By loving on my partner like this in public, I now see how this act of counter-proposing is also an approach for the world: showing what equity looks like stamped on two hearts.
When I came out, I thought I would never get married. Few of my LGBTQ+ friends had even held long-term relationships. I had never even seen a gay wedding before. I thought the best I could do was be in a happy long-term partnership, unmoored from legal titles.
When Malcolm’s surprise proposal landed in my lap in July 2020, I honestly could have been content there: having had the mirage of low expectations whisked away. As a trained observer, I began to notice things in the hype: how all the labor of planning the surprise was also compounded by the…
Five Ways to Foster an Intersectional Pride
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes.
This Pride, June 2018, will mark nearly three years since I came out to my family and began the hard process of embracing whatever came next. What came next, initially, was a flood of “pride”: acts of overcompensation for pain, shame, and explaining something I could never change. I needed that phase to deal with my “velvet rage.” But as I become a fully-realized man and successfully gain internal and communal acceptance, it is time for something more sustainable.
This Pride, I want to introduce an idea. I call it being “sincerely queer” — the…
The Secretary of HUD is causing more harm than good, and we need a national intervention
Dr. Ben Carson. Where do I even begin? Maybe it’s best to start with the end in mind: a swift resignation and cooperation with the Robert Mueller investigation. And with all the quickness. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has already had suits filed against it by civil rights groups for stripping protections from housing choice vouchers. And with Secretary Carson’s recent move to infantilize HUD by removing language about anti-discrimination, clearly he ain’t backing down.
So as Carson seeks to deflect the growing tension around Furniture Gate, we need a cultural intervention. Remember the way Black…
After years of waiting, we can finally feast on the going-back-for-seconds, Pan-African jambalaya of Black excellence that is Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther. Not only will it join the rarefied ranks of billion-dollar blockbuster feature films, but it jumpstarts the simmering genre of Black science fiction, which had largely been left to the cinematic wayside since the 1990s.
As a ’90s baby, I confess nostalgia ultra to that epic first generation of Black superhero films: Spawn, Shazaam, Blankman, Meteor Man. But Black Panther feels more grand and unprecedented: almost like Disney/Marvel got an elaborate infusion of Nigerian-wedding-level of Black excellence, whereas the…
Matthew Jordan Miller, Ph.D.
Urban witness, Black wordsmith, queer worldbuilder wondering about cities, humanities, and power. Forthcoming author. Faculty @UPenn School of Design. 🖤💎✨🌈
