A Different Kind Of Power: Uplifting Black Queer Voices
On this last day of Black History Month in 2024, I want to share with you my love for Black Queer voices.
Over the past few years these voices have been so very nourishing to me. I think the main reason is because they are the most liberating voices I have experienced in all of my life.
These incredible humans I’ve met personally, these books I’ve read, and these physical spaces I’ve inhabited created by these humans have opened a door in my heart and said, “You can truly be all of yourself. No cages, no closed doors, no walls. There is love here for everyone.”
These voices are intersectional. They have experienced the worst of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism from multiple angles and in spite of this fact, these humans are choosing the most inclusive and, when needed, the most fierce love I’ve ever witnessed. It’s breathtaking.
Left Photo: Kelsey & Brandon on the Emmys red carpet 2022. Right Photo: Kelsey & Brandon after Brandon’s Show “The Heaux Church” at Ars Nova 2024.
One such voice is Brandon Kyle Goodman: Author of You Gotta Be You: How To Embrace This Messy Life And Step Into Who You Really Are, and Creator of “The Heaux Church” and Messy Mondays. I met them in person at the Emmys in 2022. I shared my gratitude for their work and we bonded over sweating profusely on the red carpet. The following year they gave my book a shoutout on Instagram during my Kickstarter launch!! Brandon will talk all things pleasure with you - openly, honestly, and hilariously - and will include lessons of self-love and consent at every turn. They make me laugh, they help me love and be loved, and they are an exquisite gift to the world.
Next, Tina Strawn: Author of Are We Free Yet?: The Black Queer Guide to Divorcing America, TedX Speaker, Founder and Leader of Legacy Trips, and more. I met Tina in Denver, CO at a Here 4 The Kids sit-in on the capital lawn (an abolition community she also co-founded but is no longer personally leading). I cried when I hugged her and she held me lovingly, letting my tears fall. Tina will talk pleasure while also talking history and abolition. Her presence is both soothing and strong. She is a natural leader - fully owning the space within and around herself - and I feel grateful to know her.
And finally (for today, as there are countless incredible humans to follow), Cole Arthur Riley: Author of This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us and Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human. I haven’t been blessed to meet Cole personally yet, but her writing is a balm to the soul - intertwining exquisite beauty, full humanity, and spiritual medicine. It calls us back to ourselves and to each other and makes me want to live my best life while seeing the complete truth about and taking action against the systems built to tear us down.
Cole also helped me pinpoint another reason I find Black Queer voices so nourishing: Because they exhibit a different kind of power than the ones prevalent in our current society.
In Black Liturgies Chapter 14: Power, Cole writes about the Silent Parade in 1917 shortly following the East St. Louis Race Riot, where white residents shot, hanged, and burned hundreds of Black people and their homes. She shares:
When ten thousand Black people marched down Fifth Avenue in the heat of July, it was the children, all in white, who led them… these children had as much power to protest as they did. And I think about how it is more than mere symbol that every adult in the crowd would have had to submit themselves to the pace of hundreds of tiny child footsteps. A redistribution of power in the body… Their silence, I’m sure, was in stark contrast to the taunts and vitriol aimed toward them by white people. It was a way to say, our power doesn’t look like your power.
”A Pilgrimage for Peace” reflection video by Kelsey. Click here to view on Instagram.
I read this a week after joining A Pilgrimage for Peace, comprised of faith leaders, artists and activists who walked from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. calling for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine and Israel, release of all hostages, and increase in humanitarian aid. I joined for Day 2 of the journey, walking with this incredible group of humans for over 11 miles, from Chester, PA to Wilmington, DE.
While the Pilgrimage was not specifically led by Black Queer voices, it was led by Black voices AND Queer voices as well as Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Hindu voices - and included Quaker, Buddhist, atheist, and disabled voices!
The current power structures attempt to pit us all against each other, making our issues into binaries of us vs. them. So to be on a pilgrimage with humans from literally all walks of life - all faiths, all races, all ethnicities, all abilities, all genders, all sexualities and all ages - was… a different kind of power.
Brandon, Tina, and Cole all embody this different kind of power. The kind of power that makes space for and uplifts all of humanity, no matter our differences, and centers the most marginalized.
May we follow and learn from them. May we choose love and liberation for ALL.