Career
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Okundaye worked in policy, seeing his writing as a side hobby. He then quit his job to freelance as a writer full time. [13]
He has been a regular contributor to The Guardian , the London Review of Books , Vice , Dazed , i-D , GQ , the Evening Standard , and Bustle . [14] [15] [7] He has also written for NME , the New Statesman , British Vogue , The Independent , The New York Times , the Financial Times , Time Out , and The Sunday Times . [16] [17] In 2020 and 2021, he had a column in Tribune Magazine . [18]
Okundaye is vocal about a number of social and political issues in the UK, writing about them from a left-wing perspective. He has written about topics such as race in British society, politics, the housing crisis, the monarchy, and Black British LGBT+ culture with a specialty in the experiences and history of Black British gay men. [19] [20] [21] In addition, he covers popular culture and media in the film, television, theatre, music, and literary worlds and has interviewed public figures.
In 2021, Okundaye co-founded the digital archive and podcast "Black & Gay, Back in the Day" with Marc Thompson. [22] [23]
His debut book entitled Revolutionary Acts (2024), documents Black British gay history and culture from the 1970s to the present. [24] [25] [26] The book is structured around profiling the following figures: Ted Brown, Dirg Aaab-Richards, Alex Owolade, Calvin "Biggy" Dawkins, Dennis Carney, Ajamu X, and Thompson. [27] Revolutionary Acts had a positive critical reception with The Guardian calling it a "groundbreaking debut" and Bricks magazine saying it is "a dynamic and crucial narration of Black queer history for the 21st century". [28] [29] It has also been shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2024. [30]
Eric Arthur Blair was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element. Camp is historically associated with LGBTQ+ culture and especially gay men. Camp aesthetics disrupt modernist understandings of high art by inverting traditional aesthetic judgements of beauty, value, and taste, and inviting a different kind of aesthetic engagement.
Queer as Folk is a 1999 British television series that chronicles the lives of three gay men living in Manchester's gay village around Canal Street. Initially running for eight episodes, a two-part follow up was shown in 2000. It was written by Russell T Davies and produced by Red Production Company for Channel 4.
Peter Gary Tatchell is an Australian-born British human rights campaigner, best known for his work with LGBT social movements.
LGBTQ slang, LGBTQ speak, queer slang, or gay slang is a set of English slang lexicon used predominantly among LGBTQ+ people. It has been used in various languages since the early 20th century as a means by which members of the LGBTQ+ community identify themselves and speak in code with brevity and speed to others. The acronym LGBT was popularized in the 1990s and stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. It may refer to anyone who is non-heterosexual or non-cisgender, instead of exclusively to people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. To recognize this inclusion, a popular variant, LGBTQ, adds the letter Q for those who identify as queer or are questioning their sexual or gender identity.
Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and for his novel The Line of Beauty the 2004 Booker Prize. Hollinghurst is credited with having helped gay-themed fiction to break into the literary mainstream through his six novels since 1988.
Jon Savage is an English writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his definitive history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England's Dreaming (1991).
The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" ; between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
Simon Tseko Nkoli was an anti-apartheid, gay rights and AIDS activist in South Africa. Active in the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), the United Democratic Front, and the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), he was arrested as part of the Delmas Treason Trial in 1984. After his release in 1988, he founded the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) and organized South Africa's first pride parade. His activism influenced the African National Congress (ANC) to enshrine gay rights in the South African constitution. One of the first South Africans to disclose that he was living with HIV/AIDS, Nkoli founded the Township AIDS Project. After his death from AIDS-related complications, his colleagues established the Treatment Action Campaign.
Richard Barrington "Rikki" Beadle-Blair MBE is a British actor, director, and playwright. He is the artistic director of multi-media production company Team Angelica.
Jason Cowley is a journalist, magazine editor and writer. After working at the New Statesman, he became the editor of Granta in September 2007, while also remaining a writer on The Observer. He returned to the New Statesman as its editor in September 2008.
Johann Eduard Hari is a Scottish writer and journalist who wrote for The Independent and The Huffington Post. In 2011, Hari was suspended from The Independent and later resigned, after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001 and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct. He has since written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, the effect of technology on attention span, and anti-obesity medication, which have attracted criticism for inaccuracies and misrepresentation.
Twink is gay slang for a man who is usually in his late teens to twenties whose traits may include a slim to average physique, a youthful appearance, little or no body hair, and flamboyancy. Twink is used both as a neutral descriptor, which can be compared with bear, and as a pejorative.
Oliver Burkeman is a British author and journalist, formerly writing the weekly column This Column Will Change Your Life for the newspaper The Guardian. In 2021, he published Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a self-help book on the philosophy and psychology of time management and happiness.
In 2015 a racial controversy developed in the United Kingdom surrounding the activities of Bahar Mustafa, a representative for Goldsmiths Students' Union. The incident resulted in media and academic discussions regarding race relations and the impact of police investigations on free speech.
Malia Mazia Bouattia is the former president of the National Union of Students (NUS) of the United Kingdom, elected at the National Conference in April 2016. She was the first female Black British and Muslim leader of the NUS. She attended the University of Birmingham. In March 2017, she was defeated in her attempt to run for a second term in office by NUS Vice-president Shakira Martin.
Tanveer Wasim "Tan" France is a British-American fashion designer, entrepreneur, and television personality. He is best known as the fashion expert for the Netflix series Queer Eye, host of the web series Dressing Funny, and co-host of Next in Fashion. His memoir, Naturally Tan, was released in June 2019. Of Pakistani descent, he is one of the first openly gay South Asian men on a major show, and one of the first openly gay Muslim men on western television.
UK Black Pride (UKBP) is a black gay pride event in London that has taken place since 2005. It is Europe's largest celebration of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Caribbean heritage lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people attracting nearly 8,000 people annually.
Jason Arday FRSA is a British sociologist, writer and fundraiser best known for his research on race and racism. In March 2023, he began an appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK, becoming the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge. He had previously been a Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Glasgow in the College of Social Sciences, and before that Associate Professor of Sociology and Deputy Executive Dean of People and Culture in the Faculty of Social Science and Health at the University of Durham, as well as visiting professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Centre for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation, South Africa.
From this moment despair ends and tactics begin is a stencil mural at Marble Arch in London by the graffiti artist Banksy. It was created during Extinction Rebellion protests in London in 2019 when Marble Arch was a base for the protestors.
