You Can’t Stop the Queer South is Them’s series spotlighting LGBTQ+ voices of resistance and resilience in the American South, created with guest editor adrienne maree brown. In the time since producing these stories, Hurricane Helene has devastated areas across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia, with nearly 200 dead, a million without power, and countless homes destroyed or displaced. We ask readers to support on-the-ground relief efforts however possible. See our Hurricane Helene relief resource guide to learn how you can help.
If there's one thing adrienne maree brown knows how to do, it’s how to love.
The celebrated queer author, musician, and organizer attributes this skillset to her Southern roots. Brown’s parents grew up an hour away from each other in South Carolina — her mother from North Augusta, her father from Pendleton. As far as brown’s known ancestry goes back, her lineage can be found in the Carolinas. “It's a revelation to be back on the land that my ancestors also lived and died on.”
Brown, who after many years away from the South is now based in Durham, North Carolina, says she descends from a long line of lovers. She was born in Texas, where her father was stationed at a military base. When she was three months old, he and the family were restationed to Germany. Her parents welcomed this change. Brown's mother, Jane, a white woman, and her father, Jerry, a Black man, first spotted each other in a library at Clemson University, going to school at a time and in a culture that was still shaped by anti-miscegenation laws despite their overruling in the U.S. in 1967. (South Carolina — among many states that left their miscegenation laws on the books for decades — was the second-to-last state in the country to fully remove miscegenation from their state constitution in 1998.)
“Everything that they had been told about each other was that they couldn't be together, and that they didn't belong together,” she says. “My mom lived in a white world, and the way that white people saw Black people at that time — and I think a lot of pockets still do — is not as a full human being, not as someone that they could love or date.” With no blueprint, Jerry and Jane fell in love, and three months after meeting, they got married.
“I think about all the tools, and resources, and frameworks we have now for race, and race relations, and intersectionality, and how to be an accountable white person, and how to combat internalized racism, and all the stuff we have now, none of which [my parents] had when they were in their early 20s, just being in love in South Carolina,” brown says.
Much of brown’s body of work is, in one way or another, about how to love in the face of kyriarchy. In recent years, brown has played an integral role in informing and building both the transformative and restorative justice movements by way of two prevailing organizing methodologies, each with a corresponding book. The first, “emergent strategy,” presents a framework for slow movement-building through decentralized, nature-informed collective leadership. The theory offers “relational organizing” as a means of transforming collective consciousness one conversation at a time, among other ways. The second methodology, ”pleasure activism” expands on Audre Lorde’s Black feminist ideal that caring for one’s self is a “radical act” — an aphorism that over the last decade has been usurped and distorted by a capital-driven wellness culture. Brown nuances popular conversations about self-care and brings it back to the revolution, incentivizing others to re-relate to their bodies and their aliveness so that one can be equipped to build communal power with both their peers and the planet.
Brown’s latest book, Loving Corrections, which was released on August 20 from AK Press, expands on both these methodologies with love as the lens. “Sometimes you have to really surround people with love in order to let them see themselves,” she says. “Love is going to hold up a mirror right now, and we'll be that mirror.”
In some ways, a “loving correction” is a form of restorative justice. Brown describes the act as an effort to be “in right relationship” with others, without casting judgment. A loving correction lives within emergent strategy, and in some cases, perhaps also pleasure activism. Learning how to love, and therefore how to make a loving correction, is a skillset brown thanks her parents for. “My mom calls it a ‘love ambush.’”
With family or romantic partners, it’s sometimes difficult to address when someone is off course, especially when they’re causing harm to others. It’s easy, brown says, to instead let a loved one slip away — into carelessness, apathy, fundamentalism, or even fascism. “Loving interventions are one of the ways we help pull people out of those things. I do think it happens person to person. I don't think it ever happens yelling at people on the internet.”
Rather, a “loving correction” happens when you care enough to repair. Brown's parents always advocated for getting in right relationship with loved ones. “When something goes awry with either one of their families, my parents are always trying to help each other get back to their families,” she says. Her dad is one of seven kids and her mom is one of six. Often, the process of resolving beef between siblings was a matter of seeing each other’s humanity and answering the question, “Which part of this can you let go?”
Instead of approaching relationship repair with a question of, “How can I fix, and adjust, and change, and better that person?” brown says, a loving correction implores you to focus on the relationship itself. If you feel like something hurt you, you lead with vulnerability and grow to understanding.
