Season 2 Episode 14: My Gay Curriculum w/ Tina and Krista! Welcome back folks! This time I am in conversation with two friends of mine, Tina & Krista, about the ⁠Gay Curriculum. Tina started for me when I came out a couple of years ago.

Tina hails from Louisville, Kentucky, and is your soon-to-be favorite rich lesbiauntie. A double Scorpio with a dark and brooding mood and fierce loyalty to those she allows into her queendom, she lives life on her own terms. She is a pop culture enthusiast and an unflappable cynic. In her professional life, she manages crisis, curates inclusion, and holds court with her subjects.

Krista McQueeney is a sociologist, meditator, grammar nerd, a Gemini with fairy energy, and a lesbiauntie. She is an award-winning professor, a published writer, and a professional editor who loves to help people of all ages discover their passions and connect through writing. She is working on a book about white womanhood where she does the painful but necessary healing work of trying to unlearn white supremacy from the inside out.

Here we discuss all kinds of things - from my coming out process and all the emotions attached to it, to them reflecting on their own coming out stories and the histories of queer and lesbian culture, to the impact music has had on all of us coming more into ourselves. This is a conversation you will want to come back more than once because of the richness of queer history given here.

For the full unedited 2 hours please go to my Patreon.

Sources mentioned in the episode:

Music/Musicians: Tracy Chapman; Meshell Ndegeocello (albums "Bitter", "Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtapes", and "Comfort Woman")

TV Shows and Movie: "A Luv's Tale" (both show and movie), "L Word"; Black Mirror episode "San junipero".

Books: "Does Your Mama Know: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories" ⁠by Lisa C. Moore⁠; "If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past" by ⁠Christopher Castiglia⁠ & ⁠Christopher Reed⁠

Episode 10: Learning To Live. This is the final episode of Season 1 and this time I do some reflecting on what this first season has taught me about what it means to actually live. And in doing so I know I will be back for a season 2 because this has been a fun ride.

Season 2 Episode 13 Thoughts While High w/ Donnell. Welcome back ya'll! This episode I am talking with Donnell A. McLaughlin, AKA @donnellwrites on Tik Tok and IG. This time around we smoked up and had a conversation while elevated about music, hip-hop and the Diddy lawsuits, community, the present moment, and why we have to dream now of the types of communities we WANT instead of focusing on what we don't. What happens if we break repetitive public conversations that keep us in the same discursive loops? And what does the smoke help us make space for so that we can create the realities we say we want? All that and more this episode!

You can find Donnell @donnellwrites on ⁠IG⁠, Tik Tik and YouTube

Episode 9: Abolitionist Astrology. This episode is a long, but good one. This time I am conversation with ⁠Laura Chung from the "⁠Awaken and Align⁠" Podcast, and we talk all things astrology and abolition. In this present moment we need to look to different reference points to help us make sense of the violence we are seeing and experiencing that is being fed back to us as what is needed for "freedom and democracy". What happens if we reject that? What happens if we allow our humanity to come forward instead of allowing these nation-states to dictate our next moves? The stars, planets, and zodiacs can help us with this.

Episode 8: Justice for the Ancestors. In this episode I ask the question "What is justice for our ancestors?" This is a real flow of consciousness this time around as my body, soul, and mind come to a place of acceptance of what is and focus on what possibilities we can dream and conjure to create new worlds. This is where the ancestors come in, as they have been screaming at us to believe ourselves and come back to other ways of knowing and being. And as we all bear witness to the genocide being enacted in Palestine, the Congo, and Sudan (and there are even more), the reality that we are all living within the colonial project is front and center. So then, what does justice look like for our ancestors who were also suppressed? Because justice for them is justice for us as well.

Episode 7: The Ancestors Are Smart. In this episode I talk about how my ancestors had to get creative in getting me to hear them. And it came via a reading with a Hougan in Haitian Vodu that began the cracking open process so I could again hear AND trust my dead. I get into that and more, so have a listen and let me know your thoughts and own stories below!

Episode 6: Talkin With The Dead. Welcome back ya'll! In this episode I am talkin about the dead and my relationship to them. As always I bring in some astrology and liberation theory and put that in conversation with my experiences both as a kid and now with ancestors and the dead. And I go into my own complicated relationship with my bloodline as a mixed race Black woman.

Episode 5: Sittin With Myself - Lessons From Osun. This is Episode 5 ya'll! I'm rockin and rollin and in this episode I go into some musing about lessons I am learning from #osun through the planet transits of Venus and her signs of Libra and Taurus. For me Venus and Osun energy are parallel and it is through astrology that I learn from and work with my ancestors and Orisa. Here I talk love, relationships, and coming out of hermit mode. And it is the nodal transit in the signs that Venus rules (Libra and Taurus) along with Venus herself being in the sign of the sun - Leo - all summer that is really shinning a spotlight on what relationship really means and looks like when you get real with yourself.

Episode 4: The Ancestors Are Queer. In this episode I talk about the relationship between our ancestors and queerness. To know our ancestors means to gain a deeper understanding of Self. Which means we have to question the assumptions we have about who we are and how we are trained to see ourselves in rigid/binary ways. This is where queerness enters. For me it was my elevated queer ancestors and Orisa who helped me not only see and embrace both my queerness and gayness, but in doing so I was able to see the larger ways the spirit of capitalism and Christian white patriarchy makes its ways into Black spiritual spaces. And it clouded the ways my readings were interpreted by babalawos who were aligned with a more patriarchal lens of relationships.

Episode 3: The Body. In this episode I open with the Montgomery Brawl of August 2023 as a way to introduce the topic of the Body and how the more we are in our bodies the more we can learn to connect with our elevated ancestors. And this is part of us deconstructing from the dehumanization we learn to do to ourselves and one another in these capitalistic societies. I talk about my own institutionalization of seeing my body as a location of service and sport, and how neither really allowed me to fully see myself until I let it go. And in that letting go, that is the space needed for our elevated ancestors so we can truly hear them and begin to trust in ourselves and our own knowing.

Episode 2: Pleasure. This episode I talk about what the spirit and energy of Pleasure has been teaching me, starting with the Orisa Osun and continuing with astrology and the conversations Venus has been having with all us lately. I explore how I have been working with my pleasure through classes, in my dating life and fashion, and through body work.