Sunday, May 9 is the national observance of Mother’s Day. For people who are fortunate to still have a living mother or a mother who takes part in child-rearing, the day will be spent by pampering the woman responsible for giving life. While Mother’s Day is often a celebratory day, for many Black LGBTQ+ people, it can also be a day filled with the opposite emotion. Far too many Black LGBTQ+ people have faced rejection based upon their sexual orientation or gender identity. Those stories are real and must be acknowledged and told, if for no other reason, but to serve as a deterrent for it ever happening again.

“What happens when a Black boy puts a flower behind his ear?”

In a perfect world, free from the constraints of societal and cultural expectations, a Black queer boy would have the permission to just be. But we don’t live in a perfect world, which is why the imaginations of Keith F. Miller, Jr. and Terrance Daye, the creative forces behind the upcoming animated film “Pritty: The Animation,” have created a world that shows how life could be when Black queer boys have the freedom to love, play, and heal.

For a city known as a magnet to Blacks, gays, and serial entrepreneurs, Atlanta has a surprisingly short list of people who check off all three boxes.

Mychel “Snoop” Dillard is a high-profile exception. At 36, the Nashville transplant who u-turned from hard-scrabble youth to Vanderbilt University alumni heads a string of successful restaurants and salon spaces across Atlanta.

Now she’s setting her sights on lifting others as she climbs. Dillard recently launched a series of business courses and a four-week mentorship program she hopes can provide tips and tricks for people starting a small business or just trying to keep one afloat.

When Brandi Pinckney-Green learned that NAESM Founder Rudolph “Rudy” Carn needed help to bring his vision for a new Men’s Health and Wellness Center to fruition, her first instinct as a nurse practitioner was to ask how she could help. Despite juggling teaching duties as a nurse educator at Georgia State University and as a home health and hospice RN, the Savannah, GA native, who was born into a family of nurses, says she “saw an opportunity to be a part of something good” when she received the call nearly two years ago to bring her medical expertise to this unique healthcare facility.

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.”

Forget Gun Oil, Wet, or Vaseline—few substances lubricate relations between Black gay men as frequently as marijuana. Online interactions are as likely to begin with an invitation to “match”—where each party supplies a blunt to be shared—as with a greeting or compliment.

“I think smoking weed is probably the best icebreaker,” says Legend Richardson, 33, who began smoking when he was 15 and now consumes marijuana daily. “Ultimately, a 420-friendly hook-up is the best.”

Imagine having to process the life-altering news that you’ve acquired HIV. Now imagine that your new health status can be weaponized against you, setting the stage for a felony conviction with a penalty of up to ten years in prison. The premise may sound like the story arc of a screenplay, but for Georgians living with HIV, the possibility of entering the criminal justice system because of HIV-related offenses is real, even more so if you’re Black, a sex worker, or identify as LGBTQ.

For over 20 years, Tracee McDaniel has been a permanent fixture in trans activism in Atlanta. With a historic appointment by former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed to the Atlanta Citizens Review Board—making her the first trans person to occupy a seat on the Board—McDaniels is now serving her second term on the LGBTQ Advisory Board under Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms while maintaining her role as Founder and Executive Director of Juxtaposed Center for Transformation, Incorporated—an advocacy, consulting, and social services referral organization, specifically designed to empower the trans and gender non-conforming community.

There has been an outpouring of support for queer Democratic State Rep. Park Cannon (D-58) in the aftermath of her March 25 arrest, where she was apprehended by Georgia State Troopers at the office of Gov. Brian Kemp. In a viral video that has been viewed over two million times on Twitter, Cannon can be seen knocking on Kemp’s office door during the signing of SB 202, a controversial voting rights bill critics say targets Black and Brown voters, effectively making it harder for minorities to exercise their right to vote.

When Magic Johnson announced during a press conference in 1991 that he’d acquired HIV, Masonia Traylor, 34, was only four-years-old. And in 1995, when the first HIV “cocktail,” a combination of antiretroviral drugs used to suppress the replication of HIV in the body, became widely available for use, Traylor was eight. The gravity of Johnson’s diagnosis and the impact it would have around the globe at the height of the epidemic couldn’t have been further off eight-year-old Traylor’s radar. HIV wasn’t a part of her world as a child growing up in Atlanta, and this would remain unchanged well into her early 20s until it did.

On a lunch break from work, Traylor recalls seeing a woman wearing a t-shirt that read on the front, “I Have HIV.” Traylor says she was shocked and figured if the “woman was bold enough to wear that I could ask her if she had HIV.”

