Overview: T-Boy Tuesdays, a monthly open mic night hosted by the Transgender Health and Wellness Center and St. John’s Community Health’s Transgender Health Program, celebrated its 10th anniversary with a focus on the current political climate. One of the performers, Devlin Winston, debuted an original spoken word poem titled “Black Truth” which addressed the impact of the political climate on minority communities, including the recent redrawing of congressional maps in Tennessee and Louisiana to dilute Black political power. The event was a testament to the power of artistic mediums to resist and empower communities.
Aryana Noroozi
Community members gathered at Back To The Grind coffee shop for T-Boy Tuesdays, a monthly open mic night presented by the Transgender Health and Wellness Center and St. John’s Community Health’s Transgender Health Program, celebrating its 10th anniversary. The room was open to all and conversations around the current political climate took center stage.
Among the performers was Devlin Winston, a community organizer with St. John’s Community Health, who took the mic to debut an original spoken word poem titled “Black Truth.” Before reading, he shared the political climate that many today face.
“Tennessee has completely voted out their whole wide Democratic district,” Winston told the crowd. “That is a whole Republican House – and that is a big, big issue, especially there in the south and for the people that live there.”
His words were not hypothetical. Just days earlier, Tennessee Republicans passed a new congressional map cracking Shelby County – home to majority-Black Memphis – into three separate districts, effectively eliminating the state’s only Democratic-held seat. The move followed a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the provision that had long protected majority-minority districts. Louisiana is now moving to eliminate one of its two majority-Black congressional districts as well.
Winston wrote “Black Truth,” he told the audience, after being asked himself – more than once – to define it. The question itself became the poem’s engine.
The piece moved through the full weight of what Black life in America demands: the unspoken rules carried into every public space, the exhaustion of code switching, the violence embedded in children’s games. “You want to play games like hangman to let me know strange fruit still exists,” he said. “You want to play eeny meenie miny mo as if I don’t know the truth to the name of that game.”
Winston recalled the names of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery among others— insisting that the dream of freedom belonged to more than one person. He called for decolonizing the mind, reclaiming language and hair, and standing with trans brothers and sisters whose bodies and rights are equally under attack. At an event rooted in transgender health and community care, the solidarity was deliberate and felt.
The poem closed without softness. “Black truth is don’t [expletive] ask me how to define Black truth,” Winston said, “if you are not ready to hear my Black ass truth.”
In a week when lawmakers in Tennessee and Louisiana were busy redrawing maps to dilute Black political power, Winston’s poem arrived as both witness and warning — proof that the community is watching and they will find ways to resist and empower through artistic mediums.
T-Boy Tuesdays is a monthly event hosted at Back to the Grind, 3575 Main St, Riverside, CA 92501. The next event will be a Painting & Drag event hosted on Tuesday June 9 from 6-9 pm. For more information, contact info@trans.health.
