Native Son has spent 10 years making Black gay and queer men visible. Its founder, Emil Wilbekin, isn’t sure that visibility has turned into power.
“We have great wins, and we have great visibility,” Wilbekin told The Black Wall Street Times. “I just don’t know how much power we have.”
With the Nov. 3 midterm elections less than three weeks away and LGBTQ rights under political attack, Wilbekin says closing that gap starts at the ballot box, and in the conversations that get people there.
Wilbekin, a former Vibe editor-in-chief and Essence editor-at-large, founded Native Son in 2016 as what he calls “an intervention for myself.” He was often the only Black gay man at work and in leadership. The organization marked its 10th anniversary on Juneteenth with its largest Native Son Awards to date, honoring Grammy-winning singer Durand Bernarr, director Anthony Hemingway and actor Tramell Tillman, and opened its first Native Son House in New York.
Visibility is not the same as power
The biggest change in a decade, Wilbekin said, is visibility. Young Black queer men can now open social media and see people like themselves leading.
“I didn’t have that growing up,” he said. “I didn’t have a place to look and see somebody else like me.”
He pointed to Bernarr, who ran to the stage in February to accept the Grammy for Best Progressive R&B Album. Wilbekin called the sprint a metaphor for what it takes to claim that moment.
In Georgia, Everton Blair Jr. became the state’s first openly gay member of Congress in September after winning a special election in the 13th Congressional District.
Blair was sworn in Sept. 1. Two weeks later, House Speaker Mike Johnson sent members home for a seven-week recess that runs past Election Day, leaving Georgia’s first openly gay congressman with only a few weeks of floor votes in a four-month term.
Still, Wilbekin said, “I feel like I’m still pushing as hard as I was 10 years ago.”
The question he keeps returning to comes from activist Rashad Robinson, whose new book, “From Presence to Power,” argues that being seen is not the same as having influence.
Marriage equality is law, Wilbekin noted, but “our brothers in the South are still struggling with HIV.” The South accounted for about half of the nation’s estimated new HIV infections in 2022, according to federal data. Wilbekin, who has spoken openly about living with HIV, has long fought the stigma that surrounds the virus.
He also described a crystal meth crisis he said the community rarely discusses, along with continuing fights for equal pay. And he pointed to George M. Johnson’s memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” which the American Library Association named the most challenged book of 2024.
“It’s a North Star so that future generations don’t have to go through the stigma and shame that so many of us have grown up with,” he said.
‘Architects, innovators and inheritors’
Tim’m West, founder and executive director of the Rustin Institute for Leadership Development in Atlanta, said Native Son has given Black queer men a place to see themselves.
“For the past decade, Emil Wilbekin has held up a mirror to the extraordinary diversity of who we are, how we show up, and how we persevere in a world that too often pathologizes our identities while making a spectacle of the very contributions we make to culture,” West said.
“Native Son reminds us that we are not merely contributors to culture; we are its architects, innovators, and inheritors,” he added.
West is a member of Native Son’s 101 Class of 2023.
Nii-Quartelai Quartey, PhD, a KBLA radio talk show host, Pepperdine University professor, and Native Son 101 2022 Class member, pointed to what the list says to the rest of the world.
“I salute Emil Wilbekin for having the vision to create Native Son and spending the last decade bringing Black queer men together, building community and making sure our stories are told,” Quartey said.
“At a time when so much is dividing us, the remarkable men recognized on the Native Son 101 List remind the world of who we are, what we contribute and why our stories matter. I’m proud to be counted among them and even prouder to do my part to help move our community and movement forward.”
Closing the generational gap
Wilbekin said younger men must understand that the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s “wiped out a whole generation” of artists, educators and everyday people.
“You see them one week, they’re gone the next,” he said.
That loss left a gap Native Son tries to fill as an archive and a bridge. He reminded Gen Z that gender fluidity is not new. “I have the photos. I have the receipts,” he said. He also honored the lesbian women who cared for gay men when they were sick.
Elders, he said, owe young people patience and mentorship so they “don’t have to go through what we went through.”
What the 2026 midterms demand of Black queer men
“In general, Black queer men vote,” Wilbekin said. The bigger opportunity, he argued, is persuading others, especially disillusioned Gen Z voters who have lived through COVID-19, a second Trump administration and an uncertain job market.
His question for them is simple: “Are you happy with the way things are right now?”
He urged Black queer men to follow the civil rights movement’s example by organizing, registering voters and talking politics at work, at church, at the barbershop and in family group chats. He invoked Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin and Fannie Lou Hamer, whose work he said is now being rolled back.
“We can’t be complicit in the Uber Eats and Netflix and chill of it all,” he said.
The next 10 years for Emil Wilbekin and Native Son
Native Son has grown beyond its awards and Native Son 101 list into a fellowship, a leadership forum and Native Son House. Wilbekin said building that infrastructure “was always the plan,” but the community had to come first.
Global work is further off. Native Son receives messages from queer men across the diaspora seeking shelter and asylum, he said, but international advocacy requires specialized expertise and funding that likely falls beyond the next decade.
Wilbekin recently became a deacon at First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem and a tenured journalism professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Neither role, he said, was on his list. Both connect to Native Son through one idea: “treating the needs of the community as holy.”
Now embracing what he calls his “uncle era,” Wilbekin said he is focused on mentoring and “not gatekeeping,” so the next generation can be “stronger, faster, smarter.”
But the stakes he described arrive sooner. Election Day is Nov. 3.
Wilbekin recalled a clip of former President Barack Obama describing ancestors who ask him whether he did enough. With the gains Rustin, Baldwin and Hamer fought for being rolled back, Wilbekin said, Black queer men must answer that question too.
“I think we have to ask ourselves if we’ve done enough,” he said.
Disclosure: BWST Founder Nehemiah Frank, who conducted this interview, was named to the Native Son 101 list in 2022.
