A glint is a switchblade shining under someone’s tongue. Crown Jewels catching the sun. The entirety of knowledge condensed into a point in someone's eye.
A glint is a moment that is sharp, elegant, heavy with existence – and often missed.
We think this is the perfect metaphor for the Black feminine - the pulsing core of this zine. Welcome to the first issue of Glint. This zine is a project stretching the glint’s moment of brevity into a playground of prose, poetry, and visual art.
We start with the knowledge that Black gender-marginalized people exist in paradox. We are encumbered with conflicting stereotypes and expectations – invisible and ever-present, slut and mammy, hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine.
The bizarre nature of this arrangement creates a wonderful loophole – if people tell you are everything, then you can be anything. You can build any sort of container you want and live inside of it. This is fantastical, magical work. And that is why we chose fantasy as our first theme. Because warping realities is no small feat.
In making this project, we discovered over and over how fantastic Black gender-marginalized people are. Every single person we feature in this zine has a robust dreaming life, filled with fantasy, that helps them exist as their fullest selves. Every part of this project is soaked in fantasy.
This process takes belief. Contemplating fantasy challenges us to have the courage to allow our imaginations to be infinite.
That immensity can be scary. When making this zine, there were moments when we were afraid. Afraid to open ourselves up to all of the potential that this project could have. Afraid to believe in our ability to conjure our fantasies into reality.
What this work has taught us is that embracing fantasy is a choice that takes intent, belief, and courage. And it is in making this choice that we have been able to pull our dreams into reality.
And now we have created this – a materialization of our dreams. A tangible, physical item, a reality, that encapsulates all the things we meditated on, that we imagined.
This zine is our attempt to cast our minds into reality. You are a vital part of making these fantasies real. We invite you to enter into this text, meander. We invite you to dream. To fantasize. And to practice conjuring those fantasies into reality.
