50 min listen
Strange Fruit #210: Tea AND Shade To Those Who Co-Opt Black Gay Culture
FromStrange Fruit
ratings:
Length:
28 minutes
Released:
Sep 8, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Yasss, kween! Werq. Slay. What do these phrases have in common? They come from the gay black community — specifically drag and the house ball scene — and have since been co-opted by mainstream culture, with little credit to their originators. Jefferey Spivey writes the blog "Uptown Bourgeois," and recently wrote a piece about this phenomenon for the LGBTQ website SOULE, In it, he calls out Elle magazine for publishing a photo gallery from this year's Latex Ball without including any of the performers' names (just captions like "Sickening," and "You betta work.") Spivey joins us this week to talk about appropriation and erasure.
Released:
Sep 8, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Strange Fruit #42: Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney: Playwright [Tarell Alvin McCraney](http://www.steppenwolf.org/ensemble/members/details.aspx?id=54) has been called the next August Wilson. Maybe that can be partially attributed to the fact that there are so few prominent African American playwrights, but there's still no doubt he is carrying an important mantle. At age 33, he's already had plays debut at the Royal Court London, New York's Vineyard Theatre, the Young Vic, and Steppenwolf Theatre, where he is an artist in residence. In March, he received the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. We spoke to McCraney this week about his career, and how and why he writes about black gay life. He told us the real-life roots of some of his most famous works, and about working as August Wilson's assistant at Yale (including an unforgettable story about buying Wilson an iPod). In our Juicy Fruit segment this week, we had lots of news to cover: The #[solidarityisforwhitewomen](http://thehai by Strange Fruit