Black Queer Travel Guide is a digital resource prioritising Black queer travellers and our safety as we navigate the world, through offering experiences, advice and information on destinations around the globe. You have to consider your personal safety and the safety of those you’re travelling with, particularly if you’re visibly queer, how comfortable you feel travelling with your partner(s) and more. We have to assess and reassess our surroundings and where we visit constantly. Our resources are limited and they often only pertain to ‘Black travel’ or ‘LGBTQ+ travel’, meaning that we have to forge something for ourselves in the middle - or simply google ‘LGBTQ+ rights in [insert country]’. It is simply not enough and BQTG aims to contribute towards filling those gaps.

As a registered charitable company (CIC), BQTG is committed to the Black queer communities it will be serving and as a result, profits made will be going straight into our services and supporting local queer charities and organisations around the globe.

For four months, we spoke to over 20 Black queer activists and community organisers around the world, from Jamaica to Papua New Guinea to Nigeria, finding out about the daily precautions they take in their countries, the grassroots work they're doing in their communities and how they travel and navigate life. This research has informed the building of the resources and will continue to shape how we grow.

Through the afore-mentioned research carried with Black queer activists globally, it’s also clear how much support is needed by people who have been arrested, harassed by the public and police and as a result, we would also seek to support these individuals through financial support for legal services and representation.

We’re aiming to create a hub for Black queer activists to be able to share resources, advice and more, alongside creating a conference for Black queer creatives and activists to be about to share their work, research, resources and practices. Eventually, we hope to run retreats catered specifically for Black queer people, with free retreats for younger Black queer people.

PAULA AKPAN

Paula Akpan is a journalist, historian and public speaker. A sociology graduate from the University of Nottingham, her work mainly focuses on blackness, queerness, and social politics and she regularly writes for a variety of publications including Vogue, Teen Vogue, The Independent, Stylist, VICE, i-D, Bustle, Time Out London and more.

She’s also a published essayist, having written an essay on Black women and community in Slay In Your Lane’s anthology Loud Black Girls (published by 4th Estate Books at HarperCollins, 1 Oct 2020) and another on Black British Lesbians and their relationship with the UK Black Women’s movement for the forthcoming Queer Bible anthology (published by HQ at HarperCollins, 10 Jun 2021).

Paula is currently a fully-funded Masters student at Goldsmiths, studying Black British History with an interest in mapping out the lives and activism of Black British lesbians and queer women during the 70s and 80s.