McKenzie

I’ve said it before: it’s hard being a black woman in the world. It’s hard being any kind of black person. Any kind of brown person. Any kind of woman. Add queerness to the mix, and life becomes an amazing kind of struggle, one filled with enormous losses and small triumphs.

The triumphs, however small, are always significant. I’m not talking about huge social justice movements, but rather the smaller things that always spark those movements, the smaller things that keep those movements going. I’m talking about black women, domestic workers, refusing to give up their seats on buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Not just Rosa Parks, but all the women who refused to get up before her. Each of their actions was a small triumph. Even when they got arrested, which they did. Because the small triumph wasn’t in the outcome, but in the act of resistance itself.

During the Stonewall Riots of 1969, when some of Greenwich Village’s most marginalized queers—homeless youth, drag queens—fought back against police brutality, every brick thrown, every foot of ground held, was a small triumph. When the police grabbed folk singer Dave Van Ronk—who had heard the commotion from a bar two doors away from the Stonewall and come to help—he didn’t run. He wasn’t gay, but he had experienced police violence during antiwar demonstrations. He said: “As far as I was concerned, anybody who’d stand against the cops was all right with me, and that’s why I stayed in.” His fighting, his allyship, was a small triumph.

Alice Walker wrote that resistance is the secret of joy. I think this is true for people of color, for queers, for all of us whose lives are deemed less valuable in a hateful world run by evil people. Resistance comes in many, many forms. It comes in the throwing of bricks, but not only in the throwing of bricks. It comes, most often, in quieter, less media-worthy ways.

When I was a kid, I was forced to go to church on Sundays. Much of it was boring and terrible, and as soon as I was old enough to refuse to go, I did. Not all of it was terrible, though. One thing that was wonderful was that, always, at some point during the sermon, we would all be instructed by the pastor to turn to the person next to us and say, “God loves you and so do I.” All these years later, I don’t know about the God loves you part. But the And so do I was surely an act of resistance. The pastor knew—we all knew—that the world did not love us. We all knew that loving each other as hard as we could was how we survived in a world that wanted to kill us, and that made our love an act of defiance.

Little did the pastor know that the girl who recited elaborate bible verses so beautifully would grow up to be a radical, feminist, pussy-licking queer. Yet my love for my community is the same kind of love we promised each other in church every Sunday.

One morning, a couple of weeks ago, I awoke to a terrible pain in my shoulder. I injured it a few years ago and it gives me trouble ever since. This one morning, I needed to be at my computer, writing things for y’all, and I knew my shoulder wasn’t going to let me do it. So, I texted my friendly QTPOC massage therapist, Ana at Wild Seed Wellness, and asked if she could squeeze me in last minute. She did, and my shoulder, my whole body, was much happier for it. That was an act of resistance. On my part and hers. Her love for and investment in the wellness of queer people of color is an amazing act of resistance, and so is my investment in my own wellness.

I created this blog as an act of resistance. I created it as a way to reclaim the idea of dangerousness in a world that insists that as a black woman I am scary and aggressive and angry by default (I am angry, but it is not by default). I created this blog as a safe space for queer women of color who are tired of holding their tongues so as not to offend non-queer people of color, and white people, queer and not queer. And every time I post something here, something that is meant to inform or nurture my community, I get push-back from men and white people who want to tell me and all of us that we should shut the fuck up, that what we have to say has no value. I delete those comments so that the people I am creating safe space for don’t have to see them, don’t have to have yet another experience of being hated, because we get that enough everywhere else. But I know that hatred is there. I do this anyway. It is my every-day act of resistance.

For me, this blog is a small triumph. This blog is how I love my community, how all the writers featured here love ourselves and our people, of which, if you are reading this and recognizing your experience at all, you might be one. This entire endeavor is a love letter to you. It is my way, our way, of pushing back.

My childhood pastor was onto something. Turning to each other and naming our love is a radical and important act. Loving other queers, other people of color, and other queers of color especially, is an act of resistance. Loving us in all the ways I do, including fucking us, is about more than just sex or even friendship. The intentional act of loving other brown queers is about healing, in a world that says we are not worthy, that things like pleasure and care and security and unconditional love are not for us.

It’s not true, my loves, my lovers. They are for us. Give me your hand. Let me show you how much they are for us.

