BLACK DIASPORA HISTORY

People, places and things. For one month only.

[blackqueertings]

Black Caribbeans and the Rave: A (Very) Short List

The current electronic music scene has been greatly influenced by the innovations of queer people of colour. In Chicago nightclubs, house music was developed and spread widely. In Britain Jamaicians brought sound system culture to clubs across the country. White cis male European DJs heard these innovations, experimented with them, and drew fame and acclaim from mainstream audiences. In this new configuration, the white decision-makers that populated record companies, nightclubs, and radio stations privileged these men over the Black originators, and feared the controversy of including them in lineups. Black also points out the impacts of AIDS in depleting the number of community leaders and advocates to address this erasure. Now, this history is being better acknowledged and understood, though these same institutional practices of homophonic and femmephobia do continue to impact Black artists. Below I have complied a small list of queer figures, organizations, and artists from the Black Caribbean diaspora that have shaped the underground scene.

Blockorama and Blockobana

Blockorama began in 1988 when the Toronto Collective Blackness Yes! wanted to create a space for Black queer Torontonians at Pide. According to organizer Syrus Marcus Ware, because the parade was already full, the first Blockorma took place at the edge of the official Pride parade, it has been a feature ever since. The Blockorma stage is the longest-running in Toronto Pride’s history. In 2010, Blackness Yes! Began Blockobana, a  day-long music event that closes Pride weekend.  Between 2007-2010 Blackness Yes! Was pushed out of pride, and moved away from the main stage to small, unsafe venues. It took community resistance for Pride organizers to place Blockorama back at its original stage. This concealment and marginalization by privileged white queer decision-makers are characteristic but it illustrates the power of collective response. Not only this Blockorama’s success as a uniquely pro-Black space at Toronto Pride is a testament to the community’s collective power.

2. BAMBII

Play before reading, don’t stop till’ the end.

BAMBII is a Jamican-Canadian queer DJ from Toronto, Ontario. BAMBII has performed in Asia, Europe and across North America. BAMBII is a fixture in the underground club scene, and is vocal about the significance of Black artists and  sound culture to the existing white-dominnated electronic music mainstream. BAMBII has been vocal about instaces of discrimination in music by artists and event organizers. BAMBII mixes a variety of Black diaporia music like reggeton, dancehall, afrobeats, rap and more. In using this mix, BAMBII evokes, Walcot’s defintion of Canadian-Blackness as “diasporic and transnational”.  

In November 2021 I attended a Moonshine event that included BAMBII. In dancing to her music I was lost in the complex breakdowns, spins, and samples. I couldn’t help but revel in the conversation that she created. UK drill rappers, followed by Jamaican dancehall, Kelis’s “Milkshake”,  and the sound of a stick being dragged across an oil drum. For me, BAMBII’s sounds felt like an ode to Blackness for its multiplicity and shared invention, linked in spite of a collective deracination.

3. Kaytranada

Kaytranada is a queer Haitian-Canadian DJ who emigrated to Montreal, Quebec from Port-au-Prince, Haiti as a child. Though he began playing underground shows with collectives like MOONSHINE Kaytranada has found significant mainstream success. Since signing to XL Recordings in 2014 Kaytranda has released 99.9% (2016), Bubba (2019). In 2021, Kaytranada became the first Black artist to win the Grammy for Best Dance Recording for the Bubba and the single 10%. The award was not included in the official Grammys broadcast.  Kaytranada’s success as a francophone Black Caribbean is a testament to the increasing visibility and respect being granted to Black queer artists. 

4.Sistermatic

Sistermatic was a Black lesbian sound system that operated out of the South London Women's Centre in Brixton from 1986 to 1995.  Yvonne Taylor, Eddie Lockhart, Lorna Edwards, and Sharon Lee founded the collective in 68’ after noticing the geo-racial segregation of London nightlife and the safety risks to Black queer women who went out in London. Soundsystems are a Jamaican tradition that began in the 1940s. A colelctive of DJs would host events with just sound speakers, turntables and a generator. Soundsystem parties soon eclipsed those with live music. Sistermatic's events were hosted monthly at the center and created a safe space for Black and other racialized women to exist, partake and let go in a safe, communal space. Yvonne Taylor spoke about the collective’s insistence on politicizing their events at a time when club promoters refused to acknowledge the politics of the scene. Events went from 9PM-9AM and had rooms for dancing, talking, and games. In reading a testament from Glynnis about the events, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison to my experience during BAMBII’s set.  A feeling of community that is missing from many of the white-dominated spaces we frequent. 

