Since its launch in 2013, Black Gay Men’s Wellness Month has focused on the mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being of Black gay and bisexual men. Another key component is educating them on prevention, testing, and treatment of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The goal of the month is to empower the community to “take charge of their own lives through sustained healthy habits,” according to In The Meantime founder, Jeffrey King. To support that goal, The Meantime is hosting five events at the Carl Bean House on August 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th, and the 29th. The first event, a panel titled “Our Love Is Worth Protecting” will be facilitated by Gabriel Maldonado, Executive Director of TrueEvolution and Jayce Baron’s, from Kiss+Tell Collective. The panel is named after In The Meantime’s billboard that went up in Atlanta by Bull Dogs (a popular Black gay nightclub) during Pride weekend. In the billboard, two muscular Black men embraced, with the language “Our Love Is Worth Protecting” and “We Get Tested” in bold font beside them. On Tuesday, August 11, 2015, there will be a dialogue with Greg Wilson, Deputy Director at REACH LA, OVAHNESS Youth Leadership Group and In The Meantime’s BoiRevolution to discuss …show more content…
Riggs was an openly gay director, educator, and poet. While shooting the documentary, he was diagnosed with HIV. “Tongues Untied” combines footage of Riggs hospitalization with poetry, historical clips, interviews, and dramatized scenes in an attempt to depict the minutiae of Black gay identity and “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” The documentary premiered on PBS on July 16, 1991. According to the DVD, it “contributed to the national debate about the National Endowment for the Arts funding for art with nudity, gay themes, and pointed political
I attended “Queer Brown Voices Platica” at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas, on October 10, 2015. “Queer Brown Voices, Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism” delves into the personal discrimination experiences inflicted upon them not only from the population at large but also from within their own Hispanic communities and their struggle to disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism and homophobia. One of the three books editors, Letitia Gómez (Leti), is my sister-in-law. To fully comprehend their fights to survive and be relevant in mainstream America is awe inspiring. Their activism was not only to negate the prejudices but also for equal access to healthcare particularly during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s.
In today’s American society, being born black is often life threatening and comes with many struggles and fears. The author Brent Staples visibly demonstrates the presence of black men, in his article “Black Men and Public Spaces”. Staples illustrates to the readers how black men attempt to live their lives as normal as possible, but are unable to because of the fear society has of them. Brent Staples attests to the turbulent lives black men face in society, from their childhood to an adult age. Staples is able to demonstrate the various issues black men face in society with the use of logos, ethos, and pathos.
The organizers of the event stood on the steps before us. A poet was brought to the front and introduced. He was reading a poem titled “Dig Deep” that he’d written that morning. Silence washed over the crowd when he began. A tenacious passion addressed each and every person listening. The poet’s voice cracked and wavered as tears streamed down his face. My eyes widened when the words “queer black youth” were bellowed into the megaphone. He had given queer black youth a tribute, thanking me and everyone else involved in the community for stressing the importance of intersectionality. I raised my left fist as tears stung at my eyes, silently thanking him for recognizing our efforts. My fist remained up until the last words of the poem were
“African American communities are populated by men who are too weak and by women who are too strong”. In my opinion, this sentence alone fully summarizes chapter 6 of our Black Sexuality and Health text. It has become a norm in the Black community to suggest that strengthening “weak” Black men is the best way to fight racism and to reverse African American poverty. African American women are constantly viewed as “too strong”, and unwilling to accept help for others including her Black man. The tremendous strength of Black women has caused for counseling to “let” Black men lead and also has led to African American men and women being encouraged to blame one another for economic, political, and social problems within African
On a day to day basis African-American individuals are diminished on account of prejudicial biases. Therefore, the movement “Black Lives Matter” has been constructed. It is a network of people working together to rebuild the black liberation movement. Black Lives Matter became a hashtag in the summer of 2013, when Alicia Garza posted a Facebook status called “a love letter to black people.” This status was posted as an assertion for a distressed community over George Zimmerman’s exculpation
In a society that separates families from each other, kill children for unreasonable reasons, and incarcerate young adult for a crime they did not commit. This group strived in this kind of environment, instead of becoming weak as a result of this mistreatment, they became even stronger for the sake of future generation. The civil right movement and Black lives matter movement are some of the many weapons used in building this group into a strong and fortified group. The strong sense of togetherness in this community is one of the strongest weapons in overcoming this
The film depicts the camaraderie among the group’s members, and the empowerment resulting from their collective sense of belonging. However, given the group’s diverse membership, it is unlikely that this fluid narrative put forth by Hubbard tells the whole story. Taking this into consideration, how does United in Anger portray the makeup of ACT UP, and what impact does its depiction have on understanding the larger AIDS movement? Jih-Fei Cheng offers his viewpoint in his article “How to Survive: AIDS and Its Afterlives in Popular Media.” He condemns the precedent of cherry-picking AIDS movement coverage “through the lens of white male heroes” at the expense of “women and queers of color” (Cheng 73). However, Cheng argues that United in Anger is an exception to this widespread oversight, and takes into account the “multiracial” and “multigendered” diversity of AIDS activism (Cheng 76). He commends United in Anger and how it “carefully [portrays] how AIDS activists have countered capitalism, racism, sexism, and transphobia” (Cheng 78). Like Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, an activist who took part in the AIDS movement, addresses the issue of misrepresentation of the AIDS movement in her article “Forgetting ACT UP.” Juhasz similarly criticizes the media and public’s focus on white gay males, a phenomenon that downplayed the numerous races, genders, and sexualities that comprised people with AIDS (Juhasz 72). However, she adds that there was an unacknowledged sense of exclusiveness in ACT UP that fostered the underrepresentation of minorities such as herself (Juhasz 70). She argues that United in Anger omits important minority members of the AIDS activist community left unrepresented by ACT UP, and thereby discounts the barriers they faced (Juhasz
The struggles not only happen by outsiders for African Americans LGBTQ individuals, but within their own communities. Yet the LGBT movement’s lack of substantive work on issues most relevant to people of color leaves the movement vulnerable to irrelevance and division—and leaves fully one-third of the members of the LGBT community underserved.
