Strange Fruit

Sober spaces for LGBTQ folks to socialize are on the rise. With many of them facing social stigma, discrimination, harassment and violence, LGBTQ people are at a greater risk for drug and alcohol addiction than their straight counterparts.

We wondered just how easy or difficult it is for queer folks to commit to sober living when so much of gay social is tied to parties, nightclubs and bars and many of our community’s biggest Pride Festival sponsors are beer and liquor companies. In this week’s episode, we hear from four friends of the show who called to tell us about their individual struggles with substance abuse and their new lives of sobriety free from drugs and alcohol.

In Hot Topics, we discuss why the body-shaming sentiment of “she’s let herself go” is never a good excuse for when a man cheats on his wife.

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In recognition of Minority Mental Health Month, we continue examining issues affecting African Americans and their mental well-being – or the lack thereof.

In February 2016, 23-year-old Black Lives Matter activist MarShawn McCarrel took his own life on the step of the Columbus, Ohio courthouse steps. This March, the body of another social activist, 29-year-old Amber Evans, was found in a Columbus river, and her death was also ruled a suicide.

JoAnne Viviano, Health Reporter for The Columbus Dispatch joins us this week to discuss the toll that fighting for social justice can take on the mental health of activists like McCarrel and Evans. The activists she interviewed for her piece in the Dispatch cited long workweeks, encountering widespread racism, vicariously transferring traumas, and unrealistic expectations of fellow activists as some of the factors that adversely affect their mental health – and have necessitated a shift in how their community looks after one another in a commitment to a healing process.

Then, we shine the spotlight on a small Texas college named Paul Quinn College that is so committed to the mental well-being of its students that it offers and encourages every incoming student to meet with a counselor to have their needs assessed, at a free on-site mental health clinic. Eva-Marie Ayala, staff reporter for The Dallas News, tells us how this tiny HBCU, which prides itself on recruiting at-risk students, promotes health and wellness throughout its campus.

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Because July is Minority Mental Health Month, we’re dedicating this entire episode to discussing the mental health and wellness of black kids and adults.

They join us to discuss suicide and depression in black boys, how the school system is complicit in creating and fostering poor mental health, and what it will take to turn this trend around.

Later, therapist Brittany Johnson join us to discuss how poverty, race and unresolved childhood traumas are leading more black adults to seek therapy. She credits Millennials with breaking the stigma around mental health and therapy.

Johnson, author of the self-published book "Get Out of Your Own Way: 21 Days to Stop Self Sabotage,” shares tips on recognizing and conquering anxiety.

In Juicy Fruit, we salute chart topping crossover rapper Lil Nas X, who recently publicly confirmed that that he’s a gay man, and we celebrate black and queer mermaids everywhere.

Social movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp have brought greater attention to the issue of sexual harassment and sexual assault. These movements are largely focused on women and girls – so what about the nearly 1 in 4 men who have experienced sexual violence?

Zeke Thomas is a music producer, deejay and the son of NBA Hall of Famer Isaiah Thomas – and he’s a survivor of sexual assault and rape. In 2017, Thomas revealed in a nationally-televised interview that he was sexually assaulted at 12 years old, and then experienced date rape at the age 27, committed by a man he met on a dating app.

Later in the show we’re joined by longtime friend to the show Dr. Frederick Smith, who first joined us in 2015 to discuss his novel "Play It Forward." (He’s also the author of "Right Side of the Wrong Bed," a Lambda Literary Award finalist.)

Smith joins us this week with poet and creative writer Chaz Lamar, to discuss their new novel, In Case You Forgot, which tells the story of two newly-single black queer, men who are packing up and starting again—in love, career, and life—in the West Hollywood neighborhood of LA.

And in Juicy Fruit: A shopper at a Texas Walmart learns the hard way that  you can have your cake but you must pay for it, too!

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In 1920, black farmers in this country owned some 15.6 million acres of land, but by 1999 that number had fallen to 2 million.  In 1910, there were nearly one million black farmers in America. In the year 1999, only 18,000 remained, and statistics showed that black farmers were disappearing at a rate five to six times that of white farmers.

Leah Penniman, farmer and educator at Soul Fire Farm in the Albany, New York, area, attributes the virtual disappearance of Black farmers to decades of discrimination against Black farmers by the US government – denying them farm loans, for example – and racist violence targeting land-owing Black farmers in the South.

But after 100 years in decline, Penniman writes for YES Magazine, Black farmers are making a comeback. She joins us this week to say that these farmers aren’t just growing healthy food, but just as importantly they are healing racial traumas, instilling collective values, and changing the way communities of black folks think about the land.

Later in the show we talk with writer Gloria Oladipo about her essay in Teen Vogue describing why her therapist specifically needed to be a woman of color.

And in hot topics, we talk about drivers behaving badly.

Mothering within Black communities can take many forms. Dr. Patricia Hill-Collins coined the term “other mother” to describe a woman who cares for a child that is not biologically her own.

