While commentators have astutely cited the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (2000) as a watershed moment which provided both a platform for the staging of black queer studies and a foundation for various other related pursuits, like collaboration and mentoring that support the work of black queer studies and black queer scholars and artists, an event that preceded it by five years is just as significant, yet has garnered little critical attention (Alexander, 2000, pp. 1285-1305; DeVere Brody, 2000, pp. 1-1277; Woodard, 2000, pp. 1278-1284). The 'Black Nations/Queer Nations?' Conference, documented by Shari Frilot in a film of the same name, was concerned not only with raising questions about the study of black LGBT two-spirited and same-gender-loving black people, across nationality, class, ability, gender and sexual expression, but also with expanding the capacity for critical engagement and political organizing (Frilot, 1995). As Vincent Woodard asserted in his astute review of the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (2000), the 'Black Nations/Queer Nations?' Conference 'was the first to pose the black queer question in an academic setting'. The interrogative and often contradictory meanings and politics of each term - black, queer and nations - and the articulations instantiated by the stroke (/) make this at once a potentially destabilizing and generative heuristic. In fact, this heuristic sutures (or makes coherent) the in-between idea of black/queer/diaspora. 'Black Nations/Queer Nations?' is thus also an important model for engaged projects, which, like black/queer/diaspora work, attempts to deepen and broaden the ineluctable connections between scholarship, activism and artistry. Even a cursory look at the foundational works of black queer studies - anthologies, broadsides, chapbooks, poetry collections and other non-academic intellectual and political work - demonstrates this connection. ${ }^{3}$ Black queer studies and queer of colour critique is practised not only in scholarly publications