Here’s a roundup of this week’s top Black LGBT stories you might’ve missed while wrapping (and unwrapping) presents (12/21/13-12/27/13).

LesBiSwirl: The Uses of the Erotic in “Beyoncé”

After the firestorm last week on the internets about Beyoncé‘s new visual album and its politics, Marcie Bianco and her colleague and dear friend Vicky Bond decided to put on their LezBi spectacles and conduct their own reading of this fine album.

Beyoncé’s new self-titled album, BEYONCÉ, and its accompanied video collection are masterpieces for their elevation of the erotic in popular discourse. If Bey wants to identify as a feminist, that’s good enough for us. As a lesbian and a bisexual, we experience Beyoncé’s work as about corporeal desire and art and less about politics insofar as politics has no vocabulary for the erotic. More often than not politics uses sex to shame. Especially as queer women, we’re over that hump. Pleasure and celebration don’t have a damn thing to do with shame. Beyoncé asserts the same goes for womanhood. Girls, we don’t have anything to be ashamed of! But we do have plenty to flaunt. Beyoncé reminds us of just how much.

We find our inspiration, and believe Beyoncé does to, in Audre Lorde’s seminal essay, “The Uses of the Erotic”…

Read more on After Ellen.

Black Gay Men on their Relationship to Feminism

When gay men badger other gay men because of socially constructed ideals about how a man is supposed to act, when our position in the bedroom becomes a foundation for establishing gender roles, when we touch a woman at the club without her consent, or decry them with derogatory words, what we’re doing is protecting and promoting misogyny and sexism. If classism, sexism, and racism are inextricably linked through a thread of oppression, then the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality are bound together through a thread of equality, anchored in waves of feminism.

Continue reading on Huffington Post.

10 FAB photos of Sassy from Black Ink Crew

Last year we were introduced to a FAB femme named Sassy by way of VH1′s hit show Black Ink Crew. After Sassy revealed that she has indeed swam in the lady pond a time or two, lezzies around the world became infatuated with this quirky young lady and wanted to know more about her.

Check them out over at The Fab Femme.

Morgan State Student Takes a Stand for Gay Rights at Historically Black University

Brian Stewart’s rejection letter from a fraternity at Morgan State University in Baltimore stated that members had reviewed and vetted his application and that, unfortunately, not enough brothers wanted him to join.

He was disappointed, as are many of the thousands of students across the country who rush Greek houses each year and aren’t accepted. But Stewart is convinced that he was rejected by Kappa Alpha Psi because he is gay.

“I was denied unjustly,” said Stewart, 21, a senior business administration major from Annapolis. “I believe that, and I know that to be true.”

Openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have long felt excluded from fraternities and sororities. But that’s difficult to prove when a secretive recruitment process is overseen by student leaders who are allowed to pick new members based on personality, likability or pretty much any other characteristic.

More on Washington Post.