Bitch Listen, a rewired news group podcast hosted by Gimani Gandhi.

This is Bitch Listen. So bitch, listen.

Welcome to Bitch Listen, a podcast where I say what I mean and mean what I say, whether it's about identity, justice, culture, or just trying to make sense of this mess.

I'm Imani Gandhi, aka Angry Black Lady, and if it makes you uncomfortable, that's probably the point.

Coming out late in life is a mind fuck fuck because it's not just about finally saying, oh, I'm

queer.

It's about all the years before that.

Years spent thinking I was straight because honestly, I didn't really think queerness was an option

for me.

Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, queerness was out there, but not in a way that

I could see myself in. You had Paris is burning. You had ballroom culture. You had people out there

living it. But as a black kid in mostly white spaces, I didn't have any access to that.

Nobody at school was talking about Paris is burning. TV sure as hell wasn't showing

queerness. And in my world, queerness was either whispered about, mocked, or erased.

So I thought I was straight. What else was I supposed to think, right? There was no mirror for me,

no blueprint that said, this is yours too. Then I left home and it started to shift. I was in college

when Ellen premiered in 1994, a little later after I graduated,

Will & Grace hit. And sure, those were big deals, right? They cracked open something in the culture,

but again, none of that queerness looked like me. None of it felt like something a black girl from

Philly could claim. So what do you do? You play the role. You act straight. You tuck parts of

yourself away because you don't know that there's another script. And the kicker, while I was busy hiding queerness from myself, I couldn't hide my blackness from anybody. Growing up in mostly white spaces, I was always the one, the black girl, the example, the token, hyper-visible, whether I wanted to be or not.

I couldn't disappear even if I'd wanted to. But at the same time, the part of me that was queer, it was

...