In observance of WORLD AIDS DAY, CNP joins in the global recognition of the lives lost to HIV/AIDS, the breakthrough scientific advancements, and the millions of people around the world who are living and thriving with HIV. At CNP, we believe great storytelling can change hearts and minds, which is why we incorporate HIV narratives into our work throughout the year. Today, we invite you to revisit these deeply personal stories of individuals and organizations working to end the HIV epidemic in America and beyond.

“That woman left her son.” I was haunted, and pleasantly surprised by those words from my mother. I’d emerged from a week of work doing technical production on a virtual presentation of the play “Before It Hits Home". CNP partnered with Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theater and Georgia Equality to produce this virtual screening in honor of National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day 2021. I seemed to be working non-stop in my home office, and decided that, on show day, I’d load the broadcast downstairs for my mother to watch. Unsure if she would, I gave her the offer, and to my surprise she did watch.

More than that though, I was struck by how this play resonated with her.

With 2022 upon us, we could not be more excited to continue to engage the #CNPTribe around our programs, events, and stories to shift narratives, elevate the voices of our community, and build power. We also wanted to offer you a preview of just a few programs and projects we have in store. Your support means so much to us, and we look forward to continuing to be in community with you all.

As we approach the beginning of the holiday season and the last weeks before the start of a new year, it’s imperative that we begin to give thanks, not just on the official holiday but every day throughout the year. If you’re reading this, congratulations, you’re still surviving a pandemic that has taken over 5 million lives globally nearly two years after its emergence. That alone is a reason to give thanks. But let’s be clear, Black gay men were navigating an epidemic and a host of other challenges before COVID-19 arrived, which can often make it difficult to exist in a continuous space of gratitude. But it is not impossible. It is an intentional act to choose joy and gratitude, especially in the midst of life’s challenges. “If you can change your mind, you can change your life,” wrote philosopher William James.

After months of debates, campaign ads, meet and greets, and canvassing, Atlanta is close to naming a new mayor and potentially welcoming some new and familiar faces to the City Council and Board of Education.

Unfortunately, some of those faces will not include the dozen or so Black LGBTQ identified candidates who launched campaigns for the council, school board, and the mayor’s office.

Of the slate of Black LGBTQ candidates, Keisha Waites is the only candidate with a chance of possibly winning their campaign. A native of Atlanta and a former state legislator, Waites is in a runoff against Jacqueline “Jacki” Labat for the Council’s Post 3 At-Large seat. Labat’s husband, Patrick Labat, is Fulton County Sheriff.

Waites’ platform is centered on four issues: public safety, restoring public trust, regional transportation, and affordable housing.

Throughout his life, Dr. N.J. Akbar has become something of an expert in overcoming personal challenges.

Labeled “dumb” by an elementary school teacher, the 37-year-old eventually earned a doctorate, a high-ranking administrative position at one of the largest universities in Ohio, and a seat as the president of Akron Public Schools’ Board of Education.

But it was in a very private area of his life where this very public figure faced one of his most unique challenges and earned one of his most fulfilling rewards.

Just before the pandemic, Akbar, who is fully mobile, met and fell in love with his partner Alex Mayweather, 30, who uses a wheelchair.

Before the digital explosion of Black gay blogs and social media in the mid-2000s, “CLIK,” a glossy full-color monthly magazine created specifically for the Black gay community dominated as the publication of choice for a decade. Co-founded by Lewis Nicholson, who served as the first editor-in-chief, and Dwight Powell, initially a publisher and graphic designer who assumed the role as editor-in-chief after Nicholson’s departure; ultimately becoming the magazine’s longest-running editor and the personality most widely associated with the magazine, which quickly became a Black LGBTQ+ staple.

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.

When he was in the fifth grade at F. L. Stanton Elementary School, Jason B. Allen led a group of classmates in a community service activity.

His teacher at the time overheard him venting about what was happening in the community and how he felt like no one cared about its upkeep.

“She, Miss Edwards, who is still teaching today, inspired me to do something about it,” Allen told The Reckoning. “Instead of going to Six Flags for a class trip, we cleaned yards, cut grass, and picked up trash.”

There he was at ten years old, leading his classmates and helping to sustain the community. Today, Allen is one of two candidates seeking to replace Jason F. Esteves, the current board chair of the Atlanta Public Schools Board of Education, as the at-large District 9 representative. D’Jaris ‘DJ’ James, founder of a college and career coaching program, Secrets of a Southern Belle & Gent, is the other candidate.

When a young 12-year-old boy, reportedly named Tyler, was ridiculed live on social media for being effeminate, Devin Barrington-Ward was one of the first community activists to reach out in support of the pre-teen.

He reached out, he told The Reckoning, because there is a lack of safety nets available to young people like Tyler.

“There are countless young people like Tyler who are Black and LGBT who need an advocate and someone to care.”

Barrington-Ward is one of a handful of LGBTQ+ individuals running for Atlanta City Council. He is looking to unseat the incumbent Councilmember Dustin Hillis for the District 9 seat.

