This year’s Juneteenth, June 19, 2022, will be a day of celebration, remembrance, and hopefully change. It is the day our fair city of Portland will simultaneously commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the Stonewall riots (arguably the birth of the modern gay rights movement) and the 157th anniversary of Juneteenth: the day Black Americans celebrate the official end of US slavery—two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
At first glance, the overlapping dates of Portland’s Pride Parade and Juneteenth might strike some as peculiar, inconvenient, inappropriate, and perhaps even offensive. However, a deeper look reveals a fundamental overlap of all liberation narratives and humanity’s continued struggle against oppression. Long before Black, transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson threw anything at Stonewall, former slave William Dorsey Swann was crowned America’s first ever Queen of Drag. Since then, the Black Queer community has remained at the forefront of cultural advance, from Audre Lorde and James Baldwin to Alvin Ailey and Stormé DeLarverie.
What better way to illustrate the relationship between these two historic events than with an event to celebrate the intersection of Black and queer identity? And who better to produce such an event than two local legends who both reside at that very intersection?
In February, Henry Felton (Kimber K. Shade, of the House of Shade) and Isaiah Equire (one half of local production power duo iZohnny and the team behind Boyerism) created an event where attendees can celebrate both queerness and Blackness, as their whole selves.