In many Black families, the role of the aunt has fit this function. Sometimes aunts are blood or marriage relatives but many of them are chosen family – mom’s best friend from college or the elderly neighbor down the street who looks after the community’s children. She can serve as a quiet confidant or a gentle authority figure.

This week we spoke writer Brandon T. Harden about his Philadelphia Inquirer article, “They may not get a holiday, but ‘aunts’ are the backbone of the black community.”

Later in the show we talk with freelance journalist Sonia Weiser about the troubling financial realities of New York City’s Legal Aid attorneys – many of who have to moonlight as rideshare drivers or bartenders to make ends meet – as highlighted in her New York Times piece, “Lawyers by Day, Uber Drivers and Bartenders by Night.”

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In the US, June is recognized as LGBTQ Pride Month. Celebrations and festivities are held throughout the month to commemorate the rebellion that began at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, and to celebrate the social and legal advances for LGBTQ people in the 50 years since.

This weekend in Louisville marks the return of the annual Kentuckiana Pride Festival, our city’s largest and longest-running annual Pride celebration. Our guest this week is the organization’s president and director, Allen Hatchell who joins us to discuss the festival’s headlining entertainment, vendors and what changes folks should expect this year. 

We also have the beginnings of a tough but important public conversation about community gatekeeping, transphobia, and gay racism within LGBTQ pride organizations, and Allen addresses some of our public criticisms of the Kentuckiana Pride Festival.

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While becoming a mother is often a wondrous, exciting and joyous endeavor, it can also be wrought with anxiety, fear and even danger for many black women.

We begin this week by speaking with author Dani McClain about the politics of black motherhood, and her TIME essay “I Won’t Let Racism Rob My Black Child of Joy.” In the essay, McClain recounts being pregnant with her first child in the summer of 2016 -- the same summer that Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota were killed by police.

“Reading the news of these men’s deaths brought to mind black children who had died just as senselessly: 17-year-old Jordan Davis, gunned down at a Florida gas station by a white man annoyed by the music Davis and his friends played; 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed by police in a Cleveland playground as he held a toy gun; 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, shot and killed by police during a middle-of-the-night raid on her home."

In order to avoid succumbing to her fears, McClain made a plan to interview black mothers, grandmothers and other experts about how she could raise a carefree joyous child while still keeping her safe. The result became her first book, "We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood."

“I understand that simultaneously demanding that our children be allowed to be children and carefully introducing them to the realities of black life in this country are just part of the work," McClain writes. "Dancing, laughing and finding pleasure in the small things may be of value to most families, but for black families, engaging in joyful practices is necessary to our survival, to our ability to fully claim our humanity.”

Later in the show, we speak with Dr. Mary-Ann Etiebet, MD, about her work as Executive Director of Merck for Mothers, a global initiative to reduce maternal mortality worldwide.

In her op-ed, “Black Women Dying From Childbirth Is Persistent, But Here’s How We Can Reverse This Unacceptable Trend,” Etiebet notes that more women in the United States die today from complications of pregnancy and childbirth than 20 years ago. Further, Black women are three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy or childbirth related complication than white women.

We examine the causes of this trend and the work being do to reverse it.

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But it's not uncommon that once these social safe havens are created and made public, organizers and attendees are met with the inevitable barrage of interrogations and accusations regarding such spaces:

"Why is this space just for black people?" "Why is this club just for Latinx people?" "Isn’t a black gay pride event divisive and 'reverse racist?'"

Our first guest this week is Berkeley-based writer Kelsey Blackwell, who wrote the essay “Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People.” We discuss with Kelsey the need for POC-only gathering places that are free from white judgement and the stereotypes and marginalization that permeate mainstream society.

Later in the show we get specific in the conversation of race, with Salem State Communications professor Joshua Adams. He recently published a piece on Medium: We Should Stop Saying “People of Color” When We Mean “Black People”

“Saying POC when we mean black people is this concession that there’s a need to describe a marginalized group as 'less' Black for in order for people (specifically, but not only, white people) to have empathy for whatever issue being discussed,” he writes.

And in Juicy Fruit, we talk about two very different kinds of uninvited house guests.

Welcome to a new season of Strange Fruit!

In her essay “'Children do not deserve privacy,' and other abusive myths masked as good parenting," Oakland-based writer and educator Amber Butts examines the complicated feelings she holds for the ex-stepfather who raised and provided for her. “His metric for goodness was stepping up and taking care of a child that wasn’t his,” she writes. “But my ex-stepfather is not a good man.”

It wasn’t until Butts saw a social media post where a mother said she knocks on the door before entering her kids’ rooms that Butt was reminded of the lack of privacy she had as a child and she began to reflect on how refusing children privacy is one of several abusive practices mislabeled as good parenting.

We discuss the need for parents and caregivers to actively work to examine and undo the “misleading metrics” of good parenting that they inherited from previous generations.

Butts says children deserve houses that aren’t prisons. “Anything that mirrors how the state achieves control must be questioned and obliterated, especially when that influences how we care for our babies," she writes. "Children deserve privacy in the homes that they are in. Children deserve love beyond conditions. This is a requirement. They should not have to prove this."