I was able to teach my son the un-whitewashed version of the Stonewall riots, giving power to the black and brown folks that put their bodies on the line so that his mom could be free to love freely.

Here are eight books, seven poems, six people to follow, five ways to support black trans people, four places to donate, three shows, two albums, two games, and one tool to get you ready for Pride 2022!

This is my last week at Autostraddle. I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you.

“I’m shipping you and Tasha!”

“Once I hit 37, I officially stopped giving a fuck about what anyone thought — outliving your life expectancy makes it real easy to not care.”

As legislatures and hate groups seek to censor and erase queer and trans lives and experiences, these spaces, be they physical or digital, housed in universities or grassroots-led, are perhaps more important than ever.

“I’m just…I can’t stop watching this and blushing.”

“I’m sorry, I cannot stop laughing at Blondie McGee and Her Blondie Ancestors.”

In a field that was once dominated by the cis straight white male voice, LGBTQ poets and poets of color are finally starting to get their due.

I don’t know sounds like a deal to me!

It’s complicated (or at least, it’s by design) that underneath structures of capitalism, queer independent media is never intended to survive.

Join Ms. for Cocktails and Conversation with Cherríe Moraga!

At the inaugural event for our new book club community series, author and activist Cherrie Moraga will join Ms. digital editor Carmen Rios in Los Angeles for a conversation about her memoir Native Country of the Heart.

$10 for Ms. Members | $20 for Non-Members

Non-member tickets include admission to the reception and conversation with Cherríe and a one-year membership to Ms.—including print and digital access to the magazine and discounted access to future Ms. events.

We recommend reading the book in advance. Click here to purchase: https://amzn.to/2FBdJrZ

ABOUT THE BOOK

In her intensely moving new memoir, Native Country of the Heart, Cherríe Moraga writes with piercing intimacy about her mother’s past and her own coming-of-age in a half-Mexican, half-Anglo household, where she struggled to come to terms with her own burgeoning queer identity within her family’s Catholic community. “Who needs Juan Preciado or Pedro Paramo when there is Elvira Isabel Moraga and her daughter?” author Myriam Gurba wrote of the “double memoir” in the latest issue of Ms. “As Moraga demonstrates compellingly, they are the stuff of literature, too.”

MEET CHERRIE

Cherríe Moraga is a writer and cultural activist whose work serves to disrupt the dominant narratives of gender, race, sexuality, feminism, indigeneity and literature in the United States. A co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Moraga co-edited the highly influential volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981. After 20 years as an Artist-in-Residence in Theater at Stanford University, Moraga was appointed a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018—where, with her artistic partner Celia Herrera Rodríguez, she instituted Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought and Art Practice. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award and a United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature.

MEET CARMEN

Carmen Rios is the Digital Editor at Ms., co-founder and Contributing Editor at Argot Magazine and co-host of Trigger Happy, a weekly feminist webseries on Binge Networks. Her writing, which has been published by outlets including BuzzFeed, BITCH, Everyday Feminism, ElixHER, GrokNation, Girlboss and Feministing, spans the political and personal, emerging from her own background as a mixed-race queer woman of color raised by a working-class single mother.

“‘Did you get this because you used to be goth or because you used to be a theater kid?’ What do you mean, used to???”

“OMG, I love our cover. The image is titled “juicy fruit” and it’s by Naima Green,” said Yezmin Villarreal, creator of Dyke Queen.

“Damn, I dressed like #5 every day this summer and yet experienced a distinct and disappointing lack of inevitable reunions with former love interests.”

“MILF Manor? More like Cougar Castle!”

I’m leading a workshop on building a media company at BlogHer 2014, you should come! Also Kerry Washington and Tig Notaro and the “Everyone is Gay” girls will be there, so.

“Beware. That is the pit of doom. You don’t want to go in there.”

(Jeff Goldblum voice) “Lesbians… uh, find a way.”

“You’re serving up excellent writing with the same generous hand a good diner serves up hash browns!”