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Please support queer, trans*, and gender-non-conforming writers of color! Watch this video! Then go HERE!

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Mia McKenzie is a writer and a smart, scrappy Philadelphian with a deep love of vegan pomegranate ice cream and fake fur collars. She is a black feminist and a freaking queer, facts that are often reflected in her writings, which have won her some awards and grants, such as the Astraea Foundation’s Writers Fund Award and the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award. She just finished a novel and has a short story forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She is a nerd, and the creator of Black Girl Dangerous, a revolutionary blog.

The Black Girl Dangerous Writing Workshop, May 2012

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QTPOC! ALLIES! WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT!

Are you a queer or trans* person of color? Are you a straight and/or white ally who supports the voices of queer and trans* people of color? Do you feel loved and represented by Black Girl Dangerous? Give some love back!

The best way to make sure our stories get told is to support each other in the telling. You can do that today by donating as little as $5 to the Black Girl Dangerous Writing Workshop for queer, trans*, and gender-non-conforming writers of color!

$5! That’s less than the cost of one drink at happy hour this week.

Black Girl Dangerous can provide radical writing workshops for up to 76 writers over six months, but it cannot be done without your help! Are you QTPOC or an ally? Do you love writers? Do you love Black Girl Dangerous? Want to support us all at once? Got $5 bucks?

Then go HERE and get all the deets! And spread the word!!!!

xo

Mia

by Mia McKenzie

( New: Resistance Is the Secret of Queer Joy)

I think I’m a pretty self-reflective person. I think I try really hard to listen and learn and grow. I like the idea of evolving. Some days I evolve more than other days. Some days I do the opposite of evolving. Which, I guess, is still evolving, but in less desirable ways.

The hard work of self-reflection and emotional evolution are everyday practices. Every day, there are things I can do to grow, even if just a little bit. Doing these things won’t make me perfect. Nothing will ever make me perfect. But I can grow to be better at this human being thing. Here are some ways I know that may be helpful to you:

1. Stop hiding behind your intellect. Or your philosophy of life. Or your spiritual practice. Okay, so you’re smart enough to win arguments with carefully constructed points. Okay, so you learned a long time ago that you have to put yourself first. Okay, so you’re a Buddhist. So what? You want a cookie? Nah. You fucked up, and you need to own it. When you gossip about people and call it speaking your truth, when you exhibit the same behaviors as people you claim to despise but somehow find ways to justify that behavior in yourself using skilled debate and footnotes, when you are adamant about showing love to the earth but terrible at showing it to other human beings, something aint right. You need to get on that.

2. Accept that racism/sexism/heterosexism/transphobia/ableism and all sorts of other really effed up stuff exists in the world. That we’re not making it up. And then accept that you are either part of the solution, or part of the problem. If you can’t list any concrete ways in which you are part of the solution (and, for the record, “Some of my best friends are black,” is not going to cut it), accept that you are part of the problem. And get on changing that.

3. Embrace your wrongness. Being wrong, knowing it, and holding that knowledge can be really powerful. Once you know you’re wrong, you can give up trying to win that argument and actually put your energy into listening, and maybe even learning something. Only dickheads and Republicans put energy into winning arguments when they know they’re wrong. Are you a dickhead? Are you a Republican?? What the fuck are you doing on this blog?!

4. Which leads me to…Give up being right. I have a friend who I kicked it with a lot a several years ago who would have an argument with someone (sometimes me) and get so wrapped up in how right she was that the friendship would suffer, and sometimes even end, because she couldn’t bear not having her rightness be acknowledged. She lost a lot of friends this way. The truth is, sometimes, you can be right or you can be friends. If you have to choose between the two, and your friendship means enough to you to be worth keeping, then there’s only one choice that makes sense. So get over yourself. K?

5. Take an emotional risk. I have known people who, in all the time I have spent with them, have never once taken an emotional risk. You know, people who only ask questions whose answers they already know so they don’t run the risk of being hurt by truths they can’t handle. Or people who never say I love you first. Or people who never say the thing that is at the back of their tongues, the thing that they are afraid will make them more vulnerable than they have ever been. I have been this person myself at times. Honestly, I have been this person many, many times. But I work on it every day.

6. Hold hands with someone. I think holding hands is one of the most vulnerable and connected things you can do with another person. Sometimes, if you lace your fingers with theirs, you can feel someone’s pulse in their hands. Go ahead. Feel someone’s pulse. Let them feel yours. It can be seriously liberating.

