Something Else to Be: Generations of Black Queer Brilliance and the Mobile Homecoming Experiential Archive

Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace use their archive of the Mobile Homecoming Project, a cross-country project in which the authors travel the United States creating ritual for and with black lgbtq visionaries, to examine what it means to move from individual recognition (neither white nor male nor straight) to a collective (“something else to be”). Putting pleasurable queer pressure on the terms “generation,” “brilliance,” and “home,” this essay uses the concept of the “experiential archive” not to insert the value of difference into an existing narrative or to draw on normative resources but rather to generate alternative resources and narratives for coming home.