BINARY BASHERS

Frances Thompson, a formerly enslaved Black trans woman, lived her womanhood in public despite escalating danger in post, Civil War Memphis. She survived the white supremacist violence of the 1866 Memphis Riots and testified before Congress, placing her voice into the national archive at a time when Black women were rarely heard.Later arrested under laws policing gender nonconformity, Thompson's life reveals how race, gender, and state power intertwined during Reconstruction era United States — and why her testimony still matters as debates over bodily autonomy and public identity continue 150 years later in 2026.Music: "Hard in America" by Gabriel Kelley, licensed through Epidemic Sound.A Note on Sources:This episode was made with care. It's based on established scholarship and publicly available archival records. If we've made an error, please let us know at https://binarybasherspodcast.comEmbracing All of Me is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. Visit our FAQs and Sources page to learn more about how this episode was developed.Topics: Frances Thompson, Black trans history, Black transgender history, Reconstruction era, 1866 Memphis Riots, Congressional testimony, Black women's history, gender nonconformity, trans resistance, bodily autonomy, LGBTQ+ history, Black queer history, post-Civil War America, trans historical figures

Born into Jim Crow and refusing every box it tried to seal, Pauli Murray lived at the fault lines of American law, race, gender, and faith. Episode 6 of Binary Bashers, traces a life spent translating personal struggle into constitutional vision: from early challenges to segregated education, to legal theories that helped shape Brown v. Board of Education, to arguments against sex discrimination in Reed v. Reed that later undergirded Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s work.Murray’s journals and letters reveal an interior life wrestling with identity beyond rigid binaries. As a poet, lawyer, activist, and eventually the first Black woman ordained an Episcopal priest, Murray insisted that justice must be capacious enough to hold contradiction, vulnerability, and hope.This episode was made with care. It's based on established scholarship and publicly available information from credible sources. If we've made an error, please let us know at https://binarybasherspodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ Embracing All of Me is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our FAQs and Sources page to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Abdurahman Farajajé charted his own path to become the total embodiment of a binary basher.Raised in a multiracial, multireligious Berkeley, California where difference was ordinary, Farajajé learned early that wholeness did not require erasure. Episode 5 traces a life shaped by multiplicity, Blackness, fluidity, spiritual and intellectual curiosity, at a time when institutions demanded legibility over truth.From being disciplined for an “untogether” curriculum, to navigating the fragile language of bisexuality as it first emerged as an identity, to confronting racism and gatekeeping in academia, Farajajé insisted that liberation without the body, desire, and spirit was incomplete. During the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, he carried that insistence into the Black church, choosing presence over safety.This episode was made with care. It's based on established scholarship and publicly available information from credible sources. If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://embracingallofme.org.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Embracing All of Me is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠FAQs⁠ and ⁠Sources page⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Born Donald Weems, Kuwasi Balagoon forged himself in the crucible of rebellion. A member of the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army, Balagoon’s life traced the fault lines of 1970s America—state violence, political imprisonment, and the unfinished work of Black liberation. He survived the Attica prison uprising, endured years in solitary confinement, and wrote fiercely about autonomy, queerness, and revolutionary love.Balagoon rejected binaries: nationalist and anarchist, soldier and poet, a gay man within movements that often erased queerness. His essays and letters reveal a thinker wrestling with revolutionary strategy and selfhood, insisting that freedom must include the fullness of identity.Today, as debates over protest, policing, and political prisoners continue, Balagoon’s voice asks what solidarity truly demands, and who it must protect.This episode draws on established scholarship and publicly available sources. If you notice an error, please let us know at https://binarybasherspodcast.comBinary Bashers is part of Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, as well as our communities, kin, and allies. Visit our FAQs and Sources page to learn more about how this episode was developed.

This episode of Binary Bashers explores the life and work of June Jordan, a groundbreaking Black feminist poet, essayist, educator, and activist who wrote from the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and empire. Refusing neat categories, Jordan centered lived experience and used language as a powerful tool for survival, intimacy, and resistance.Through her poetry, essays, and archival materials, this episode examines how June Jordan named injustice with precision while holding onto joy, love, and possibility. Her work bridges the personal and political, affirming Black life, bisexual identity, and global solidarity at a time when these connections were often ignored or erased.We also explore how Jordan understood freedom as a daily practice, something shaped in classrooms, communities, relationships, and movements for social justice. Her voice remains urgent, clear-eyed, and uncompromising, offering lasting insight into identity, activism, and the power of words.This episode draws on established scholarship and publicly available sources to present an accurate and thoughtful portrait of June Jordan’s legacy. If you notice an error, please let us know at https://binarybasherspodcast.com.Binary Bashers is part of Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform uplifting the voices of Bi+ BIPOC, as well as our communities, kin, and allies. Visit our FAQs and Sources page to learn more about how this episode was developed.

