Queer Icons
Icon /ˈīˌkän/ noun. a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or worthy of veneration.
In honor of Pride month, we’re celebrating Blackness, queerness, and the creative spirits that give voice to the Black queer experience. This list lifts up some incredible writers, artists, and educators of this century, who decades after Stonewall, continue to live into the revolutionary legacy of Pride through their commitment to exploration in their activism and their artistry.
These icons offer to the world their brilliance and insight as a gift and we are better for it.
Explore their work.
Share their stories.
Get inspired.
Queer in this context is of course gay meaning beyond the binary of social systems and structures, defying hetero-normative conventions and gender roles. Here we take that definition further. Expanding it to uplift the inherit queerness of the Black experience, celebrating artists who speak to the kind of boundary pushing that started the first of many LGBTQIA+ liberatory actions more than 50 years ago.
Jasmine Mans | Poet
“I met a girl
who holds me
like she is fighting
for me
in her sleep.
If you ever decide to age,
love, invite me.
I’ll retire my bones
to make you tea,
and read you poetry.”
Ayana V. Jackson | Visual Artist
“Especially when it comes to historical documents, we often assume that the past is fixed. In doing so, however, we risk reproducing the arrangements of power that normalize White supremacist mythologies and therefore domination of non-White people. By confronting the archive, new systems of knowledge can be created. New knowledge can, and should, include new memories.”
Ericka Hart | Educator
“If I come in off the bat and I’m talking about queerness and trans people, and I don’t know, threesomes, that opens the floor to talking about pretty much everything because [it is clear that I won’t] shy away from talking about topics that people may find are hard or challenging to discuss.”
Yrsa Daley-Ward | Writer
“Do not go too far for peace and quiet do not run too far because the country can be as loud as the city too noisy in its stillness and anyway, there will always be your breath which, hard as you try, you cant do without you cant run away from. There will always be your heart beating stronger and louder the harder, the further you run.”
from Bone
adrienne maree brown | Writer
“Right now, emergent strategy is how we can intentionally get into the right relationship with the planet and with each other. Emergent strategy is focused towards people who have a desire to change the world. They see that something is wrong. They see that there's injustice, imbalance, and that deep transformation is needed. The question is, how does one transform oneself in order to bring about that transformation? It's also about creating the right relationship to change.”
Gabrielle Smith | Educator
“My favorite part of Non-Monogamy is the fluidity it allows me. No longer do I feel like my relationships have to be loaded with an end goal. No longer do they have to be strictly platonic or strictly romantic. They can just be.”
Jalen Amir King | Visual Artist
“Let’s stretch, challenge, mystify these Black things and look at them through an artistic context…that’s all that surrealism tries to do. It takes the common and puts it in this new atmosphere, and forces you to look at it differently.”
Devin-Norelle | Activist
“My community is my rock and foundation. To find a safe space and find others can be a powerful thing, motivating one another to take one more step forward and not feel so alone. That is a lot of the reason why I’ve been so excited to see the conversation around depression come to the forefront, to see support tools and resources developed that are more tailored to the various and unique intersections of our diverse community.”
Golden | Photographer
“I think that what I'm trying to do with a photograph is to visually show you what that process is like. This living is a byproduct of surviving anti-Blackness and surviving the transatlantic slave trade, but also surviving the day-to-day. I'm trying to show that all those things are happening together at once in a visual way and also to write about it. I feel like that's where the poems and the photography come together.
They are both attempts to do that.”
from Interview with Them
Want to highlight more Black queer visionaries? Submit a name and links to their work below!