7. Create a boundary/respect a boundary. Creating boundaries is one way to let people know what you need. Respecting other people’s boundaries is one way to meet another person’s needs. The two go hand in hand. If you’re dynamite about setting boundaries and lax about respecting the boundaries of others, or vice versa, something’s off. I will admit that I have never been terrific at either of these things. But I’m much better than I used to be, and I’m working hard on both. What I’m working hardest on is understanding for myself the boundaries I’m setting and why I am setting them, where those needs are coming from, if they are real or just a way of controlling relationships and having the upper hand. If I’m just trying to get my way, without any regard for the needs of the people I claim to care about, that’s not real boundary-setting. That’s douchebaggery.

8. Separate what happened from your story about what happened. When I was six, I had the lead in my 2nd-grade class play and my mother didn’t come to the show. I was devastated and, as a six-year-old, I thought it meant that my mother didn’t love me enough. I grew up believing that. It became my story about my mother. Every time my mother did anything to disappoint me, every time she failed to show up in any way, it added truth to my story. Only it wasn’t truth. It was never truth. It was a story created by a wounded six-year-old. It took me 25 years to realize that. When I did, my life, my way of thinking about my mother and myself, my way of relating to everyone in my life changed. It didn’t make me perfect. I still behave sometimes in response to that story, with my mother and with everyone, but A LOT less than I used to. And when I do, I know what’s actually happening, I know it’s that story and not something real.

9. Check your ego. My ego is enormous, and I come ego-first into most difficult interactions. I used to think that my ego was there to protect me from things like rejection. But at some point I realized that it’s really there to protect itself from rejection. If in protecting itself it also happens to protect me, cool. But if what I need is different from what my ego needs, I’m fucked. Because my ego doesn’t really give a shit about what I need. That’s why it’s so necessary for me to put that bitch (my ego) in check. If we are constantly being protected from rejection, we miss out on a lot of life’s really important lessons.

10. Say you’re sorry. There’s someone out there who you wronged. You know it. You did effed up things, said really mean shit, lied, cheated, whatever. And you never apologized. At some point, you started regretting it. But you felt so much guilt, or so much time had passed, that you weren’t sure if you should go there, if you should bring it up again. Well, you should. If you want people to say they’re sorry when they hurt you, you better damn well be someone who says you’re sorry when you hurt other people. It’s not really that complicated.

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(Yes, I realize the grammatically correct phrasing is we queers. I’m doing a thing here, okay?)

Please support queer, trans*, and gender-non-conforming writers of color! Watch this video! Then go here!

*

Mia McKenzie is a writer and a smart, scrappy Philadelphian with a deep love of vegan pomegranate ice cream and fake fur collars. She is a black feminist and a freaking queer, facts that are often reflected in her writings, which have won her some awards and grants, such as the Astraea Foundation’s Writers Fund Award and the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award. She just finished a novel and has a short story forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She is a nerd, and the creator of Black Girl Dangerous, a revolutionary blog.

by Jezebel Delilah X

Don’t forget about love

When the bell tower is bloodied with disappointment

And revolution is splayed-legged, stillbirth pushing through contractions

When necks are crooked downward, shoulders hunched in,  

Curving towards the sternum,

Feeding into gaunt rib cages,

Hearts opulent with struggle,

And high on pain

When our children are dragged, iron clad and bullet riddled away

Our ankles are swollen, our eyes maroon, our knuckles busted and shredded from concrete,

When we see our schools torn down, our community halls demolished, our civil rights ripped from our fingers,

When we visit prisons and hospitals more than libraries, and we’re more familiar with serial numbers than books

When our tears stain our bath water, and even if we scrub our skin sheer, filth still clings to our bodies

Don’t forget about love

Don’t forget about the blue-black hands seducing midnight moans

Our thighs – soft and fat, encompassing the faces of our lovers

Don’t forget about teeth, smiling under pink gums, chewing raw kale, glistening in the dark, scratching lobed bellies

Or lips puckered around whiskey straws, Lips puckered around nipples, lips pushing apart labia, Lips teasing smiles

Don’t forget about the love that we made with each other, the love that we created for each other

