I tune in to the Summer Olympics every four years primarily for one sport: Women’s Gymnastics. I like basketball, women’s tennis, track and field, and men’s diving, too. But Gymnastics is my bread and butter. I had the privilege of falling in love with gymnastics in the early 1990s, the golden era of Team USA. […]
Throwback Thursday: Living Single
Today’s Throwback Thursday has me digging up a piece I didn’t claim as mine before. I don’t like to get personal on here because some of y’all don’t know how to act. Also, I’m still working out the importance of emotions and expressing them. This may be a lifelong process. I wrote living single at […]
A (Not So) Guilty Pleasure: Love & Hip Hop Atlanta
By now, many of you have experienced the delightful ratchet theater that is Love & Hip Hop Atlanta. One word: Ratchetstilksin Love and Hip Hop Atlanta is the brain-child of producer, Mona Scott-Young, who also unleashed upon the world created the first Love and Hip Hop series. LAHHA follows, as you might have guessed, the […]
Throwback Thursday: “You’re Pretty for a Dark-Skinned girl!”
Today, I am revisiting the first blog I wrote for the collective in 2010. I can’t remember why I wrote about colorism, but it feels as fitting and relevant today as it did two years ago when I first found the words. I wrote about how “You’re pretty for a dark-skinned girl” is a backwards pseudo-compliment […]
Man or Beast?: Revisiting the White Male Gaze
By Andreana Clay Originally Posted on Queer Black Feminsist “I’m the man!” the little girl screamed at her father in a climatic scene from Beasts of the Southern Wild, a new film by Behn Zeitlin. My dear friend Holly and I checked it out tonight in downtown SF. It’s a film I’ve been wanting to check out for […]
The Wait of the Nation II: Parent Companies, the “Bain” of our Existence!
On May 24th I posted the blog “The Wait of the Nation” in response to the four-part HBO documentary “The Weight of the Nation,” and I specifically focused on part three “Children in Crisis.” My major concern is both the blaming of individual parents as the primary problem and the marketing of obesity clinics as […]
Asking for Sex: Revisited
Last week, I wrote a post called Asking for Sex: What to Do When the Guy Says No. My interest in writing the post was to explore the contingencies and challenges of asserting sexual desire as a straight Black woman. What I know now is that there is much truth to that saying about hell […]
Coming Out Stories: On Frank Ocean
By Summer McDonald Original Published at The Black Youth Project I’ve spent the last week treading in the liquid of a queer-flavored ambivalence, trying to determine why the Anderson Cooper and Frank Ocean coming out announcements mean less to me than other people. I have seen enough episodes of Coming Out Stories and foolishly subjected myself and […]
The Joys of Stillness
Recently, Tim Kreider published a piece in the New York Times called “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” where he extolled the virtues of being both lazy and ambitious. Krieder is not really talking about genuine busyness brought on by meaningful obligations, but all the small stuff that can take up a lot of room in our lives. […]
Asking for Sex: What Do You Do When the Guy Says No?
Frequently, I tell my friends that my life is a bad romantic comedy. There’s plenty of comedy, little romance, and never a happy ending. This has become all the more apparent as I have attempted to make sex a regular rather than sporadic occurrence in my post-30 life. I swear that I have managed to […]