Black. Gay. Quaker.

An Auto-Bio-Poetic Sermon in the Transatlantic Tradition.

What does it mean to live an undivided life in a world built on fragmentation?

In Black. Gay. Quaker., Rashid Darden offers a bold, lyrical, and uncompromising work of witness—part memoir, part sermon, part poem—that traces a life formed at the intersection of Black communal memory, queer self-knowledge, and Quaker spiritual practice.

Moving from a childhood in Washington, DC’s “Black Utopia,” through the fraught terrains of race, sexuality, faith, and belonging, Darden refuses respectability politics and easy reconciliation. Instead, he writes toward integrity—naming the costs of survival, the ache of exclusion, the discipline of love, and the possibility of building a life rooted in truth.

Delivered first as a live spoken work at Haverford College in 2026, this text carries the cadence of the oral tradition, the urgency of testimony, and the stillness of Quaker worship. It challenges readers to consider Blackness, queerness, and faith as sources of divine authority.