Marlon M. Bailey is a professor of African American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and an affiliate professor of theater and drama at Washington University in St. Louis. [1] He previously taught at Arizona State University and the University of California, San Francisco, in the Department of Medicine. [2] [3]
Bailey writes and researches in the area of African-American studies. [4] He also has written about LGBT subcultures, [5] and in particular topics which involve both subjects. [6] [7]
Bailey is also a director, actor, and performance artist. The most recent play that he acted in was in 2006, The Hard Evidence of existence: a Black Gay Sex (Love Show, directed by Cedric Brown. His most recent directing was in 2002 Blackness: Perspectives in Color in the Durham Studio, UC-Berkeley.
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(December 2018) |
Butch and femme are terms used in the lesbian subculture to ascribe or acknowledge a masculine (butch) or feminine (femme) identity with its associated traits, behaviors, styles, self-perception, and so on. The terms were founded in lesbian communities in the twentieth century. This concept has been called a "way to organize sexual relationships and gender and sexual identity". Butch–femme culture is not the sole form of a lesbian dyadic system, as there are many women in butch–butch and femme–femme relationships.
Femme is a term traditionally used to describe a lesbian who exhibits a feminine identity or gender presentation. Alternate meanings of the word also exist with some non-lesbian individuals using the word, notably some gay men, bisexuals, nonbinary and transgender individuals.
LGBT slang, LGBT speak, or gay slang is a set of English slang lexicon used predominantly among LGBT people. It has been used in various languages since the early 20th century as a means by which members of the LGBT 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.
Vogue, or voguing, is a highly stylized, modern house dance originating in the late 1980s that evolved out of the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1960s. It gained mainstream exposure when it was featured in Madonna's song and video "Vogue" (1990), and when showcased in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. In its modern form, this dance has become a global phenomenon that continues to evolve both stylistically and demographically.
Gayle S. Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects including feminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pedophilia, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and histories of sexual subcultures, especially focused in urban contexts. Her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory. She is an associate professor of anthropology and women's studies at the University of Michigan.
E. Patrick Johnson is the dean of the Northwestern University School of Communication. He is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and professor of African-American studies at Northwestern University. He is also a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson is the founding director of the Black Arts Initiative at Northwestern. His scholarly and artistic contributions focus on performance studies, African-American studies and women, fender and sexuality studies.
William Roscoe Leake, better known as Willi Ninja, was an American dancer and choreographer best known for his appearance in the documentary film Paris Is Burning.
The Ballroom Scene is an African-American and Latino underground LGBTQ+ subculture that originated in New York City. Beginning in the late 20th century, Black and Latino drag queens began to organize their own pageants in opposition to racism experienced in established drag queen pageant circuits. Though racially integrated for the participants, the judges of these circuits were mostly white people. While the initial establishment of Ballroom mimicked these drag queen pageants, the inclusion of gay men and trans women would transform the Ballroom scene into what it is today: a multitude of categories that all LGBTQ+ people can participate in. Attendees "walk" these categories for trophies and cash prizes. Most participants in Ballroom belong to groups known as "houses", where chosen families of friends form relationships and communities separate from their families of origin, from which they may be estranged.
Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, and is currently on leave while holding an appointment as Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College. Stryker serves on the Advisory Council of METI and the Advisory Board of the Digital Transgender Archive. A transgender woman, she is the author of several books about LGBT history and culture.
Aisha Diori is an Events Director, Community Mobiliser, HIV/AIDS Preventionist, educator, Talk Show Host, Event MC, Pan-Africanist, and has been named "Iconic Mother" in Ball culture. Her father is Abdoulaye Hamani Diori, a Nigerien political leader and business person, and her mother is Betty Graves, the first Ghanaian / Nigerian woman to own a travel agency in Nigeria.
Jeanne Córdova was an American trailblazer of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and proud butch.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focuses on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals and genderqueer people.
Assotto Saint was a Haitian-born American poet, publisher and performance artist, who was a key figure in LGBT and African-American art and literary culture of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Gender roles in non-heterosexual communities are a topic of much debate; some people believe traditional, heterosexual gender roles are often erroneously enforced on non-heterosexual relationships by means of heteronormative culture and attitudes towards these non-conformative relationships.
The African-American LGBT community, otherwise referred to as the Black LGBT community, is part of the overall LGBT culture and overall African-American culture. The initialism LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. A landmark event for the LGBT community, and the Black LGBT community in particular, was the Stonewall uprising in 1969, in New York City's Greenwich Village, where Black activists including Stormé DeLarverie and Marsha P. Johnson played key roles in the events.
Zethu Matebeni is a sociologist, activist, writer, documentary film maker, Professor and South Africa Research Chair in Sexualities, Genders and Queer Studies at the University of Fort Hare. She has held positions at the University of the Western Cape and has been senior researcher at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at UCT. She has been a visiting Professor Yale University and has received a number of research fellowships including those from African Humanities Program, Ford Foundation, the Fogarty International Centre and the National Research Foundation.
Juana María Rodríguez is a Cuban-American professor of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly writing in queer theory, critical race theory, and performance studies highlights the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and embodiment in constructing subjectivity.
Erickatoure Aviance is an American nightlife personality, club host, clothing designer, fashionista, drag performer, recording artist, dancer, actor, singer and songwriter. She is a member of the House of Aviance, one of the vogue and ballroom houses in the U.S. founded in 1989 by Mother Juan Aviance. It is from this House that she takes her last name from as customary for all ballroom house members.
C. Riley Snorton is an American scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender and race, specifically Black transgender identities. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Snorton is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. In 2014 BET listed him as one of their "18 Transgender People You Should Know".
Lesbian erasure is the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or reexplain evidence of lesbian women or relationships in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources. Lesbian erasure also refers to instances wherein lesbian issues, activism, and identity is deemphasized or ignored within the LGBT community.