By Verónica Bayetti Flores • @veroconplatanos • 10 years ago

Feministing Jamz: The Afropunk Festival is doing it right

our mudflap girl, jammin on her headphones

The Afropunk Festival is hands-down one of my favorite things about summer in New York City. Every year, at the end of August, there is a whole weekend full of amazing musicians, and this year’s lineup is super exciting. Even outside of the music, though, the Festival has managed to create a wonderful and accepting space for all sorts of folks in attendance, and particularly for queer folks of color.

They’ve been really great about booking queer and gender non-conforming artists: last year there were performances by Feministing Jamz faves Le1f, Mykki Blanco, and Big Freedia. This year they’ve got a whole slate of awesome queer and feminist artitsts too. There are folks we’ve featured here on the site, including Cakes da Killa, Thee Satisfaction, and Gordon Voidwell, as well as other amazing feminist artists like Valerie June and Meshell Ndegeocello – and that’s just the beginning. I am so excited about so many of the artists, both the ones that are on my heavy rotation already as well as ones with which I’m looking forward to getting more familiar.

But aside from the actual music, I was really excited to see that the following was part of their press release:

NO: SEXISM, RACISM, ABELISM, HOMOPHOBIA, FATPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA or GENERAL HATEFULLNESS ALLOWED. – YOU WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE.

Fuck yes, Afropunk! You are doing it right.

The Afropunk Festival will be on August 23-24 this year, in Brooklyn’s Commodore Barry Park. See you there?

1bfea3e7449eff65a94e2e55a8b7acda-bpfullVerónica is SO EXCITED for this lineup!

New York, NY

Verónica Bayetti Flores has spent the last years of her life living and breathing reproductive justice. She has led national policy and movement building work on the intersections of immigrants' rights, health care access, young parenthood, and LGBTQ liberation, and has worked to increase access to contraception and abortion, fought for paid sick leave, and demanded access to safe public space for queer youth of color. In 2008 Verónica obtained her Master’s degree in the Sexuality and Health program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She loves cooking, making art, listening to music, and thinking about the ways art forms traditionally seen as feminine are valued and devalued. In addition to writing for Feministing, she is currently spending most of her time doing policy work to reduce the harms of LGBTQ youth of color's interactions with the police and making sure abortion care is accessible to all regardless of their income.

Verónica is a queer immigrant writer, activist, and rabble-rouser.

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