The urgency for unity within the Black community is palpable, but the question of how to unify Black men is elusive.

In the 1984 essay "Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart," Joseph Beam wrote, "Black men loving Black men is an autonomous agenda for the eighties, which is not rooted in any particular sexual, political, or class affiliation, but in our mutual survival."

How do we come together to heal and press forward with love and intentionality?

“Black Is The Color of the Cosmos," was the theme for the 2022 CNP Summit, held virtually on Saturday and Sunday, March 19 and 20. In framing this year’s Summit, CNP offered the following quote to describe the work at hand; “So often, we’ve looked to the past, but where our liberation lies is in our future. This summit is for us to prepare for the movement of tomorrow.” While there is much within this quote to unpack, what resonates most with me is the pointed emphasis on the importance of preparation for [the movement of] tomorrow. In the simplest of ways, it all boils down to one significant point we’ve all seen and heard demonstrated time and time again; representation matters.

However, when it comes to the lives of Black queer people (and Black gay men in particular), there’s far more nuance and context to consider, simply because of how our existence has always been toyed with. Our Black gay lives have almost always had an ongoing (and extremely toxic) relationship with silence, shame, secrecy, and fear. Thankfully, that is why organizations like CNP and so many others exist; to combat such pointed attempts at erasure and humiliation, while ensuring that none of those attempts are successful in trying to dim our light or silence us, as they are structurally intended to do.

Between December 2019 and May 2020, Joshua Henry Jenkins, co-creator of “Black, Gay, stuck at home,” lost two of his closest Black queer friends—Dr. Louis F. Graham, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Policy at The University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Marcus R. White, an Assistant Professor of Dance at Arizona State University. The sudden loss was incomprehensible and rippled throughout the marginalized and artistic communities in which their work was rooted, specifically, but not limited to the cities of Chapel Hill and Greensboro, where Jenkins first encountered the former romantic partners as undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill during the early stages of creating KuchuQwanzaa—a 7-day celebration and expression of Black LGBTQ+ cultural principles, values, and ideals that expands on the more widely known Kwanzaa celebration from December 26, to January 1.

“The idea of interrogating or flipping Kwanzaa on its head to be Black and queer meant that Louis [Graham] and Marcus [White] wanted to also interject those ideologies into the name,” Jenkins says.