Tear All This Ugly Mess Down Now

Aaron and James revisit Chrystos, Audre Lorde, and Minnie Bruce Pratt--three queer poets who were censored and attacked by Jesse Helm after winning fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Please consider supporting authors and indie bookstores. You can purchase books by the writers we discuss at Loyalty Books, a black-owned DC-based independent bookseller.

Chrystos is a Menominee writer and two-spirit activist. Chrystos is a Scorpio. Their books include Not Vanishing, Dream On, In Her I Am, Fugitive Colors, and Fire Power. Read an interview with Chrystos here.

Audre Lorde  was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. Lorde was an Aquarius. She died of breast cancer in 1992. Her books include The First Cities, Cables to Rage, From a Land Where Other People Live, New York Head Shop, Coal, Between Our Selves, Hanging Fire, The Black Unicorn, The Cancer Journals, Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power, Chosen Poems: Old and New, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Our Dead Behind Us, A Burst of Light, The Marvelous Mathematics of Distance, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems, and I Am Your sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Read Lorde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" here.

Dr. Minnie Bruce Pratt is a Virgo (Sept. 12). She was born in Selma, Alabama and received her BA from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her books includeThe Sound of One Fork, Crimes Against Nature, Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991, We Say We Love Each Other, S/HE, Walking Back Up Depot Street, The Money Machine: Selected Poems, The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems,  Inside the Money Machine, and (most recently) Magnified. Read an interview with Pratt regarding her book Magnified (Wesleyan, 2021) here.

We mention Sarah Schulmann and her book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993.  It was a 2021 New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and it was also one of NPR's Best Books of 2021.

You can read Wanda Coleman's essay on Audre Lorde in the LA Times here.

While her birthday is not exactly revealed in the show, many followers of the show Friends believe that Monica is a classic Virgo or perhaps a Taurus.