I’ve been a lesbian since before I had language for it. I’ve been Black since before I took my first breath.
That order matters to me, and I’ve stopped apologizing for saying so out loud.
The Question Nobody Asks Out Loud
People love to ask queer folks “when did you know?” Nobody ever asks Black people that question, because there’s no moment to point to. There’s no closet I walked out of to become Black. There was never a version of me that wasn’t. So when I sat down to actually think about which identity built me first, which one taught me how to survive before I even understood what I was surviving, the answer wasn’t complicated. It just wasn’t a popular thing to say out loud.
I’ve watched people flinch when I say it plainly. I’ve watched queer friends — including Black queer friends — treat the sentence like a betrayal, like I’m handing ammunition to somebody. I’m not. I’m telling the truth about my own life, and I think more of us need to sit with what that truth actually is instead of performing the version of intersectionality that’s easiest to post about.
The World Reads My Race Before It Reads Anything Else
When I walk into a room, nobody clocks my sexuality first. They see a Black woman. The cop who pulls me over doesn’t slow down because I might be queer — he speeds up because I’m Black. The hiring manager who skims my resume and hesitates on my name isn’t hesitating over who I love. The systems that were built to contain, surveil, and extract from Black bodies were built centuries before “queer” was ever a word I could reach for.
My queerness is real. It shapes who I love, how I move through romance, what my household looks like. But it is not the first thing the world uses against me, and it is not the first thing that shaped how I survive in it.
I think about this every time I’m in a queer space that’s overwhelmingly white and somebody wants to talk about “the community” like it’s one flattened, borderless thing. It isn’t. My experience of being queer is not the same as a white lesbian’s experience of being queer, because I’m never just navigating homophobia. I’m navigating it stacked on top of anti-Blackness, and the two don’t sit side by side politely — they compound. A white lesbian can walk into most rooms and, once she stops talking about her partner, disappear into whiteness. I don’t get that option. My skin doesn’t wait for me to come out. It’s already spoken before I say a word.
That’s not a complaint. It’s just data. And once you have the data, you organize your life around it.
Blackness Is Where My Politics Started
Long before I came out to anybody, I was already Black in a country that has never fully made peace with that fact. I inherited a fight I didn’t choose — the fight for the right to simply exist, to be believed, to be paid fairly, to not be buried early. That fight raised me. It’s in my mother’s voice, my grandmother’s hands, the church pews I grew up in, the block I grew up on.
My queerness came later, as a discovery. My Blackness was never a discovery — it was the ground I was standing on the whole time.
I remember being seven years old and my grandmother sitting me down to explain why I had to be “twice as good” to get half as far. I didn’t understand it then the way I understand it now, but I understood the weight of it. I understood that something about me made the world require more of me before it would even consider giving me anything. That lesson came before puberty, before crushes, before I ever had a single thought about who I’d love. It came before I even had the vocabulary to know that “queer” was a thing I could be.
By the time I figured out I was attracted to women, I already had a fully formed sense of what it meant to move through the world as Black. I already knew what it felt like to be watched, doubted, underestimated, and overpoliced. Queerness didn’t introduce me to marginalization — it added a second layer onto a house that was already built.
That’s an important distinction, because a lot of coming-out narratives treat sexuality like the moment everything clicks into place, like discovering you’re queer is the origin story. For me, it wasn’t the origin story. It was chapter two. Chapter one was already written.
This Isn’t a Rejection of Queer Community
I say this knowing some people will hear it as a betrayal of queer solidarity. It isn’t. I love my queer community. I’ve found real safety, real joy, real family in queer spaces that didn’t exist for me anywhere else.
But solidarity doesn’t require me to pretend every part of my identity carries equal weight in every room. Intersectionality was never supposed to mean “pick the identity that’s trending.” It was supposed to mean: tell the truth about which parts of you the world attacks first, and organize accordingly.
For me, that truth is Blackness. Every single time.
I think about the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement’s history and how often Black queer people were asked to wait our turn. We were told marriage equality had to come first, that our specific issues — police violence against Black trans women, housing discrimination against Black queer youth, the criminalization of Blackness itself — could be addressed “after” the bigger fight was won. Except the bigger fight was never actually bigger. It was just whiter, and better funded, and easier to sell to a mainstream audience that wanted its queerness palatable.
I’ve sat in rooms where I was the only Black woman and watched an entire strategy session get built around a version of queer liberation that had nothing to do with my liberation. That experience taught me something I can’t unlearn: queer community, as beautiful as it can be, is not automatically Black-safe. I have to keep asking it to be. I have to keep pushing it to remember that Black queer people exist at the center of this fight, not the margins of it.
Why the Order Matters
There’s a reason I lead with race and not orientation. Black liberation is the foundation everything else stands on for me. If Black people aren’t free, no version of my queerness will save me from what comes for Black people first. History has already shown us this — Black queer folks have always been failed twice: once by a world that hates Blackness, and again by movements that treated queerness as the “real” fight and Blackness as a side issue to be managed later, or worse, left behind entirely.
I won’t do that math. I won’t let anybody convince me my sexuality is the more urgent, more defining, more “progressive” part of who I am. Not because it isn’t valid — because it isn’t first.
Think about the women who built the frameworks we still lean on. Black lesbian thinkers and organizers spent decades insisting that race, gender, and sexuality couldn’t be separated out and ranked against each other — that the fight had to be waged on every front at once, because the systems attacking us were never single-issue systems either. I hold onto that teaching. But I also hold onto something else they knew deeply: that Black women, queer or not, have always had to fight for their humanity first, before anyone would even consider fighting for their freedom to love.
That’s not a contradiction. It’s the whole point. You can believe every part of your identity deserves liberation and still recognize that one part of you is targeted first, hardest, and most consistently. For me, race is where the target lands first. Sexuality lands second — not because it matters less to my heart, but because it costs me less immediately in a world that has spent four hundred years perfecting its violence against Black bodies specifically.
Living in the Fullness of Both
I’m not asking anyone to rank their own identities the way I rank mine. This isn’t a universal formula. It’s mine, earned through my own life, my own body, my own history.
But I needed to say it plainly, because too many spaces — queer and straight, Black and white — want to flatten me into whichever identity is convenient for their narrative that day. I refuse the flattening.
Some days that means showing up to a rally for Black lives and feeling completely at home, fully seen, no explaining required. Other days it means showing up to a Pride event and feeling like I have to bring my whole self and hope the room can hold it. I’ve learned not to apologize for the fact that those two experiences don’t feel the same. They were never going to.
What I want, more than anything, is for the next generation of Black queer women to grow up without having to choose a hierarchy at all — to live in a world where Blackness and queerness are both fully protected, fully celebrated, fully safe. Until that world exists, I’ll keep telling the truth about which one I lean on first when the ground gets shaky. And the ground gets shaky more often than people think.
I am a Black woman who loves women. In that order. And I have never once felt smaller for saying so.
What about you — which part of your identity did the world teach you to lead with first, and did you ever choose it, or was it chosen for you?
