“I Am Just So Glad You Are Alive”: New Perspectives on Non-Traditional, Non-Conforming, and Transgressive Expressions of Gender, Sexuality, and Race Among African Americans.

In this paper, we argue that both traditional psychology-based group identity theories related to race and sexuality and perspectives on the politics of difference obtained from poststructuralist queer theory underdetermine identity as it is experienced by a distinct subset of individuals, emblematized by non-traditional, non-conforming, and transgressive Black queers. We offer a new explanatory model for these emerging identities that is rooted in metaphysical explanations of human experience. To support our model, we draw historical and contemporary illustrations from African American popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]