Everyday Health Celebrates Black Queer Heroes

Shanéa Thomas (he/she/Dr.) is an LGBTQ+ training specialist, assistant research professor, and coordinator for training and translational research at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Dr. Thomas is a mother and identifies as nonbinary, meaning his gender does not fit neatly into a single woman or man category, and may be different from day to day. She resides in Temple Hill, Maryland, and aims to shift power toward marginalized voices in all of her work. 

First Identification With the LGBTQ+ Community

Queerness to me is just, like, not straight, not heteronormative. It's really against the grain. Queer is this expansive definition of just world-otherly. It's spiritual to me. It's political. It's personal. It's a part of my family. It's my framework. It’s how I move through the world.

When I first said, “Hey, I know that I'm gay,” it was at a gay club, and it was an interesting adventure for me. But looking back, I've always been a queer kid, and I feel like other people knew I was different in that way. I remember being younger and always wanting to wear my shirt off. In college, that's when I really started questioning not only just my sexuality but really my gender.

Challenges Facing the LGBTQ+ Community

If you have the belief that trans people don't exist or that queer people aren't supposed to be in a relationship, then you can discriminate against them. We have been raised in a heteronormative white society, deeply rooted in Christianity. There is no room to think about queerness or to think about sexuality or gender in an equitable way, to where people see folks as human, because [society has] an innate belief that LGBTQ+ folks do not deserve to exist on this planet.

Advice for Younger LGBTQ+ Generations

They’re doing it, keep doing it. Some of these kids are light years ahead. I’m an elder at this point. It's just beautiful to see: It's pure queerness, like the way they dress, their politics, the way that they have relationships, the way that they see the world, so outside of a certain norm.

That also goes to my elder folks. I want to tell them there's a younger generation that needs leadership and support. We need to do a better job of stepping up to be able to support them.

What I Wish the Public Understood

I think one thing to remember is that all of those things, [being Black, queer, trans], can exist in the same space, and not take away from each other, and not in a hierarchy, not cancel one another out. In terms of identity, I cannot separate my queerness and Blackness. People have to understand that you can't pull those identities apart. They're all on the same plane.

Who or What Inspires My Work

A part of what inspired me was just that I wanted to learn why it was bad to have sex — that was really what drove me. I was just like, “Why? What is the big deal about having sex?” I got into sexuality work because I wanted to teach other people. It’s harm-reduction work.

Van Bailey (he/him) is a diversity, equity, and inclusion expert, as well as a disabled trans man, organizer, strategist, and facilitator of healing spaces. He is based in Temple Hill, Maryland, and is passionate about creating positive representations of Black queer men of size and providing safe spaces to explore queer boihood. 

First Identification With the LGBTQ+ Community

I started using language in college. I knew that I was queer, however, ever since I was a young child. I was identifying with things like tomboy. People would say that I was the odd duck in the family. In terms of language and having a sense of identity around being a queer person, when coming out in the late '90s, early 2000s, it's just not language that I felt was being used in the community that I was a part of — so there were terms like "butch" and "stud" to identify the male aspects of my identity — but I didn't really understand my trans identity until I went to grad school.

Challenges Facing the LGBTQ+ Community

For me, I cannot separate my racialized identity from my queerness, so for me as a Black queer person, having to navigate systemic oppression on multiple levels is always a challenge, right? Black trans people, who are often not a part of the conversation, are in a constant place of grieving because we are so used to losing people in our communities year to year, and maybe not even having it acknowledged properly with the right names and pronouns. In my current work around bias, we are in a country that believes in fairness rather than equity, and so those things are pervasive, and we are typically putting Band-Aids on conditions that really need overhaul.

Advice for Younger LGBTQ+ Generations

Even though people may not believe you, you know who you are, and you should do everything you can to live an authentic life because if not, there will be deeper repercussions for your mental health. The only person who really needs to validate your identity and experience is you.

What I Wish the Public Understood

There is never a time that I'm not negotiating my trauma in how I show up in spaces, so it is ever present for me, because there are multiple systems at play that are consistently trying to disenfranchise me. When we talk about minority stress, when we talk about racial battle fatigue, there are multiple pieces around my identity that are feeling that all at the same time.

What Inspires My Work 

I'm inspired as a co-parent, raising a child through a queer lens, having a level of consciousness of the future. Being future minded is ever present for me, thinking about this child in a world that has so much pain in it. I think about my child, and I am also inspired by trans elders, people who have survived multiple systems of oppression and have fought so hard.

T.J. Tallie (he/they) is an associate professor of African history at the University of San Diego. Tallie identifies as a cis-adjacent male: “More than just a simple he/him,” but they say it’s a closer fit than other labels. In their work, Tallie brings a queer lens to historical indigenous practices suppressed by colonial regimes. 

First Identification With the LGBTQ+ Community

For me, it was a long process moving toward it. I was raised in an evangelical background, so that made it a bit harder to sort of begin to suss out and understand that. I recognized by about age 16 that I was attracted to a variety of people that were beyond the heterosexual spectrum.

