Darnell Moore is Black, Queer, and Free
Darnell Moore wearing CNP’s Burre Lane “Bayard & Baldwin” Hoodie
At 45-years-old, Darnell Moore is coasting on blessings. For much of the last decade, Moore has been a formidable force in the movement for Black equality and LGBTQ+ liberation, while meticulously providing a blueprint for Black queer men to claim our freedom. With every media appearance, speaking engagement, article, or book, Moore continues to lay the foundation for a legacy that will be remembered and studied long after his work is completed in the physical. He is our ancestor’s wildest dream—living, breathing, teaching, learning, and thriving in the fullness of his badass Black, queer self.
Moore has experienced a sort-of meteoric rise over the last decade that has positioned him squarely in the focus of national and international media. With his long list of accomplishments: double master’s degrees in clinical counseling and theological studies, an award-winning memoir “No Ashes In The Fire,” the podcast “Being Seen,” countless print, digital, and television credits, and in his new role as Director of Inclusion for Content and Marketing at Netflix—one conversation with Moore about who he was in the first half of his life will reveal the success he’s currently enjoying was anything but guaranteed.
“I was one of those Black boys growing up who didn’t see myself living past 25,” said Moore.
A Camden, New Jersey native, now residing in Los Angeles, Moore tells The Reckoning that his twenties were the darkest period of his life.
“I was in undergrad for 5 1/2 years. My GPA was a 2.1. Part of that had to do with the fact that I was suffering through severe depression in undergrad, which had so much to do with me finally coming to terms with my queerness,” he said.
Moore says he somehow graduated from undergrad, but quickly found himself back in his hometown after struggling to land a decent job.
“I was hired by a Presbyterian Urban Youth Missionary Program in Camden—three to four blocks from where my mom lived,” said Moore.
The job paid him a weekly stipend of $30.
“Imagine being the first to go off to college from your family. The person that got voted most likely to succeed in 12th grade and 8th grade—you graduate from college and boomerang your ass right back to the place you left making $60 every two weeks,” said Moore. “It didn’t fit the sort of proverbial idea of the American Dream that so many of us are told we’re afforded to have,” he said.
Moore says he found himself raising his fist to God, but in hindsight, the experience shaped his career trajectory.
“It was in that period where it became clear to me that whatever work that I would end up doing, the work would have to have an impact on my people: Black folk, working poor folk—at the heart of whatever I say yes to if it’s not gonna bring equity and access to the people who I know need it I’m not gonna do it,” he said.
“Black, queer, and trans, and non-binary folk have always been present and fighting for us even when the us wasn’t fighting for Black queer and trans folk. The continual need to assert that we are here, have been here…to sort of go back and fill in our names where people have erased them in history books is so crucial.”
Organizing for our lives
The lives of Black LGBTQ+ people, which is a critical focus of Moore’s long history of organizing from Newark to Ferguson and beyond, dates back to his relationship with Black lesbian and Newark Pride founder June Dowell-Burton.
“She pretty much pulled me into the streets and pulled me into organizing,” Moore said of Dowell-Burton. “We’re in Black ass Newark organizing Pride marches down Broad Street. And it wasn’t just organizing Pride Marches, but we did a lot of policy work. We helped to set up the city’s first commission on LGBT concerns that I chaired for Cory Booker. We were really out in the community,” he said.
A precursor to the work Moore would eventually do as an East Coast organizer of an activist bus ride to Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the 2014 Michael Brown Shooting with Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, founders of a then-burgeoning movement called Black Lives Matter (BLM).
With two of the three founders of BLM publicly identifying as queer, the intersection of Blackness and queerness has always been present in the movement, with Black queer folks, such as Moore and other queer-identifying individuals contributing to the cause. Yet, in lock-step with how history has framed Black LGBTQ+ people, the contributions of queer BLM activists are often diminished and their voices silenced by the Black straight majority. This tactic worked in by-gone eras before social media and before Black queer men like Moore earned a platform to push back.
“Folks walking around with Black Lives Matter shirts on and hating queer and trans folk…the labor that energized this movement, and a movement that is also concerned with the value of Black straight peoples lives—is a labor to a Black, queer, and trans, and non-binary people,” said Moore.
“And I always say, if you ain’t down with that, then take the damn shirt off. Take the fist down. Black, queer, and trans, and non-binary folk have always been present and fighting for us even when the us wasn’t fighting for Black queer and trans folk. The continual need to assert that we are here, have been here…to sort of go back and fill in our names where people have erased them in history books is so crucial,” he said.
Black was queer before queer was cool
Moore, who identifies as queer, says the umbrella term appeals to him because “queerness is about disrupting or destabilizing norms.”
“I would love for us to get to a place where none of those fuc***g identities matter,” said Moore.
“In a society that attempts to dehumanize us, that uses the law to constrict our lives, it’s important that we name ourselves. I’m me,” said Moore. “I love who I love. I have sex with who I decide to have sex with if I decide to have sex. And I don’t need an identity category, which often is necessary to make the uncomfortable comfortable,” he said.
Now that he’s older, Moore says he no longer feels the need to squeeze himself into a box. And when presented with the options of living inside a cage or experiencing freedom despite potential consequences, the choice will always be freedom.
“You have to want to be free,” he said. “I was a person having sex and doing things with other men, and hated myself for it and hated queerness. I breathed homophobia and hetero normativity like it was air. I didn’t know that I was breathing it like air until it was revealed to me through the words that I read...through the communities I was around.”
One place where Moore found community and what he describes as a “second type of home” was in Atlanta.
“This Black ass, gay ass city. I’d never experienced anything like that before and I was so drawn to it,” he said. “And also, I was like, why am I spending all of this money living in New Jersey when I could go down here and live nice? I would go, and all of my friends from the northeast started coming with me and we just started developing community. I even wrote the first half of my book in College Park. I rented a house there for several months. I just loved it,” said Moore.
“My freedom came not from becoming the man that other people desired for me to be, but unbecoming. Failing at the rules, failing at the vision, giving the middle finger to all the idealism around what manhood is supposed to be.”
Like many Black queer men who venture to Atlanta seeking freedom and liberation from restrictive and often toxic societal expectations of manhood, Moore says he is in the process of what he calls “unbecoming.”
“My freedom came not from becoming the man that other people desired for me to be, but unbecoming. Failing at the rules, failing at the vision, giving the middle finger to all the idealism around what manhood is supposed to be,” he said. “I’m trying to become a better human. Because even those notions of manhood and masculinity are so full of these ideas that don’t have anything to do with me or my freedom. It was at that point where I let go of the overwhelming urge to appease society, to appease these ideas of what men are supposed to be, of what Black men are supposed to be, what real Black men are supposed to be. This is where I found my freedom. So my message to folk is to “unbecome.”