The movements, the intellectual orgies, the grunt and sweat of our work

The organizing we did, the hands we held, our chins kissing the heavens,

The codes we created in secret, in bedroom frenzy, in back alleys and dark bars, under lifted skirts and button broken blouses, behind the eyes of officers, husbands, employers, through the tenderness of hours writing, creating, inspiring, archiving, rioting, healing, and praying

Don’t forget about the communities that blossomed through outreach, through perseverance, through loss, through fat fisted determination

Through songs sang by elders, written by children that lived long before them

Through poems written on newspaper, on our bedroom walls, in math textbooks, on our backs, between our thighs, on the tripe of our bellies, and sole of our shoes

Through hip hop, blues, ragtime, soul, and folk, banjos, trumpet, trashcans, and djembe drums, through crime and wails and moans and whispers, through messages passed through gutters and dressing room, shouted in front of town halls, across cotton fields, and carved into prison steel

In our agnosticism, don’t forget about the church, what it once was, what it should have become, what it can still be

The pregnant chapel where we learned to read

Where our little girl voices, grew into rally chants and war cries

Where we marked the day we stopped flirting with usher boys

And began kissing their sisters,

When we willingly embraced their thick baptismal waters dripping down our chins and learned to love vaginal metaphors

When we realized that our skits for Jesus, slowly transitioned to impassioned orations at the picket lines, in supermarkets, in college classrooms, on the block in front of the liquor store, before sex, after sex, to our parents, in front of politicians and judges, in front of the mirror, to the gods

When we loaded our guns and replaced our lipstick with liberation

When we realized, that for some of us, wearing lipstick was liberation

 

Please don’t forget about love

When we remember the books that were burned

The altars crushed with shiny black pilgrim boots,

 Necks slashed with conquistador swords,

The heads of children bobbing on poles facing the Atlantic oceans,  

The skulls of children, creamy white, decorating the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean

The weapons written with words,

The weapons manufactured over centuries,

The weapons that so many of us have forgiven

Like imperialism, and Heaven, and Money

And when you remember how our thighs were jerked wide, our hips sore, our bones broken, our backs disfigured with horse-whips, the acid agony of rape breeding, or babies stolen by missionaries, babies stolen by slave blocks, babies stolen by the police, babies stolen by the streets

And when you remember how our homes were dismembered, and how our men were taught to hate us, and the many ways we were taught to hate ourselves

And worship what was foreign, a foreign god, foreign capital, foreign capitalism, foreign hierarchy, foreign legislation, architecture, education, medicine

And how we almost believed that liberation

Was a college degree

And that war happens to protect our freedom

Despite the fact that soldiers, who look just like us, fights an enemy, who looks just like us; except for that enemy speaks the languages we forgot, we gave up, we lost, the languages that were stolen

And that our bombs cause their land to regurgitate the bones of our ancestors

 

Don’t Forget About Love

That exists in the folds of our skin

In the pockets of flesh that bulge and stretch outward

In the fat that came from food we shared across mirthful tables, food that was stretched and strained to feed blood related strangers and accumulated family, food that we grew in our backyards, that we found in dumpsters, food ripe with heritage and swapped across cultures and generations

In the breast that drift sideways, that are heavy with life, that have been suckled by babies and lovers, that fill palms and spill over, that gleam above low-cut tight red dresses as we dance, that are pushed flat with binders and ace bandages, that crown puckered nipples under naked sunlight, that have been chopped and prodded and poisoned with chemical radiation – and that were always so beautiful regardless.

Don’t forget the laughter, that vibrated against clitoral skin, that danced out of disheveled bed sheets, that drizzled bawdily across paper stormed office tables, wittingly over blogs and zines, righteously in classrooms and project apartments, intimately between mothers and daughters and infants, and those deceptive chuckles that masked tears and heartache, that covered up hunger and abscess, that serenaded death

And don’t forget the dead, that loved us enough to die, that didn’t want to die, whose lives were stolen, don’t forget why their lives were stolen, how their lives were stolen, the role you played in their lives being stolen, the ways you benefited when their lives were stolen, and love them.

 

Love who you once were, and love what history has turned you into, and the woman that’s cradling your face when your body is aflame with illness or desire, love her also.

Love your bones, be they broken or jellied or strong, because in some way, you are still upright, then the world has worked so hard to see you face down

Love your self determination, your motivation, the ghetto accent that some times slips out, that’s always there, that your parents never gave you a chance to develop, because in that accent, is the great great great great grandmother you fantasize about knowing, the bosom you crave to crawl into, the womb that birthed you.

