Peace, family! Welcome to The Tea! As we welcome spring, we are in deep gratitude for our communities’ resilience and love. This year, we’ve been dealing with a lot. From the legislative attacks on trans youth and women, to the detainment and lack of necessary urgency to #FreeBrittneyGriner, we’ve had so much to fight against and for. Through it all, we still find joy and prioritize our healing. While working to free ourselves from the systems that oppress us, we have to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves and our beloved communities—beyond survival.
In this issue, we are: uplifting three dope transgender, gender-nonconformig, intersex, queer (TGNCIQ) folks working to help us heal; sharing an interview that covers reproductive justice, sexual violence, gender-expansive identities, and what consent looks like within our communities; hearing from a guest writer about The Healing Practice of Kink; calling you in to participate in our first-ever Pride community issue of The Tea in June; and of course, putting you on to What We Are Vibin’ To this month! Thanks for reading!
Black TGNCIQ folks are more visible than ever, which also means we are at risk of being harmed by individuals and systems rooted in homophobia, transphobia, and anti-Blackness. Being visible can lead to empowerment, and is almost always followed by opposition from those who feel threatened by that power—especially when it forces them to confront their beliefs.
Alok Vaid-Menon said, “Something so small and irrelevant like how I walk and gesture and the tinge in my voice had such a catastrophic impact on the feeble imaginary of my peers. It was a constant lesson: both that people have been taught to fear the very things that have the potential to set them free, and that there are no such things as queer issues, there are just issues that people have with us. What is the queer struggle but the unfettered imagination of other people?”
Centering our imagination and healing during times like these is essential. Meet three amazing TGNCIQ folks who are reimagining what it looks like to heal our Black TGNCIQ community:
Prentis Hemphill (they/them) is unearthing the connections between healing, community accountability, and our most inspired visions for social transformation. Prentis is a therapist, somatics teacher, facilitator, political organizer, writer, and the founder of The Embodiment Institute.
Prentis is the host and creator of the popular podcast, Finding Our Way, which entered its second season in January 2021 and the iTunes Top 100 podcasts chart in its first week.
For more than ten years, Prentis has been working with individuals and organizations during their most challenging moments of change: navigating leadership transitions, moving through conflict, and realigning practice with values. Prentis does all of this with an embodied approach, ensuring that our intentions and ideas can be lived out and practiced in our lives and through our bodies.
Fundamentally, their work is to disrupt the complacency and comfort of mainstream healing and therapeutic models, and infuse what we know of justice, repair, and accountability into our deepest work of transformation. Their belief is that the reclamation of feeling and relationship makes room for justice in our lives and in our world.
Marisa Hall (she/her) is an herbalist and movement facilitator from Berkeley, California, who is currently based in upstate New York. She is also the founder of Augustine Herbals, a small-batch herbal medicine initiative that fuels her ongoing project, Herbal Medicine for Black Lives, which offers Black people anywhere in the U.S. to receive limited runs of herbal medicine free of cost.
She’s the co-founder of Queer Healers, an online directory of queer practitioners who offer a broad spectrum of healing modalities. Marisa takes a holistic approach to healing by offering modalities that encourage inward exploration, balance, and access to deeper and more sustainable joy. Her hope for anyone she works with is for them to walk away feeling grounded and embodied in their healing journey, with more capacity to reach further toward a more abundant state of being.
Toni-Michelle Williams (she/her) is an Atlanta-based performance artist, embodied leadership/somatics coach, and the co-founder and executive director of Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, Inc. (SNAPCO). SNAPCO came together in direct response to the criminalization of sex workers in the city of Atlanta. Since then, they have led and won campaigns that divest from the criminal-legal system in Atlanta and invest back in our community.
Toni-Michelle embodies supernatural grace and sacred silliness as a tool to tap into joy and satisfaction. She believes in the power of collective transformation of Black people. Toni-Michelle also serves as a somatics teacher with Generative Somatics and a student of Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD).
Who are some amazing folks in the TGNCIQ community that you’d like to see featured in The Tea? Living or Ancestors. Well-known or Unsung.
Nominate them here.
As an autistic, Black & Indigenous, queer femme, I’m told that the world has access to all of me, all of the time—access to my smile and my interest when I’m walking down the street to get home, access to my free labor when large brands ask me to “collaborate” with them in exchange for “promotion,” access to my culture when white people decide to wear Native ceremonial headpieces for Halloween, access to my mental energy and expectations of my patience when I’m expected to “just adjust” or “be less sensitive” when a restaurant is blasting music and has just turned on strobe lights.
In the kink space, though, there are boundaries and rules for how everyone is expected to engage. Scenes are constructed by both the top and the bottom that involve a consensual plan for play. There’s a community that allows space for submission, dominance, make-believe, masochism, sadism, aggression, crying, laughing, intensity, tenderness, stillness, fulfillment, care, meditation—all within the realms of consent and clarity. And it feels freeing. Kink affirms my agency over my body—that no one has access to me, my identity, or my energy without my explicit permission. In a world where I have to fight for that every single day, kink reminds me that I’m in complete control. The careful balance between play and pain I engage in through the practice of BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism) silences the movement of my overactive, overanxious mind.
