The Normal Anomaly Initiative Takes Black Queer AF Music Festival on Tour

Award-winning activist Ian L. Haddock is taking The Normal Anomaly Initiative, Inc. on the road to expand the reach of the nonprofit across the American South with this month’s launch of Act I of the Black Queer AF Media Tour. Having presented Black Queer AF Music Festival for the last three years in Houston, this tour aims to bring a unique blend of culture, community, and awareness to Black, Queer individuals in Atlanta, New Orleans, Montgomery, and Dallas before the end of 2024.

The idea for the Black Queer AF Media Tour grew out of The Normal Anomaly Initiative’s Project Liberate, a social enterprising program designed to help co-create and launch sustainable businesses. “Mostly Black LGBT people have participated in Project Liberate over the last three years. And, in the first year, we were trying to figure out how to launch these businesses,” Haddock says. “Through the innovation of our team at The Normal Anomaly, we created the Black Queer AF Music Festival.”

Across the last three years Project Liberate and the Black Queer AF Music Festival have helped launch 48 businesses, which made people take notice. This opened the door for Haddock and his team to engage with The HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN). HPTN’s study 096 is centered around building equity through advocacy, and The Normal Anomaly wanted to see if they could work with HPTN 096 to implement Project Liberate within their study cities.

“We had a little bit of complexity because, previously, we would launch these businesses at the festival,” explains Haddock. “So instead of doing the music festival in all these cities and putting it at the end as a launch, we said, ‘Why don’t we just bring some semblance of the music festival to each one of these cities at the beginning for recruitment.”

The tour is for anybody who is interested in participating, but it will have a specific focus on Black gay and Back trans men because that’s the focus of HPTN 096, and within these cities, those populations face an unfortunate disparity around HIV prevention and treatment.

Because art and music bring people together, educate, and enlighten, this tour utilizes those modalities. “To be able to highlight artists, both musical and creative artists, in these local cities, is a wonderful way to bring community together across the South,” states Haddock. Each stop will feature both local and national talents performing live music that cultivates and showcases both community and joy for the Black and Queer communities. Additionally, each stop includes live tapings of the Dear Black Gay Men podcast and Relentless AF podcast, and exclusive viewings for the upcoming limited series They’re Not Coming to Save Us.

“We are collaborating with the Dear Black Gay Men podcast, led by Jai the Gentleman, because it has arguably the most niche focus on the population that we are trying to specifically recruit for the implementation of Project Liberate across these study cities,” Haddock points out. “Some of my senior leadership at The Normal Anomaly will also be traveling with us as we are launching a new podcast called Relentless AF. We’ll be talking to people who are relentlessly pursuing things such as businesses, love, and family.”

Another key aspect of the tour will be advocating for equity around HIV prevention and care. “About 38 percent of all new HIV infections are Black gay men, and in 2021 about two thirds of those Black gay men were diagnosed in the South. Now, the updated data says it’s about 52 percent,” says Haddock. “There’s a disproportionate amount of people still contracting HIV in the South, so I think to have positive, empowering conversations around things like sex, HIV, and the relentless pursuit of success—whatever that means for people—hopefully will leave people able to dream again and to feel like they have purpose and are part of a movement.”

The last goal for the tour is to recruit people into Project Liberate within their localities. “We absolutely believe that economic justice, social justice, and racial justice, are all a part of ending the epidemic of HIV. And, my personal argument is that we will not end the epidemic of HIV if we don’t break the barriers that contribute to HIV, such as being unhoused, poverty, transportation, and access to care and medication,” explains Haddock. “That means we have to give people an economic ecosystem in which they have a better probability of thriving. And we know that one of the avenues by which we can do that is entrepreneurship, and social enterprisers specifically, because that creates businesses that not only pays bills and earns profits, but also has social good tied to it.”

For the remainder of 2024, Haddock will be taking everything he has learned and developed within Houston’s supportive and robust LGBTQ community that has allowed him to flourish and thrive to these other cities. But that’s not where it ends. Act II of the Black Queer AF Media Tour will launch in 2025 and plans to have stops in Tennessee, South Florida, and Houston, among others.

For more information on the BQAF Media Tour and to stay updated on events and locations, visit normalanomaly.org/bqafmediatour/