By the time that I was 18, there was a sort of recognition that it was like a sexual identity, although it wasn't a personal identity yet. It was probably at about 20 to 22 where I was low-key out to people, but I was formally out to all people in almost every aspect of my life at 27.

Challenges Facing the LGBTQ+ Community

I think there are a variety of approaches, and I think one answer would be that these challenges are as intersectional as the people themselves. Yes, there are potentially existential or legal, physical, challenges for people who are LGBTQ+ identified, but it really does often intersect with their other types of vulnerabilities or their lack of vulnerabilities, right?

Advice for Younger LGBTQ+ Generations

It is not your job to make spaces better for you. By this I mean, let me be very clear, it is not your job to make the world less hostile, and it is not your job to make straight people's lives more interesting, and it is not your job to help bridge these divides. You are not on this earth to bridge a variety of peoples. You are not a tool. You are not a roadway.

What I Wish the Public Understood

First off, being Black and queer is f***ing awesome. Not everybody gets to be either one of those, and I'm so sorry that many of you miss out! That must be awful, but it also comes with unique intersections of both immense creative power and potential that shapes so much of our culture but also at the same time, unique marginalization and violence.

Who Inspires My Work 

I'm often inspired by my students, who are incredible and are often willing to think through the hard challenges — and challenge themselves. They're far more able to articulate their desires, needs, and purposes than I was at that age.

Hess Love (they/them) is a nonbinary community organizer and writer from Baltimore. Love’s writing examines a variety of issues surrounding feminism, queerness, and Blackness. Their poem on the trauma that can accompany Black breastfeeding often goes viral during each year’s Black Breastfeeding Week. 

First Identification With the LGBTQ+ Community

I first identified as part of the LGBTQ+ community in high school. That identity was a loosely kept secret amongst my friends, many of whom were also queer. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gained access to more language around sexual orientation and gender. The queer identities that I’ve come to inhabit have evolved and continue to do so.

Challenges Facing the LGBTQ+ Community

Quality of care within the medical system. Going beyond verbal gender affirmation and support, often people engage with our bodies with an assumptive lens of cisgender, heteronormative navigation. They miss out on experiences that impact our health and often the only healthcare education that considers queer folks is around STDs and STIs.

Advice for Younger LGBTQ+ Generations

My advice is to invest in self-discovery early and often. Get your hands on as many things that are willing to teach you without trying to bend you to their will. Interrogate what you know about family, spirituality, work, rest, and pleasure, and realize that some things need to evolve and some things that you were taught were actually helpful.

Understand that there is no experience in this life that takes everything away from you. You always have the ability to use the magic of regeneration in your life. Reinvent yourself; rebirth yourself; keep reclaiming yourself at every stage in your life. You are holy, liberated ground.

What I Wish the Public Understood

The things we take for granted — the ability to secure a job, housing, access to quality food — are things that queer trans people of color, especially queer trans Black people, face a lot of hurdles toward obtaining. There are a lot of ways that we often have to compromise ourselves in order to secure basic necessities.

What Inspires My Work 

Community and everyday acts of kindness inspire my work. People who reclaim ancestral history and community-centered ways of knowing simultaneously anchor me and give me hope. So many traditions center around taking care of not only ourselves but each other, and being a dutiful steward of the earth. It’s in these models that I see the possibility of a world that’s free from anti-Blackness — because it has happened before.

Shay-Akil McLean (he/they) is a queer trans-masculine educator and social and natural scientist who studies evolutionary genetics, among many other scientific disciplines, currently residing in Buffalo, New York. Their interdisciplinary approach is underpinned by an insistence on decolonizing the sciences for racialized people and improving the health and wellness of their communities. 

First Identification With the LGBTQ+ Community

I’d spent the majority of my childhood trying to perform cisgender heteronormativity, from around age 7 on up. It was clear that I was trans and nonbinary, since most of the trouble I was in surrounded me failing to perform Euro-colonial femininity.

I just didn’t have the language for it until I was around 22 years old, after reading and getting involved in community organizing that I began to be able to find the language I needed and started building a space where I felt comfortable enough to identify as a queer and nonbinary trans man.

Challenges Facing the LGBTQ+ Community

Settler state-sanctioned patriarchy is the main issue that many queer folks in Settler America are experiencing, and it manifests across industries and throughout our personal and work lives. The recent striking down of Roe v. Wade, the denial of gender-affirming care, and the constant attacks on nonbinary and transgender children all stem from Euro-colonial patriarchy.

Advice for Younger LGBTQ+ Generations

It’s important to know how to think for yourself, so that you can have the information you need to make whatever choices for your life. Other worlds are possible only if we hold ourselves accountable and do the work it takes to build communities that prioritize people over profits.

What I Wish the Public Understood

I want the public to know and understand racism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy in America, and the roles that they play in keeping those social systems functioning at the expense of racialized and queer peoples.

Who Inspires My Work 

For me, the why of my work started at a young age. I remember being about 6 years old and recognizing patterns of health, illness and death, life and sickness of the people around me. Death was everywhere, and I, for the life of me, could not understand why. My greatest fear then, and now, was losing my maternal grandmother. After all this time, I’m still that same little Black trans boy who very desperately wanted to figure out how to heal his grandma and keep her safe.