We turn to the quietly radical life and work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935), a poet, journalist, educator, and activist whose legacy does not fit neatly within the categories history has assigned her. Best known in her lifetime as a writer of refined verse and regional sketches, Dunbar-Nelson also lived at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and politics in the early twentieth century, navigating them with both discretion, poise, and defiance.Through essays, short stories, and political organizing, she chronicled Black life under Jim Crow while navigating respectability, race, gender, and power with precision. Her private journals, read closely in this episode, reveal a fuller interior world marked by three marriages, same-sex desire, frustration with patriarchal constraints, and an acute awareness of how identity could be both shelter and strategy.This episode was made with care. It's based on established scholarship and publicly available information from credible sources. If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://embracingallofme.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Embracing All of Me is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠FAQs⁠ and ⁠Sources page⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Reintroducing Countee Cullen (1903-1946), a poet whose life and work cannot be easily classification. Writing at the height of the Harlem Renaissance era, Cullen believed deeply in poetic beauty, form, meter, and universal themes, even as the world insisted on reading him through rigid racial and moral frames. His poetry lives in tension: between faith and doubt, protest and lyricism, belonging and alienation.This episode situates Countee within the movement’s internal diversity of thought. Poems like “Heritage” and “Yet Do I Marvel” reveal a writer grappling with God, history, and the burden of representation, while archival silences around his intimacy and desire point to the quiet strategies required to survive public life in the early twentieth century.If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://binarybasherspodcast.com⁠⁠Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me. EAOM is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ BIPOC, people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FAQs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sources page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson was one of the most famous Black entertainers in 1930s Britain—a Grenadian-born cabaret singer who performed for royalty, dazzled London high society, and lived inside a world of glamour, scandal, and contradiction.In this episode of Binary Bashers , we explore Hutch’s rise from the Caribbean to the elite salons of Mayfair, where he became the highest-paid entertainer in Britain, arriving in Rolls Royces with a white piano strapped to the roof. Moving through queer-adjacent and bi-coded social circles that included figures like Ivor Novello and Tallulah Bankhead, Hutch inhabited spaces where desire was fluid, performance was power, and identity was carefully managed.But behind the spectacle was a harsher truth: despite his fame, Hutch faced racism, surveillance, and public scandal. He was celebrated in public and sidelined in private, often forced to enter through servant entrances while entertaining the very people who adored him.

Born into the churn of Reconstruction-era Georgia, Ma Rainey, born Gertrude Pridgett, carved a voice that could not be silenced.Long before the blues was archived, categorized, or commercialized, Rainey lived it, on tent-show stages, in juke joints, and in a life that unsettled respectability politics.Known as the “Mother of the Blues,” she sang openly of desire, migration, and survival, leaving lyrical traces that scholars still parse for their radical honesty. Rainey’s recordings and rumored relationships complicate neat binaries of gender, sexuality, and propriety, offering instead a textured portrait of Black self-definition in the early twentieth century.If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://binarybasherspodcast.com⁠Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me. EAOM is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ BIPOC, people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FAQs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sources page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

Meet Claude McKay (1889–1948), the Harlem Renaissance poet whose brilliance, rebellion, and contradictions still echo through Black, queer, and literary history in 2026. Known for his fierce critiques of racism and empire, McKay also lived a life shaped by desires and identities that society had no safe language for yet.This episode explores the tension between visibility and survival: how a Black man, writing in an era of lynching, criminalization, and moral surveillance, carved out interior freedom while navigating public danger. Through narration, historical context, and careful archival research, Binary Bashers interprets McKay's own words, desires encrypted in verse, truths revealed obliquely in letters, as both survival strategy and creative act.If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://binarybasherspodcast.comBinary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me. EAOM is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color, our kin and friends. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FAQs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sources page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

The bi and queer grandpa you never had taught strangers on airplanes how to love their kids.ABilly S. Jones-Hennin spent 81 years living out loud — organizing the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, building movements nobody else would build, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, loving his husband Chris for 45 years, and never once agreeing to be simple.That's who ABilly was. Not a monument. A person. The elder who left a door open so wide you could walk through it decades after he first unlocked it.This is his story. And maybe a little bit of yours.If we've made an error, please let us know at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://binarybasherspodcast.com. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me. EAOM is a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, complex, and in-between, uplifting the voices of Bi+ people of color and complexity. ⁠⁠⁠Visit our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FAQs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sources page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about how this episode was developed.

In a world shaped by code, culture, and the stories we inherit, Binary Bashers emerges to unearth the lives that refuse to fit neatly into boxes. Black or white. Gay or straight. Saint or Sinner are just a few of the binaries explored. Each episode journeys through the archives, recovering voices often flattened by history, and reassembles them with care, context, and wiser language.This series is not just about the past or retroactive labeling; it is about the frameworks we still live within, and challenge, today. By tracing the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, culture, and computation, Binary Bashers invites listeners to question binaries of all kinds and to see history as a living, evolving dialogue.Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me - a storytelling platform centering the voices of bi+ people of color and complexity.If you notice any factual errors, please contact us at [email protected]. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Visit https://binarybasherspodcast.com to view our sources and FAQ pages.