Activist and human rights defender Lady Phyll. Photo courtesy of Black Pride. Photo Credit: Kofi-Paintsil for Gay Times. — Activist and human rights defender Lady Phyll. Photo courtesy of Black Pride. Photo Credit: *Kofi-Paintsil for Gay Times.*

By Jaimee A. Swift

For Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, who is popularly known as Lady Phyll (she/hers/hers), Black Queer Feminist Belonging does not mean creating collectives in response to white exclusion––it means recognizing that Black LGBTQ+ people in Europe exist whether they are in those spaces or not.

Lady Phyll’s interview is a part of ‘Voices in Movement’ December 2019 theme, ‘On Belonging.’ To read the descriptor of ‘On Belonging’, please click here.

Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, 45, is most certainly a force to be reckoned with. She is widely known as Lady Phyll because of her rejection of a MBE––otherwise known as The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, an award for civil and public service ––due to Britain’s role in imperial role in creating and maintaining anti-LGBTQ penal codes and persecution across its empire. A Ghanaian-British lesbian who identifies as a queer Black woman, Lady Phyll’s work as an activist, leader, organizer, and human rights defender is transforming the ways in which Black LGBTQ people in Europe can know, experience, and feel Belonging.

Despite chronic erasure and invisibilization, Lady Phyll is not only on a political and personal quest to create spaces where Black LGBTQ+ people feel a sense of community, she wants people to know that they exist whether they are in white spaces or not. As the co-founder, trustee, and executive director of UK Black Pride, an annual Pride which is “Europe’s largest celebration for LGBTQ people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and Latin American descent”, for Lady Phyll, segregation, exclusion or even inclusion of the Black LGBTQ+ community from and in predominantly white spaces does not invalidate or validate their lives. In other words, they do not need the permission of the white gaze to stake claim to their existence––they exist, resist, and can Belong on their own terms.

In addressing the oppressive anti-LGBTQ colonial British legacies and creating more inclusive futures, Lady Phyll is also the executive director of Kaleidoscope Trust, “the leading UK charity advocating for the human rights of LGBTQ people globally”––a position that makes her the first Black woman in the United Kingdom to lead a LGBTQ human rights organization. She is the co-editor of Sista! An anthology of writings by Same Gender Loving Women of African/Caribbean descent with a UK connection; a patron of akt, UK’s first LGBTQ youth homelessness; and a columnist for DIVA, a European magazine for lesbian and bisexual women.

Lady Phyll wrote to Black Women Radicals about what Belonging means to her; the beauty of Black African Queer Womanhood; what true freedom for Black LGBTQ+ women is; and what a Black Woman Radical means to her.

How would you define Belonging? What does Belonging mean to you?

Belonging is the hug Black women give each other, when we rock side to side and squeeze hard. Belonging is standing on stage at UK Black Pride and seeing and hearing 10,000 people screaming with joy. Belonging is spending quiet evenings with activists from across the Caribbean discussing the futures we’re working towards, crying and laughing together. Belonging is the “checking in” message you get from a dear friend.”

As the co-editor of ‘Sista! An Anthology of Writing By and About Same Gender Loving Women of African/Caribbean descent with a UK Connection” (2018), you write in your essay, ‘Sistas Making It Happen’ that when you were organizing UK Black Pride that:

“...over the last 10/11 years, the pain I have felt at being rejected by the wider, mainly white gay LGBT+ community, who didn’t and don’t see their privilege whilst blocking Black Pride for wanting to be visible, is not something I can bear to explain (2018, p. 51)”

As a Black Queer Woman, how have you been able to create Belonging for yourself, in spite of the invisibilization, rejection, racism, sexism, prejudice, and more enacted by the white LGBTQ+ community and even by members of the Black/BME/PoC LGBTQ+ community?

The lack of substantive representation can be hard to see - we, of course, would like our experiences and our contributions recognised - but I think we have to move away from a narrative that suggests that if we don’t exist within white spaces, we don’t exist at all. When predominantly white LGBTQ organisations render us invisible, they do so only on their platforms and within their spaces.”

UK Black Pride, for example, was not started in opposition to white LGBTQ spaces: we set up UK Black Pride after a trip we specifically planned for Black lesbians. It was in that space, which we created for our own emotional and spiritual nourishment, that UK Black Pride was born. When we went to LGBTQ organisers and influencers and asked them for their support, they told me to “F*ck off back to where you came from; there will never be a Black Pride in this country.” So, we walked away a little bruised and upset at the rank racism, but determined. We never needed permission from anyone to set up UK Black Pride, especially another pride organisation.

