Results for: be the change
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The Lunar New Year Coming Out Letter I’ll Never Send To My Mom
I’m not coming out to you as a lesbian, umma, I’m coming out as your daughter. I’m tired of being a stranger to you and I’m tired of tripping over boxes in my living room because you’re incapable of just being vulnerable with me.
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Curls That Dance Under Any Light: Rediscovering My Queer Hair in India
I’m not sure I am any of the things that the aunties here tell me I am: Good. Hindu. Girl. I’m not sure about a lot of things these days. But I’ve found a way to care for myself that keeps me alive.
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Confessions of An Undocumented African Immigrant
“I couldn’t afford to go home, but it was common knowledge among the many international students that, technically, one could remain in the country beyond the visa validity period as long as you were still enrolled in school. So I did.”
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Line Breaks for Resistance: How Black Poetry Lets Us Rescue Ourselves
If Alice Walker once said “hard times require furious dancing,” then hard times call for reading poetry, particularly black poets. Follow zaynab’s journey in reconnecting with black poetry as a means of daily survival and understand why reading the work of black poets can enhance our collective understandings of what it means to cultivate and sustain resistance.
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How Whitney Houston Taught Me the Greatest Love of All For My Queer Black Self
My journey to self-love through the influence of Whitney Houston’s life and music.
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That One Time The Patriarchy Blessed Me
“I loved the Church, and I loved the gospel. I was the kind of Mormon who politely dismissed myself from classrooms when teachers showed R-rated movies. At my first and only high school rager, I texted my mother to pick me up because I felt out of place amidst the drinking and smoking. That was me, Straight-Edge Dera, except apparently I wasn’t so straight.”
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Digital Mixtapes and Protests: Oh, To Be A Queer Black Millennial
“For a moment, I forgot about the summer of 2015. I forgot about the panic I experienced, the insomnia, the depression. We watched the new season of Orange is the New Black together and by the end of episode 12, it suddenly all came back.”
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Birth of The Nintendo Generation
It was the end of my innocence when I realized that being Black or being Queer in this country could get you killed. This was the time before Hurricane Katrina, before 9/11, before Ferguson. Before. Before. Before.
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I Didn’t Know How to Be Poor, Black, Biracial, AND Queer; So I Wasn’t
“I wasn’t in denial, I had just become extremely successful at compartmentalizing difficult emotions that I had no idea what to do with.”
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What We Mean When We Say “Femme”: A Roundtable
We now live in a world where it is totally possible to claim the same word as someone else and completely disagree on what the word means.
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Mama Outsider: No Place Like Home
“Every day since my father died has been at least a little fucked up. There is no such thing as a non-fucked up day when you are a Daddy’s girl without a father.”
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I Need Justice, I Need Peace: A QTPOC Roundtable
It felt important for us to have a voice somewhere, so we’ve gathered a few of the Black queer voices and put them together here. We want to offer this as a place of healing for QTPOC in this time of tragedy.
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In A World Lacking Lesbian Rom Coms, I Made My Own
“Sidetrack is a show largely about my life and my experiences, because after years of watching so much television that erased me, I just wanted to write myself in.”
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If I’m Queer But I’m A Preacher, Maybe He’ll Love Me
“My father has very few admirable qualities when it comes to our relationship: he doesn’t follow through on his promises, he doesn’t compromise, and he has a God complex. “
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Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously
“But, like embracing the woman I am, I couldn’t stay back from the allure of the waves. The pull of my trans-ness and queerness, of course, would always be stronger, the strongest impulses I have ever known. The sea, like them, was a place that represented a kind of forbidden love. I needed to overcome my fears or I would feel that I was holding myself back from living authentically.”
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I Feel Pretty
“I know exactly why I did it. Attempted to shave my face. I wanted to be like my dad.”
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Graduation to Womanhood: Navigating Trans Identity at a Southern College
It’s as if I had just discovered a new color and now had this entirely new dimension to my life. I was able to paint a holistic portrait of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like.
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We Cry With Charleston: How I’m Healing as a Black Queer Christian
“Now more than ever, I think it’s important to say alabanza to those who were slain, to lift their names up in prayer and to remind those of us still living that Black lives do matter — they’ve always mattered and will always matter.”
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Salsa y La Naturaleza: How a Willie Colón Song Taught Me About Queerness and Love
“If Simón was a girl, then I was a dyke and if my father let the song play, then maybe I could sing to him and we’d finally be able to speak to each other.”
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TransBlack and Beautiful: Acknowledging My Authentic Revolutionary
“One morning, while I was applying my new lighter makeup, I accidentally put too much banana powder on which created a shroud of ashy yellow veil all around the center of my face. I stopped and stared back at my reflection. I looked absolutely foolish. Here I was relishing in this depigmentation of my beautiful ebony skin that I no longer looked like myself.”