In the ruins of post–Civil War Memphis, Frances Thompson lived her womanhood in public despite escalating danger. A formerly enslaved Black trans woman, 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, and why her testimony still matters as debates over bodily autonomy and public identity continue 150 years later.

Music: “Hard in America” by Gabriel Kelley, licensed through Epidemic Sound.

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 veteran 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 liberation. He survived the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility, endured years in solitary confinement, and wrote fiercely about autonomy, queerness, and revolutionary love.

Balagoon rejected binaries: nationalist and anarchist, soldier and poet, gay man within movements that often erased queerness. His essays and letters reveal a thinker wrestling with strategy and selfhood, insisting that freedom must include the fullness of identity as a bisexual black man and revolutionary.

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.

In the glittering salons of interwar Europe, where royalty mingled with film stars and empire still shaped the social order, Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson moved with effortless grace.

Born in Grenada and rising to prominence in London, Hutch became one of the most celebrated cabaret singers of the 1920s and 30s.

His rumored romances with aristocrats and public figures unsettled rigid racial and sexual hierarchies, placing him at the fault lines of class, empire, and desire. In a society obsessed with appearances, he embodied both assimilation and quiet defiance.

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 into the churn of Reconstruction-era Georgia, Ma Rainey, born Gertrude Pridgett, carved a voice that refused silence.

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.

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 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://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.

In a world hungry for clean lines and easy answers, 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.

In Episode 4 of Binary Bashers: June Jordan wrote from the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and empire, push back against neat categories in favor of lived truth. A poet, essayist, teacher, and organizer, Jordan insisted that language was a tool for survival, intimacy, and resistance. Her work braided the personal and the political, honoring Black life, bisexuality, and global solidarity at a moment when such intersections were often erased.

This episode translates Jordan through her archives and poems, attending to how she named injustice without surrendering joy, and how she imagined freedom as something practiced daily, in classrooms, streets, and relationships. June Jordan’s voice remains urgent, clear-eyed, uncompromising, and fiercely humane.

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.

In Episode 3 of Binary Bashers, we revisit 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.

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.⁠