this is important because we need more Black queer histories to be preserved and given to everyone!! i definitely thought there were some solid points in here too (like we cannot use legal precedents as our arguments if we want to fight outside the confines of the courtroom).

that being said, i would not recommend this if you're looking for a radical perspective. i had some feelings about some of the ways that the authors talk about people that are throughout the book, but even the conclusion (where they shoutout amandla stenberg..? i don't follow them on social media or know anything about their personal life so maybe i'm missing something here) was like yay representation! which yes, important, but it's also reminding me of all the liberal af asian americans who were fighting for hollywood representation :/

when i first got politicized, i was stuck between the rationalism that my (explicitly pro-capitalist) parents raised me with and wanting to dream a better future. how am i supposed to imagine when what i see with my eyes is so different? i wish i had come across this book earlier, because maybe the imagination here would have sparked or resonated something within me. there's a lot of pain and healing and grief and trauma (which isn't something i ever gravitate towards in the fiction i read, so maybe that's why it's reminding me of MOCKINGJAY, the last book in the hunger games trilogy, because i don't have many other books in my completed pile that strikes this cord), while also a lot of hope, collaboration, respect, trust, and community care.

this book is also reminding me a lot of my all time favorite paranormal romance series (the psy changeling series by nalini singh). it's definitely more hopeful and while there's death and grief, a lot of times it feels more removed than in this book, where a lot of the interviewed people have had direct ties to people martyred in the fight for liberation. so while i think this book is important, i think the psy changeling series is a lot softer in an also important way. while capitalism is still a thing in the psy changeling world (it's not intentionally a political series, and uh the author and the characters are certainly not abolitionist), there's a lot of emphasis on the way that people relate to the world and take care of it, the way that packs/herds/other changeling (aka shifters in other paranormal terminology) groups take care of each other is reminiscent of the way that communes are imagined here. people can go to the communal eating space and have automatic rights to food, they don't participate in anything MIC related and there are pack healers who provide healing without any payment, everyone is entitled to a home within pack lands (without rent or mortgage), the young are taken care of by everyone in the pack regardless of their nuclear family (this series does have nuclear families).