As their teammates traded pre-game handshakes at center court, Johnson, an auto plant worker’s son from Lansing, Michigan, and Thomas, a native of Chicago’s hardscrabble West Side, stepped toward one another. 

The best friends shook hands. Then they kissed one another on the cheek. 

In 2000, I wrote an introduction for a new edition of Essex Hemphill’s magnificent collection "Ceremonies." I pointed out what I believed to be that work’s purpose: remembrance as the only way to begin the process of healing the wound that white supremacy, poverty, homophobia, heterosexism, and most recently HIV/AIDS had inflicted upon us as Black Gay Men. (Cover image of Essex Hemphill by Barbara N. Kigozi, June 1994)

The rise of social media has inevitably altered our access to information, how we share knowledge, and where narratives may circulate. This is especially true for political news. A recent Statista report revealed that social media is now one of the main ways the average person seeks political information and knowledge.

On November 12, 2017, at 6:49 pm, I received a text that read: “Antron has transitioned.”

The official cause of death was cancer, but HIV was the cause. I’ve never written that publicly before, although it’s true. Antron-Reshaud Olukayode was a poet, artist, and community activist, but more importantly, he was my friend.

2017 was an important year for me as a creative. In retrospect, it’s hard to wrap my head around just how much work I was able to curate. I produced podcasts and multiple live events, shot countless photoshoots, produced a music video, co-curated an art display at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and even won an award.

It was 30 years ago, on November 7, that basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. announced he’d acquired HIV. No other HIV disclosure has had such a reverberating impact before or since. From the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles, where he achieved era-defining success with the LA Lakers, the cherub-faced icon held a press conference where he revealed he was living with HIV and would immediately retire from basketball. The magnitude of this event was due not only to his popularity as a sports hero; he was a 32-year-old heterosexual Black man who appeared to be perfectly healthy and still in his athletic prime.

Unlike other celebrities with HIV whose disclosure and/or death made mainstream (Rock Hudson, Liberace) and LGBTQ (Sylvester) headlines, Magic was not gay, nor did he use intravenous drugs. He was heterosexual, which meant he was "just like anybody else" and not like those dispensable others. Those others made up a besieged minority who did not need to be convinced that AIDS was real. Among them were Black gay men.

Thanks to the recent success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, Black horror has become a force to be reckoned with in the horror genre. The subgenre has always been there, but not taken seriously outside of the mainstream horror audience and academics alike. Although there were several pieces written about black inclusion, or lack thereof, throughout the years. A quick Google search for “Black Horror” pulls up a lot of these pieces, as well as suggested watching lists that chronicle not only black participation in horror, but the history of black horror itself. However, when you do a quick Google search with the terms “Black gay horror,” you will find little to nothing concerning the black queer experience in horror.

Norris Bumstead Herndon grew up in a shadow as broad as Georgia. Yet he could only live up to his father and society’s expectations by shrinking himself.

“Norris was a young man coming of age and struggling with his homosexual identity,” historian Carole Merritt wrote in her 2002 biography, “The Herndons: An Atlanta Family.”

“With a father who insisted upon a straight and narrow course and in an early 20th-century society that had no tolerance for what it considered deviant, Norris would have to deny himself. He would assume a compromised selfhood, his sexuality arrested, denied, or expressed in secret.”

One of the more comical realms of social media is the DL mystique — whether it’s guys trying to enhance their desirability to other men by insisting how non-gay they are, or ridiculous captions on freak videos that read like millennial updates of ‘70s porn scripts: My Uber driver was on his way to play basketball and his wife is eight months pregnant with their third child. His shorts started to rise when he talked about missing sex, and since I didn’t have any money for a tip, I gave him this instead!

I expected it to be really painful the first time I got fucked.

I was 20 years old. I had placed nothing bigger than my finger inside. Before this initiation, I enjoyed getting and giving head and frottage, but no penetration whatsoever. It was a college friend who did the honors. I was not only infatuated with him. I trusted him. I was so relaxed throughout it all that it stumped him. “You sure you haven't done this before?” I told him I really liked it and that I looked forward to getting better at it. Lighting a second post-sex Newport, he advised, “Well if you do that with someone, make sure you get yours back.”

Growing up in the progressive Washington D.C. area, lesbian-identified Britney Lee never gave a thought to whether she’d be able to marry when the time was right. The right time arrived in 2020, five years after a chance meeting of a fellow soror with whom she shared a near-instant bond. The pair married last July, in an intimate ceremony in their East Point backyard, becoming one in a wave of Black lesbians increasingly saying “I do.”