Black. Fat. Femme: Revealing the Power of Visibly Queer Voices in Media and Learning to Love Yourself

Fat Black Femme Podcast host Higgins debuts with an earnest account of how they came to embrace their identity as a “Black, fat, queer, feminine, nonbinary man.” Narrating their story through sketches of the celebrities who influenced them, Higgins recalls learning from singer Luther Vandross’s interviews how to “duck and dodge” questions about their own sexuality during their uneasy childhood in 1990s California. As a teenager in a repressed and religious household, Higgins found a queer, fat, and Black role model in America’s Next Top Model judge André Leon Talley; later, as an adult who’d come out but was contending with the queer world’s “subtle messages—both online and off—that not just my race but my size was an issue,” Higgins admired the unapologetic confidence of fat Black queens like Latrice Royale of RuPaul’s Drag Race. While Higgins’s prose is clunky in places and their takeaways tend toward the trite (“We are not who people say we are but who we want to be”), they offer an emotionally honest discussion of the challenges of straddling diverse and sometimes competing identities. Higgins’s fans will be inspired. (Mar.)