Recidivism is a significant problem for those leaving federal prisons in Canada.  About a quarter of people leaving federal prisons reoffend within two years. Community re-entry fails even before incarcerated persons leave prison. This is exacerbated for Black same gender loving, gay, trans, gender diverse, nonbinary, and bisexual adults incarcerated in Canadian jails and prisons. Incarceration-related disruption of social ties can affect all forms of social re-entry. 

Inspired and motivated by Sankofa, we are taking up our collective intersections of incarceration, gender, sexual diversities, Blackness & GBTQI+ identities pasts, to move forward. We seek to make communal positive change for the future and “grow roses out of concrete”.

We would like to hear your stories, solutions, and voices. We are calling on formerly incarcerated justice-impacted Black men who have a range of same-gender experiences, including same-gender sex, desires, relationships, identities, who enjoy and love other men, including gay, bisexual, trans, gender diverse, nonbinary, and queer men. This is not a research data collection project, rather the aim is to give back to the community and to share your voice directly with publics.

Submission Guidelines

In particular, we are interested in your personal community-entry story. We would like to know:

• What was re-entry like for you after you left prison?
• Having identified your re-entry needs, how did anti-Black racism, homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia and other forms of gender and sexual discriminations impacted your ability to access those needs?
• What solutions do you have for improving community re-entry for this population?
• Who or what helped you with re-entry into the community?
• What advice would you give to other Black GBTQI+ people preparing for re-entry?
• Note we will not accept any works of fiction, only autobiographical stories. 

We are seeking stories, about your time in prison or about community re-entry in multimodal or variety of forms and methods:

• audio or social storytelling
• interviews
• poetry personal narrative written, video or audio slam poetry, spoken word or dub performances
• a short song or music
• a short paragraph, or as long as a newspaper article, poetry prose, slam poetry, spoken word or an interview
• a short music video, music or audio recordings should not exceed three minutes
• artwork illustration forms of painting, photographs text, mixed media should be shared in the form of photo – we are only accepting photos of the artworks, which should be in a high-quality jpeg format

Submissions Are Ongoing

We will be reviewing all submissions and post reviewed selection.

Ownership of Copyright & Public Education

It is your responsibility to ensure ownership of consent and copyright is approved. No content will be posted without copyright approval, your permission, and an internal review and approval of your submission.

No Data Collection

Since our aim is to share these submissions with the public, not research data collection, it is important to note that a publicly available site will not guarantee privacy: it is accessible to anyone. To that end, you will be required to provide written or oral consent for your contribution to be posted on our project public website: https://blackgbtqireentry.ca/en/

Confidentiality & Privacy

All submissions will have the option to use a pseudonym or preferred name. Individuals who share audio, videos and photographs which contains identifying information, will not be guaranteed anonymity. Sharing identifying information on the blog will be seen by others on the internet where this information can be shared with others and will be kept on the internet indefinitely.  Anonymity cannot and will not be guaranteed if you share blogs with identifying information.