Laverne Cox, Dyllón Burnside and George Johnson join PRIDE episode of ‘Dear Culture’

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For Pride Month, the Dear Culture Podcast is celebrating the Black LGBTQIA community.

The episode comes after last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision expanded worker protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include gay, queer, and trans people. Prior to that, it was legal to fire an individual over their gender and sexual orientation.

Decades of activism has moved the LGBTQIA communities from the margins to the mainstream. Hosts Steven Cornelio, theGrio‘s Video Director, and Gerren Keith Gaynor, Managing Editor at theGrio, ask the question: “Dear Culture, how far have we come and how much further do we have to go?”

Read More: Queer entrepreneurs explain how CBD company is owed to Black, LGBTQ people for Pride

As Gaynor notes, society has reached a sort of breakthrough for queer and trans lives in the movement for Black lives. Earlier this month, nearly 15,000 people took to the streets of Brooklyn to support Black trans lives.

“It’s important we identify that it’s about time we’re all included in this fight. Black Queer people have always been in the fight for sure,” said Cornelio.

Of the three Black women who founded the #BlackLivesMatter movement, two of the women identify as queer. Queer and Black liberation are not separate struggles. The environment in which Black queer children grow up is about “talking like this, walking like this” instead of naturally letting the child identify as they are, notes Pose actor, Dyllón Burnside.

It’s not even about sexuality or gender, it’s the assigning of gender and culture in a way that places queer kids and adults in boxes and not allowing them to live in natural human instincts. 

Read More: Billy Porter speaks up for Black LGBTQ: ‘Our lives matter too’

Speaking on the homophobia within the Black community, All Boys Aren’t Blue author George Johnson says, “Blackness is inclusive of Queer people, they think we’re at war with our Blackness. When it’s like no, you’re at war with your Blackness. Because you fully don’t understand that your Blackness has to encompass people who have a different identity than you.”

Emmy-nominated actress Laverne Cox notes that Black queer and trans people have existed since the beginning of time. With her Netflix film, Disclosure, Cox believes the work she’s doing is “teaching people to reckon with internalized transphobia, homophobia, and anti-Blackness.” Her goal is to open hearts and minds and change them. 

“I believe everyone in America has internalized the values of a white supremacist culture that devalues Black bodies and stereotypes Black people,” said Cox.

To hear the entire conversation on Dear Culture, listen below:

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