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Limit(less) Reminds Us That Africans Can Be Queer, Too, and Debunks Stereotypes
For centuries, U.S.-based evangelical Christians have traversed the continent of Africa spreading messages of homophobia and transphobia against the LGBTQ community. People like Scott Lively, an anti-gay extremist, for example, who was subjected to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (pdf) because of his travel abroad to promote Uganda’s anti-gay propaganda—the Anti-Homosexuality…
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Remembering the Pulse Nightclub Tragedy: 1 Year Later
One year ago June 12, I awoke to a flurry of text messages and missed calls from friends demanding that I turn on my television. It was a Sunday morning, and like many black gay men who reside in the nation’s capital, I was in hibernation, sleeping off one too many Jack and Cokes. When…
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Public Service Announcement: ‘Black Pride’ Is for Black People Only
If you reside in the nation’s capital and, at the end of every May, don’t notice thousands of black LGBTQ people descend from the gay clouds in their fiercest outfits to slay the weekend away, then you may be living under a rock. To be sure, Memorial Day weekend is certainly when we honor those…
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The 2017 Miss USA Is a Proud, Black HBCU Graduate, and She’s Also Problematic as Hell
For the second consecutive year, Miss District of Columbia, a black woman and HBCU graduate, has been crowned Miss USA. Outgoing 2016 Miss USA Deshauna Barber crowned her fellow Washington, D.C., resident, Kára McCullough, 25, Sunday night in Las Vegas. McCullough is a chemist working for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Two black women were…
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Dear Miley Cyrus: Hip-Hop Culture Never Needed You and It Won’t Miss You
We often see celebrities evolve before our very eyes, for better or for worse, especially if we have been exposed to them since childhood. Beyoncé, for example, went from creating mainstream pop music to making music more reflective of black women’s lived experiences in her critically acclaimed Lemonade. Then there are celebrities like Miley Cyrus.…
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‘Stealthing’ Is Just Rape by a Different Name
Lately I have been seeing “stealthing” on my social media timelines. Intrigued, and likely against my better judgment, I searched for clearer meaning. In short, stealthing is when a man intentionally removes or damages his condom without his partner’s knowledge and/or consent. While stealthing may not be a new phenomenon, we should make no mistake…
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What Happened to Your Revolution, Bernie Sanders?
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a person I prefer never to talk about, especially online, but this time I’m making an exception. It appears that no matter what he does wrong, many people, especially “Bernie bros,” have been making excuses for him since we were first introduced to the senator in 2015. It’s almost as if…
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When Incarcerated People Die, Blame the Prison-Industrial Complex
Early Wednesday morning, Aaron Hernandez joined the long list of incarcerated people, including Sandra Bland and Kalief Browder, who allegedly committed suicide while in prison, or soon after being released. We should not be mistaken about who or what is to blame: prisons and jails. The prison-industrial complex and the various ways it promotes the…
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STD Awareness Month: I’m a Black Nerd Who Went on PrEP and I Encourage Others to Do the Same
As a black queer man, I understood at an extremely young age that I didn’t have the ability to be as sexually free and liberated as my heterosexual male counterparts. Whether it was because black gay men are merely looked at as a health statistic or because our freedom comes at a deadly cost, it…
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The Danger of Forcing the ‘Runaway’ Label on the Missing DC Girls
Double-digit numbers of young black and Latinx girls in the nation’s capital are missing and, as expected, there has yet to be a national outcry. Instead, within the past week, Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and other social media outlets are now focused on emphatically underscoring the message that social media distorted the stories and…
