At Pride in the Park, Jackson’s Black LGBTQ+ community finds connection
By Anna Hu | Originally published by Mississippi Today
Under the welcome shade of Fondren Park trees, dozens of LGBTQ+ friends and allies socialized and enjoyed barbecue with a drag performance at a local Black Pride event, organized by public health group My Brother’s Keeper. Then, they were called upon to provide the entertainment.
After some cajoling by repeat Jackson Black Pride host JStruktuur on Saturday, a few intrepid attendees stepped up to the open mic, which featured a $75 cash prize for the winner. First up was Tony Patrick, who sang Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking of You.” Patrick came to the event with Jose Ramirez, driving from an hour away in Scott County on his lime green motorbike. After hearing about Pride in the Park the night before at Shade, a LGBTQ+ bar and nightclub in Jackson, they decided to make another trip to the city.
Despite living in an environment that can feel “closed in,” Patrick said he feels comfortable expressing himself as a gay man.
“We’ll go right now to a club that we’ve never been to and hold hands,” he said. ” If I love myself, there’s nothing nobody can do about it.”
Afterward, they were off to a birthday party, again traveling by motorcycle and hoping the rain would hold off.
Next on the mic was Cyanne Herron, an artist, fashion designer and poet. Herron told Mississippi Today that she is still shy about sharing her poetry. When she found out about the open mic, her first reaction was, “ Don’t look at me.”
An hour later, wearing a bright yellow bandana and a shirt she painted herself, Herron sat on the steps on the Fondren Park stage and began reading from her phone. Friends who had encouraged her to speak cheered her on, including Landon Williams, a retail worker by day and drag queen by night.
Herron and Williams first met at Shade, and at Saturday’s event, they caught up on his Batman-themed show hosted at the nightclub the weekend prior. Williams flipped through videos on his phone of a fellow drag artist performing stunts as DC antihero Harley Quinn, while he twirled his cape as Quinn’s paramour, Poison Ivy.
”Drag has saved a version of myself that was kind of scared,” Williams said. He’s 26, but remembers that at 18, he didn’t have public events like Pride in the Park to meet other members of the LGBTQ+ community. In January, he started doing drag after finding two drag mothers, or mentors, who gave him a makeup kit and his first wig.
“When you want to show your confidence in a bold way, you kind of feel shy about wanting to put it out there like that because people might look at you a certain way,” he said. “ But it’s just like, why don’t I get to be bold in my confidence?”
“ I love that for you, actually,” Herron said. “ Because I feel like we all deserve, our last day on Earth, to at least have some type of thought in our consciousness that says that I actually was being myself while I was here.”
Connecting people to care
Aside from building a sense of community, Pride in the Park allowed attendees to connect with resources. Some partners, like MS Capital City Pride and the Transgender Resources, Advocacy, Networking and Services (TRANS) Program, have been at previous iterations of the event. Others, like Awakening Love, a Jackson-based, Black and trans-led organization with a drop-in center that offers health resources and regular social programming, were there for the first time.
Love Latonia, the founder of Awakening Love who is herself a veteran drag entertainer and transgender woman, tabled a booth alongside her longtime friend, Aubrey Grayson. The two got to know each other through the Jackson nightlife scene, where Grayson loved the way her friend performed in drag shows.
“It just drew me to her,” she said, turning to Latonia. “And then you did my hair. Remember you did my hair?”
Latonia replied with an emphatic, “Uh-huh,” as they laughed together.
Grayson said she knew several of the people there but wanted to mingle in the crowd. “ I thought it was more important for me to come out here because I’ve never really been, and I just wanted to just see my community,” she said.
Participants also learned about health resources and received HIV screenings through the Open Arms Healthcare Center, the clinical arm of My Brother’s Keeper.
Inside an air-conditioned trailer several notches cooler than the humid 90 degrees outside, phlebotomist Monica Smith took finger pricks for about a dozen attendees throughout the day. With each blood sample, she then administered an HIV test. Seconds later, the appearance of a blue dot in the HIV test showed a positive or negative result.
The mobile unit can be requested through Open Arms Healthcare to travel across Mississippi, and provides both screenings and information or referrals to PrEP, a prescription drug that prevents HIV.
Outside, the party wound down as the sun began to set. Dana Brooks, who owns a catering company and is a transgender man, started packing up the burgers and beans he supplied. Friends folded up their lawn chairs, and Taylor Turnage, running the vintage sports clothing pop-up booth, put away her wares.
The open mic wrapped up, too, after announcing the winner: Cyanne Herron.
This story was produced with support from the Sarah Yelena Haselhorst Fund for Health Journalism.
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
