BYLINES
Essays and Reported Work Published Beyond UNSPUN. Every Piece, Where It Landed, and What It Was After
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HIV | HEALTH | INTIMACY | QUEERNESS | LOVE
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KEEP TAKING THE PILL: ON LIVING AND LOVING WITH UNDETECTABLE HIV STATUS
An essay on what it means to carry an undetectable diagnosis and still show up fully for the people you love. Not as a medical milestone. As a daily act.
July 29, 2026
Publication: BLACK YOUTH PROJECT
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The message came in the middle of something ordinary. A notification. A man I had never met, a name I did not recognize, but a kind of voice I had learned to brace for. You know this ritual if you have lived it: the small risk of opening a message from a stranger who has reduced you to your status before he has said a single word to you as a person. This one was not about curiosity. It was a verdict. “You don’t deserve to live like this. You have tainted everyone you’ve ever touched.” I read it once. My breath did not catch so much as forget its job. [Continue…]
DESIRE | LOVE | GAY | QUEERNESS | SEX
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DESIRE HAS A RACIAL HIERARCHY
A reported essay examining how racial preference operates inside gay desire. Not as personal taste. As structural conditioning.
May 5, 2026
Publication: BLACK YOUTH PROJECT
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On the apps, it is always the same choreography. I open the grid and feel my body enter a market, lit by the cold light of my phone. Faces slide past: white, light, maybe one or two Black men scattered like decoration across a page that was never designed for us. The messages I get live at the extremes, either hyper-visibility or silence, either a category someone waited to check off or nothing at all. [Continue…]
NOISE is the external record of UNSPUN. It lives in three sections: BYLINES, for commissioned essays and placed work. HONORS, for competitions, accolades, and awards. SUMMONED, for the rooms and institutions that reached out first. Every entry is the work, placed.
My commitment to myself and to you is that this work is, and will remain, independent of corporate and party money; it answers to the people willing to follow it closely enough to see where it lands.
If this record moved you, that movement has a cost on this side of the screen: time, refusal, and the choice to keep producing work worth placing.
If you are able, a paid subscription or recurring contribution keeps UNSPUN answerable to its readers instead of to its silencers. If you are not in a position to support UNSPUN, your willingness to follow the work already counts.
NOISE continues for those willing to stay with the work as it travels.