Love those buildings that were destroyed because you, and your sister created them, and you create them, but even better, with more fortitude, and more community support, because the foundation is there, and you are strong.

Those children, be they in shallow graves, prison cells, college classrooms, strollers, libraries, shooting balls into hoops, or wearing short skirts – don’t forget to love them, because they are you.

And when this list is too complex, and your fingers feel too swollen to write, or build or fuck or cook, love you. Because you were the first. And this earth is the land that you plowed, and seeded. And the feathery blackness hidden beneath cement, that our ancestors were buried in, that’s you. And the sky, telling secrets, and the clouds keeping secrets, that’s you. And the Gods we pray to, in temples, churches, backyards, empty glasses, and ejaculating into our wombs – that’s you too. So love yourself, because you are not only your own survival, you’re mine.

Want to support queer, trans*, and gender-non-conforming writers of color? Go HERE!

 **Jezebel Delilah X is a fierce fat femme Faerie Princess Mermaid Dragon, Hot English Instructor, and contemporary urban hippie activist who uses literature, performance, storytelling, and flirting to advance her politics of radical love, socioeconomic justice, anti-racism, and community empowerment. She is co-host of East Bay Open Mic, Culture Fuck, a member of the performance troupe, Griot Noir, and a part of Deviant Type Press.

by Mahfam Malek (cross-posted from Watch Me Cultivate)

Today? Oh, am I ever struggling with notions of masculinity and femininity and the in-between and the outside-of.

Over the past couple of days at work I have been subjected to the highest concentration of the toxic combination of male gaze and male boundary-pushing aggression passed off as sincerity and compliments and why won’t I just engage? he’s just trying to be nice! since I began working in this particular place. Since this kind of thing has been increasing steadily and slowly, I can’t help but associate it at least partly with the growth of my hair, the femininity and sexual orientation it implies, and the ways it makes my queerness and my ever-evolving gender identity invisible to dominant and mainstream culture.

This is complicated. The more generally aware I become of power dynamics and oppression as I age and learn, the more I rage in the face of being interacted with by this culture as “a beautiful woman,” “a pretty girl,” “a pretty face,” and basically any and all comments outside of a hyper-politicized and safe (to me. as in, queer) context about my beautiful hair. I have been cultivating this hair-growth for somewhat muddled reasons: proving to myself that I can step into the uncomfortable, care for something over the long-term even when it is not convenient, and push myself gently beyond the limits I have set for myself. But the implications are proving to be more uncomfortable than I had anticipated. Part of what being genderfluid means for me, so far, is that I can’t seem to integrate who I am inside with who I appear to be to the outside world, ever. In fleeting moments and in certain spaces, I feel safe in this. I feel held by people who understand that what I look like, and how they perceive me, is not necessarily who I am. But in most of the world, I feel both hyper-visible and completely invisible - defined by others’ perceptions, rather than by my self-definition. These disconnects are becoming less and less bearable.

I stand in a funny place. I don’t want to make light of, appropriate, or make assumptions about trans-masculine, butch, or otherwise masculine identity. I don’t identify in any of these ways, although I do hover around the edges of these identities, sometimes dropping in, and I stand in allyship, shoulder-to-shoulder with my trans, genderqueer, and otherwise gender non-conforming homies in our queer community and in our fight for gender justice. In my fluidity, I similarly hover near and around feminine identity, sometimes touching down, and because of my body, my parts, my socialization, and our collective socialization, I am far more often boxed into femininity than masculinity. I don’t want either of these ends of the binary, nor any part in the in-between space in this spectrum, to be punished. But mostly, considering that power dynamics ingrained in our society locate femininity as inferior, I feel most protective over my femininity. I don’t want my femininity, external or internal, public or private, to be punished, or objectified, or deemed powerless. (I know these are not new thoughts.) How then, to live with what is? A culture that wants to punish, objectify, and strip power from any whisper of femininity? Do I rage in the face of that? Or do I adopt an outward, more masculine identity that might feel safer, like I am less objectified, less likely to be desired or sought after or raped (which is about power, and not about desire) by those with bodies and skintones and bank accounts that determine that they have more power than I do? Wouldn’t that play right into what I’ve been told is right? That masculinity is not only allowed, but celebrated, a thing to be coveted and revered. And femininity is nothing more than what it is in relation to the dominant.