“​​Systematic knew how to throw awesome parties! At the time, it was the only place that played the kind of music that I liked and where I could relate to the DJs and the crowd… It had a huge impact on my own self-esteem and on the building of my identity as a Black, gay woman. That place gave me, like many of my friends, the feeling of belonging to a collective and a place that could be considered as our own". 

Sources

Blockorama.ca

Blockorama/Blackness Yes!

Building Blocko

Trailblazing Pride party Blockorama turns 20

The Queer of Color Sound Economy in Electronic Dance Music

‘This is radical love’ – the history of black queer Britain in pictures

Sistermatic: An Ode to London's Long-Lost Pioneering Sound System and Collective Run by and for Black Queer Women

[blackqueertings]

Rinaldo Walcott

Rinaldo Walcott (he/him) is a Bajan-Canadian academic, radical, and activist. Out and proud Walcott had written on a diversity of topics related to Blackness in the diaspora, African-Canadian identity, queer theory and media, and anti-capitalism. Walcott was originally born in Barbados but emigrated to Canada at a young age.

Walcott is a leading scholar in African-Canadian and diaspora studies, an ever-growing discipline. I first came across Walcott through the anthology Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Published in the 1990s Rude, was named after Clement Virgo's identically named work, a seminal Canadian film directed by a Black man, that centered on Black Torontonians. Walcott edited the anthology and contributed a chapter. Reading Walcott's chapter was a moment of being seen for the first time, of having my feelings of unease and otherness validated and articulated. Despite my years of education, including three years at an 'elite' Canadian insition, I have yet to fully encounter something like this. Here is what he wrote:

“It is my contention that when Blackness works to elaborate Candianess it simultaneously unsettles Candianness. That is, Blackness interrupts “Canadian” scenes and simultaneously sets the stage for particular and different enactments of Canadianess. [..] Blackness is a counter narrative of the normalized image of Canadians as chromatically white.”

Walcott's publishing record is brief but powerful. Black Like Who? his first book is part theory, part- ethnographic account of the construction and signification of Blackness by African-Canadians. Later novels include Queer Returns, a queer diasporic essay collection as well as On Property and The Long Emancipation. Both are detailed, provocative accounts of the manifestations of the 'afterlife' of slavery and the continued subordination of Black folks. Walcott should be remembered for his extensive contrition to critical, intersectional theory and the Black radical tradition.

[blackqueertings]

The ‘Buller Man’ and the ‘Batty Bwoy’

This entry will center on two Caribbean terms used to describe men who have sex with men (MSM). Analysis that is not my own will come from Wesley Crichlow’s  Buller Men and Batty Bwoys : Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities. 

These two terms are commonly used in Jamaican and other Anglophone-Caribbean nations. Curiously, they reinforce a gender binary in dividing MSM into a “masculine” or male role--the Bull or top and a “feminine” role--the ‘batty bwoy’ or bottom. The words masculine and feminine are in quotations to reflect the fallacy of this binary. Obviously, neither of these roles is inherently more masculine or male then the other. This feminization is connected to the shared ‘receiving’ between women and bottoms, by simply accepting a member, one is conceived as therefore subordinate to it’s possessor. Crichlow describes these as ‘dread words’ a term coined by Mikeda Silvera that refers to words that cut deep. That the groups they are targeted at have not yet (and may never) reclaimed, nor softened. 

‘Batty bwoy’ is by far the term I am most familiar with. It still carries shame and judgement to this day. This is likely because unlike ‘Buller Man’, which is still harmful, it targets ones ‘manhood’ and sexuality. Not all gay Black Caribbean’s are ‘batty bwoys’, one must display or be caught expressing so-called feminine behaviors. I posit that one may draw a parallels between this term and the, well-known term ‘fairy’. Both are a term meant to ‘box’ queer men back into a binary understanding of gender expression and sexual intercourse. Not only these but these terms are specifically targeted at ‘feminine’ MSM, they may be weaponized by other, more traditionally masculine or conservative MSM. Interestingly, ‘batty bwoy’ may also be used as a threat. For example, my father asks my brother, as a joke “Are you a batty bwoy?”, the question was said in jest but it is a provocation no less. To suggest this feminization is a call to the subject to reassert their masculinity in a traditional fashion.

