Strange Fruit

If you grew up with network TV like we did (or basic cable, if you were lucky), you might find the current media landscape overwhelming — not just what shows to watch, but what platforms to access. The multiple ways it's now possible to consume and produce entertainment has made the industry more accessible to creators working outside the traditional network system, and a happy byproduct is more people of color, queer people, and trans people telling their own stories. That's what you'll find on Open TV,  a Chicago-based platform for queer and intersectional television. This week we meet Open TV founder Dr. Aymar Jean Christian, who's also an assistant professor of communication at Northwestern University. Christian started the platform as a research project two years ago and joins us to talk about how they focus on centering marginalized artists, and some of the original work they've produced so far.

This week we speak with Vashti DuBois, Executive Director and Founder of The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia. DuBois says she was inspired to create a physical space celebrating "the ordinary extraordinary colored girl" because black girls and women have been contributing to the world in a powerful way but getting no recognition. "I use colored because I really think of how the world takes its Crayola crayon to the black girl and colors her whatever they want her to be," DuBois says. "Color her promiscuous, color her too angry, color her too assertive. And many of us will take that same crayon and color each other, because that's what we've been taught to do." She joins us to talk about what kinds of objects and experiences she seeks to share, and her own most transformative moment in the process of bringing the museum to life.

If you're straight, you're probably not used to being denied access to things based solely on your sexual orientation — unlike LGBTQ people, who have been historically excluded from housing, jobs, and clubs because of their identities. But a new opinion piece in The Advocate says there are spaces that straight people just don't belong. Specifically, in the back rooms or "play spaces" of gay bars — which are often places where typical social rules about sex are relaxed, if not absent. Columnist Alex Chevez describes the need for such segregated spaces, calling them, "[C]ultural zones for certain demographics that are intentionally exclusionary — not out of hate, fear, or prejudice, but because everyone deserves space, and you must respect it." In his Advocate piece, he tells the story of one such space in a bar he frequents. A few months ago, a straight woman wandered into the space. Someone touched her, she complained, and now that play space has been converted to a well-lit smoking lounge. Alex joins us this week to talk about the importance of spaces that cater just to men who are seeking sexual contact with other men, and why women and straight men should honor that distinction. "This isn’t because misogyny is not a huge problem in the gay community — it is," he says. But he says straight women can find bars to welcome them "literally anywhere else in the world. Wherever you go, you can be assured that there will be straight people there."

You may have seen Brian Michael Smith on "Girls," "Law and Order," "Blue Bloods," or other television shows and commercials, playing cisgender men. Now he appears on the OWN Network's "Queen Sugar," playing a transgender cop — and earlier this summer, Brian came out as trans himself. He joins us this week to talk about visibility and representation, and his first day on the set. "Honestly, it was like going to black heaven," he says. "It was a dream come true in so many ways." Later in the show, we meet Lori Selke, an activist and journalist who was recently profiled in The Advocate. From the outside her family looks pretty typical: a woman, a man, and a couple adorable kids. But actually, Lori's butch, her husband Gus is a self-described dandy, and they're both queer and polyamorous. You might think of it as a different kind of passing, but Lori just says her family is "queerer than we look." [Brian Michael Smith photo by Ben Enser]

The Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee is a living piece of civil rights history. It functioned as a folk school from the 1930s through '60s, hosting Rosa Parks, Dr. King, Congressman John Lewis, and other activists and icons. Now in its 85th year, the Highlander continues to be a space where movement leaders come together to teach and to learn. Executive Directors Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson and Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele join us this week to talk about the center's legacy, and its future. We also check in a little closer to home with Dominique Barber, who's organizing the Louisville Black LGBT Pride Festival, coming up on August 27th. [Photo: highlandercenter.org]

President Trump's tweets about the armed forces this week brought the stories of transgender service members into the spotlight. This week on Strange Fruit, we learn about documentary film series that tells stories specifically from the lives of trans people of color. André Perez, the filmmaker at the helm of "America in Transition," joins us to tell us more about the project and why it's important to bring these stories into the light. Learn more about the project at americaintransition.org.

Tony Award-winning actor, signer, and songwriter Idina Menzel originated the role of Maureen Johnson in the Broadway and film versions of "Rent," kicking off a celebrated career and solidifying her place as an LGBTQ icon. She spoke to Jaison Gardner and Kaila Story, hosts of WFPL's Strange Fruit podcast, in anticipation of her appearance in Louisville next month. Menzel will perform at the Louisville Palace on August 6th. Check out the Strange Fruit Facebook page for a chance to win tickets to the show and a meet & greet with the artistl.

The race for mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida is getting ugly — thanks in part to racist rhetoric like this from a candidate named Paul Congemi: "Your people already got your reparations. Your reparations came in the form of a man named Barack Obama. My advice to you, if you don’t like it here in America, planes leave every hour from Tampa airport. Go back to Africa. Go back to Africa. Go back!” That's right. A political candidate at a public appearance in 2017... is telling black people to go back to Africa. We talk about this and other stories in the news this week, in an all-Juicy-Fruit news roundup!

There's no shortage of profiles and think pieces putting a human face on the Opioid crisis. Coverage focuses on addicts' struggling families and childhood traumas, framing addiction as an illness you suffer from — not a crime you perpetrate. Much of this media attention is centered on white drug users and their families. When the drug crisis was largely in black communities, drug use was linked to depravity and a proclivity for crime. The response was a "war" on drugs that focused on punishment, not treatment. This week we reflect on how race and racism play into the way we talk about addiction and drug use.

Scroll through any gay dating app and you'll come across the words. "No fats, no femmes." It says a lot about which kinds of bodies are seen as desirable and which are not. Especially in gay black spaces, where a simple "preference" is often anything but simple. Artist Jamal Lewis is making a documentary exploring this phenomenon. We speak to him this week about his own dating experiences, and the politics of desirability.