Due to the increasingly negative view of homosexuality in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, the LGBTQ community was facing a world altering decision; they could either shrink into the background, and allow the world to continue to draw its opinions based on speculation, or claim the spotlight and allow themselves to be judged based on their own merit. Harvey Milk, “the first openly gay elected official in the United States” (Hope Speech, Commentary) saw a need for an uprising of the latter. When addressing a crowd of his supporters and the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) people in “The Hope Speech” at San Francisco City Hall on Gay Freedom Day in 1978, Harvey Milk uses the I-You/Us-Them relationships as defined by Martin Buber, pathos appeals, and shared experiences to establish an emotional bond with the LGBTQ community. This relationship of comradery and mentorship, deeply rooted in shared values, best prepared the crowd to absorb his message of activism and hope.
According to recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 1.2 million individuals in the United States have HIV (about 14 percent of which are unaware of their infection and another 1.1 million have progressed to AIDS. Over the past decade, the number of HIV cases in the US has increased, however, the annual number of cases remains stable at about 50, 000 new cases per year. Within these estimates, certain groups tend to carry the burden of these disease, particularly the gay, bisexual, and men who have sex with men (MSM) and among race/ethnic groups, Blacks/African American males remain disproportionately affected. (CDC)
Up to today, in a very short amount of time, I have had the opportunity to be able to visit numerous settings and participate in the activities that are offered by the following organizations: Foothill Unity, Boys and
Unfortunately, the AIDS-stricken director died before the film was completed. This film operates as a kind of last will and testament for Marlon Riggs. “He bequeaths the idea that rigid
While hooks believes that black women cannot identify with Sapphire as a black women when "visibly constructed, [she] was so ugly", she finds from her conversation with black women that they actually claimed Sapphire as a "symbol of that angry part of themselves white folks and black men could not even begin to understand" (97). The contrasting perspectives amongst minorities lead to further division among subaltern and makes it increasingly difficult to include the historically marginalized in mainstream culture. Mercer, however, sees this diversity as a means to combat the burden of expression, rather than an impasse in the issue of representation. In his essay, he analyzes Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied, and the effects of the dialogic voicing that is used in the film. In Tongues United, Riggs speaks from the specificity of his own experience as a black gay male, and simultaneously illustrates the degree to which black cinema attempts to present one heterosexual voice for the entire black race. By forgoing the master codes of documentary in favor of a personal non-representative story, Mercer asserts that Riggs successfully challenges the “heterosexual presumption that so often characterizes the documentary realist aesthetic in black cinema”. Mercer further notes that by following this dialogic strategy, Riggs is able to presents a story that does not simplify or attempt
“We’re here, we’re queer, get over it.” In 1990, these words, shouted and displayed proudly on signs waved by the activist group, Queer Nation, were revolutionary. Never, not since the Stonewall Riots, had non-straight, non-cis people been so vocal about their existence and demanded acceptance – something that straight people take for granted on a daily basis. However, in the years since the Riots, LGBT activism has become much more mainstream, no longer whispered about behind closet doors or something to be wholly ashamed of. Gay marriage is legal in all 50 United States, something that has been fought for since the conception of the LGBT movement. In fact, gay couples are routinely being featured on popular television and other forms of media. Some might say that in 2016, the dreams of the rioters in Stonewall have been realized. Marriage rights and the spotlight on nighttime television; equality seems to truly be right on the horizon.
When we interviewed Mrs. Hicks, we asked her why she wanted to be apart of Reach. Her answer was, “I wanted to be able to help the students and teach them how to be compassionate and how to help others.” We also asked her why she wanted