In this dreaming workshop, Black Femme Brunch guided participants to imagine the possibility of a future world: a world in which fat, Black, dark-skinned, poor, disabled, neurodivergent, queer and trans femmes and women do not exist in the clutches of anti-blackness, but instead lavish in a life free of its menace.

Participants collaboratively facilitated a dreaming salon that imagined abundantly sustained futures for Black queer and trans folks where we will craft a world in which our needs and desires are the standard of care, access, and community. Our dreaming will garner a safe place for kikis, connection, care, learning, family, gender expression, sexual expansion, sustainable living, and interdependence.

Our goal is to manifest a world that opens us to our fullness and to challenge everyone who brings their brilliance to leave with ways to bring their idea of paradise one inch closer to our present. May our brave dreams generate enclaves of care, safety, pleasure, play, rest, and ease that will allow us to exhale, live well, and get free.

This workshop was for Black folks only.

About the Hosts

Black Femme Brunch builds community by being a radical, irreverent, and unapologetic celebration of trans and queer black femmes of all genders. Founded in 2014 in Washington, DC by Tuere Khanyisa and Shaan Wade, Black Femme Brunch began with a simple idea: to create an oasis for black femmes in the desert of white queer events, black straight spaces and cis-heteronormative LGBT events. Under the stewardship of current creative co-directors, Tuere Khanyisa and Janae Williams (juh weems), since 2015, Black Femme Brunch has curated an Annual DC Black Pride Concert, hosted kink and sexual health events, artbuilds, film screenings, parties and picnics amongst other rich offerings. Black Femme Brunch has been featured on podcasts, The Read and the Black Joy Mixtape and in the Collective Action for Safe Spaces DC Communal Care against COVID zine, Black Femme Brunch has collaborated with Blk in Space, Halcyon Arts Lab, BYP100DC, BLMDC and Woolly Mammoth Theatre. BFB has presented at the International Mx. Leather & Bootblack Conference, Common Field Annual Convening and at the Inaugural Black Sex Workers Conference. Black Femme Brunch will continue until the entire world is Black Femme Euphoria!

Janae or juh (like “duh” with a “j”) is an illustrator, musician, photographer, creative director and movement artist low femme dyke who likes to think of theirself as an interdependent–disciplinary artist, a style of creating they’ve adopted from the Black baptist church (and from witnessing the countless femmes and folks who had a hand in raising them); each area of their work needs the others to have context, community and growth.

Tuere Khanyisa is an afrofuturist writer, editor, visual artist and curator of black trans and queer spaces. She is a genderqueer leatherdyke. Her messianic imperative is to serve the black queer and trans community with the radical notion that pursuing pleasure is an affirming, powerful, and reclaimed right of black people’s humanity. She works to demystify understandings of kink, pleasure, and sex positivity by offering people safe containers to explore and encounter them without judgment. Tuere loves writing Black speculative fiction and is the creator and co-organizer of Black Femme Brunch and editor of the Queer Latifah Zine.