Ever so often, a piece of art is created that causes a cultural shift—an unexpected, yet welcomed reflection of the lived experiences of a segment of society that is often overlooked, if not outright dismissed by media gatekeepers. “For The Boys,” the hit SLAY TV web series now streaming on YouTube from co-creators Mekhai Lee and Ellis Dawson, is filling the void of Black queer representation on a scale that has surpassed similar projects online, and is inching closer to achieving the kind of cultural impact on a new generation of Black queer audiences not seen since the early 2000s.

“For The Boys” follows three Black queer best friends as they navigate the intoxicating and exhausting minefield of love and friendship in New York City. Set in Brooklyn, the series follows the lives of Anthony (Chandler Bryant), Jamal (Andrew Coleman), and Syed (Lamont Walker II), each on their own roads to personal self-discovery and fulfilling relationships.

Mike Russell easily admits he is not a politician.

He is a retired military officer with a background in law enforcement who moved to Atlanta, in large part, due to its civil rights history.

But last summer, after people took to the streets to march and riot in cities across the country, Russell found himself increasingly upset as he watched what has been described as an uprising in downtown Atlanta.

“It was really upsetting,” he told the Reckoning. “So much so that I started yelling at the television. My husband kept saying to me, ‘You do know they cannot hear you. If you are really this upset, get involved.’”

He did but started out slow.

“As I started expressing my ideas and frustrations on social media, people took notice and began suggesting that I run for office,” he said.

Then just a fresh-faced youth, Atlanta lesbian Charlotte Hubbard spent her early 20s attending the city’s legendary Black gay pride celebration — one of the few places where she felt she could truly exhale.

“I loved just being in a place where I’m not seeking acceptance,” Hubbard says. “Just being able to be free felt really good.”

Then something shifted. Fist fights seemed to rise. The carefree vibe seemed to diminish. Eventually, for Hubbard, it stopped feeling like home.

“The turning point was when I was at Piedmont Park and every other corner I turned, there was a fight,” says Hubbard, who at 37, hasn’t attended Black Pride in a decade. “I said, ‘I can’t do this’.”

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.”

During a random conversation at an event in early May, Bethsheba Rem found herself assessing her life. She met someone who mentioned they were recruiting people interested in being campaign managers or running for local office.

“I told him I am a professor and spoken word artist when he asked what I did for a living,” she told The Reckoning.

Without missing a beat, he suggested that she run for the school board.

“In two seconds, I assessed my whole life,” she said. “I took an inventory of where I am and what I have done. For me, I am either going to do something 100 percent, full speed ahead, completely all in, if I believe in it.”

In those two seconds, running for Atlanta School Board made sense.

NAESM exists to serve Black, gay and bisexual men. Full stop. This tenet has been central to the organization’s mission in the fight to reduce new HIV infections and to provide care for those living with HIV, including Atlantans who do not exist within the targeted group for over 30 years. It’’s with the same laser focus on Black, gay and bisexual men, one of the most heavily impacted groups by HIV, that NAESM’s African American MSM Leadership Conference on Health Disparities and Social Justice, the nation’s largest annual convening dedicated to exploring HIV prevention, care, treatment, policy, and research, will escape the cold of the Southeast in January for the warmth of sunny Los Angeles.

To say that 2016 was a whirlwind for Academy-Award-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney would be an understatement. Five years after the film release of “Moonlight,” based on McCraney’s play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” and four years since taking home the top prize of Best Picture during an unprecedented live television mix-up—McCraney’s ascension from Liberty City, Florida, to Chair of Playwriting at The David Geffen Yale School of Drama, to creating the OWN series “David Makes Man”—now in its second season — has made the MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient a creative force of stage and screen. In his first interview with The Reckoning, McCraney opens up about his queer identity, collaborating with director Barry Jenkins to create a masterpiece, being awkward and reveling in going unnoticed on the street, and reactions to the last 20 minutes of “Moonlight,” and why much of it, for him, was troubling.

Each year on October 11, the LGBTQ+ community celebrates National Coming Out Day. Although today’s political and cultural environment is vastly different from it was in 1988 when Robert Eichberg and Jean O’Leary created the inaugural observance-coming out, or rather, inviting others in, still matters. While individuals arrive at this deeply personal decision in their own time, the benefits of living an authentic life far outweigh the alternative of a life rooted in fear and shame. For this National Coming Out Day, CNP’s staff is opening up about the moment the personal became public by sharing their individual coming out stories.

Jereme Sharpe is convinced that most people don’t know what to think of him, and he likes it that way.

Sharpe is among a handful of Black LGBTQ+ identified candidates for Atlanta City Council. He, along with three others, is seeking to unseat Michael Julian Bond for the Post 1 At-Large seat. The other candidates include educator Alfred Brooks, attorney Brandon Goldberg, and former Atlanta Board of Ethics member Todd Gray.

“From the outside, people tend to make all sorts of assumptions about me,” Sharpe told The Reckoning. “I don’t like being put in a box. I know the struggles of life. I have seen life’s highs and lows and been in places and situations that maybe I should not have been. But my experiences have taught me important lessons that help me to understand how to help people, regardless of who they are and where they come from.”