When I first started my kink journey around eight years ago, it was difficult to find images of queer, Black, disabled and differently abled, fat, gender-fluid bodies in BDSM. And when I did, oftentimes it looked like the person had been stripped of their power rather than empowered by their desires. So, I knew that I had to create the imagery I wanted to see and dig deeper to find the communities I knew were out there. Now that I’ve found a broader kink community (shout-outs to @LiquidandLeather, @VenusCuffs, @urdomsfavedom, @cleogirl2525, @troyorleans, @Obsidian_LA, @kolbybrianne, @therealkingnoire, @unboundbabe, @blackwolfleather, and more!) I’ve also learned how deeply kink is rooted in the Black community in particular (major gratitude to Jill Carter + Vi Johnson [who also founded the Carter/Johnson Leather Library @cj_library], Mistress Mir, Jewell Gomez, Sigrid from Lesbian Sex Mafia, and many others). Kinky Black leatherdykes, trans and nonbinary folks, and gay men have been paving the way for our sexually expressive, perverse selves for decades!
Kink in its nature is a sexual practice, and I don’t want to minimize or trivialize that. But in this sexual practice, which has deep history throughout our communities—through naming my desires, claiming agency of my body and what I do or don’t want to happen to it, engaging with play outside of the roles I feel obligated to have in day-to-day life, and pushing my body and mind to the limits of what I think is possible or “allowed”—I’ve experienced kink and BDSM to also provide a foundation for healing ancestral trauma situated in respectability, abuse, toxic gender roles, self-policing, and more.
The possibilities for us are endless. Let’s get free, y’all.
Follow Sara Elise on IG @saraelise333
Sara Elise is a Black & Indigenous, queer, autistic femme creative splitting her time between Brooklyn and upstate, NY.
She is a pleasure doula; the co-founder and designer of Apogeo Collective, a hospitality experience centering QTPOC; and the founder of Harvest & Revel, an event catering + design company. She is currently working on her forthcoming book with Harper Collins (Amistad Books), entitled A Recipe For More.
Sara Elise has been featured in Dazed, Playboy, Afropunk, Healthy-ish, Well + Good, Nylon, StyleLikeU, and them, among others.
With all of her work, she aims to challenge our collective reality by first reimagining and then creating alternative systems and spaces (both external and internal) for BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ folks to thrive.
She spends much of her thoughtspace contemplating pleasure, pain, healing, destruction, and growth—and how inextricably those concepts are linked. To that end, Sara Elise has deep interests in BDSM, ritualization, relationship dynamics, and the development of personal awareness and well-being. You can follow her Instagram @saraelise333
Who are some amazing folks in the TGNCIQ community that you’d like to see featured in The Tea? Living or Ancestors. Well-known or Unsung.
Nominate them here.
Click here to watch our Tea correspondent (and M4BL Mass Engagement and Communications Coordinator), Tomme Faust, sit down and talk with Breya Johnson, who organizes with the Abolishing Patriarchal Violence (APV) table within the Movement for Black Lives. The APV table’s mission is to end the epidemic and legacy of patriarchal violence that terrorizes and dominates women, girls, LGBTQIA, and other gender-oppressed people within Black communities. Breya is a queer Black woman and identifies as a womanist, Black feminist, cultural worker, and freelance writer. Breya says, “I also identify as an abolitionist, so really having to take a queer and gender-inclusive approach to how I understand things like patriarchial violence. . . . The queer Black feminist framework helped me see all different varations, scopes, of harms.”
Tomme and Breya discussed everything from the intersections of reproductive justice, sexual violence, and gender-expansive identities, to what care and consent look like within our communities. Watch here and drop a comment on the page!
This is What We Are Vibin’ To this month! Check out these dope queer and TGNCI folks from our community who are doing amazing things.
Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and gender- and genre-busting artist Jay Marie is Holy (they/them) is on a mission to reclaim ✨W-Holy-ness✨ in a binary world meant to break. Their new single is fun, light, and shows the love that queer folks across the spectrum deserve, which is “big love” in all sense of the phrase.
“I Weigh” with Jameela Jamil is a space to have open and honest conversations with thought leaders, performers, activists, influencers, and friends on their own experiences and stories about their mental health. In this conversation with TS Candi and Tahtianna Fermin, they discuss the compounding challenges that impact the livelihood and humanity of Black trans people.
The State of the Hustle captures the experiences, motivations, hopes, and demands of sex workers across the state of Missouri. In the face of hostile living and working conditions—COVID-19, legislation like FOSTA-SESTAA, HIV criminalization, and local penal codes criminalizing sex work—Missourian sex workers are pushing back. This report details the state of sex work in Missouri from the perspective of sex workers and sets the stage for meaningful reform.
What have you been vibin’ to this month? Let us know which Black TGNCIQ artists, books, movies, shows, etc., you have been feeling this month! We might feature them in future issues and credit you!
Share here.
This June will be our first Pride Month edition of The Tea, and we want to include YOU! Submit a piece of writing, visual artwork, music, a recipe, or anything else that you’d like to share with our community, and we will include the selected works in the issue! If selected, you will receive a $250 honorarium and full credit for your entry. Click here to make your submission today! Due by April 25, at 11:59pm EST.
