When my parents told me I was being “rebellious,” that my character was “ungodly” and that I was “going down the path to hell” for not doing the laundry that day or being a good caretaker in general, what they communicated to me was: I was not fulfilling my role properly, to continue to fail would mean more punishment, more isolation, unless I followed “God’s will.
The Ancient Greek pantheon, though upsettingly low on the lady loving women considering the rampant male bisexuality going on, does has a surprising wealth of asexual and aromantic goddesses.
+ “I’m a Lesbian”: Rapper Keko Comes Out.
+ Standing Up for Transgender Acceptance.
+ If People Talked About Other Things the Way They Talked About Gender Identity.
+ Support Hot & Bothered! “A fast-paced satirical comedy that follows the lives of two sarcastic stoner twenty year olds who get in over their heads when they create the “Grindr” for lesbians.”
Especially when exploring how to support other resistance movements, other people who are marginalized in ways different than us, we need to approach our activism with love and with power. We need to use our institutional privilege to make meaningful change, when we can. We need to move beyond emotion and self-expression to action and praxis and doing. To taking risks. To getting uncomfortable. Love is nice, but it doesn’t win social justice by itself.
For more than a century, QTPOC have resisted displacement in U.S. cities by unapologetically claiming space for themselves. During the 1920s, Harlem served as a mecca for Black queer creators who sustained themselves via revolutionary art and rowdy rent parties. A Black lesbian named Ruth Ellis opened her Detroit home up on weekends as a safer space for Black queer and trans people in the mid-1900s. Trans women of color activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera operated the STAR House in the 1970s to shelter LGBTQ+ runaways in NYC, using money earned from doing sex work to fund their project. Creativity and resourcefulness have allowed QTPOC to establish sites of safety and resistance within cities that benefit from our cultural contributions and wage labor but neglect our needs as those who are most vulnerable to homelessness and interpersonal and state violence.
This episode stays true to the rest of the series through storytelling without resorting to the tired tropes and stereotypes so commonly found in queer and POC characters that are created by white (and often male) writers. Denise is a thirty-something, masculine-of-center, black lesbian who exists in the Master Of None universe as a multidimensional human with dreams and a future and a past; as opposed to say, the lesbian character in Dear White People who serves only as a fuck toy and moral barometer for the straight male hero.
Do you have any fur kids? What are their names? How did they come into your life?