The Influence of Black Nationalism 

Regardless of one’s label to be called a ‘buller’ man or ‘batty bwoy’ is in essence a rejection. Black communal solidarity is a major source of joy, stregth, self-worth and resistance. For Black-Canadians, this solidarity is a balm for the exhaustion (racial battle fatigue) and violence that's comes with navigating white spaces in a social structure that works to deny lived experiences of racism and discrimination and minimizes historical antiblackness. But for MSM, this is identification is complicated by pervasive homophobia. Crichlow draws a connection between the hompohbia present in African-Caribbean and African-Canadian families and Black nationalism. Crichlow argues that to be an open MSM is to remove oneself from the communal solidarity of hetero-Blackness because “ Black heterosexist thinking is grounded in very specific gender expectations of masculinity, which the men in this book must live up to; the alternative for them is to suffer the public and communal violence that is associated with being labelled weak, buller man, batty bwoy, feminine, or race traitor” (Emphasis added, 5). 

[blackqueertings]

Connie Fleming AKA Connie Doll

Connie Fleming (she/her) is a trans icon, former model, and venerated door woman who came up in New York nightlife. Fleming was born in Jamaica and immigrated to Flatbush, Brooklyn with her mother at the age of 5. As early as eighteen years old Connie was becoming significant in NYC nightlife. Fleming first began doing drag shows, but in an interview with The Standard, she admits she partook more due to the difficulty for openly transwomen to participate in nightlife, and other gigs. “There are only a few employment options available to trans people,” she told The Standard, “You’re a whore, or you can be on stage and perform. There’s no room in society for us.” But, drag was not just a stepping stone. Connie struggled to to gain acceptance from her family, and drag “... gave me confidence and a voice, and lifted my head up off the ground, but I had to solidify myself within.”. 

In 1992 two major events in Connie’s career occurred. Her iconic moment in Thierry Muger’s Spring/Summer 92′ show, in which she strutted down the catwalk in a red, stoned cowgirl outfit. The look included a cowboy hat, bodice, fingerless gloves, chaps and boots. Adorned with ruby stones, Connie’s presence, beauty and confidence made the moment iconic. Connie represented transness, Blackness and queerness, she represented dark-skinned women and her sexuality and confidence defied hegemonic ideals. Her beauty and grace, was itself, a form of resistance and protest. Her image continues to have power. Months later, RuPaul , another 80s club kid with aspirations, released “Supermodel”, which became a hit. Charles was also Black, but a drag queen. Just as mainstream, cis and heteronormative audiences flattened the nuances between Black queens and trans women in Connie’s at the beginning of Connie’s career “Supermodel” exacerbated this, drag was once again, stifling Connie Doll. 

Later, according to The Standard, when Connie became known as a door girl she used this same confidence and defiance from the runway to construct a new persona; that of the “evil door bitch”. Once again, Connie carved out an alternative way of being seen. By simply owning her identity, and commanding respect Connie was reorganizing the value system of New York nightlife. In her interview with The Standard Connie Girl noted that when she started, a Black dark-skinned trans women working the door was rare. Her status as an icon is further illustrated as she remains a go-to door woman for events throughout New York City. 

Sources

The Untold Story of the Fearless Connie Fleming

James Flemons Breaks Down 7 Iconic Moments in Black Queer Fashion

[blackqueertings]

Is there an objective?

Mostly, yes. But also no. The point of this brief archive is to highlight the multiplicity, resilience and significance of queer people in the Caribbean diaspora. This is not an attempt to claim supremacy over other groups or invoke diaspora wars. It is simply a ode to Black queer Caribbean folks, who transcended toxic masculinity, white supremacy and colonialism. Iconic thinkers, creatives, places and collectives will be spotlighted. With this blog I may only hope to celebrate, uplift and center the uncentred, downplayed and misrepresented. As a part of this space I take our idols for granted. My non-Black peers hardly know who Marcus Garvey is so what hope is there for Dionne Brand, or Steve McQueen or Yvonne Taylor? This gap is what I hope to redress.