Busy Being Black

The urgent problems of our time require collective engagement with the generative offerings of our imaginations. Whether our work calls us to challenge the extractive practices ruining our planet, educate a new generation of thinkers and creators, or to put out into the burning world poetry that awakens and enlivens, each of us carries – and feels the weight of – a responsibility to help fashion a better future. My guests today offer us ways to tackle the demands of liberation through active engagement with the Black radical imagination and tradition. I'm in conversation with Melz Owusu, Marai Larasi and Yomi Sode. Melz is the Founder of the Free Black University and a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge. Marai is a feminist advocate, community organiser and consultant who has worked in social justice for over twenty-seven years. And Yomi is an award-winning writer and the recipient of the 2019 Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. This conversation was recorded at Rehearsing Freedoms, a festival of community health, healing, movement building, arts and culture created and curated by Healing Justice London. And together we explore how the Black radical imagination helps shift us out of oppressive landscapes and times, and towards just and dignifying worlds that affirm Black aliveness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julian Joseph is acclaimed as one of the finest jazz musicians to emerge this side of the Atlantic and his career has been characterised by many ground-breaking advances: he was the first Black British jazz musician to host a series of concerts at London's Wigmore Hall and the first to headline a late-night televised performance at the BBC Proms. We explore how jazz and life are both animated by the art of improvisation, the methodology that undergirds the educative offering of the Julian Joseph Jazz Academy, the instruments and symphonies that enchant him, the artists and composers he recommends to inspire us to adventure, and his message to those who feel like they have music within them, but aren't quite sure how to get it out. Julian plays Gershwin with London Philharmonic Orchestra on 22 November – and subscribers to Field Notes have an exclusive discount on tickets. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black with Josh Rivers is the award-winning podcast that centres and celebrates queer Black liveliness. Help these enlivening conversations reach more people, by leaving a rating and review. Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Questioning and then breaching our limits is a salient and consequential concern — and a quest Elijah McKinnon undertakes as founder and executive diva of Open Television (OTV), a platform and media incubator for intersectional storytelling. Elijah's insights into how their imagination is supported and encouraged by their pragmatism made me think and reflect on how I engage with my own; and we wax lyrical on a shared desire to become undone. We explore the difference between surrender and intentional release, the differing demands of and confusion between transparency and vulnerability, and refusing to be bound by other people's ideas and labels. Elijah reflects on their stewardship of OTV, the care required to sustain artistic vitality, and how an entitlement to softness has transformed their sense of duty to themselves and the communities they love. About Elijah McKinnon Elijah McKinnon (they/them) is an award-winning entrepreneur, strategist and visionary from the future currently residing on planet earth. They are the founder of Chicago-based consultancy and creative studio People Who Care, which specialises in campaign development and management, brand strategy and identity and cultural productions exclusively for non-profits and grassroots initiatives. Elijah is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Open Television, an Emmy-nominated non-profit and web TV platform for intersectional artistry. About Busy Being Black Sign up for Field Notes – Busy Being Black's newsletter offering to encourage your wonderlust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8 Kokomo City takes up a seemingly simple mantle — to present the stories of four Black transgender sex workers: Daniella Carter, Liyah Mitchell, Dominique Silver and the late Koko Da Doll, who share their reflections on desire, confronting taboos, gender's many meanings and the ways Black trans women are harmed by both structural and cultural impositions that render their lives less valuable than any other. The film is the directorial debut of D Smith, a veteran of the music industry who was shunned when she came out as trans. In creating Kokomo City, D Smith has captured an unapologetic and cutting analysis of Black culture and society at large from a vantage point that is vibrating with energy, sex and hard-earned wisdom – and tenderness, intimacy and humour. We explore how the artistic process that made Kokomo City possible reflects what D's learned through her own survival, thriving and liveliness; the role of forgiveness in clearing room for creative expression; and creating art about Black LGBTQ lives that intentionally extends beyond the confining limits of mainstream LGBTQ media narratives. D says she was inspired to create a work of art that not only calls us to imagine and produce more and better options for Black trans women in the world, but also one that cis Black women, her brothers, uncles and father would encounter and which might provoke necessary and life-sustaining conversations about the world we want to inhabit together. About D Smith and Kokomo City D. Smith is a Grammy-nominated producer, singer and songwriter. She is the director of Kokomo City, which was executive produced by Lena Waithe, and the film won the Sundance Film Festival's NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award, as well as the Berlinale's Audience Award in the Panorama Documentary section. Kokomo City is released in the UK and Irish cinemas on 4 August, 2023. A special thank you to Campbell X for always advocating for Busy Being Black and thus making this conversation possible. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At just 23 years old, Leon Benson was sentenced to 61 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. At 47 years old, Leon is a free man after his case was taken up by lawyers at the University of San Francisco Law School's Racial Justice Clinic. Over 25 years, Leon consumed as much knowledge as he could get access to, which helped him explain the complex dynamics of not only his physical form in relation to confined space, but also of how his mind made sense of the injustice of his experience and the experiences of those like him. We explore the parallel experiences of those confined within and beyond the walls of prison, the awakenings and reckonings that helped him build emotional and psychic resilience and the near impossible task of embodiment in a place that traffics in sensory deprivation. We discuss the moments and people in 2020 that would be instrumental in his release and how people born guilty in America maintain faith in the idea of justice, which he believes is a natural human impulse and, like hope, is also a spiritual practice. About Leon Benson Leon's case was championed by The Racial Justice Clinic at the University of San Francisco's School of Law and led by all-star attorney and author Lara Bazelon. The particulars of his case are the focus of season three of investigative podcast series Suspect. Leon performs as EL BENTLY 448 and shares his survivor's journey on Innocent Born Guilty, an explosive hip hip record full of poetry, philosophy and world history, inspired by Black-led social justice movements. Innocent Born Guilty is available now from Die Jim Crow Records. Throughout his incarceration, Leon was supported by family, friends and strangers on the internet, like Shannon Coleman and Steve Willet. For those interested in supporting charities in the UK addressing miscarriages of justice and prison reform, please consider supporting the work of Appeal and the Prison Reform Trust. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer and organiser Kenyon Farrow is fighting for better infrastructures of support for queer Black people vulnerable to and living with HIV. He trained as an actor before he pivoting to activism in response to the fault lines he saw emerging as gentrification, criminalisation and healthcare inequalities began to rock his personal and extended networks. He has since coordinated campaigns large and small, local, national and global at the intersection of public policy, public health and social justice. Today, we explore his upbringing in Cleveland, Ohio – including watershed encounters with gay Black film and literature – and the events that led to a hard pivot from acting to activism. He shares how his work at the policy level is work that centres queer Black liveliness, and speaks lovingly about house music and house music spaces as evidence of the ways queer Black communities create for themselves that which is often structurally denied: spaces of love, care, spiritual renewal and healing. About Kenyon Farrow Kenyon Farrow is a writer, editor and strategist working at the intersection of public health and social justice. Kenyon has a long and distinguished track record working in communities impacted by HIV. BET named Kenyon a "Modern Black History Hero". About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this year, writer, actor and director Rikki Beadle-Blair gave an electrifying and affirming keynote speech at Let's Debate, a conversation about creativity and culture in the UK, produced by arts commissioner Mediale with the support of Arts Council England. As Rikki does, his speech centred his insistence that marginalised communities create art unashamedly; and at a time of increased cultural and political disregard for queer life around the world, Rikki reminds us all that art-making is life-giving. So it feels like the right time to resurface our 2018 conversation, in which he asks us to pay closer attention to the beauty that abounds around us and within us, and to our role as creators of the worlds we want to inhabit. Watch: Let's Debate Keynote for Inclusivity and Relevance About Rikki Beadle-Blair Rikki Beadle-Blair MBE is a British actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, singer, designer, choreographer, dancer and songwriter of British/West Indian origin. He is the artistic director of multi-media production company Team Angelica. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Farzana Khan is the tender titan leading the transformative work of Healing Justice London, which works to dignify lives made vulnerable and to cultivate public health provisions for collective liberation. She's a writer, cultural producer and award-winning arts educator, and her work centres community health, repair and self-transformation, rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-informed practice. We share a love for the poetic wisdom of Kevin Quashie and language and practices that engender tenderness. And our conversation today explores how Farzana and the team at Healing Justice London are thinking through and building new infrastructures that respond to the ongoing needs of vulnerable communities. Undergirding this work is Farzana's commitment to holding and facilitating spaces that invite change through a deeper engagement with the world of feeling and wisdom in our bodies. We discuss the importance of attending to our grief, mobilising with an improved class consciousness and the long work of un-internalising hundreds of years of colonial thinking. Farzana calls on us to refuse the individualising thrust of the colonial regime, so we can then free ourselves for the transformative work of extending ourselves to each other's aliveness. References in this conversation include: "Unworlding: an aesthetics of collapse", "the endless possibilities of open-source design" and Rehearsing Freedoms. About Healing Justice London Healing Justice London builds community-led health and healing that creates capacity for transformation. Working for and with communities surviving state and systemic oppression, Healing Justice London build towards futures rooted in dignity, safety and belonging and free from intimate, interpersonal and structural violence. Their practice nurtures the work of radical and holistic medicine to support our personal, collective and structural transformation. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is a divine vision for all of us and Mikael Owunna hopes his work can be a vessel for the transformation of our consciousness. Trained in the mechanics of bioengineering and empowered by the imaginative possibilities of photography, his artistic practice conjures queer Black people as embodied reflections of the black and brilliant cosmos. He does this work because he believes we, as queer Black people, are heirs to African cosmological traditions, which place us as the stewards of spiritual experience and as gatekeepers between the realms of the physical and the numinous. Our conversation explores how Mikael utilises technology to help us reencounter ourselves as divine beings, what 50 different expressions of queer Black liveliness taught him about his own capacity for self-actualisation and how art helps us push back against distorted images of ourselves. About Mikael Owunna Mikael Owunna is a Nigerian American multimedia artist, filmmaker and engineer. He is the Director of Mikael Owunna Studios, LLC., a full-service art production company, and the co-founder of Rainbow Serpent, Inc., a Black LGBTQ art nonprofit. His art emerges from the generative intersection of technology, art and African cosmologies, with the aim of reanimating our imaginative possibilities. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping create the Busy Being Black artwork. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us have an intimate and ongoing relationship to shame and shame forms part of a very public conversation about what it means to be queer in the world. And until my conversation today, which is with social worker and psychotherapist Rahim Thawer, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what shame is. I was wrong. I wasn't aware, for example, of how shame really operates, nor how it prevents the radical intimacy necessary for our collective liberation. Our conversation today explores how shame thrives on white supremacist ideas of desirability, how we learn to live with shame's imprint and residue and the four defensive behaviours we exhibit to separate us from our shame. Rahim also shares why attempts to love ourselves before we can love anyone else will always leave us wanting; and says that contrary to the dominant culture's insistence that shame is a problem for the individual to address in isolation, we must learn that love for yourself only develops in positive relationships with other people. For those who'd like to dive deeper, Rahim has a number of articles available on Medium. About Rahim Thawer Rahim Thawer works as a psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, facilitator and public speaker, sessional lecturer, writer and community organiser. Rahim is particularly interested in examining innovation in queer relationships. He has dedicated almost ten years to community organising with Salaam Canada, a national volunteer-run LGBTQ Muslim organisation. He was also a co-editor and essay contributor in a local history anthology entitled Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Aboud believes that art needs to be political. Whether in its critique of power or its provocation of joy and laughter, art must help move us towards freedom. Her cabaret-play, Splintered, gathers the first person experiences of 12 queer women in Trinidad and Tobago and weaves together these experiences to show how queer women living under threat of homophobic violence manage to cultivate and nurture intimacy, joy and resistance together. Emily says she made an explicit and intentional decision to avoid centring the trauma queer women know so well, deciding instead to let laughter, irreverence and satire act as the vehicle for a necessary critique of what post-colonial countries and cultures decide to hold onto. We explore Emily's complicated feelings about carnival, her adoration of the mythic shapeshifter Lagahoo, and her challenge to what she calls the false binary between art and science. Emily says art and science are asking the same question in two distinct but connected ways and we discuss how Splintered is evidence of her scientific approach to theatre-making. About Emily Aboud Emily Aboud is a theatre director, a film director and a writer of mixed heritage, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, based in London. She won the Evening Standard Future Theatre Award in 2021. She is an associate artist at the Bush Theatre and Artistic Director of Lagahoo Productions. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we think of the sweeping constellation of music that is Americana, we could be forgiven for thinking of it as a genre that doesn't really speak to our lived experiences as queer Black people. Emerging in the 1940s as music borne of the weathered realities of rural life in the United States, Americana is perhaps most closely — if not accurately — associated with the region of Appalachia and the experiences of white Americans. But as my guest, Paula Boggs, makes clear: there is no Americana — no bluegrass, no country, no folk music — without the backbeat of African influences and the musical ingenuity of Black Americans. Paula Boggs fronts the Paula Boggs Band, whose music is described as “Seattle-brewed soulgrass.” She is an accomplished musician and songwriter and the COVID-19 pandemic offered her an opportunity to reevaluate and research, §and to come into closer relationship with her ancestral lineages — an experience which animates Janus, the newest release from the Paula Boggs Band. Today, we explore how the pandemic has altered our understanding of place and belonging, how the segregation of public radio helped obscure the West African roots of bluegrass and why bluegrass is the genre Paula feels most at home within. She also shares the recipe for her 30-year relationship with her wife, a secret sauce which offers insights into how we might create a more graceful civic life together now and in the future. About Paula Boggs Paula Boggs served as Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at Starbucks Corporation from 2002 to 2012. In 2009, NASDAQ©️ named her its top general counsel. She also had a 14-year career in public service, including as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and in various capacities as an attorney for the U.S. Army, the Department of Defence and the White House Office of Legal