In honor of Black History Month, the Edendale Library Branch collaborated with Ityatunde Folayan as a guest curator for an event called Unflinching: ‘80s and ‘90s Black Queer/Trans Art and Rebellion… And the Fight That Remains.” Folayan, self-identified as a Black queer woman, took on the task of sharing Black LGBTQ+ knowledge over the weekend with LA residents. She utilized poetry, film, music, and oral history from Black LGBTQ activists of that time period. In 2025, some members of the LGBTQ community use the term queer in lieu of LGBTQ+ as a way to reclaim a historically derogatory word as a form of empowerment.
A Detroit, Mich., native, she is no stranger to advocating for her community. Folayan has thrown herself into the social justice movement for over 30 years. She served as an associate producer and music researcher for the PBS documentary “A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde.” She is also an inductee into the 2017 UCLA Community Scholars Program on Building a Theory and Practice for Black Liberation in Los Angeles. She currently has a short film called “Savior” in development. The community builder is also a fierce advocate who also fought against police brutality in Long Beach during the early 2000s, specifically with the death of Marcella Byrd in 2002.
At the Unflinching event, a communal space of conversation, learning, and reflection, Folayan set the tone of the presentation by juxtaposing two clips. The first was a video clip of the 1992 Republican National Convention speech from Pat Buchanan, in which he specifically used the term “culture war” in his speech as he persuaded his audience to support Republican candidates who upheld conservative values such as George W. Bush.
“It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America,” said Buchanan.
In his speech, Buchanan aimed his words specifically at individuals who do not fit the status quo, such as Black, Brown, women, and LGBTQ+ people who supported progressive and intersectional ideals such as civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.
She then played a clip from an interview with Black filmmaker and activist Marlon Riggs in response to the Pat Buchanan speech. Buchanan highlighted “the fight for the soul of America,” while in Rigg’s interview, the filmmaker emphasized progressiveness.
In the “In the Life: Interview with Marlon Riggs,” an unedited pilot that was filmed in 1992 from the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Riggs spoke about the conservative right population’s refusal to embrace progress. “… They want to return us back to those ‘glorious days’ where we didn’t have these problems [according to conservatives]. When f*ots and dkes were not even known to exist and were never acknowledged.”
He continued, “When Black people knew their place and accepted it, where women had their place and nurtured family… and didn’t exacerbate tensions in the household or in the workplace, or in the political arena.”
She also played clips of Black LGBTQ media spearheads such as Jamika Ajalon and Marvin K. White. Jamika Ajalon is a Black queer artist who is known for her poetry and short films such as the “N-Poem” and “Cultural Skitzophrenia.”. Marvin K. White is known for his expansive Black queer poetry, such as “Last Rights,” which was read by a guest to the audience.
Dalena Hunter is a librarian archivist for UCLA Library Special Collections. As a fellow community member and colleague of Folayan, Hunter was ecstatic to help gather many of the learning materials used for the event.
“We were thinking about the things that people create over the course of their lives. Photographs, letters, diaries, flyers for events, minutes of meetings, films, clothing, and so on.”
Hunter expressed gratitude and appreciation for the opportunity to see the event come to fruition as attendees soaked in knowledge.
Hunter worked with another guest at the event, Dr. Byron Johns (DBJ), an interviewer for the UCLA Center for Oral Histories Research for the Black LGBT Project. Three years ago, she proposed UCLA’s support of Byron’s endeavors to create a Black LGBTQ+ video archive collection, which he previewed in Folayan’s presentation.
The video collection of interviews is called “Stories from the Los Angeles Black LGBT Community and consists of 16 interviewees from prominent Los Angeles Black LGBTQ+ folks and activists such as Reverend Alfreda Lanoix, J. Michael Cook, and Mother Devine Gorgeous Gucci. The collection is not complete yet, but DBJ has held a few promotional events previewing it in various Black LGBTQ spaces.
“The significance of the project is that many young people may find themselves in some sort of difficult situation, as we’ve all experienced as a part of life; the interviewees triumphed over the challenges they’ve had.”
DBJ shared that young people will have a deeper perspective of life and its challenges by seeing how older Black LGBTQ+ people survived life’s struggles when they were younger.
Folayan also spoke about how all intersectional identities were placed under attack during the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the height of Bush’s administration. In today’s political climate, transgender rights are now the new ‘other’ as eliminating gender-affirming care and gender-affirming identification documents is at the forefront of Trump’s administration; as gay rights and HIV/AIDS were the enemy of the far right over 30 years ago during the late 80s and 90s.
“As we face all of the same challenges today, we have to see that their game plan has not changed. What I really wanted us to focus on is how we fought back at that time and how beautifully we fought back through art, poetry, film, organizing, community building, and strategizing.”
