A Jamaican poet and Harlem Renaissance firebrand whose poems traced desire for men and women across borders, Claude McKay lived a global, fluid life that history tried, and failed, to straighten.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Through letters, three marriages, love affairs, and activism, Alice Dunbar-Nelson reveals how Black feminist, spiritual, and bi-coded lives were often hidden in plain sight, waiting for someone to read closely.
Countee Cullen
Caught between church, masculinity, and poetic longing, Countee Cullen’s bi-coded life shows how he chose beauty over spectacle, using classical form to insist that Black art could be elegant, universal, and free from being defined only by trauma.
June Jordan
June Jordan bent language until it could hold her whole life, Black, Caribbean, woman, mother, lover, freedom fighter. Through poetry and public truth-telling, she dismantled binaries of nation, gender, sexuality, and power, insisting that justice must be as complex as the people who demand it.
Dr. Ibrahim Farajaje
A multi-ethnic Berkeley professor, Sufi scholar, and activist, Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Farajajé wove together intersectional scholarship, spirituality, and lived experience, using literature and teaching to explore how identity, faith, and survival could coexist without reduction or rigidity.
Pauli Murray
Long before “gender-expansive” was part of our vocabulary, Pauli Murray lived beyond rigid categories while shaping American justice itself, fighting for voting rights, laying the legal foundation for sex-discrimination law, and planting the seeds that would transform both civil rights and feminism.
Ma Rainey
Decades before “coming out” was imaginable in the music industry, Ma Rainey sang openly about loving men and women, using the blues as a radical language of freedom, survival, and unapologetic Black womanhood.
Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson
From Grenada to Palm Beach and once Europe’s most dazzling Black cabaret star, Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson’s bisexual relationships and racial transgressions made him both desired and disposable in a world addicted to his brilliance and allergic to his humanity.
Kuwasi Balagoon
A revolutionary shaped by love, rage, bisexuality, and betrayal, Kuwasi Balagoon’s life asks what happens when Black masculinity is forged under violence, and whether liberation can survive when tenderness is denied.
Francis Thompson
A Black, gender-nonconforming former slave and survivor of the Memphis Massacre of 1866, Frances Thompson testified before Congress to expose racial terror during Reconstruction, revealing how gender, power, and respectability politics determine whose truth is believed, and whose is remembered.
ABilly S. Jones-Hennin
ABilly S. Jones-Hennin lived 81 years as a Black bi/queer man in America, organizing, loving, falling, returning, and never once agreeing to be less than all of what he was. This is the story of the grandpa most of us never had, and the door he left open wide enough to walk through decades after he first unlocked it.