I know this is tricky. I grapple with writing this. I can’t imagine what relationship to these dynamics my trans-identified friends (and the many transfolks I don’t know) have. I don’t want to diminish the validity of these identities. I am just trying to figure out where I land. I am in a big opening around my gender identity and I don’t know who I am, or which direction to go, or if I need to go anywhere at all.

So here’s what happened. Yesterday afternoon, at work, a young man asked me for my phone number. I was far nicer than I would have been had this taken place anywhere but at my workplace, which he has patronized more than once. With that power dynamic already in place, I politely explained that I was feeling pretty maxed on the social sphere and not looking for new people to add to my life. He persisted, “What if I just got your number and texted you a nice message every once in a while, and maybe sometime you’d change your mind?” He remarked on my tan, saying it indicated that I like to be outside, and maybe I’d like to hang out by the lake sometime? I declined again. I explained that I was at capacity. He asked me how many friends are too many. I explained that I was not looking for new friends and I didn’t want to get into that discussion. He then informed me that “other baristas like to talk.” He told me that he just wanted to get to know me, so I told him something about me: that I’m good at drawing boundaries. He told me he’s good at pushing them. Taking a breath and taking a moment and forcing my brain to scream at my mouth and demand that it not call him a rapist, I said, “Well. That feels non-consensual and icky to me.” And I turned around and walked into the back room.

What the fuck kind of rape culture do we live in that this lizard thought informing me that he’s into “pushing boundaries” was some kind of pick-up line? This level of entitlement and male privilege and power show make me want to vomit.

I was approached twice more in the last 24 hours. Once by a friend and coworker of a friendly regular, who first informed me that he thought I was “really cool,” while staring hard and leaving a five dollar tip for one beer, and who then came back to buy a round for his friends and tell me that he thought I was really beautiful over and over again, waiting for some kind of response that he was not getting. And you know what? I was thanking him. Because that is what I’ve been trained to do. Thank and thank and thank. Thank you for deeming me acceptable, thank you for telling me that I’m doing my job, my woman’s work, being something nice for you to look at. Thank you, drunk man. Thank you for making me feel like an absolute piece of shit. Thank you for helping me notice that I am nothing to you but a fulfillment of your fantasies. That I am a woman who is trapped behind a bar, serving you and smiling and thanking you, for as long as you are here and you don’t do anything too rape-y. Thank you for reminding me that this world thinks I am nothing but a hole or two or three, with a “pretty face” attached, topped with “beautiful hair.”

For so long, all I wanted was to be beautiful. In a world that taught my little awkward, four-eyed, immigrant self that everything about me was bad and wrong and ugly, being beautiful was the greatest thing someone like me, born with a vagina, could be. Three decades later, I own my beauty fully and hardcore, loving the strong body that has brought me to this point, the brain and heart that have led this body here, and the family, culture, and community that have taught me and held me up or picked me up when my own sense of self failed. But this? These interactions? These are not about my beauty. They are about what these people, trained to believe that I am here for their pleasure, want me to be. And I just don’t want to participate in that anymore.

I’ve worn my queerness as armor. The physical indicators, the signals we develop so we can find each other, like our short hair and our big, baggy shorts, and the packs we run in wearing multi-colored clothes and button-down shirts. Do I still have to wear this armor? Do you? Or is it a choice? What about within our own community, when we continue to play into these dynamics? What about our attractions and desires, and the things we assume about each other, the ways we label each other? I find myself in the tug of replication of binary interactions and relationships, butch/femme, masculine/feminine, and how these partnerships are so largely normalized and valued and prioritized within our queerness. I never know where this puts me.

On May Day, of all days, as someone who had to go to work so as not to lose her job, I think about these intersections. I sit with them. And instead of running to catch up with the marching in the streets, I sit at a computer, trying to process the assault on my body, on our bodies. On CeCe McDonald’s body, on Brandy Martell’s body. On the bodies of women & queers & transfolks & disabled folks & people of color & the poor & the working class & those affected by this climate crisis & disenfranchised folks everywhere. And I still don’t have an answer. I never have an answer, or an easy way to tie up and end these things. But I want you to know I’m thinking about you and how to support you in being your whole and glorious self. And I hope you are with me, too.

