Last year a friend of mine asked me, since I've been chronicling the black experience in Japan, when I would get around to writing about the experience of black people in the LGBT community here. "We're a minority of a minority of a minority," he'd said.
I told him I was on it, but I wanted to do it right. What I meant by that was, I wanted to find the right voices from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community — people who were fully knowledgeable, representative and well-spoken as well as outspoken. And, fortunately, in my travels, I've come to know two such gentlemen. Though both are situated in Tokyo, they are from different generations and their tenures here in Japan are vastly different, so I was able to get some fairly disparate perspectives.
The first, a man by the name of Darien Alexander Williams, I met for the first time quite recently. He attended a Kwanzaa event I held in Yokohama last month. He's a 23-year-old high school teacher from North Florida and has been living in Tokyo since August 2014.