Traylor says the woman chuckled and said, “Girl, no. Read the back.” The woman turned around to reveal the text written on the back of her t-shirt: “If only it was that easy to tell. Get tested.”

In 1989, Malcolm Reid, 63, had gone to so many funerals that he lost count. He remembers being so emotionally exhausted from burying friends he decided during those early days to stop attending funerals altogether. The clock was ticking towards his demise, or so he thought.

“Well, I'm next,” Reid recalls thinking. “And when the next person died, I was like, I'm next. And that never happened. And I remember asking myself, why did they die and I'm still here?”

It would be another eight years, in 1997, before Reid would learn that he acquired HIV. But his story would not mirror those of his friends whom he laid to rest, instead, it would become the impetus he needed to co-create The Silver Lining Project, a group that would impact his life and the lives of Black gay men living with HIV, particularly those over 50 who are often rendered invisible in the broader Black gay community.

Nicole Roebuck says she has always felt chosen throughout her 20-year career with AID Atlanta, the city’s leading HIV service organization, founded in 1982 in response to the national HIV epidemic. Roebuck, who has served as Executive Director of AID Atlanta since 2015, became only the second Black woman in the agency’s history to ascend to the top leadership position, a role that she says she actually never applied for, continuing a non-traditional but rewarding trajectory from the beginning of her tenure at the agency.

If you ask David Wilmott, 38, and Darnell Morgan, 34, co-owners of the new Kennesaw restaurant Forks & Flavors how long they’ve been married, you’ll likely encounter a moment of awkward silence followed by laughter that comes from a place deep inside their bellies indicating to anyone within earshot that there is a story behind their reaction.

“A year and a month this time,” said Morgan, as he interrupts the laughter to explain the couple’s complex history that led them down the aisle and to divorce court before ultimately remarrying and opening their restaurant in 2020.

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.”

Something is happening on blackgayweddings.com, and that something reaches beyond the dozens of Black LGBTQ+ couples prominently featured on their website or popular Instagram page during one of the most pivotal moments in their lives. In 2021, there are still very few spaces, digital or otherwise, where LGBTQ+ couples comprising two Black partners are celebrated in mainstream or LGBTQ+ media. But unless you’ve followed this disparity over time, you’d probably never know that there is a lack of representation in this area after scrolling through blackgayweddings.com. All at once, the website is celebratory, inclusive, and keenly aware of how intersectionality impacts Black LGBTQ+ people. And like many of the long-standing and revered Black publications that came before it, Black Gay Weddings was also birthed from discrimination.

(Thumbnail Image of Sevyn and Annie by Majore Photography)

Prentiss Matthews III is a playwright, director, actor, and singer who made quite an impression after we met a few months back. I wanted to learn more about his work, artistic vision, and his approach to his craft. He graciously agreed to sit down and chat with me. Here is what we discussed.

Before Lady Gaga released her gay anthem “Born This Way” in 2011, singer Carl Bean, an openly gay Black man signed to Motown Records released the soul-stirring disco gay anthem “I Was Born This Way,” 34 years before it was in vogue to be anything other than heterosexual publicly, or even an LGBTQ+ ally. The gay-affirming single, which cracked the top 20 on the Billboard charts is one of many groundbreaking achievements by Bean—the recording artist turned social justice activist and minister with deep roots in the Black Pentecostal experience, dating back to his childhood at Providence Baptist Church in his native Baltimore, Maryland.

Three is not a crowd for Que Brown, 28, Tye Brown, 26, and Martel Star, 27. The Tallahassee, FL and Mansfield, OH transplants are one of many Black gay polyamorous triads or “throuples” in Atlanta who are finding and creating healthy romantic partnerships outside of the traditional two-person monogamous relationship model. However, there is one distinction between their triad and others— these men are living and loving out loud, online and off, and are rejecting the stigma associated with polyamory that often pushes those within this relationship structure to the margins of society.

Eventually, Agarrat’s work ethic would command the respect of Barclay, and the hungry intern who began making coffee would be trusted to write music video treatments alongside the in-demand music video director, ultimately becoming responsible for Snoop Dogg’s 1993 debut single, “What’s My Name?.”

“I’m gonna get hurt.”

That’s what Deondray Gossfield, 47, recalls saying to himself in the fall of 1996 after meeting Quincy Gossfield, 46, through mutual friends. Together for 24 years and married for seven, the directing/producing duo behind the indie hit gay series The DL Chronicles, has experienced magical highs and devastating lows in their decade's long relationship—long before their nuptials were televised in front of an audience of millions at the 2014 Grammy Awards, and long before they became the public face of Black gay relationship longevity.