As an adult, brown found herself needing to get in right relationship with the South, though at first she never saw herself coming back to the Carolinas. In part from her parents’ experiences, brown had internalized an idea of the South being “dangerous” or “backwards.” During her nomadic childhood, she dreamt of living in Paris or Mexico, yearning for a stable relationship with a place, the people who lived there, the food she ate. After finishing college in New York City, she lived in Oakland, then Detroit, where she was mentored by the legendary activist Grace Lee Boggs at her eponymous institute. Brown describes Detroit as a “powerful teacher,” but also very cold. As a disabled person living in a second-floor apartment in a city that can be frigid six months out of the year, Detroit would have her hibernating, if not isolating. She longed for a closer relationship to the place she lived, and to land itself.
When the opportunity came in July 2021 to move to Durham, a city just a few hours drive from the Appalachian mountains on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other, she jumped on the opportunity. She’s periodically visited her hometown since her family left, and “would just feel this rooting,” she says. After a lifetime of feeling like the South might not be the place for her, slowly but surely, she proved herself wrong. “It's like the soles of my feet open up and just extend down, like there's something alchemical happening.”
Brown describes her circle in Durham as renaissance-like. As a flurry of organizers and artists have clustered, they’re creating spaces that allow each other to be their freest selves, just as organizers that came before them have materially changed many conditions of living in the South in general.
The thing brown loves most about Durham is the honesty — that for better or worse, she knows exactly where everyone stands. “These people don't fuck around. They're actually just saying what it is to each other in real time, and finding ways to stay connected, and willing to slow it down.”
“When you're in the South, people aren't pretending like there's no racism, there's no patriarchy, there's no homophobia,” she says. “No, these things are here. They exist. If we're doing it, we're loud about it, and if we're fighting it, we're loud about it."
For Black communities in particular, she says, taking issues with both presidential candidates is nothing new. “We've always, always, always been voting for people who don't agree with our values. We've always been voting for people who don't even want us to exist. What we're constantly trying to do is figure out how to create the best terrain possible for our existence in a nation that doesn't want us to exist. We know that down here. We're not under any illusions about it.”
Brown points to an ecosystem of organizing energy in the South, past and present, pushing the work forward: Southerners on New Ground, Project South, Carolina Federation, SpiritHouse, Stop Cop City, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Prentis Hemphill, Sendolo Diaminah, Mary Hooks, Charlene Carruthers, Stacey Abrams, Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer.
“Black women in the South know how to come up and meet that force with force. It's a loving force, it's a loving intervention, but that's how it's always been,” brown says. It’s a loving correction from Black women that can be as simple as “Okay, what are we going to do?” or, “You all really haven't figured this out, so we will.”
Brown cites a teaching of W.E.B. Du Bois, which she first heard from organizers at Project South (and also written about by her cousin, the writer Imani Perry): “As the South goes, so goes the nation.” As in, “What’s happening in the South sets the stage for what the nation is capable of.” From the economic impact of slavery and Civil War, to Jim Crow laws, to the disastrous hurricanes of the climate crisis.
“We're in it. We've been in it. We've already lived through one Trump presidency. We've already been watching as our rights and our sovereignty over our bodies are removed by MAGA-appointed judges,” brown says. She sees Southern approaches to organizing in stark contrast to the intellectualized and ivory tower approaches often found on the coasts or in metropolitan vacuums. In Durham and across the South, brown’s experience has been that organizing tends to be more grassroots, focused on coalition-building and the material needs threatened by a Trump-influenced era of “racial domination.”
“There's this real sense for people organizing here that what we do will shape what's possible for the U.S., and will shape in large part what's possible in the rest of the world,” brown says, “that the fights we have here, and the pace of it matters.”
The pace of Durham specifically is something brown brings up again and again. When she was in New York, Oakland, or Detroit, her approach was always, “How quickly can we get this done?” In Durham, she says it’s shifted to, “How deeply can we get this done?” What does it mean to meaningfully show up for each other, even through small acts of love? Lingering on the porch. Dropping off some sweet tea. “There's a sweetness to the way people come together here,” brown says. In Durham, you don’t show up to a neighbor's without something from the earth to offer — whether it’s flowers, okra, a bag of peaches. "We're all eating each other's gardens all the time."
“You have to move at a pace that allows you to be a neighbor, and allows you to be in community, and it's taken me a while,” she says. “We're moving at the pace of a river.”
“Think about the abundance it takes to have a river, the abundance of water that has to be coming from a source, to have a river that continuously runs forever,” she says with awe. Brown references the Eno River, where storm water brings rushing higher tides into a crystal clear, 28-mile stretch of water through Durham, which she regularly visits to center herself. As a river replenishes itself, impossibly and without fail, so does love, and therefore, so does a movement. “If I let that abundance flow into this [work], what becomes possible?"
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