While it is important to highlight fatherhood and those who shepherd their children into adult life, we frequently forget to ask a critical question: who gets the opportunity (and privilege) to be a father if desired? For many men who identify as queer, there is a delta between wanting a child and having one.

Despite waning attention, HIV is still around, and most new cases are found in gay men ages 13-34. Of note, we know Gen Zers are between the ages of 13-27. Thus, an unfortunate and impactful storm is brewing, but we must predict the weather and prepare.

At barely 10 years old, Pierce Hand Seitz already had a leg up on other 5th graders: After getting a taste of legal proceedings during a mock trial, he was pretty certain he wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up

Seventeen months ago, Byron Perkins, a Hampton University football player, was in a dark place. After a promising 3-0 start to the season, his team lost two games in a row —  including a likely discouraging, 32-point beatdown at the University of Delaware. 

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)

It was with these words that poet Audre Lorde began her groundbreaking 1982 work “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”, in the process launching earning a reputation as a master poet and black lesbian literary icon that has endured years after her death.

In 2020, at the peak of his career, Dwight Howard had a list of accomplishments many of his pro basketball peers would envy: a championship with the Los Angeles Lakers, multiple selections to NBA all-star teams, a seven-figure salary and sportswriters debating whether the Atlanta native is among the greatest players in history.

Joshua Johnson has what he calls a “God-shaped hole” in his heart. The death of Pat Robertson helped put it there. 

A journalist, former NPR talk-show host and MSNBC news anchor, Johnson didn’t personally know Robertson, a televangelist who founded “The 700 Club” empire and was an influential figure in conservative Republican politics.

'Tis the season to be jolly. Or depressed. Or overwhelmed. Or just plain over it. For all its reputation as a joyful time, the holiday season can be a serious emotional drain.

The potential for violence during police encounters with Black Americans is all too common, but when the person in custody is living with HIV, their health status in proximity to law enforcement can often result in prosecution.

Do fat people exist in the future?

That's likely a question that many have never thought to ask. It has been argued that people of size are some of the most openly discriminated against and marginalized. So, for some, thinking about fatness and fat people existing in the future may be hard to imagine.

But not for writer Alex Smith, a 46-year-old, Philadelphia-based artist, with roots in the Punk music scene. Smith is not afraid of anarchy. In some ways, he thrives on it, and people are taking notice. His newest work, "Black Vans," takes his ambitions to uncharted territory and places Black, queer, fatness center stage.

"If we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this," Smith tells The Reckoning. "It was a no-brainer that the main character was going to be a fat, Black bear, period," when discussing his comic book series and its lead character, "Bo," who is of Afro-Latin descent.

With a bearded, high-heeled Saucy Santana featured in mainstream music videos and a pony-tailed Billy Porter hosting ballroom legends on the BET Awards, it’s become easy to think that the Black queer man has claimed his seat at the mainstream table. It took just one cable show and a blink-and-you’d-miss-it sex scene to prove otherwise.

For Mother’s Day, Johnnie Ray Kornegay III pays tribute to Dorothy Beam, the mother of celebrated Black gay anthologist Joseph Beam, whose devotion to her son's legacy transformed personal grief into a powerful act of advocacy. After Joseph's death from AIDS-related complications in 1988, Dorothy refused to let his unfinished work disappear; instead, she collaborated with poet Essex Hemphill to complete Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1991), a landmark text in Black LGBTQ+ literary history.

The 33rd GLAAD Media Awards returned to The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on April 2, 2022, and for one night, the room belonged to us. The Reckoning's Darian Aaron captures the full sweep of an evening where LGBTQ+ people of color took center stage, from Michaela Jaé Rodriguez's tearful acceptance of the Stephen F. Kolzak Award to Marvel's Victoria Alonso putting Disney's Bob Chapek on notice, all set against the backdrop of a country rapidly moving to erase queer and trans lives through legislation.

Despite an active childhood that included playing football and running track since fifth grade, Gerald Thomas was a bit spooked when he read his class schedule at the start of his freshman year at Elbert County Comprehensive High School in northeast Georgia.

“When I saw it said ‘weightlifting’ I went to my school counselor and asked her to change it because for some reason I was intimidated,” Thomas recalls. “She told me that for all athletes, weightlifting was our P.E.”

Thomas’s aversion to bench presses and squats soon dissipated as he became a stronger defensive end, a faster 400-meter runner, and experienced other benefits of regularly being in the gym.

“It helped me improve my performance, and it also made me look better,” says Thomas, who more than 30 years later remains an avid weightlifter, and whose 50-year-old physique resembles that of a college athlete. He briefly stopped working out after ending his collegiate track career, but within a month, Thomas noticed the activity he once dreaded had become an essential part of his being.

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.

When he joined the Atlanta City Council, Antonio Brown was seemingly unknown to most. What many did not know, however, is that he had an extensive background in community engagement and organizing.

“Before coming onto City Council, I was doing work in and for the city’s LGBT community,” Brown told the Reckoning. “I hosted fundraisers, did work around HIV/AIDS prevention and youth homelessness. Folks knew me, but not on the Atlanta City Council level.”

Now Brown, who currently represents Atlanta’s District 3 (Vine City, English Avenue, and Atlantic Station), is one of 14 candidates vying for the city’s top job—mayor.

The tragic and sudden death of R&B superstar Aaliyah on August 25, 2001, remains one of the most devastating tragedies in the history of music and pop culture. Only weeks after the release of Aaliyah, the self-titled third studio album, and a final television appearance on BET’s 106 & Park, four days before boarding the twin-engine Cessna plane that crashed shortly after take-off at Marsh Harbour Airport in Abaco, Bahamas, killing all nine people on board, the beloved singer and budding actress was on a meteoric rise.

Now, twenty-years later, family, friends, and fans continue to grieve the loss of an artist whose cultural impact in her short seven years as a mainstay on the R&B charts…

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.”

According to the New York Times, I Was Born This Way, released in 1975, is “the first record to feature lyrics about being an out-and-proud gay man.” At face value that statement is significant, but when you look further, it has a much deeper meaning. Here’s the truth: Charles Valentino (then known by the mononym “Valentino”), a Black gay man, sang the first record to feature lyrics about being out and proud. The lyrics were written by Bunny Jones in 1971, a Black woman. CNP plans to honor the legacy of this groundbreaking song in LIBERATION: Remembering I Was Born This Way—a two-part event kicking off in July.