Black, Queer, Free: What UK Black Pride Gave Us!

We take you inside one of the most joyful, radical, and hard-won celebrations of Black queer life: UK Black Pride. As the movement gets ready to mark another year, we reflect on Aiwan’s work on the UK Black Pride Time Capsule Podcast, what it really means to come into yourself, and the very real challenges of building sustainable spaces that can hold us through every stage of becoming.

Aiwan reflects on her first encounter with UK Black Pride back in 2015, the American YouTubers who shaped her sense of queer embodiment, and how discovering Black queer community changed her life after leaving the Church. Tamanda shares her own rather intellectual coming of age, her pathway into queerness in her mid-thirties, and what it means to find belonging without ever having attended UKBP.

Together, we explore what it takes to build a Black queer movement that lasts, the unexpected role of YouTube in our sexual and emotional education, and what it means to go through a second adolecense - sex education and all - as a full blow adult! 

In this episode:

• UK Black Pride’s twenty-year legacy, and why its existence is no small feat
• Coming into queerness later in life, and why a “second adolescence” can be just as disorienting as the first
• What it meant to find King Kellz, Amber’s Closet, and other queer YouTubers in Aiwan’s second coming of age
• Leaving the Church and finding the internet, a gateway to queer joy, sex, and survival
• Tamanda on longing, embodiment, and finding sex ed through Beck Thom’s Quintimacy and Lama Rod Owens’ teachings
• The challenges of branding, sponsorship, and resourcing UK Black Pride and the challenge of longevity
• What would it take to properly fund a Black queer movement for the long haul?

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