Counsel. She served eight years as a Regular Officer in the United States Army, earned Army Airborne wings and a Congressional appointment to the US Naval Academy – among America's first women to do so. Paula is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and earned a bachelor's degree in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University. She was also an adjunct professor at the University of Washington School of Law and she served under President Obama on the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Theory and Play of the Duende, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca extolled the artistic necessity of duende – a poetic and artistic force that emerges from the darkness of our wounds. Lorca believed that art could only be great when duende was joined with wisdom and inspiration; the romance of angels and muses alone is not enough to create art that resonates with our fleshy, human experience. It was duende I thought of while in conversation with my guest today, Mojisola Adebayo. She is a performer, playwright and theatre maker, who often draws from the deep wells of Black pain to address the extractive practices that have robbed Black people of our lives and environments for 400 years. She marries these histories of extraction with the fantastical, adventurous and more-than-human to create art that challenges, provokes and inspires. Today, Mojisola takes us on a journey from Goldsmiths University to Antarctica, to space and back again, in a conversation that explores utilising performance to challenge the sanctity of whiteness, what an orgasm-seeking space odyssey tells us about the world-changing potential of queer Black pleasure, and how the reanimation of the life and story of Henrietta Lacks prompts us to consider our own genealogical and cosmic immortality. About Mojisola Adebayo Mojisola Adebayo is a Black British performer, playwright, director, producer, workshop leader and teacher of Nigerian (Yoruba) and Danish heritage. Over the past 25 years, she has worked on various theatre and performance projects from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. She has acted in over 50 theatre, television and radio productions, and devised and directed over 30 scripts for stage and video. More information about STARS: https://tamasha.org.uk/projects/stars/ More information about Family Tree: https://www.atctheatre.com/production/family-tree-uk-tour-2023/ About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, I'm in conversation with queer Black theologian and Anglican priest Father Jarel Robinson-Brown, whose theology and pastoral practice offer a re-embodied understanding of Christianity. Jarel is one of many theologians, poets and philosophers whose work has offered me an affirming and vitalising framework for understanding and practising my evolving spirituality. You'll have heard me talk about author Sophie Strand, biological philosopher Andreas Weber and poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama, who joins me today for a conversation about his new book of poetry, Feed the Beast, which features poems wrestling with sexuality and religion. Today, we discuss the body as a site of divine and erotic intelligence, the potential of poetry to help us approach and unlock our desires and Pádraig reads four of his poems: “Monster”, “Exorcism”, “Someone” and “How to Be Alone”. About Pádraig Ó Tuama Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet and theologian from Ireland. His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland, The Harvard Review, Gutter and the Academy of American Poets. He is host of the podcast Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios and his newest collection of poetry, Feed the Beast, is available from Broken Sleep Books. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Father Jarel Robinson-Brown is a queer Black theologian and Anglican priest, whose 2021 book, Black, Gay, British, Christian, Queer: The Church and the Famine of Grace, takes the Church and its leadership to task for its exclusion of queer Black bodies, citing the historical and ongoing “ecclesial terrorism of the Christian community through its speech and its silence”. Far from justifying queer Black bodies of faith as worthy of communion, Jarel argues that Christianity as it's ministered and practised now evidences a famine of grace, a wayward deviation from the inclusive ministry of Jesus.  In our conversation, Jarel gives an honest appraisal of the doctrine of forgiveness and shares how his theology has been transformed in relationship with those he ministers to. He also diagnoses the disembodiment of our faith as a symptom of the Church's bodyphobia and says that the separation of faith and prayer from sex and pleasure prevents us from knowing and enjoying God as fully as God wants us to. And as the church continues to rattle through an identity crisis, Jarel also shares with us his vision for what Christianity becomes at the end of the world as we know it.  About Father Jarel Robinson-Brown Father Jarel Robinson-Brown is the Assistant Curate at St Botolph-without-Aldgate and Holy Trinity Minories in the Diocese of London. He is also Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, Salisbury and Co-Chair of the LGBTQ Christian Charity OneBodyOneFaith, which works for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the Church. His books and publications are available at jarelrobinsonbrown.com. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, I'm in conversation with author and scholar Dagmawi Woubshet, whose 2015 book, The Calendar of Loss, has transformed how I engage with the work Black gay men created during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and '90s. In this clip from our 2018 conversation, HIV activist and community organiser Marc Thompson shares insights about the Black gay experience in London in the 1980s. About Marc Thompson Marc Thompson is an HIV activist and writer. He established The Love Tank in March 2018 and is one of the original founders of PrEPster. Marc lead Positively UK's peer mentor programme until June 2018 and he is now Strategic Programme Lead for Health Improvement at the UK's Terrence Higgins Trust. He has a rich history of community organising and engagement, co-founding Big Up in the late 1990s to respond to the sexual health needs of Black queer men. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I cherish my copy of Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill's 1991 anthology, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. It is a soaring, sensual and at times heartbreaking collection of the writings, plays, poetry and speeches of some of the Black gay men we lost during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. I cherish it because it has affirmed my unequivocal spiritual lineage to the Black gay men who came before me – and because it offers such piercing first-person insight into how Black gay lived and loved. As I've learned from Dagmawi Woubshet, Brother to Brother is also an effervescent and enlivening demonstration of grief as a public and political act. In The Calendar of Loss, Dagmawi illuminates how AIDS mourning challenges how we have come to think about loss and grief, insisting that the bereaved can confront death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice. We explore how political funerals during the AIDS crisis honoured those who died — and would die — by exposing and confronting governmental neglect, what we can learn from those whom Dagmawi names “disprized mourners” about how we utilise our rage in our present moment; and the ways queer Black men maintained a fierce erotic intimacy that would animate their legacies long after their deaths. Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press. About Dagmawi Woubshet Dagmawi Woubshet is a scholar of African American literature and art at the University of Pennsylvania, working at the intersections of African American, LGBTQ and African studies. The Calendar of Loss has transformed how I engage with the art and writing of those we lost during the AIDS crisis and I'm excited for his second book, Here Be Saints: James Baldwin's Late-Style. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his essay, "Nothing Personal", James Baldwin writes: “One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith.” What light do we see in ourselves and in each other amid the literal and metaphorical darkness of our time? And what do we need in order to answer Baldwin's call to be light bearers? To encounter our light, we often need courage, which my guest today defines as “acts that bring something necessary to the surface.” Prince Shakur is a queer, Jamaican-American author, journalist and videomaker, whose work is steeped in his commitment to Black liberation, prison abolition and queer resilience. His memoir, When They Tell You to Be Good, was released in October and won the Hurston/Wright Crossover Award, which honours probing, provocative and original new voices in literary nonfiction. Connected by our love for James Baldwin, Prince and I explore how our anger can often feel like a reaffirmation of our Blackness, defining and cultivating the courage we need to live according to our beliefs and how his desire to create spaces of transformation for others acts as a transformative force upon himself and what writing his memoir taught him about telling the truth. The music for this episode was provided by 3CNB. Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've been drawn to expressions of art and life that speak to a wisdom shared with me by mentor: "Your ministry is in your DNA". The work we choose do in the world, the people we choose to be against the odds, is how each of us does the ministering necessary to ensure we and our communities can thrive. We live as an expression of our truth. And the ministry we're engaged in is one that requires defiance, which my guest today offers through a prodigious kaleidoscope of artist expression. Nakhane is a multi-disciplinary artist and musician from South Africa whose music, writing and film-work strikes an unusual balance between vulnerability, rage and the erotic. Nakhane grew up in the throes of Christianity and felt compelled to renounce their sexuality in order to do what was asked of them. But the religious community Nakhane gave up so much for was not there when Nakhane needed them – their queer family was. And so our conversation today explores what their excommunication from the church taught them about their capacity for love – and to be loving, their refusal to abide by the dictate that Black people should always take the high road, the importance of understanding our chosen art forms as both multi-faceted and as a calling to be taken very seriously and their advice to those who are resisting against a world that wants them to be anything other than who they are. Pre-order and save Nakhane's new EP, Leading Lines, here. Listen to Nakhane's new single, "My Ma Was Good", here. Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can we look at the stars queerly? And if so, how might queer star-gazing help orient us towards earthly liberation? To help me answer these questions is Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein – a theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist. Her book, The Disordered Cosmos, presents a Black queer feminist challenge to the dominant understanding of physics and calls for a more robust and intersectional approach to ensuring the sciences and the night sky are available to all.  Three lessons in particular stand out to me from this conversation: The first is that science is queer. If we understand queerness as a refusal to aspire to the norm, then the insatiable curiosity that queerness demands is well-suited to a science like physics. Indeed physics – perhaps the most difficult and ever-changing of the sciences – could be the queerest science of all. Physics is for us. The second lesson is personal. Ahead of my conversation with Chanda, I told her I was feeling nervous because I'm not a scientist: do I have what it takes to hold space for her enchantment with something I don't fully understand? Chanda assured me that I don't have to pass a physics test to understand what lights her up or to read her book, and so I was reminded of something Mary Oliver wrote: “the touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together”. The third lesson is that physics is the science concerned with how the universe behaves; and whether through scientific inquiry, poetry or lived experience, is that not also the work we're engaged in together here?   Our conversation explores how Star Trek upholds and challenges ideas about who is representative of the human race, how queer Black feminisms have taught Chanda to look to the stars in more generative ways and why dreaming of a future where every Black child has access to the dark night sky requires robust interventions across culture and society right now.  Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My conversation this week is with artist, producer and educator malakaï sergeant. During the recording of our conversation, malakaï flagged the carceral geographies many of us have become so accustomed to – limiting and murderous as they can be. In the moment, I grabbed one of my favourite books of poetry, The Actual by Inua Ellams – an incisive, fiery and tender defence of Black liveliness. My favourite poem in the collection is "F*ck / Sunflowers", which speaks with such stunning heartbreak about the realities so many are forced to endure when robbed of the soil that could sustain us. With Inua's permission, I'm reciting it for you today. Content warning: this poem infers death by suicide. The Actual is published by and available from Penned in the Margins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2020, as we enclosed ourselves to protect ourselves and others from the ravages of Covid-19, I noticed for the first time in a long time the resonant chorus of birdsong. Without the sound and smog of vehicles, the natural world around us began to sing more loudly. As I discovered through a conversation between Krista Tippett and sound ecologist Gordon Hempton on the radio programme On Being, the return of birdsong – to the world around us and to our consciousness – is much more than something beautiful to listen to: humans have evolved to not only detect the faintest birdsong in the distance, but to move in its direction because birdsong is the primary indicator of habitats prosperous to our survival.  But the birds of our ancestors sang in a very different jungle. The concrete jungles we inhabit now are increasingly inhospitable to our survival. And as malakaï sargeant explores with me today, tapping into and utilising the ancestral and evolutionary wisdom within us is urgent work. What else do we know? In order for us to survive and to do for others what our ancestors have done for us, malakaï says we must continue to dream outside the carceral geographies of the cities we can feel trapped in. To help themself and others do this, malakaï does dream-enabling work creating and holding space for queer Black creative expression in the arts. From theatre-making to artistic direction, poetry and performance, malakaï enables art that not only challenges the carceral limitations of our world, but which offers what Katherine McKittrick might call “liberatory clues”. I caught up with malakaï ahead of their pilgrimage to Jamaica where they reconnected with their liveliness through a closer proximity to land and lineage; and our conversation today is one of diasporic tensions, cultural knowledge, queerness as cosmic and ancestral gift – and how malakaï knows they sparkle when they sleep. This conversation was made possible with funding from the AZ Creative Fund. Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Busy Being Black is the award-winning podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Each week, I have conversations with academics, artists, activists, thinkers and change-makers who help me and listeners understand ourselves as complex and complicated, messy, beautiful and vibrant people making the grandest and noblest attempts to thrive. Whether we're searching for our place in the vast expanse of the universe or tracing our ancestral lineages through dance, guests on Busy Being Black bring their hard earned wisdom to your ears and heart each episode. From Black Trans Feminist theory to poetry, HIV/AIDS activism and questions of Black masculinity, Busy Being Black centres queer Black hope, as we discuss what it means to show up as ourselves against the odds.  Busy Being Black is by us, for us. In the words of poet and activist PJ Samuels: "Come into this; it's flavoured, fully seasoned. Taste. Look what was made for you." #busybeingblack busybeingblack.com twitter.com/_busybeingblack instagram.com/_busybeingblack instagram.com/_joshrivers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've been utterly enchanted by Walter Brueggemann's 1978 book, The Prophetic Imagination. In it, this preeminent theologian helps us understand the role of the prophet: a truth-teller, whose ministry utilises grief to criticise the dominant order. In doing so, prophets energise those suffering under brutalisation and awaken us all to possibilities of life beyond what we know. Part of what the dominant order does to us all is stilt and stunt our imaginations. Brueggemann refers to this stunted imagination as the “royal consciousness”: our imagination is limited in the interests of the ruling elite. It does not have to be this way. Today, many of us understand that limited imagination through the imposition of gender, the stereotypes we fight against that limit how we as Black queer people can show up in the world and the arduous but necessary conversation and organising around abolition. In their new book, Black Trans Feminism, Marquis Bey makes clear that even the identities we've come to hold dear need to be done away with since they have been fashioned under duress. Many of us are increasingly comfortable within these identities – myself included – but Marquis says that in the future of the Black Trans Feminist imagination, we won't be Black or Trans or Man or Woman. We don't yet know what we would be because our anchor for understanding ourselves in the world is relative to the world we live in. Marquis says we must lean into the terror of the unknown. Marquis was reluctant to accept my crowning of them as prophet in the order of Moses, but if the role of the prophet is to awaken us to possibilities beyond our imaginations and to energise us to action, then Marquis and Moses have much more in common than I'm willing to ignore. Our conversation today explores enchantment in the quotidian, the Black trans feminist imagination and poets and theorists as prophets. This conversation was made possible with funding from the AZ Creative Fund. Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers. Tickets for Busy Being Black Live on Saturday, 5 November with Melz Owusu at Hackney Bridge. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my favourite quotes is from the late Toni Morrison: “Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that that makes it elegant.” For those of us inclined to share ourselves through the creative process, we can also be navigating imposter syndrome, structural barriers and limiting beliefs about ourselves. The reminder that our attempt is the grandest part of it all feels like a reminder worth shouting repeatedly.  Dionne Edwards is a wonderful example of Morrisonian attempt in action. She's a screenwriter and director, whose debut feature film Pretty Red Dress debuts this month at BFI London Film Festival. We explore why it's important for us to embrace the grandiose, the beauty and weirdness of distortion in the creative process, and telling the stories of flawed people with care. We discuss the impossibility and undesirability of perfection and why she thinks utopia is a wonderful ambition — as long as we never get there. This conversation was made possible with funding from of the AZ Creative Fund. Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm still revelling in an acute awe, inaugurated by the images captured by the Just Wonderful Space Telescope in July. As a big and beautiful conversation about our significance continues, a persistent narrative about how small we are has emerged and I suspect that the language deployed to make us insignificant as we gaze at the stars, has something to do with the dominant culture's denuding of our imaginations, which my guest today says requires an emotional athleticism. To help us reckon with our collective awe and our responsibility to harness our imaginations for the futures we deserve, I'm in conversation with Ahmed Best. Ahmed is a multi-hyphenate story teller, artist, educator, and futurist – as well as an Adjunct Professor at USC School of Dramatic Arts and the Stanford d. school. You may also know him as the actor who played Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars. We explore afrofuturism as an imaginative framework that helps us work through current and oppressive realities in order to fashion a future worthy of us all. And the need for Black people – especially – to take seriously the project of engaging with what Ahmed calls long futures. He reminds us that the oppressions so many of us live through now are the result of someone's imagination. If we are to have any chance of helping shape the future, we don't have the luxury of not thinking about it. Together with Dr Lonny Brooks, Ahmed helps facilitate AfroRithms from the Future – a collaborative, design thinking, storytelling game that helps activate our radical imaginations by centring the experiences and wisdoms of Black people and BIPOC. This conversation was made possible with funding from of the AZ Creative Fund. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My conversation this week is with Ahmed Best, a story teller, artist, educator and futurist who helps facilitate the game Afrorithms from the Future. In this bonus episode, Ahmed and Afrorithms from the Future co-creator Dr Lonny Brooks take Long Time Academy host Ella Saltmarshe through the game. Afrorithims from the Future is a collaborative, design thinking, storytelling game that helps activate our radical imaginations by centring the experiences and wisdoms of Black people and BIPOC. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is episode 100 of Busy Being Black. To honour this milestone, my friend DYLEMA takes my seat to interview me. Busy Being Black emerged four years ago at a time of great personal distress – and transformation. I am unendingly grateful that you all keep showing up, tuning in and talking back. Busy Being Black returns on Saturday, 1 October, for what I'm calling Busy Being Black version four.  About DYLEMA DYLEMA is an acronym: Do You and Let Every Man Adapt. She is an artist, musician and spoken word poet, whose life and spiritual guidance continue to enrich and inspire my own. You may remember her voice from our soaring conversation in 2019, "When I Named Myself, I Became a Poet", which I encourage you all to revisit.  The voice notes included in this episode are (in order of inclusion): Max and Freya Powers, Lerone Clarke-Oliver, Adrian Jönsson-Iseni and Pádraig Ó Tuama. The poem included in this episode, "The Dancing Boy", was written and performed by Josh Rivers, includes vocals by Lazarus Lynch and was scored by Joshua Pleeter. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire, for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm in conversation with Rico Norwood, who opens our conversation with a beautiful and important introduction to Isaac Julien's seminal film Looking for Langston. As well as doing more justice to Looking for Langston's importance than I could, we open with this introduction because Rico flags an important word “quare”, which – as some of you already know – I have tattooed right across my throat. “Quare” was put forward by E. Patrick Johnson, the fairy godfather of Black queer studies, in his 2001 essay, “Quare studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother”. Part of what animates Johnson's theoretical intervention is an understanding that Black queer people and the non-queer people who birth, nurture and raise us, often have much more to offer the world than we're given credit for.  It is a “quareness” that energises my own cultural and intellectual inquiry and which brings me and Rico together, both as friends and conversation partners. Today we explore Looking for Langston's ongoing importance, the role cultural institutions like the BFI play in either gatekeeping or providing access to our quare cultural canons and how politics of respectability and representation continue to hinder our collective cultural memory. And together we attempt to answer an enduring question, one addressed often on Busy Being Black, how do we ensure that work that could be so important to our liberation isn't so continually withheld from us?  About Rico Norwood Rico Norwood (they/them) is an American Film and Video Game researcher out of the University of Southampton, who currently resides in London and Berlin. They hail from Houston, Texas but received their undergraduate degree in Mass Communications from Xavier University of New Orleans and their M.A. in Media Studies at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus. Their primary academic concerns are Black Queer Art and historical narratives through films, as well as Video Game studies with regards to race, gender, sexuality, and their development. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My admiration of Travis Alabanza runs deep. They were one of the first people to say yes to me and Busy Being Black at a time of tremendous uncertainty for me, and our 2018 conversation remains a firm favourite with listeners. The wisdom and insights Travis shared on art, gender, race and self-awareness are as relevant and salient today as then. I find them refreshing, not least for the ways they engage with the spectacle of curiosity that confronts them and trans folks daily. Travis reproaches with sass, or critique or silence: a questioning back that asks, ultimately, whether the rest of us know the role we play in the ongoing hostilities facing trans people. But Travis' work is not only, always or forever work about their experience as a trans person in a transphobic world, nor do they create to explain; which is perhaps most beautifully expressed in a statement made to Travis by writer and friend Kuchenga: "This is for us, baby, not for them." At the heart of Travis' new book, None of the Above, is a call to keep questioning who we are when no one is watching.  None of the Above is available to pre-order from Gays the Word, the UK's oldest LGBTQ bookshop. This conversation was recorded live at Shoreditch House in East London in May 2022, in front of an audience of friends, family and Busy Being Black listeners. A special thank you to Khaleel Johnson at Soho House, and to Matt Noades and his team at Anvil Audio. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2015 and 2016 were big years for me: in April 2015, I was shocked into my political awakening by the Baltimore riots, which erupted after the funeral of Freddie Gray. The rage and grief expressed through the riots inspired me to action: how might I be part of a solution? And a year later, in 2016, I stumbled on No Tea, No Shade, an anthology of nineteen essays from scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. No Tea, No Shade helped focus the fire stoked by the riots towards something generative, rigorous and tender. Busy Being Black is a product of these two events — and a life of searching and questioning before, during and since. So, you can imagine how honoured I am to be in conversation with Dr Jafari S. Allen, whose essay "Black/Queer Rhizomatics" opens No Tea, No Shade and was the first piece of Black queer theory I ever read. We discuss his latest book, There's a Disco Ball Between Us, a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” We explore the impact of the church and Black folk on his lyric use of language, tussling with the wisdom offered by our ancestors and forebears, his beautiful friendship with freedom fighter Sister Nehanda and how inhabiting or embodying a Black fullness can make space for all the ways we've decided to, or need to, show up in the world – for protection, survival and thriving. About Jafari S. Allen Jafari S. Allen is the Director of Africana Studies, Inaugural Co-Director of the Centre for Global Black Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Miami. Dr. Allen's scholarship and teaching has opened new lines of inquiry and offered re-invigorated methods of Black feminist narrative theorising in anthropology, Black studies and queer studies. His latest book, There's a Disco Ball Between Us, was released on 1 March by Duke University Press. