Often already experienced with outright discrimination or bigoted slights because of their skin color, for a number of Black gay men, the biggest concern when coming out of the closet is not whether they’ll be able to withstand homophobia in the workplace or on the streets. Instead, many worry about the family cookout: Will they be invited? Will they be treated differently? Will their spirits be fed?

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Atlanta Black Pride, one of the largest Black Pride celebrations in the United States. And unlike previous years, In The Life Atlanta (ITLA), the non-profit organization responsible for Black Pride programming is no longer at the helm. Instead, Atlanta Black Pride, a separate entity led by former ITLA representatives, Terence Stewart (President, Atlanta Black Pride) and Amber Moore (Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Atlanta Black Pride), are now leading organizational efforts for all official Atlanta Black Pride events. It’s an important distinction, among others, that Stewart and Moore are being more vocal about in the days leading up to this year’s Black Pride celebration and since departing ITLA.

“For the longest, you would hear that nobody was in control of Atlanta Black Pride, especially from people that are new to Atlanta,” says Stewart. “Who is in charge? There is no cohesion,” he recalls hearing from members of the community. “But when you look at Atlanta Pride, you know who's in charge.”

For Black LGBTQ+ Atlantans, Sundays in Piedmont Park have long been an unofficial event, until 12 years ago when organizers of the first Pure Heat Community Festival turned the unofficial park gatherings into a massive cultural event. This year, the free festival is returning to Piedmont Park on Sunday, September 5, after organizers postponed it in 2020 out of safety concerns for attendees at the height of the global pandemic. A highlight among the extensive list of events offered over Labor Day Weekend during Atlanta Black Pride, the festival is a significant visual representation of the collective power and visibility of Black LGBTQ+ people, with organizers seizing the opportunity to honor and showcase the business acumen and artistic prowess of Black openly LGBTQ+ leaders and entertainers in the community.

Even in death, Commissioner Joan Garner continues to make history. On Monday afternoon, dozens of supporters, city officials, and friends gathered outside of Ponce De Leon Library in Midtown for a renaming ceremony in honor of the late Fulton County Commissioner who passed away in 2017 after battling breast cancer. In 2011, Garner became the first openly gay Fulton County Commissioner, representing District 4. Now, she becomes the first Black openly LGBTQ+ person to have a Fulton County public library renamed as the Joan P. Garner Library at Ponce De Leon, in her honor.

From his grandfather, Johnny Foreman, Larry Carter learned one important lesson—service first.

Foreman served as a former bishop in New York and Virginia for the United Methodist Church.

“He taught us that being of service is all about what is best for the community,” said Carter. “He used to always say, ‘You can't take things for granted. Life is fleeting, but it is also important to do what you can when you have the time’.”

Foreman’s guidance has been the driving force for Carter’s life and is at the root of his current endeavor—a campaign for Atlanta City Council.

The term “Black Hollywood'' gets tossed around often in Atlanta. With so many people acting, directing, and producing their own content, it becomes easy to get overwhelmed by the immense amount of talent Atlanta offers, especially within the Black and Brown LGBTQ+ community. Creatives are staking their claim on the vast abundance of representation and visibility. Though, sometimes the voices become oversaturated with one-dimensional characters and repetitive stories. This is where content creator W. Wesley Henderson enters the conversation.

With his own streaming network, WatchACTV (aka Aconnectiontv), the Atlanta-based writer, director, and producer has been engaging audiences with his specific brand of content for years. Henderson’s roots reach back to the infancy of YouTube before it became a powerhouse within the online content creation realm, but before then Henderson was a young Black gay kid trying to make sense of what set him apart from the other kids in his neighborhood.

Season—it’s a simple yet versatile word that can encompass everything from the month on the calendar to how many gray hairs are on your head. Yet for most ethnic foodies, one definition reigns supreme: It’s that mysterious yet irresistible touch of flavor that makes a dish mouthwatering.

Generations of Black cooks have perfected an almost preternatural talent for using a pinch of this and a dash of that to transform the simple into the sublime, earning a cultural badge of honor if you know how to make a roast sing, or a scarlet letter if your dish evokes the dubious cookout question, “Who made this potato salad?”

One of the goals in softball is to return to the same home plate you started from, but Jeremy Nobles’s journey through the sport led him to a new world.

“Growing up, being around the same people, doing the same thing every day and every weekend,” Nobles says, describing his life as a 20-year-old in Moundville, Ala., population less than 2,500. “And just knowing in the back of my head that I like guys and there’s no way the people I hang around with would acknowledge or understand that. It’s hard living with that kind of secret with nobody to talk to, and trying to find myself—I just didn’t know what to do.”

A few days ago, I emailed some trusted colleagues concerning a documentary project idea. It’s part of how I process. I’m really lucky to have a fairly extensive network of individuals in various sectors that I can reach out to from time to time. Most of my ideas never make it to the manifestation stage because of this incredible vetting process.

I find it useful, even necessary, to think through projects and get feedback before I launch them. If there are red flags or warning signs, potential kinks, or concerns, it’s always good to get solid advice from trusted people. I hope that they will tell me the truth, and they always do. It’s also good in the early stages to register any critical feedback and develop responses, which helps me determine my level of excitement for a project.

