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BLACK GAY MEN SERIES
We are the authors of our own narratives.”ĬNP creates an abundance of high-quality content through three different platforms: The Reckoning, an online publication focused on telling the unique stories about Atlanta’s Black LGBTQ community the CNP podcast network, which covers everything from conversations with prominent Black LGBTQ people to analyses of your favorite horror films and Revolutionary Health, a YouTube series covering Black gay men’s health and wellness.ĬNP’s initiatives don’t only include creative pursuits. “It’s critical that there aren’t just stories told about us, but that we own the narrative,” Stephens said. By creating its own content, CNP is combating the violence of erasure while ensuring that Black gay men have control and power over their own narrative. To Stephens, media and culture are tools for social justice, strategies used by CNP through both the inclusion of artists in organization and mobilization work and the creation of original content. To harness the positive power of narrative building, CNP works at the intersection of art and activism. Narratives can be weaponized against marginalized communities, but as much as narratives can be weaponized against us, we believe that we can reprogram and build narratives to empower our community, to fight back, resist, and most important to inspire activism.” “Narratives have public policy consequences. “We knew that we wanted to operate in the terrain of narrative because we saw such power in that work,” Stephens said.
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Stephens and others at CNP believe that narratives have power, power that can be weaponized against either marginalized groups or racial injustice, depending on how they’re used. “I didn’t see the wide range and diversity of representations I knew to be true. “I was frustrated with the public narrative that I saw about Black gay men in the media,” Stephens told Georgia Voice. When Charles Stephens founded the Counter Narrative Project (CNP) in 2014, he wanted to create a political home for himself and other Black gay men who found themselves victimized by the narratives surrounding them.
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The Counter Narrative Project is a love letter to Black organizers from history