*If this post represents you and/or your community, show your support of queer, trans*, and gender-non-conforming writers of color. Go HERE!

Mahfam Malek likes to write, perform, dance, cook, practice somatics, and play kickball. She has an opinion on everything and is kind of bossy. She’s beyond honored to be the first non-black girl featured on Black Girl Dangerous.

Read more Black Girl Dangerous here.

Support the Black Girl Dangerous Writing Workshop for queer, trans*, and gender-non-conforming writers of color! Go HERE!

Thank you from all of us!

Are you a queer or trans* person of color? Are you a straight and/or white ally who supports the voices of queer and trans* people of color? Do you feel loved and represented by Black Girl Dangerous? Give some love back!

The best way to make sure our stories get told is to support each other in the telling. You can do that today by donating $5 to the Black Girl Dangerous Writing Workshop for queer and trans* writers of color!

Black Girl Dangerous can provide radical writing workshops to 76 queer and trans* writers of color over six months, but it cannot be done without your help! Are you QTPOC or an ally? Do you love writers? Do you love Black Girl Dangerous? Want to support us all at once? Got $5 bucks?

Then go HERE and get all the deets! And spread the word!!!!

:)

by Mia McKenzie

*Read Love, QPOC Style*

President Obama just “endorsed” gay marriage. And guess what? I barely give a damn.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s okay. It’s fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Saying that gay people who want to get married to each other should be able to do so is basically a good position. And considering that North Carolina just banned gay marriage yesterday, it’s a nice way to combat (or, at least, speak against) laws invented to discriminate against certain groups of people. In his interview with Robin Roberts (the gayest of all morning show personalities—and that’s saying something!), the President said, “I’ve always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly,” and “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” Yeah, that sounds great.

He also said, “I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together…”

Um. Okay. Hold up.

See, this is where it gets sticky. And not in a sexy queer way.

So, basically, what the President is saying is that same-sex couples who are in relationships that look a certain way (monogamous, for example) should be able to have all the rights of straight people.

Hmm.

What about those of us, queer and straight, who aren’t into monogamy but are into committed relationships? (And, for the record, you can be poly and be committed to multiple people). We still get the shit end of the stick, right? (No pun intended!) We still don’t get the tax benefits that married people get, or immigration and residency for our (non-monogamous) partners from other countries, or inheritance automatically in the absence of a will, or joint adoption with whomever we choose, or any of the other 1,400 legal rights that are conferred upon married couples in the U.S.. Right?

This is the problem with this whole same-sex marriage thing (okay, there are a lot of problems with it, but this is one). It’s not really about equality. Not for everyone (which is what equality means). It’s just about extending a few more “rights” to a select few people. It’s just a way of saying, “As long as you are otherwise as much like us normal people as you can possibly be, we will overlook the fact that you do icky things in bed and let you have some more rights. You’re welcome.”

It reminds me of white folks, liberal-types, who think they’re not racist because they have black friends, only their black friends have their same level of education, talk just like they do, live in houses and neighborhoods that look just like theirs, and are basically indistinguishable from them except for their skin color, which happens to be browner. They need their colored folks to be just like them, or as near as possible. Otherwise, it’s just awkward.

In fact, this whole marriage thing is a lot like whiteness. Over time, certain groups get to be added to this realm of privilege, so that other groups can always be left out of it. (see: Irish folks, Jewish folks, etc.)

Here’s another problem I have with all this: A few years ago, I was watching Keith Olbermann and he did this whole long, drawn-out, pompous blow-hard piece on why the gays should be able to get married. And his position was, basically, LOVE. Yeah. Love. That same-sex partners who love each other should be able to get married. Because that’s just fair and right. Yeah, he was real proud of himself, like he always is. And I was all, “Fuck you, Keith Olbermann.”

Because guess what? Straight people are not required to love each other to be able to get married. Nobody even asks them—no goddamn government official, anyhow. There is no question on any marriage license form that says, “Do you really love this person you are about to marry?” (Ok, I’ve never actually read a marriage license form, so I don’t know what the questions are. But I’m pretty sure that aint on there. And even if it was, it’s a pretty easy thing to just lie about). I mean, Kim Kardashian and that cro-magnon-looking mofo she was married to for like five seconds certainly did not love each other, certainly were not committed, probably were not monogamous, and still were allowed 1400 more legal rights for the duration of their five-second marriage than I get.