If you were unfamiliar with DaBaby (born Jonathan Kirk) before July 25, 2021, you’re likely all caught up on who the rapper is by now. Born in 1991 in Cleveland, OH, and hailing from Charlotte, NC, DaBaby rose to fame in 2018 and has since been a mainstay on mainstream urban radio.

Victor Jackson deserves your attention. Throughout much of the pandemic, the quadruple threat (singer, actor, choreographer, creative director) never stopped creating. Over the last year, Jackson has longed for the moment supporters of his latest EP, “Man. Muse. Magic.” could convene in the same space for a live performance absent the threat of COVID-19. On July 28, at Parlor, a Black-owned bar and performance space in downtown Atlanta, he partially got his wish. Jackson kicked off “Man. Muse. Magic. neat,” an intimate live performance residency scheduled to run once a month through November.

Every time abstract artist Emmy Marshall, 36, sells a new painting he places a red sticker on the back of his bedroom door. So far this year, there are 52 stickers and counting. It’s one way the Atlanta native and openly gay artist visually celebrates his success, which doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

“This train is moving,” says Marshall during his interview with The Reckoning.

“I don't know how these things are happening, but people find me and they put my name in hats and in rooms and conversations and people are reaching out,” he says.

Besides producing quality work, one theory the self-taught artist has for his recent success is his ability as an abstract artist to tap into the imaginations of art consumers.

Growing up in the Caribbean nation of British Guyana, Christopher Inniss, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Area Chief of Staff at Banfield Pet Hospital in Lawrenceville, GA, had no blueprint for a career in his chosen field. Of the veterinarians he was exposed to, not a single one matched the reflection he saw when he looked in the mirror. Now decades later, Inniss is becoming a role model for aspiring veterinarians during a crucial time when there is an industry shortage and an even greater shortage of Black veterinarian students and professionals.

Passionate, sweaty, even reckless—the unbridled spontaneity of sex can be one of the things that makes it so damned fun. Now imagine that every sudden urge required a lengthy pause while you search for a bulky, hard-to-wear sexual aid that just might fall off mid-stroke.

It’s a mood killer, to say the least.

Yet for countless men and women whose sex lives revolve around so-called strap ons - artificial penises that attach to the body using a strappy harness - it’s a uniquely bitter pill they’ve learned to swallow.

Glenise Kinard-Moore aims to do something about it, turning a cocktail-napkin idea into a potential sex game-changer for LGBTQ+ people and the disabled alike.

Jason Hudgins began attending Westview Community Organization meetings well before he moved into the community.

He was house hunting and felt the best way to get an idea of what the community offered was to attend meetings and see firsthand.

“This is how it all started for me,” he told The Reckoning. “There was an older lady, Miss Hattie, who served as the organization chaplain. She stood up in one meeting and mentioned that someone who had recently left the community was supposed to paint her house.”

As Miss Hattie said, “he promised to paint my house,” it took no time for Hudgins to volunteer.

I knew I was not alone. I had spoken to other Black gay men who were caregiving, but it was not something that was often discussed openly. Caregiving can be a very solitary role, where you end up isolated, and unable to find an outlet for all the emotions that you’re experiencing. Because, for some, you are caregiving 24 hours, and unable to leave your care recipient.

I was taught growing up that men were the providers, and as a Black man, I was supposed to leave the home to earn a living to take care of my family. The emotional and physical care wasn’t something I was taught would be my burden to carry. The truth is, there was never going to be any other way this would go. My parents have two sons. We were going to have to shoulder this burden or consider a home for our parents.

“How can you believe in something you’ve never seen?”

It’s a question that plagued a young Jamal Jordan during his formative years in Mobile, Alabama as he acknowledged his same-sex attraction as the thing that made him different from some of the other boys in the Gulf Coast community that he called home. The something that he’d never seen was queer couples of color. It would be decades after a young Jordan’s initial realization of the erasure of Black LGBTQ+ couples in mainstream media that the adult journalist would take control of the narrative in a viral story for The New York Times, and the subsequent book by the same title.

New data from the Georgia Department of Corrections has found that more people between 1999-2020 have been impacted by Georgia’s HIV crime laws than previously reported, with the average cost to Georgia of incarceration alone adding up to over $9 million in the last two decades.

The new analysis appears in an updated report from The Williams Institute UCLA School of Law that finds between 122 and 133 people have been incarcerated for an HIV crime in Georgia since 1988. This is a 61% to 76% increase in the previously reported number of 74 convictions. Much of the difference (26 cases) is the result of new data from 2017 to the present.

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!

In between breaks on the red carpet at the July 1 launch party of iElevate+ TV, a new Black LGBTQ+ on-demand live streaming platform, CEO OC Allen III emphasized that the time is now for a digital space to center Black LGBTQ+ content and storytellers.

A throng of supporters filed into "Book Boutique," a new Black-owned bookstore inside Atlantic Station to celebrate the beginning of an exciting era in Black LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship and collaboration. The event preceded the holiday weekend sneak peek that gave viewers a glimpse of the content Allen and his team have curated over the last six months—setting the stage for underrepresented Black LGBTQ+ content to be seen on a global stage to an underserved audience.