Where the streets meet romance, Nau’Jour Grainger, better known as Toosii, has proven to be one of the fastest rising artists we’ve seen this year. The Raleigh rapper gained widespread popularity with his 2020 album
Platinum Heart, giving us a gritty sound with a sensitive touch. Toosii showed his grind by dropping another powerful project in the same year,
Poetic Pain, which debuted at No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 200 chart.
His single “Love Cycle” featuring Summer Walker earned him his first Gold plaque and over 20 million views on YouTube. Since then, he’s worked with other major acts such as Dababy, Lil Durk, Wiz Khalifa,and Queen Naija among others Now, as he follows up on his successes with the release of his long-anticipated
‘Call Your Mother’s’ Queer Star Austin Crute Follows His Own Path
The April 23 2021 2:43 PM EDT
Austin Crute represents the next generation of LGBTQ+ talent. With his latest role, as Lane on ABC’s new sitcom
Call Your Mother, Crute is one of the few out actors on prime-time network television playing a queer character.
As a 25-year-old gay Black man, he knows the importance of this representation. Most gay characters on network TV have a
Modern Family aesthetic, where “they’re grown and figuring out how to have kids and do stuff,” Crute explains. Seeing a young single gay guy living in Los Angeles hits differently than most roles.
John Blake, CNN, January 24, 2021
I was scrolling through Facebook one evening when I noticed an odd image that someone had posted on my page. It was a screenshot of a solitary Black man on roller skates, freeze-framed in the middle of a country road flanked by horse pastures.
As I clicked on the video I braced myself, expecting to see a Black person being brutalized by police or accosted in public by White strangers. But that’s not what I saw.
The man flashed a wide smile and he started to dance. He had a gray beard, but he skated like someone 20 years younger: rolling his shoulders, shimmying his hips while Mary J. Blige sang “Not Gon’ Cry” in the background. Soon I was smiling, too.