My point is, straight folks are not held to criteria such as love or monogamy or even commitment when being assessed for the right to marry. They do not have to be made worthy in the eyes of the public. (And nor should they be.) They just get it, flat out, case closed. And the rest of us don’t. Which means that all this talk of marriage “equality” is a kind of a joke.

(I am not advocating for poly marriage here. I don’t really care about that. I am saying that the issue of “marriage,” gay or straight, still elevates that particular kind of relationship above all others, and gives rights to some people that others never get.)

And even more importantly than all of that, is this question: what does same-sex marriage do for homeless queer youth? What does it do for the trans people being murdered in the streets? What does it do for the poor, of which many, many are queer people of color? Who does all this same-sex marriage stuff really benefit?

Until we stop giving value to certain kinds of relationships over others, until we stop projecting our personal values onto the lives of other consenting adults and making laws about it, until we stop being distracted by the crumbs that the few people in power throw at us so that we are too busy fighting over them to see that the actual pie is still forever off-limits to us, we’ll never break down these oppressive systems that let a few people through the door just so they can help hold it closed to the masses of people still being kept on the other side.

*If this post speaks to who you are and how you feel, then show your support! Please go HERE to help make marginalized voices heard!

Mia McKenzie is a writer and a smart, scrappy Philadelphian with a deep love of vegan pomegranate ice cream and fake fur collars. She is a black feminist and a freaking queer, facts that are often reflected in her writings, which have won her some awards and grants, such as the Astraea Foundation’s Writers Fund Award and the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award. She just finished a novel and has a short story forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She is the creator of Black Girl Dangerous, a revolutionary blog. She is a nerd who will correct your grammar, so watch out for that.

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by Saida Agostini

I started out writing a cute article about Da Brat, a 90s rapper icon with a masculine gender representation who was recently profiled on the new “it” makeover show of the moment, Styled by June.  This particular episode consisted of June Ambrose decked out in a huge black floppy hat shoving Da Brat into feminizing gowns that would, in her words, “give Da Brat that red carpet moment.”  It was hilarious at the time, trying to comprehend why the prescription to a more successful and happier life always involves forced feminization and a bad weave.

But I just read that Cece McDonald accepted a plea deal for involuntary manslaughter, her crime being self defense against a group screaming out transphobic slurs, one of whom smashed a glass and struck it so deep inside her cheek that it punctured her salivary gland.

I want to know what rage it took for this woman to smash a glass against the wall and shove into another human being’s face—what fear was born inside her that made her decide that she had to literally cut out a piece of flesh from Cece’s face?  

We’re consistently hungry and desperate for images of ourselves that others will see and acknowledge and hold as real and lovely.  The myth that styling shows like June Ambrose’s sells is that by stepping into gender normative dress we will be seen.  However, what I wonder, watching any queer youth step out in clothes their mama bought them to get a job so that their gender markers match what their potential employer wants to see—-is what is the cost? As a youth worker, and clinician, I have worked with young folks who have been so traumatized by the price of their truth, they have literally tried to cut it out of themselves. And as we all know, whether or not those cuts happen with a steel blade pressed against thigh or the words swallowed as some angry passer by screams out into the night—-those wounds stay open.

I have been struggling in writing this, because like many makeover shows, I want to end this blog with words that are completely uplifting. I want to finish with the story of CeCe McDonald not taking a plea deal because she could have faith in the criminal justice system, a story where nine years ago, fifteen year old Sakia Gunn told a man at 3 am that she was gay, and went back home to her mother, instead of being stabbed in the chest, and bleeding to death in the arms of her friend.

That’s not the ending we have. But maybe there is hope in this: that we are still here, still hoping and dreaming a world where our truth doesn’t rip us, but makes us greater and more beautiful than we can ever imagine.  That we are made of flesh and go through our lives fierce in our truth and that the stories of Cece McDonald, Sakia Gunn and every other ancestor/breathing hero make us stronger in our love.

*

Want to support queer and trans writers of color so that stories like this get told? Go HERE!

**Saida Agostini is a black queer poet, clinician and youth worker. She has released several chapbooks. Her latest, Hunger, was released in 2011. If you are interested in contacting Saida as a performer, please feel free to contact her at saida.agostini@gmail.com

Read more Black Girl Dangerous.