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've long admired the work of Da'Shaun L. Harrison. Like many of those I've come to encounter and adore over the past few years, Da'Shaun's work came across my timeline on social media and their incisive and invigorating intellectual offerings have had me hooked since. Da'Shaun is a Black, fat, queer and trans theorist and abolitionist, and in their debut book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness, they argue that to live in a body that is both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that limits us in ways we may have never considered. In our conversation today, Da'Shaun expands on the connection between anti-fatness and anti-Blackness, explains how diet culture persists as a tool of social control and offers up ways of thinking about how the policing each of us might do of our own bodies invariably impacts how we interact with – and even judge – those around us. Like all of the best intellectual work, Da'Shaun's intervention is grounded in a political awakening that took place at the community-level, where they say they felt safe and brave enough to explore who they wanted to be in the world; and so we also discuss how community-building has shown them what the future – or, a beyond as they call it – could look like, and they make a compelling case for the power of our imaginations to help us think beyond what we know. About Da'Shaun L. Harrison Da'Shaun L. Harrison is a Black, fat, queer and trans theorist and abolitionist in Atlanta. Harrison is the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, and a public speaker who often gives talks and leads workshops on Blackness, queerness, gender, fatness, disabilities and their intersections. Da'Shaun currently serves as the Editor-at-Large for Scalawag Magazine and is the co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, my conversation is with Black, fat, queer and trans theorist and abolitionist Da'Shaun Harrison. Their new book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness is an important addition in the fields of fat and Black studies, which offers us all necessary knowledge and insights to help improve how we relate to one another and ourselves. In this bonus episode, Da'Shaun and I explore the erotic and how the many barriers society forces us to erect around ourselves, preclude a deeper, necessary and potentially world-ending intimacy. Content warning: sexual violence. Da'Shaun Harrison is based in Atlanta and is the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the face of the ongoing and various violences experienced by Black women in the UK and across the world, Zinzi Minott wonders why more people don't ask, “What do Black women's bodies need?” It's a question I've been sitting with since we recorded our conversation, which includes us exploring what our duty of care is to each other. Zinzi is a dancer, artist and filmmaker and she's interested in ideas of broken narrative, disturbed lineage and how the use of the "glitch" can help us to consider notions of racism one experiences through their life. She is specifically interested in telling Caribbean stories, highlighting the histories of those enslaved and the resulting migration of the Windrush Generation. In this sweeping conversation, we explore her work commemorating the Windrush Generation, how we might show up better and more meaningfully for Black women and how her queerness kicked the doors open to her acceptance of what she calls her weirdness. Zinzi also explores her rearing in both the Pan Africanist and Black Radical traditions, and credits her belief in abolition with helping her hold space for those she encounters among her archival work and artistic practice. As she makes clear, the generations who came before us may not have had the attitudes or the language to hold who we have become in the world, but no one is to be discarded. About Zinzi Minott Zinzi Minott's work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies and politics. Zinzi explores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender and class. As a dancer and filmmaker, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance, and sees her live performance, filmic explorations and made-objects as different but connected manifestations of dance and body-based outcomes and inquiry. ​​BLOODSOUND is Zinzi's latest work and features newly commissioned prints, moving image, sound and sculpture and expands on her durational film work(s) FI DEM, released annually on 22 June to commemorate the Windrush Generation. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For many of us who've grown up in the so-called West, our understanding of what belly dancing is has been shaped by colonialism's legacy. What we've learned about or encountered as belly-dancing is actually a white-washed mishmash of several cultures, designed to play into the West's fascination with and manufactured fear of those designated Muslim. My guest today, Shrouk El-Attar, is an LGBTQ rights campaigner, electronics engineer and belly dancer from Egypt. She is currently working on a piece of interactive art – a belly-dancing robot – which troubles the line between technology and human, and between the east and west. Her desire is to return belly-dancing, or more accurately Egyptian dancing, to its roots – which, she reminds us, has little to do with the movement of the belly and was never a practice restricted to women.  Today we explore her experience as an asylum seeker, her fascination with technology and the moment she learned the people in her television set were there through the magic of engineering. She shares what she's learned about nations and borders and citizenship, the joy, refusal and revolution enabled through dance, and how she's turned her life experience and passion into both art and activism. About Shrouk El-Attar Shrouk El-Attar is an LGBTQ rights campaigner, electronics engineer and belly dancer from Egypt. She was named one of BBC's 100 Most Influential Women in the World 2018, UNHCR Young Woman of the Year 2018, and one of the Institution of Engineering and Technology's Top 6 Young Women Engineers in the UK in both 2019 and 2020. She is one of two artists taking part in Watershed's Winter Residences programme, which offers artists the opportunity to develop their ideas with the financial, critical, and technical support of Watershed. Watershed is the leading film culture and creative technology centre in the South West of England and champions engagement, imagination and ingenuity, working locally, nationally and globally from Bristol. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The late Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing – instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there.” And it is down there, among roots and earth, that Black trans gaming designer, archivist and artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is looking for our Black trans ancestors—those whose lives and stories have been lost to history and thus our collective memory.  Danielle believes we are each responsible for someone in the earth, and through her work, calls us to interrogate the roles we play in the ongoing violence directed towards our trans siblings. Her approach to this interrogation brings together AI and game design, and places us in situations where we have to make choices—choices that can feel impossible. And that is the point.  In our conversation today, we explore how she provides space and means for the expression of multiple Black trans essences; disrupting ideas about what an archive is, what we think it should do and who it should serve, by centring those whose lives and stories have been erased; how her residency at Serpentine, one of the UK's most important contemporary art galleries, is helping shape her understanding of the potential of humanity; and her ongoing research into and fascination with creating a Black trans AI that speaks back to us and makes decisions for itself. About Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist living and working in London. She creates work that seeks to archive Black trans experience, and uses technology to imagine Black trans lives in environments that centre their bodies – those living, those that have passed and those that have been forgotten. About Serpentine Danielle has long been part of Serpentine's network and last year contributed to their Future Art Ecosystems: Arts x Metaverse report, which analysed what the metaverse means for the future of art, artists and cultural institutions. In particular, how real change and collaboration is vital to support the ever-growing number of artists, like Danielle, who work with advanced technologies and use the virtual space as a site of social liberation and resistance. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I met Raven Gill in March 2020 at the Equality and Justice Alliance convening in Saint Lucia, just before our countries went into their respective lockdowns. We became fast friends. She is an outspoken and forthright activist, who does essential and life-sustaining work with trans and non binary Bajans through the civil society organisation she founded, Butterfly Barbados. In our conversation, we explore how she and the communities she fights for have navigated the challenges of Covid-19, the toll the weight of responsibility has taken on her over the past two years and how the positive image Barbados has earned on the global stage recently obscures some harsher realities for trans and non-binary Bajans. And she shares some of her more personal reckonings, including learning what she needs from her friendships, the chosen family she has gathered around her, and what — or rather who — is bringing her joy. About Raven Gill Raven Gill is a community organiser and activist and the founder of Butterfly Barbados, which advocates for transgender and non-binary Bajans. She works with the Barbados Family Planning Association, the Ministry of Health and with organisations regionally and internationally in order to redress and address the erasure of issues impacting trans people. Barbados is one of 54 countries in the Commonwealth, many of which still have colonial-era laws on their books that enable the discrimination against and persecution of LGBTQ people. And Butterfly Barbados is a member of The Commonwealth Equality Network is a network of 60-plus organisations working to uphold the human rights of LGBTQ people across the Commonwealth. UK-based charity Kaleidoscope Trust is host to the Network's Secretariat. Kaleidoscope Trust believes the UK has an important role to play in redressing colonial era wrongs and works with partner organisations across the Commonwealth to provide funding for programmes to both sustain and liberate LGBTQ communities. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place” is just one of the many powerful and lyric aphorisms that ennoble The Prophets, the New York Times best-selling debut novel from Robert Jones, Jr. – a story about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other and a betrayal that threatens their existence. Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer and thinker, and the creator and curator of the social-justice social media community Son of Baldwin. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Essence and the Paris Review. Today, in a far reaching conversation, we explore how The Prophets came to life and why he felt it so important to ensure queer Black love was neither denigrated nor ignored within it, his desire to correct the historical record, learning rebellion from his mother and making sure that queer Black people know they are loved, valued and have a purposeful place in the world. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, I'm in conversation with Robert Jones, Jr., author of The Prophets – his New York Times best-selling debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men. In this bonus episode, Robert reads an excerpt The Prophets, entitled “New Covenant”. Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer and thinker, and the creator and curator of the social-justice social media community Son of Baldwin. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Essence and the Paris Review. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edafe Okporo is an author and activist, who successfully sought asylum in the United States after years of violent persecution in Nigeria because of his sexuality. Since then, he's made it his mission to not only speak out against the ongoing violence faced by LGBTQ people in Nigeria, but to help those displaced by violence build new lives as close to the American Dream as possible. We explore his relationship to the idea and the reality of America, the importance of pleasure in our understanding of freedom, his refusal to participate in the spectacle of Black death and trauma, making space for his hopes, dreams and desires, and his complicated and evolving understanding of what it means to be a Black African man in America.  About Edafe Okporo Edafe Okporo is an author and activist. He currently serves as the Mobilisation Director at Talent Beyond Boundaries, and in 2022, Simon and Schuster will publish Edafe's first book, ASYLUM, a Memoir & Manifesto. He is also among the inaugural winners of the David Prize, which is modeled on the Macarthur Genius Grant and celebrates individuals and ideas that create a better, brighter New York City. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Phyll Opoku-Gyimah and Frank Mugisha are two powerhouse LGBTQ human rights activists. Phyll, who has been a guest on the show before, is the co-founder and executive director of UK Black Pride, Europe's largest pride celebration for LGBTQ people of colour, and the executive director of Kaleidoscope Trust, the UK-based charity working to uphold the human rights of LGBTQ people across the Commonwealth. She became widely known as Lady Phyll, after she turned down an MBE from the Queen, to protest the UK's colonial impact and legacies.  Frank Mugisha is a Ugandan LGBTQ activist. He's the founder of Icebreakers Uganda, a support network for LGBTQ Ugandans, and is the executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, or SMUG, an alliance of eighteen organisations supporting and advocating for the Ugandan LGBTQ community. Frank is a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, the Rafto Prize, the International Human Rights Film Award at Cinema for Peace, and has been recognised by the United Nations as a human rights defender. In 2014, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. We came together for Black Tech Fest 2021 to discuss the many and varied ways social media platforms are used to connect those fighting for their human rights, the impact of Covid-19 on their respective organisations and work in community and what they have to say to tech leaders at platforms like Facebook, who continue to overlook important insights from marginalised communities about how tech can be utilised for more good.  About Black Tech Fest Black Tech Fest takes place annually during Black History Month here in the UK and exists to inspire and create space for powerful conversations around technology, inclusion and innovation. #BTF21 About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tobi Ajala is the founder of TechTee, a complete lifecycle digital agency that specialises in software development and design within fashion and luxury industries. And Yasmina Kone is Senior Partnerships Manager at Beam – the world's first crowdfunding platform for homeless people. We came together at Black Tech Fest 2021 to explore navigating and excelling within industries that can be inhospitable to Black women, addressing and redressing some of the barriers that prevent those experiencing homelessness from re-entering the job market, challenging assumptions that we all have equal access to technology and therefore equal opportunities, and their advice to young Black people who see a world they want to help change. You can support Beam's current campaigns here and sign-up for TechTee's Device Scheme here. About Black Tech Fest Black Tech Fest takes place annually during Black History Month here in the UK and exists to inspire and create space for powerful conversations around technology, inclusion and innovation. #BTF21 About Busy Being Black Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“A part of each of us, our essence, is timeless, has never been harmed, and carries a dream it is waiting for us to bring into the world.” These are words from my guest today, Langston Kahn, whose new book, Deep Liberation, brings together the shamanic wisdom of ancient spirituality with the needs and demands of modern-day life— he wants to help us transform the emotional patterns that hold us back from healing.  Langston is a queer Black teacher and shamanic practitioner who specialises in radical human transformation. We began our conversation in the usual way, with me asking how his heart is, but for all the wonder of technology in the 21st century, we experienced some digital interference. So, we jump right into the meat of our conversation which explores grief, his journey towards Shamanic healing, connecting with our felt sense, our individual purpose as contribution to the fabric of the universe and using our voice in service of our vision. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Koritha Mitchell is a firebrand and one of my favourite people to follow on Twitter. She's Professor of English at Ohio State University and the author of two books: Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship; and From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture. Among much else in our far reaching conversation, we discuss why she pursued and expanded upon a connection between the lynching of Black people post emancipation and anti-LGBTQ violence now, the ways white people reaffirm their dominance with what she calls “know your place aggression”, how Black women have continually redefined success and citizenship in America and why it can feel so utterly satisfying to point out white mediocrity. As she says, we've been surrounded by whiteness our entire lives and we have not been surrounded by excellence. About Busy Being Black Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr Francesca Sobande is an author and academic whose book, The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain, explores the myriad ways Black women in Britain thrive, influence and are erased as they navigate social media platforms. We discuss disentangling a distinct digital experience for Black women in Britain, her ongoing interest in borders, citizenship and diaspora, and whether expressions of Black women's interior lives are possible on platforms designed for public performance. She cautions against a limited understanding of Black women's digital lives as always and only subversive and she reflects on the role poetry played in helping navigate, inform and shape her work—both as personal journal and vehicle for collaborative dialogue. About Dr Sobande Dr Francesca Sobande is a Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University, where she is Director of the BA Media, Journalism and Culture programme. She is the author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain, and To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu wants us to unleash our imaginations. A playwright, actor and director of Ghanaian heritage and raised in South London, he's committed to telling stories that are wild, seasoned and passionate. He's the director of a new play, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, in which six young Black men meet for group therapy, and let their hearts – and imaginations – run wild.  Our conversation explores the limitations put on expressions of our anger, building support for mental and emotional health in the process of theatre-making, exercising the muscle our imagination, a limitless Black Britishness and what he hopes we take away from the work he puts out into the world. About Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu is a playwright, actor and director. He's written for The Royal Court, directed at The Young Vic and performed at The National Theatre. He's received awards from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Roehampton University.  For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy is a new show from Nouveau Riche, written by Ryan Calais Cameron and directed by Tristan. The play runs from 12 October – 6 November, and tickets can be bought here. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lazarus Lynch is the multi-hyphenate artist behind Busy Being Black's theme music. He's a dear friend and someone I share a spiritual connection with, and I admire so much his ability to harness his creativity to create spaces, moments and music in the world that nourish, heal, provoke and soothe. Our conversation is a meditative exploration of our shared histories in the Black Church, the pursuit and expression of our individual songs, unlocking our hearts, building community, faith in ourselves and in others and the bravery and vulnerability it takes to kneel before someone else and wash their feet. About Lazarus Lynch Lazarus Lynch is an entrepreneur, author, musician and multimedia host. He is a two-time Chopped champion and the host of Snapchat's first-ever cooking show, Chopped U, and the Food Network digital series Comfort Nation. This year, he's one of the chefs selected to cater Vogue's 2021 Met Gala. He's the creator of Busy Being Black's theme music and his new album, Sanctuary, is released later this year. The song, Busy Being Black, was released by Lazarus in February 2021 and is accompanied by a music video, created by and starring a global cohort of Black creatives coming together to express, celebrate and centre our love for each other and our cultures. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Content warning: This episode explores imprisonment, police brutality, homicide, sexual violence and mental illness. Please listen with care.  I believe in the abolition of prisons, and while I'm still learning about imagining and building societies that prioritise care, restorative justice, and people over profit-making, I know that we should not be locking people up in cages.  Michael Tenneson, Kevin Woodley, Dane “Zealot” Newton, Phillip “Archi” Archuleta, Gilbert “Lefty” Pacheco, Jose “8Bizz” Talamantes and Frankie Domenico are seven men imprisoned at Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Canon City, Colorado. They are the musicians, from completely different walks of life and serving differing sentences, who make up the band Territorial.  Their new album, TLAXIHUIQUI (Tla-She-Wiki), is the first recorded music to make it outside the forbidding walls of Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility into the free world since it was founded 150 years ago. TLAXIHUIQUI (which translates to “the calling of the spirits” in the Uto-Aztecan language of Nahuatl) takes listeners on a visceral journey through violence and heartache to catharsis and hope. With these deeply personal songs, Territorial shines a light on the enduring human spirit in a divided country – and asks us all to consider whether or not we are prepared to heal the societies in which we so regularly put behind bars and walls those we are unprepared to properly care for. For those who are at the start of their journey in understanding prison abolition, like myself, there are a number of places to start. There's a wonderful TedTalk by Deanna Van Buren called “What a world without prisons could look like”. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who has long served as a prison abolitionist, is the feature of a profile in the New York Times, “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind”; and Angela Davis' book Are Prisons Obsolete? is serving as a reference point and learning for my own understanding of abolition. About Die Jim Crow Records Die Jim Crow Records is the first record label in the United States for formerly and currently incarcerated musicians. Their mission is to provide artists with a high-quality platform for their voices to be heard. A special thank you to Royal Young for his help in making this special episode a reality. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ted Brown is one of our most important and formidable elders. He's an activist and change maker, who's been fighting for the rights of black and LGBTQ people for over 50 years. An original member of the Gay Liberation Front, Ted was instrumental in organising the UK's first pride March through London. He's been at the forefront of campaigns to demand better treatment of LGBTQ people in the media and he's been a vocal advocate for addressing homophobia within Black communities and racism in the LGBTQ community. Ted and I sat down for a live conversation at UK Black Pride's 2021 virtual pride celebration, Love and Rage, to explore the sparks that ignited his activism, our shared connection to Bayard Rustin, what he's learned about love and rage, and his advice to a new generation of activists and change makers. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn't cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black's artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we honour the forgotten, whose work was once celebrated, and who gets to decide which work stands the test of time? These are questions we’re asked to consider in a new audio play called recognition, which explores the story and legacy of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – an Afro-English composer and conductor born in London in 1875. The play brings Coleridge-Taylor to life in conversation with Song, voiced by composer, musician, actress and writer Shiloh Coke.  recognition is one of eight plays forming Written on the Waves, an audio project presented by 45North. 45North champions, develops, and produces outstanding work by female-identifying and non-binary artists. Listen to the full audio play here: http://www.forty-fivenorth.com/writtenonthewaves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’m in conversation today with Shiloh Coke, a composer, musician, actor and writer who stars in a new audio play called recognition. In it, she voices Song, a Black woman composer who stumbles upon the work of Afro-English composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The play, and their conversation across space and time, asks important questions like: How do we honour the forgotten whose work was once celebrated, and who gets to decide which work stands the test of time?  In our conversation, Shiloh and I explore how she’s carving her own space in industries dominated by white people, her close relationship with her grandmother, coming into herself as a queer Black woman and how music offers her space for safety, joy and love. We discuss the importance of orienting ourselves and our work in our purpose, pursuing impact over recognition, and the conversation she hopes a queer Black woman will have with her work in the future, long after she’s gone. About Shiloh Coke Shiloh Coke is a composer, musician, actress and writer. She stars as Song in a new audio play called recognition. This episode features a clip from ‘Myoho’, which Shiloh composed to accompany a short film written by Pamela Nomvete, called Sisterhood for the Sake of Happiness. The film symbolises five generations of buddhists and artists from the African diaspora. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.  Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black’s artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices