A Black Queer Joy Visual Without A Witness

by: Amari Murray

The first time I noticed the change, it was in the mirror. Not my reflection – hers. We were getting ready to go out, Beyonce’s “Diva” spilling from a speaker on the dresser while the bass vibrated softly through the bedroom walls. Clothes covered nearly every inch of the bed: a black mesh top she already rejected, two pairs of jeans, one gold heel hiding beneath a denim jacket, earrings scattered across the dresser beside makeup brushes and perfume bottles. The sink in the bathroom overflowed with foundation, lipgloss, mascara, and flat irons warming the room. 

She stood in front of the mirror adjusting an earring, turning her face slightly left, then right, studying herself with a kind of patience I had never seen from her before. 

“You think this looks okay?” she asked. 

But it wasn’t really the outfit she was asking about. I looked at her for a second too long because something about her felt different that day. As if pieces of her that once moved separately had finally decided to arrive together. 

“You look comfortable.” She laughed. 

“Comfortable is crazy.” But then she looked back at herself and smiled anyway. 

Usually she rushed getting dressed. She would throw on whatever felt safest, glance at herself just long enough to fix an earring, and walk away before the mirror had much to say back. I had watched her avoid lingering in her own reflection more times than I could count. 

That night she stayed. Nobody outside that room witnessed what was happening. But I did.

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Long before the world would have called her visible, she already had witnesses. Friends who noticed the way confidence returned to her posture before it appeared in her words. Friends who recognized versions of her that never needed public approval to be real. Looking back, I realize that Black queer joy has never existed without witnesses. It has simply not always been witnessed by the people who decide which stories deserve attention. 

That realization asks me to reconsider whose witnessing we have been taught to value in the first place. We often mistake public recognition for proof that something exists, as though visibility only becomes real once institutions, media, or history choose to acknowledge it. But Black queer life has always been witnessed first by the people living it: friends, chosen family, lovers, neighbors, and communities who recognized one another long before the outside world was willing to look. Their witness did not make that joy real. It always was. It simply reminds us that recognition has never belonged exclusively to those with the power to record, publish, or legitimize our lives. 

Public conversations about Black queer life often begin with trauma. Violence. Legislation. Rejection. Survival. Black queer people are repeatedly asked to explain how we endure the world before we are invited to discuss how we live inside it. News headlines and political debates have made pain the most familiar language people expect from us, as though joy can only exist after suffering has been acknowledged first. 

But so much of Black queer life happens somewhere else. It happens while sharing makeup across a crowded sink. While somebody laughs because they burned the edge of their forehead with a flat iron. While everyone argues over whose turn it is to use the mirror. While somebody starts dancing before they’re even dressed because their favorite song comes on. Those moments rarely became headlines. They are too ordinary, too intimate, too full of life to fit inside the narratives people have already written about us.  

I began understanding this more deeply through my friendship with her. Before she embraced herself publicly, there were already small shifts happening privately. Sometimes we would stay in that bedroom long after we were finished getting ready, sitting cross-legged on the bed surrounded by discarded outfits and open makeup bags, talking about identity, fear, visibility, and the exhaustion of constantly explaining yourself before people decided whether you deserved kindness. 

One night she looked over at me while searching through a pile of earrings scattered across the dresser. “Which one feels more to me?” She held up a pair of silver hoops. Then a pair of small gold studs. I laughed because ten minutes earlier she had asked the same question about her shoes. Before that it had been lipstick. Before that, a jacket she had put on, taken off, and draped across the bed. She wasn’t indecisive. She was practicing. Every choice sounded like another permission she was giving herself. 

She stood in front of the mirror again. Not in vain but recognizing herself. 

For years I had watched her move past mirrors without looking for long. That night she kept returning to hers, almost surprised by the woman looking back. She only asked my opinion that night because she already knew the answer. She wasn’t asking whether the earrings matched the outfit. She was asking whether the woman she had fought to become was finally visible. And she was. 

There were so many moments like that. Late-night walks home after functions, splitting fries while talking about our futures we hoped would exist for us someday, laughing so hard somebody had to sit on the curb because they couldn’t breathe, and dancing badly at an event while music drowned out every worry we had carried in with us. Nobody reached for a phone. Nobody paused the music to take pictures. Nobody thought those moments needed proof. They already belonged to us. Those are the moments I think about when Black queer life is reduced to survival. 

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Joy is not simply the opposite of suffering. Joy is knowledge. It is knowing which people make your body unclench. It is laughing without calculating who might be watching. It is hearing your own voice become louder because nobody in the room requires you to shrink first. 

Privacy too can become protection. Not secrecy rooted in shame, but intimacy protected from consumption. There is something sacred about moments that belong only to the people inside them. Especially now, when so much of life feels organized around documenting, posting, sharing, performing, and proving. Some experiences lose something when transformed into content. Some moments deserve to remain held instead of displayed. Historically, Black queer communities have always created a space where that kind of intimacy could exist. Chosen family, underground spaces, shared language, and mutual care. Entire emotional worlds built where people could finally exhale. 

Joy did not wait for public acceptance before it existed. Neither did the witness.

Watching my friend embrace herself taught me that joy is often quieter than people expect. Sometimes it is simply someone lingering in front of a mirror, asking one more question about a pair of earrings, laughing without hesitation, and someone finally taking up the space they had always deserved.

I still think about that bedroom, music, cluttered sink, warmth from the flat irons, clothes covering the bed, the way she smiled at herself before we ever walked out the door, and the world did not witness that moment. But I did. And so did every person in that room who already understood what it meant. 

And that is the real meaning behind a Black queer joy visual without a witness.

The understanding that some of the most important moments of becoming in the community happen privately first, fully, and beyond the need for witness. 

Bio: Amari Murray (she/her) is a poet and essayist from Brooklyn, New York. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Purchase College, SUNY. She began writing poetry at the age of eight and later published her first poem, in high school. Alongside writing her first essay at twelve. When she writes, it is drawn from her personal experiences, rooted in the dualities of pleasure and pain, silence and voice, intimacy and independence. Her work explores secrets, self-discovery, and survival through vivid imagery, layered emotion, and lyrical rhythm. She has performed at Girls Write Now, Bowery Poetry Club, and Blinky’s. Her work has appeared in the 2021 Girls Write Now Unmuted Print Anthology, Spoken Black Girl Magazine, Italics Mine, No Dear Magazine, and elsewhere with forthcoming publications in Brown Sugar Lit, Poetries in English Magazine, 1455 Books, Sinister Wisdom, Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Flip The Script Publishing, and Rough Diamond Poetry Journal. Currently, she is working on her first poetry manuscript.