Surprise, I Am Queer: A Manifesto of Becoming, Belonging, and Beyond

I am queer. Not simply in who I love, but in how I live.

"How dare you?!" Incredulously seeking to extract, and categorize, ME!

My queerness is not a performance, no baby it is a praxis, a politics, a prayer.

It is how I mother. How I teach. How I breathe. How I build.

It is how I heal

myself, my lineage, my people.

my scars, my head when itches, the tension in my back and shoulders when

you dropped some more shit on me again.

IT ain't mine to carry.

I am not here to fit into the world as it is.

I am here to remake it.

And baby if I am delusion

What is it to you!

Why I bother all of yall? My light and my dark triggers you whole

You not ready. No.

I carry contradiction as my compass,

both spirit and flesh, softness and steel, gospel and groove.

You thought I was a Lost One.

I walk with my head wrapped in the whispers of my ancestors and my steps guided by the shimmer of radical possibility. Radical Negressita.

Who the f*ck you think you are? No you didn't scream it, but yo body language sho did tell it.

I am a queer woman who believes in love that liberates, work that nourishes, knowledge that emerges from the scars, the stretch marks, the soul.

I am a 21st-century Neolithic jazz babe.

Hey Babes,

an improvisation of Black womanhood ,a remix of ancestral wisdom,a rejection of obedience to any world that insists I shrink.

After all it is a Big Momma thang!

I do not believe in binaries.I believe in becoming.

I do not believe in respectability.I believe in remembrance.

I do not believe in assimilation.

I believe in altar-building, boundary-setting, and breaking cycles.

You know I pay it to dust.

My queerness is embodied resistance against white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and Christian nationalism.

But I ain't going to let nobody just up and take my Jesus Christ.

And yet I remain a believer, in Spirit, in justice, in the magic of the mundane.

Pretty extraordinary!

I create spaces where beauty is not decoration but declaration.

Where teaching is not transaction how we get to transformation instead.

Where wellness is not luxury it is my whole lineage.

My queerness cannot be tamed by language.

It is not a box, a label, a checkbox.

It is not yours, again, it is not yours babes.

It is a living, breathing practice of freedom, of care, of accountability, of abundance.

It is mine, I declared it is MINE.

I do not just belong to myself.

I belong to Blackness.

To queerness.

To resistance.

To joy.

To God.

To my daughter.

As her Mother, the best that I can be and defined by me.

To the dreams that refused to die in Grandma Babe’s hands.

The dreams that gained momentum in prayer's before I was a thought of.

I am not a brand.Or maybe I am?

I am a blueprint.

I am not a product for consumption.

I am a portal into the discomfort of being.

I am not the future.

I am the altar for my descendants where the future begins.

And much to your surprise this is why I am Queer.

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April 11 2025 in Helsinki, Finland featuring Shapel and the light of the Sun

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I am queer because I was never meant to fit inside the boxes they built. Not of gender, not of faith, not of knowledge, not of desire. I move through this world holding tension like a prayer, a poem, a protest. Shoutout to Sor Juana! I live in the both/and: Black and feminist. Christian and radical. Mama and scholar. Sensual and spiritual. Tender and thunder.

My queerness is rooted in healing, in touch, in breath. It shows up in my sacred practices — the way I mix esthetics, education, and wellness into a balm, a blessing, a way of being. I do not run from contradiction. I honor it and sit inside the tension, hands open, letting both softness and fire speak through me. Year by year leaning into the discomfort of my calling and being.

My queerness is political. It is how I unlearn domination in schools, in systems, in skin. It’s how I unlearn the lies about love, about labor, about worth. I don't believe love is just romance alone, I know it as a radical force that remakes what we thought was possible. Even when people get upset and even if my dreams are expansively delusional.

I teach queerly. I love queerly. I mother queerly. I lead queerly.

I create learning spaces that make room for feeling and a particular kind of truth-telling. I hold up the mirror and say, “See yourself. All of you. Even the parts they told you to hide.” I teach with my full self because I know my existence is a curriculum alone. My queerness is ancestral and held in support and cherished in the hands of Grandma Babe, affirmed in the resistance of Uncle Abdul and visits seeing him fully, sung through the lives of the Black women who made me, well me before I got to this point. It’s cosmic and laced with astrology, numerology, Spirit. It’s intellectual and weaved with theory and love from the text and visions of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, June Jordan, tonight Morrison, Anna Julia Cooper, Toni Cade Bambara, and the holy hush of knowing what’s real even when the academy tries to say it isn’t. Y'all ain't the first ot gaslight me and my mending heart, and you( you too) won't be the last.

I don’t just say I’m queer.I live it. I build with it.I praise through it.I resist through it.I become through it.

Queerness is my compass. It is not perfect, it is messy.. My liberation language.

I am not queer because I follow a script I’m queer because I refuse one.