Black Queer Studies Collection

The raw poems inside Song of My Softening studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. Poems open wide the questioning of how we express both love and pain, and how we view our bodies in society, offering themselves wholly, with sharpness and compassion.

A transformative memoir that reimagines the conventions of love and posits a radical vision for healing. In Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America. Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it – to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world. With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness of spirit – not to mention a thrilling, and unrivaled, storytelling verve –Another Word for Love makes an irresistible case for life, healing, the fullness of our humanity, and, of course, love.

Tired of not having a place to land, twenty-year-old Akua flies from Canada to her native Jamaica to reconnect with her estranged sister Tamika. Over the span of two fateful weeks, Akua and Tamika visit significant places from their childhood, but time spent with her sister only clarifies how different they are, and how years of living abroad have distanced Akua from her home culture. Akua confronts the difficult reality of being gay in a deeply religious family, and what being a gay woman in Jamaica actually means. By turns diasporic family saga, bildungsroman, and terse sexual awakening, Broughtupsy is a profoundly moving debut novel that asks: what do we truly owe our family, and what are we willing to do to savor the feeling of home?

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective – the tropes, the presumptions – Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.

An inside look at the music born, bred, and perfected in Chicago. Chicago house music originated in the city's Black, gay underground in the late seventies and became one of the most popular musical genres in the world by the end of the century. In Chicago House Music: Culture and Community, Marguerite Harrold tells the story of the genre's rise and the prolific creators who have sustained it for decades. Full of interviews and first-hand accounts from the people who stood behind the turntables, carried crates of records, or danced until dawn, Chicago House Music is the history of an art form that continues to be a force for social interaction, spiritual liberation, and community today.

Snapping Beans offers a collective narrative of Southern queer lesbian women and gender-nonconforming persons. Blending autoethnography and oral histories, Jayme N. Canty explores how both geographic location and social spaces, such as the Church, intersect with categories such as race, gender, and sexuality to shape and mark identity. Just as the intergenerational practice of snapping beans provides an opportunity to slow down, Canty enables readers to make space and to hear a new Southern narrative.