Black LGBTQ Research Articles

Descriptive Evidence of COVID-19’s Impact on Black LGBTQ Adults Amidst Ongoing Health Inequities

Older adults are faced with an increased risk of comorbid chronic disease such as diabetes. While multiple health behavior change interventions (MHCIs) are known to improve clinical outcomes more than targeted interventions, less is known whether such effects persist in older populations. The objective of the study was to examine the effects of multiple chronic condition (CC) remote monitoring program enrollment and mental health program enrollment on glucose and blood pressure reduction, adjusting for self-monitoring behaviors. In a sample of 594 older adults (age 55+, 14% 65+ years, 46.8% female) evaluated over a 12-month period, statistical models showed that older adults with uncontrolled diabetes (A1c >= 7.0%) had a 7.9 pt. reduction in blood glucose for each additional program enrolled and a 22.7 pt. reduction in blood glucose when enrolled in mental health compared to those not enrolled. Similarly, older adults with uncontrolled hypertension (BP >= 130/80) had a 4.8 pt. reduction in systolic blood pressure for each additional program enrolled and a 7.2 pt. reduction in systolic blood pressure when enrolled in mental health compared to those not enrolled. The findings indicate the potential for multiprogram digital health interventions that incorporate mental health to further improve clinical outcomes in older adults suffering from multiple chronic diseases, namely diabetes and hypertension.

“I'm Hard to Catch”

AbstractThis article examines Living with Pride: Ruth C. Ellis @ 100 (1999) by Yvonne Welbon, an independent documentary film centered on the life of African American lesbian centenarian Ruth Ellis to advance a queer of color theory of longevity. The analysis closely considers Ruth Ellis's assertion in the film that she: “. . . wasn't in—What you call it? . . . Closet. Never.” Although Ellis explicitly disavows “the closet” declaring instead that she was never in it, both in the film and commonly she is often referred to as “out.” The article addresses the ways in which “out,” along with Ellis's declarations of “never” and “wasn't in,” examined together as “never in,” render Ellis's living legible within black sexuality studies and LGBTQ cultural politics. Ellis advises at the end of the film that cultivating “atmosphere” interpersonally in daily life engenders longevity. Living with Pride puts forth a model of longevity that is personally and collectively grounded in black sexual difference and queer of color resistant social practices that trouble public health life expectancy discourses. Drawing on queer of color critique, black sexuality studies, and visual cultural studies, the article engages Ellis's formulation of black queer atmosphere as a site of imagining that advances the livability of racialized sexual difference.

Moving toward health equity: A journey

Moving toward health equity: A journey

19.1 “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?” EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF RACE, TRAUMA, AND ORIENTATION IN AN EVER-CHANGING WORLD: NARRATIVES FROM TODAY’S GENERATION

Patient narratives provide an intimate journey through the eyes of today’s young survivors. Attendees will appreciate the resilience of Black LGBTQ youth who persevere and overcome hurdles sustained by complex trauma. By reflecting on youths’ firsthand trauma narratives, attendees will deconstruct biases and learn to foster change in their own practices and views. Attendees will explore patient narratives to gain a greater appreciation of complex trauma and identity-related prejudice. Youth participants articulate their life experiences to further clinicians’ understanding and to foster conversation among clinicians. The presenter will also share her exploration as a provider within a metropolitan inpatient setting, where conversation meets collaboration. Firsthand patient stories encourage practitioners to reevaluate and conceptualize what it means to experience adversity tied to various identities. Attendees will understand how traumatic life experiences challenge one’s core identities and identify points of impact for child and adolescent mental health practitioners. Attendees will also learn to create conversation among community initiatives and health systems in order to develop culturally competent inclusive practice parameters within systems of care. Practitioners will experience a deeper connection to youth served by discussing their narratives and reflecting on the impact of race, gender, and sexuality for LGBTQ youth of color.

Getting Freaky with Missy

This article analyzes the music of Black female rapper Missy Elliott in order to consider performative challenges to the politics of visibility and visuality of Black queerness in hip hop. While mainstream media lauds the recent increase in and representation of out Black LGBTQ rappers, scholars such as C. Riley Snorton caution such praise for the unique ways visibility and surveillance are entangled formations that render Black queer communities vulnerable to violence. This article draws on Elliott’s songs “Get Ur Freak on” and “Pussycat” to present alternative ways of navigating the violence of visibility for Black queers and queerness. It argues that Elliott musically inhabits, expresses, and produces queerness through a set of cultural practices that this article calls the “musical aesthetics of impropriety.” The musical aesthetics of impropriety are performative expressions that are developed and deployed at the level of the sound recording, and that exploit the gaps and fissures of what qualifies as proper sexual subjects (e.g., LGBT) and how we come to perceive them as such (i.e., “evidence“) in order to produce alternative sexual and sonic formations. It is, thus, through the musical aesthetics of impropriety that we might imagine and articulate racialized queerness in hip hop differently.

Abstracts

Abstracts

#ProjectPresence: Highlighting black LGBTQ persons and communities to reduce stigma: A program evaluation

Etiologies of HIV disparities are multifaceted; anti-LGBTQ stigma and social marginalization are contributory factors. A city health department developed a program, #ProjectPresence, exhibiting professional photos of Black LGBTQ persons in public spaces. An academic partner explored the relationship of the program to visibility, anti-LGBTQ stigma and social marginalization of Black LGBTQ persons, i.e. models, directly involved in the program and their perceptions of these relationships more broadly for community members. Brief self-administered surveys and semi-structured, in-depth interviews with #ProjectPresence models (n = 15) were conducted after the program to gather their experiences before, during and after the program. Descriptive analyses of survey responses were conducted using Stata 15.1. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed in NVivo10 using categorical analysis. Surveys indicated prevalent experiences of enacted stigma (73 %) and perceptions of poor local acceptance of LGBTQ people (53 %). Interviews suggested that the program may have influenced positive individual- and community-level changes by increasing visibility of LGBTQ communities and improving acceptance among non-LGBTQ persons, inspiring personal growth and self-acceptance among models, and providing opportunities to foster new connections among LGBTQ subpopulations. Our findings suggest similar programs may present promising approaches for the reduction of stigma and social marginalization affecting LGBTQ persons and communities.

Screening Black Lives Matter: on-screen discourses, distortions, and depictions of Black Lives Matter

ABSTRACT The proliferation of popular culture depictions of Black Lives Matter (BLM) yields questions about media and marketing professionals’ (mis)use of representations and rhetoric associated with social justice movements, and, more precisely, Black activism. This commentary is titled “Screening Black Lives Matter” in an attempt to: 1) reflect on how BLM has been re-mediated and re-presented on screen in mainstream media and popular culture, and 2) consider who and what is typically excluded (“screened out”) from such images, narratives, and media production processes. Make no mistake about it, inclusion in anti-Black institutions, including media organizations and industry discourse, is far from being a liberationist goal. However, reflecting on who and what is foregrounded in on-screen depictions and discourses related to BLM in TV and film can contribute to important understandings of how Black social justice organizing is typically framed in contemporary mainstream media in ways that distort the reality of activism, such as by sidelining the work of Black LGBTQ+ people and diminishing or denying the radical politics at the core of such collective and transformative efforts. What does all of this suggest about the relationship between media, marketing, and Black activism? This commentary considers such issues.

Passing It Forward: Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ Elders Sharing the Wisdom from Their Walk

Passing It ForwardBlack and Latinx LGBTQ+ Elders Sharing the Wisdom from Their Walk Juan Battle (bio) In this moment of racial reckoning throughout the united States, how are the voices of older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals being captured and stored? While large collections of archives exist curating LGBTQ+ local, regional, and national artifacts, far too few of those collections are digitized, fewer are one-on-one interviews (where respondents are allowed to be heard in their own words), and even fewer are one-on-one interviews with older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals. This project—Passing It Forward—seeks to fill that gap by conducting 150 one-on-one interviews, via Zoom, from January 2021 thru June 2021, with this very unique population. The interview protocol gathered information about the respondents’ background, professional and political activism, as well as their insights on prescribing a more inclusive future for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and their intersections. Within this collection of papers, some of the undergraduate and graduate students who collected the data then wrote these articles exploring a plethora of research questions. Because the researchers tended to be one— or two, and sometimes three—generations younger than the person they interviewed, this project will provide a venue to allow these changemakers to educate and inspire. So then, how do racial and sexual orientation identity enhance or inhibit the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) changemakers? For this target population, three specific areas were investigated: (a) their personal life history; (b) their ‘activism’ life histories, and how their personal life histories are interconnected with their activism life histories; (c) their perspectives on current topics versus historical ones; for [End Page 1] example, what are the similarities and differences between the resources and responses to Covid-19 in 2020 versus HIV/AIDS in the 1980s? Simmel (1955), a pioneer in research on identities, developed the idea of “crosscutting social circles.” Blau & Schwartz (1984) expanded Simmel’s work and argued that membership in multiple identity-based groups could be a positive attribute (allowing access to more people) or a negative one (when differences are consolidated). Early work on how individuals navigate the space between means, goals, and social structure (see Merton 1949/1968) highlights the ongoing struggle between changing identities and cultural expectations. Though multiple roles can create opportunities (Coser 1975 & 1991; Lifton 1993); other researchers—primarily Black feminists—have argued that multiple roles can serve as interlocking systems of oppression (Collins 1990 & 2003; Crenshaw 1989 & 1991). Subsequently, a new generation of scholars have expanded upon the work of these feminists and have explored the “intersectional imagination,” a term used to describe the analytic process that occurs when examining individual-and group-level oppressions based on identity (Pastrana, 2006) and their interaction with social structures. More recently, scholars have applied these theories to transborder constructions of racial and cultural hierarchies (Patil, 2013). Central to producing as well as impacting research, policy, and evidencebased knowledge is examining how issues that affect the broader population of people in the U.S. (i.e. healthcare, language proficiency, immigration, and reproductive health—just to name a few) continue to disproportionately affect populations who live at the intersection of non-normative identities, like people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender populations. In sum, longstanding and central to research being conducted by sociologists are issues of identity—including racial (Frazier 1939), sexuality (Foucault 1990), and their intersections (Collins 1990 & 2004; Crenshaw 1989). Documenting and dissecting those identities can be uniquely done via video archives of one-on-one interviews. The interview structure notwithstanding, in terms of archives focusing on LGBTQ+ populations, one of the largest collections located at a university is the one at the University of Southern California. As their website boasts: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives is the oldest active Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning (LGBTQ) organization in the United States and the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world. [End Page 2] Founded in 1952, ONE Archives currently houses over two million archival items including periodicals, books, film, video and audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records and personal papers. However, unfortunately, only a small subset of this material has...

Feelin’ Real/Unbroken: Imagining Blackqueer Education Through Autopoetic Inquiry

This autopoetic inquiry offers insights into and critiques of public education. The author specifically interrogates the absence of curricula, which focuses on the fullness of Black LGBTQ+ representation. Through the usage of pivotal artists, lyrics, poetry, and reflection, the author centers a Blackqueer analysis to argue for a reparative educational experience for Black LGBTQ+ youth. Mirrored within the essay is the reality that Black and queer individuals must exhume Black and queer histories, ancestors, and community across the curriculum for ourselves. Likewise, educational practitioners and those who profess to love Black and queer youth must create curricula that represent the totality of Black and queer pasts and present.

Which Identity Frames Boost Support for and Mobilization in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement? An Experimental Test

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has organized hundreds of disruptive protests in American cities since 2013 (Garza 2014; Harris 2015; Taylor 2016). The movement has garnered considerable attention from the U.S. media and is well recognized by the U.S. public (Horowitz and Livingston 2016; Neal 2017). Social movement scholars suggest that such robust mobilizations are typically predicated on clear social movement frames (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow et al. 1986). Tillery (2019b) has identified several distinct message frames within the social media communications of BLM activists. In this paper, we use a survey experiment to test the effect of three of these frames—Black Nationalist, Feminist, and LGBTQ+ Rights—on the mobilization of African Americans. We find that exposure to these frames generates differential effects on respondents’ willingness to support, trust, canvass, and write representatives about the Black Lives Matter movement. These findings raise new questions about the deployment of intersectional messaging strategies within movements for racial justice.

Negotiating racialised (un)belonging: Black LGBTQ resistance in Toronto’s gay village

This article explores the ways in which homeless Black queer and trans youth embody and perform everyday acts of temporal and spatial resistance in Toronto’s gay village. By analysing interviews, mental maps and photographs from my research with homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and Two-Spirit (LGBTQ2) youth, I present how homeless Black queer and trans youth counter the whiteness and anti-Black racism they frequently experience in the village through acts of remembering and placemaking. Specifically, I argue that despite the small-scale reach of the everyday resistance that manifests in our interviews, temporal and spatial resistance challenge the whitewashing of Toronto’s gay village, which is particularly crucial in a moment when the village is centred in conversations of anti-Black racism in the city’s queer community. Engaging in these forms of everyday resistance illustrates the ways in which homeless Black LGBTQ youth instruct their own placemaking in an otherwise uninhabitably racialised neighbourhood, shift narratives of their experiences in processes of knowledge production and spark processes of their own politicisation and community building.

Identifying Community-Informed Language to Promote HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in Black LGBTQ Communities in Baltimore.

LGBTQ populations, particularly Black men who have sex with men and transgender women, experience significant HIV disparities; public health messages may inadvertently stigmatize LGBTQ populations. We sought to use qualitative methods to inform a PrEP campaign. Unstructured focus groups were conducted among predominantly Black LGBTQ persons recruited through social media and events. Discussions were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in NVivo using categorical analysis. Eighty individuals participated in 13 focus groups; 80% (64) identified as sexual or gender minorities. Eighty-eight percent (70) identified as Black/African American. Four themes emerged: (1) culturally competent, community-informed, locally relevant messaging, (2) avoiding stigmatizing language or images, (3) inaccessibility of clinical language, and (4) using identity labels representing local communities and their diversity. Findings suggest PrEP campaigns need to be developed through community-informed processes to engage and avoid stigmatizing priority populations. Ongoing partnerships between public health and LGBTQ communities can facilitate development of campaigns with engaging, acceptable language.

#BlackLivesMatter: Innovative Black Resistance

Since 2013, extrajudicial police killings of black people have captured the attention of U.S. and international media, substantially because of the work of leaders in the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement. #BLM is simultaneously a group of localized organizations and a broad online social movement. In this article, we examine the #BLM movement in detail, with particular emphasis on the following aspects of the movement: (1) its innovative organizational practices and social media use; (2) its accent on black perspectives (counterframing) of systemic racial oppression, heteronormativity, and capitalism; and (3) its broad emphasis on oppressed Americans, including black women and LGBTQ people. We also situate the #BLM movement within the surrounding system of racial oppression, including the historical role of racialized policing in maintaining social control of blacks. We detail the long tradition of black social movements, especially black feminist organizing, against systemic racial oppression. In doing so, we intend to contribute social movement theorizing that more fully considers powerful counterframed perspectives of black activists in U.S. social movements. Although the #BLM movement reflects black feminism and past civil rights movement struggles, it is a uniquely twenty‐first‐century social movement that uses new technologies for innovative social protest.

Power to Become Children of God: Remembering in-the-Life with a Johannine (Dis)Position1

abstract Honoring the contributions of Shaykh Dr. Ibrahim Abdurramah Farajajé and Joseph Beam, this article advances an in-the-life approach to selected scriptures from the Gospel of John as a means to affirm that Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), and same gender loving persons are among those who can chose to access, in the words of John 1:12, the power to become children of God. In its critique of the hypocritical erotophobia of African American Christian communities toward its queer members, this article proposes that Farajajé and Beam’s writings can undergird the agency to live into God-with-us-ness. Characters from John’s gospel are put into context with contemporary Black LGBTQ and same-gender-loving experience to gesture toward possibilities for resilient self-acceptance, dignity, and flourishing.

Intersectionality in the Contemporary Women’s Marches: Possibilities for Social Change

The Women’s Marches of January 2017 and 2018 were some of the largest mass demonstrations in history. They represent an important stage in the American feminist movement in its current iteration. Unlike the first and second waves of the movement, which were led by privileged class cisgender white women, the leadership of these marches includes women of color who have brought a vision of intersectionality and diversity to the marches. Banners covering a wide range of issues including reproductive choice, #MeToo, equal pay, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, and support for immigrants, became the hallmark of these marches. Is the contemporary feminist movement finally recognizing the importance of intersectionality? Or, is it merely paying lip service to the concerns of diverse people by way of representational politics? This article provides a historical analysis of the contemporary “Women’s Marches” with the specific intent of evaluating their contribution to intersectionality and diversity within the mainstream feminist movement.

Intersections, Ambivalence, and Racial Justice in Schools: Black Queer Students Remap Complexity

This chapter analyzes retrospective interviews with Black LGBTQ college students discussing how their racial and LGBTQ identities intersected in high school. Their complex analysis shows the difficulties schools had recognizing the intersections between support for racial equity and LGBTQ-related equity. Their experience demonstrates the necessity of preparing educators and administrators to understand how many vectors of identity shape students’ lives. Their narratives, too, show how Black community values and practices helped them to develop their sense of political advocacy on all issues, that traditions of civil rights advocacy gave them vocabularies for articulating new recognition and rights claims, and that longstanding forms of racialized sexual and gender identities were resources for their own rethinking of their commitments, even if they nonetheless did not always experience acceptance at schools or at home.

Queering Black activism: Exploring the relationship between racial identity and Black activist orientation among Black LGBTQ youth.

