A new independent magazine titled The Tenth Zine aims to shed light on the history and culture of the African American queer community.
Creative director Khary Septh explained to HuffPost Live's Josh Zepps on Thursday how this bi-annual zine, which is disseminated online and in print, is giving black gay men a voice in how they're portrayed in mainstream media. He said:
Tons of queer culture, of course, has been appropriated throughout the years, and black culture certainly has been kind of taken on by the mainstream media since the beginning of Hollywood -- or time, really, for that matter. So we thought how cool would it be if we just experimented and kind of assorted all these interesting and talented artists and thinkers and intellectuals and interesting kids to make something that really reflected authentically what we were thinking in 2015.
As part of its first issue, the creators explored what life could have been like for gay men working on plantations.
"Here we are, a group of 12 to 15 creative directors, artists, photographers [and] stylists taking all of these very modern, hip kids down to a plantation in Franklin, Louisiana, to try to explore what our identity might have been during ... the Antebellum South," Septh said.
Despite having so much talent working on the zine, Septh addressed some of their challenges.
"We’re high on talent, but it's a zine and it’s still independent and we still have our struggles to get it done. It’s always going to be a struggle," he said. "That’s something that we’ve experienced in our black man narrative and as our black gay man narrative, so, you know, struggle is not a problem."
Watch the clip above to learn more about The Tenth Zine.
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