Join us as Michelle Meow brings her long-running daily radio show to The Commonwealth Club one day each week, exploring important issues of interest to the LGBTQ community.

This week, our special in-studio guests are Grammy-nominated comedian Sampson McCormick and transgender activist Janetta Johnson.

Sampson McCormick is a nationally touring, award winning, stand up comedian, writer and activist who can make audiences double over in laughter whether he's joking about his whacky and beloved, Aunt Jackie, his twink neighbor or addressing homophobia, poverty, and religion. For over a decade, he has been a favorite at LGBT pride festivals and mainstream venues alike. His screen appearances include BET, MTV's Real World, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. He is also the author of two books, Ebonic Faggotry and Taboo Village: A Perspective on Being Gay In Black America, and is at work on his third. He's also released three live stand up comedy albums, including his latest That Bitch Better Be Funny: Live at the Howard Theater, where he made history, becoming the first openly gay comedian to headline the famous venue. Other prestigious venues that he has headlined include The White House, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Comedy Store, and Harvard University.

McCormick's comedy offers riveting, refreshing and original takes on religion, sexuality, life and politics--you know, all those things there you weren't suppose to talk about in polite company.

Janetta Johnson is an Afro-American trans woman who was raised in Tampa, Florida. She is a healer through her work at the Transgender Gender Variant and Intersex (TGI) Justice Project and facilitator invested in decolonizing spaces. Since 2006, she has been organizing around the intersections of violence she and her trans and gender non-conforming communities of color face. She has been both politicized and mentored by Miss Major, who has been deeply influential in her life, and she is honored to have accepted Miss Major’s former position as executive director of the TGI Justice Project. The spiritual force that drives her to dismantle the violent systems that black trans people are subjected to and oppressed by is one that awakens her.  
 
As a formerly incarcerated trans person, Janetta has faced adversity and this has informed her community work as well as her deep investment in the liberation of all black trans and gender non-conforming people. Janetta works to restore her community’s spirit from the confines of the prison industrial complex: she has developed a grassroots reentry program with the focus on recidivism and reentry, she is a member of the Bay Area chapter of Black Lives Matter, and is dedicated to ending capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, and building the organizing capacity of trans and gender non-conforming communities of color as a trans warrior. She enjoys working to shift and reframe the value of black trans lives through media, education, and community building.

See upcoming Michelle Meow Shows at The Commonwealth Club here.