Watching Pose from Nairobi

mah tongue is in my friend’s mouf —Zora Neale Hurston Soon after I completed high school, I worked at a small nursing home. Every few months, a certain kind of patient would come in: a young man, brought by family, rarely visited, visibly wasting. This was before antiretrovirals. He seemed terribly isolated and resigned. He...

Category is: Work!

Category is: Live! Work! Pose!—Pray Tell The second episode of Pose focused on work: the care work of being the mother of a house; the political work of challenging transphobic, misogynist, gay white publics; the have-to-eat work performed by Blanca in a nail salon and Angel in a peep shop; the freedom work of expanding...

Queer Returns

A point of departure: The advent of HIV/ AIDS is the moment that captures the real energies made possible by the outpouring of the carnal pleasures that Stonewall unleashed. Stonewall was queer sexual liberation, alongside heterosexual liberation, but HIV/ AIDS was citizen-making; the distinction is important. HIV/ AIDS worked to produce a very particular and...

No Tea, No Shade

A peculiar anxiety marks E. Patrick Johnson’s introduction to No Tea, No Shade. It emerges as repeated assurances that younger scholars respect and follow the work of older scholars. Listen: The black queer “children” who came of age during the burgeoning stages of black queer studies also learned from the lessons of their foremothers and...

Inxeba: Kwanda

I have been having trouble thinking-feeling about Kwanda—acted by the beautiful Niza Jay Ncoyini. I am always undone by scenes of anti-queer violence, from the insults and bullying to the beatings and killings. I am undone when queerness is treated as a synonym for disposability. Undone because of the impossible demand that truncation not be...

Inxeba

Inxeba is a sensitive exploration of toxic masculinity and repressed same-sex love, set against the backdrop of Ulwaluko, an initiation rite into manhood practised by the amaXhosa. —Pierre de Vos  In a country that has always celebrated diversity, Inxeba asks of Xhosa men whether they are able to welcome people who are queer, or whether they have to...

tender(ness)

They are sitting alone, dreaming a world, wishing for a little tenderness. Wishing for a different kind of tenderness, not the limp-stumble, bruise-soft after that lingers, not the aloe-rubbed, ice-packed relief, not the gravel-hard calluses where tenderness used to be. And now the thick-thick scar tissue where tenderness cannot be. The question of whether tenderness...

Queer African Studies: Personhood & Pleasure

I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am. —John Mbiti Let us face it. We are undone by each other. If we are not, we are missing something. —Judith Butler I have been reading bits and pieces of African philosophy focused on the problem of personhood. This particular exploration started when...

Moonlight

Water is another country. --Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return At first, the sound of water. Residence time.1 Black time. Black untime. The memory of water—the memory water has—the memory water is. We keep returning to the water. We keep being returned to the water. A face plunges into ice. Again. my...

random gay stuff

Within the Kenyan imagination, gay men come in two flavors: elite and commercial. Elite gay men are wealthy and powerful. Or wealthy or powerful. Either way, they command enough capital—economic, cultural, social—to navigate Kenya. Their capital protects them from hostile crowds. They can pay blackmail, if required. They can travel outside the country to be...