“To understand my relationship with this symbol of masculinity, we’ll have to start with my journey of queerness I had no idea I had embarked upon until I was turning 28, the sleeves of my buba — the tailored Agbada shirt — all rolled up to my elbows and my fingers rubbing down on the clit of a girl I had only met a couple of times prior to that moment.”

In the pool hall, my sweetheart and a close friend tease me one night: “unimpressive,” “pure luck,” “you aren’t that good.” They were trying to get my ire up so that an hour later when I told them to stare into each other’s eyes as I fucked my sweetheart’s body, I would mean it with a snarky competitive vengeance, I would mean it with power and control, I would be pushed to take what I want.

“She asks me how it went, I say it went bad. I don’t say much more because she hates hearing about my family like they hate hearing about her. It goes better when I keep it to myself.”

“I craved that isolation, that feeling of utter aching loneliness that I found inside houses where I did not belong.”

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.

“There’s nothing more I want to remember than every moment and sensation we shared. Our grinding hips at Queer Cumbia, feeling your drunken sweat drip onto my freshly implanted tits. The way we sloppily made out and smeared our red and burgundy lips all over our mouths, noses, forehead, and neck.”

“I paid a dude to knock me unconscious, peel back my face, and cut out chunks of my skull and jaw.”

If you present in a traditionally feminine way, you’re just being a misogynistic parody of a woman, and if you fail to present in a traditionally feminine way, well ha! There’s the proof that you’re not really a woman right there.

“This past year of my transition, 2012, has been one of road travel with many miles revisited across numerous American states… Not the least of my concerns was driving my friend Xene’s unfamiliar Prius. Yet, my larger concern was driving solo as a woman.”

We wanted to sit down and share stories with you around this virtual campfire to somehow express one little piece of what it means to be queer and a person of color in this crazy, crazy world.

“In my years with the Minneapolis Lesbian Avengers, we defaced anti-choice billboards, participated in visibility actions at schools, constructed a giant paper machè bomb piñata filled with lube and dental dams, helped plan the first of many Dyke Marches, designed and built a boat out of milk cartons for the Aquatennial Milk Carton Boat Race (dubbed The “Lez Boat” and pronounced with a hard “z” – no mystery there) and ate fire on countless occasions.”