Queer

Singer, Songwriter & Actor

b. December 1, 1985

“I’ve never lived my life in a binary way.”

Janelle Monáe is an eight-time Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter and an award-winning actor and activist. Known for her bold fashion choices and music videos, which she calls her “emotion pictures,” Monáe describes herself as a nerdy polymath, Afrofuturist storyteller and pansexual android.

Janelle Monáe Robinson was born to working-class parents in Kansas City, Kansas. Her father struggled with addiction. Her mother devoted herself to God and family and, along with her grandmother, supported Monáe’s participation in musicals, talent shows and playwriting groups. Monáe credits her family with her intense work ethic.

By age 16, Monáe had established her own record label. When the American Musical and Dramatic Academy awarded her a college scholarship, she moved to New York City. As the only Black woman in her drama classes, she felt typecast and grew frustrated. She dropped out and moved to Atlanta.

In Atlanta, Monáe established an artist’s collective, the Wondaland Arts Society. In 2005 she made her professional debut as a featured artist on several OutKast tracks. Two years later, she released a solo concept EP, “Metropolis: Suite 1,” on which she introduced herself as an android. She received her first Grammy nomination for the album.

Monáe carried the android persona into her next two albums, “The ArchAndroid” (2010) and “The Electric Lady” (2013). In 2013 she made her first appearance as a musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.” When asked about her signature black-and-white tuxedo, she explained, “My mother was a janitor and my father collected trash, so I wear a uniform too.”

In 2016 Monáe made her film debut in “Moonlight” and played Mary Jackson, one of the starring roles, in “Hidden Figures.” Monáe received Critics Choice Award nominations for both. She won for “Moonlight,” as part of the ensemble cast.

In 2018 Monáe came out publicly as a “queer Black woman.” She founded Fem The Future, a mentoring organization and movement for women, and released the radical, critically acclaimed album, “Dirty Computer.” She said she wanted “young girls, young boys, nonbinary, gay, straight, [and] queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality …” to know she saw them. “This album is for you,” she said. “Be proud.”

In 2019 Monáe appeared as Marie in “Harriet,” a biopic about the abolitionist Harriet Tubman. In 2020 she starred in the horror film “Antebellum.”

Among countless awards and nominations for her music, videos and acting, Monáe has also received a GLAAD Media Award, an NAACP Image Award and two Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. Monáe resides in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Disability Rights Activist

b. May 19, 1987
d. May 19, 2020

“I would want people with disabilities 20 years from now to not think that they’re broken.”

Stacey Park Milbern was a civil rights advocate best known for her role in establishing the disability justice movement. She proudly identified as a queer, crip (slang for disabled person) woman of color.

The child of a white U.S. army serviceman and a Korean mother, Milbern was born with muscular dystrophy — a serious, progressive, degenerative disease. Though she began life in Seoul, South Korea, she spent most of her childhood in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Milbern was in grade school the first time she realized she had “a totally different reality.” She could walk on her own, but she was unsteady on her feet. When she fell in the school restroom, the other little girls just continued to chat, oblivious to her predicament.

As she matured, Milbern had trouble establishing independence as a physically impaired person confined to a wheelchair. “The world literally isn’t made to house us, it feels sometimes,” she said. By the age of 16, she had become a full-fledged disability activist. She secured a role as the community outreach director of the National Youth Leadership Network and later founded the North Carolina Leadership Forum and Disabled Young People’s Collective.

In 2004 the governor of North Carolina appointed Milbern to the Statewide Independent Living Council, where she served for six years with a two-year overlap on the North Carolina Commission for the Blind. Thanks largely to her diligence, North Carolina mandated disability awareness instruction in its public schools. In 2005 Milbern established the disability justice movement as an “intersectional approach to achieving access” for people of color, the LGBTQ community and other traditionally excluded groups.

Milbern graduated from Methodist University in 2009. She moved from her parents’ home to San Francisco at age 24, because of the city’s reputation for disability access. She earned her MBA from Mills College in Oakland, California, in 2015 and took a leadership position at the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley.

A gifted writer and blogger, Milbern rebuked the mainstream disability movement for marginalizing LGBTQ people and racial minorities and criticized telethons for their pity ploys. She faulted doctors for recommending unnecessary surgeries in pursuit of a “good body” versus a good quality of life.

Despite her declining health, in 2019 Milbern organized the distribution of generators to people on ventilators during the California wildfire power shutoffs. Just months before she died in 2020, she mobilized a group to help protect homeless people from the novel coronavirus.

Milbern died on her 33rd birthday from surgical complications. The New York Times published her obituary.