In Episode 3 of Binary Bashers, we revisit 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.

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.⁠

In Episode 2 of Binary Bashers, 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 sit 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.⁠

Before there were words like "bi," "fluid," or "nonbinary," there were perspectives, lives, and art no mold could contain.

Episode 1 of Binary Bashers opens with Claude McKay (1889–1948), the Harlem Renaissance poet whose brilliance, rebellion, and contradictions still echo through Black, queer, and literary history in 2026. Known for his fierce critiques of racism and empire, McKay also lived a life shaped by desires and identities that society had no safe language for yet.

This episode explores the tension between visibility and survival: how a Black man, writing in an era of lynching, criminalization, and moral surveillance, carved out interior freedom while navigating public danger. Through narration, historical context, and careful archival research, Binary Bashers interprets McKay's own words, desires encrypted in verse, truths revealed obliquely in letters, as both survival strategy and creative act.

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.

Binary Bashers is an original audio docu-series by Embracing All of Me that explores Black historical artists, poets, lawyers, and activists whose lives reveal belonging, identity, desire, and creative work beyond rigid binaries.

The series employs a "bi-coded" and a "queer-coded" lens grounded in the figures own words, work, and relationships. This modern interpretive lens isn’t about assigning labels; it changes what we are trained to notice, so Black history can finally hold what it always was: more than one thing.

Featuring stories of Claude McKay, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Countee Cullen, June Jordan, Dr. Ibrahim Farajaje, Pauli Murray, Ma Rainey, Leslie Hutchinson, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Frances Thompson.

Launching February 3, 2026 for Black History Month with new episodes every Tuesday.

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 the episodes were developed.

In a world hungry for clean lines and easy answers, Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Abdurahman Farajajé lived beyond binaries.

Raised in a multiracial, multireligious Berkeley, California where difference was ordinary, Farajajé learned early that wholeness did not require erasure. This episode traces a life shaped by multiplicity, Black, fluid, spiritual, intellectual, 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 a personal 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 FAQ page.

Binary Bashers is an original audio documentary series by Embracing All of Me, launching February 3, 2026, for Black History Month.

The series centers Black historical figures whose lives moved beyond rigid, self-limiting social binaries, revealing how race, desire, identity, creativity, and survival have always existed in layered, expansive, and unfinished ways. Binary Bashers uncovers resilience not as perfection, but as proof of life lived between definitions.

This is not a revision of history or retroactive label assignment. It’s a restoration of its complexity with updated language and understanding.

Series features:

• Claude McKay

• Alice Dunbar-Nelson

• Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson

• June Jordan

• Ibrahim Farajajé

• Ma Rainey

• Frances Thompson

• Countee Cullen

• Pauli Murray

• Kuwasi Balagoon

• Frances Thompson

Each episode invites listeners to witness how power, beauty, faith, artistry, and resistance emerge when people aren’t simplified, and recognized for who and what they are.

Follow Embracing All of Me and don’t miss an episode of Binary Bashers, and the stories that have always lived between the lines.

https://embracingallofme.org/binary-bashers/

In this special holiday episode and season finale of Embracing All of Me, a rare and intimate conversation brings together bisexual, fluid, and queer fathers to reflect on family, identity, and what it means to raise children while embracing their full selves.

Frank, Keaton, Mark, Gattison, and Brian, fathers with children across different ages and stages, weigh in from a wide range of lived realities.

Among them are dads who are married, co-parenting, polyamorous, partnered with same-sex and different-sex partners, and navigating family life in ways that don’t always fit dominant cultural scripts.

Together, they explore:

• ​What fatherhood has taught them about love, vulnerability, and masculinity
• ​How Bi/Queer identity shows up (or doesn’t) in parenting and family life
• ​Navigating holidays, family gatherings, and cultural expectations
• ​When and how they've spoken to children about identity, relationships, and difference
• ​The pressures queer dads face — and the freedoms they create
• ​How living between identities can foster empathy, imagination, and emotional intelligence in children

What emerges is a powerful reminder that bisexual fathers and queer dads at large are not only real, but uniquely positioned to model expansive forms of love, family, and belonging.

Bisexual father research study referenced in the conversation is available here

On this episode of Embracing All of Me, Ross sits down with psychotherapist and death worker Stevie Luna Ibarra (they/she) to explore how grief takes shape inside queer people of color, especially during the holidays.

Together, they unpack what happens when colonization, silence, identity, and family dynamics collide at the exact moment we need grounding the most.

Stevie brings over 13 years of experience in mental health, end-of-life support, and community grief work. They break down the window of tolerance, explain what death doulas really do, and offer practical rituals for staying regulated when our families don’t have language for who we are—or for what we’ve lost.

This episode is for anyone navigating complicated family systems, ancestral grief, the heaviness of the season, or the quiet ache of becoming. It’s also a reminder that grief isn’t just sorrow; it’s love, memory, transformation, and the human capacity to come home to ourselves again and again.

If you’ve ever felt alone in your grief, this conversation is a soft landing place.

Learn more about Pause at timetopause.org

In this episode of Embracing All of Me, Ross sits down with MARQUE, a Bronx-born, Puerto Rican singer-songwriter and dancer, to explore how dance, music, and creativity shape identity, healing, and self-expression.

Together, they talk about growing up surrounded by rhythm, dance as a first language, and how performance and people-pleasing can become survival skills. One key takeaway from this conversation: sometimes the body learns how to survive before the mind ever catches up—and movement can be the bridge back to self.

This episode is for creatives, dancers, music artists, queer men, and anyone learning how to soften without losing their edge.

Check out Marque in the band ONQUE here

Check out Heal It First here

Read about MARQUE's Savage collaboration with Ross on The Source Magazine

Feedback for the podcast or the host? Access our feedback form here

Don't forget to rate and review the podcast!

On this episode of Embracing All of Me, Ross sits down with former U.S. Marine, certified life coach, and ally Langston Montgomery to explore masculinity, addiction recovery, and the emotional battles men often face in silence. Langston shares his journey through addiction, divorce, and the moment he finally stopped running from himself.

Together, Ross and Langston discuss:

• How cultural and generational scripts teach men — especially Black and Brown men — to disconnect from their feelings

• How to know if you have an addiction

• Why shame thrives in isolation and how community, therapy, and 12-step spaces support healing

• The role of the “inner adult” in breaking reactive cycles

Instead of perfection, this episode centers the real, nonlinear work of becoming whole. If you’ve ever felt alone in your pain or unsure how to begin again, this conversation offers a grounded blueprint for healing — starting with the courage to tell the truth.

Check out Blueprint Life Coaching here https://www.theblueprintlifecoaching.com/