Binary Bashers Vol. 2: Latinidad opens Latinx Heritage Month with Juan Gabriel, the Mexican music icon who made a career out of refusing easy categories.

Born Alberto Aguilera Valadez, Juan Gabriel traveled from Ciudad Juárez clubs and “No Tengo Dinero” to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, crossing ranchera, bolero, pop, gender expectations, and the line between popular culture and artistic prestige. Through songs like “Amor Eterno,” he created a musical language for grief, love, defiance, and belonging that generations across Mexico and Latin America made their own.

This episode explores what Juan Gabriel’s life and legacy reveal about Latinidad, cultural gatekeeping, queer possibility, and the freedom of being larger than any label.

If you notice any factual errors, please contact us at [email protected]. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit embracingallofme.org.

Binary Bashers: Latinidad uncovers the hidden bi-coded and queer history of Black and Brown Latin America, from Mexico to Brazil, Texas to Argentina, to the seven countries where the archive went silent by design.

Launching for Latinx Heritage Month 2026, Volume 2 of the Binary Bashers audio docu-series turns south, tracing bi-coded and queer-coded lives across the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas: Juan Gabriel's refusal to be labeled, Mário de Andrade's one surviving letter, Frida Kahlo in her own hand, Reinaldo Arenas writing his memoir from a hospital bed, and Marielle Franco, the Afro-Brazilian councilwoman whose murder didn't silence her.

This trailer also confronts what and who is missing. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Uruguay, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador: seven countries where almost no bi+ or queer Afro-Latino history survives on record, and why that silence is evidence, not absence.

Hosted, researched, and written by Ross Victory apart of the Embracing All of Me, storytelling platform for bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. No speculation, no erasure, just the archive followed to the end.

New episodes dropping throughout Latinx Heritage Month. This is Volume 2. Catch up on Binary Bashers Volume 1, our original Black History Month 2026 series, wherever you listen.

#BinaryBashers #Latinidad #LatinxHeritageMonth #BiVisibility #QueerHistory #AfroLatino #EmbracingAllOfMe #LGBTQPodcast

Frances Thompson, a formerly enslaved Black trans woman, lived her womanhood in public despite escalating danger in post, Civil War Memphis. She survived the white supremacist violence of the 1866 Memphis Riots and testified before Congress, placing her voice into the national archive at a time when Black women were rarely heard.

Later arrested under laws policing gender nonconformity, Thompson's life reveals how race, gender, and state power intertwined during Reconstruction era United States — and why her testimony still matters as debates over bodily autonomy and public identity continue 150 years later in 2026.

Music: "Hard in America" by Gabriel Kelley, licensed through Epidemic Sound.

A Note on Sources:
This episode was made with care. It's based on established scholarship and publicly available archival records. If we've made an error, please let us know at https://binarybasherspodcast.com

Embracing All of Me is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. Visit our FAQs and Sources page to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Topics: Frances Thompson, Black trans history, Black transgender history, Reconstruction era, 1866 Memphis Riots, Congressional testimony, Black women's history, gender nonconformity, trans resistance, bodily autonomy, LGBTQ+ history, Black queer history, post-Civil War America, trans historical figures

Born into Jim Crow and refusing every box it tried to seal, Pauli Murray lived at the fault lines of American law, race, gender, and faith. Episode 6 of Binary Bashers, traces a life spent translating personal struggle into constitutional vision: from early challenges to segregated education, to legal theories that helped shape Brown v. Board of Education, to arguments against sex discrimination in Reed v. Reed that later undergirded Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s work.

Murray’s journals and letters reveal an interior life wrestling with identity beyond rigid binaries. As a poet, lawyer, activist, and eventually the first Black woman ordained an Episcopal priest, Murray insisted that justice must be capacious enough to hold contradiction, vulnerability, and hope.

This episode was made with care. It's based on established scholarship and publicly available information from credible sources. If we've made an error, please let us know at https://binarybasherspodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ Embracing All of Me is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our FAQs and Sources page to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Abdurahman Farajajé charted his own path to become the total embodiment of a binary basher.

Raised in a multiracial, multireligious Berkeley, California where difference was ordinary, Farajajé learned early that wholeness did not require erasure. Episode 5 traces a life shaped by multiplicity, Blackness, fluidity, spiritual and intellectual curiosity, at a time when institutions demanded legibility over truth.

From being disciplined for an “untogether” curriculum, to navigating the fragile language of bisexuality as it first emerged as an identity, to confronting racism and gatekeeping in academia, Farajajé insisted that liberation without the body, desire, and spirit was incomplete. During the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, he carried that insistence into the Black church, choosing presence over safety.