Linked fate, or connection to the Black community, may be a pathway to engagement in social justice action for Black liberation. The purpose of this study is to understand the role of racial identity on Black queer youths' orientation toward Black activism. We used hierarchical linear regression to examine relationships between dimensions of racial identity and Black activism orientation among 142 queer-identified youth. We found that racial centrality and racial ideologies predicted high-risk activism orientation. Additionally, assimilationist ideology moderated the relationship between racial centrality and high-risk activism orientation. The degree to which Black queer youth feel race is central to their self-concept relates with their intent to engage in Black activism. These findings demonstrate that racial ideologies matter distinctively to activism orientation and offer that perception of risk nuances linked fate as a pathway to activism for Black queer youth.

Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard

Reviewed by: Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard Casely E. Coan Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy Eric Darnell Pritchard Southern Illinois UP, 2017. 306 pp. Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard inhabits the intersection between African American, feminist, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) literacy, composition, and rhetoric research where Pritchard hopes to call forth a field of study called Black Queer Literacies. "Literacy" takes on a capacious and shifting definition in this text, reaching far beyond simple reading and writing. Pritchard's definition of literacy is rooted in the work of Sojourner Truth and Paulo Freire: literacy is understood as the myriad ways of meaning-making that are contextualized by sociocultural conditions. Among the literacy activities employed toward that meaning-making are more traditionally regarded ones such as a reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as well as other literacy performances that occur alongside or external to those traditional literacy activities. These 'other literacy performances' refer to literacies that emerge off the page as well, such as sense-making, discernment, and methods of encoding and decoding various signs and symbols we encounter in our everyday lives. (19) The expansiveness of this approach is apparent from the prologue wherein Pritchard offers five vignettes which narrativize his own life experience as a Black, queer, feminist, cisgender man who makes meaning as "a learner, teacher, scholar, artist, activist, and advocate" (1). These vignettes signal the importance of life stories in this text's exploration of literacy and the ways in which literacy and meaning-making emerge off the page. As Pritchard turns to the life stories of his Black LGBTQ research participants, he specifically examines literacy through the twin poles of literacy normativity and restorative literacies. Literacy normativity is used here to describe those uses of literacy that "create and impose normative standards and beliefs onto people whom are [End Page 84] labeled alien or other through textscapes" (28). Through these standards and beliefs, literacy normativity inflicts harm, "steals emotional resources from people, wounding them through texts" (24). We see literacy normativity in the ostracization of young Black queers whose reading habits render them simultaneously queer and 'not black enough;' within rigid interpretations of the Bible which condemn LGBTQ identities; and in the estrangement of Black LGBTQ people from texts and resources that would educate them about their histories and communities. The damage and violence done by literacy normativity highlight the danger of "treat[ing] African American, LGBTQ literacy, composition, and rhetorical studies as mutually exclusive" (33). Indeed, one of Pritchard's most meaningful interventions into the field of literacy, composition, and rhetoric here is his critical attention to the intersectional nature of literacy, its acquisition, its utility, and its role in identity formation, affirmation, and expression. By channeling discussions of raced, sexualized, or gendered experiences with literacy as separate and distinct issues, much scholarship in literacy, composition, and rhetoric neglects the compounded experiences of Black LGBTQ people whose lives are impacted by the racialized nature of their gender and sexual identities. This separation of race, sex, and gender from literacy is challenged here by Pritchard's attention to the creation of restorative literacies in the face of the damage caused by literacy normativity. Restorative literacies are those practices that Black queers employ "as a means of self-definition, self-care, and self-determination" (24). These practices foster self- and communal love within and among the Black LGBTQ people who utilize them to counter messaging that might otherwise make such love feel undeserved or out of reach: Restorative literacies are the way in which one creates a space outside of oppressive institutional structures and individual acts of violence. … Restorative literacies do not seek to reconsolidate power; rather, restorative literacies occur when one displays or asserts control over one's life and voice through various literacy acts. Restorative literacies are very much dependent on one's self-identification and positionality, which means that individual and communal acts of restorative literacies are situated differently and evolve across time and place. (33–34) This negotiation of power, like the participants' subjectivities, shifts in response to changes...

Courting the Abject: A Taxonomy of Black Queer Rhetoric

This essay explores how Black LGBTQ students use writing to translate and transmit African American vernacular language codes in their everyday lives. Through documenting how students experience and interpret homophobia through the prism of African American vernacular English (AAVE), I demonstrate how some use language and literacy practices to critique and perform dominant gender behaviors reflected in their community. I theorize a Black queer rhetoric as a framework for understanding and nuancing the discursive limits of African American vernacular English