Four out of 26 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Fellowship award — sometimes referred to as the “genius grant” — are LGBTQ+ identified and, of those, two are Black and one is of Asian ethnicity.
The fellowship will award each recipient $800,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years. But more importantly, the honor elevates their work into the public eye and gives them valuable time to continue pursuing their work in line with the philanthropist foundation’s larger goal of “building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.”
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Here are the four queer recipients of the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship award:
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Justin Vivian Bond – performer
A longtime cabaret performer, Bond gained notoriety during the height of the AIDS epidemic as their drag alter-ego Kiki DuRane. Their chaotic and inspired performances (sometimes through the musical duo of Kiki and Herb) combine raw emotion and historic commentary in playful, passionate ways that inspire emotion and a punk rock sense of rebellion.
The transgender performer has appeared onscreen — in queer director John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, for example — and in nightclub stages and concert halls worldwide. Her memoir Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels won the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.
“I have always thought of cabaret as a form of political resistance. I think cabaret, at its best, is beautiful, powerful music,” she said. “Creating beauty in the face of beauty or hate is a very very powerful thing. It allows you to be beautiful, have a rich inner life and to express that outwardly.”
Jericho Brown – poet
“Poet is my first identity,” the gay-identified poet says. “I feel as much a poet as I am black. I feel as much a poet as I am Southern. I feel like I can’t help it. I feel like it’s in my veins — it’s in my blood.”
Brown’s poetry collections examine Black masculinity, spirituality, family, sexuality, and racial identity through old and contemporary musical and poetic forms, including pop, jazz, blues, and even the ghazal, an old Arabic poetic structure.
He developed a unique poetry structure known as a “duplex,” and his collections have addressed suffering and broader injustices such as the HIV/AIDS crisis, mass incarceration, and community trauma in ways that unite, inspire, and startle readers’ souls.
“Poems are meant to be difficult, and their difficulty is that they take that which is tender and that which is violent, and they put them side by side, so that we better see and understand ourselves,” Brown said.
“I also think my poems are ultimately about the human condition,” he continued, “and the human condition is a condition of loneliness. And if you understand that everyone experiences that, then loneliness can indeed become a way to get to love, a way to get to joy, a way to get to celebration. And poems allow for that in a way that no other art can.”
Shamel Pitts – choreographer
Although Pitts, a queer-identified choreographer, was trained as a classical dancer in ballet and modern dance, he has since become famous for creating multidisciplinary performances that incorporate unique lighting, projection, electronic music, fashion, and other technical elements through an Afro-futuristic lens.
He founded Tribe, a multidisciplinary Brooklyn-based Arts Collective, where he works alongside other artists to “reimagine a future in which we thrive as black and brown people, in which our bodies are rendered spaces of regeneration and potential and connection and community.”
“I love dance because of its power and capacity to communicate beyond verbal language, there’s a lot of poetry in motion,” he said, adding that his training has mostly been based in “Gaga,” a style that “has a lot to do with listening to the body before we tell it what to do.”
“There is the possibility to connect to many different things at the same time,” he said. “When people encounter my work, I would love for them to experience the power of dance and collaboration and proclaim the pleasure and liberation through and beyond our bodies.”
Alice Wong – disability justice activist
“Disability is so much more than pain, trauma and tragedy,” Wong, the renowned queer writer and editor, says. “There’s creativity, adaptation and talent that comes from living in a non-disabled world.”
In 2014, she founded the Disability Visibility Project (DVP) to “amplify the unfiltered voices of disabled people” while examining their experiences through intersectional lenses. She has since built a media platform that includes podcasts, videos, educational outreach and collaboration efforts with other community organizations, and also collections of essays from disabled writers.
“As a writer and editor, I address the lack of disabled voices in publishing, journalism and popular culture, and illustrate the systemic ableism that renders disabled people as disposable burdens and objects of pity,” she said. “Storytelling is a powerful form of resistance. It leaves evidence that we were here in a society that devalues, excludes and eliminates us.”
“The systemic ableism that I and millions of us face every day tells us that we don’t matter, that our lives are too expensive and not worth saving,” she continued. “I want to change the way people think about disability from something one-dimensional and negative to something more complex and nuanced. There’s such diversity, joy and abundance in the lived disabled experience. We are multitudes.”
“By telling my story and amplifying the stories of others, cultural change can happen,” she added, “and collectively, we can build a world centered on Justice, access and care.”
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