“...but I think we have to move away from a narrative that suggests that if we don’t exist within white spaces, we don’t exist at all. When predominantly white LGBTQ organisations render us invisible, they do so only on their platforms and within their spaces.”

To say it another way, we get asked a lot about why UK Black Pride is necessary and if UK Black Pride exists because other pride organisations aren’t doing something properly. What this question does is diminish UK Black Pride and the people who work hard to put this space together. UK Black Pride has never been about white people or whiteness and we created it because we deserve spaces by us, for us and in service of us. It’s that simple. White does not need to enter the equation when we talk about Black, but it so often does. We are allowed to create our own spaces for no other explanation other than we want to.

In thinking about Black radical queer feminist imaginations and possibilities, in your opinion, what does true freedom, liberation, and revolutionary belonging look like for Black LGBTQ+ people in Africa and in the African Diaspora?

Freedom is necessarily deeply personal for Black people because we’ve thought about it and worked towards it for so long. We understand it (for ourselves) more than others who haven’t had to work for it. What I’ve learned is that we all have very different and personal ideas of what freedom is and what freedom feels like. For some, it’s very much about the legal framework - a codified freedom, if you will. For others, it’s spiritual, a turning inwards to the vast expanse of our interior lives. For others, it’s both. The same goes for liberation. There are so many ways in which our minds have been colonised - from beauty standards, to the way we view our work ethic, to the way we view our individual agency - that freedom and liberation take on different forms in different parts of our lives. I’m working towards liberation and I think liberation begets freedom. Liberation, for me, speaks to the internal work so many of us are doing to be better allies, siblings, activists, lovers, mothers, etc. We are trying to liberate our emotions, our sexuality, our talents, our passions, our potential, etc. We’re trying to embody liberation because once the fire of liberation has been ignited within us, that march towards freedom cannot be stopped.

“I’m working towards liberation and I think liberation begets freedom. Liberation, for me, speaks to the internal work so many of us are doing to be better allies, siblings, activists, lovers, mothers, etc. We are trying to liberate our emotions, our sexuality, our talents, our passions, our potential, etc. We’re trying to embody liberation because once the fire of liberation has been ignited within us, that march towards freedom cannot be stopped.”

Freedom is also a practice and a responsibility. What will we do with it when we have it? I trust that Black LGBTQ people can decide for themselves what freedom, liberation and belonging look like for them. Part of my job, at both UK Black Pride and Kaleidoscope Trust, is to offer counsel and support, to let you know just how absolutely possible your dreams are and to let you know that you are not alone. I also bang on doors and shout at tables and carry the ancestors into the hallowed halls I’m invited into so that the communities I come from and represent know they have a voice in spaces where we’ve historically been silenced. And I trust that whatever your ideas of liberation and freedom, they will line up with mine and our communities’ in some ways. Which is the link to belonging, right? We have to understand that each of us is carrying so much around with us, but that we are all working towards the same liberated future. There’s power in that.

“The Black Woman Radical knows that we are the alpha and the omega, Genesis and Revelations, the beginning, middle and end, and that there is nothing in this world - past, present or future - that will happen without us.”

What gives you joy these days?

My daughter, memes on Black Twitter, listening to the podcast, Busy Being Black, meeting activists from around the world who are some of the most impressive people I’ve ever had a chance to meet, my teams at UK Black Pride and Kaleidoscope Trust who work so hard and believe in what we’re all doing so much, Ghanian Jollof (because it’s the best), the sun kissing my melanin, moving my hips, being a Black African queer warrior woman.

What does a ‘Black Woman Radical’ mean to you?

Angela Davis said “radical simply means ‘grasping at the root’”. The Black Woman Radical knows that we are the alpha and the omega, Genesis and Revelations, the beginning, middle and end, and that there is nothing in this world - past, present or future - that will happen without us. We have always been the vanguards and I take a lot of pride in the fact that I’m descended from these women who refused to be quiet, who refused to sit down. The Black Woman Radical also prioritises herself and her joy over all else; she fills herself up, she takes time off, she says ‘no’, she luxuriates in her Blackness. She enjoys herself.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I am so honoured to take part in this series and so proud of each of you. Our stories deserve telling and I’m so glad you’ve taken this important, noble and necessary task on.

Sista! Outsider: Lady Phyll On Black Pride, Black Queer Feminist Belonging, and Freedom as a Responsibility and Practice