This episode was made with care. It's based on established scholarship and publicly available information from credible sources. If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://embracingallofme.org.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Embracing All of Me is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠FAQs⁠ and ⁠Sources page⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Born Donald Weems, Kuwasi Balagoon forged himself in the crucible of rebellion. A member of the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army, Balagoon’s life traced the fault lines of 1970s America—state violence, political imprisonment, and the unfinished work of Black liberation. He survived the Attica prison uprising, endured years in solitary confinement, and wrote fiercely about autonomy, queerness, and revolutionary love.

Balagoon rejected binaries: nationalist and anarchist, soldier and poet, a gay man within movements that often erased queerness. His essays and letters reveal a thinker wrestling with revolutionary strategy and selfhood, insisting that freedom must include the fullness of identity.

Today, as debates over protest, policing, and political prisoners continue, Balagoon’s voice asks what solidarity truly demands, and who it must protect.

This episode draws on established scholarship and publicly available sources. If you notice an error, please let us know at https://binarybasherspodcast.com

Binary Bashers is part of Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, as well as our communities, kin, and allies. Visit our FAQs and Sources page to learn more about how this episode was developed.

This episode of Binary Bashers explores the life and work of June Jordan, a groundbreaking Black feminist poet, essayist, educator, and activist who wrote from the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and empire. Refusing neat categories, Jordan centered lived experience and used language as a powerful tool for survival, intimacy, and resistance.

Through her poetry, essays, and archival materials, this episode examines how June Jordan named injustice with precision while holding onto joy, love, and possibility. Her work bridges the personal and political, affirming Black life, bisexual identity, and global solidarity at a time when these connections were often ignored or erased.

We also explore how Jordan understood freedom as a daily practice, something shaped in classrooms, communities, relationships, and movements for social justice. Her voice remains urgent, clear-eyed, and uncompromising, offering lasting insight into identity, activism, and the power of words.

This episode draws on established scholarship and publicly available sources to present an accurate and thoughtful portrait of June Jordan’s legacy. If you notice an error, please let us know at https://binarybasherspodcast.com.

Binary Bashers is part of Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform uplifting the voices of Bi+ BIPOC, as well as our communities, kin, and allies. Visit our FAQs and Sources page to learn more about how this episode was developed.

We turn to the quietly radical life and work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935), a poet, journalist, educator, and activist whose legacy does not fit neatly within the categories history has assigned her. Best known in her lifetime as a writer of refined verse and regional sketches, Dunbar-Nelson also lived at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and politics in the early twentieth century, navigating them with both discretion, poise, and defiance.

Through essays, short stories, and political organizing, she chronicled Black life under Jim Crow while navigating respectability, race, gender, and power with precision. Her private journals, read closely in this episode, reveal a fuller interior world marked by three marriages, same-sex desire, frustration with patriarchal constraints, and an acute awareness of how identity could be both shelter and strategy.

This episode was made with care. It's based on established scholarship and publicly available information from credible sources. If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://embracingallofme.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Embracing All of Me is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠FAQs⁠ and ⁠Sources page⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Reintroducing Countee Cullen (1903-1946), a poet whose life and work cannot be easily classification. Writing at the height of the Harlem Renaissance era, Cullen believed deeply in poetic beauty, form, meter, and universal themes, even as the world insisted on reading him through rigid racial and moral frames. His poetry lives in tension: between faith and doubt, protest and lyricism, belonging and alienation.

This episode situates Countee within the movement’s internal diversity of thought. Poems like “Heritage” and “Yet Do I Marvel” reveal a writer grappling with God, history, and the burden of representation, while archival silences around his intimacy and desire point to the quiet strategies required to survive public life in the early twentieth century.

If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://binarybasherspodcast.com⁠⁠

Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me. EAOM is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ BIPOC, people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FAQs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sources page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson was one of the most famous Black entertainers in 1930s Britain—a Grenadian-born cabaret singer who performed for royalty, dazzled London high society, and lived inside a world of glamour, scandal, and contradiction.

In this episode of Binary Bashers , we explore Hutch’s rise from the Caribbean to the elite salons of Mayfair, where he became the highest-paid entertainer in Britain, arriving in Rolls Royces with a white piano strapped to the roof. Moving through queer-adjacent and bi-coded social circles that included figures like Ivor Novello and Tallulah Bankhead, Hutch inhabited spaces where desire was fluid, performance was power, and identity was carefully managed.

But behind the spectacle was a harsher truth: despite his fame, Hutch faced racism, surveillance, and public scandal.

He was celebrated in public and sidelined in private, often forced to enter through servant entrances while entertaining the very people who adored him.